President Obama sprinted through San Francisco on June 6 to attend yet two more high-end fundraisers. And I dogged him every step of the way.

Although Obama studiously avoided mentioning the Wisconsin election results during either of his speeches in S.F., Tea Party protesters rubbed his face in his party’s painful defeat yesterday, as we shall soon see.

Protesters — from both the right and the left — vastly outnumbered supporters wherever Obama went in the city. But at my first stop, most of the accidental rubberneckers had no idea which celebrity was responsible for the annoying street closures. “What’s all this for? Some politician?” asked a passing San Franciscan as Obama’s motorcade approached. “President Obama’s showing up,” I replied. “Oh. Again?” he shrugged as he walked away.

Obama has been to the Bay Area to withdraw cash so many times this campaign season that everyone seems to have lost count.

Interestingly, the Occupy Wall Street movement was nowhere in sight and seems to have completely faded from the political landscape, even though both fundraisers were in buildings that Occupy actually vandalized in earlier times.

Let’s follow Obama on his visit to the ATM known as San Francisco.

His first stop was a mysterious high-ticket fundraiser for 25 unknown donors at One Market, a skyscraper on the Embarcadero. While several hundred protesters (visible in the far distance) futilely awaited Obama’s motorcade at the building’s front entrance, I knew from experience that the Secret Service always sneaks him in the back way. So I maneuvered myself to the rear of the building, where I was almost completely alone.

When the cops started blocking unwitting pedestrians with barricades, under the direction of guys wearing business suits with sunglasses, American flag pins, and earphones, I knew I had hit paydirt — this was going to be the entrance point.

A bomb-sniffing dog from the K-9 Unit checked out every possible hiding place — another sure sign that the motorcade was going to pass this way.

After 20 minutes or so a cluster of onlookers had gathered, almost all of whom were there by chance. One by one I had informed them of Obama’s arrival, and the word spread. A few stuck around to catch a glimpse of the most powerful man in the world. As his motorcade approached, a couple of young ladies stepped into the street, and the cop was like, “Whoa whoa whoa, are you out of your mind? Do you want to get shot? Get back on the sidewalk!”

They stepped back, but the cop moved in to ensure compliance.

Hilariously, at this exact moment, an open-topped tour bus ran the barricade on the other side of the intersection, and was directed by tense cops down a side street. Never before was the cliché, “Move along, nothing to see here” more appropriate. Apparently neither the driver nor the tourists had the slightest clue that they missed seeing the president by just a few seconds.

The first of two identical limousines drove by. People waved and yelled. But as an old Obama Hand I know that he’s almost never in the first limousine — he’s in the second one. I squinted through the window and saw that I was correct — it was a body-double.

Then the actual presidential limousine cruised past. Interestingly, not only were the two vehicles visually identical, but they even had the same license plate number (800 002). Strange!

As you can see from the people across the street, the misdirection worked pretty well — most people were waving at the first limousine, while Obama went unnoticed.

But that was definitely him in the back seat. His jug ears gave him away, despite the poor visibility.

“Hello, Mr. Body Double!” everyone waved at the first car, as Obama slipped past them in the second.

Obama himself gave a perfunctory wave to my side of the street, though he had turned his head to talk to the guy next to him.

The crowd of blockaded pedestrians had grown to a couple hundred people; some decided to wave at the second limousine, just in case, even though he wasn’t really visible from that side of the street.

Obama finally turned his head to observe the passing peons. Too bad each of us didn’t have a spare $35,800, so we could actually see him in person! I guess that’s a privilege reserved for the elite.

The person next to me reached out a desperate, pleading hand. It seemed symbolic of something, though I’m not sure what.

Massive crowds of Wisconsin union protesters. Collective bargaining rights being challenged by right-to-work laws. Union picketing of private homes. Paint bombs. Bullying. Alinskyite tactics. All of this and more is documented in a blog post about the situation in Wisconsin regarding the gubernatorial election and controversial union demands.

Except there’s one very peculiar twist: The blog post is dated April 17, 1956.

Or at least it would have been a blog post, except that back in the ’50s there were no blogs, no Internet. If you wanted to disseminate coverage of unreported political outrages, you had to publish a printed pamphlet and distribute it by hand. Which is is exactly what Herbert Kohler, President of Kohler Co., did in 1956 after he personally witnessed the violent bullying tactics of Wisconsin unions.

I recently discovered this now ultra-rare pamphlet for 25¢ in the “ephemera” section of a local white elephant sale in Oakland. But its contents were so modern-seeming and so relevant to the recall election of Scott Walker happening right now in Wisconsin that it seemed as if it was a blog post written yesterday. The issues, tactics and warring sides are almost exactly the same today as they were 56 years ago. I was so amazed by what I read that I decided to take this April 17, 1956 blog post and finally put it on the Internet.

Why? Because the voters of Wisconsin need to know that this drive by Wisconsin unions to control the employment market and the levers of political power has been going on for an extremely long time; the upheaval that has wracked Wisconsin since Scott Walker first won the nomination to run for governor in 2010 is just the latest battle in a decades-long war.

At the conclusion of this post you will find high-resolution scans of each page from the short pamphlet entitled In Freedom’s Cause: The Menace of UAW-CIO Coercion, by Herbert Kohler. But first, a short explanatory introduction.

In Freedom’s Cause: The Menace of UAW-CIO Coercion

From the 1930s through the late ’60s, Herbert Kohler was the president of Kohler Co., a major plumbing and household supplies manufacturer headquartered in Wisconsin and founded in the 19th century by his immigrant father, John Michael Kohler. In 1954, the UAW tried to unionize all the employees at the Kohler factory, despite the fact that they were already among the best-compensated manual laborers in the state. The UAW played hardball in contract negotiations with Kohler management, and at first won some wage-hikes. But when Kohler resisted additional demands, the UAW ordered a massive strike against Kohler, and things started to get ugly.

