Justin Elliott’s latest report on OWS deserves careful reading. He begins with a photograph that appears to show a protester tackling a cop. The photograph appeared on the front page of the Washington Post.

The photographer says the photograph was not representative of what he saw of the protest. Indeed, without knowing the context, we can’t say for sure what the photograph is showing us. And Elliott stresses over and over again that the enormous majority of OWSers are committed to nonviolent protest.

However,

I’ve observed elements in Zuccotti Park who seem set on unnecessary confrontations with police in ways that go beyond civil disobedience. Around 11 p.m. on Oct. 10, for example, a small band of about 60 or 70 protesters set out on an impromptu march toward Wall Street. This was not endorsed by the general assembly; there didn’t appear to be any plan. There was no apparent media presence besides myself and one other reporter.

The group seemed to be led by a few over-excited young guys wearing Anonymous masks or bandanas over their faces and included many people bearing red-and-black anarchist flags. (A couple photos from the march are here.) The marchers were much younger on average than those sleeping in the park. Some of them appeared to be well under 18 and simply along for the thrill. Marchers walked aimlessly through the streets around Zuccotti, banging on the roll-down metal gates that protect storefronts after hours. At one point, for no apparent reason, a young man wearing red and black broke a large wooden police barrier and threw it in front of a car stopped at an intersection on Beaver Street. No police officers witnessed this moment; I’m certain he would have been arrested had the NYPD been around.

Eventually the march attracted a large contingent of police officers who occasionally ventured into the crowd to threaten people with arrest for wearing masks. The group ultimately wound its way back to the park without any major incidents. But I could imagine these adventurist types causing problems for Occupy Wall Street down the line.

“When you have such a grassroots movement, those people are going to come,” said Ted Actie, one of the early participants in Occupy, when I asked him about the incident. “You can’t do anything about it. We can tell the media that’s not Occupy Wall Street. 99 percent of it is non-violent.”

Yes, you can do something about it. You can have leaders. You can have ground rules. You can make it clear that those people who are unwilling to accept the rules will be expelled from the movement. It’s been done.

It’s always a minority of over-excited young guys, you know. That was true of most of the antiwar demonstrations during the Vietnam era. Most of the people in most of the demonstrations were nonviolent. It was just a minority of over-excited young guys (and a few young women, but mostly guys) who committed acts of violence, but the violence is what everyone remembers now.

This same unwillingness to take direction, to show respect to the cause and one’s fellow demonstrators by not being an attention whore, is also at least 60 percent of what went wrong during the Iraq war demonstrations.

I think OWS has been incredibly lucky so far. The media gods have mostly smiled on it. But, children, it’s not good enough to tell media “that’s not Occupy Wall Street” when you aren’t willing to draw any other parameters around Occupy Wall Street, other than being a bunch of people occupying a public plaza. And when the violent ones are identifiable as “elements in Zuccotti Park” even by someone like Elliott, who is sympathetic to the cause, don’t expect media or anyone else to believe you when you say “that’s not Occupy Wall Street.”

My suggestion is to at least ask everyone who is staying on the plaza to sign a pledge to take direction from the group and commit no acts of violence. Then, be willing to confront and denounce anyone who doesn’t abide by the rules. Otherwise, those few over-exicted young guys will sink OWS just as they’ve sunk nearly every other leftie demonstration since MLK died.

Found this on Facebook:

Compare/contrast to the whiners at Erick Erickson’s whinefest site.

The Nixonization of OWS:

“At the Occupy protests, [anti-semites] are, at best, allowed to push their hateful messages,” wrote William Teach. “At worst, the Occupyers agree with the messages.” And at very worst, they’re all space invaders plotting to colonize our planet. Use your imagination!

Heh. And now here’s Mistermix:

• Obama has raised more ($99 million) than the entire Republican field combined.
• At the same time in the 2008 cycle, Romney had raised $11 million more than he has now.
• Ron Paul is third, having raised a total of $12 million. He spends it, too, unlike his fellow Texan Rick Perry.
• At this point in the 2008 cycle, Guiliani, Romney and McCain, combined, had raised about $100 million. This time around, Cain, Romney and Perry have raised less than half of that number.

