Our reader V the K linked this report about Sandra Fluke’s distaste for opposing points of view:

As a student at Cornell and treasurer of a pro-choice organization at the school, Sandra Fluke, helped shut down a pro-life speech on Cornell’s campus by counter protesting. She argued that a pro-life organization at Cornell was about “manipulating [students'] emotions” with misleading statistics about abortion.

So, if this organization offered misleading statistics, why then didn’t Ms. Fluke take it upon herself to demonstrate their inaccuracy and argue the merits of her own position?  If this story is true [and it appears it may not be*], this woman is not much interested in debating ideas, but in preventing the airing of views with which she disagrees.

In this, she has much in common with her ideological confrères in the Occupy Movement.

Just over a week ago, “unruly Occupy students at American University in Washington, D.C., shouted down Republican governor Jan Brewer of Arizona on Friday, forcing her to flee the room with aid from security guards.”  H/t:  Instapundit.

This week, they disrupted “a panel discussion [at AIPAC] led by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami, FL led a discussion about Stopping Iran: Can the West End Iran’s Nuclear Drive?”

In the fall of 1964, liberal students at the University of California/Berkeley launched the “Free Speech Movement”; they wanted to end the school policy preventing student groups from operating “on campus if they engaged in any kind of off-campus politics, whether electoral, protest or even oratorical.”  Now, liberal students want to prevent their ideological adversaries from expressing their views.

They times, they are a-changing.

* (more…)

Some stories just seem to fit too perfectly into a media narrative.  Many of our Facebook friends recently posted a picture of a restaurant receipt where a banker supposedly left a 1% tip to waitress (on a $133 tab), telling her “To Get a Real Job.”   That 1% tip seemed was mighty convenient, given the #Occupy rhetoric of the 1%.

And, c’mon, what restaurant patron tells his server to get a real job?  Why would he want to spite someone who might be serving him.  Only credulous “leftists would believe,” as Jim Hoft put it, “that ‘rich’ bankers are this obnoxious and horrible.” Indeed.

As the Smoking Gun reports:

The restaurant receipt that a California banker purportedly used to denigrate a waitress–while also leaving her a one percent tip–was wildly “altered and exaggerated,” according to a spokesperson for the Newport Beach restaurant where the businessman supposedly dined earlier this month.

. . . .

The amount on the actual receipt is $33.54, Reagan said, not $133.54 as seen on the altered receipt. And while the tip on the online receipt claims that the server was left $1.33 (or one percent of the bill), the actual tip was $7 on the $33.54 tab.

Over at the Hot Air Green Room, blogger Howard Portnoy reminds us that it wasn’t just the Huffington Post that fell for the hoax.  One of his readers provided . . .

. . . this video of CNN’s holier-than-thou coverage of the story. It is definitely worth watching, if for no other reason than to revel in host Soledad O’Brien’s self-righteous indignation over a story that turned out to be bogus.

Well, it did fit that network’s narrative.

Could this get more absurd?

QUEER OWS TO PROTEST HRC NYC GALA

QUEER OCCUPIERS DENOUNCE HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN FOR HONORING GOLDMAN SACHS & FAILING TO DEMAND FULL FEDERAL EQUALITY

New York, NY, February 1, 2012 – Queer/LGBTIQA2Z Occupy Wall Street, a caucus of the NYC based Occupy Wall Street movement, announced today that it will protest a Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Gala honoring Goldman Sachs on Saturday February 4, 2012 at the Waldorf Astoria.

In contrast to the $650 a plate Gala, the Queer/LGBTIQA2Z Caucus will host a “Guerrilla Potluck” on the sidewalk outside of the prestigious hotel at 50th Street & Park Avenue from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The Queer Caucus: 1. Condemns HRC for honoring Goldman Sachs, 2. Calls upon HRC to adopt a strategy of Full Equality by 2014, and 3. Demands that HRC create a transparent process that includes the grassroots.

1. The Queer Caucus condemns HRC’s decision to honor Goldman Sachs in a time of financial collapse caused by their unethical business practices and greed, and deplores the use of our cause and suffering for corporate public relations. HRC honoring Goldman Sachs at this time reveals all one needs to know about the corporate LGBT lobby, and its disconnect from the 99% and the LGBT people it purports to represent.

2. The Queer Caucus calls upon HRC to embrace the grassroots demand for Full Federal Equality by 2014 the 50th Anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

After 60 years of struggle, there is still not a single federal non-discrimination law protecting LGBT Americans from discrimination. More incredibly, HRC, the corporate entity that controls our strategy, is not even seeking equal protection for our community.