The 1954 UAW action is now known as “The Kohler Strike” and is considered one of the most contentious and violent in American history:

Six years of sporadic violence ensued between strikers and strike breakers. In time, the company would charge opponents with more than a thousand acts of vandalism. At one point, more than 300 people were arrested. Calls for a national boycott of Kohler products were vociferous and sometimes effective. Strikers were able to continue their often violent activities because of some $12 million provided by the UAW.

The strike lasted for six years, until 1960, and was not fully resolved until 1965, with a partial victory for the UAW, after the National Labor Relations Board mostly sided with the union (as it almost always does). But Kohler Co. successfuly resisted efforts by the union to take over the corporation, and survived the boycotts, and to this day remains privately owned and very profitable.

In the middle of all this, Herbert Kohler went on a speaking tour around the country trying to warn people about the hyper-aggressive Wisconsin union political tactics and what it meant for American freedom overall. His stump speech was then typed up and supplemented with photographs documenting some of the union behavior, and it was turned into a smal pamphlet entitled In Freedom’s Cause: The Menace of UAW-CIO Coercion, which you can read in its entirety below.

Interestingly, many of the union tactics descibed and documented by Kohler are what would now be called “Alinskyite” tactics. But this is no accident: Saul Alinsky himself said that he learned the ins-and-outs of in-your-face “community organizing” by working with brutal CIO union enforcers in Chicago early in his career.

When reading the 1956 pamphlet, keep in mind its relevance to the 2012 gubernatorial recall election, coming up on June 5. The exact same issues which drove the union-initiated recall and underlie the left’s hatred of governor Scott Walker — collective bargaining, right-to-work laws, union pensions, and so forth — were what spurred the Kohler Strike in the 1950s.

Your vote and your sympathy, now as then, hinge on one question: How much power do you want to grant the unions? And will they bankrupt the state, as they tried to bankrupt Kohler, given a chance?

Remember the Laffer Curve?

First popularized in the ’70s and ’80s, the Laffer Curve was a brilliantly simple economic graph which demonstrated that government revenue grows as taxes are increased only up to a certain point, after which revenues begin to decline as tax rates approach 100%. (See idealized Laffer Curve on the right; click to enlarge.) The high point on the curve shows the optimal tax rate for bringing in the most revenue.

The reasoning behind this is self-evident. Obviously if tax rates are 0%, then the government will collect no tax revenue; but if tax rates are 100%, then the government will almost certainly also collect no tax revenue, because there would be no motivation for anyone to work, earn or invest, since all their income would go directly to the government. A tax rate of 100% may sound tempting at first, but since it would precipitate an economic collapse, the end result would be no economic activity to tax, and thus no revenue. Therefore, the most effective tax rate is somewhere in the middle; the trick is determining exactly where.

Keep the Laffer Curve in mind as we turn our attention to the astounding recent political transformation of comedian Jon Lovitz. On April 23, a recording of a Lovitz comedy routine savagely criticizing Obama’s “bullsh*t” class warfare rhetoric went viral on the Internet, and before long Lovitz was cropping up everywhere, in great demand as the spokesman for everyone disgusted by Obama’s claims that high earners “don’t pay their fair share” in taxes. And this is coming from a self-described Democrat who voted for Obama.

Most significantly, Lovitz claims that many of his fellow Hollywood liberals agree with him but are too afraid too say it publicly.

And then it struck me. Wealthy Hollywood liberals just love to skewer evil corporate fat cats and country-club Republicans, and up until now no one had encountered a limit to their enthusiasm for leftist class warfare rhetoric. And then…Obama went too far, and suddenly it got personal.

I realized that the principles behind the Laffer Curve also apply to the economic and political relationship between Democratic politicians and the Hollywood elite. Wealthy West Coast liberals will cheer on and swoon over any politician who engages in overheated class warfare rhetoric — up until a certain point, when it suddenly dawns on them that the rhetoric is aimed directly at themselves. Then very quickly their donations, fundraisers and helpful propagandizing start to dry up as the radical rhetoric begins to threaten them personally.

Just as in a Laffer Curve, Revenue and Support from Hollywood (RASH) is at a minimum for any politician who (like President Reagan, for example) doesn’t engage in talk of class warfare and refuses to demonize the rich; but it would also be at a minimum for any politician who’s so extreme (like Lenin, for example) that he’s likely to forcibly confiscate all the money and mansions of the wealthy Hollywood hypocrites. Somewhere in the middle, there is a perfect “sweet spot” for class warfare rhetoric that ensures maximum RASH –  strong enough rhetoric to demonstrate your liberalism, but not so strong as to go “the full Vladimir.”

All this can be explained more clearly in a new graph. And so I hereby present: The Lovitz Curve:

Just as in the Laffer Curve illustration above, this is an idealized, symmetrical version of what the Lovitz Curve would look like. Yet progressive critics of the Laffer Curve claim that the point of optimal revenue is likely not at the exact middle (e.g. a 50% tax rate in that case), but most probably further off to the right of the graph, somewhere around the 70% mark. (On the right you can see what critics say a more accurate Laffer Curve would look like — click to enlarge.)

The same principle holds true for the Lovitz Curve. Hollywood liberals are much more enthused by and generous to politicians closer to the Lenin end of the scale than to anyone near the Reagan end of the scale. It’s not like they’re most enthused by perfectly centrist populists; instead, they tend to give RASH to fairly high levels of class warfare, just so long as it doesn’t get so high that it starts to become scary.

