Greg Mitchell | The Nation

More than 400 protesters were “kettled” and arrested last night in Montreal and mass arrests were reported in other cities in Canada as the student-led demonstrations gained even more momentum.

This came after at least 300 people were arrested and twenty were injured in Montreal during weekend clashes between police and protesters, according to CTV. The movement began after a proposed tuition hike of $1,625, which would be implemented over several years. Support rallies were held in some cities in the US yesterday with more planned today. Check out this photo gallery of the arrested—or those asking to be arrested—in Montreal posing with messages on signs.

From today’s report in Toronto’s Globe and Mail: “A peaceful evening march that began with people banging pots and pans in support of protesting students ended in the early morning hours with police kettling demonstrators and arresting 400 of them after officers were pelted with projectiles. Montreal wasn’t the only city to have roundups Wednesday night. There were also mass arrests at student protests in Quebec City and Sherbrooke.

“The nightly march, which starts from an east-end park, was declared illegal by police the minute it was scheduled to start but was allowed to proceed for almost four hours before a line of Montreal riot cops blocked part of Sherbrooke Street as the marchers approached. Riot squad officers had been marching on the sidewalk beside the front of the protest all evening. An order to disperse was given when it arrived at Sherbrooke Street because police had been pelted by projectiles and other criminal acts had been committed, Montreal police spokesman Daniel Lacoursiere said. The group had also apparently resisted going in a direction ordered by police.”

—Interesting and complete piece on history of the movement (even going back quite a ways), the use of the “red square,” broadening issues and more.

—Anonymous takes down more Canadian government sites in response to “illegal” new laws leading crackdown.

—Montreal Gazette: Protests reveal economic and generational “fracture” in Quebec and Montreal, even as critics hit “whinintg” youth… First-person account by journalist on his arrest.

—Two professors in NYT op-ed piece knock America’s “not-so-friendly” northern neighbor over anti-protest laws.

—Quebec’s education minister says she is willing to meet with students but no new talks set so impasse continues. Also: the new anti-protest laws are “not on the table”… Trade unions outside Quebec have sent money “pouring” into the student strike fund…

—A handy guide to ten key points to remember relating to the protest movement (for English speakers, since protest material has been largely in French and “misconstrued”), including that it’s more about student debt than tuition, since tuition is still relatively low there.

My report yesterday is here.

The nomination of an African-American for president by a major party, and the Republicans’ first selection of a female candidate for vice president, were not the only historic aspects of the 2008 election campaign in the United States. This was also the first national campaign profoundly shaped—even, at times, dominated—by the new media, from viral videos and blog rumors that went “mainstream” to startling online fundraising techniques.

James Poniewozik, the Time magazine columnist, observed at mid-year that the old media are rapidly losing their “authority,” and influence, with the mass market. “It’s too simple to say that the new media are killing off the old media,” he declared, while highlighting a pair of influential scoops for the Huffington Post by a hitherto unknown “citizen journalist” named Mayhill Fowler. “What’s happening instead is a kind of melding of roles. Old and new media are still symbiotic, but it’s getting hard to tell who’s the rhino and who’s the tickbird.” He concluded, with an oblique reference to the late Tim Russert: “Maybe we’ll remember this election as the one when we stopped talking about ‘the old media’ and ‘the new media’ and, simply, met the press.”

Now flash forward to 2012: Obviously this trend has only continued, if not accelerated, in all realms, including fundraising and attack videos. Twitter was not even a factor in 2008. Just in the past week we’ve seen much contoversy over a planned Rommey-friendly PAC video hitting Obama for his Reverend Wright connections—and now blowback on a viral Obama campaign video smacking Romney over the Bain of his existence.

For some context, you might consider the following, which I wrote just days after the 2008 election and later used as the preface to my book and ebook, Why Obama Won—and Lessons for 2012 (Sinclair Books). And watch for the debut, in a few days, of my new daily “live-blog” (in the tradition of my WikiLeaks and Occupy blogs) on all aspects of 2012 campaigning.

* * *

The rules of the game have been changed forever—by technology. It was more than the “YouTube Election,” as some dubbed it, or “The Facebook Election” or “hyper-politics.” James Rainey, the longtime media reporter for the Los Angeles Times, declared that there is a “new-media revolution that is remaking presidential campaigns. Online videos can dominate the evening news. Or an unpublished novelist ‘with absolutely no journalism training’ can alter the national debate,” a reference to Mayhill Fowler.

