Last week I noticed two signs go up in my neighborhood, announcing a “Recovery.gov” project. I did a little searching and discovered that federal stimulus money was being spent to resurface two roads in my city, at a total cost of $1,619,000.
According to the site, this project will create 0.22 jobs. At that rate, one job would cost $7,359,090.
The roads to be resurfaced are Bartlett Boulevard (from the southern limits of the city of Bartlett to Memphis-Arlington) and Altruria Rd (from Summer to Yale), both of which I drive frequently, and neither of which appear to be in current need of any major repairs. It’s a bit like that scene in Falling Down, where road crews shut down a perfectly fine street for repairs in order to justify the government’s budget.
Except in this case, we’re also paying for the government to create propaganda telling us how wonderful the stimulus is. According to one estimate, the government has spent $20 million on these signs alone.
Here in Tennessee, our government is apparently tickled to death about them:
“One state brags it posts signs but manages to keep the process cost-effective. The Tennessee Department of Transportation boasts, “There are a total of 324 signs statewide for a total cost of $12,931 and an average of $37.67 each.” The reason for the small cost, they say, is that their signs are small– about equal to a speed limit sign.”
Oh, but isn’t $37.67 such a small price to pay to remind us how out of control, spendthrift and corrupt our government has become?
The signs don’t help direct traffic. They don’t help alert drivers to road conditions. They don’t offer any necessary information. They serve absolutely no purpose other than to glorify the regime.
The statue in Percy Shelly’s Ozymandias reads, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
The question is, do these reprehensible signs stand as a testimony to the hubris of our malignant government, or to the decline of our great nation?
I’m not sure how I overlooked this blog post by the anarchists who protested the Southern Republican Leadership Conference last weekend:
Anarchists took to the streets in New Orleans on Friday to protest the SRLC, marching to the Hilton Hotel, where a banner was hanging from the roof which said “We won’t pay for their crisis. Become the crisis!”
The march then headed to Brennan’s Restaurant, where a $10,000 a plate SRLC dinner was in progress. Brennan’s is notorious as the largest donor to the LA Restaurant Association, which sued to block a $1 minimum wage raise that was approved by voters in New Orleans in 2002.
Protesters marched against traffic and lost the police on the way, and attempted to storm the restaurants doors after chants echoed off the walls in the narrow French Quarter streets. The police arrived just as people started to stream through the doors and they pushed everyone back outside. SRLC delegates were forced to walk a gauntlet of protesters chanting “they say cut backs, we say fight back!” as they exited the restaurant.
Eventually the march headed back to the Hilton and chanted “Racist, Sexist, Anti-Gay, Right Wing Bigots Go Away” to the delegates entering and exiting the hotel before dispersing.
The march included brass bands, students from UNO, healthcare workers fighting to re-open Charity Hospital, and people angry about a bunch of racist, fascist bigots coming to New Orleans after their leaders drowned it only 4 years ago. New Orleans is still badly damaged from the hurricane, and the GOP should be ashamed to come party on top of its ruins while we still struggle to recover. Their arrogance and wealth is only fuel to stoke our fires of anger at the injustice and deprivation we live through every day.
Sounds like a confession to me.
Since this story apparently doesn’t deserve any attention, I’ll keep it under 10 words:
Now they’re threatening me: “Do your worst, /b/. This conservative doucheblogger is posting personal info on activists and trying to frame them on an attack on a GOP aid… He is the enemy of all amonymous, everywhere. Do not forgive. Teach him a lesson he’ll never forget.”
Nice.
UPDATE: Link removed.
While it’s always important to get the facts of a story correct and not jump to conclusions, I’ve become frustrated with the reluctance of many to give adequate attention to the sociopolitical context of the brutal attack on Allee Bautsch and Joe Brown last weekend in New Orleans.
Some still refuse to even entertain the possibility that the attacks may have had a political motive, despite some very strong evidence to the contrary. Further, some have used an early, errant rumor (the Palin pins), or the overall violent crime rate in the city, as an excuse to deny the legitimacy of a very real and chilling story. The dismissive treatment of this heinous attack is ignorant and wrong.
