LANGUAGE WARNING – Dozens of Occupy DC protesters were arrested on K Street in Washington D.C. today for obstruction of a public highway. When we at MRCTV arrived, police began the process of arresting the participants.

However, while the protesters were lying in the streets, blocking traffic, and refusing to move, one Occupy participant warned them to move because they did not have the money to bail them out. We interviewed him while the arrests were underway and he told us they were not instructed to be arrested at that given time. The protester insinuates, like other videos have shown, arrests from the Occupy movements are staged as theatrics to draw attention to the group- which one attendee told us off camera.

Officer Hugh Carew from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department told MRCTV that 62 people have been arrested. Of the 62, the public affairs official stated 61 were for obstruction of a public highway. He was unsure about the last arrest.

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As Google dives head first into the world of K-Street lobbying, political giving and greasing the wheels of the Beltway favor factory, disclosure report obtained by Big Government show that the company has not strayed from its liberal core despite efforts to influence Republican policy makers.

Recent FEC reports filed by the company show a huge liberal slant in political giving to 527 organizations including the Democratic Governors Association, the Democratic Attorneys General Association, and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. These reports build on a long history of support for President Obama.

According to disclosures, this year Google contributed the following amounts to Democrat Party political organizations:

Democratic Governors Association – $25,000

Democratic Attorneys General Association – $25,000

Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee – $10,000

Most corporations that seek favors look to both sides of the political aisle. But Google did not contribute to the counterparts of these organizations. In 2011, Google did not give to the Republican Governor’s Association or the Republican State Leadership Committee (Parent to the Republican Attorneys General Association).

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Sources on Capitol Hill have told Big Government that the House Leadership is pushing for a fast-track vote on radical Patent Reform legislation and the bill could come to the floor as early as this Wednesday. The bill is an affront to conservative values and principles and the Speaker must derail this freight train.

Patent Reform is a long time dream of lobbyists for multinational corporations and Fortune 100 companies looking to get out of the burden of paying inventors for this innovative discoveries. To achieve this goal, the bill will change 250 years of American patent law by turning our constitutional system of “first to invent” into the European version of “first to file.” Under a “first to file” system, lawyers win. Under the American system, inventors and innovators win.

Conservatives have pushed back against this scheme. Phyllis Schafly and Ed Meese are leading the charge on the constitutional principles and last week the Supreme Court signaled their objections are valid. Writing for the Supreme Court in Stanford v. Roche, a patent infringement case Chief Justice John Roberts held that “[s]ince 1790, the patent law has operated on the premise that rights in an invention belong to the inventor.”

In addition to the push to “harmonize” our system with Europe (what’s next the metric system?), the bill contains a special interest handout available only to big banks and Wall Street firms. Section 18 of H.R. 1249 is another billion-dollar bailout for the biggest banks in the nation. Attacking the provision as “special interest legislation, pure and simple,” legal scholar Jonathan Massey argues that it would “shift the cost of patent infringement from financial services firms to the U.S. Treasury,” requiring the public to once again pick up the tab for the banks’ wrongdoing.

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When a bad plumber or electrician comes to your house you might pay a lot of money for an incomplete and potentially dangerous fix of the problem.

But a band aide on a bad pipe just means that a potentially disastrous leak is still very much in your future and that the money you just paid has been wasted. That’s what the debate about the Bush tax cuts sounds like to me.

Of course it’s a bad idea to raise taxes when the economy is still struggling and while almost ten percent of the workforce can’t find a job. Of course it’s a bad idea to further punish our citizens when so many have seen their home values plummet beneath the loan amount.

But underneath this debate is this leaky and destructive pipe: the income tax system is a monstrosity that only continues because Washington insiders make so much money off it and because Congress—both parties—love the power over the citizenry that comes with plum assignments to the tax committees.

There is a huge lucrative culture in Washingtonthat has grown up around the income tax code that turns a blind eye to the destructive effects and almost comical complexity of the 68,000 pages of regulations in the tax code. They love the system and we hate it.

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If you haven’t read by now all the headlines on this story, you’ll want to start at the beginning and read the first post, SEIU Storms Private Residence, Terrorizes Teenage Son of Bank of America Exec.  Because as each day passes, new facts are popping up.  The story seemed so outrageous at first.  After all, the thought of over 500 screaming and chanting protesters surrounding a Bank of America lawyer’s private residence while the man’s teenage son, home alone, hid frightened inside a bathroom – it’s just so extreme, even by SEIU’s standards.

I knew something was up when the following day, Fortune magazine editor Nina Easton, a neighbor of the targeted residence, published an account of the incident and was almost immediately attacked by what seemed like practically a coordinated dogpile of writers from several specific sources.

In almost mirror fashion to the Town Hall events last August, when both the Huffington Post and Media Matters seemingly tried to cover up and dismiss the violent acts that SEIU committed against Kenneth Gladney, the same players were again out in full force.  As our Larry O’Connor wrote, both outlets behaved less like journalists and more like arms of the SEIU press office, dismissing SEIU’s bad behavior and attacking an innocent party with fabricated conflicts of interest as a method of distraction and intimidation.

Bob Borosage, Erica Payne, and John Podesta

And now we learn this:  Erica Payne, the guest who was invited to appear Friday on Megyn Kelley’s Fox News show and proceeded to blame the Tea Parties for the behavior of SEIU?  She was co-founder of Democracy Alliance, the very organization that spawned and is a donor to Media Matters.  SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger is also the Vice-Chair of its Board.

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Alinsky Rule #12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Nina Easton just became the left’s latest target.  Why?  So that SEIU can hide from the truth about its financial liabilities to Bank of America (more on that after the jump).