In June, the alleged Obama “terrorist fist bump” went from viral to The View in just three days. Fortunately, the candidate was able to laugh it off, which was certainly not the case after the Reverend Wright videos went viral—another example of the unpredictable power of web politics. More evidence: after wrapping up the nomination in June 2008, the Obama campaign launched an extensive website devoted solely to shooting down viral rumors and innuendo.

“What’s different this year is that the entire political and media establishment has finally woken up to the fact that the internet is now a major player in the world of politics and our democracy,” said Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the TechPresident blog and annual Personal Democracy Forum. “We are watching a conversion of our politics from the twentieth century to the twenty-first.”

How did sites with names like Politico and FiveThirtyEight and Eschaton and Crooks and Liars collectively come to rival the three television networks in influence, even if partly by influencing the networks themselves? It’s been more than thirty-five years since “the Boys on the Bus” were anointed and celebrated. Now the Huffington Post’s “Off the Bus” site often made headlines with on-the-scene bulletins and audio/video snippets from some 3,000 contributors.

Defending one of Mayhill Fowler’s scoops—on Bill Clinton’s “sleazy” attack on Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair captured along a rope line in South Dakota—Jay Rosen said, “Professional reporters are going to have to decide whether they want to view citizen journalists as unfair competition, which is one option, or as extending the news net to places that pro reporters can’t, won’t or don’t go, which is another—and I think a better —way to look at it.”

Online influence in political campaigns predates the current race, of course. Who can forget the web-organized “meet-ups” that helped spark Howard Dean’s insurgent drive in 2004? Daily Kos was backing Dean and many Democrats in Senate and House races—while losing almost every key contest, it should be noted. The blog phenomenon had barely begun, YouTube was not yet born, social networking sites were in their infancy or still a glimmer in the eyes of entrepreneurs. The “Swift Boating” of John Kerry was mainly carried out in the traditional ways—TV spots, print ads and interviews on Fox News.

Two years later, the “tickbird” really started… ticking, with the 2006 elections, in which the Democrats took back Congress—thanks, quite significantly, to the activism and funding generated by liberal blogs and their allied groups. This reversed the poor new media/netroots record in the 2004 campaign and signaled that the “revolution” had really arrived.

YouTube had burst on the scene. The most revealing single incident: Senator George Allen’s “macaca” moment. This was when he uttered a distasteful slur at an obscure campaign rally, which happened to be caught on video and soon watched by millions on the web, and millions more when picked up (in the usual manner) by cable TV.

This was unthinkable—even impossible—until recent years. Allen lost narrowly to Jim webb, the Democrat. Then the liberal web-backed candidates triumphed in several special elections in 2007.

That same year, Obama’s online fundraising prowess, I suggest, was a key to his eventual victory, for several reasons: It gave him a quick start in the spending race; the millions of small donors gave him credibility as a broad-based candidate and provided the mainstream media with a catchy story line; it showed party leaders and super-delegates—and the press—that he might be the most powerful nominee; and it allowed his followers to feel they were intimately linked to his fortunes (in both meanings of the word).

But let’s not forget that the wildly passionate, if not exactly successful, Ron Paul phenomenon was purely a product of the web. On the other hand, other candidates—such as Rudy Giuliani and Joe Biden—faltered badly partly because they had little or no life online. Hillary Clinton’s web operation was largely viewed as old-fashioned and “square,” and she did not get her online fundraising act together until too late in the game. Her most “hip” moment of the whole campaign came early when she filmed a video spoof of the final episode of The Sopranos, with her husband in a diner. It was viewed by millions but she never followed up on that type of success, even though she had hired a former blogosphere ace, Peter Daou.

Clinton was mocked by many for campaign videos that had a saccharine “Up with People” quality, while more cutting-edge acts put together hot Obama tunes.

At the same time, many of the candidates had to repeatedly answer charges or respond to embarrassing videos posted on the web. Giuliani had to put out almost weekly flash fires about his record and his mistress/wife; Mitt Romney had to defend his making his dog ride on the roof of his car and claiming that his sons were doing their part in the war on terror by campaigning for him; John McCain was captured singing the old Beach Boys tune with new lyrics: “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran.” And John Edwards had to endure the constant replay of him fluffing up his hair before a TV appearance four years earlier.