The obvious political contrast here is the media treatment of the TEA parties, which have been declared extreme and racist, and are then used as an indictment against the entire conservative movement, without even a fraction of the evidence available in this case. This story is and should be bigger than gotcha politics, but none should deny the role politics played in this crime, whether or not the assailants themselves belonged to a political party or even participated in the political rally.
While the victims’ family, the police investigators and the Governor’s staff have been justifiably restrained and conservative in their public pronouncements, it is well past time to lay out a case that the extreme Leftwing, anarchist radicals created an atmosphere of hate and violence, at the scene of the crime, targeting the very people who were attacked that night.
At this point, without further evidence, nobody should accuse the protesters who participated in the “secondline for healthcare and education” of having committed the assaults, which put Bautsch in the hospital with a broken leg and gave Brown a concussion and a fractured jaw and nose. At the same time, it would be absurd to assume that the protest played no role in creating the hostile circumstances under which these attacks took place.
If we step back and take a look at where the rally was held, what its message was, who the protest targeted, and who was involved in the march, the picture becomes very clear. Radical anarchists and Leftwing extremists, spreading a message of violence and hate, marched directly to the scene of the crime. Their target: Gov. Bobby Jindal, his “rich” friends, and Republicans.
Is it just mere coincidence, then, that the victims of this assault were Republican employees of Gov. Jindal attending an expensive fundraiser, at the exact location, and at the exact time, that the protest took place?
Is it just mere coincidence that the perpetrators purposely targeted the victims and shouted insults at them concerning “money,” as Allee’s mother claims, and their being “nicely dressed,” as the police report states?
I don’t think so.
In a previous post, I briefly described my own encounter with the protesters, who I’ve since discovered were part of the Iron Rail collective, the anarchist group who organized the march. Iron Rail rail members like Daniel Mauch and Joanna Dubinsky speak with contempt against the New Orleans Police Department, reject private property rights, and advocate a political revolution or complete overhaul of the Constitution. They are aligned with far Left socialist groups that consider as heroes people like Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx and Chairman Mao.
Here’s what Iron Rail wrote on Facebook last Friday, the night of the attack: “What an awesome action. New Orleans bared its fangs and snarled, and the rich people shat themselves in fear.”
While the protesters have now removed many of their videos, web postings and photos, for what I assume to be nefarious reasons, let’s take a look at the message this protest was sending, and the dangerous environment it was creating, from the perspective of one Flickr photoset that is still online (all photos copyrighted by Jessie Jacobs): read more…
If the attacks on Allee Bautsch and Joe Brown in New Orleans last weekend were not politically-motivated, why has Daniel Mauch (aka francisnblake) now taken his protest videos private? What is he afraid we’ll see in those videos?
Mauch has now also concealed his Facebook page, where he had written, “My offer to film any mischief making today still stands. Give me a call if you’re doing any street theatre in the FQ.”
Again, if there was nothing objectionable in those videos, and on his webpage, why is he now concealing the records, when earlier he was asking his comrades on Facebook to comment on his videos and give them high ratings so they would appear higher in the YouTube search engine?
What is he trying to hide?
I can now reveal the identity of the leftwing radical who shot video last weekend during the Southern Republican Leadership Conference (SRLC) in New Orleans.
As I posted earlier, a protester using the pseudonym Francis N. Blake captured video of their march to the Hilton Riverside, where the SRLC was held, as well as footage of a splinter group who continued on to the street outside Brennan’s restaurant, where a separate Republican fundraiser was being held, and where a member of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s campaign staff was later allegedly assaulted. According to reports, Jindal staffer Allee Bautsch suffered a broken leg, and her boyfriend suffered a concussion and fractured nose and jaw in the incident.
I took a break from the conference Friday night to see what I could find out about the protest, which another SRLC attendee had casually informed me about earlier that evening. As I approached Mr. “Francis N. Blake” and a group of four or five other young, white males, one of them shouted, “Racist! Sexist! Homophobe!” etc., etc.
Over the course of an hour, I spoke to these guys, asking questions, trying to get to the bottom of who they were and what they were really after. Most of them sulked away after finding me to be a mellow, reasonable, inquisitive member of the “media,” as my badge indicated, signaling that I might be friendly to their cause. As they left, one said something like, “wow, you really managed to calm us down.”
