It seemed like the afterthought in the payroll tax cut extension fight. But the two-month clock is now ticking on whether Obama will approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s environmentally disastrous tar sands. If we want him to make the right decision and deny the permit, maybe it’s time to Occupy Exxon, with creative protests at local Exxon/Mobil stations.

“I’ll Occupy” Recruitment Song: The 99 is Pissed and We Will Not Be Dismissed!

University of California Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi won’t resign her post because, she says, she needs to earn the students’ trust. Somehow, she proposes the University heal with her remaining at its helm.

“I really feel confident at this point the university needs me,” she told GMA …. “There are so many critical issues to be addressed and we really need to start the healing process and move forward.”

I’ll bet you 10 quatloos that if you eat Thanksgiving dinner with right wing relatives one or more will make the baiting comment, “You know, the police never had to use tear gas on the tea partiers.”

Last night, Portland television viewers were treated to wall-to-wall, all-local-channels, helicopters-hovering coverage of the approach — and uneventful passage — of Mayor Sam Adams’ three-day deadline of 12:01am to close the public parks where #OccupyPortland camped.

Our local media exhibited the lamest qualities of their national betters described by Glenn Greenwald: confusion (“what do these people want?”) and disdain (“people living in mud, filth and trash”) and dangerousness (“drug overdoses” and “molotov cocktails!”) but then the on-the-ground television correspondents, cheered on by their comfortable studio-bound anchors who passed the baton from one to another, devolved into a simple message in almost every sidewalk interview with Police Bureau representatives and #Occupy demonstrators: “WHY DON’T YOU & HIM FIGHT?!”

TV news loves conflict. It’s exciting! What they don’t love is doing actual research and real reporting about the conflict. “We’ll leave that for the suckers at Frontline six months from now. Look! Behind you! A fire and people in hoodies running away! Are you getting all this?”

Information like who is causing the conflict, their motives and objectives are not really their forte. They do love the shots of rocks and tear gas being thrown, they don’t really care who is throwing them.

The police will object to this kind of video for many reasons including the fear that an undercover cop might be in danger if he is in another undercover operation. That’s really not our problem. The police made a decision to use an undercover cop in this way and they got caught. The MSM might agree with the police and refuse to run a story which would amplify the undercover cop’s identity, but now the protesters know and some of the public following along at home will find out, giving them more sympathy for the protesters and more suspicion of the police’s claims.

The United States was founded on the principle that no individual is above the law. We are, as John Adams said, “a nation of laws, not men.” But that principle is under assault, as Glenn Greenwald explains in his powerful new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.

Bunch tells the story of the bridge through the eyes of several vividly drawn characters: A 19-year-old veteran street protester with working class roots and a genius for escaping arrest; a 69-year-old retired lawyer who showed up on impulse after being moved by a play about the final day of Martin Luther King’s life; a painfully shy theater tech who found the movement online; a self-styled branding expert/saxophonist; and a 24-year-old Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union, drowning in student debt.

This morning there was a raid on the Occupy Oakland encampment.