This is hot off the press. Their website isn't fully up yet. But they have a plan:

(Dec. 19, 2011) – Des Moines, IA

Today Occupy Iowa Caucus (#OIC) launches a campaign that calls on all Iowans to show our dissatisfaction with the current field of political candidates, both Republican and Democrat, by caucusing for “Uncommitted” on January 3rd. To learn more, visit Occupy the Iowa Caucus’ website at http://occupyiacaucus.org/.

Occupy Iowa Caucus (#OIC) is a non-partisan grassroots movement that believes Iowans should support exceptional individuals to serve as President, not merely caucus for the least bad candidate. As the first to have our voices heard, Iowans would be failing in our duty to the nation if we simply rubber-stamp nominees that political and economic elites have selected for us. Instead, together, we must send a message to both parties in Washington that the nation will not support candidates who have been bought by special interests.

Occupy Iowa Caucus (#OIC) is not seeking disrupt the caucuses. Rather, Occupy Iowa Caucus asks Iowans to demonstrate the strength of our democratic traditions by using democratic processes to tell both parties we are unhappy with political games, and want real change.

Occupy Iowa Caucus (#OIC) will be promoting our message through a meme-campaign, designed to combat multi-million dollar presidential campaigns, with the strength of our ideas and creativity. This new method of campaigning allows Occupy Iowa Caucus to inject ideas into the political arena without relying on the support of large corporations and special interest groups. It is the combination of traditional neighbor-to-neighbor outreach and an adept social media presence. Please see the attached graphics for examples of the images and slogans we will use to raise awareness about our campaign.

Wednesday night, broadcasting from Liberty Square in lower Manhattan, MSNBC's Ed Schultz rhetorically asked his guests if the Democrats were the biggest winners of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The crowd laughed a little at the myopic spin.

Thursday, Rush Limbaugh – citing an unnamed, likely imaginary “friend” – said that Obama's actually behind Occupy Wall Street, and, laughably, that the President's been planning “riots” for months. Riots. Planning. For months.

Although I can easily imagine both of these guys ending up in the same ICU for similar gasket-blowing ailments, I'm not playing the false equivalence card. These individual acts of stupidity are not equal, but they are both incredibly wrong.

El Rushbo's lying. No one told him this. And if they did, that person (Herman Cain?) was lying. He's a leaky bucket of bile; these are known knowns.

Schultz isn't lying. But he is off by a mile. This movement is rooted deeper than America's shallow, money-infested political dichotomy, but, indeed, it's been fertilized by this Democratic Administration's bullshit.

Rush is right: a good number of these kids turned out for Obama. Some of the protesters I talked to last weekend will hold their noses and vote Obama in 2012. Some will not. And all of them are painfully aware that despite Limbaugh's – and other insane right-wing – charges of “socialism,” Obama is Jeb Bush with a better jump shot. They know Dodd-Frank is a watered down bowl of nothing. They know that both parties are bought and sold by the same moneyed interests. They know recessions are worsened by so-called “austerity” measures. They know this pay-to-play political paradigm must crumble, for democracy to function properly.

If the Democrats gain from this movement it will be by embracing the populist sentiment of the now nationwide occupation, and making good on it if elected. No doubt Dems will co-opt the message. But will they deliver? Will we see this real populist movement translated into policy, as we saw the fringe tea party set affect the national dialogue?

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Like Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and many other states, Alabama has a big, new Republican legislative majority working hard to undermine unions. The House passed HB 64 yesterday, which would amend Alabama's 1901 constitution to require secret balloting for workplace unionization. Democrats objected to the bill, challenging sponsor Kurt Wallace on the relevance and necessity of such an amendment. Wallace had few answers to offer, but to his credit he never wavered from insisting the bill was "common sense." Part Two and notes below the fold:

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So a week or so ago, Freddie deBoer wrote a widely-cited post bemoaning the lack of an actual pro-labor left among most widely read liberal blogs. Instead what we have is mostly a neoliberal consensus that supports many of the same things that neoliberal presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama support: Free trade, an interventionist foreign policy and public-private "partnerships" such as the 2010 health care bill that outsources what should be a public good (health care) to private entities (insurance companies). Deregulation of the financial services industry was until recently a staple of this ideology, but it's fallen out of vogue for extremely obvious reasons.

