New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says that Newt Gingrich is just the latest of the "fools and clowns" in the Republican presidential race to become a frontrunner.

"I have a structural hypothesis here," Krugman told ABC's Christiane Amanpour Sunday. "You have a Republican ideology, which Mitt Romney obviously doesn't believe in. He just oozes insincerity, that's just so obvious. But all of the others are fools and clowns. And there is a question here, my hypothesis is that maybe this is an ideology that only fools and clowns can believe in. And that's the Republican problem."

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan spoke up in Gingrich's defense.

"We need a little on the pro-Newt side balance," she remarked. "The base of the Republican Party knows that the establishment of the Republican Party doesn't like Newt. That's a big plus."

"It was his time," Krugman explained. "The Republican base does not want Romney and they keep on looking for an alternative. And Newt, although -- somebody said, 'He's a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like.' But he is more plausible than the other guys they've been pushing up."

Willee Roberts Recounts Important Details of UC Davis Excessive Force/Pepper Spray Incident from N A on Vimeo.

Via:

"Credit goes to "brwnjeanette" at Ustream and the Occupy UC Davis channel she broadcasted during the moving silent walk of shame/protest of Chancellor Katehi on Saturday, November 19, 2011. Had to cut this portion out from the full recording of the live-stream."

"She obtained this interview with one of the protesters, who deserves even more credit for taking a nonviolent, powerful stance against the police overreaction."

"The revealing first-hand account tells important details regarding the malicious, unnecessary order to use pepper spray by Lt. John Pike. This was a decision to use force by Pike himself, pre-authed by UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza and UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi as indicated by the chief herself during the press conference they held today."

[Via: Xeni Jardin]

Xeni Jardin also has her own exclusive interview today with a UC Davis student who also was pepper sprayed by Lt. Pike:

"22-year-old UC Davis student W. (name withheld by request) was one of the students pepper-sprayed at point-blank range Friday by Lt. John Pike while seated on the ground, arms linked and silent."

"W. tells Boing Boing that Pike sprayed them at close range with military-grade pepper spray, in a punitive manner. Pike knew the students by name from Thursday night when they "occupied" a campus plaza. The students offered Pike food and coffee and chatted with him and other officers while setting up tents. On Friday, UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi told students they had to remove their #OWS tents for unspecified "health and safety" reasons."

"Move or we're going to shoot you," Pike is reported to have yelled at one student right before delivering pepper spray. Then, turning to his fellow officers and brandishing the can in the air, "Don't worry, I'm going to spray these kids down."

More disturbing details of the incident at the link here.

Also, another "must read" at Huffington Post from a teacher at UC Davis, who among other items of interest notes that in prison, pepper spray cannot be used on inmates. Yet it's "okay" to spray students?

Juan Williams apparently forgot what network he was working for if he thinks "fairness" is something we're going to get from Chris Wallace. While discussing whether or not the "Super Committee" is going to come to an agreement before the deadline later this week, Williams dared to say something good about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Heaven forbid we can't have any of that going on at Fox.

WALLACE: But Juan -- to the degree that the failure of the super committee gets portrayed as Republicans refuse to cut taxes on the wealthy.

WILLIAMS: Raise taxes.

WALLACE: To raise taxes on the wealthy. And Democrats refuse to structurally reform and reduce the rate of growth of spending and entitlements, who gets the better side of that argument?

WILLIAMS: Democrats do. Easily. And it's overwhelming. It is not even close. If you look at the polls the American people. It's two-thirds of the American people think there should be higher taxes on people who make more than $250,000 a year in this country. And they think that should be part of the deal.

And I don't think anybody is going to forget that when the Republican candidates were asked will you take one dollar in tax hikes in exchange for 10 dollars in spending cuts, they said no.

HUME: You're talking about the presidential candidates.

WILLIAMS: Yes, the presidential candidates.

So the overwhelming impact in terms of the presidential campaign is that the Republican in this time of Occupy Wall Street are the protectors of the super rich at the moment.

WALLACE: I'm not sure we should talk about Occupy Wall Street as a plus anymore.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, I think we should, because they...

WALLACE: Really?

WILLIAMS: Yes, because if you...

WALLACE: Really, with all of the violence in the streets? You really think that most of the American people...

WILLIAMS: You know what, you are getting distracted. And you are distracted by simply, you know, people who are crazy...

WALLACE: I think I'm in touch with what most people are thinking, which is, they're getting fed up with it.

WILLIAMS: You are not. You are not. The fact is when you ask most people, is Wall Street out of control, is there inequality in terms of income in this country? People say yes. And those are the basic tenets of Occupy Wall Street that have trouble on the streets about, by the way, globally. So not just here in the United States.

WALLACE: OK. Let's...

WILLIAMS: Let me finish my point. So the point is...

WALLACE: Juan, Juan, there is a limit, and we've got to go. If we want to play fair here.

WILLIAMS: You are not playing fair, but go right ahead. It is called being the moderator.

Brit, your thoughts about what to do about this -- how do you this playing politically, if Democrats are going to say, they didn't want to raise taxes on the wealthy?

