A passel of Occupy Wall Street activists will meet with leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus today, specifically about legislative issues: Ten organizers from New York’s OWS group will speak to the caucus about their legislative priorities, according to an email sent to Members and obtained by Roll Call. “This is the very first meeting [...]

In his Osawatomie, Kansas speech, an echo of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 address in the same city calling for a “New Nationalism,” President Obama gave a good summation of the social contract built up through generations and their government, and how conservative “you’re on your own” economics have broken that contract, created staggering inequality and a [...]

The President held a brief availability on the payroll tax cut, and it was certainly more strident than we’ve come to expect. Here’s an excerpt: And that’s why in my jobs bill I proposed not only extending the tax cut but expanding it to give a typical working family a tax cut of $1,500 next [...]

Though all movements have their rough patches, the Occupy movement has proven resilient in its first two months. Now, on Thursday, the movement plans to celebrate and motivate with a series of actions across the country. Unions and Occupy Wall Street protesters will be joining forces next week for a “day of action” to pressure [...]

Former Congressman Alan Grayson, who is running again for a House seat in 2012, criticized the Democratic leadership in a discussion in Los Angeles this weekend, saying that they don’t understand the basic concept that voters need something to vote for. Grayson, speaking at the offices of the progressive filmmaking organization Brave New Films in [...]

Brian Beutler reports on the House GOP’s next trick. Their plan is to find the two worst parts of the President’s jobs bill and deficit plan, and combine them for a package that sounds almost comically silly, but that gives them the talking point that the President supported the component parts: The piece of the [...]

The 1% at the Wharton Business School showed how their side in the class war operates by chanting “get a job” at protesters of the Occupy Philadelphia movement during the protests over Eric Cantor’s cancelled speech on Friday. It was a revealing moment. The response to the Occupy Wall Street protests has been generally muted [...]

Last night, the Manhattan Community Board 1 held a Quality of Life Committee hearing about the Occupy Wall Street encampment, hearing the complaints of neighbors about incessant drumming and general inconvenience to the community. The hearing ended with a resolution asking Occupy Wall Street to “limit the use of drums, trumpets, tambourines, bugles, and air [...]

Looks like I gave Doug Schoen way too much credit in criticizing him about his poll of Occupy Wall Street. His MO was to marginalize the protest movement in familiar terms, as a “radical” left-wing group supporting some amalgam of godless communism and hippie free love-ism for America. All of the actual policies that his [...]

The new new thing in journalism is a little thing called fact-checking. I know, it’s very novel. What happens is that claims are actually tested and subjected to a rigorous analysis. We’re still one step away from the test happening BEFORE the alleged facts get into stories; usually the “fact check” article is separate from [...]

This was a good day for this poll to come out. A new Gallup survey finds that Americans believe government has overreached. The irony of that coming out today, when the US completed the executive assassination without trial of Anwar al-Awlaki, even though the survey results have nothing to do with that kind of executive [...]