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It appears Fox doesn't want to let their viewers know why Hillary Clinton was met with protests in Egypt if this interview with Neil Cavuto and Fox regular, KT McFarland is any indication. Cavuto was discussing the fact that Hillary Clinton's motorcade was met with demonstrators a little over a week ago and they managed to get in a little fearmongering over the Muslim Brotherhood's future role in Egypt's government. What they somehow managed to fail to mention is Michele Bachmann and her cohorts' role in causing the protests. Imagine that?

For a reminder of what set things off, here's more from Think Progress: Bachmann’s Islamophobic Conspiracy Theory Fuels Egyptians’ Anti-Clinton Protest:

Egyptian protesters threw shoes and tomatoes at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s motorcade in Alexandria this week. The New York Times reported that their demonstration “delighted conservative bloggers in the United States” but “what has attracted less attention” is why they were protesting: a conspiracy theory cooked up by Islamophobes in the U.S. that the Obama administration is working on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood:

Pressed by American reporters to explain where they got the idea that their new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, had been foisted on them through a U.S. plot, rather than the will of the majority, several Egyptians cited information gathered from American blogs or news sites.

An Egyptian-American Christian who met Mrs. Clinton on Sunday cited a recent assertion by Representative Michele Bachmann, a Republican, “that the Obama Administration is pursuing a closeted pro-Muslim agenda,” in a conversation with Time magazine’s correspondent, Abigail Hauslohner.

Rumors that the Obama administration has provided the Muslim Brotherhood with billions of dollars in aid remain an article of faith with many Egyptians who are convinced that Mr. Morsi’s victory was a sham, despite repeated efforts by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to correct the record on Twitter.

That’s right — Bachmann’s ludicrous allegation that the Muslim Brotherhood has “penetrated” the United States government convinced anti-Islamist Egyptians that the U.S. is backing their domestic Islamist opponents. The source for Bachmann’s ravings is Frank Gaffney, a conspiracy theorist who claims that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the government and that shari’a law is coming to the U.S.

It seems Cavuto and McFarland are more concerned with protecting Michele Bachmann and her fellow wingnuts who are all regular guests on Fox than letting the viewers know they were the cause of Clinton's "really awful" treatment in Egypt. I'm sure not wanting anything to get in the way of their fearmongering about the Muslim Brotherhood has something to do with it as well.

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As Diane reported at our Occupy site, this week, sadly we got another example of police officers getting out of hand in their response to a protest by students -- 30 Pepper-Sprayed at Santa Monica College Protest Included 4-Year-Old:

Thirty Santa Monica College students and one 4-year-old were treated for injuries and as many as 5 were hospitalized on Tuesday after being pepper-sprayed during a protest against a plan to possibly quadruple fees to $180 per unit or more for the most popular classes, which are already hard to get into. Students protested outside at board of trustees meeting.

Of course the talking heads over at Fox couldn't pass up the opportunity to attack the students with Neil Cavuto bringing on resident fearmonger David Horowitz to go after them as a bunch of lazy moochers that just want a "free education" to go along with that "free birth control." Horowitz really is a nasty piece of work so his comments here weren't going to be a surprise to Cavuto or his show's producers. I'm sure they got exactly what they wanted out of him.

Here's more on the interview above from Mediaite -- Neil Cavuto Guest Argues That Pepper Sprayed Santa Monica Students Deserve To Be ‘Expelled’:

So far, much of the media coverage has focused on the campus police’s actions (the school has instigated a probe into the incident), but a segment on Your World with Neil Cavuto took it another way. Whereas some people watch the video and wonder how we can stop the growing trend of people being viciously pepper sprayed by authority figures, Your World guest David Horowitz watched it and wondered how we can stop all these darn kids.

“This is mob rule. This is a mob and all these students should be put on probation or expelled for their behavior. The Board of Trustees had a plan, it was aired. There’s a way to complain about a plan. Barging into a Trustees meeting as a mob isn’t the way to do it.”

Cavuto compared the video to those taken in Greece and made the point that it’s not like the Trustees “weren’t altering this to charge you what they do at Harvard.” Right. As we all know, there’s a minimum amount that a tuition hike can be before Americans are allowed to complain.

Meanwhile, Horowitz continued to explain why the students represented the worst of America.

“They want free education! ‘We’re gonna have free contraceptives so why not free education, free food, free shelter?’ That’s where this is going and what’s driving it is the anarchist, communist left, the Occupy movement across the country which was involved also in the UC Davis incident where there was pepper spray. You can’t have mobs running around like that. You can’t have that kind of disrespect for other people’s opinions and other people’s property.”