Thus, a more accurate Lovitz Curve would likely look something like this:

I don’t employ the term “idiot” lightly; but really, there’s no more accurate term to characterize the sheer nitwittedness on display at last week’s May Day march spearheaded by OccupyLA.

As documented by indefatigable photojournalist Ringo in his “Occupy May Day / General Strike – Los Angeles” report, the idiocy manifested in at least four distinct ways:

• Thought disorders
• General ignorance or stupidity
• Foolishness, or the absence of wisdom and insight
• Narcissism

Let’s look at each type of idiocy separately, in the following brief selection of images from Ringo’s massive photo essay. (Ringo posted hundreds of pictures so that, as he puts it, he “can’t be accused of ‘cherry picking’ the worst images.” What you see in this PJM excerpt is just a small appetizer from OccupyLA’s overwhelming all-you-can-stomach idiocy buffet; click the link above to see the rest. All images here were taken by Ringo.)

Thought Disorders

It’s one thing to squat in your darkened basement scribbling word salad messages to the demons in your head. It’s quite another to carefully craft an oversized protest sign intended for public display at the next Occupy protest. But many of the Occupiers could not seem to keep the two behaviors distinct, and the result can only be seen as evidence for major thought disorders among some of the protesters. Occupy Wall Street: serious protest movement, or manifestation of brain malfunction?

Stupidity

Just as in Oakland, the latest fad among teenage anarchists is to fashion riot shields out of plastic garbage cans.

But unlike in Oakland, where they figured out that it’s best to hold the shield upside-down, some of the LA Occupiers held what looked like full-size garbage cans right side up, so that they appeared to the casual observer to be Vaudeville slapstick comedians standing in trash cans for the audience’s amusement. Or, more succinctly: FAIL.

One thing about those nasty olicarks: They know how to spell.

Because everyone admires the environmental records of Soviet Russia and Communist China, protectors of the Earth!

Foolishness

This category is reserved for Occupiers who, through foolishness or “absence of wisdom and insight,” ascribe to political ideologies which have already been thoroughly discredited or debunked. Chief among these is…

…Communism, which seemed to predominate at L.A.’s May Day rally, with communist and socialist groups turning out en masse for the march. My only question at this point is: Where do these people come from?

Second-most popular foolish ideology of the day: Anarchism. Which in many ways is the polar opposite of communism, and equally unfeasible as an actual organizing principle for society — but none of that seemed to matter to the swarms of ignorant youths burning off their hormones by running up and down the street trying to look like rebels. Sad, really.

And then there are those, such as this young lass, whose foolishness has no label, other than perhaps “shameless avarice.” How did we reach a point in history when people could proudly hold up signs saying, essentially, “Give Me Your Money”? The other side of her sign reveals all:

So I guess capitalism is, according to her, a system in which people get to keep their own assets, something which in her foolish universe is entirely unacceptable. Noted.

After spending the first part of May Day in downtown Oakland, which I documented in my “Occupy Oakland May Day General Strike“ report, I next moved down to Fruitvale BART at 3pm, where the day’s second big event was scheduled: the Decolonize Oakland rally, also known as the “March for Dignity and Resistance.”

While downtown’s “general strike” was mostly a playdate for the white Occupiers, the “Decolonize Oakland” rally was designed to attract the city’s Hispanic population. The rally was held at Fruitvale because it’s the heart of the city’s Hispanic neighborhood.

As always at such things, the rally started with some Aztec dancers. The Aztecs have come to symbolize the essence of pre-colonial North America, and since the rally was to “decolonize” Oakland, what better way to kick off the festivities?

In case you may be wondering how exactly they plan to “decolonize” (i.e. kick out all those of European descent) a major American city, the answer can be found at the rally’s astonishing decolonization manifesto page, which should be required reading for anyone who thinks that the left wing is the mellow side of the political spectrum. Titled “For People Who Have Considered Occupation But Found It Is Not Enuf,” the manifesto goes on to explain that “decolonization” is not simply a physical process, but rather is a philosophy, a frame of mind, in which the social structure, attitudes and creations of white people need to be discarded entirely. Furthermore, the decolonization folks see the white-led Occupy movement itself as part of the problem:

Some of us participated in the formation of Occupy People of Color and Queer People of Color groups in order to hold space, or find refuge when encountered with incidents of racism, sexism, or homophobia. The simple fact that our groups served this purpose shows that OWS spaces prioritized the wants, needs, values, and culture of heterosexual white men first. Frankly, many of us have encountered this straight-white-man approach to movement-building too many times to count. In fact, many of the same characters that have attempted to dominate movements in our communities in the past are the same people who lead OWS from the light and shadows.

The physical presence of multitudes of white Occupiers on Wall Street, which was once the site of Native genocide and African chattel slavery, is troubling. Though Occupy activists now widely share the history of Wall Street to show that its foundations are corrupt, they use this truth to justify a new occupation that is 80% white and 68% male.

…This occupation of public space upholds white supremacy….

We demand that our white allies speak with their comrades about the racial privilege that enables their actions…

We demand that Occupy activists cease using their experiences of police repression and brutality to erase the historical and current practices of genocidal violence against our peoples. What does it mean to suggest that people being pepper sprayed or badly injured by a gas canister is somehow on par with the generational traumas and current realities that Native communities, for example, experience?…

We demand that future encampments be organized and led by those who most need them.

Clear enough? They don’t want to take over Oakland; they want to take over the racist Occupy movement. An internal coup is necessary before the final revolution, because even if Occupy succeeds in overthrowing society, it would still be just a bunch of pasty-ass white guys controlling everything, and nothing will have changed.

