End the Occupation!

Bad behavior by various “occupiers” continues. In New York, protesters who look like hippies befoul Zuccotti Park:

Leftists swarmed onto Broadway and other streets, blocking traffic and scuffling with policemen:

In Boston, leftist protesters spat on a female Coast Guard member who was in uniform. Now the Coast Guard is warning its members not to wear their uniforms in the vicinity of the liberals.

Here in Minneapolis, I was on a conference call in my office late this afternoon when I heard noises from the street below–chanting, beating on drums, etc. I looked out the window and, sure enough, it was our own local occupiers, who are camping out in a downtown plaza. They marched to the biggest nearby bank, which is where my office is, and halted in one of the city’s busiest intersections, where they stayed for a half hour or so, blocking traffic. I shot this picture out my 25th-floor window, so it isn’t great, but it does give an idea of the size of the demonstration, which I would estimate at around 200 people:

After the first few minutes, cars stopped appearing, so I surmise that the police must have re-routed traffic around the demonstration. If so, there were a lot of unhappy drivers. After around a half hour, the protesters marched back to where they came from.

The stupidity of these protests almost defies belief. I have yet to see a single demonstrator interviewed who can explain what they are protesting or what their program is. The only thing we know for sure is that they don’t like banks. From the look of them, however, I doubt that many have extensive banking experience. Their hostility toward banks appears to be nothing but childish greed–banks are associated with money, and they want some–but our bank took no chances. When I left the office, all the outside doors but one were locked, and two security guards were manning that door. So they obviously thought it was necessary to lock the protesters out to keep them from entering the bank’s lobby.

In New York, when demonstrators battled policemen the crowd chanted, “The whole world is watching.” God, I hope so. We first heard that chant at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, and it took the Democrats 25 years to recover. History seems to be repeating itself, but when the first time was farce, I’m not sure what to call the rerun. I’m pretty sure, however, that if Democratic politicians like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi think it is to their advantage to identify themselves with these ignorant misfits, they are seriously mistaken.

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