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Stephen Colbert had a bit of fun with El Presidente Barack Obama for his "shocking" new policy where he's now "thrown open America's doors to people who already here" with his administrations newly announced policy of halting deportations for young undocumented immigrants.

COLBERT: This of course replaces our long standing policy of not deporting them if they were really good at baseball. This is shocking folks. This is shocking! [...] Now we can expect a steady stream of preexisting, born into their present locations.

After showing clips of Tim Pawlenty, Lindsey Graham and Karl Rove carping about President Obama using this as nothing but a "cynical political move" Colbert pointed out that President Obama needs to do something about November and that 43 point lead he's "barely clinging to" with Latino voters.

After noting that even Bloody Bill Kristol, George Will and Matt Dowd said this was the right thing for the President to do, Colbert noted "Fine but, the President's not supposed to do anything in an election year. Let alone the right thing. Now maybe I'm a conspiracy theorist, but I'm beginning to think Barack Obama is trying to get reelected. You don't see Republicans cynically pandering to Latinos like this."

Cue the RNC's Latino outreach page with stock photos of Asian children and Mitt Romney touting self-deportation during one of the Republican debates.

COLBERT: Yes, if Mitt Romney is elected, illegals will self-deport. In fact, some Americans might even join them. But folks, that's how effective... that's how effective the policy will be.

Colbert followed up with a bit mocking Neil Munro from Tucker Carlson's rag, The Daily Caller, for interrupting the President when he was announcing this policy during his press conference and pretending he didn't realize President Obama wasn't done talking and some "footage" of Colbert supposedly joining Munro at the press conference as well and heckling the President.

[Occupy Wall Street members enter a plaza known as Duarte Square that is owned by historic Trinity Church, one of lower Manhattan's largest land-owners December 17, 2011.]

Eight protesters with Occupy Wall Street that include a retired Episcopal Bishop who won both the Bronze and Silver Stars for his service in Vietnam, have been convicted of misdemeanor trespassing for entering a lot owned by Trinity Church a month after the Zucotti Park encampment was dismantled.

A judge in Manhattan Criminal Court found the protesters guilty Monday after a weeklong trial. One of the defendants was also convicted of trying to slice through the fence's locks with bolt-cutters.

The defendants had been charged after a Dec. 17th incident when protesters scaled a chain-link fence or crawled under it to get to a lot to use it as a new camp site.

The original camp in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan was shut down in November. Protesters had wanted church officials to let them occupy the church-owned property but were refused.

[Via]

Thousands of people gathered on the state Capitol lawn in Lansing Monday evening, to protest the treatment of two female lawmakers who were barred from speaking on the House floor last Thursday following an emotional debate over abortion.

They heard a recitation by the two lawmakers and others of The Vagina Monologues.

The performance, kicked off by the work’s author Eve Ensler who flew in from California for the occasion, was the culmination of five days of reaction to the decision by House Republican leaders to issue one-day revocations of the right of state Reps. Lisa Brown, D-West Bloomfield, and Barb Byrum, D-Onondaga , to speak on the House floor.

They said the discipline was in response to "incivility" displayed by the two representatives a day earlier during a debate over legislation to impose new restrictions on abortion clinics. Brown said she was punished for using the word vagina.

Welcoming the crowd, Brown said the legislation would “effectively overturn Roe v. Wade,” the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision which ended most state-level restrictions on abortion, and “turn back the clock to the 60s, when women were denied health care.”

Concluding her remarks during the House debate, Brown had said, “I’m flattered that you are all so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means ‘no.’”

Monday evening she said, “We shouldn’t be legislating vaginas, if you can’t say vagina.”

Via:

The play is a series of graphic tales - some funny, some violent - about vaginas. The author, Eve Ensler, said the protest setting at the capitol was a first for her show in its 16th year.

"This is a turning point moment," Ensler said. "This is a moment where we can turn this whole war on women in a whole other direction. And it's really important that we have her back and that we support her. And we let the world know this isn't going to be tolerated."

