In March, Bill O'Reilly used footage of "union thugs" in Wisconsin shoving people. The clip used to illustrate his assessment had some suspicious looking palm trees in the background. Suspicious because there are no palm trees in Wisconsin. Yes,
October 6, 2011

In March, Bill O'Reilly used footage of "union thugs" in Wisconsin shoving people. The clip used to illustrate his assessment had some suspicious looking palm trees in the background. Suspicious because there are no palm trees in Wisconsin. Yes, the family-friendly polite mid-western saunter around the Capitol Building was being reported as violent by right-wingers on Fox News. Those who couldn't get enough of all those wonderful tea partiers showing up with Glocks talking about watering the tree of liberty with BLOOD - denounced the teachers' union supporters as being ready to bust heads if their demands were not met. They doctored footage for it.

In Madison, there had been palm trees - blow up palm trees carried as an homage to the uprising in Egypt. Then O'Reilly tried to paint them all as psychopaths. Then the number of blow up palm trees increased, the meaning then changed. After the Factor clip above those palm tress were a big middle figure to Billo's BS. And they were still peaceful.

Mayor Bloomberg has allowed the NYPD to arrest the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. They were again pepper sprayed Wednesday. On the other side of the country, a horrible law passed during the midterms called Measure L, criminalized sleeping on the streets of San Fransisco. So the OccupySF group had a run in with SFPD last night too.

Those who oppose people who work for a living are figuring out how to kill this movement. They're going to throw whatever they can at it until something sticks.

We've grown so used to the extremist right-wing being smitten with protests and demonstrations because it's been their billionaire-funded buses bringing the outraged to photo ops. It'd be easy to assume they just enjoy the First Amendment in their venerated Constitution on display. The airing of ideas in the public square. They don't.

This is the brilliance of OccupyTogether. It disseminates the storyline. How can it be said that the Occupy Wall Street crowd are anarchists who want to eat your children for Satan / Soros / Mao / Hitler / Moveon / Unions / BlackPanthers / ACORN / Muslims / BigGovernment / Czars / Socialism / Illegal Immigrants / Obama / DeathPanels / ShariaLaw if the solidarity demonstrations are all peaceful? If it's your neighbors in your neighborhood locally being out there voicing their frustrations with a rigged system fixed for the 1 percent - it's impossible to slime all of them. The OccupyTogether movement is a Spartacus moment: "We are the 99 percent."

We are still doling out pizzas to the demonstrators. This is what I knew I could do to support locally-owned businesses and the protestors: buy pizzas across America. I had no IDEA how big it would get. Amato tells me over 440 of you have donated over $13,000 now. We've given out pizzas in seven or eight cities and it's only growing. Thank you guys for participating!

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