I would argue that videos featuring Bill, not Hillary, Clinton led to the true turning point in the primary race, when on three separate occasions he was caught making what some took to be “racial” remarks and/or losing his temper with voters or reporters—all in informal settings captured by amateurs or small town reporters and then beamed to millions. Countless Democrats, and particularly African-Americans, who had always revered the Clintons, switched to Obama in the space of a week or two. Even if they still liked Hill they did not want another four or eight years of Bill. Obama won eleven primaries in a row and the race was all but over.

Early in the final Obama-McCain showdown, the number one campaign charge from the Democrats was that the Republican wanted to stay in Iraq “for 100 years.” What was the source for this? An amateur video of McCain making a remark to that effect at a small campaign gathering months earlier, spread widely on the web—in the usual fashion, first by liberal bloggers, then by the Obama campaign itself. Soon it turned up frequently on network and cable TV shows and even in Democratic commercials.

From the GOP side, Reverend Wright’s Greatest YouTube Hits perhaps peaked too early, quickly grew stale and were not utilized widely in the fall until the final days of the campaign . Some Republicans lamented that McCain was getting killed on the web—and he didn’t help his image any when he admitted that he was still an internet neophyte. In June, when Obama passed the magic barrier of 1 million Facebook friends—a measure that didn’t exist four years ago—it was noted that McCain only had 150,000.

And we haven’t even mentioned Obama Girl.

Greg Mitchell’s other books on great American campaigns include The Campaign of the Century (Upton Sinclair, 1934) and Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady (Nixon vs. Douglas, 1950).

The number of women serving in the US Senate today remains disturbingly small, but at least there are more than a handful, and several exert real power. This was hardly the case just a few years ago. And, further back, In 1950, only three women had ever served in that boys’ club, and mainly as appointees filling out their husband’s term.

That year, near the height of anti-Comnmunist hysteria America, a race in California might have started to change all that.

Helen Gahagan Douglas, an intelligent, attractive former actress and liberal activist—and three-term Democratic congresswoman from Los Angeles—ran for an open Senate seat. Her opponent: a young Republican named Richard Milhous Nixon. It was the campaign that would earn him a nickname that stuck: Tricky Dick. His team would call her the Pink Lady. I wrote about the campaign a few years ago in a Random House book, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady. It probed the contest in the context of the Red Scare but also, as the subtitle had it, “Sexual Politics.” Indeed, Douglas would become a feminist icon in the 1970s.

Here is an excerpt from the opening of the book, set on primary day nearly sixty-two years ago, in June 1950.

* * *

Two Hollywood screenwriters, former members of the Communist Party, flew east to face imprisonment for contempt of Congress. Seventy-three professors at the University of California fought dismissal for failing to sign a loyalty oath. The owner of KFI, a radio and television station in Los Angeles, ordered his 200 employees to endorse a similar oath. Only one KFI worker, a registered Republican, refused on principle, denouncing not only her boss but coworkers who “chose to see no further than today’s loaf of bread.” The mayor of Los Angeles, meanwhile, called on all citizens to notify the police of any neighbors they considered politically tainted.

In this atmosphere of vigilance and fear, Californians went to the polls on June 6, 1950, to nominate two candidates for the US Senate, setting the stage for a sensational election contest that fall.

As polls opened on primary day, political “dopesters” went “stir-crazy” trying to predict the results, the Hollywood Reporter observed. With California’s population surging it was impossible to predict how the new arrivals would vote. At midafternoon, Helen Gahagan Douglas, the Democratic front-runner in the Senate race, received a telegram from actress Greta Garbo that read, “Helen—Tonight or Never. God bless you.”

Garbo must have sensed her friend’s need for a boost on primary day, for the campaign had been painful and exhausting. The outgoing Democratic senator, Sheridan Downey, had announced that Douglas did not have “the fundamental ability and qualifications” to replace him and accused her of giving “comfort to Soviet tyranny.” Privately, an associate had advised Downey that Douglas was “a self-seeking, highly perfumed, smelly old girl,” adding, “I don’t believe in sending women to the House of Representatives or to the US Senate either. “A San Jose newspaper reported that if not exactly Red, she was “decidedly pink.” Westbrook Pegler, the syndicated columnist, cataloged her female deficiencies: her inattention to serious duties and her willingness to be nothing more than a “fluttering satellite” of the far left wing of her party. On top of that, fraternity boys at the University of Southern California had sprayed seltzer at her during a campus rally.