That's why thousands of Brown's supporters, young and old, attended the event. They wanted to make sure the next generation has a voice.

"She's going to change the world, and we gotta start somewhere," said Molly Kozlowski referring to her 2-year-old, who wore a "Viva Vagina" shirt and rainbow tutu. "She's going to be a strong, independent woman, and we're going to start here."

Women weren't the only ones speaking out about vaginas. There were plenty of men in the crowd supporting Representative Brown as well.

"We need to be honest talking about women's health issues, that it's not a dirty word," David Widmayer said. "This is not someone making a scene, this is how you have to talk about it if you're honestly going to talk about women's health in the legislature."

Ensler called on all women to participate in “One billion Rising,” on Feb. 14, 2013. On that day, she urged women to leave their jobs and their schools and go to the streets to dance.

“I want you to take over this place,” Ensler said. “I want you to dance for vaginas and life.”

Batemanimation: McCain vs Citizens United from scottbateman on Vimeo.

JOHN McCAIN: I think there will be scandals, as associated with the worst decision of the United States Supreme Court in the 21st century. Uninformed. Arrogant. Naive. I just wish one of 'em had run for county sheriff.

Corporations are not people. That's why we have different laws that govern corporations than govern individual citizens. And so to say that corporations are people again flies in the face of all the traditional Supreme Court decisions that, that we have made that have been made in the past.

Good morning, today is Tuesday, June 19th, 2012. Some good news today, Tiny Darth Vader, 7-year old Max Page who starred in a Super Bowl Volkswagon commercial was discharged to home from a Los Angeles hospital after having surgery to replace a heart valve. Be well, and may The Force be with you, Max.

From Reuter's photographer's blog, photojournalist Andrew Burton decided that he wanted to get a look at Occupy Wall Street's everyday activities rather than the sensationalist activities that are covered by the mainstream media. So he ended up following a friend of mine, Austin Guest, to take photos and talk with him.

Reuters:

As a journalist, Guest helped re-shape my own notions of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Like many people, I thought the OWS movement seemed unorganized and unwilling to state clear political desires. On the contrary, Guest demonstrated that the movement does have organization and leadership, though at times they focus so extensively on each person having a voice, it can be hard to reach consensus and mobilize. Regarding political goals, Guest explained that Occupy Wall Street is a social movement, not a political one.

Austin Guest was one of the occupiers who "moved in" to the lobby of a Bank of America branch office, and you can see that video here.

Looking to get a handle on the foreclosure crisis, the loan modification fiasco, and the robo-signing scandal? ProPublica put it all in a music video.

Thousands of people from civil rights groups walked down New York City's Fifth Avenue in total silence Sunday, marching in protest of "stop-and-frisk" tactics employed by city police.

The quiet was interrupted only by the tapping of feet on the pavement and birds chirping as protesters strode along Central Park from Harlem to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's town house on the Upper East Side townhouse.

For almost 30 city blocks, the march moved slowly and silently. Then, as they passed Bloomberg's home on East 79th Street, the crowd erupted in protest chants. The house was blocked by police barricades.

It was not known if Bloomberg was at home when the protesters passed.

Critics say the NYPD's practice of stopping, questioning and searching people who police consider suspicious is illegal and humiliating to thousands of law-abiding blacks and Hispanics. Last year, the NYPD stopped more than 600,000 people, up from more than 90,000 a decade ago.

Via:

Tensions increased between police officers and a group of protesters who tried to keep walking down Fifth Avenue below East 77th Street.

Police officers on scooters lined both sides of the avenue and officers on foot formed a line to keep people on the sidewalk. Several scuffles broke out between screaming protesters and officers who pushed them behind barricades on the sidewalk.
...
"The silence ended and the people's voices came out," said Matthew Swaye, 34, a former Bronx school teacher and self-described longtime Occupy protester.

"We were told to go home and we weren't ready to go yet," said Swaye, who added that his wife, Christina Gonzalez, 25, was one of the protesters arrested in the melee.