To address this, the Queer Caucus calls on HRC to take The Pledge for Full LGBT Equality to seek and secure full non-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identify for all people.

The right to be protected from discrimination secures a core liberty interest. And it is the duty of government to protect LGBT Americans from the harm caused by discrimination as a matter of public welfare, law and conscience, as it has for decades for all other oppressed groups.

There’s more to this press release, but if I read it again….my IQ would drop.

First of all, there is NO “right to be protected from discrimination”.  Do left-wing Progressives even understand what a “right” is?  *eyeroll*

When John Aravosis and I agree on something….. you know it’s bad.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

In his post last week on Time magazine’s decision to name the Protestor as its “Person of the Year,” Ed Morrissey thought the magazine a “little late to ‘the protester’ story in terms of real impact“:

In 2009, Time had the same opportunity to pick “the protester” when the protests were the Tea Party and Iran’s Green Revolution, which followed from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, and so on.  Who did they pick?  Ben Bernanke.  When the Tea Party movement actually delivered results at the ballot box in 2010 in a historic midterm drubbing of Barack Obama’s Democrats — they lost 68 seats, the worst outing since 1938 — they could have hailed The Protester then, too.  Who did they pick?  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

What impact, he wonders, “has ‘the protester’ actually had in 2011?  Has the Occupy Movement, such as it is, had any kind of ground-breaking impact on politics in the way the Tea Party did in 2010 and still does in this cycle?  Not even close, and even people on the Left have begun washing their hands of the literally pointless display.”

Well, the folks in the various Occupy movements did chant the right (er, left) slogans (at least according to our friends in the MSM).

To see just one reason why fewer and fewer right-of-center Angelenos subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, take a gander at this front page puff piece on a left-wing playwright’s revisioning of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol. The story is not even about a play that has been produced, but merely about a script a man has written:

Ebenezer Scrooge is a corporate banker, busy foreclosing on the hapless masses. Bob Cratchit and his beleaguered family live in a chilly tent in an anonymous Occupy encampment. The ghost of Christmas future sports a flowing black robe of taped-together trash bags and plastic sheeting. Tiny Tim dies.

At least that’s how the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s resident playwright, Michael Gene Sullivan, has re-imagined “A Christmas Carol” for the troubled 21st century.

Truth be told, it wasn’t much of a stretch to place Charles Dickens‘ Victorian classic into today’s Occupy world. And that, as Sullivan would be the first to tell you, is exactly the point. Dickens’ novella was written in the heart of the “Hungry ’40s,” a time of labor unrest, unemployment and starvation across 19th century Europe.

Not much of a stretch to place this in today’s Occupy world?  Um, what?  Hate to inform Mr. Sullivan or Miss La Ganga, the writer of the column, but the folks shivering in Occupy encampments chose to “suffer” in such circumstances.  At least those who actually occupied the tents in the various Occupy encampments.

Despite all we’ve learned about these movements and the costs its Los Angeles manifestation incurred on the city Miss La Ganga’s paper serves (which her own paper reported), she still has a rosy few of this outfit.  Nowhere in her article does she question the playwright’s idealistic view.

Do wonder if the Times has ever run a front-page puff piece on an unproduced play — or offered such favorable coverage to a conservative artist’s revisioning of a classic work.  Perhaps, there is purpose to the paper’s editors choice to feature this play on their front-page–to alert deep-pocketed movers and shakers in the entertainment business to this left-wing script.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Reader T finds another flaw in the script, “Also, Bob Cratchit WORKED for Ebenezer Scrooge. The fact that he WORKED disqualifies Cratchit as being an occupy protestor.”

Glenn today links a post on the damage the folks at OccupyBoston did to the “scenic Rose Kennedy Greenway,” quipping that Boston Occupiers Leave Site In The Kind Of Condition The Country Would Be In If They Were Listened To:

[Nancy] Brennan [executive director of the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy] said the grass, which has turned into a mud pit, will need to be completely resodded, and she fears several trees that have been damaged will have to be replanted.

“Three or four trees might be lost. There’s browning of the foliage, and there are some broken and bent limbs,” she said. “Part of what we need to do is check on the root systems, and that is just going to take a little bit of time.”

Brennan also expects that the sprinkler system was damaged so much it will have to be repaired or replaced. Also in need of replacement are about 20 percent of the shrubbery and the pebbles from a pedestrian walkway that runs along Purchase Street.

And that’s just a partial listing of the damage.  Wonder how much the cleanup’s gonna cost.