Michael Lind has a very good breakdown of neoliberalism and its grip on the leaderships of the both Republicans and Democrats:

Neoliberals continue to believe that at home governments should provide basic public goods like infrastructure, healthcare and security by "market-friendly" methods, which in practice means vouchers, tax incentives or government contracts for for-profit corporations. Because trade by definition is supposed to be a force for progress, neoliberals see little role for government in trade beyond promoting trade liberalization, providing a business-friendly infrastructure and educating citizens to equip them to compete in the supposed global labor market of tomorrow.

That's not to say there aren't differences between Republican neoliberals and Democratic neoliberals. For instance, Republican neoliberals believe that rich people are magical wealth-creating leprechauns who must be fawned over and showered with tax cuts and free money from the Federal Reserve lest they get sad and leave us all forever. Democratic neoliberals, on the other hand, believe that rich people are magical wealth-creating leprechauns who should be allowed to do whatever they want but who should also pay for slightly higher taxes so that the government can afford to do things like pave roads and whatnot. But despite these differences, you'll notice that both sects have a critical flaw in their thinking: That is, that rich people are magical wealth-creating leprechauns who should more or less be free to do whatever they want and that the only thing worth arguing about is their marginal tax rates.

The reason that this ideology has so much influence over both party establishments is screamingly obvious, i.e., "CREAM / Get th' money / dolla-dolla bill y'all." Take a look at the big brain on Evan Bayh for example:

In 2010, Sen. Evan Bayh retired. Part of the reason, he told me, was that the corrosive effect of money in politics had left his profession looking corrupt. "You want to be engaged in an honorable line of work," Bayh said, "but they look at us like we're worse than used-car salesmen."

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I meet Brian Dunkiel , a dem lawyer from Burlington, VT. He is on the observer team. He is about 30, sharp, witty and "gets it". In wrap around shades he informs me in a whisper that he is also doing an NPR audio report about the election down here. I tell him I am writing for this blog. I take some photos of the crowd. He freaks."Don't let the republican poll watchers see you. They've been getting the Sheriff's men on any photog they see. We saw one guy arrested moments ago."

No one knows if this is legal or not. But it is clearly intimidating. The Repubs do not want these long lines to be seen. However, the oddity is that tons of news crews are video taping with impunity. I resort to my Motorola V-300. I took a shot of two poll observers inside. These democratic lawyers were about to get involved in my case, but pulled back when they realized I had it under control.

On October 12th, big donors laid down some very, very big money to defeat Democratic Senate candidates. While it's not a surprise, the size of the expenditures was eye-opening, even to someone like me who thinks she's seen it all. They are at least ten times the usual amount spent on ads three weeks out. Combined with today's news that the US Chamber of Commerce has taken in at least $885,000 from foreign corporations, I fear our democratic process is forever corrupt and irreparably tainted with the smell of global agendas.

From the FEC near real-time report on independent expenditures:

AMERICAN CROSSROADS - C00487363

1. Opposes Candidate: Michael F. Bennet (S0CO00211)
Office Sought: Senate, Colorado District
Payee: Crossroads Media LLC
Date Expended = 10/12/2010 Amount Expended = $770144.20
Purpose: TV/Media Placement

2. Opposes Candidate: Michael F. Bennet (S0CO00211)
Office Sought: Senate, Colorado District
Payee: McCarthy Marcus Hennings Ltd.
Date Expended = 10/12/2010 Amount Expended = $14899.00
Purpose: TV/Media Production

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I normally wouldn't worry too much about one poll showing Andrew Cuomo beating racist thug Carl Paladino by a mere six points. But when you combine it with Cuomo's eerily familiar campaign style, it's time to get worried.

Take a look:

Stung by Carl Paladino's below-the-belt attacks, an angry Andrew Cuomo summoned his war council on Monday to figure out how to fight back against his slash-and-burn GOP rival.