HUME: A failure to deal with the debt and spending issue that so drove the 2010 election is going to hurt everybody.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said Sunday that millionaires and billionaires pay "all the taxes" in the U.S.

The tea party favorite told CNN's Candy Crowley that he was against repealing the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because the rich are already paying their fair share.

"The top 1 percent, the millionaires in our country, pay on average 29 percent of their income," Paul declared. "The top 50 percent of wage earners pay 96 percent of the income tax. The rich and the middle class are paying their fair share."

"There are anomalies, there are aberrations," he continued. "If you are a millionaire or you are a corporation that's not paying, we're all for eliminating those loopholes and deductions. But on average, the vast majority of millionaires and billionaires are paying all of the taxes. That's who pays the income tax."

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service recently found that 25 percent of millionaires pay a lower tax rate than 10 million middle-income Americans. The IRS found that in 2009, 1,470 millionaires and billionaires actually paid no taxes at all.

While Paul is working to make sure the richest Americans continue to receive a tax cut, he's against extending unemployment benefits or a 2 percent payroll tax cut for the less wealthy.

"If you want to extend unemployment benefits, they have to be paid for," Paul explained. "So the question is, do we want to borrow money from China to pay people not to work? ... I want to get millions of people back to work and the only thing historically that's ever worked in our country is to lower tax rates on the upper income folks."

"Let me ask you about the payroll tax," Crowley said. "That is Social Security taxes, which were cut by about 2 percent for most people and that will also expire so there is Social Security, their payroll tax will go up. Are you willing to extend that?"

"I have a difficult time with saying it's good thing for Social Security to lower the amount of money coming into it right now because it is a system that's $6 trillion short," Paul replied. "We'll have to cross that bridge when we get there, but I have a tough time with figuring out how that helps Social Security."

Newt Gingrich loves to be the tough guy in the room, spouting off bizarre and dissonant policy suggestions in the name of toughening up Americans with some vague promise of self-made American-ness at the core of his thought process. Well, not really, but that's how he portrays himself. He tries to come off as some sort of out-of-the-box thinker but falls flat on the mean streak he always seems to let come out.

During a talk he gave at Harvard University this week, he said this, via The Politico:

The comment came in response to an undergrad's question about income equality during his talk at Harvard's Kennedy School.

"This is something that no liberal wants to deal with," Gingrich said. "Core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods, crippling them by putting them in schools that fail has done more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy. It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid.

"You say to somebody, you shouldn't go to work before you're what, 14, 16 years of age, fine. You're totally poor. You're in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I've tried for years to have a very simple model," he said. "Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they'd begin the process of rising."

He added, "You go out and talk to people, as I do, you go out and talk to people who are really successful in one generation. They all started their first job between nine and 14 years of age. They all were either selling newspapers, going door to door, they were doing something, they were washing cars."

Never does Newt consider what happens to those "unionized janitors" if they were to be terminated in favor of paying a child a pittance to clean their school at the expense of their homework, I assume.

The richest part of the Newt/GOP mean streak is that so many of them made their fortunes being pond scum after leaving Congress or their government jobs. Here's a guy who never held a legitimate job in his life, who lives off the largesse of corporate and small business donors who pay for everything from his Tiffany's bill to his private jets, and he has the nerve to suggest that if only kids would be school janitors for a couple of bucks an hour there would be less income equality. Because the adult janitors who are paid whatever they're paid (union or otherwise) would then do what? Stand on the street and beg?

When does someone stand up and remind Newt that right now in this country there are 5 applicants for every job available and those applicants include college graduates?

But Newt promises more exciting ideas:

The former House Speaker acknowledged that it was an unconventional pitch, saying, "You're going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America and give people a chance to rise very rapidly."

Oh, happy day.

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain declared Saturday that he would "overturn" the Supreme Court if they legalized same sex marriage.

During a debate at the First Federated Church in Des Moines, Iowa, National Organization for Marriage (NOM) president Brian Brown asked the Republican candidates what they would do if the Supreme Court ruled that that Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) -- a law that bans federal marriage equality -- was unconstitutional.

"If the Perry case or a DOMA case gets to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court were to overturn DOMA or to find a -- quote -- unquote -- constitutional -- a U.S. Constitutional right to same sex marriage, if you were president, what would you do?" Brown asked.

"I would lead the charge to overturn the Supreme Court if they overturned DOMA," Cain insisted. "Whether that was new legislation coming out of the Congress like Rep. [Michele] Bachmann said. The United States Congress is supposed to pass laws so if they did overturn DOMA, that charge, I would lead to reverse that."

The number of near-poor in America is exploding, too, as shown by the same census data that placed so many more people below the poverty level:

When the Census Bureau this month released a new measure of poverty, meant to better count disposable income, it began altering the portrait of national need. Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September. All told, that places 100 million people — one in three Americans — either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.

After a lost decade of flat wages and the worst downturn since the Great Depression, the findings can be thought of as putting numbers to the bleak national mood — quantifying the expressions of unease erupting in protests and political swings. They convey levels of economic stress sharply felt but until now hard to measure.

