Pro-Labor Occupiers About to Win Big

It's not difficult to show the evolution of the "town hall mobs" of rightwingers angry healthcare reform to the Tea Party. It was basically the same people who listen to the same radio shows and fell for largely the same BS. But where the town hall rowdies were focused on one issue, the Tea Party came about when complaints broadened to other issues. "Healthcare reform sucks!" became "healthcare reform sucks -- and I like guns and Obama's a Kenyan Muslim and when government spends money on anyone other than me, that's just like Nazi Germany!"

Sure, both the town hall mobs and the Tea Party were astroturf creations, but look at why people joined. What happened was that people with other concerns were drawn to the coverage the town-hallers were getting and wanted in on the action. The movement grew and the focus broadened.

There's a clumsy parallel on the left with the Occupy movement. It may just be that I'm from ground zero, but I see an evolution from the Wisconsin union protests and the ongoing recall effort to Occupy Wall Street. People saw the occupation of the State Capitol, thought about their own issues, and wondered if that would work for them as well. The left was electrified by the Wisconsin activists and the "hit the streets and take over" method of protest spread out to other states.

One of those states would be Ohio, where Gov. John Kasich and state Republicans jammed through a union-busting bill similar to Wisconsin's. But Ohio is not Wisconsin -- the laws are quite different -- and state Democrats were able to put the question up to the voters. Where Wisconsin only has recall as an option, Ohioans are able to put repeal on a referendum. And that referendum is not going Kasich's way.

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Despite Scandal, Cain Rising Among GOP Voters

Someplace, Democratic strategists are planning a party. Herman Cain's sexual harassment scandal has not hurt him with GOP voters and he continues to rise in the polls. Those are the findings of Washington Post/ABC News poll out today.

Businessman Herman Cain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney are running nearly even atop the field of 2012 GOP presidential hopefuls, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows, with most Republicans dismissing the harassment allegations that over the past week have roiled Cain’s campaign.

Seven in 10 Republicans say reports that Cain made unwanted advances toward two employees when he was head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s — allegations which have been stiffly rebutted by Cain’s campaign — do not matter when it comes to picking a candidate.

Beautiful. Of course, it's not all smooth sailing for Cain. "[T]he potential threat to his burgeoning campaign is evident as well, with Cain slipping to third place among those who see the charges as serious, and Republican women significantly more likely than men to say the scandal makes them less apt to support Cain," the report continues.

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The More People Know About the Occupy Movement, the More They Agree with It

You may not have heard, but Occupy Oakland and their supporters staged a general strike in that city yesterday. The fact that you may not have heard about it points to a new trend I'm detecting -- the media brownout, as opposed to a blackout. If you're not familiar with the term, a media blackout is a form of censorship where corporate media refuses to cover a story. What I'm calling a media brownout happens when corporate media refuses to cover a story well. Sure, there are mentions of it on a media outlet's website, but on-air or in-print coverage is brief and uninformative. As crappy as it is, most people get their news from TV, because that's all they really have time for. So, regardless of how thorough their web coverage is, an on-air snub keeps the story out of the public spotlight, for the most part.

And there's a reason why the Occupy Oakland strike didn't get a lot of coverage. While companies like Men's Warehouse support the Occupy movement (see photo above), there's no shortage of companies that oppose it -- income inequality may not be good for retail, but it works out well for banks and other companies. These corporations are advertisers, news organizations are ad-supported enterprises, and... you get the idea. Corporations like Lockheed-Martin don't buy ad time on CNN because it sells a lot of jets, they buy ad time for the same reason they contribute to political candidates.

So it's a little ironic that CNN would put out a poll that both shows they've failed to cover the Occupy movement well enough and betrays the reason for that failure.

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Newest Smear: 99-Percenters are Secretly Rich

When you're running a smear campaign, you're not going to want to let things like facts or logic or math get in the way. You're just going to make stuff up. But the trick is to make things up that are as close to the truth as possible. That way, you can throw out numbers and statistics that -- while being either meaningless or actually undercutting your argument -- can be made to seem to support your smear.

And consistency isn't very important here -- especially if your target audience has the attention span of the common house fly. One criticism that contradicts a previous criticism is A-OK, just so long as the criticism sticks. If there's one thing a smearer can count on, it's cognitive dissonance among a significant portion of their audience.

So it should be no surprise that the latest smear against Occupy Wall Street contradicts the previous smear that they're all uncouth rabble (i.e., "smelly hippies"), made poor by their own bad choices in life, clamoring for a government handout.

Daily Caller:

Many "Occupy Wall Street" protesters arrested in New York City reside in more luxurious homes than some of their rhetoric might suggest, a Daily Caller investigation has found.

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