Occupy the Holidays

I was hoping to take the kids to see Occupy Wall Street in NYC next week, but that tourist attraction is now undetermined. It turns out the Federal government colluded with over a dozen cities to set the movement of the parks today, most notably NYC where the 12th richest man in America, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, must be cleaning up in advance of the first wave of holiday tourism next week.

The good news is that it isn't working everywhere and, more importantly, the protesters have already changed the national conversation from the GOP deficit talking points. Deficit reduction is for the 1%; taxing the rich is for the 99%.

To top it off, the movement occupied the offices of the owners of NYC's Zuccotti Park tonight in Washington, DC:

The conversation continues.

Bloomberg for Freedom

Big credit to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his stirring defense of the Muslim community center to be built near ground zero, and for leading a multi-faith address on the subject today. Clearly super-hacks Palin, Gingrich, Lieberman, etc are just working on fear and anger, typical demagoguery. From a simple Federalist viewpoint, supposedly the philosophy these desperate hacks follow, shouldn't the decision be up to the New Yorkers who are overwhelmingly in favor of it?

From Bloomberg's emotional speech:

“Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

“This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

“Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies' hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

"For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetimes, as important a test. And it is critically important that we get it right."

The Cordoba Initiative, the group building the mosque, is in fact an enemy of Bin Laden. That may not help an earlier argument I wanted to make about a mosque making it less likely that the site would be attacked again, but instead it speaks volumes about the reductive hatefulness of the GOP political attacks on the mosque.

As the Mayor says, NYC is the most free city in the free world. (Although I'd argue that Amsterdam could make a good case!) Death to tyrants, both overseas and in our midst.

Here's the whole event, which included three Jewish leaders as well:

May God have mercy on the souls of the hacks.

Thankful

Over at Talking Points Memo there's a hilarious video collecting "Testimony We Give Thanks For" by the Cheney/Bush Administration officials who appeared in front of Congress over the past year, the first of Democratic control in twelve years. Disgraced ex-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is the star scumbag, but there's no shortage of forgetters and pretenders.

While crime in D.C. has gone up during Republican rule, i.e. in the Federal government with seemingly anything they've touched, it's actually decreased in NYC, and some credit should go to faux-Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg switched parties from Democratic to GOP in order to get a nomination (he was right that the NYC Dems would never nominate him) but he's led as a pragmatic, connective centrist, much more so than the self-myth of ex-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

So since I'm closing out a holiday family visit to the city, I'm grateful for these statistics from The New York Times:

New York City is on track to have fewer than 500 murders in 2007, by far the lowest amount in a 12-month period since reliable Police Department statistics became available in 1963.

But within the city’s official crime statistics is a perhaps even more striking figure: so far, with roughly half the killings analyzed, only 35 were found to be committed by strangers, a microscopic statistic in a city of 8.5 million.

That's right -- it's not so dangerous to visit anymore.

Let's hope this holds until we're safely on the plane and headed back to sunny Santa Monica.