This is the logical endpoint of modern leftist ideology, with affirmative action and “progressive stacking” and reparations taken to their ultimate conclusion. The Decolonize Oakland group sees the whole world as a gargantuan Apartheid regime, and they are seeking a globalized version of the day that the white South African government voluntarily stepped down and handed power to the oppressed people. Or, to put it more succinctly: Step aside, whitey: It’s our turn!

Despite all that, a surprisingly large number of naive white Occupiers showed up, perhaps unaware of just how unwelcome they were, and just how insufficient their radicalism is.

While the downtown Occupy event was mostly an anarchist affair, down here in Fruitvale it was much more overtly communist. This couple left me wondering: Does the sign on the left advocate the kind of gun-wielding power of their hero Che; or is it a complaint that the white police have unfair advantage; or what? Troubling. And amusing. Depending on how seriously you take it.

The Hispanics were communists…

The white people were communists… (Dude — seriously? Lenin?)…

The Black people were communists…

The Asians were communists…

Heck, it’s a Communist Party!

So many communists, one needs road signs to keep from getting lost in the maze of ideologies. Where can I find such signs…?

Ah, here we go.

The radical anti-capitalism spanned the generations. We had…

…babies…

…toddlers…

…teenagers…

…twenty-somethings…

…young adults…

…grown-ups…

…and seniors, all hating racist capitalist America equally! Such a scene of cross-generation harmony brought a tear to my eye.

On Tuesday, May 1, Occupy Oakland organized a series of events around the city, all as part of what they deemed a “General Strike” in commemoration of May Day, International Workers’ Day.

Ooooh, looks very exciting, doesn’t it?

Well, actually, no. Despite Occupy Oakland’s earnest attempts to stir things up and to attract attention, or at least pose (as in the picture above) for the cameras in such a way that it looks like their protest is newsworthy, in the end very little happened, by Oakland standards at least. Some windows were smashed, some businesses vandalized, a few people were arrested, but that was it — your typical Oakland protest, in other words.

But was there indeed a “general strike”? Did business as usual shut down? Nope. Not even close.

The central rendezvous point for the day’s “General Strike” events was Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of City Hall, which the Occupiers have renamed “Oscar Grant Plaza.” In the morning, there were several “decentralized srike actions” around the city, in which the various Occupy committees would act on specific ideological agendas. For example, the “anti-capitalist” group vandalized banks, the Chamber of Commerce, and other symbols of capitalism; the “anti-gentrification” group tried to force local businesses to obey Occupy’s demand that they shut down for the day’s “General Strike”; and so forth.

After convening at the plaza for a noontime break to rally the troops, in the afternoon everyone would then once again scatter throughout the city wreaking havoc, before meeting up at Fruitvale BART for a mid-afternoon “Decolonization March” back to the plaza, where everyone would rest up for the night’s vandalism.

It was all very confusing and scatterbrained, and there was simply no way one person could keep on top of it all. So (like most of the protesters) I made Oscar Grant Plaza my home base, and monitored the comings and goings from there.

Just as I had assumed, there were several minor street battles on Broadway near the plaza throughout the day. There was no purpose or goal to any of these confrontations; in fact, the act of confrontation was the goal. Everyone would mill around waiting for something to happen, and then some cops would show up, and the crowd would go into a frenzy, for no apparent reason. The mere presence of a policeman is all that it takes to send an Oakland Occupier into either blind rage or a life-affirming adrenaline rush.

This brief video of two random street confrontations (shot by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous) illustrate the kind of flare-ups that went on all day around downtown Oakland:

In the first half of the video, a small group of police showed up, causing the crowd of Occupiers to swarm like a disturbed hornet’s nest; in the second half, everyone scatters after some anarchist set off a small incendiary device in the crowd.

Neither of these two specific incidents were significant in and of themselves; rather, the video is just illustrative of innumerable similar scenes that played out all day and all night across Oakland.

The Occupiers were all hoping that one of these flare-ups would escalate into a full-fledged riot, but (as far as I could tell at least) that never happened.

The whole day had a very Rashomon-quality to it; each person, depending on where he or she was standing, might have a completely different impression of what happened. For example: After hearing what sounded like a brewing fracas nearby, I rushed past this (then intact) news van to see the action; but the fracas quickly fizzled, and I heard a crunching sound behind me. Thirty seconds later, I returned and took this picture of the van’s smashed windshield, having missed the moment of destruction by just a few yards and a few seconds. The perpetrator was long gone (or perhaps was standing right next to me — who knew?). Yet someone else could very well have been randomly at “the right place at the right time” and witnessed the whole thing.

Similarly, several times throughout the day I was caught up in the middle of various meaningless crowd-swarms in which people would rush at the police, and then retreat, and swirl around and rush again; projectiles would fly overhead; explosions would go off nearby; people would scream and cry and call out for medics; and yet even though I was in the middle of it all, I couldn’t really tell what was happening. It was sheer chaos. Later I would see news videos of police getting hit by paint-bombs, or Occupiers getting arrested, and realize I had been just steps away from the focal point of the action, and yet had not been able to see through the morass of people to the white-hot center of confrontation.

Here, for example, an Occupier threw some kind of smoke bomb over my head, and it landed nearby and exploded. It happened so suddenly that I didn’t see who threw it, nor could I see exactly where it landed, nor at whom it was aimed. Perhaps if the bomb had landed next to me, this would have seemed like a significant incident; but since it landed 40 feet away, it felt like just another trivial and purposeless act of social vandalism barely meriting a mention.

Like I said: Rashomon.

Here’s generally how the day’s ebb and flow played out:

First, a squad of cops would line up on the street.

Next, a line of ludicrous poseur anarchists would face off against them, mainly for the purpose of trying to look cool for the cameras.

Then the cops would start to move forward, and everyone would scatter and scream in outrage.