Betcha didn’t know that. I sure didn’t. See also the New York Times page on who is donating what to whom.

Finally, “Elizabeth Warren’s Appeal.“

According to the New York Post — not the most reliable source — ConEd is using dirty tricks to evict the Park 51 developer from its section of the old Burlington Coat Factory in lower Manhattan.

The old coat factory occupied what is actually two different properties. Park 51 owns one property and ConEd the other part. The Park 51 developers have been renting ConEd’s part and wants to buy it, and then knock the structures on both properties down to build their Islamic community center. Here’s what the Post says –

But the plan hit a major obstacle in August when Con Ed raised the rent from $2,750 a month, a rate set in 1972, to $47,437 a month, retroactive to July 31, 2008, The Post has learned.

They can do that? They must have found one mother of a loophole in the rental agreement.

When the mosque failed to fork over the $1.7 million, the utility fired off a letter demanding the money by Oct. 4 and threatening to evict.

Park51 principals responded with a lawsuit to stop the increase, calling Con Ed’s rent demands “outrageous.”

That’s just wrong. Somebody got to somebody.

The rented section is the area being used for prayers. The other part is being used for community events, such as a recent photography exhibit.

Wonkette has a video showing NYPD arresting some demonstrators inside a CItibank branch. The demonstrators were being very low-key, lining up to be arrested, when the cops nabbed a woman in a business suit, bank book in hand. She is screaming “I’m a customer! I’m a customer!” as they haul her to the paddy wagon.

Wonkette says the woman was there to close her Citibank account, although you can’t tell that from the video. The cops just said they were arresting her for being inside the bank. Apparently during business hours, I might add.

Some self-appointed Stasi informant “infiltrated” OWS — like that was hard — and got on their internal listserv, and has been forwarding the emails to Breitbart, the NYPD, the FBI, and anyone else he thought might be interested. The stooge, Tom Ryan, has been trying to identify the members of the hacktivist group Anonymous for some time. Now Ryan is trying to tie OWS to al Qaeda. Seriously. And Breitbart is claiming that OWS is a terrorist organization trying to undermine U.S. security by destabilizing the markets.

No doubt Ryan, Breitbart et al. are volunteer stooges for the plutocracy because they believe in freedom.

BTW, the Reuters description of the global protests yesterday makes most of them sound pretty underwhelming.

I fluctuate between thinking OWS might really turn into something and then thinking the usual hotheaded halfwits who tend to take over leftie demonstrations will sink it.

OWS is still a much smaller movement than the antiwar movement was ca. 2003. Some jerk left a vulgar message on the comment thread (caught in the filter and deleted) taunting me because OWS has gone global. Well, child, according to some accounts between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war. OWS hasn’t come anywhere close to that.

I’m reading that hundreds of protesters marched to Times Square today, There were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of New York in February and March 2003. Nobody noticed.

And my point is that getting a lot of people out into the streets isn’t the same thing as actually changing anything. I’ve noticed a lot of OWSers are contemptuous of the anti-Iraq war demonstrations. And I’d be the first to say (in fact, I have said) there was plenty to be contemptuous about regarding the anti-Iraq war demonstrations.

But, children, there’s times you don’t look all that different to me. Like it or not, some of you are making the same stupid mistakes. And what was the point of marching to Times Square? Were you trying to scare the tourists?

The riots in Rome ought to be a lesson that things will get out of control sometimes. Groups with no leadership and no self-policing authority and a fuzzily defined purpose — but getting a lot of publicity — will attract all kinds of hotheads and whackjobs, which could undermine everything you are trying to accomplish.

The anti-Iraq war movement couldn’t maintain momentum largely because the “movement” was like a multi-headed hydra, with each head wanting to move in a different direction. There was no cohesive coalition; just a collection of factions who would drag their diverse agendas to demonstrations and compete for attention.

Now, I understand the NYC OWS is considering electing an executive committee, which is a hopeful development. I would also strongly suggest setting some ground rules and coming up with some kind of enforcement procedures.

