#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy L.A. Goons Shut Down Burger King. “No justice… No peace… Hold the pickles.”
Archive for 2011
November 7, 2011
#OCCUPYFAIL: Elderly Occupy D.C. Victims Interviewed. “I have a lot of bruises.”
SUPREME COURT TO HEAR GPS surveillance case. If putting a GPS on my car without a warrant isn’t a privacy invasion because the roads are publicly observable, then it should be equally okay for me to put one on a judge’s, a U.S. attorney’s, or a Congressman’s car. Right?
MCDONALD’S CEO: Cut Spending And Taxes! “As the leader of a remarkable turnaround at McDonald’s, Skinner’s comments will resonate across the country. His company is one of only a few big US employers still hiring in significant numbers, with more than 500,000 staff on its domestic payroll.”
UPDATE: Reader John McGinnis writes: “Well of course. His company can afford to hire — They received an exemption from ObamaCare. Coincidence?”
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Where Have All The Chemists Gone? “If you find yourself complaining that the hard work of a STEM major is distracting you from your ‘real’ college experience and you don’t have a large trust fund, you have some major attitude adjustments to make. Make them now, while it’s relatively easy, or make them later when you are mired in student loan debt and working at Starbucks.”
IS THIS UNIONIZED POLICE TAKING SIDES, OR JUST THE USUAL D.C. GOVERNMENT INEPTITUDE? Koch group staffers, event attendees: 911 hung up on us four times during Occupy DC mob.
HOWARD KURTZ to POLITICO’S JONATHAN MARTIN: “Why publish the story then when you couldn’t answer the essential question: What precisely is Herman Cain alleged to have done to these women?”
Meanwhile, David Gregory underperforms as expected.
#OCCUPYFAIL: Three Arrests Connected to Occupy Phoenix.
THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER EDITORIALIZES: White House should stop fighting Solyndra subpoena. “Republicans asked voters in 2010 to return them to the majority in Congress in part because they claimed to have learned from their mistakes during the Bush years, one of the most significant of which was allowing congressional oversight muscles to grow flabby. The bottom line here ought to be this: Congress is the first branch of our federal government and its oversight authority should never be limited by partisan considerations, no matter who is in the White House.”
SOLARGATE UPDATE: Obama’s Solyndra Fiasco.
SLANDERING THE RED STATES: Today, we have a stark contrast: blue states like California, New York and Illinois are careening toward bankruptcy as a result of the irresponsible policies imposed by their Democratic politicians, while red states like Texas, Utah and the Dakotas are showing the way to prosperity. “In a sane world, the news media would disseminate information about which states are most successful and what policies they pursue, so that other states can emulate them. That is a pipe dream, of course: we all know that in the world we actually inhabit, our media have an entirely different agenda. . . . For the moment, however, let’s just pause to consider why NPR thought it necessary to do a hit piece on South Dakota at all.”
FROM AN OCTOBER SNOWSTORM: Tempers flare over 6 days of Conn. power outages. “Angry residents left without heat as temperatures drop to near freezing overnight have been lashing out at Connecticut Light & Power: accosting repair crews, making profane criticisms online and suing. In Simsbury, a hard-hit suburban town of about 25,000 residents, National Guard troops deployed to clear debris have been providing security outside a utility office building.”
UPDATE: Reader Marylou Lavoie emails:
Driving around Simsbury, CT, yesteray, Sunday, November 6, 8 days after the October snow, you see a mess of entangled tree branches, trees and wires, branches ready to fall dagger-like on cars or passersby, even more so than the usual mess of co-mangled trees and powerlines that are always there, and you see VERY FEW WORKERS working on the problem. In most areas, you see NO ONE AT ALL working on the problem. Of course, some crews are here working, but one would think they would be visible at every turn. It appears we still have too few workers dispatched.
Now we learn that the new projected full restoration is Wednesday, November 9th???!!!
For a snowstorm in Connecticut, even if a bit early, a place where it has been snowing for many years??!!
Even if the workers were not called in until AFTER last Saturday’s storm, certainly, if the will to actually bring in adequate crew was there, they could have arrived here from virtually anywhere on the East Coast by last Wednesday and been done or largely by now.
It is a disgrace. . . .
My power came back on Saturday evening, one full lost week of work since I had to shut my home office, and one full week of discomfort. We were lucky it wasn’t pipe freezing cold. I am biting the bullet and investing in a generator because I do not trust CL&P or the politicians to fix this. Despite high electric bills, they can’t even trim the trees adequately over the summer/fall.
Not sure what goes wrong, but it sounds like greed in not wanting to hire enough workers, failure to pay out of state crews that came up to help with Irene, incompetence, and poor character.
Well, take this kind of response into account when making disaster-prep plans. Or, you know, deciding to move somewhere that’s more competently run.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Sponauer writes:
Another Connecticut resident weighing in on that storm story.
The central thing I got out of the October storm was the need for a “go-bag.” When the trees started popping around my house so fast that it sounded like the nearby gun range, we had enough stuff prepared that we were out of the house and on our way to the last available hotel room in the area within 15 minutes. We lost power there too, but there wasn’t a 50-foot oak tree hanging over our heads.
Thanks to your constant disaster-prep posts, we knew what we needed to bring and were out the door quickly. I think the who-did-what-when fallout of the long power outages is the least important part of the story at this still-awful point in time for thousands of people. I’m not defending CL&P (although I feel a great deal of respect for the many, many crews working out there), but there was simply a massive amount of damage in the state. This was no normal winter storm; having all the leaves still on the trees was a catastrophic factor in the damage. My thoughts are with all of my fellow Nutmeggers. Those of us who regained power already are so very lucky. I don’t think anyone’s seen anything like this before.
Glad to be of help. Good point about the leaves — we don’t usually get snow when the leaves are still on the trees. Stupid global warming!
Meanwhile, Connecticut reader Jerome Mayer writes:
I agree with your point that people need to be better prepared. Everyone should be ready to last for a month or so without help from outside. My family has been in CT for a while and I have watched with horror as the state morphs from the land of stoic, self-reliant yankees into the land of whiny, helpless babies.
But there are some facts that you may be missing if you rely on the AP version of the story.
1. It was a freak event. We had a very wet and mild early autumn. The trees were still in full foliage. A foot of wet snow and wind will cause some problems at the best of times, but the storm uprooted 100 year old oaks. All over the state, trees came down across wires and roads causing around 800,000 outages. The low temperatures for the first few nights were 20 degrees or so.
2. I’m sure that the post mortem will show that CL&P could have done better, but clearing the downed trees and restoring 800,000 outages in a week is no easy task either.
3. There were certainly some jerks out there. These kinds of events bring out the worst and best in people. I did not see too much of the jerky behavior, but I did see people helping each other and getting the work done. Believe it or not, most of the roads were clear within 24 hours of the storm and most of the state was at work on Monday morning. The whiny babies weren’t happy with the pace of the restoration, but they never are anyway.
All in all, we could have done better, but we did OK.
I’ll try to hold the smug the next time some unexpected event (like a little snow or ice) paralyzes Tennessee.
And, speaking of smug, New Hampshire reader Sean Cox writes: “I live in the great state of NH and my power was out for less than 3 hours. I used a flashlight to let my wife get her contact lenses out (around 10:30pm) and when I got up at about 2:15am the power was back. Less than 3 hours in central NH. I’d make a union joke here, but the boys & girls at the NH electric Co-Op are union. They’re just better than everyone else.”