Then some knucklehead would throw a smoke bomb or a paint bomb or a bottle or some kind of incendiary device at the cops, and everyone would rush around taking photos and screaming “Medic!” because someone got hit by friendly fire or got trampled by the crowd.

Then the cops would arrest someone and retreat, and everyone would wander away, leaving the street deserted just moments after it had been the scene of what felt like a brewing major battle.

This exact same series of steps happened over and over and over throughout the day, to the point where it felt repetitive.

So, what was the purpose of all of this? Nothing. Excitement for the teenage rioters. Moral outrage for the Occupy organizers. Overtime for the cops. Boarded-up windows for the businesses. And higher bills for the taxpayers.

After one of the meaningless battles, I took some photos of the impact points where the Occupiers’ homemade explosives landed.

This one hit a garbage can.

A paint-bomb that missed its mark, though you can see the “splatter shadow” of someone’s foot at the upper right.

There was perhaps less violence this time around because the Oakland police employed a new strategy today; instead of trying to control the whole crowd, they’d just zip in and quickly arrest individual malefactors, and then retreat. The Occupiers tried to stop the arrests, which they dubbed “snatches,” to little avail.

SFGate captured photos of a few arrests, as part of their summary of the day’s events, which they characterized as “a kaleidoscopic variety of protests ranging from skirmishes with police to dancing, chanting throngs of demonstrators peacefully waving signs.”

The “Bay Area Strike” twitter feed archive is a essentially a list of each individual clash, recorded in real-time.

But enough of these pointless skirmishes! Let’s retire back to Oscar Grant Plaza where a colorful parade of eccentric characters and eccentric messages provided entertainment for the whole family.

Some douchebag carried a homemade banner with Obama’s new campaign slogan “Forward,” while in the background a different douchebag waved an upside-down American flag. Nice juxtaposition!

One of the Occupy security team members behind the main stage wore a shirt that said “Defend Oakland” and pictured an AK-47.

He showed off a rather sharp-looking flip-knife which he carried around — just in case.

On Saturday, a coalition of women’s rights, feminist, labor, progressive, and pro-choice groups organized marches in over 50 cities nationwide to protest in favor of President Obama’s health care agenda and against any restriction on abortion rights.

Photojournalist Ringo of Ringo’s Pictures attended the Los Angeles rally and has now posted a report about what happened.

[NOTE: As of 9:00am on May 2, this report has now been UPDATED with new photos, videos, text and links. If you only saw the original "preview" version earlier, keep reading.]

You can view Ringo’s full report here:

Women March Against the Phony “War on Women” – Los Angeles, CA 4/28/2012

This PJM post is merely an excerpt of Ringo’s report, to draw attention to it; click the link above to see plenty more photos.

By adapting the phrase “War on Women,” the protesters are unabashedly aligning themselves with the Democratic Party and the Obama 2012 presidential campaign, both of which are pushing this exact term as a campaign issue this year, claiming that the GOP is waging “a war on women.”

Here’s Ringo’s summary of the impetus behind the march:

We all know the story – When the Catholic Church objected to a provision in President Obama’s 2000 page “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”, that requires Catholic hospitals and schools to provide both contraceptives and so called “Day After” pills as part of their employee healthcare packages, Democrats pulled the old bait and switch, accusing Republicans of engaging in a “War on Women” for supporting the Church’s objections. A 30 year old Democrat activist named Sandra Fluke, posing as a doe-eyed college student, was brought in to speak before a group of House Democrats as part of the “Conscience Clause Committee”. She explained how the Catholic University she attended did not provide her with free contraceptives and so she was forced to spend over $1000.00 per year of her own money to pay for birth control. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, finding Flukes claim of spending $1000.00 per year on contraception to be a bit of an exaggeration, made a series of tasteless jokes about how much sex would be required in order to spend more than $1000.00 on birth control in a mere 365 days….

A rational person might think that the real issue is whether the Federal Government has the right to force a religious organization to provide (or subsidize) services that are in direct opposition to their long held religious values, but Democrats (and the Left in general) are not concerned with reason (or the U.S. Constitution), and they quickly pounced upon Limbaugh’s comments as an opportunity to create a distraction from the true issue at hand.

So on Saturday, April 28th, women (and some men) gathered in various cities around the country to protest against the completely fabricated, entirely phony, non-existent “Republican War on Women”.

I paid a visit to the rally at Pershing Square in the middle of Downtown, Los Angeles.

For a few more specifics about the march, check out the organizers’ Facebook page and the site of a local NOW chapter.

[All photos in this essay are by Ringo of ringospictures.com.]

This short video of a speaker at the rally is a good illustration of exactly the worst argument you can make at a pro-abortion rally:

“When my mom found out she was pregnant with me, she really didn’t feel like she had any options, and uh…I mean, I’m glad I’m here to share this with you, but…for her, y’know, at the time, there wasn’t Planned Parenthood, she didn’t really know what to do…”

In psychology, they call this “cognitive dissonance.”

The march was not particularly large — Ringo estimates a few hundred. Here’s his video showing the entire protest column:

An observation from Ringo:

At one point after a speaker gratuitously used the words “penis” and “vagina” again and again, a young girl of perhaps 7 or 8 standing at the front of the stage put her hands over her ears and yelled out, “Hey, there are children here!” to which the woman on stage replied, “Some day you’ll find out what your vagina is for, and then you’ll thank me”. The crowd had a good laugh.

The obscenity wasn’t just on the signs. Here’s what one of the rally’s speakers sounded like (NSFW):

Want to see the full photo essay? Check out Ringo’s report.

Are you ready for the most ridiculous and pointless Occupation ever?

Last week, on Earth Day, the Occupy movement illegally took over an entire farm and transformed it into…a farm!

