I’ve told you in previous reports to expect the increasingly broke, desperate and nomadic Occupy movement to continue to make police the enemy and to make more flailing ‘direct actions’ in an attempt to stir up headlines. In New York City this weekend, they did not disappoint.

As The New York Times East Village Local (h / t Justin Samuels) reported…

Last night’s riotous atmosphere resulted in a sergeant and lieutenant suffering minor injuries while scuffling with anarchist protesters at the Astor Place Starbucks, the police said.

According to police, around 25 people tried smashing the windows of the cafe with eight-foot long steel pipes at around 8:45 p.m. after attending the Anarchist book fair earlier in the day. “Patrons fearing that they would be hit by flying glass hid under tables,” the police said in a statement. “Several” officers were assaulted with pipes and bottles, the police added.

As the news reports, the clash started after the Anarchist Book Fair. Lest you think this is mere coincidence, let’s take a quick look at the some of the workshop offerings presented at the Fair — which advertises that they welcome children, by the way.

So what was being taught at the Anarchist Book Fair prior to Saturday’s attack on a Starbucks and subsequent march calling the police pigs? Here’s a couple of the courses offered:

Occupy Anarchism; Commons Not Capitalism – Saturday, 12:45-2:15pm Think Coffee Basement

Cindy Milstein

As the do-it-ourselves occupations that have swept across the globe from Egypt to United States are proving, direct democracy and cooperation are becoming powerful everyday experiences for millions, with people self-organizing everything from civic defense and trash collection to tent encampments and general assemblies. This compelling and quirky, beautiful and at times messy experimentation has cracked open a window on history, affording us a rare chance to grow these uprisings into the new landscape of a caring, ecological, and egalitarian society–a world of our own collective making and doing. This talk will draw out some of the promise as well as dilemmas of the occupy moment, focusing specifically on the anticapitalst/antistatist opening of notions and lived practices of “the commons,” and then facilitate a conversation, in hopes of better strategizing toward increasingly expansive forms of freedom.

And…

Food Justice for Anarchists, Come One, Come All! – Saturday 11-12:30pm Judson Garden Room

Alice, Ashley, David, J.”g.”J., and Lana

New York City is alive with projects and people working  toward a more sustainable, accessible, responsible, and delicious food  system. However, many groups operate within state, corporate, or  non-profit frameworks.

As anarchists, we must ask: what does it mean to work toward  food justice in a way that is non-hierarchical and anti- oppression? How do we build a better food system while nurturing community and  fighting the state and capitalism?  How can food be relevant in a  successful fight against gentrification?

You’ll also not that J.”g”J., listed as one of the panelists at Food Justice was also scheduled to teach the following course on Sunday.

Self-defense and street combat for anarchists… – Sunday, 4:15-5:45pm Judson Assembly Room

J. “G.” J.

will provide a basic overview of offense and defense when dealing with recalcitrant fascists and / or pig police. We will deal with holds, strikes, traps and disarming techniques. No prior martial arts experience is necessary. The techniques are simple and effective, derived from the Yip family Wing Chun lineage (invented by a womyn, for wimmin and slight-bodied people). Anyone with experience, ideas and techniques of their own are welcome and encouraged to share! Come prepared to move, and preferably with someone you trust to work with. I try to make this as fun and non-triggering as possible!  *appropriate for teens.

The NYT Village Local also reports what else happened on Saturday night.

According to police, part of the rowdy group — some of them masked — marched near Washington Square Park, chanting “cops are murderers” and “all pigs must die.” The crowd eventually grew to around 150, with some tipping garbage cans and spray painting anarchist symbols on buildings, the police said.

Remember that Andrew Breitbart was derided by the mainstream media for shouting “Behave yourself!” at the Occupy shock troops who were assaulting CPAC 2012 and Andrew was castigated for calling them ‘filthy animals’. Those cams critics will, of course, be silent on the Black Block masked anarchists shouting “all pigs must die!”, breaking windows and spray painting New York City.