Perhaps the most distasteful personal attack, however came from the state’s leading political writer. Kyle Palmer of the Los Angeles Times had criticized her Democratic rival, Manchester Boddy, for running a colorless campaign with “too much dignity” but advised that he “might still defeat the lady if he tried—in a political sense, of course—to slap her around a bit.” And so as the race tightened, Boddy charged that a “subversive clique of red hots” was attempting to take over the Democratic Party, and he accused Douglas of harboring “communist sympathies.”

But it was the newspaper he published, the Los Angeles Daily News, that first put into print a new nickname for Helen Douglas. “The Pink Lady,” the Daily News called her.

Through it all, Douglas had remained confident, and with some cause. She was intelligent, articulate and attractive, one of only nine female members of Congress, the best-dressed woman in public life (according to the Fashion Academy in New York) and the first prominent actor to run for high office. “I know I am going to win,” she informed a national Democratic leader. Most of the party leaders in California, however, opposed her. They didn’t like the idea of having a woman in the Senate “with whom they can’t make deals,” she charged. “In the House it is all right since it is like having a feather stuck in your hat, but it is not all right in the Senate.” She had fought back, campaigning furiously, barnstorming by helicopter—the first time this had been done outside Texas. An editorial cartoon portrayed her in a football helmet, stiff-arming male politicians. Another, under the title if a body meets a boddy, pictured Douglas and Boddy blocking each other’s path, with the caption “Coming through the rye, should the Body or the Boddy let the other by?”

Tall and stately, Douglas was the number-one glamour girl of the Democratic Party, a writer for a New York newspaper observed. On the campaign trail, however, she had little time for “feminine necessities” such as getting her hair and nails done, according to the reporter, and she had already put on ten pounds, munching on candy bars to keep up her energy and consuming cakes baked for afternoon teas. Another writer observed that a woman running for the Senate has problems that never bother a “baldheaded candidate.” A man goes straight to bed at night after a final speech, but a woman “has to get a shampoo at midnight. She has to go to bed with her head in a towel to dry while she sleeps.” Douglas also had to contend with the demands of two children at home. “But mother!” her 11-year-old daughter, Mary Helen, had recently implored. “Why must you work so hard? Why can’t you stay home and go swimming with me?”

When Douglas visited Santa Clara, a local columnist revealed that she had arrived for a campaign appearance right on time, “sufficiently remarkable in any woman.” She looked young for her age, which was 49, and the former opera diva and Hollywood star did it without the usual artifice of makeup, retouched hair, or “trick millinery.” From this, the columnist concluded that she was interested “in persuading the minds of her audience, not in charming them off their feet.” Still, the political attacks on the candidate grew harsher, and she was too busy defending herself from attacks by Democrats to go after her likely Republican opponent, Congressman Richard M. Nixon. Yet she told her San Diego organizer, “You know, what happens to me personally isn’t very important. But that pipsqueak [Nixon] has his eye on the white House and if he ever gets there, God help us all.”

Close to primary day, Douglas assured her mentor, Eleanor Roosevelt, that Boddy’s Red-baiting was so excessive “it helped us.” In San Francisco near the end, she led a march of women carrying grocery baskets up Market Street to protest the high cost of living. A local newspaper published a photo of a radiant Douglas surrounded by the huge crowd under the headline NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF A——. Over the radio, Douglas confidently proclaimed, “Money alone never has won and never will win an election.”

* * *

Carey McWilliams, later the longtime editor of The Nation, in 1949 identified California as essentially “a freak, a trend-setter, the great exception.” Yet in many ways, it was postwar America in microcosm, with an expanding middle class, a severe housing and school shortage, racial problems, and a growing reliance on the automobile. California had all this and Hollywood, too. McWilliams detected a “golden haze over the land—the dust of gold is in the air—and the atmosphere is magical and mirrors many tricks, deceptions, and wondrous visions.” And nowhere in 1950 was this more evident than in the atmosphere of electoral politics.

As they visited friends on primary day, Representative Richard Nixon and his pretty wife, Pat, radiated happiness and confidence. Dick Nixon appeared certain to win more than 90 percent of the Republican vote, and Manchester Boddy had already bloodied the likely Democratic winner. Nixon knew that his campaign against Helen Douglas would be well managed and well financed, and the most grueling period was already past: his travels up and down this cruelly distended state in a yellow wood-paneled station wagon, journeying 15,000 miles to deliver more than 600 speeches in fifty counties. And that was for a one-sided primary contest. The rest of the campaign would be a war; it would be for all the marbles; it would pit him against a strong, worthy, but highly vulnerable candidate (a woman, no less)—meaning, in political terms, it would be challenging, fascinating, possibly even fun. “There is only one way we can win,” Nixon had vowed. “We must put on a fighting, rocking, socking campaign.”