So proud are they of this revolutionary act that they showed off the farm to the media yesterday, so naturally I had to check it out.

The farm they seized was not a working farm per se, but rather a “research farm” for the University of California, near its Berkeley campus. The only difference between the way the farm used to be (prior to a week ago) and the way it is now is that the Occupiers have transformed what was essentially a well-maintained and important open-air laboratory into a disheveled and ultimately purposeless pretend-farm for trustafarian dropouts.

The struggle over the farm is not just a struggle over land; it is a Battle of Narratives. The “Occupy the Farm” group (loosely affiliated with Occupy Cal and Occupy Oakland, but a new separate group) has already put up a slick web site called “Take Back the Tract” which explains the “philosophy” justifying their behavior:

We are reclaiming this land to grow healthy food to meet the needs of local communities. We envision a future of food sovereignty, in which our East Bay communities make use of available land – occupying it where necessary – for sustainable agriculture to meet local needs.

…followed by a raft of conspiracy theories involving Whole Foods and senior centers and baseball fields.

The university, on the other hand, has fired back with a devastating press release of its own, dismantling Occupy’s ludicrous theories and moral gymnastics:

• The agricultural fields on the Gill Tract that are now being occupied are not the site of a proposed assisted living center for senior citizens and a grocery store. The proposed development parcel is to the south, straddling the intersection of Monroe Street and San Pablo Avenue, and has not been farmed since WWII.

• The existing agricultural fields on the Gill Tract are currently, and for the foreseeable future, being used as an open-air laboratory by the students and faculty of our College of Natural Resources for agricultural research. Their work encompasses basic plant biology, alternative cropping systems, plant-insect interactions and tree pests and pathogens. These endeavors are part of the larger quest to provide a hungry planet with more abundant food, and will be impeded if the protest continues. And, they are categorically not growing genetically modified crops. We have an obligation to support their education and research, and an obligation to the American taxpayers who are funding these federally funded projects.

• The university has been actively participating in a collaborative, five-year long community engagement process about our proposed development project with hundreds of hours of meetings, hearings and dialogue. We have a great deal of respect for all those who have been involved and regret that “Occupy the Farm” appears to have little regard for the process or the people who have participated in it.

• We take issue with the protesters’ approach to property rights. By their logic they should be able to seize what they want if, in their minds, they have a better idea of how to use it.

To clarify matters for those not familiar with the area:

The University of California has its main campus in the center of Berkeley, but that’s not the only property it owns. Scattered around the East Bay, the university also owns several other large tracts of land, used for housing, office buildings, research facilities, storage, and so forth. One of these properties, known colloquially as “Albany Village” because it’s in the adjacent small town of Albany, is home to a housing complex for students who are married (and/or who have children) which is called “University Village”; and nearby on the same property is an experimental farm technically known as the “Agricultural Research Fields” but more commonly referred to simply as “the Gill Tract,” named after the Gill family which farmed the land originally.

The Gill Tract, about the size of a city block, is used by researchers and graduate students in UC’s College of Natural Resources to study biology, crop yields, plant diseases and genetics — often with an eye toward ecologically friendly, sustainable and organic practices.

Here’s one of the few articles in the mainstream media about Occupy the Farm, giving the basic facts and also pointing out that the biological researchers need access to the land immediately for their experiments because of the spring planting season.

The scientists themselves are for the most part royally pissed off at the Occupiers and some may have years of work ruined by the Occupiers’ juvenile prank.

Now that you know the whole story, let’s look around the Gill Tract today, shall we?

COMPOST CAPITALISM! In this context, is “Compost” a verb, or an adjectival noun? Are we supposed to compost capitalism, i.e. throw it on the compost heap; or is Occupy engaging in the practice of compost capitalism, a form of free trade based on the compost standard? Only your Marxist knows for sure.

Working in the hot sun. The thrill of breaking into gated property and “liberating” land is exciting; the tedium of then spending endless hours over the next year in the blistering heat, in order to legitimize your actions and prove you’re not just jacking everyone around — not so fun.

Prediction: Very few, if any, of these “crops” will ever be harvested, or even grow to maturity.

Before the Occupation, the Gill Tract was an agricultural research farm where twenty-somethings getting their PhDs would work the fields to grow crops, as they researched biology or how to raise better, healthier plants. But now, after this incredible revolution by Occupy, the Gill Tract has been utterly transformed into a farm where twenty-somethings work the fields to grow crops. The only difference is that before, the farm served a scientific function to improve society, and was managed by experts and hard-working students doing meaningful research; but now, it’s run by a bunch of smug amateurs and dropouts who plant store-bought seedlings in the middle of what once was a controlled research environment. Meet the new farm — same as the old farm, except worse.

Just as in collective farms in Russia and China, the first order of business at the occupied farm was to set up an open-air lecture space so the “workers” (necessarily with sarcastic quote marks in this case) can receive their daily political instruction.

Only a handful of rows, right near the entrance, were planted all along their length, from end to end. Soon enough, those rows gave way to other rows with just a few plants near the walkway, seemingly just for show, while the rest of the row went unused.

Many rows’ plantings were pretty pitiful, or perhaps just symbolic; in this case, for instance, a single full-grown leek was stuck in the ground at the start of one row, to simulate the concept of “farming leeks.”

The vast majority of the tract had been Roto-tilled but still remained unplanted as of yesterday.

Elsewhere around the acreage here and there were various ill-considered haphazard zones of a few transplanted seedlings. The plant with the label near the center is a young citrus tree, bought at a nursery, and stuck in the soil at this essentially random spot. Since it takes citrus trees several years to mature enough to bear fruit, this sapling will be growing here for quite a long time before it becomes a producing tree. Had Occupy really thought out the location of this tree, for the long-term — or was it (as I suspect) just some dude who stuck it there without much (or any) foresight; and since he won’t be around three years from now to tend it, why should he care that it will likely interfere with other uses for that part of the tract?