That may be anathema to many of the OWSers, but if they want to be taken seriously by most of the 99 percent, such things as public nudity, drug use, vulgarity, and off-message signs need to be firmly discouraged. I’m not saying they should hire bouncers; sometimes a little non-violent peer pressure goes a long way.

I’m sure they’re all very high with having started something now, but they need to keep in mind that they haven’t actually changed anything yet.

Washington Post:

President Obama said Friday that he had ordered the deployment of 100 armed military advisers to central Africa to help regional forces combat the Lord’s Resistance Army, a notorious renegade group that has terrorized villagers in at least four countries with marauding bands that kill, rape, maim and kidnap with impunity.

The deployment represents a muscular escalation of American military efforts to help fight the Lord’s Resistance Army, which originated as a Ugandan rebel force in the 1980s and morphed into a fearsome cultlike group of fighters. It is led by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed prophet known for ordering village massacres, recruiting prepubescent soldiers, keeping harems of child brides and mutilating opponents.

Rush Limbaugh:

Obama Invades Uganda, Targets Christians

…Now, up until today, most Americans have never heard of the combat Lord’s Resistance Army. And here we are at war with them. Have you ever heard of Lord’s Resistance Army, Dawn? How about you, Brian? Snerdley, have you? You never heard of Lord’s Resistance Army? Well, proves my contention, most Americans have never heard of it, and here we are at war with them. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. It means God. I was only kidding. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. That’s what the lingo means, “to help regional forces remove from the battlefield,” meaning capture or kill.

So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda, and — (interruption) no, I’m not kidding.

If you could condense all the world’s ignorance and evil down to something the size of a golf ball, that would be Rush’s brain.

I continue to be baffled at the overreaction of the NYPD toward OWS in Manhattan. This video is from this morning; see the cop run up behind a guy in a green T-shirt who was just walking. The cop whirls the young man around and punches him.

Either some among the NYPD are Neanderthal thugs, or someone is paying them under the table to punch the hippies. Of course, both could be true.

BTW, the young man’s name is Felix Rivera-Pitre. He says he is HIV positive and that the cop drew blood and had better get tested.

According to CBS News, the cops claim protesters were throwing bottles and garbage at them. If true, surely someone caught it on a cameraphone. I’ll wait to see the video.

However, young folks, whatever you do — don’t fight back. That’s what they want you to do. Don’t give in to the temptation. Well, unless you think they’re about to kill you, I suppose. And don’t provoke the cops unnecessarily. Just go about your lawful business, and let the blame be entirely on them if they stop you. It’s what Gandhi would do.

In another incidence of PSHSD — post sixties hysterical stress disorder — someone in Boston is claiming that the “hippies” spit on a woman in a Coast Guard uniform. I’m with Susie on that one — highly unlikely.

Polls show that a majority of Americans have a favorable view of OWS, and the Right is going to do everything it can do to tarnish that approval, including making up stories about spitting at people in the armed services. There’s no way to stop that.

But this is where the Greater Asshole rule comes into play. If the people slandering OWS appear to be the bigger assholes, then the slander shouldn’t hurt much. However, a few undisciplined hotheads could undo everything and neuter the demonstration.

I hope the Zuccotti Park crew understand that occupying a plaza is not a movement; it’s a symbolic act. It could become the anchor of a movement, or not, but that movement requires popular support if it is going to effect change. They can camp on the plaza a hundred years; if the public turns against them, eventually no one’s going to care.

Assuming that Mitt Romney is truly the “inevitable” GOP nomiinee, the question is, what will the Tea Party faction do?

According to Steve Kornacki, Rush has been trashing Mittens robustly and urging his listeners not to support him — anybody but Mittens. Rush’s influence is such that he could keep support for Mittens low enough to cost him the nomination.

Kornacki says also that much of Rush’s animus is directed at Mitt’s Massachusetts health care plan, the blueprint for “Obamacare.” However, Rush was fine with Romney when he ran in 2008 and had no issues with Romneycare, even though it was a couple of years old at that point.

