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Opening Arguments

The 90 and 9

The Occupy Space movement has come to Indianapolis, so I suppose it will reach Fort Wayne soon. Doesn't this sort of say it all about them?

The throng broke into occasional chants of "You are the 99," referring to the 99 percent of the American people they say government and corporations take for granted.

We couldn't have a better contrast with the Tea Party movement than this Pity Party bunch of whiners. Keep marching, people and, above all, talking.

Comments

Christopher Swing
Mon, 10/10/2011 - 6:36pm

Ah, toeing the company line at the Sentinel and trying to belittle the Occupy movement for being something it's not, I see.

Perhaps if you were actually gathering news instead of coming up with names to call them, you'd know Occupy Fort Wayne was already having an organizational meeting today?

http://occupyfortwayne.org/

Tim Zank
Mon, 10/10/2011 - 6:52pm

Better stock up on popcorn Leo, this is going to be entertaining as hell.

"What do we want?"

"Jobs!"

"How we gonna get those jobs?"

" We're gonna kill the corporations!"

It's going to be hilarious to see the Dems back pedal from these loons after jumping on their bandwagon so quickly.

Christopher Swing
Mon, 10/10/2011 - 6:57pm

Who's yelling that, Tim Zank? The imaginary people in your head?

"They're complaining about the fact that Wall Street wrecked the economy three years ago, and nobody's held responsible for that... They're upset that Wall Street has iron control over the economic policies of this country, and that one party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street and the other party caters to them as well."

- Alan Grayson

"What

Tim Zank
Mon, 10/10/2011 - 7:15pm

From the website Swing offers above:

"Some Things you can do now for this Event:

.

1) We need Some people to reach out to the downtown businesses and residents. We will be in their front yards (and they have bathrooms!) Trust me we will need those bathrooms."

Great idea! They're gonna love you guys. Like Ft Wayne doesn't have enough of an image problem attracting people downtown.

Ohhhh, Hizzoner Henry is gonna just love y'all blocking that new Marriot too. Nothing says "Welcome To Fort Wayne" like a mob of half-wit moochers with signs and no clue.

I hate to be a pessimist, but I don't see this ending well at all.

Christopher Swing
Mon, 10/10/2011 - 7:34pm

Tim, "image" isn't the problem attracting people downtown.

Maybe if some of those bailout banks were actually loaning money out for people start businesses downtown, giving people a reason to go there...

What the mayor thinks isn't really an issue. He doesn't have the power to take away the right to peaceably assemble.

Christopher Swing
Mon, 10/10/2011 - 11:36pm

I forgot to mention: isn't this exactly what you two want, though? The mayor having a demonstration downtown when he's campaigning on just how well off Fort Wayne supposedly is, "ready to attract businesses and jobs?" (Which is just another way of saying that businesses haven't been attracted yet, and they don't know when it will happen.)

And please, feel free to walk up to a guy like this and let him know what a half-wit moocher with a sign he is:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/115422160411497346366/posts/gC7SVTRSuw2?hl=en

William Larsen
Tue, 10/11/2011 - 12:52pm

It was not wallstreet that wrecked America, it was congress and the president. How many of these people actually took the time to vote?

Congress wanted to grow the economy and they did this be relaxing home mortgage loans. An individual goes to the bank, takes out a loan and agrees to the terms. The individual is not able to make the payments and this house of cards falls apart. Each individual who is unable to pay their mortgage or walks away from a home underwater, simply adds to the problem by adding additional homes to the supply which reduces the need to build new homes, causing a drop in building, resulting in less demand for labor, which causes a reduction in materials and reduces further demand across the economy.

Congress then bails out the banks. Congress could have simply let these bad wallstreet banks collapse and the stock holders of these bad banks would have simple went broke themselves. So who is at fault here?

The borrowers who did not have sufficient income to make a purchase?

The banks who loaned money to people who should have never applied for a loan?

Elected politicians by the people who bailed out bad banks?

Christopher Swing, do you have a 401K, IRA, Roth IRA, savings, or non qualified account? If so, you are most likely part of Wallstreet as a share owner. Do you think you are to blame in anyway for the economy?

William Larsen
Tue, 10/11/2011 - 12:57pm

"1) We need Some people to reach out to the downtown businesses and residents. We will be in their front yards (and they have bathrooms!) Trust me we will need those bathrooms.

Harl Delos
Tue, 10/11/2011 - 2:16pm

Yesterday, I was in a restaurant. I knocked on the door of the men's room stall, and there's a voice that cries out, "This one is OCCUPIED."

OccupyRestroomStall?

My god, this madness has got to end!

(If someone is in my front yard, and they need to use the bathroom, I hope they knock on my door, because I don't want to clean up after them, otherwise.)