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CNN's Howard Kurtz chastised the big media companies who have failed to disclose their conflict of interest and their support of the controversial Internet privacy bills, SOPA and PIPA which they finally covered when there was a blackout by a large number of Internet companies in protest of the legislation.

I'm glad Kurtz at least decided to mention that they should have been more open about their conflict of interest, but less than one minute with no mention of the names of the bills at the end of his show hardly qualifies as anything that really informed his viewers of what those conflicts are. It's a step in the right direction, but a pretty lame one at best.

Now if we could get them to disclose their conflict of interest with the Citizens United ruling that allows corporations to pour unlimited amounts of money into campaigns anonymously and the fact that the big media companies don't want to fix the mess since they're the ones benefiting from all that money flowing into the advertising on their networks.

I expect that to happen about the time hell freezes over. They only covered this blackout because they were forced to because too many people who use the Internet were wondering what was going on or were about to and they would have looked like incompetent buffoons to have completely ignored the story. And Kurtz's complaints here ring pretty hollow when there was a virtual blackout on the story for months while Congress hoped to get it passed with no one noticing.

KURTZ: A strange thing happened this week that transformed the complicated Congressional debate into something that, if you own a computer, was impossible to miss.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC ANCHOR: Gone blank. Tonight, the big fight behind what happened to some big names on the Web today and why they went away.

DIANE SAWYER, ABC ANCHOR: You may have noticed today if you happened to go to Google or Wikipedia, the popular Web sites were blacked out in protest over proposed new crackdown on the Internet.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: These and other opponents say the heavy hand of government regulation could ruin the Internet. They are taking the fight to the big media companies and the Motion Picture Association, which say new restrictions are needed to crack down on online piracy.

And it worked. Public pressure forced congressional leaders to put the bill on hold. But here's the thing - when "Good Morning America," "CBS This Morning" and the "Today" show first covered the blackout, they didn't mention that ABC, CBS and NBC have lobbied hard for the restrictive legislation, although the "Today" show did take note of it during a subsequent interview.

No initial disclosure as well on CNBC. The "New York Times" says that CNN has been, quote, "relatively diligent" in disclosing that parent company, Time Warner, supports the legislation.

This is an important story about online freedom and thievery. And it's just plain embarrassing that the networks didn't fess about the very clear financial interests of the companies that own them.

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After virtually ignoring the upcoming SOPA legislation and the upcoming online blackout to protest the pending legislation, now that the blackout is upon us, the corporate news channels that also support the bill finally decided to let their viewers know what was going on, because they had no choice. Were it not for the blackout, I'm sure they'd still be ignoring it for the most part.

MSNBC decided to bring on recently retired Senator and now lobbyist for the motion picture industry, Chris Dodd, for a nice "fair and balanced" discussion on the blackout. Dodd more or less accused the web sites participating in the blackout of acting like a bunch of spoiled children and offered little in the way of details to address the concerns of those who are against the legislation.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a pretty scathing piece on Dodd and the letter he issued via the L.A. Times. You can read the rest for his criticisms of Dodd's lobbying activity among other issues, but I thought I'd share some of his thoughts on Dodd and the MPAA's response to the protest -- Chris Dodd’s paid SOPA crusading:

The L.A. Times, yesterday – “MPAA’s Chris Dodd takes aim at SOPA strike”:

Hollywood’s chief lobbyist lashed out at tech companies for mounting Tuesday night’s planned online blackout to protest proposed anti-piracy legislation that has pitted Southern California movie and music distributors against Silicon Valley Internet corporations.

Motion Picture Assn. of America Chief Executive Chris Dodd, the former Senator from Connecticut, accused technology companies such as Google, Mozilla and Wikipedia of resorting to stunts. . . .

“It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and who use their services,” Dodd said in a statement. “It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.”

[...]

It is in that capacity that Dodd has become the leading public spokesman and private lobbyist for the truly dangerous PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, bills craved by the industry that pays him. These bills, which vest the power in large corporations and the government to seize and shutdown websites with little or no due process in the name of stopping piracy, pose the greatest dangers to Internet freedom of any bill in the last decade, at least. So serious are these threats that they have prompted a rare — and inspiring — protest movement from numerous large Internet companies and blogs in the form of an Internet “blackout” today.

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From Demotix -- U.S. Marine Sergeant defends Occupy Wall Street protestors:

Thousands supported Occupy Wall Street in Times Square last night. After several arrests, a U.S. marine began questioning NYPD officers patriotism as well as their courage.