Wait, what — “our” lot? Suddenly you’re in favor of private property and ownership, now that you’ve stolen it? How is that lot yours any more than it was the university’s before you took it?

Hypocrisy, thy name is Occupy. When society draws boundaries, builds fences, and makes rules, Occupy gets to violate them at will. But once they’ve seized control, Occupy immediately starts making new rules and new boundaries that everyone else is supposed to honor. Perhaps that’s the new Occupy motto: “Rules for thee, but not for me.”

Despite several signs in the area declaring that the Gill Tract Occupation was not a “tent city,” as detractors had worried, but was instead devoted entirely to farming, in reality a tent…well, let’s just call it a “tent eco-village” has sprung up in the fields. This is not a tent city! Who do you trust — me, or your lying eyes?

Some leftist U.C. professors are lecturing today at the farm to show their solidarity with the Occupiers (and to thoughtlessly reveal their antagonism against fellow faculty members whose research at the farm was interrupted/spoiled by the Occupation), including Laura Nader (Ralph Nader’s older sister, famous for helping to lead the field of anthropology toward self-critical Political Correctness); Gill Hart, a Gramscian anti-capitalist; and Paul Rabinow, a deconstructionist anthropologist. What do any of these professors know about farming, or plant biology? Nothing. But hey, they know about the significance of what it means to spout off a bunch of revolutionary socialist verbiage while absconding with stuff that isn’t yours. And that will make the Occupiers feel ever so snug in their smugness. Group hug!

Scholars have for centuries been pursuing clues to “the historical Jesus” — evidence that the religious figure now known as Jesus Christ actually once existed as a real person. There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of popular books, documentaries, television programs, magazine articles, research papers, films and more on the search for the “real” Jesus. While this investigation into the ultimate origins of Christianity may have once long ago been controversial, it is by now quite commonplace and accepted as a standard part of religious studies, even when the researchers conclude (as they often do) that the evidence for the historicity of Jesus is skimpy at best.

But no similar investigations have ever been conducted on the historicity of Muhammad (a.k.a. Mohammed, depending on the Arabic transliteration). Why not?

Most people assume that no one bothers to investigate whether or not Muhammad was a real person for the same reason that no one bothers to investigate the reality of other religious founders such as Joseph Smith or Martin Luther or Anton LaVey — because the evidence for their existence is overwhelming, well-documented and unquestioned. Regardless of whether or not Muhammad’s teachings were moral or useful, everyone, even the most hardened infidels, of course accepts that he must have existed. Right?

Well, actually, no. At least not according to a surprising and eye-opening new book by Robert Spencer, the bestselling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and many other books, and a well-known critic of the Islamic doctrine of jihad.

While it may be true that “absence of proof is not proof of absence,” Spencer in his new book Did Muhammad Exist? does quite a convincing job of showing that there is, indeed, a complete “absence of proof” when it comes to the historicity of Muhammad. Yes, admittedly, it’s nearly impossible to “prove a negative,” and Spencer concedes as much; but in the vacuum of evidence there is no reason from a skeptic’s perspective to accept as factually true the traditional stories about Muhammad. (As we will see, alternate theories about the origins of the Muhammad tales more closely match what little evidence we have.)

The Evidence

To tackle such a big subject, Spencer focuses on five potential sources of information about Muhammad:

1. Documents from the era (7th and 8th centuries) written by independent (i.e. non-Muslim) outside observers;
2. Documents from the era written or created by Arabs/Muslims themselves;
3. The Qur’an itself;
4. The Hadiths, Islamic commentaries and sayings collected in the 8th and 9th centuries; and
5. The first biography of Muhammad, written by Ibn Ishaq over a century after Muhammed’s lifetime, on which all subsequent biographies are based.

Over the course of 200 pages, each category is carefully examined for solid evidence of Muhammad’s historicity, and each category is found wanting.

Of particular interest to a skeptic like me is the first category, because it is the only one that counts as a truly independent source. I simply assume that Islam, like most religions, boasts sacred texts which are self-referential and self-confirming (turns out I was wrong, but more about that later).

So: What did non-Muslims have to say about Muhammad and Islam, during his lifetime, and for 60 years afterward?

Nothing.

They made no mention of Muhammad or Muslims or Islam at all, at least until around the start of the 8th century. In case you’re thinking that there’d be no reason for outsiders to mention the religion of some obscure far-off tribe, remember that starting with the date of Muhammad’s purported death in 632, Arabs galloped out of the desert and conquered or captured almost the entirety of the Near East, the Middle East and North Africa in just a few decades. They encountered many cultures and civilizations, but none of those conquered peoples seem even to have heard of Islam or Muhammad. As Spencer notes in Chapter 2,

The Arabian conquests are a historical fact; that the Arabian conquerors actually came out of Arabia inspired by the Qur’an and Muhammad is less certain.

There are many puzzling details which tend to cast doubt on the standard narrative of Islam’s early years — that is, Muhammad’s life, and the decades immediately after his death when Arabs conquered the Middle East under the banner of their new religion, Islam. For example, a record exists of what was essentially a religious debate between a Christian in Antioch and an Arab commander at the height of the Arab conquest of the region, but, as Spencer notes,

In it the author refers to the Arabians not as Muslims but as “Hagarians” (mhaggraye) — that is, the people of Hagar, Abraham’s concubine and the mother of Ishmael. The Arabic interlocutor denies the divinity of Christ, in accord with Islamic teaching, but neither side makes any mention of the Qur’an, Islam, or Muhammad.“

Imagine debating a “Christian” about religion, and he never mentions the Bible, Christianity, or Jesus. You might begin to doubt that he was a Christian at all.

