Marketplace, the daily business program produced by American Public Media (APM) and broadcast by public radio stations throughout the country, has been doing its best lately to support the decrepit Occupy Wall Street movement. While odd, perhaps, for a program ostensibly focused on financial news, the obsession with promoting Occupy has become a feature of public radio in general, and Marketplace is no exception to that rule.

Yesterday, for example, Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal hosted an organizer from Occupy and a leader of the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt to explore “common ground” and connections between the two groups. The intent was clearly to flatter Occupy by association with the success and idealism of the Tahrir Square revolution–although the fact that Islamist parties swept the vote in Egypt’s recent elections was not mentioned in the segment.

Curiously, the political advice offered by the Tahrir Square activist at times spoke more to the concerns of the Tea Party about big government, and inadvertently punctured some of the socialist pretensions of Occupy: “[You should] engage those 1 percent and you tell them: ‘Take bureaucracy and take away corruption. We could do way much better.’”

Nonetheless, in a related story by Ryssdal and Mitchell Hartman from Jan. 24, Marketplace sought to find the inspiration for the Occupy Wall Street protests in the Arab Spring: “Young people feeling squeezed, demanding better opportunities and a fair deal. The issues sound similar — from Maged in Cairo, to Max and Brian in Portland.”

At one point, Hartman even compared the protests against former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak to the protests against Wisconsin’s new Republican governor, Scott Walker, last spring–an inflammatory comparison favored by public sector unions in their attempt to demonize Walker and his collective bargaining reforms. Hartman suggests that the symbolism of the Wisconsin protests may have inspired the Occupy demonstrations–without noting the financial and institutional role played by public sector unions in both.

While casting the Occupy movement in a heroic mold, Marketplace often attempts to downplay and debunk the Tea Party and its concerns.

On Jan. 23, for example, the show featured a story entitled, “Why Saul Alinsky Matters in the 2012 Election.” Instead of shedding light on who Alinsky was, what he believed, and why he is important to understanding President Barack Obama and the organized left, Ryssdal and interviewee Bob Bruno from the University of Illinois attempted to obscure the true nature of Alinsky and his ideas: (more…)

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

If Gandhi got it right, the Tea Party is on the verge of a major victory.  The latest log of evidence tossed on this fire is the Tea Party Crashers, and their blatant efforts to squelch free speech.

Let’s review the charges from the Left against the Tea Party people:

1. Racism
2. Intolerance
3. Ignorance
4. Disingenuousness
5. And Possibly Having Cooties

Instinctively, the MSM jumped on the claims of racism and intolerance when they rushed to judgment and declared the Tea Partiers guilty of screaming racial epithets and spitting at black members of Congress as they walked through a group of protesters. (The Capital Police have yet to arrest a single person, and not one legitimate claim has been filed in Andrew  $100,000 challenge.) (more…)

Sire — the people are revolting:

And this:

What’s the old Alinsky rule?  You know, No. 5 in the “Tactics” section of Rules for Radicals?  Oh yeah — (more…)

The Democrats and their activist old media are running in circles and working themselves into pretzels trying to define the “Tea Party” movement. It can be quite entertaining to watch.  They really have no idea what is happening right in front of their eyes. The media would have an easier time reading Mandarin Chinese than they would deciphering the signs at a Tea Party rally.

You could argue that they don’t want to understand what they are seeing because that means they would have to admit that Democrats have lost the beloved grass roots that they claim to have had forever, and I would not disagree. But, for the moment, let’s just say that they are really trying hard to figure this out and it’s just not sinking in to their brilliant Ivy League minds.

Let’s give them a little hint:

Sunday on Meet the Press, Dee Dee Myers, the former Clinton press secretary, took a stab at defining the Tea Party movement. “I’m not sure exactly where this is going….is it a third party, is it part of the Republican Party?” (more…)