Bad lip reading from Michele Bachman. Probably the best video you’ll watch today.
A CNN Business reporter, Alison Kosik, summarizes what she thinks the purpose of Occupy Wall Street is.
Here is her Twitter post.
UPDATE: Kosik deleted her tweet. That’s the kind of confidence she had in her observation, I guess. The New York City police are fairly visible at Occupy Wall Street. They are also strict about smoking weed in public. So I wonder if Kosik’s observation has any factual basis at all.
MORE: Alison and another CNN-er yuck it up about those whining protestors at Occupy Wall Street. This one hasn’t been deleted yet.
BONUS: And to further unfold the attitude at CNN, do watch this clip of Erin Burnett reporting on Occupy Wall Street. (“What are they protesting? No one seems to know.”)
COMMENT: At Balloon Juice, a political blog, they say the CNN staffers on stage here “are acting like the Heathers of the mainstream media.” Kinda puts it well.
It’s like they’re not even pretending anymore.
"College debt shows up a lot in these stories, actually. It’s more insistently present than housing debt, or even unemployment. That might speak to the fact that the protests tilt towards the young. But it also speaks, I think, to the fact that college debt represents a special sort of betrayal. We told you that the way to get ahead in America was to get educated. You did it. And now you find yourself in the same place, but buried under debt. You were lied to."
— “Who are the 99 percent?,” Ezra Klein, The Washington Post (via hold-a-wolfs-ears)
(Source: littleredwolverine)
"You know who this guy was? It wasn’t a Democrat. It wasn’t some crazy socialist. It was Ronald Reagan. It was Ronald Reagan. Last time I checked, Republicans all thought Reagan made some sense. So next time you hear one of those Republicans in Congress accusing you of class warfare, you just tell them I’m with Ronald Reagan."
— President Obama yesterday in a speech, after using a ThinkProgress video of Reagan calling it “crazy” for a millionaire to pay lower taxes than a bus driver. Just in case you missed it… (via think-progress)
"The fact is when the United States spends $2 billion a week in Afghanistan and thinks nothing of lobbing hundreds of cruise missiles at $1.41 million a pop to kill people, cutting a few billion dollars a year from the budget for caring for the sick, starving and dispossessed is more than just cruel. It’s plain stupid."
— David Atkins at Hullabaloo (via wilwheaton)
(via wilwheaton)
Chart o’ the Day: Somewhere along the way (okay, 1997), Justice Clarence Thomas stopped filling out his disclosure forms properly. With the Supreme Court set to consider President Obama’s health care reform in the near future—a law Thomas’ wife was paid to lobby against—the liberal watchdog group Common Cause is calling for a formal inquiry.
Related: Pay at the Top, which lists CEO pay from 200 companies and compares executive compensation between 2009 and 2010 (because the turn of the decade was kind to CEOs).
(via pantslessprogressive)
Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it.
Yes, as so many journalists seem obligated to point out, kids are criticizing corporate America while tweeting through their iPhones. The simplistic critique is that if someone is upset about corporate excess, he is supposed to abandon all connection with any corporate product. Of course, the more nuanced approach to such tradeoffs would be to seek balance rather than ultimatums. Yes, there are things big corporations might do very well, like making iPhones. There are other things big corporations may not do so well, like structure mortgage derivatives. Might we be able to use corporations for what works, and get them out of doing what doesn’t?