Christopher Swing
Tue, 10/11/2011 - 3:06pm

William Larsen, it's entirely possible to protest against the Wall Street financial institutions that did wrong and the particular government people that helped them.

It's a false choice that it has to be government or Wall Street, and it's a false choice that it has to be all or none of either of those.

And I have to clarify to you: it's not my group. I don't own it or lead it. I just support being honest about it, without the agenda Leo has here.

Tim Zank
Tue, 10/11/2011 - 10:30pm

Swing sez: "I just support being honest about it, without the agenda Leo has here."

Heh..Leo doesn't have an agenda, he just get's a kick out of people making fools of themselves. We all do. Please carry on, I'm gonna make more popcorn!

Christopher Swing
Tue, 10/11/2011 - 10:42pm

Ah Tim, I see you're still in the "Anger" phase of grief over OWS. So you're about as far along as Leo's brought you.

http://huff.to/ox6KdI

Anger -- That the GOP establishment and its state-run television over at FOX news would treat the protesters with a mixture of dismissal, scorn and fear all at once is unsurprising. But other media outlets have also piled on. The initial refusal to cover OWS has given way as the protests persisted on Wall Street and then spread to other cities. In this second phase, a typical media angle on the protests has been to mock the dress and other cultural habits of the protesters. CNN's Alison Kosik characteristically suggested that they mainly wanted to play bongo drums and smoke marijuana. Other media outlets have commented that OWS participants are "letting their freak flags fly" and are "aligned with Lenin." When former Congressman Alan Grayson explained -- quite cogently -- what the OWS protesters stood for, the sniveling and frivolous P. J. O'Rourke retorted that Grayson should "get your shoes off, get a bongo drum, forget where to go the bathroom, it's yours..." The New York Times' Gina Bellafante kicked off her generally snide piece with a mocking vignette about a supposedly "default ambassador" for the movement -- "a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka. A blonde with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968, Ms. Tikka had taken off all but her cotton underwear and was dancing on the north side of Zuccotti Park..."

Tim Zank
Tue, 10/11/2011 - 10:56pm

No anger here, merely gratitude for the help supplied by OWS & it's Dem supporters!

It smells like 1968! Please! Carry on!!

Christopher Swing
Tue, 10/11/2011 - 11:00pm

If you think there's any hope at all for the straight-crazy offered on the Republican side, well, I suspect there's not much hope for you to begin with.

And if you think OWS likes the Democrat side any better than the Republican side, I can see you're still not paying attention, to boot.

William Larsen
Tue, 10/11/2011 - 11:22pm

"it

Christopher Swing
Tue, 10/11/2011 - 11:30pm

Criminy, Larsen, you can only fit so many words on a sign and have people still be able to read it. They do bother to spell out much of what you describe right there, if you bother to dig deeper than just looking at the signs. The signs get attention, they don't constitute the entire message from beginning to end.

You should show up at a meeting, there's probably more people there in agreement with you than not.

William Larsen
Wed, 10/12/2011 - 10:08am

Hey, I had signs that had "Just Say No to Social Security", Just Say No to Budget Deficits", "Just Say No to Bailouts."

I have not read much on the topic since the people who have voiced their opinion were all over the place; jobs, banks, Wallstreet, CEO's, etc. Based on what I have seen and heard on the radio, message is easily identified "Bad Politicians/Banks." Take the "Just Say No" symbol and place Politicians, banks, bailout on it.

Your signs are gathering attention, but I think they are turning off most of the people. More than 95% of the companies out there are run well. They are publicly held companies that millions of Americans own.

Christopher Swing
Wed, 10/12/2011 - 2:13pm

Larsen, don't confuse the common media narrative of "they have no clear message" with what's actually going on. It's easy to go out to any group's protest and find the edge cases that make it look bad/disjointed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/occupy-wall-street-media_b_1005544.html sums it up well:

"Bargaining -- Perhaps the most popular media meme, consistent with what media critic Jay Rosen calls the "church of the savvy," is that the protesters lack a clear, coherent message or the broader political and organizational chops necessary to form a serious movement. Yes, one can find a variety of complaints among the various demonstrators, but their main beef is pretty clear. As Congressman Grayson put it:

"They're complaining that Wall Street wrecked the economy three years ago and nobody's held responsible for that. Not a single person's been indicted or convicted for destroying twenty percent of our national net worth accumulated over two centuries. They're upset about the fact that Wall Street has iron control over the economic policies of this country, and that one party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street, and the other party caters to them as well."

