Well, let’s give her a chance…you have a better idea? :-)

I’m looking forward to reading Glenn’s chat and his book, it sounds incredible. I’ll be here for a few more minutes and I’ll also check back in tonight and answer any late questions — I realize that a lot of people had to work, etc.

You’re absoluetely right, DW — look at the right wing reporting to its usual bag of tricks to kill this movement, and it’s not working. That’s because three years into this economic calamity, they see and understand the massive wealth gap in this country, and how they’ve been scammed on student loans, mortgages, etc. So middle class people aren’t being scared by the usual boogymen.

You bet (about Elizabeth Warren). I think you’ll see an enthusiam level that will be MUCH greater for her campaign than there will be for the Obama re-election effort. It would be interesting to see if she would be someone that the movement could groom for 2016, when I think the real push to take the country back will come to a head. Of course she has to beat Scott Brown first.

Winter in much of the US is not for the faint of heart — some protesters will surely drop off. If the movement can make it through the winter, that will be a remarkable test of its mettle. It would be interesting to see thousands of OWS supporters marching on the Democratic convention in Charlotte — shades of 1968! Meanwhile, my sense is that the Tea Party movement (which I wrote a 2010 book about called “The Backlash”) is really waning — I think that’s because Fox News in particular pulled the plug to some degree. You won’t see that with this movement.

Defintely, the whole urine-soaked smelly hippies trope has emerged because Fox and the right-wing radio talkers (and the right wing) are terrified by this movement — real middle-class populism instead of the pseudo brand that they sell. They are trying to make regular middle class citizens think twice about supporting the movement.

That’s a great unanswered question. I could see cases where OWS supporters could benefit from challenging established politicians. Even the congressman here in Center City Philadelphia, the city party boss Bob Brady, would benefit from a primary challenge, IMHO. But I find it hard to imagine OWS working with an Americans for Prosperity styled group.

Lindsay, I’m just getting to your earlier question about “kettling” — it’s a police tactic in which marchers or protesters are surrounded on all sides by the cops (In NY, they use the now famous orange netting) and detained in a confined space, sometimes ultimately arrested and sometimes not. Either way, it makes protesting — a supposedly legal activity protected by the Bill of Rights — an uncomfortable acivity and also associates it with lawbreaking. That may not matter to some experienced protesters, but it does matter to some regular folks who might be sitting on the fence. The use of kettling has become widespread since the unrest at the 1999 WTO protests and accelerated (as so many things did) with 9/11.

Well, that would be more realistic, I guess. I think so far the movement has done a good job at working with labor and other progressive groups but not getting taken over, which is exactly what happened to some extent with the Tea Party and the Koch Bros./ Americans for Prosperity.

FoxNews.com did an “expose” of me by Jana Winter, exact same hack who tried to write this week that OWS was created by “ACORN.” It didn’t have any impact on my editors. They love the controversy.

There’s been some of that — protesters chanting at the cops, “Come join us!”

Yes, it reminds me of late 60s protests, too, and the prime era of the protests lasted more than three years, from 1967 through 1970. This has been going on for barely five weeks — there could be many twists and turns. A similarity is that in both eras the 2 parties had abandoned the people. You had Dems in the WH — LBJ and now Obama. I think Obama would help himself by going to Zuccotti Park unannounced, not making a speech but just listening to people. I think that would cause his re-election — but I would be shocked if he did that.

That’s right — the Bloomberg admin was working to strip a pension benefit worth $12,000 from rank-and-file NYPD. Clearly, some of the lower ranking “blue shirts” have sympathy for the movement — whether any real links can be forged is a challenge for OWS.

Scarecrow, I think the resilency of the movement will surprise a lot of people (allow this may be one case where warmer winter temperatures via global warming would help….just kidding). As I write in “The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge,” the occupation itself is the message, and I think it can continue. It’s already changed the conversation and forced better-than-nothing action from Obama on foreclosures and student loans — what will be interesting is whether it has any impact on 2012 elections — and whether it wants to. Would OWS challenge blue dog dems on a primary, in the Tea Party fashion?

Thanks — we all need to rally behind Scott and do what we can for him and about the situation.

TCU, I think you have to think through the pros and cons of the strategy. When Anonymous posted personal info about “Tony Baloney” and his family online, I think that alienated some folks right when people were sitting on the fence about OWS. Just my opinion. The movement needs the support of exactly the kind of person who might be offended by such a tactic.

Heh, well as some people know, Rashomon is the famouus Japanese (Kurasawa..sp?) movie about a crime which shows the very different perspective/recollection of the different players. That gets to your earlier question and my earlier answer — whether the move by 1000 or so people to march on the Brooklyn-bound roadway was an act of civil disobedience or an NYPD trap — to “kettle” the marchers and break the spirit of OWS — depends on where you were in the march and what you saw. My reporting shows there was almost certainly an element of entrapment by the NYPD.

DWB, I wrote a longer response that somehow got eaten by my computer — but the short answer is the PDN is a VERY unusual corporate-owned newspaper, generally liberal and with different ideas about point of view and “objectivity” than pretty much every other paper in America. So there’s no trend…sigh.

Teddy, I was just thinking this morning that something should be written about Scott, maybe for a major magazine. I’d love to do it — on the other hand, I’ve used up all my days off here at the newspaper in Philadelphia. I’d also love to write a traditional book about OWS, although right this second I’m emotionally exhausted from writing this.

Lindsay, maybe confusion isn’t the right word. I think we’re seeing this at other protests — some people want to risk confrontation and arrest, and some don’t. The Brooklyn Bridge march had elements of both — some people chanted “Take the bridge, take the bridge!” knowing that it’s illegal to block traffic. But the mass of marchers who went on the bridge thought it was OK to do so — many because they saw police seemingly lead the march onto the bridge. Which they in fact did — it is captured very clearly on video.