Easton, a Washington Editor for Fortune Magazine, wrote a column early morning Wednesday, addressing the outrageous protest organized by SEIU and National People’s Action, where 700 protesters stormed the front lawn of the private residence of Greg Baer, deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America.

As I wrote in my post yesterday, “SEIU Storms Private Residence, Terrorizes Teenage Son of Bank of America Exec,” Easton is actually a neighbor of Baer.  When she was startled by the loud, screaming, bullhorn-rattling protesters, she called Baer’s teenage son to check on him.  Home alone, the frightened teenager had locked himself in the bathroom.  After witnessing the entire incident as it unfolded on her neighbor’s private property, Easton criticized the SEIU and left wing groups in her article for crossing the line this time.

Alinsky’s Rule # 12 states,

“Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)”

In almost coordinated lock-step fashion, the 12^th Rule was promptly and firmly applied.  As Larry O’Connor posted on Big Journalism yesterday, a series of several posts soon followed the publication of Nina Easton’s article:

• Late Wednesday evening, John Vandeventer of SEIU posted “Nina Easton & the Bank Lobbyists: Too Close for Comfort” in response.  Conveniently, Vandeventer distracts readers by recounting the sob stories of foreclosure “victims”, then quickly focuses the attention on Easton and polarizes his target.  He proceeds to play a guilt by association game to tie her husband to Bank of America through Business Roundtable.  You can read my post from yesterday about that here.
• Then came Arthur Delaney’s piece from the Huffington Post, with the headline: “Nina Easton, Fortune Columnist, Compares Bank Protesters To ‘God Hates Fags’ Group.”  He ends his piece with a link to an open letter to Easton penned by Al Marshall, SEIU Local 1021 shop steward in Oakland, CA.  Marshall begins his letter by mentioning that he flew out to DC for the protest  from CA because “Wall Street caused” his wife to lose her job, and then him and his wife to lose their house.  (I’d like to know how he could possibly afford those plane tickets, in that case).  The whole tenor of the post is undoubtedly less jovial than his prior day’s, when he gleefully bragged about the whole event.
• And then, the much anticipated and expected Media Matters post: “Attacking SEIU, Nina Easton fails to disclose husband’s ties to Bank of America“.

Of all of the responses, not a single one of the posts actually addresses any of the issues. None will account for the fact that the protesters were on the private property of a private citizen, though Vandeventer tries to rationalize their actions as acceptable because the police supposedly followed the crowd to the location.  Then, he paints the picture that Baer is lurking in the crowd trying to blend in; rather, the man was trying to get to his front door without creating a scene so that he could get to his frightened son inside as quickly as possible.

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UPDATE: Video has since been removed from YouTube

By now, you’ve probably seen the mob-scene that developed on the front lawn of the private residence of Greg Baer, deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America.  This was planned for some time by the SEIU as part of a larger national event, their Showdown on K Street, which was shared with National People’s Action and thousands of other activists from MoveOn.org and other left-wing groups.

Prior to the main event on K Street in Washington DC, SEIU and company made a little pit stop.  According to Fortune magazine Washington editor Nina Easton, 14 busloads of riled up protesters unloaded on Baer’s private property and stormed up to his doorstep, while his teenage son was home alone.  Easton is a neighbor of Baer’s and had called to check on her neighbor’s son when she heard and saw all the commotion outside. Easton writes,

“Waving signs denouncing bank “greed,” hordes of invaders poured out of 14 school buses, up Baer’s steps, and onto his front porch. As bullhorns rattled with stories of debtor calls and foreclosed homes, Baer’s teenage son Jack — alone in the house — locked himself in the bathroom. “When are they going to leave?” Jack pleaded when I called to check on him.

Baer, on his way home from a Little League game, parked his car around the corner, called the police, and made a quick calculation to leave his younger son behind while he tried to rescue his increasingly distressed teen. He made his way through a din of barked demands and insults from the activists who proudly “outed” him, and slipped through his front door.

“Excuse me,” Baer told his accusers, “I need to get into the house. I have a child who is alone in there and frightened.”

Imagine what you would have done if your child were inside that house and that mob was on your front lawn as you tried to reach him.

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In his State of the Union speech, the president puffed up his chest, fixed his Mr. Scornful face, and once again pulled out the populist’s handbook to bash those evil, monstrous lobbyists.

Obama mentioned lobbyists seven times in his address and in every case they were used as a scapegoat to explain away Washington’s inability to get one thing or another done.

Obama promised — again and for the thousandth time — to “end the outsized influence of lobbyists” in Washington. He then praised himself for excluding lobbyists from jobs in his administration and he proposed even more limits on them.

This attack on lobbyists is cathartic and makes for great populist boilerplate, of course, but there isn’t much truth in Obama’s attack on them because the fact is K Street — the D.C. street where many lobbying firms are located — has made more money off the Obama Administration than from any previous president.

And Obama has been pretty blatant about ignoring the obvious disconnect between his populist harangues against lobbyists and his coddling and sidling up to them. Obama’s big paydays to lobbyists at nearly every level has been nothing short of breathtaking. It has been like this since day one.

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Alan Grayson.  How did this clown get elected?  Even Democrats are asking themselves that.

The man who delighted in claiming Republicans want the sick to die to save the taxpayers money, was so proud of his obnoxiousness that he started a website to celebrate himself, www.congressmanwithguts.com.

No sooner did his self promotion tour get off the ground before his mouth got some more attention, calling one of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s aids a “K Street whore.”  After 24 hours of defending the outrageously out-of-bounds slur, and after pretty candid criticism from his fellow Democrats, Mr. Manners finally apologized.

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