This illustrates perfectly how irrational and hysterical much of the right’s response to Obama’s presidency has been. The individual mandate is actually a concept with deep conservative roots, one that numerous congressional Republicans touted as an alternative to Bill Clinton’s reform proposal in 1994. This is why Romney had no trouble finding a representative of the Heritage Foundation to join him on stage when he signed his law in 2008. And it’s why that law just wasn’t a big deal to Limbaugh and most other conservative opinion-shapers back in 2008 — and why it only became a problem for Romney when Obama embraced it at the national level.

It’s not that hard to imagine an alternate universe in which Romney somehow won the White House in 2008, then muscled through a national version of his Massachusetts law — with Republican support. But it was Obama who won, and when he tried to do the same thing, virtually every Republican in America accused him of destroying capitalism. As Jonathan Bernstein put it, it seems that to the right the Affordable Care Act isn’t socialism but that Obamacare is.

When politics gets this irrational, it’s hard to predict what people will do. Baggers who run screaming from Romney now might be persuaded to vote for him in the general election. Nate Silver thinks the Republican primary calendar mostly favors Mittens (although less so if Hew Hampshire is moved up to December), since he is likely to win two early states, New Hampshire and Nevada.

Speaking of irrational — Jonathan Bernstein brings up something I’ve been thinking about also. The baggers have been stirred up into a fevered pitch about the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes. However, it’s almost certain many of these same screamers pay no federal income taxes themselves and don’t realize it. He writes about the “We are the 53 percent” movement —

… the other story in the “53 percent” group is that I’m pretty confident that a substantial portion of them…don’t actually pay income taxes, and therefore are not, in fact, part of the 53 percent of households who do. For example, this citizen claims to be a college senior working “30+ hours a week making just barely over minimum wage.” Which is great and all, but if that’s all he’s got he’s not paying any income tax. Just as a guess, I’d be surprised if any fewer than 10 percent of the posters are actually income-tax free, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s about 50/50.

[Note: If the link in the quote isn't working, this is the site he is talking about.]

Of course, they’re paying payroll taxes, and some federal taxes probably are deducted from their paychecks. And they file income tax returns and enjoy their refunds. What’s not connecting in their brains is that what’s being refunded is whatever federal income taxes were taken out of their paychecks, and that FICA taxes do not count as “income” taxes.

But this takes us back to the fact that these people are very stupid and will believe whatever they are told by the media mouthpieces they listen to, and if Mittens is the nominee, you can bet that Rush and the rest of the mouthpieces will fall in line and order their audience to do their duty and vote for Romney.

There’s no right-wing equivalent of Ralph Nader (well, except Ralph himself) to persuade them that it doesn’t matter which candidate wins, so they should send a message to the GOP by not voting, or by voting for a third-party candidate (such as Ralph). It’s mostly lefties who are dumb enough to fall for that one.

Herman Cain is now the runaway frontrunner in the GOP field, leaving many in the Establishment to conclude, grumpily, that Mitt Romney is the inevitable nominee.

That says something about Republicans, doesn’t it?

So will the Establishment knives come out for Cain now, or will they let him ride the wave for awhile? And if the latter, how long will “awhile” be?

New Hampshire is threatening to move its primary to this December, and South Carolina, Florida, and Nevada are in January. That’s really not a lot of time. If Cain takes any two of those, it’s going to be harder to bump him off later. If he takes three, the GOP may have a runaway train on its hands that it cannot stop.

So I’m betting they knives will come out in the next few days; possibly as early as next week.

They may be hoping he will self-destruct as Perry has, but I’m guessing Cain possibly has one or two more working brain cells than Perry. You can say the same thing about shrubbery, of course. But just a little smarts goes a long, long way on the Right, as long as it’s not overdone.

Steve Kornacki provides reasons why Cain can’t win the nomination, but at least two of those — that he says stupid things and his policy proposals are ridiculous — is true of every candidate in America with an R after his name. I think he is less likely to stumble under the front-runner spotlight than Perry stumbled, as long as he continues to pretend racism is no longer a problem in America.

