On the ground in Albany, and in the air everywhere, signs that a movement has changed the conversation about inequality.
New York State Police are cracking down on Occupy Albany protesters in Lafayette Park, but Albany County's District Attorney won’t prosecute.
Framed inaccurately by the press, The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear is best understood as a contemporary extension of the French Situationist movement of the ’60s, a mass inversion of rhetorical logic, meant to break the spectator’s passivity toward the spectacle and turn the obscuring force of mass media back on itself. Using pop cultural references and superficial Internet memes like the double-rainbow guy and “Hide ya kids, hide ya wife...” in the context of a once-powerful political forum was a Dadaist attempt to wipe the slate clean, to rise above the fruitless tit-for-tat schoolyard shouting match to which our political discourse has been reduced by the 24-hour news cycle and corporate spin-doctoring.
Between this year and last, LifeChurch.tv's congregation swelled by more than 5,000 regular attendants at its 13 campuses, including locations in Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Arizona and Florida -- and the one here in Albany.
Many manufacturers and retailers of children's products, along with book publishers, artisans, concerned parents and consumers, even the American Library Association, have begun to panic about the monumental scope of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act's impact.