Last night at Occupy Wall Street in Times Square, Marine Sergeant Shamar Thomas boldly defended the occupiers. Sergeant Thomas calmly asked the NYPD why they aren't protecting the peaceful protestors. The NYPD ignored his questions and continued telling protestors to leave the sidewalk otherwise "they'd get hurt."

Then, in an epic scene, Thomas approached the line of NYPD officers who held their batons.

While many Occupy Wall Street demonstrators had been arrested for merely crossing the street, he exclaimed, "These are U.S. citizens peacefully protesting! These are the people you are supposed to protect!" The 10-15 NYPD officers he addressed dared not to touch him.

Sergeant Thomas continued denouncing the NYPD's actions shouting, "This isn't a war zone! I've served overseas, that's a war zone! Get rid of your batons and helmets!"

After five minutes of severely and loudly criticizing the NYPD, the Sergeant walked away leaving the scorned officers behind. The few people who were there applauded and cheered. Read on...

As they noted, there's no way to know if seeing more members of the armed services joining in these protests will make a difference in the mindset of the police, but I hope it would as well. So far I've seen little indication of that and it didn't seem to make a difference in Boston earlier this week.

h/t Scarce

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From the St. Louis Beacon -- Occupy St. Louis briefly occupies downtown streets for rally and march:

Shouting "We are the 99 percent!," close to 1,000 sign-waving participants and sympathizers of Occupy St. Louis took to the streets Friday to highlight their belief that too much power and money is increasingly concentrated among the few.

"Corporate greed has got to go!" declared Candace Smith, who has been participating in the Occupied movement, which has transformed part of Kiener Plaza into a tent city for over a week.

Smith joined Bob Soutier, president of the Greater St. Louis Labor Council, and others in addressing the crowd at a rally in Kiener before all marched down Market Street for a symbolic protest outside the biggest Bank of America building in town.

"To take our money, and then doing what they do to us, it has to stop!" Soutier said, igniting cheers.

He noted that similar marches were being held Friday in about 120 cities as part of the Occupied Wall Street movement, which has attracted various progressive groups and labor organizations as spinoffs have been formed.

St. Louis police, many on bicycles, lined Friday's march route, but no incidents were reported. Vans equipped to house any rowdy protesters lined a couple side streets, but went unused.

Shouted the crowd at various points during the 90-minute event:

"We are too big to fail!"
"Whose streets? Our streets!"
"What do we want? Jobs!"

Indeed, although various marchers waved signs advancing different causes -- from ending war to gay rights -- the common thread was their concern about the lack of jobs.

My friend Adam from St. Louis Activist Hub has more video from the march -- Video: 1,000 People March With OccupySTL (UPDATED With Additional Coverage) .

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Keith Olbermann talked to activist David Swanson about one of the latest incidents we've seen from those on the right who are doing their best to infiltrate and agitate the protests going on across the country right now in the United States. Sadly if the protests continue to pick up, we're going to see more of this sort of stuff.

Case in point, apparently James O'Keefe decided to show his mug at the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York this Monday, but if what I read in my Twitter feed was any indication, it didn't take long for him to be followed by protesters with video cameras in hand there.

From The Washington Post -- Conservative journalist says he infiltrated, escalated D.C. museum protest:

A conservative journalist has admitted to infiltrating the group of protesters who clashed with security at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on Saturday — and he openly claims to have helped instigate the events that prompted the museum to close.

Patrick Howley, an assistant editor at the American Spectator, says that he joined the group under the pretense that he was a demonstrator. “As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator,” Howley wrote. (The language in the story has since been changed without explanation.)

A group called the October 2011 movement had organized the march in order to protest the U.S. government’s use of unmanned drones overseas, joined by a few members of the D.C. branch of the Occupy Wall Street movement, as the Post reported Saturday. Howley writes that a small number of protesters—himself included—had tried to move past the security guards at the main entrance of the museum. He says that one protester next to him got into a shoving match with a security guard in an antechamber before they hit the second set of doors that led to the museum itself. The guard pepper-sprayed the protester, spraying Howley as well.

But, according to his account, Howley was determined to escalate the protest further. “I wasn’t giving up before I had my story,” he writes, describing how he continued to rush past security into the museum itself. “I strained to glance behind me at the dozens of protesters I was sure were backing me up, and then I got hit again, this time with a cold realization: I was the only one who had made it through the doors....So I was surprised to find myself a fugitive Saturday afternoon, stumbling around aircraft displays with just enough vision to keep tabs on my uniformed pursuers. ‘The museum is now closed!’ screamed one of the guards as alarms sounded. ‘Everyone make your way to the exits immediately!’”

