Image by Getty Images via @daylife Former U.S. Representative (D) from Orlando Alan Grayson puts Bill Maher, P.J. O'rourke in their place and gets a standing ovation from the audience when he responded to panelist and political theorist P.J. O'Rourke when he teased Grayson for being the group's (OWS) spokesman, Grayson shot back with this byte: "Listen, if I am a spokesman for all the people who think we should not have 24 million people in this country who can't find a full-time job, that we should not have 50 million people in this country who can't see a doctor when they're sick, that we shouldn't have 47 million people in this country who need government help in order to feed themselves, and we shouldn't have 15 million families who owe more on their mortgage than the value of their home, okay, I'll be that spokesman."
Above from Tampabay.com...click here for full story
Also for verification of the facts Grayson made, go to Politifact Florida...click here...The ruling said:Maher's audience gave Grayson a standing ovation. His retort popped up on YouTube and then spread through Facebook and Twitter. Liberal bloggers praised him for his succinct explanation. You can see the video clip here. Here is the clip embed:Grayson's defense of the Occupy Wall Street movement earned him praise from the left-wing blosophere and pundits for its pith. No pundit or official in the movement's first month had quite articulated the protesters' qualms -- high unemployment, expensive health care, poverty and underwater mortgage payments -- as Grayson did in 20 seconds on Maher's show. We examined each of his economic claims and found them accurate, point for point. We rate his claim True.
I like Bill Maher and have most often enjoyed watching his show. His tone on this one I - personally - found somewhat objectionable. His guests as well were seemingly ignorant of OWS. I believe Grayson set them all straight. I would have thought that Bill Maher would have jumped on this throwing his full weight behind the people.
So did the people at Mediaite.com:
One would think that the anti-corporatist ideals of the Occupy Wall Street movement would receive some safe harbor on Real Time with Bill Maher, and one would be correct that their ideology gelled entirely with the audience. But before Alan Grayson passionately stood up as a spokesman for their cause, the panel spent a fair amount of time mocking the group ruthlessly, for their “bongo drums,” disorganization, and incoherence.Read the entire article...click here
“The don’t really have a coherent message,” Maher noted, with P.J. O’Rourke laughing beside him through an Occupy Wall Street bashing session about how useless their bongo drums are and how they don’t have bathrooms (that latter complaint from panelist Nicolle Wallace, who noted that it was “the logistics of the protest that bother me”). Maher, on his end, was just dismayed at the lack of marketing ability– “the Teabaggers named themselves after a gay sex act,” he joked, “but at least that was catchy.”
The OWS protests are one of the most important actions of the people taking place here in this country in decades. Not since Martin Luther King and the anti war protests of the 60's (in which Sen. Kerry participated and vocalized heavily) have we seen such a dedicated movement. As with those protests, the people did not fear weather, inconvenience or police wrongful actions. I can remember seeing video during those protests of protesters being brutally dragged away by police - somewhat similar to what we are seeing today. Today as yesterday, those relative few arrested in comparison to the numbers of protestors is not significant enough to erase the movement.
The protest goes further to prove one more time that our freedoms in this country still exist despite those who would remove them and destroy our Constitution. We still have the right to free speach, we still have the right to peaceful assembly. And most important, we are prepared to suffer and expose ourselves to protect and guarantee those freedoms for us, our children and generations to come.
No one as yet, in any country has been able to write a Constitution as well as ours with the foresight to endure for centuries. The level of intelligence of our founding fathers and authors of the Constitution and The Bill of Rights far exceeds the intelligence of anyone we have in our government today.
Shame on you Bill Maher. You lost many points with me on this one. And P.J. O'Rourke, your humor has always made me cringe. Your sarcasm is not funny, you are not funny.
9 COMMENTS:
What the Costumes Reveal
On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm,
which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a
“foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage
servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from
their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New
York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including
Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/opinion/what-the-costumes-reveal.html
Occupy San Francisco: the teenager who was refused cancer treatment
Miran Istina, 18, joined protests after four years of being denied life-saving bone marrow transplant for leukaemia
She was inspired to take part in the protest by the refusal of her insurance company to pay for treatment for her chronic myelogenous leukaemia.
She said: "They denied me on the terms of a pre-existing condition. Seeing as I had only had that insurance for a few months, and I was in early stage two which meant I had to have had it for at least a year, they determined it was a pre-existing condition and denied me healthcare."
The Occupy movement attracted Istina as she ties the corporate influence on American politics to the decision that has sentenced her to death.
She said: "The corporate influence on politics influences just about anything that happens, seeing as politicians write the plans that healthcare has to follow. It directly links the fact that insurers only pick and choose those who are actually worth it [financially]. I just happen to not be one of the ones they wanted to be around much longer.
"The decision was absolutely influenced by some corporation or some bank saying, 'we can't afford her. She's not worth our money.' In end terms, corporate greed is going to cost me my life.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/28/occupy-san-francisco-cancer-patient
Bill Black Goes To Occupy Wall Street
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=196770
Ralph Nader Explains Why Ron Paul Is An Excellent Presidential Candidate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2HcvpYIIxeE
Latest Leak on State Attorney General Mortgage Settlement: A Shameless Sellout to the Banks
There have been so many rumors about the so-called 50 state
attorney general settlement (which now is more like a 43 state
settlement) being on the verge of having a deal that we’ve discounted
them. We’ve said from the beginning that this was a cash for release
deal. Basically, because the Federal regulators and state AGs, by
design, had done no meaningful investigations, they didn’t have any
threats to bring the banks to heel. So they’d have to offer a bribe, and
the bribe has always been a “get out of jail free” card.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/latest-leak-on-state-attorney-general-mortgage-settlement-a-shameless-sellout-to-the-banks.html
Sat Oct 29, 2011 at 10:33 AM PDT
"Keep Wall Street Occupied." Let's Help This Go Viral.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/29/1031267/-Keep-Wall-Street-Occupied-Lets-Help-This-Go-Viral?
MR. DRAGHI’S Goldman
connection has been the one mark on an otherwise spotless résumé and a
cause for continued suspicion from some in Europe. In
June, at an appearance before the European Parliament after his
appointment, he was asked once more about the Goldman swaps and, in a
rare loss of his public cool, cited again his lack of involvement. He
said that while at Goldman, he had no interaction with the public
sector, despite being hired for that purpose. “I was not in charge of
selling stuff to the governments,” Mr. Draghi said. “In fact, I worked
in the private sector even though Goldman Sachs expected me to work in
the public sector when I was hired.” Those statements came as a surprise to Pascal Canfin, a French
member of the Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee.
“Are we supposed to believe that he had a discussion with Goldman
executives that he cannot have business with sovereign governments even
though that was what he was hired to do?” he asked. “It’s very weird.
The swaps are not illegal — the question is did he lie before
Parliament?”
http://www.fundmymutualfund.com/2011/10/nyt-who-is-mario-draghi.html
If you go to obama rally...just laugh...he's a joke...this guy says rubin's minions running show
Eric King interviews Chris Whalen on Bank of America/Bank of New York’s huge legal problems
http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2011/10/29_Chris_Whalen.html
Then we are joined by former constitutional and civil rights litigator and contributing writer to Salon, Glenn Greenwald, the author of “With Liberty and Justice for Some; How the Law is Used to Destroy and Protect the Powerful”. We
discuss the two-tiered system of justice in this country that protects
the powerful and punishes the powerless, and how the uprising by the 99%
is the first step in reversing a complete takeover of America by
oligarchs.http://ianmasters.com/
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