The Census Bureau, which published the poverty data two weeks ago, produced the analysis of those with somewhat higher income at the request of The New York Times. The size of the near-poor population took even the bureau’s number crunchers by surprise.

“These numbers are higher than we anticipated,” said Trudi J. Renwick, the bureau’s chief poverty statistician. “There are more people struggling than the official numbers show.”

Outside the bureau, skeptics of the new measure warned that the phrase “near poor” — a common term, but not one the government officially uses — may suggest more hardship than most families in this income level experience. A family of four can fall into this range, adjusted for regional living costs, with an income of up to $25,500 in rural North Dakota or $51,000 in Silicon Valley.

But most economists called the new measure better than the old, and many said the findings, while disturbing, comported with what was previously known about stagnant wages.

“It’s very consistent with everything we’ve been hearing in the last few years about families’ struggle, earnings not keeping up for the bottom half,” said Sheila Zedlewski, a researcher at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic and social research group.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has some advice for members of the Occupy Wall Street movement: take a bath and get a job.

"Jefferson said that people that want to be both free and ignorant are asking for something that has never been and will never be," the former House Speaker told an audience during a debate at the First Federated Church in Des Moines, Iowa Saturday. "Captain John Smith said in 1607 in the first English speaking permanent colony to the aristocrats who paid their way and didn't want to work, 'If you don't work, you won't eat.'"

"Let me take that for a brief moment to describe Occupy Wall Street. All of the Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything. They take over a public park they didn't pay for, to go near by to use bathrooms they didn't pay for, to beg for food from places they they don't want to pay for, to obstruct those that are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park so that they can self-righteously explain that they are the paragons of virtue to which we owe everything."

He added: "Now, that is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, 'Go get a job right after you take a bath.'"

The Republican debate audience responded to that comment by filling the Christian church with some of the loudest applause of the evening.

Only two days before, Gingrich found himself being "mic checked" by members of the Occupy movement in Florida. Considering Saturday's remarks, the candidate can probably expect to hear more from the 99 percent.

It's not every day a former US Poet Laureate is clubbed by police for standing up. But that's what happened to Robert Hass at the #OccupyCal demonstration last week.

In his essay for the New York Times, Hass writes about what drew him to the demonstration. It was pure, simple curiosity.

Earlier that day a colleague had written to say that the campus police had moved in to take down the Occupy tents and that students had been “beaten viciously.” I didn’t believe it. In broad daylight? And without provocation? So when we heard that the police had returned, my wife, Brenda Hillman, and I hurried to the campus. I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved. If there was trouble, we wanted to be there to do what we could to protect the students.

What happened next is pretty bizarre. His wife was talking to the police about nonviolence and why they should be home with their children instead of standing in front of her with billy clubs when one of the cops shoved her in the chest and knocked her down. These people, remember, are not college students. Robert Hass is 70 years old. I imagine his wife is close to him in age. They're both old enough to remember Reagan and what he's done to this country.

Another of the contingencies that came to my mind was a moment 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan’s administration made it a priority to see to it that people like themselves, the talented, hardworking people who ran the country, got to keep the money they earned. Roosevelt’s New Deal had to be undealt once and for all. A few years earlier, California voters had passed an amendment freezing the property taxes that finance public education and installing a rule that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature to raise tax revenues. My father-in-law said to me at the time, “It’s going to take them 50 years to really see the damage they’ve done.” But it took far fewer than 50 years.

As Hass stepped forward to help his wife to her feet, this happened:

My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.

NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm. Some of the deputies used their truncheons as bars and seemed to be trying to use minimum force to get people to move. And then, suddenly, they stopped, on some signal, and reformed their line. Apparently a group of deputies had beaten their way to the Occupy tents and taken them down. They stood, again immobile, clubs held across their chests, eyes carefully meeting no one’s eyes, faces impassive. I imagined that their adrenaline was surging as much as mine.

His entire essay is moving, as much for his sadness and concern for the students as his concern for the entire country. But there's one small shiny spot in the story.

The next night the students put the tents back up. Students filled the plaza again with a festive atmosphere. And lots of signs. (The one from the English Department contingent read “Beat Poets, not beat poets.”)

Someone should ask these officers whether they can look at themselves in the mirror and like what stares back at them. Someone should ask them if they feel more manly and powerful when they club a guy who writes poetry for a living. Someone should ask them why they're afraid of poetry. Someone should make them stop.

Thinking of the GOP Presidential nominees and their slavering eagerness to take away the freedoms of LGBTs, women, voters, etc., I am reminded that I am only as free as whomever is most discriminated against. When you take the freedoms of one, you take freedom from us all. This is why we fight. Thank you all for a great week.

Brilliant at Breakfast: Everything the Right-Wing knows about protests, it learned in the 1960s while punching hippies.

Simply Left Behind: America - Let's try and understand it.

True Blue Liberal: Groucho Marx would just have a field day with the maroons in the GOP.

Celluloid Blonde: Oh, Edward Murrow, how we miss you.

Send tips to mbru AT crooksandliars DOT com.