And, jumping to the book’s conclusion, that’s exactly what Spencer posits: That the 7th century Arabs may have practiced a sort of nonspecific monotheism, loosely syncretized from pre-existing Judaic and Christian beliefs; but this new religion at first did not have a name, did not have a supposed “founder,” did not have a sacred text, and did not have rigid rituals. All of those were added much later, but fashioned in such as way as to retroactively assert their own 7th-century origins.

Surprising even for me was the book’s revelation that even among Arabic documents and artifacts, there is no mention of or example of any Qur’anic text until the year 691, a full 80 years after Muhammad supposedly started dictating it, and 60 years after it was completed and purportedly became the central text of Arab society. And even that 691 appearance — an inscription on the Dome of the Rock — may not have been a copy of Qur’anic text. From Spencer’s book:

This Qur’anic material is the earliest direct attestation to the existence of the book — sixty years after the Arab armies that had presumably been inspired by it began conquering neighboring lands. … Given the seamlessly mixed Qur’anic / non-Qur’anic nature of the inscription and the way the Qur’an passages are pulled together from all over the book, some scholars, including Christoph Luxenberg, have posited that whoever wrote this inscription was not quoting from a Qur’an that already existed. Rather, they suggest, most of this material was added to the Qur’an only later, as the book was compiled. … It may be that both the Dome of the Rock and the Qur’an incorporated material from earlier sources that contained similar material in different forms.”

As for the third potential source of contemporary information about Muhammad, the Qur’an itself, non-Muslims might be shocked to learn, as Spencer writes, that,

The name Muhammad actually appears in the Qur’an only four times, and in three of those instances it could be used as a title — the “praised one” or “chosen one” — rather than as a proper name. By contrast, Moses is mentioned by name 136 times, and Abraham, 79 times. Even Pharaoh is mentioned 74 times. Meanwhile, “messenger of Allah” (rasul Allah) appears in various forms 300 times, and “prophet” (nabi), 43 times. Are those all references to Muhammad, the seventh-century prophet of Arabia? Perhaps. Certainly they have been taken as such by readers of the Qur’an through the ages. But even if they are, they tell us little to nothing about the events and circumstances of his life.

Indeed, throughout the Qur’an there is essentially nothing about this messenger beyond insistent assertions of his status as an emissary of Allah and calls for the believers to obey him. Three of the four times that the name Muhammad is mentioned, nothing at all is disclosed about his life.
…
That is all as far as Qur’anic mentions of Muhammad by name go. In the many other references to the messenger of Allah, this messenger is not named, and little is said about his specific actions. As a result, we can glean nothing from these passages about Muhammad’s biography. Nor is it even certain, on the basis of the Qur’anic text alone, that these passages refer to Muhammad, or did so originally.”

Wait — there’s basically nothing about Muhammad in the Qur’an?

And even if there had been, that may not have proven anything anyway. Spencer goes to great lengths to dissect the early history of the Qur’an, recounting how even Islamic sources admit that it was not compiled until long after Muhammad’s death, often based on the memories of random people the compilers met by chance; and there are even competing versions of who compiled it and when, and what their political and military motivations were for including or excluding certain passages.

If you thought that big political rally in San Francisco on Saturday must have have been a “Romney for President” event, then you are forgiven — because it sure looked that way.

But it actually was Tea Partiers from around the Bay Area who gathered on the Embarcadero for the biggest Tea Party of the 2012 election season so far. (That’s right — they’re ba-a-a-a-a-ack, demanding fiscal responsibility and smaller government, and not letting the mainstream media’s lies silence the debate.)

And although early in the campaign Mitt Romney was not at first the Tea Party favorite, they’re now rallying to his side, if Saturday’s event was any indication.

“Hear us shout! Vote Obama out!” was the rallying cry of the day. And that meant only one thing: Vote Romney like your life depended on it. The event’s official motto was “NObama 2012,” and after a bruising primary season, there’s only one NObama left to vote for: Romney.

True, there was a small contingent of Ron Paulians at the San Francisco rally, but they were overwhelmed by the nearly universal Romney support. I have no doubt that among the true hardcore conservatives in the crowd, that support was more pragmatic than ideological; but contrasted against free-spending big-government Obama, even a moderate conservative like Romney seems like a messiah by comparison. And just about everyone at the rally realized that.

Romneysiacs plied the crowd with Romney stickers — and almost everyone took them up on the offer. By the end of the day, the place looked like a Romney rally.

The Tea Party is good at math, and there’s one very simple equation they’ve solved:

- America will go bankrupt unless spending is reined in and the size of government is reduced;
- Obama is charting the exact opposite financial course from what needs to happen;
- Romney is going to be the Republican nominee for president, whether or not he was everybody’s first choice;
QED, we must support Romney if we want to save the country.

Meghan McCain staffed the Romney table. (No, not really, but she sure was a lookalike.) The guy on the right was saying, “Romney is no milquetoast — he will crush all opposition with his mighty claws, like so!” Or something like that.

About 600 people showed up; one of them was “Larry in SF,” who has also posted a photo essay about the rally on his Fund47 blog, including hi-res crowd shots to verify the attendance numbers. Larry has kindly consented to the use of a few of his photos (as credited) in this report; if you like them, check out his full photo essay here.

Even the pooches planned to vote for Romney. And why not? No voter ID is required. Just walk into any polling place and bark, “Woof! My name is woof! Eric Holder woof! Give me my woof! ballot!” Affix a pawprint as a signature, and you’re good to go!