The #OWS movement is really shaking up the wingnuts. Susie's post about Eric Cantor was picked up by Matt Yglesias, who adds some nice insight:

An excellent headline from Susie Madrak:

If #OWS Has No Coherent Message, How Come Eric Cantor Is Suddenly Talking About ‘Income Disparity’?

Indeed. Obviously at some point in the process of political change it matters which policies get adopted. But control of the agenda space matters too.
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Dragging the conversation onto the terrain of inequality is a major win for the 99 Percenters

Income inequality is real because the very wealthy are bragging about just how well they're doing.

It’s also useful, for a bit of perspective, to go back to another good Times article from the summer of 2007, The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age :

These days, Mr. Weill and many of the nation’s very wealthy chief executives, entrepreneurs and financiers echo an earlier era — the Gilded Age before World War I — when powerful enterprises, dominated by men who grew immensely rich, ushered in the industrialization of the United States. The new titans often see themselves as pillars of a similarly prosperous and expansive age, one in which their successes and their philanthropy have made government less important than it once was.

The prosperity, such as it was — it never did trickle down much — is gone. But these guys still think they earned it all, and the rest of us should be grateful to have them.

This leads me to the con artist in the headline of my post. Doug Schoen has been on Fox News for some time now, claiming he represents the Democratic Party and beliefs, but as with most Fox News lefties, he's nothing more than a shill for Roger Ailes and the GOP. He published an op-ed in the WSJ and goes so far as to lie about the results of his own poll on the #OWS protesters.

Here's a little bit more about Doug Schoen's survey of 200 Occupy Wall Street protesters, which he wrote about in today's Wall Street Journal.

In the Journal column, Schoen, who is Michael Bloomberg's pollster, said the survey, conducted by a senior researcher at his firm, was the first "systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion." Its findings, which formed the basis for Schoen's conclusions about "the movement" as a whole, led him to write that Occupy Wall Street is "dangerously out of touch" with American values and that protesters are "bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies." His lead was, "President Obama and the Democratic leadership are making a critical error in embracing the Occupy Wall Street movement—and it may cost them the 2012 election."

Wow, what a horrible result for a poll about #OWS. If only it had any basis in fact, instead of some fantasy projections of NewsCorp. Here in the world of reality, Schoen is simply a lying liar.
Nate Silver tweets:

Doug Schoen came to several conclusions about #OWS that are not supported by his own survey. Intellectual dishonesty.

Judd Legum writes:

Similarly, while Schoen writes that a “large majority” express “opposition to free-market capitalism,” when asked what frustrates them most about the U.S. political process, only 3 percent named “our democratic/capitalist system.” Out of 198 respondents, that amounts to five or six people, which is quite the opposite of a large majority. Here are the full results for that question:

Schoen also writes that “[s]ixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost.” But the actual question makes no mention of costs. Schoen, who bills himself as a Democrat but has effusively praised the Tea Party and advised Obama not to run for a second term, was determined to paint the Occupy Wall Street protesters as politically toxic. As a result, he grossly misrepresented the results of his poll to Wall Street Journals readers.

You can write to the WSJ editorial page and request a correction HERE.

Schoen has always been a Roger Ailes shill. The WSJ also omits Doug Schoen's ties to Fox News since he works as an analyst for the network and writes this as his bio:

Mr. Schoen, who served as a pollster for President Bill Clinton, is author of "Hopelessly Divided: The New Crisis in American Politics and What It Means for 2012 and Beyond," forthcoming from Rowman and Littlefield.

Doug Schoen works for Fox News, which means he works for Rupert Murdoch and in turn, he's indirectly linked to the WSJ. The idea that he's a Democratic operative is preposterous.