Howley, in fact, chides the protesters for not taking his lead and rushing into the museum after being pepper-sprayed. “In the absence of ideological uniformity, these protesters have no political power. Their only chance, as I saw it, was to push the envelope and go bold. But, if today’s demonstration was any indicator, they don’t have what it takes to even do that.”

At the same time, Howley criticizes the movement as being “disruptive,” even as he personally helped catalyze the shutdown of a national museum. He warns ominously, “What began on Wall Street is now spreading, and the question still remains: is it dangerous? Socialist indoctrination methods are surprisingly effective.”

Howley scrubbed his original post and posted a second edited version since. Here's the kind of nonsense we get to look forward to as those on the right get more desperate to shed a bad light on any of the protests going on. Let's hope we see more incidents like with O'Keefe where the cameras get turned back on them so they get away with less disruptions than they formerly would have.

Well isn't this nifty.

via the NY TIMES cityroom blog:

The above video, posted by USLaw.com, captures a confrontation on Saturday between the police and several protesters from the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In slow motion, and with annotation explaining what is happening, the video seems to show a high-ranking member of the New York Police Department spraying a substance — the video says it is Mace or pepper spray — toward several women who were standing behind a wall of orange netting. After the spraying, one woman can be seen dropping to the ground, screaming in apparent pain.

More than 80 people were arrested on Saturday as they marched from the financial district, where many have been encamped for over a week, north toward Union Square.

Another version now has over 200,000 views at YouTube since yesterday.

Our corporate media largely ignored the protests that are still going on this week in New York. I saw CNN mention it once or twice in about a thirty second segment over the weekend, but if five of those "tea partiers" show up somewhere with signs in their hands, they've got twenty reporters out there to cover it.

Susie wrote about the demonstrations over the weekend here -- Occupy Wall Street: 'This Is Not A One-Day Demonstration, We're Not Leaving'.

Here's more ongoing coverage of the demonstrations from Democracy Now -- "Occupy Wall Street": Thousands March in NYC Financial District, Set Up Protest Encampment:

Demonstrators are marching on Wall Street today on the third day of a campaign dubbed "Occupy Wall Street," which began on Saturday when thousands gathered in New York City’s Financial District. Inspired by the massive public protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Square, hundreds have slept outside near Wall Street for the past two nights. We play a video report on the protest by Democracy Now!'s Sam Alcoff and get a live update from the streets from Nathan Schneider, editor of the blog "Waging Nonviolence." We also speak with David Graeber, an anthropologist who participated in the activities. "If you look at who showed up [in Egypt and Spain], it was mostly young people, and most of them were people who had gone through the educational system, who were deeply in debt, and who found it completely impossible to get jobs," says Graeber. "The system has completely failed them... If there's going to be any kind of society worth living in, we’re going to have to create it ourselves."

Full transcript available at the link above.

I'd say this is one for the Foo Fighters, zippo for the Westboro Baptist Church hate mongers who decided they weren't too happy with the recent video from the Foo Fighters to promote their fall concert tour.

From Balloon Juice -- Foo Fighters Counter-Protest Westboro Baptist Church at Westboro Baptist Church’s Protest of Foo Fighters Concert:

If you haven’t heard, the Foo Fighters created a video called Hot Buns to promote their fall tour:

The Hot Buns video begins innocently enough. Four hillbilly-attired Foo Fighters are chowing down at a truck stop.

Then they head to the showers, soap up, shake their naked backsides and spoof a gay porn film to the strains of Queen’s Body Language.

The viral sensation, created to promote the rock band’s fall tour, drew immediate and widespread reaction from fans. And one response from an open foe. The anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, notorious for picketing at military funerals, plans to descend upon the Foos’ second tour stop Friday night in Kansas City, Mo.

“I can’t wait,” says Dave Grohl, who hatched the idea for the video after a bus break years ago at a truck stop where drivers lined up for a turn at hot showers. “You know you’ve arrived when they start picketing your shows.”

[...]

Anyway, Fred Phelps and his merry band of a**holes made good on their promise to protest the Foo Fighters show in Kansas City, but the Foo Fighters were ready for them:

As expected, the WBC showed up to protest the show yesterday (Sept. 16) afternoon. What they didn’t expect, however, was a truck-pulled float carrying all five members of Foo Fighters dressed in trucker outfits and wigs identical to those they donned in their recent ‘Hot Buns’ video. The band played the country parody song ‘Keep It Clean,’ heard in the video, skewering the protesters as they looked on with their picket signs in hand.

Safe for work video of the Foo Fighters counter-protest above. Not safe for work video that got the "God hates fags" group at Westboro so worked up to begin with below the fold.

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