The Occupy movement is a nihilist attack on Western civilization, including the warm fuzzy organic white bread NPR eco-leftism of a modern American company like Starbucks. The radicals of Occupy see right through the mix of fair trade good intentions, acoustic guitar soul patch hipster design and affluence aspiring capitalism and their answer was an eight foot long steel pipe  The gave-at-the-office latte drinking liberals aren’t able to donate their way out of the path of broken glass because at their core, they romanticize these thugs the same way the J-School Occupy fetishists do.

A well-known, mainstream media vetted college professor named Dr. Boyce Watkins states that it’s time for Trayvon Martin’s parents to “step to the side”, out of an apparent fear that “being honest” could negatively affect the race baiting political agenda that Obama allies like Al Sharpton have carefully crafted. Dr. Watkin’s stark admonishment “Get her off the stage right now “came in a recent blog post that shows the goal of the politicization of the Martin shooting is not truth or justice.

Who is Dr. Boyce Watkins? He’s a professor at Syracuse University and his website shows that he’s been a frequent guest on cable news shows, including CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. He Is also a frequent speaker on black issues and his site shows it is earned high praise from well-known leaders of the resentment driven civil rights movement, Including Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Michael Eric Dyson.

In his bluntly honestly titled article Note to Trayvon’s Mother: It’s Time for You to Step to the Side, Dr. Watkins was referring to the recent Today Show appearance by Trayvon Masrtin’s mother where saw said:

One of the things that I still believe in, a person should apologize when they are actually remorseful for what they’ve done. I believe it was an accident. I believe that it just got out of control and he couldn’t turn the clock back. I would ask him, did he know that that was a minor, that that was a teenager, and that he did not have a weapon?”

Dr. Watkin’s reaction?

When I heard these words, I froze in my tracks.  I couldn’t believe that Trayvon’s mother would make a statement that was in such stark contradiction to the charges being brought forth by the prosecutor.  In fact, there’s a big part of me that wonders why she was on the show at all.

Note that Dr. Watkins is not concerned with the truth or falsity of the statement but rather how the statement affects the politically motivated prosecution of George Zimmerman. In fact, later in the article Dr. Watkins explicitly says that even if the assessment of the shooting as an accident was honest, it should not of been said.

God bless Sybrina for being honest (if that is what she meant to say), but there are some things better left unsaid.  For the mother of the victim to make a statement in national media that directly contradicts the efforts of the prosecution is nothing short of disastrous.

Which begs the question; disastrous to what? Being honest and telling the truth is certainly not disastrous to the goal of actual justice. However, justice is clearly not the goal of men like Sharpton and Watkins. In fact, as Watkins admits in the final paragraph of this piece this really isn’t about Trayvon Martin at all. He says:

Trayvon’s parents have done their work and they’ve done it well.  They’ve achieved the first steps toward justice for their son, and now it’s time for them to try to rebuild their lives in private.  Rev. Sharpton has done a wonderful job of highlighting the racial dimensions of this highly unfortunate incident.  At this point, the conversation about black men in the justice system must grow beyond Trayvon Martin, and the prosecution should be allowed to do its work.  The family, as well all associated racial advocates, need to strategize in private, listen to the evidence and just stop talking.

In other words, thanks for letting the professional race baiters like Al Sharpton use your son but his death has now served our purpose, so please shut up.

h/t Patterico

The mainstream press would love you to believe that the video tape of Derrick Bell and Barack Obama is a big fat funky failure. Nobody care. Nothing to see. They want to ignore the fact that real Americans actually do care about radicals and do their own research.

Proof? Derrick Bell is one of the main advocates of Critical Race Theory. Look at the Google search results for “Critical Race Theory” in the last 8 years. See any sort of spike?