“Mrs. Douglas takes wholeheartedly after the Administration’s program,” Richard Nixon remarked on primary day, “one hundred percent plus, including such things as socialized medicine.” That evening, Nixon and his family checked the early returns at City Hall in downtown Los Angeles, then celebrated at election headquarters on the second floor of the Garland Building over on West Ninth Street. His vote of more than 740,000 exceeded even his high expectations as his two minor GOP challengers mustered less than 35,000 between them. More significant, however, was Nixon’s tally in the Democratic column: more than 300,000 votes. This suggested that his attacks on Truman and other Democrats as unwitting allies of the Soviets had paid off and should be pressed even more intensely in coming months.

“I welcome Mrs. Douglas as an opponent,” Nixon announced. “It won’t be a campaign of personalities but of issues.” Douglas would have to reveal where she stood on those issues, “or,” he added ominously, “I’ll do it for her.”

Most of Nixon’s advisers felt that Douglas would be a formidable foe; she was as brave and as energetic as their man, with twice the charisma. For the record, Nixon concurred, calling her “a colorful, aggressive, vote-getting candidate” who had long been underrated by the “wise boys” of politics. But privately, he and campaign strategist Murray Chotiner felt otherwise. If Senator Downey had run for re-election, the outcome, they believed, would have hinged on farm issues, not on the Communist threat. But that all changed with Downey out. Nixon and Chotiner wanted Helen Douglas to win the nomination because her liberal politics played into the freedom-versus-socialism theme they had already decided would dominate the campaign. “There’s no use trying to talk about anything else,” Nixon told his Northern California chairman, “because it’s all the people want to hear about.” This was sure to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

During their travels across the state that spring, Nixon and Douglas had rarely crossed paths. Douglas, aware of her rival’s talent as a debater, avoided joint meetings. One day, however, they appeared separately in a small town in the north. Nixon’s aide Bill Arnold went out to hear what she was saying, came back, and reported to his boss. This was during a phase when Douglas, angered by Nixon’s gibes, sometimes lost her composure and referred to him as a “peewee” who, like Joe McCarthy, was trying to get people so scared of communism they would be afraid to turn off the lights at night.

When he heard what she had said, Nixon muttered, “Why, I’ll castrate her!” That would be literally impossible, Arnold pointed out. “I don’t care,” Nixon responded, “I’ll do it anyway!”

As a woman, Helen Douglas was particularly vulnerable to charges that she lacked the toughness to oppose the Communists. But Chotiner reminded his candidate, “You can’t get into a name-calling contest with a woman. The cost in votes would be prohibitive.” Still, Nixon would later admit that Douglas’s emergence on the Democratic side “brightened my prospects considerably.”

* * *

On primary night, Helen Douglas, dressed in a simple black dress—but still movie-star radiant—joined her mostly female staffers at her Los Angeles headquarters. She had won a solid victory, defeating Boddy by a two-to-one margin and rolling up more than 150,000 votes in the GOP primary. Her supporters, true believers, responded with whoops and hugs, as if she had already won the election. She asked much, sometimes too much, of her aides, but they remained devoted to her. Some of them felt that the voters (particularly women) admired what Douglas stood for, and she was a fabulously vibrant campaigner, so there was no way she could lose. Red-baiting had ultimately failed Boddy, so Nixon would not dare revive it.

The candidate’s personal satisfaction on primary night was marred by an uncomfortable moment at headquarters involving a male volunteer, a Greyhound bus driver who demanded a private conference with her. She soon discovered that he was more interested in sexual favors than political favors. Douglas knew that the passions of a campaign often become sexually charged but still faulted herself for not recognizing the bus driver’s agenda earlier.

Before returning to the home she shared with her children and husband in the hills high above Los Angeles, she stopped at several local campaign headquarters. Paul Ziffren, the well-known attorney and one of her chief fundraisers, finally drove her home, and Douglas, all business, asked him to make sure to thank Eleanor Roosevelt and others for their help.