In Los Angeles, Democratic Mayor Antonio “Villaraigosa has said the cleanup and repair to the park might cost more than $1 million.”  Oh, and let’s not forget the “overtime costs for city employees” during the “occupation.”  According to the LA Times, “Overtime costs for the General Services Department, which runs the police force assigned to City Hall and other municipal buildings, exceeded $100,000 even before the overnight raid [ending the 'occupation'].”

If taxpayers foot the bill, as seems likely, the occupiers can just say, “Well, that’s what democracy looks like.”

Caught this first on Powerline, then on Gateway Pundit. The man who defeated the man heralded by Joe Biden as an economic advisor to the Obama administration at the ballot box in a state Obama won by 15 points lays it out:

Note how all the #OWS folks just repeat their leader.  (Wonder what that says about them).  Christie just laughs at these folks, mocking their anger.

Kudos, Governor!

Remember all those stories we read in those dark days that dominated the first decade of this century about how the president and his evil minions were seeking to silence dissent?

And in recent years, remember all those images of Tea Party protesters trying to block access to or invade liberal confabs?  Remember how Tea Party protesters used to crash events held by prominent left-wing politicos and interrupted their speeches?

And now, we’ve got the #OWS folks tearing a page from the Tea Party playbook (a playbook written not by actual Tea Party players, but their critics).  Not only are they taking over public parks, depriving citizens of these public spaces for relaxation and recreation, they’re also invading conservative conclaves uninvited, as per this video to which Bruce alerted me:

Ed Morrissey who is at the FreedomWorks BlogCon 2011 (in Denver) where the invasion took place reports:

The clash erupted before I had a chance to get too close to the Occupiers themselves. They were briefly in sight, but got swallowed up by the BlogCon attendees. Frankly, the BlogCon response overwhelmed whatever the protesters tried to say — with chants of “Mike check!” and “We paid for your student loans!”, among others, the Occupiers got roundly shouted down. At one point, the entire BlogCon contingent in the lobby started chanting, “We want the dog!”, a reference to the elected leader of Occupy Denver — a pooch named Shelby.

Jason Pye who was also there and has more footage, laments that the invaders “were turned away; but not before engaging some of us. Unfortunately, they didn’t bring their leader with them (looks like the $10 I spent on dog treats went to waste).”  Maybe you could send those treats to Bruce; I’m sure Saxbe and Marley would greatly appreciate them.

Wonder if Barney Frank and his Democratic colleagues will be doing more to “differentiate themselves” from the juvenile antics of these participants in a movement backed by the Democratic president.

UPDATE:   James Taranto finds a “disconnect between the liberal media’s cheerleading and Obamavilles’ descent into disease, disorder and destruction is as striking as was the disconnect between the media’s slanders against the Tea Party and that movement’s actual peaceful and civic-minded nature.”  No kidding.

“We can,” Stacy McCain contends with examples abundant, “no longer tolerate media assertions that this is a non-violent movement.”  Media cluck-clucking and left-wing blogging notwithstanding, he’s not talking about the Tea Party.  In this case, he’s referencing violence instigated by the “Occupy” movement outside the “Defending the American Dream Summit” hosted by Americans for Prosperity where a 78-year woman was knocked down cement stairs.

And it’s not just in Washington, D.C. where the various Occupy movements — and their various members acting individually — have engaged in violence — just as many in the chattering classes, in highest dudgeon, warned us about the Tea Party.

Well, those in the chattering classes did exult in the rise of the left-wing movement, seeing it as the left-wing Tea Party!  Does seem like the Occupy movement has become just like the Tea Party of the left-wing narrative.

UPDATE: Calling this “The Worst Media Double Standard in Recent History“, Ed Driscoll writes:

In 2009 and 2010, the media trashed the Tea Party, using the crazied, hyperbolic language possible — and yet were envious of their success at the polls last November, and wanted a Tea Party of their own. Hence, Occupy Wall Street. Richard Fernandez asks a great question at the Belmont Club. Did the MSM’s intensely negative reporting cause them (directly or indirectly) to amp up the craziness at OWS to waaaay past 11 on Nigel Tufnel’s Marshall stack, or is that simply what happens when a mass of people with an ill-defined cause co-habituate in an urban Burning Man festival for months on end?

But regarding the MSM’s coverage, since so much of what passes for “liberalism” boils down to “It’s Different When We Do It,” the amount of double-standards in the MSM is bottomless.

Read the whole thing.

Seeing “videos of youths burning things in Oakland,” Victor Davis Hanson . . .

. . . was told that it “was a small minority” and atypical of the protest. Not long ago I saw no clips of anyone spitting at black congresspeople wading into the Tea-Party demonstration, but was told they did and that it was typical of tens of thousands of racialists on the Mall.