Someone on Twitter asked me last night if I’d heard about what was happening in Minnesota with the poor. I didn’t, so they sent me a link to Crooks & Liars that talked about a law proposed there that would make it illegal for poor people to carry more than $20 cash!

(Note : It’s a total lie, but play along with my fake outrage for now.)

Look!!! Here’s some headlines. Wow!!!

Minnesota GOP wants it to be illegal to carry cash if you’re poor

Minn. to Make it a Crime for Poor to Have More Than $20

Incredible!!!

And here’s what the first couple of paragraphs of the Crooks and Liars piece says…

First Susie Madrak writes…

They’re not just crazy, they’re evil — and un-Christian, should they have the audacity to claim otherwise. If only we could force them to live like this, they wouldn’t last a week:

And then quotes an article that says…

St. Paul, MN – Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.

Wow!!! It would be a crime for people on public assistance to have more than $20 in cash in their pockets any given month! A crime!

And the article continues and there’s a ton of outraged comments, too – starting with Karoli, who I’ll talk about in a minute.

So that’s the claim. I sort of skimmed it and thought to myself “Sounds like a serious charge. “ Up until quite recently, I would have left it at that because Crooks and Liars was one of my go-to sites for information.

Now I think they might want to shorten their name to the more concise and appropriate Liars.

After a few minutes, I did some research. The name of the law in question is House File 171, so I did a Google search on that. I found the story was making quite a stir in the left wing blogosphere – you can see that from the headlines I quoted above.

You can do a Google Blog search yourself for House File 171 – here are screengrabs of what I found.

That’s a lot of left wing blogs from Marxist ones to ‘moderate left ones. One interesting thing is that they repeat the same story – like, literally cut and pasted. That’s what I would call ‘lockstep liberalism’ but it’s gone beyond that to mindless copycat liberalism.

Did anyone question the story at all or even read the law? Four pages, at the bottom – I found someone. A right winger who quotes the Bible and has a Hillary Clinton ‘Joker’ picture on his blog. The sort of fellow that liberals would call a right wing nutjob, if they were being kind.

Guess what? That’s the guy who had the story right. Hundreds of liberals get crazy about this story, with smugly violent comments about how stupid and evil the Republicans are…and a lone right winger absolutely nails the story. I present to you, The Catawissa Gazetteer., Tom Usher.

He quotes the law itself, including this relevant portion…

During the initial 30 calendar days of eligibility, a recipient may have cash benefits issued on an EBT card without the recipient’s name printed on the card. This card may be the same card on which food support is issued and does not need to meet the requirements of this section.(c) Notwithstanding paragraph (a), EBT cardholders may opt to have up to $20 per month accessible via automatic teller machine or receive up to $20 cash back from vendor.

Then he gives his opinion. Tom’s reading of the law is the same as mine…

…does it appear to you in any way that the Republicans are trying to limit the amount of cash anyone is allowed to carry? No. They are merely limiting the amount of cash that can be withdrawn from the state issued debit card.

Yep. That’s exactly what the law says. It doesn’t say (as Crooks and Liars reported) that it’s “a crime for people on public assistance to have more than $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. “

Tom closes with a statement I couldn’t have said better myself…

The internet is a wonderful way to stay on top of the issues of the day but all people, regardless of political persuasion, need to check their facts before running with a story. It’s way to easy to become party to the spreading of lies meant to harm one group or another.

The C&L story and all the left wing blog posts had it totally wrong. They had either not done basic research or they just didn’t care. Oh, man. Depressing.

A quick note about the law – I don’t know if this is a good law. Do some cash restrictions make sense? I think so but $20 seems a bit low given laundry or bus fare or whatever. There’s room for reasoned debate – except that’s not what the left wing blogs I read are doing. It’s all insults and lies and hype. So, while I am unsure about the law, I am 100% sure about the lie.

So I tweeted this info and got into a nice conversation or two about it. I wondered if Crooks & Liars would post a retraction or (more importantly) if their fans would ask for one, since the story was 1) blatantly misleading and 2) widely repeated. Nope.

