#OWS update

.

Perhaps Tony V. and the City of Angels' municipal leaders are re-thinking their conciliatory stance toward the Occupy movement. Then again, they're birds of a feather, so probably not.

Less than six months into its fiscal year, the city of Los Angeles faces a $72-million budget shortfall, raising the prospect of new cuts in services in coming weeks, according to a report released Friday.

City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana, budget advisor to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council, issued an interim financial status report calling for nearly two dozen city agencies to absorb a combined $21 million in reductions.

Santana warned that the shortfall could grow once city officials calculate the cost of cleanup in the wake of this week's ferocious windstorms and the two-month encampment outside City Hall by Occupy L.A.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity for Occupy. Instead of literally sitting around all day, doing nothing and fouling public spaces, why don't they pick up a broom or a shovel and participate in some volunteerism to take the place of those social services the losses of which they so bemoan?






And Charles C.W. Cooke on what we can expect this coming Monday and beyond:

Given their history of dogmatic insistence that one has a right to squat on private property and ignore city ordinances simply because one doesn’t like them, it should come as no surprise that the Occupy brigade enjoys such a limited understanding of the Constitution. But this is more about the optics. Expect the-authorities-are-trampling-on-our-rights! to be a theme employed widely in 2012. It is no accident that the next major protest planned is on January 16, Martin Luther King Jr. Day; OWS is fully aware that “civil rights” holds a sacred place in the American heart and to appropriate its imagery can be a highly effective, if distastefully misused, political tool.

Yes. Yes. Please remind us again of what constitutionally-protected right is being denied Occupy.

And its a shame that the modern civil rights set (see: current incarnation of the NAACP) has willingly allowed itself to become central to the statist grievance industry or else there might just be some real outrage in the civil rights community with respect to this appropriation.

.