One fellow stayed behind, however, Mr. Francis N. Blake, who had earlier introduced himself as “Daniel.” He informed me of the march and the rally that had taken place outside Brennan’s, and he proved it by handing me the rally fliers, and by writing down the address of his YouTube channel. When I saw the name Francis N. Blake, I said, “hey, that’s not your name.” He responded with something like, “no, I use lots of pseudonyms to keep them confused.” I didn’t ask who *they* were.
With little effort, however, I happened upon his Facebook account.
Meet Daniel Mauch. He’s a self-described “anarchist” who is “considering becoming the leader of a mind control cult to pay for retirement.”
Mauch is a fan of Anarchy, Left Turn, and the US Social Forum.
He helps run the Iron Rail bookstore / library in New Orleans and he’s a frequent poster on Leftists in the U.S. South, where he wrote recently:
There are accusations (made some time after the fact) that one of Jindal’s aides was attacked on friday night by people who had attended the protest.
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/04/police_release_statement_on_ji.html
Since around midnight, Right Wing wingnuts have been fllooding the videos I put on youtube o…f the protest (such as this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-pYYlHiY0g ) with fuckwit comments concerning said accusations.
and
There’s a lot of potential here. For example, if this group had existed a month or two earlier, the SRLC protests could have involved many more people from the region outside New Orleans.
On his own wall, he wrote this:
I found a bar with a strong wifi signal and am uploading the rest of the vids from yesterday’s protest. My offer to film any mischief making today still stands. Give me a call if you’re doing any street theatre in the FQ.
What does “mischief” mean to an anarchist?
What does “street theatre in the FQ” mean to an anarchist?
Is it outside the realm of possibility that it meant violent attacks on the Republican fundraisers who went to the French Quarter that night, who ended up with a broken leg, a concussion, and a fractured nose and jaw?
What role did these anarchists play in stirring up the hate that may have led to these attacks?
Someone should ask Daniel Mauch, Joanna Dubinsky, and the other radicals and anarchists who organized the rally that led protesters to the scene of the alleged crime.
My thanks go to The Hayride for continuing to follow this story. The people who did this need to be brought to justice.
Two blogs, Gateway Pundit and The Hayride, are piecing together reports on the SRLC protest march that led to a confrontation with donors attending a Republican fundraiser and may have ended in the savage assault on Gov. Bobby Jindal’s staff member and another individual.
But there are a few details missing, some of which I can provide.
Here’s The Hayride on reports that the protest split off and went to Brennan’s, where the fundraiser was being held:
…we have some sketchy reports that the protest moved to Brennan’s Restaurant where the fundraiser was. But we have yet to see any kind of documentation of what it looked like at Brennan’s…
I was in New Orleans for the SRLC, and I talked to the protesters, some who gathered near the Hilton Riverside, and some who splintered off and went to Brennan’s.
In addition to what I heard from the protesters themselves, the first piece of evidence is this flier, which one of the protesters handed to me after I spent an hour talking to them:
The flyer reads in part, “If you’d like to visit BRENNAN’s, it is on Royal St., between Conti & St. Louis. (in the French Quarter)”
If you google the “HOTLINE” number listed on the flyer, you’ll find that it’s listed to Joanna Dubinsky.
The handwriting on this flyer is written by another protester, who videotaped the march, including this video, which shows a female protester (possibly Dubinsky) suggesting that the march head to Brennan’s.
This video, a second piece of evidence, is titled “SRLC Protest 9 April 2010 – Call for Further Action.”
A third piece of evidence is a second video by this same Youtube user, which again shows a female protester (again, possibly Dubinsky), this time leading a large crowd in a chant against Gov. Bobby Jindal, calling him “dirty.”
The video is titled “SRLC Protest 9 April 2010 – Heckling Bobby.”
Hayride also identifies that the protest website is connected to the Iron Rail Book Collective, located at 511 Marigny Street. This is also the address on the flier posted above, handwritten by one of the Collective’s operators, who also shot these videos. “Francis N Blake” is one of his pseudonyms.
So who assaulted Gov. Bobby Jindal’s campaign staff? It might help to begin by asking these self-described “radical socialists.”
This past week I finished N.T. Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is