In fact, the opposite. Karoli wrote a fast blog post about this called (ironically?) Because reading comprehension seems to be at a premium. I’ve know Karoli for a few years on  Twitter. She’s nice if you agree with her.

Let’s break down how someone who is pretty widely respected in the left wing blogosphere will just blatantly fabricate something. I mean, lie in an easily provable fashion that should be embarrassing to an adult.

Karoli’s post is a lesson in total denial and misdirection. She’s clearly counting on her readers not to check her work, link a link or call her on her bullshit. Here’s the opening to her piece…

See this title?  War On The Poor: Minnesota Republicans Want To Bust Poor People Who Carry Cash | Crooks and Liars

That title was written by Susie Madrak in a post at C&L yesterday. And here’s what Susie said:

They’re not just crazy, they’re evil — and un-Christian, should they have the audacity to claim otherwise. If only we could force them to live like this, they wouldn’t last a week:

Here’s the piece of the article Susie quoted:

“House File 171 would make it so that families on MFIP – and disabled single adults on General Assistance and Minnesota Supplemental Aid – could not have their cash grants in cash or put into a checking account. Rather, they could only use a state-issued debit card at special terminals in certain businesses that are set up to accept the card.”

Hey, wait! Karoli said ‘Here’s the piece of the article that Susie quoted”’….but she left out something. Something kind of important…

Here’s a screen grab I did of Susie’s article on C&L,  just in case anything suddenly changes. Look at the paragraph I highlight in the screen grab and its position, right at the top of the story.

So, when Karoli says ‘Here’s the piece” – she’s leaving out that piece. That’s the part that says…

Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month.

And as I pointed out, it’s just simply not true. It’s a lie that was repeated and now Karoli triples down on it by intentionally leaving it out of her article. It’s nowhere to be found. Huh!

Karoli then says…

Nowhere in that paragraph quoted or Susie’s opener does she say anything about being arrested. She does talk about being busted, and rightly so. However, some have interpreted her post and use of the word “busted” in particular as “arrested”. (Emphasis added.)

Karoli is correct – because she didn’t quote the paragraph that’s at issue and then she creates a totally made up semantic debate about the word ‘busted’ — an irrelevant point to try and misdirect what the debate is about. And even THAT is load of BS, because – yes, some interpret the word ‘bust’ as ‘arrested’ when the second ‘paragraph’ in your ‘article’ talks about it being a ‘crime’ for people to have more than ‘$20’ in their ‘pockets’ any given ‘month’.

My eyesight is horrible but I can read through that that just fine, thanks.

This misdirection is common tactic I’m seeing lately and I’ll have lots more to say about it in a future post.

Update: Corrections

Blogger BJ Keefe issues a correction.

Three questions for you.

1. Do you think of Republicans and the Tea Party as dangerous, violent extremists?
2. Do you think the Wisconsin protests over GOP Governor Scott Walker’s move to strip public sector employees of collective bargaining were peaceful?
3. Do you scoff at the right wing notion that mainstream media like the New York Times, the TV networks and NPR have a liberal media bias against the conservatives?

If you answered ‘yes’ to all three of those questions, then let me ask you one more…

Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about the death threats against Republican politicians in Wisconsin?

Try to set aside whatever biases or preconceptions you might have for a moment and ask yourself why death threats against politicians aren’t considered national news, especially in the wake of the all too fresh shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and other bystanders. And there hasn’t just been one death threat, but a number of them.

Here’s an example and it’s real. According to WisPolitics.com, authorities have found a suspect to admitted to sending the following email…

I want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and your republican dictators have to die. This is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, this isn’t enough. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message. So we have built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) the 8 of you. Please understand that this does not include the heroic Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. The 8 includes the 7 senators and the dictator. We feel that it’s worth our lives becasue we would be saving the lives of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. Goodbye ASSHOLE!!!!

