This isn’t as blunt as Rudy Giuliani’s “streets are not for sleeping” rule, but apparently Mayor Bloomberg is finally taking a stand against the unwashed homeless hordes in Zuccotti Park. Sort of:

Anti-Wall Street protesters’ plans to camp in a New York park throughout the city’s harsh winter were dealt a blow on Friday when the fire department confiscated six generators and about a dozen cans of fuel. …

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Much has been written in recent years about how civic participation in America has declined. We are more selfish, more narcissistic, more individualistic and less bonded to one another, and to our communities, than we ever have been. There is something to this critique, though things are a good deal more nuanced and mixed than we sometimes imagine. In any event, here’s a terrifically encouraging story about the underlying strength of America.

The Richmond Times Dispatch reports that a 9-year-old boy, Robbie Wood Jr., vanished on a family outing Sunday in the north-central part of Virginia (Hanover County). Wood is severely autistic and has no verbal skills; Hanover County Sheriff David Hines said the youth has “absolutely no awareness of his personal safety concerns.” In response, we’ve seen a massive search effort, with more than 1,000 volunteers trained and dispatched into a 2,000-acre search area.
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The outbreak of violence during an Occupy event in Oakland, California, illustrated the underlying threat always lurking beneath the surface of entitlement that characterized the wave of leftist demonstrations around the country. One person injured during the attempt to reclaim an area that had already been declared by the city to be off-limits has already changed the narrative to one of heroic martyrdom and alleged police brutality.

The fractured skull of Scott Olsen, a former Marine who served two tours in Iraq, has become a rallying point by the Occupy movement as vigils are being held in his honor around the country. But Olsen’s injury is serving to obscure the fact that the Oakland crowd threw rocks at police in an attempt to have their way. Rather than being a symbol of a victim of “corporate greed” and the “war economy,” the behavior of Olsen and his fellow Occupiers illustrates the fundamentally undemocratic and brutish nature of the demonstrators that gives the lie to attempts by the liberal mainstream media to cast as them as a reasonable answer to the law-abiding and peaceful Tea Party.

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John Ennis makes a good (and depressing) point:

It seems that al Qaeda is moving into Libya. Their flag is flying in Benghazi. With no American boots on the ground, they should have training camps set up by the end of the year. Part One of the Libyan War is over. Part Two: Attack of the Drones should be coming to theaters next spring!

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There’s been a lot of commentary about how weak the GOP’s presidential field is, including by me.

And so I’d offer a qualifier to my own analysis: what matters in the end isn’t how strong the field is, but how strong the eventual nominee is. It’s quite easy to get caught up in the moment and worry third-tier candidates will discredit a political party. But the party is judged by the nominee it produces, not by the candidates who were defeated.

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The automatic defense and Medicare cuts that go into effect if a Super Committee deal isn’t reached are supposed to be enough of an incentive for both parties to get together and compromise. But it’s hard to be optimistic while reading stories like this:

With the panel facing a looming November 23 deadline, the plans unveiled by Republican members of the committee, and their Democratic counterparts on Tuesday, failed to narrow partisan differences over the contentious issue of taxes and appeared to do little to advance negotiations.

Instead, Republicans and Democrats traded barbs over their competing plans. A Democratic aide called the Republican initiative a “joke,” while Republican aides called the Democratic offer “not serious.”

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I wanted to add a few thoughts to Jonathan’s fine post regarding debates.

My view is they have intrinsic limits but are certainly worthwhile — and good debating skills are crucial if one hopes to be elected.

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A British MP, John Mann, has tabled an early day motion in Parliament blasting “the anti-Semitic nature” of the Occupy protests in London, noting that signs referring to “Hitler’s Bankers” and “Google Jewish Billionaires” – which also are at Occupy Wall Street (see here and here) – “are offensive and have no place at such protests.”

Furthermore, the motion notes, “the verbal or physical abuse of Jews by demonstrators is unacceptable,” also a feature of Occupy Wall Street.

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Who destroyed Israel? That’s the question a cartoon by Eli Valley, the Forward’s artist-in-residence, asks in a Halloween-themed fantasy in which he poses in a graphic cartoon which begins with the Olympic Games taking place in Tel Aviv, Palestine in 2052. Going backward, he tells us the demise of the Jewish state was the fault of settlers, Israeli right-wingers and their American friends who refused to accede to a two-state solution, leading inevitably to the United States abandoning an “apartheid” Jewish state. The graphic, titled “Never Miss an Opportunity,” attempts to turn Abba Eban’s famous line about the Palestinians “never missing an opportunity” to make peace on the Jews. But his false narrative is an absurd distortion of both recent history and the current situation.

