The Seattle cab driver pulled over and given a ticket, for the offense of honking his horn to support Occupy Seattle, was hit with a greater penalty than bank and home mortgage executives who set off America's Great Recession.
Is it any wonder that national opinion surveys -- the latest, a CBS News/New York Times poll -- show a plurality of Americans supporting the goals of nationwide protests dubbed Occupy Wall Street?
The protests have alarmed the country's right-wing media and its wealthy keeper-manipulators. The tireless promoters of the Tea Party "citizen" protest in 2009 have set out to discredit what has in 2011 become a big, spontaneous -- if loosely organized -- citizen protest.
* The Fox News Channel is raising an old bugaboo that a former leader of ACORN -- the disbanded community action group -- plays a key "behind the scenes" role in the New York protests. Fox has falsely reported that a group called New Yorkers Committed for Change is paying people to protest.
* Rush Limbaugh is labeling the demonstrators as "pure genuine parasites," "bored trust-fund kids," "this parade of human debris" and "perpetually lazy, spoiled rotten, 99 percent white kids." (I wonder if he would use that phrase to describe the 24-year-old Iraq war veteran seriously injured in the Oakland protest.)
* Ex-Bush guru Karl Rove, in a recent Bellevue appearance, described the Occupy Wall Street encampment as composed of "self-described socialists, anarchists," and even "anti-Semites."
* The Massachusetts Republican Party is labeling Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren a "matriarch of mayhem." Architect of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Warren has voiced sympathy for the protesters.
Read more:
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/connelly/article/Occupy-Wall-Street-The-right-s-smear-machine-2240034.php#ixzz1c88L4ZpB