"This, more or less, has been the clear and consistent message of the protesters, whatever other items might secondarily be on their agenda. But such clarity hasn't stopped a range of media ninnies from harping on the protesters' supposedly confused messaging. Some pundits, like Nicholas Kristof in the Times, seem genuinely sympathetic in writing about the protests and in providing what they believe to be constructive advice. Others, however, are plainly interested only demonstrating their own hard-headed realism and cool, while lecturing about the futility of protest and the need to work within the system. (And Greenwald has an excellent analysis of just how off-base some of these criticisms are).

"As Kevin Gostzola has said, these criticisms demonstrate, more than anything, gatekeeper media's self-understanding as managers of democracy first, and citizens second."

And they're not even complaining about the 95% of companies. Just the 1% that screwed everything up, made a killing off of it, and the politicians they bought off.

But I wouldn't expect anything like competent coverage from the likes of Leo here. Either he didn't even know that OWS was having a publicized meeting in Fort Wayne the day he published this, or he didn't want to tell us.

Tim Zank
Wed, 10/12/2011 - 3:12pm

"Either he didn

Christopher Swing
Wed, 10/12/2011 - 3:30pm

Tim Zank, he works at a newspaper, commenting on local news... events. That someone presumably within walking distance from his office knew about.

http://www.news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/SE/20111010/NEWS/111019960

I guess Leo doesn't talk to Christian Sheckler very much. And he also doesn't do any actual newsgathering on the thing he's writing the blog about.

So yeah, it's not a schedule of local events, Einstein. It's a blog, which should require a little more effort, but then Leo can't even get up to the level of the schedule.

William Larsen
Wed, 10/12/2011 - 7:06pm

"

Tim Zank
Wed, 10/12/2011 - 7:28pm

Swingster

At the top of this page it says: Leo Morris, Editorial Page Editor of The News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne, Indiana

What part of "he's not a reporter" is confusing you?

Christopher Swing
Wed, 10/12/2011 - 8:46pm

"I will go back to it again, The very small number of Wallstreet traded companies wrecked the economy. Throwing 99% of the companies in with the 1% dead beats is what turned me off on the entire protest."

"They" didn't and "they" aren't. I think you're just misinformed about what's really going on with them. Leo up there and the gatekeeper media are in no small part responsible for that. You should really go to one of the assemblies and find out, or even discuss it on the website forums at occupyfortwayne.org/forums.

Zank: What part of "Editor" do you not understand means checking facts and editing? Or that people don't become newspaper editors without being reporters first?

Aside from the easy-to-understand concept that someone editorializing on a subject should actually do some research on and know the subject in order to be taken seriously on that subject.

Tim Zank
Wed, 10/12/2011 - 10:07pm

JEEBUS, IT'S A FREAKING BLOG, not a news story. Go back to your google page, the adults are talking here.

Christopher Swing
Wed, 10/12/2011 - 10:14pm

Zank: You're right, it's not a news story. A news story just has to report a few facts right and present them.

An editorial needs to use facts about a subject to make a point.

Maybe you should let the adults who understand journalism talk about it.

On the other hand, you're effectively making an argument that Leo isn't a journalist, so I'm just chuckling while I wait for him to ask you to stop "helping" him. :D

Tim Zank
Thu, 10/13/2011 - 11:34am

Swing, I hope you're not a journalism major, but it really wouldn't surprise me if you were, ha!

First things first, this blog is NOT the editorial page of the News-Sentinel.

It's a blog:

blog? /bl?g, bl?g/ Show Spelled [blawg, blog] Show IPA noun, verb, blogged, blog

Christopher Swing
Thu, 10/13/2011 - 3:32pm

Funny, it's under /ns/editorial/oa

It's on the News-Sentinel web site, under the editorial section. It's under the banner of the News-Sentinel. It's credited as by "Leo Morris, Editorial Page Editor of The News-Sentinel."

So, Leo isn't a journalist or an editor because he wrote something that's only published electronically? I'm not going to argue that Leo isn't much of a journalist, thanks for making that point for me, but I think you're confused there.

If the News-Sentinel doesn't want its editorial page editors writings associated with its editorials, it probably shouldn't host those writings on its site in the editorial section.

Then again, the extent of your knowledge seems to derive from barely being able to make use of an online dictionary, so I suppose that should tell us something.

"You want to cite what journalism class/text/professor/ that little nugget derives from?"

Well, practically all of them. XD

Oh, wait! Were you confused about the difference between the dictionary definition of an editorial, and what journalists are taught about writing editorials well?

But I guess it would be hard for you to be confused about that, given you don't know anything about that second option.

It's not in an online dictionary, after all. :D

Tim Zank
Thu, 10/13/2011 - 6:50pm

You are arguing in circles. Nice try.

Christopher Swing
Thu, 10/13/2011 - 6:58pm

Silly Tim. It wasn't even an argument at that point.

Thanks for the entertainment, though. :D

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