"If a guy says you have no cojones, how do you punch him back, call him an a--hole?" the Democratic gubernatorial candidate fumed in a secret talk to his team, one insider said.

"We have all this stuff [on Paladino] and we're on the defensive," Cuomo groused, the insider added.

While Cuomo's adviser Ben Lawsky and his communications team of Marissa Shorenstein, Phil Singer and Josh Vlasto listened, the unhappy candidate wondered aloud what Paladino's pit bull campaign manager Michael Caputo would do with similar dirt.

The Democrat wields a 54%-to-38% lead in the latest Rasmussen Reports poll out Monday, making Team Cuomo reluctant to climb down into the mud and fight Paladino on what they say is his turf.

His staff stressed to Cuomo on Monday that they'd like to push the positive aspects of his agenda to the press, insiders revealed.

The brain trusters also mulled if they should start hitting back at Paladino, rather than leave it exclusively to campaign surrogates such as Democratic Party boss Jay Jacobs. They didn't reach a decision.

They also fretted about the pitfalls of repeatedly telling the press "no comment" to Paladino's broadsides - fearing the practice could ultimately turn the media against them.

Let's see: Not responding directly to personal attacks, high-minded statements about a "positive" agenda, an unwillingness to play gutter politics... why, all Cuomo needs to do is climb into a tank and put on an over-sized helmet!

Children, what's the first thing you do when a bully picks on you? That's right: you whack him right in the nose. Especially when the bully in question is a braying Banana Republican who screeches about the evils of Big Government even as he fights behind the scenes to keep his own chunk of the largesse off the chopping block. And oh, for good measure, he also sends around racist emails and videos depicting woman-on-horse action to his friends.

Let's remember how deftly Senator Jim Webb handled one George Felix Allen back in 2006:

Republican Sen. George Allen attacked his Democratic challenger's opposition to a flag-burning amendment, and James Webb retaliated by calling Allen a coward who sat out the Vietnam War "playing cowboy at a dude ranch in Nevada."

The statement by a senior adviser to Webb, a decorated veteran and former secretary of the Navy, went to extraordinary lengths to question Allen's fortitude, even repeatedly using the middle name the senator detests and never uses, Felix.

"While Jim Webb and others of George Felix Allen Jr.'s generation were fighting for our freedoms and for our symbols of freedom in Vietnam, George Felix Allen Jr. was playing cowboy at a dude ranch in Nevada," said Webb strategist Steve Jarding in the statement Tuesday....

"People who live in glass dude ranches should not question the patriotism of real soldiers who fought and bled for this country on a real battlefield," Jarding said.

This ain't rocket science, folks. When somebody calls you a wimp and you then spend days hemming and hawing over whether to respond to him, it makes you look like... a wimp! Fortunately, Paladino is a target-rich environment who offers plenty of fodder for counter punches. A few come to mind:

• If Carl Paladino wants to talk about cojonies, maybe he could have the cojones to tell black people why he thinks stereotyping them as pimps and prostitutes is funny.

• We've already had a governor who got in trouble because he had a thing for hookers. Do we really want to elect a guy who may have a thing for horses?

• Carl Paladino, a.k.a. the Pork Lord of Buffalo, can't wait to get his hands on the state budget so he can dole out goodies to all his pals, just like he's been using his Albany connections to grab goodies for himself at your expense for years.

Winning isn't so hard, Mr. Cuomo, as long as you actually try.

NY Times, Wash. Post omitted Democratic response to Bush, Cheney attacks on Iraq War critics

This works beautifully for the GOP.

One of the biggest criticisms rank-and-file Democrats have of the Democratic leadership is that they don't fight back - but what difference does it make if the news media never goes to them for a response? They should be asking them directly, but even if they are too lazy they could check their various websites (some of them even have blogs) to see what they have to say about these things.

Posted by Avedon

I actually meant to include this in my previous post, and judging from comments it's just what some of you want - a media contact list. So let me encourage you to tell the media how outrageous you find it that they give so much coverage to ludicrous right-wing talking points and then don't cover the response from the Democratic leadership - or from the majority of Americans.

Posted by Avedon