Unlike many of her supporters, Douglas knew she was far from a shoo-in. Simple arithmetic told her that Nixon’s combined vote in the GOP and the Democratic primaries exceeded 1 million, whereas hers did not quite reach 900,000. This in itself was not fatal, for the Democratic turnout would likely soar in November. But there was something more troubling. For nearly four years, she had observed her colleague Richard Nixon at close range in Congress, and she knew him to be smart, dynamic, daring, a formidable speaker—and out to win at almost any cost. A reporter for a Democratic paper called him “Whittier’s tall, dark and handsome gift to the Republican party.” Now she had received a letter from a member of Students for Douglas at the University of California at Berkeley. Nixon had spoken at Sather Gate, and the student was surprised to hear him give a “magnificent” speech. “He is one of the cleverest speakers I have ever heard,” he warned.

The letter was remarkably astute. Douglas, in reply, told the student that his report corroborated what she had heard from others. “I think you are quite right,” she observed, “and will act accordingly.” As Helen Douglas retired on primary night, she knew that if she let her gifted opponent call the shots in this campaign she had no chance of becoming just the fourth woman ever elected to the US Senate.

Greg Mitchell’s other books books on key American campaigns include The Campaign of the Century (Upton Sinclair, 1934) and Why Obama Won. More recently, he has written books about Bradley Manning, Beethoven and the Hiroshima & Nagasaki “Cover-up.” He can be reached at epic1934 @ aol.com.

Live-blogging OWS daily since October 1.  Email: epic1934@aol.com. All times ET.   See my e-book on Occupy "40 Days That Shook the World."   My other books, including recent ones on Bradley Manning, Upton Sinclair, and Beethoven, here....

1:05 Cool video of recent protest at Verizon meeting in Alabama, with Steve Earle music (he has lent a hand there in other ways, too).

12:00 FDL wrap-up on what's gone on in Charlotte so far today, inside and outside the BOA meeting, votes on shareholder resolutions, arrests (we have seen count of four so far, could be off).

11:40  Police now blocking access to OccupyTheFarm site near Berkeley (see items below)...

10:40 Arrests at BOA meeting in Charlotte (see below).  One of them, Johnny Rosa, a BOA foreclosure victim,  tells Huff Post: "I just want to stop what they are doing."  Allison Kilkenny eyeballing here, but remains to be seen if really "thousands."

10:30  Quebec students rejecting that tuition deal we wrote about earlier this week....

9:40  Frequent updates on BOA protest in Charlotte here.   Such as:  "Stephen Lerner, a member of the executive board at the Service Employees International Union, and a frequent target of attacks from hardline conservative media a sends an update: 'We have moved into streets.. Shutting down key intersections. Cops mellow so far.'"  A sporadic live stream here.

9:20 Greg Sargent at Wash Post: Romney won't criticize extremists in own party but told Occupyer, "Go back to Russia."

8:55 UC-Berkeley now says it may take legal action to evict squatters tin OccupytheFarm protest.... 9 activists now sitting in at office of president of Johns Hopkins....

8:10 Lengthy SF Weekly cover story on local Occupy and "Unmasking the Anarchists."   There, "it's clear that anarchism has always thrived at the heart of Occupy, guiding many Occupiers' goals and tactics and even providing the organizational structure for local chapters."

7:50  Wired's Kim Zetter:  Twitter hits backs at court, prosecutors over Occupy order.  "In the battle to fight online fishing expeditions by law enforcement officials there is little we can do individually to protect ourselves — which makes it all the more important for internet companies like Twitter and Google to fight back on our behalf."

7:45 It's another no-holiday bank day  and if you missed,  Allison Kilkenny yesterday had  latest on BOA shareholders protest in Charlotte, with city declaring it "extraordinary event," meaning "the city plans to restrict free speech and expand the ability of police and security forces to target and profile the homeowners, worker, community members, students, and immigrants who plan to demand justice from one of the largest banks in the country."   And Huff Post also previews and suggests it sets tone for Dem convention protest at end of summer.

7:40  In record turnout, North Carolina voters back ban on gay marriage, gay unions and such.   This is a state that went for Obama in 2008.

From late Tuesday

Portrait of Atlanta family evicted at gun point after 18 years, living with 4 generations in house.  "That old evil thing called greed...time to let it go."

Robert Reich on Democracy Now! hails Occupy, says we have to keep making a "ruckus."

Noam Chomsky with new piece at Salon:  "The jobs aren't coming back."  America doesn't make things anymore.  Financiers just "manipulate" money and move it around and aground. "The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history.... For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis."

OccupyTheFarm squatters near Berkeley set terms for exiting land--for one thing, they must retain access.