(Via Instapundit.) A Democratic president faults Republicans vying for his job because they failed to condemn an isolated boor at a candidates’ debate.  A self-important (and self-righteous) Democratic Congressman insists that his GOP colleagues need to “‘differentiate themselves’ from the hateful speech” of their supporters.  A lunatic with no apparent political agenda attacks a Congresswoman, murdering a number of people with her, and conservative rhetoric is held accountable.

Why is it that, in the eyes of Democratic politicians, liberal pundits and the mainstream media, a small, often fictional, fringe minority speaks for conservative/libertarian movements and the Republican Paty, but radical, often violent, extremists don’t speak for liberal/left-wing movements or the Democratic Party?

UPDATE:  Over at Reason, A. Barton Hinkle builds on this point:

So consider the disparity in coverage of OWS and the Tea Party. A single (still unsubstantiated) allegation that someone in the crowd at a 2010 Tea Party rally in Washington hurled a racial slur at Rep. John Lewis sufficed to prove the entire movement a kissin’ cousin of the KKK. But that “Google Wall Street Jews” guy? A lone nut. As for the signs calling for the “death of capitalism” and telling Wall Street bankers to “Jump, you [expletives]” and declaring “capitalism can’t be fixed—we need revolution”? Unrepresentative, surely. Ditto the 5:30 Oakland seminar on Marxism 101, and the dude in the Lenin T-shirt, and. . . .

Don’t feel bad if you missed such tidbits on the nightly news. Every movement has its whack jobs, but those on the left get politely overlooked.

FROM THE COMMENTS: Budding Economist reminds us of how one Tea Party critic was treated by the #Occupy Movement.

“A single (still unsubstantiated) allegation that someone in the crowd at a 2010 Tea Party rally in Washington hurled a racial slur at Rep. John Lewis sufficed to prove the entire movement a kissin’ cousin of the KKK.”

And the entire General Assembly of Occupy Atlanta isn’t accused of anything when they refused to allow Rep. John Lewis to voice his solidarity.

UP-UPDATE: Allahapundit offers:

This can’t be repeated enough: With a few exceptions, foremost among them the New York Post, the coverage of OWS protests compared to the coverage of tea-party protests is the worst media double standard in recent history. Nothing compares, because nothing else involves this much distortion on both ends of the coverage. It’s not just that most press outlets (like the protesters themselves) look the other way at depravity happening inside Obamaville, it’s that for years they treated the tea-party movement as some sort of feral mob that was forever on the brink of rampaging through the streets — like, say, Occupy Oakland just did.

Via Instapundit.

A reader alerted me to the latest episode of South Park which takes on #OWS, linking this post where Christian Toto offers a summary of the episode, including this line from Cartman, “Don’t you get it, Mom? People voted for Obama, and now that everything sucks they have to blame me!”

Shouldn’t these folks be #Occupying the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

NB:  Oops, inadvertently published this piece before I was done writing it, so delayed the publication as I was editing.

Occupy protesters declare victory at shipping port:

Occupy Wall Street protesters have shut down operations for the day at one of the nation’s busiest shipping ports.

Port of Oakland officials said in a statement late Wednesday that the peaceful rally attended by thousands of demonstrators forced them to cancel typical evening maritime activity. Officials at the nation’s fifth-largest shipping port say they hope the work day can resume Thursday.

. . . .

Meanwhile, protesters left the port declaring victory with the nearly 5-hour rally that highlighted a daylong “general strike” in Oakland that prompted solidarity demonstrations across the nation.

Shutting down operations at a one the nation’s busiest shipping ports is victory?  Success is hindering the flow of goods and keeping people from working.

Sounds like someone is delighting in sabotaging our nation’s economy.

UPDATE:   Michelle Malkin posts some imagery (not suitable for MSM publication) of how these folks won their victory.

Maybe, the Cain story notwithstanding, our media are offering more critical treatment of the left. Just caught this on Yahoo!’s homepage.

The article linked comes from the conservative-leaning Daily Caller.

This proves why some people are successful in life, and some are destined to protest, complain, whine and ask for handouts.

Must See TV!

NOTE: The video is going viral, so be patient if it doesn’t load the first time. Is WELL WORTH the wait. Best OWS video yet.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

This complements Dan’s posting below quite nicely…. (via Neal Boortz on Twitter)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

And people wonder why I cannot relate to Gay, Inc. and the liberal/”progressive” leanings of 90% of America’s gay activists??

Here they are… front and center with their radical messages at another anti-American protest movement.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)