It’s not only conservatives who have noticed that the waning OWS movement was pretty much whiter than white.  Black activist preachers have noticed the same thing and are trying to mobilize their congregants to get out there to camp on sidewalks like homeless people along with the white drug-addicted, violent OWSers:

The Rev. Harold Mayberry stood before his First African Methodist Episcopal Church congregation Sunday morning in Oakland and outlined how it was time for members to connect with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Nationally, many African American leaders have acknowledged a disconnect between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the larger black community.

Mayberry is among nearly two dozen prominent African American Bay Area pastors trying to bridge that gap at the community level through a growing national effort that is ramping up today – Martin Luther King Jr. Day – called Occupy the Dream.

[snip]

“This is a great leap forward to involve local pastors,” said James Taylor, an associate professor of political science at the University of San Francisco and an expert in African American studies. “The general critique of Occupy is that it has lacked a specific agenda. But this could be a sign of maturity for the movement.”

In February, the pastors will ask their congregants to withdraw a small amount of money – at least $30 – from their bank accounts and deposit it in either a credit union or a minority-owned bank.

If that symbolic move doesn’t get the attention of “Wall Street banks,” as Mayberry described the nation’s largest financial institutions, then in March, Occupy the Dream will ask larger African American-dominated institutions, churches and black professionals to begin transferring greater amounts to credit unions.

“I ain’t got no problem with people becoming millionaires – I wouldn’t mind joining the club myself,” Mayberry told his congregation. “My problem is when you are so insensitive to people who have not been able to raise themselves up to the level where you are – and you snuff out their dreams.”

I just heard from a friend who lives in and functions in the welfare/drug community.  (I’m not kidding when I say that I have contacts in all walks of life.)  There’s a black market of food stamps there. My friend is dining on roast beef tonight because another friend traded his food stamps with him for weed.  All these people have a few things in common:  they’re white; they’re drug users (mostly post); they rely heavily on welfare programs because of their drug use, whether we’re talking about impairment from actively using drugs or from decades of past drug use; and they support the OWS movement.  They are explicit that they see OWS as a way to ensure a continued flow of welfare benefits.

Is this really the milieu to which black pastors want to sink their congregants?

UPDATE:  This video of Valerie Jarrett giving a rousing political speech at a historically black church (after which the church hosted a voter registration guide) seems apropos.  At least Michelle Obama limited her black voter drive speech to the BET awards, a venue that doesn’t get the tax benefits extended to a church.

Not militant Islam, not a resurgent Russia or China, not North Korea, not Iran….us! Conservatives, independents, and anyone else that disagrees with his agenda. Or, so says President Barack Hussein Obama.

Why is it that Barack Hussein Obama and other Lefty presidents and presidential wannabees (Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Carter) feel compelled to rouse their base by saying “I will fight for you…against…[insert name of individual or group]” when it is clear that whom they plan to fight against are other Americans that disagree with them? With Obama and Clinton, these attacks became personal against specific individual American citizens (Rush Limbaugh comes to mind).

What ever happened to the idea of the President as our leader? Isn’t he /she supposed to be “our” leader, as in the leader of us all? Instead, these Lefty Presidents position themselves as the great dividers, exhorting groups of Americans to fight each other.

Please help me remember. Did Reagan talk this way? Nixon? Bush I? Bush II? I remember George W. Bush, for example, being gracious toward even his most vituperative opponents (e.g., Cindy Sheehan) and making a point of standing up for the rights of other Americans to disagree with him.

If only Barack Hussein Obama could muster as much indignation toward our country’s real enemies instead of trying to pit Americans against one another.

Obama has publicly labeled me the “enemy” on the basis of my beliefs and values. He has publicly exhorted his followers to fight against me. Sadly, I have to say, Barack Hussein Obama is not my President. He told me so.

Country of origin strikes me as a reasonable question for a census, although it’s not constitutionally mandated.  (The Constitution just allows for a head count.)  Race questions are obviously simply to satisfy the grievance mongers in America.  So I pass on this advice from The Corner:

Sending a Message with the Census [Mark Krikorian]

John: I haven’t gotten my letter from the Census Bureau yet asking me to make sure I fill out the questionnaire. But when I do fill it out, I’ll use it to send a message.

Fully one-quarter of the space on this year’s form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government’s business (despite the New York Times‘ assurances to the contrary on today’s editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks “What is Person 1′s race?” (and so on, for other members of the household). My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don’t do it.

Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — “Some other race” — and writing in “American.” It’s a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, “American” was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.

So remember: Question 9 — “Some other race” — “American”. Pass it on.

I had a lovely time last night at a reception on the Bonhomme Richard, and plan on writing about it later today.  However, other work calls, so I thought I’d fill this space with recommendations for interesting stuff you may want to read.  In no particular order:

William Katz, a witty, erudite man who has absorbed much from traveling through the past few decades, deconstructs the way the Left is using the concept of “guilt by association” to insulate Obama from much-deserved criticism.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Mr. Katz, spend some time with Jesse Jackson.  We’ve always known he’s an antisemite, but with the prospect of a similar thinking White House administration, he’s oozing out of the closet. As you read the article, keep in mind that Jackson is promising that an Obama administration will turn its back on the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, and will ally itself with some of the worst theocratic totalitarian dictatorships, not just in the region, not just in the world, but in the history of the world.

Jonah Goldberg points out the obvious (but does it does charmingly):  Republicans are so frightened by Obama’s skin-color, and the risk of appearing non-PC, that they are allowing him to get away with political murder.  We all know that, when it comes to Obama, there’s only one color that matters, and that is Red.

Thomas Sowell nails the liberal horror of the long-standing American tradition of “going negative” in political elections: “Why then is ‘negative advertising’ such a big deal these days? The dirty little secret is this: Liberal candidates have needed to escape their past and pretend that they are not liberals, because so many voters have had it with liberals.”

Michael Reagan provides a good run-down of Ayers’ relevance to this election, and it has nothing to do with his having bombed buildings when Barack was 8.

IBD neatly summarizes why ACORN matters so much.  And if that analysis doesn’t sway you, check out the Wall Street Journal on precisely the same point.

Many have commented on the fact that Barack Obama, both in his race speech and in interviews he gave after the speech, threw granny to the wolves, painting the woman who raised him, not only as a racist but, negatively, as a “typical white person.”  The way in which he did this was to say that it was irrational for her to express a fear of black men walking by her on the street.  The problem for Obama was that this “white think” concept was almost immediately destroyed when the Way-Back machine revealed that Jesse Jackson said precisely the same thing.

Now Randall Hoven has crunched the numbers to show that this is not the irrational fear of a racist “typical white person” (or of Jesse Jackson) but, sadly, the rational fear of people living in a society in which black men are disproportionately responsible for murders.  The only problem I can see with Hoven’s number crunching is that it doesn’t take into account the fact that the people who should be really afraid of black men on the street aren’t “typical white” people, but typical black people, who I believe account for the largest number of victims.

There is a serious problem here, but it isn’t Obama’s effort to stereotype whites.  The problem is that the last 40 years have seen a system in which black Americans, in disproportionately large numbers, turn to serious crime, crime that frightens whites and truly victimizes blacks. Obama’s prescription is what it always is coming from the Left:  throw more taxpayer money at the problem.  It doesn’t seem to occur to him that it might be time to try entirely different solutions, rather than endless efforts to refinance the old, failed solutions.