The practice of silent marches dates to 1917, when the NAACP led a protest through New York against lynchings and segregation in the U.S.

Continue reading »

When it comes to the vast, corrupting influence of money in politics, historian Thomas Frank has sounded the alarm loudly and often. In “It’s a Rich Man’s World,” one of his recent essays for Harper’s Magazine, Frank writes, “Over the course of the past few decades, the power of concentrated money has subverted professions, destroyed small investors, wrecked the regulatory state, corrupted legislators en masse, and repeatedly put the economy through the wringer. Now it has come for our democracy itself.”

Bill talks with Frank about the power of concentrated money to subvert democracy.

Frank’s book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? was a best seller and his latest, Pity the Billionaire, asks how Tea Partiers and their allies can make heroes of the rich and mighty who ran us into a ditch.

BILL MOYERS: And there's more. One of Senator Johnson's former staffers is now one of JPMorgan's chief lobbyists. And the chairman's present top assistant used to be a lobbyist for a law firm that worked for JPMorgan. I mean, this wasn't a hearing. This was a reunion of the Gambino family.

THOMAS FRANK: Well, look, this is what we call in Washington the revolving door, okay. And this, if your viewers haven't heard of this they need to learn about it right away because this is how Washington D.C. works is that people go back and forth from, typically from Capitol Hill staffs to working for lobby firms or directly for these, you know, the clients of the lobby firms that have to do with the interests that they used to work on when they were on Capitol Hill.

And then they go back and lobby to their former boss, right, and convince him or her to vote one way or the other. And that's how you get ahead in lobbying is you start out working for someone on Capitol Hill, a powerful senator on a given committee. And then you go and essentially sell that expertise, sell that, you know, the fact that your friends with that guy to, you know, to a lobbying firm or to a bank or to whoever. That's totally how it works.

BILL MOYERS: It's an interlocking cartel and it's serious business. How can we claim to have a representative government when they really are representing the people who bought the campaigns and not the voters who voted for them? It's a serious question.

THOMAS FRANK: Well, there are people who, I'm going to get cynical on you here, Bill. There are people who believe that the more money we have in politics the closer we become to a democracy. They think it's better for there to be more money in politics.

Why do they think that? Because they think that the market is a democracy, that markets are democracy and that government is, when government interferes in the economy it's illegitimate by definition. And so the more money we get in there the more it allows entities like JPMorgan to defend themselves against the sort of, you know, the heavy-handed meddling of some, you know, Washington bureaucrat.

Full transcript available here.

Good morning, today is Monday, June 18th, 2012. What's on your mind today?

Via Occupy Homes Minnesota:

Despite acknowledging that the Cruzes foreclosure was due to a bank error and repeated claims that they are working “behind the scenes” to get the Cruz family back in their home, PNC Bank has refused to accept the documents necessary for the loan to be modified. So Alejandra and David Cruz, along with several supporters, are going to make a hand-delivery to PNC’s headquarters in Pittsburgh, PA!

TUESDAY: Minneapolis

Send-off: We will be having a send-off rally in front of the Cruz home, 4044 Cedar Ave S, at 5PM this Tuesday to support the Cruzes battle for justice. Bring signs, messages of support, and your wonderful self!

Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/events/310205149071280/

WEDNESDAY: Chicago

Action on Freddie Mac: the Cruz family will make a stop at Freddie Mac’s regional headquarters in Chicago on Wednesday to demand they stop tearing up our neighborhoods with their eviction profiteering.

THURSDAY: EVERYWHERE!

NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION: Across the country, while Alejandra and David arrive at PNC headquarters, people will be demanding that PNC live up to their word and work with the Cruz family!

Actions being planned in:

Atlanta
Chicago
Cincinnati
Milwaukee
Minneapolis
New York
Philadelphia
Pittsburgh
St. Louis
Washington, DC

And many more to come! Please, organize an event in your city! Email occupyHomesMN@gmail.com and let us know if you want to help!