His being African American is part of his appeal, I’m sure. Righties have reached a point in their intellectual evolution at which they understand that racism is bad, even if they aren’t sure what it is. Today, “That he’s a black man who eagerly absolves the GOP’s Obama-era base of any suspicion of racial animus may have something to do with his appeal,” Kornacki writes.

Kornacki looks at Cain’s recent debate performance:

How would he have handled a sharp follow-up on, say, his claim that Alan Greenspan is a good model for a future Fed chairman? Or his claim that he has “secret” appointees in mind for key positions but that he won’t reveal their identities? Cain gives the impression that he has a few basic talking points but that he’s winging it otherwise. That’s a recipe for disaster.

It’s only a recipe for disaster if the bobbleheads on Faux and flapping mouths like Rush Limbaugh say it’s a disaster; otherwise, the baggers will be fine with it. They don’t understand any of it, so as long as they sense a general agreement that what Cain says is reasonable, then it’s reasonable. And from what I can tell from a Google search, Rush seems to like Cain.

Dougerhead writes,

I think Republicans like Cain because they feel have some idea of what he is talking about. Anytime anyone says something slightly specific that wingers like, Cain will say “that’s in my 999 plan”. When things get boring during the debates, he just starts yelling about his 999 plan. And it’s a simple, retro, un-focus-grouped name.

Cain doesn’t get drawn into discussions of HPV or QEII or Uz-beki-beki-stan-stan-stan or stuff his audience doesn’t understand. He doesn’t fall asleep on stage like Gingrich and Perry. He’s the only guy avoiding both of these traps, and that’s why he’s winning in a lot of polls.

All he has to do is (1) not say anything about racism, except that it isn’t a problem; and (2) give no hint that he might have a twinge of compassion for anybody who isn’t as wealthy as he is, and he could ride a big enough wave to get him through the early primaries. The Establishment has got to be nervous.

John Stossel writes that “Our Government Doesn’t Create Jobs, It Kills Them.” In this column he objects to something the President said recently:

“We’re the country that built the intercontinental railroad,” Obama says. “So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads?”

The President meant the transcontinental railroad, but he’s not the first person to call it the “intercontinental railroad.”

Stossel then launches into a history of the transcontinental railroad that makes it into the biggest money-wasting boondoggle in history — “a Solyndra-like Big Government scandal,” he says. And he brings up all the corruption and bribery that went along with the project, and tosses in the fact that the two railroad companies that built the transcontinental railroad both went bankrupt a few years later. The project inflicted terrible cruelty on the workers, particularly the Chinese hired by the Central Pacific. It also was another blow to the cultures of the plains Indians.

On the other hand, any history book will tell you that the transcontinental railroad had a huge impact on the nation’s culture and economy. Goods could be shipped across the country at a fraction of the time and cost as before. Towns, and new businesses, sprang up all along the route. Interstate trade boomed. For all the graft and waste and cruelty that went with it, it created real wealth for the entire country.

There was only one 19th-century railroad company, Great Northern, that didn’t receive government subsidies, and which didn’t go bankrupt in the Panic of 1893, as many other railroads did (for reasons not entirely of their making). But Great Northern wasn’t operational until 1890, and it didn’t build the transcontinental railroad.

Then Stossel says,

We need infrastructure, but the beauty of leaving most of these things to the private sector — without subsidies, bailouts and other privileges — is that they would have to be justified by the profit-and-loss test. In a truly free market, when private companies make bad choices, investors lose their own money. This tends to make them careful.

But the only way private companies build infrastructure is infrastructure for their own personal use. Why would any company build a road or a bridge if anyone’s trucks can use them? There’s no profit in it, unless the company can charge for using it somehow.

No private company ever would have built the interstate highway system, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Hoover Dam. Or the transcontinental railroad, for that matter. Would not have happened. Yet building those things eventually made a whole lot of business enterprise possible that would not have been possible otherwise.

Stossel’s complaint about the railroad could be said about the voyages of Columbus, you know. I’m pretty sure those voyages were a financial loss to Ferdinand and Isabella, and Columbus turned out to be, um, a problematic individual.

And has the space program made a profit yet? I doubt it.

Righties are sooooo stupid.