The problem here is not just that it is the Palestinians who refused an Israeli offer of a Palestinian state in 2000, 2001 and 2008 and have refused to negotiate with Prime Minister Netanyahu even during a settlement building freeze. Rather, it is that the Palestinians don’t really exist in the imagination of the Jewish left. Their actions, the reality of Hamas rule in Gaza, incitement, terrorism and inability to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state within any borders not only isn’t mentioned, it doesn’t even enter the debate. For Valley and other American Jewish leftists, peace is solely in the hands of the Jews; therefore the lack of an agreement is the fault of Israel and its enablers. In Valley’s vision, the true role of American Jewry should be in opposing Israeli policies and sending “reparations” to the Palestinians.

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While many politicians intentionally shield their families from the public eye, presidential contender Rick Santorum has decided to put them center stage. During debates, Santorum often brings the conversation back to the importance of marriage and family values. While other candidates also mention their families (Michele Bachmann being the prime example), much of Santorum’s campaign has focused not on his record as a former senator from Pennsylvania, but instead on the trials and tribulations of his large family.

The latest ad from the Santorum campaign doesn’t focus on the economy, job creation, foreign policy, immigration or defense. The ad is instead a three and a half minute mini-documentary about his youngest daughter, Bella, who suffers from developmental disabilities. The purpose of the video is to highlight Santorum’s pro-life stance and family values platform, but it falls flat.

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Rush Limbaugh has finally gone over the line.

In a hyperbolic, profanity-laced rant yesterday, during his opening monologue, Limbaugh twice referred to the (almost) three years of the Obama presidency as “ungodly.” He went on to say it’s been a “brutal” three years — a “very, very difficult three years.”

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It was only a matter of time before attack ads started running about Elizabeth Warren taking credit for creating Occupy Wall Street’s “intellectual foundation.” Dave Weigel argues the ad is unfair, and it’s true that Warren has walked back her original comments a bit. But she handed the MassGOP a gift by linking herself to the movement, even just ideologically, and it would have been more of a surprise if her comments never made it to video:

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The excerpt of George Will’s forthcoming Sunday column released by Politico is getting some buzz. Here’s the paragraph that’s been making the rounds, taking aim at the central argument in favor of nominating Mitt Romney:

Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable, he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate: Republican successes down the ticket will depend on the energies of the Tea Party and other conservatives, who will be deflated by a nominee whose blurry profile in caution communicates only calculated trimming. Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from “data” … Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for THIS?

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“Is Peace Possible?” is a new section inaugurated this week on The Atlantic’s website that aims to tackle the four “key barriers to peace in the Middle East.” If the first installment is any indication of the series’ contents, it will instead serve mostly as an illustration of the extent to which the basic assumptions about the Arab-Israeli conflict held by America’s chattering classes have hardened into views which are often derivative from core anti-Israelist propositions and misunderstand the conflict’s basic nature.

While there are other links, the core of the first presentation is a video on borders that, while purporting to be a fair treatment of the views of both sides, reveals its failure to appreciate the Zionist position – and basic history – from the beginning.

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There’s no better indicator of which direction conventional wisdom about foreign policy will take than Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria, whose efforts are split between CNN, TIME magazine and the Washington Post, is the man to consult when you want to know what liberals and establishment types are thinking. So his column in the Post this week calling for another round of engagement with Iran is a worrisome signal the bi-partisan consensus behind a policy of isolating the Islamic Republic and forcing it to give up its nuclear ambitions is on its last legs.

The fact that Barack Obama already tried engagement and proved it a dismal failure doesn’t bother Zakaria, because he isn’t particularly interested in either replacing the Islamist tyranny or stopping them from gaining nuclear capability. But the point here isn’t so much the weak arguments that he and other Iranian apologists have been making for years about Iran’s promises not to build nukes or even the moderation of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Coming as it does on the eve of a new report from the International Atomic Energy Agency that will outline the worrisome progress Iran has made toward military applications of its nuclear program, the Zakaria article must be seen as the first volley in an effort to influence Washington to back off rather than to press for sterner sanctions. Even more to the point, it may be a warning sign of where a second Obama administration might be heading on the issue of Iran.

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Add this to the mini-controversy over Obama hiring a former lobbyist with links to the Keystone XL pipeline, and you can imagine the left isn’t too pleased with him on ethics issues right now:

Despite a pledge not to take money from lobbyists, President Obama has relied on prominent supporters who are active in the lobbying industry to raise millions of dollars for his re-election bid.

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Rick Perry has good reason to dislike the series of debates that have become the most important factor determining the course of the Republican presidential race up until now. It was his dismal showing in them that led to his transformation from a frontrunner with a double-digit lead into an also-ran stuck in the pack far behind Mitt Romney and the surprising Herman Cain. As Perry told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News on Tuesday, “These debates are set up for nothing more than to tear down the candidates. So, you know, if there was a mistake made, it was probably ever doing” them. But can Perry get away with skipping them altogether as his campaign has hinted this week?

In his defense, the proliferation of the debates during the next three months is a bit excessive. There are 12 planned in that time period, with three in one week in November and another three over a 10-day span in December. And there’s a Saturday night/Sunday morning combo set up for one weekend in January. But if there is one candidate who can’t afford to be seen as ducking them it is Rick Perry.

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