- A Guide To The Smear Campaign Against Occupy Wall Street
- Keith’s Special Comment: Why Occupy Wall Street needs Michael Bloomberg
Sean
- The right-wing media have engaged in a relentless smear campaign against the Occupy Wall Street movement, including calling the protesters socialists and Marxists, saying they represent the "fringe of the fringe of the fringe," and claiming they "sound like the Unabomber," among other attacks.
- Following a live report from New York City's Zuccotti Park in which protesters chanted "Fox News lies," Fox Business host Gerri Willis claimed that Fox is simply "trying to cover the story just like everybody else." However, Fox hosts and contributors have pushed lies, smears, and attacks about the Occupy Wall Street movement.
- The vast majority of Americans understand that our economic system is rigged. According to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 76 percent of people agreed that America’s economic system favors a small group of rich folks over everyone else, and the government should reduce the power of the big banks and corporations. And a recent New York Times/CBS poll showed that 66 percent of the American public believes that “the money and wealth in this country should be more evenly distributed.”That’s what the Occupy Wall Street movement is all about. It’s about bringing economic fairness to America so that we can live up to our claim of being the land of opportunity.
- For the past few weeks, we've had to wait patiently while our friends across the Atlantic enjoy the BBC's seven-part Frozen Planet series on life at the poles, which won't air in the U.S. until the new year.
- Series narrator Sir David Attenborough, who has previously been reluctant to discuss the human environmental footprint in his films, spends the final episode "on location, talking to the camera in his own measured words about shrinking glaciers, warming oceans and the threat posed by man-made global warming," according to The Guardian.
But now we learn that after earning "massive ratings" from Planet Earth and collaborating with BBC to produce the sequel, the Discovery Channel will not air the climate change episode of Frozen Planet in the U.S.
- New York videographer and activist Joey Boots was filming down at Zuccotti Park when one of the stone-faced Brookfield Properties guards - evidently unfamiliar with the concept of "film" ie: "documentation" - decided to enliven the conversation by randomly hurling an epithet. Now a lot of people are looking to I.D. - ie: fire - the guy.
- Four alleged members of a Georgia militia group were arrested yesterday relating to their alleged plot to kill numerous government officials. According to the complaint, one of the arrested repeatedly cited as the source of their plan the novel Absolved, authored by Fox News expert Mike Vanderboegh, the former militia member famous for urging his blog readers to hurl bricks through the windows of Democratic offices.
- Democratic assembly member Mark Pocan, filibustering, said: “Stand up and explain why you think bigotry in the year 2011 makes sense!”
Before dropping a bomb on race-based scholarships, Wis. Republicans in the state assembly debated and voted on several other contentious bills late into the evening of Nov. 1. These included a “landlords’ rights” bill that prohibits local units of governments from establishing their own fair housing ordinances, a bill to reduce the amount of education required to be a school nurse, another one to allow school districts to discriminate against anyone with a felony conviction on their record whether or not the offense had anything to do with the job for which they are applying.
- The [Right leaning] Wall Street Journal ignored evidence that newly passed restrictions on voting rights could make it more difficult for millions of eligible voters to vote in 2012, while letting former Bush DOJ official Hans von Spakovsky claim there is "no evidence" those restrictions could suppress voting. The Brennan Center for Justice estimated that changes to voting laws could suppress up to five million votes during the 2012 elections.
- The European Union on Monday prohibited the use of X-ray body scanners in European airports, parting ways with the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, which has deployed hundreds of the scanners as a way to screen millions of airline passengers for explosives hidden under clothing.
- Keith’s Special Comment: Why Occupy Wall Street needs Michael Bloomberg
- In a Special Comment, Keith contextualizes Mayor Bloomberg’s actions against Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park and how they have – unintentionally – vaulted the movement from a local nuisance to a global platform for the disenfranchised.
Sean
