How dare you create jobs!

Alas, some of this writing is nearly a week old. I am supposedly semi-retired, but I can still cram my weekends with too many things.

The Tea Party is mighty pissed off that Obama is President. How annoyed are they? Terrence Heath has the story.

They've demanded Democrats stop talking about jobs.

They wrote a letter to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke asking him to let the economy fail until after the 2012 elections.

They demanded that Obama stop pointing out the GOP has no jobs plan.

Now the group Tea Party Nation has written a resolution for businesses to sign. It accuses Obama of wrecking the economy and ends with:

I, an American small business owner, part of the class that produces the vast majority of real, wealth producing jobs in this country, hereby resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped.

I hereby declare that my job creation potential is now ceased.

The commenters on the Tea Party Nation site propose a few more actions:

Boycott paying taxes.

Force lawmakers to read Ayn Rand novels.

Boycott the federal government and all its agencies (such as the Post Office? How about government maintained roads? Airports inspected by FAA?).

Yup, the Tea Party and the GOP want to get rid of Obama so badly they are willing to send the country down the tubes.



Here is one of the things OWS is protesting. It is a chart of the national debt and the amount each president contributed to it. All presidents before Reagan: 7%, Reagan: 13.2%, Bush I: 10.5%, Clinton: 9.8%, Bush II: 42.7%, Obama: 16.8%.



Terrence Heath has put together several dozen of the cartoons inspired by the Occupy Wall Street Protests.


Heath also has an essay on contradictions in the GOP responses to OWS. The GOP claims the protesters are jobless hippies (they make it sound like being a hippie is a bad thing). The conservative trumpeting has been get off your lazy butt and "get a job!"

First contradiction: most of the protesters have jobs. Which leaves the GOP scratching their collective heads. Why would anyone who has a job feel the need to protest? That riddle is simple for us progressives to figure out. If you're part of the 99%, you know people, probably lots of people, who don't have jobs. And we have empathy.

Second contradiction: the GOP (goaded by the Tea Party) is doing its darndest to make sure there are no jobs to be had.



The Occupy Oakland protest battled with police a couple days ago. As far as I can tell it was a result of police trying to clear the park where the protesters were camped. The protesters resisted. Apparently health or city officials decided the campers had not properly disposed of garbage and human waste, attracting vermin. Other concerns appears to be many city leaders like "orderly" even from demonstrations and this protest usually isn't or that city officials can't identify one person as the leader. Some protesters say the resistance to police seen in Oakland and other cities is from anarchists who want to give the protests a bad reputation. The Oakland confrontation involved lots of tear gas.

Jon Stewart has a lot to say on the battle in Oakland.

Oakland isn't the only city that is losing patience with the occupy protesters. The problem seems to be the issue of health and cleanliness in several cities. A lot of people siding with the protesters think it is much more than that, especially after the violence at the Oakland protest. They even think the news report (such as the one I linked to in the New York Times) are biased against the protesters. If cities push too hard there could be a fierce backlash.