It’s impossible to just dismiss this threat as the work of a crazy person, especially since the person who shot Rep. Giffords seems pretty crazy. Crazy people sometimes do crazy things like shooting people. Nope, that threat is detailed and frightening – and unfortunately, motivated by exactly the kind of rhetoric that’s been used by many liberals against GOP officials over and over again during the Madison protests. And there are more, in varying degrees of scary..

If you read liberal blogs, you might have heard of some of these threats. Indirectly, anyway. Sarah Palin said the rhetoric should be toned down. The threats themselves were ignored and Palin was mocked.

On the other hand, if you read conservative blogs or listen to conservative media, you know all about these threats because people like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and websites like Newsbusters and BigJournalism have not only been talking about the death threats for days now but they’ve been talking about the mainstream and liberal media ignoring the threats for days.

Ignoring the story of these threats is deeply, fundamentally wrong. It’s bad, biased journalism that will lead to no possible good outcome and progressives should be leading the charge against it.

Just before writing this article, I did a Google search and it’s stunning to find out that the right wing media really isn’t exaggerating – proven death threats against politicians are being ignored by the supposedly honest media. If you’ve never agreed with a single thing that Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly et al have said about anything, you can’t in any good conscience say that they don’t have a point here. Death threats are wrong and if a story like Wisconsin is national news for days, then so are death threats.

I’m in an odd position. In the last few months, I’ve had one foot in the left wing news stream and one foot in the right. My media duality began when conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart hired me to work with him on the Pigford ‘black farmers’ settlement story. I’m a pro-choice, pro-single payer, anti-war, pro-gay rights independent liberal with years of work in print and film backing those positions. Breitbart hired me to bring a different perspective to the non-partisan issue of corruption in Pigford.

Since then, I’ve written both here for the left-leaning Huffington Post and at Breitbart’s right leaning BigGovernment.com. I’ve ended up reading a lot more conservative sites and dealing firsthand with a lot more conservatives than any time since I attended a high school dedicated to the principles of Ayn Rand about 30 years ago.

Unlike many on the left, I didn’t view the Wisconsin battle as the end of days. I wasn’t convinced that I had a dog in that hunt, in part because I think there’s a strong case to be made those public employees shouldn’t have the same collective bargaining rights as private sector workers – a case made well by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said…

“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.”

Roosevelt’s statement makes sense to me; it does seem that public employees are different than private. I’m not at all anti-union. (I’ve publically supported unionizing the visual effects industry, for example.) I’m open to a good rational argument against the case FDR made but in discussions on Twitter and elsewhere, all I got in response from people on the left was anger and insults. I saw little light and felt much heat.

That tone of extreme hostility I experienced brings me back to the death threats in Wisconsin. Frankly, the bile and invective in that threat reminded me of the tone I saw directed at me from many so-called liberals because I committed the heresy of taking a different position from them on the issue of collective bargaining for public sector employees….based on something FDR said.

Is this really what liberalism has come to in 2011?

Since working with Breitbart, my position on political issues hasn’t changed but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m deeply disappointed by the virulent, lockstep attitude I see on the left. My experience in the last few months tells me what I would not have believed possible; on any number of issues (including Pigford, by the way) I’ve seen liberals act much nastier and with less factual honesty than the conservatives…and this includes on issues where I disagree with conservatives.

Burying the death threat story is a clear example of intellectual dishonesty and journalistic bias..

Don’t take my word for it, though. Look into the story of death threats in Wisconsin yourself and see who has been covering the story and who hasn’t. Try for a moment to see this story from the perspective of those who you may disagree with on policy and ask yourself how this looks to them. Can you blame them for feeling that way? Then take a few seconds and read those questions I asked you at the beginning of this article.

And then ask why progressives shouldn’t expect more from our media — and ourselves — than we expect from our political adversaries.