Conservatives looking to delegitimize the Occupy Wall Street protests have a new tactic — targeting journalists.

Republican presidential contender Ron Paul said Sunday he wants to end federal student loans, calling it a failed program that has put students $1 trillion in debt when there are no jobs and when the quality of education has deteriorated.

Oakland police attacked the Occupy Oakland camp at 4:30 a.m. Pacific time this morning:

Hundreds of protesters at “Occupy Oakland” were facing arrest in the early hours of Tuesday morning as dozens of SWAT police closed in on their location. We’ve seen reports of rubber bullets, beanbag shotguns, sonic cannons and injuries, but the situation remains unclear.

Three of Egypt’s so-called Facebook revolutionaries told a crowd of 100 people who gathered Sunday afternoon in Washington’s Freedom Plaza  that the U.S. government has abandoned their peaceful revolution in favor of an alliance with the country’s still-powerful military. (Video here.)

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided — to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1 percent. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee?

Progressives United, the group founded this year by former Sen. Russ Feingold to combat corporate influence in politics, is trying to reach Americans interested in Occupy Wall Street by promoting its message on the “OWS” hashtag on Twitter.

Judith Butler, the renowned academic and feminist theorist at the University of California Berkeley, became on Sunday the latest intellectual to express solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.

Karl Rove’s organization American Crossroads, which functions as a kind of privately run Republican Party organization, has a memo laying out how the party ought to oppose President Obama’s jobs bill. It’s a telling window into the contours of the jobs debate. The specifics of Obama’s proposal are all highly popular, and the Republican challenge is to oppose it anyway. The memo offers a fascinating look at the mechanisms of political spin in general, and the particular dilemma of the Republican Party as it blocks economic action in the face of crisis.

A Brooklyn-based software developer named Jason Van Anden has created an app that allows protesters in the process of getting grabbed by the police to send out a mass text informing friends and loved ones about the imminent lockup, just by pressing a red bull's eye. It's called "I'm Getting Arrested," and it works, for now, on Droid phones. It just requires a little forethought — you've got to tee up the numbers ahead of time, so it's perfect for OWS's deliberate cop-baiting strategy. Probably a more interesting of a mass text to get than "What are you up to tonight?," though a lot less intimate than being someone's one phone call from jail. (David Brooks, there is your next column idea. You're welcome.)

In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.

An anti-capitalist group which sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement has called for global protests Saturday to demand that leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) nations impose a "Robin Hood tax" on financial transactions and currency trades.

Canada-based Adbusters wants the Occupy Wall Street protest movement against economic inequality to take to the streets to call for a 1 percent tax on such deals ahead of a Nov. 3-4 summit of the G20 leading economies in France.

One of the bedrock principles of democracy is that nobody is above the law--not even Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas.

Thomas has flouted the law for years by failing to disclose his wife's substantial income despite being legally required to report it.

That is why U.S. Representative Louise Slaughter is demanding that the Judicial Conference, an administrative arm of the court, uphold the Ethics in Government Act by referring Thomas' apparent misdeeds to the Attorney General for further investigation.

Rep. Slaughter has written a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts, who is the presiding officer of the Judicial Conference, about this, and she has asked her colleagues to sign on as co-authors (you can read the letter below).

How rude, to show up like that without an invitation! I am so ashamed to be associated... with theseWONDERFUL, BRAVE PEOPLE!!!!

Occupy Wall Street protesters took a field trip from Zuccotti Park on Saturday morning, all the way to the wealthy suburban enclave of New Canaan, Conn., where they took their anger at income and tax disparity to GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s front lawn.

“In the land of the free they tax me but not G.E.!” read the invitation to protesters to take an hour bus ride to Immelt’s family home. “General Electric made billions last year; they paid no taxes, outsourced thousands of jobs, and got over $3 billion in tax refunds! Join us on a free bus trip to G.E’s CEO’s front lawn to see how our friends in the 1% live.”