A helpful reader sends me to the report that analyzed the psychology and motivations of the Occupy movement, with deeply differing assessments of the rank-and-file folks and the leaders.

Our Charlie Cooke wrote about it, and summarized it:

What did Frontier Lab discover? First, that many of the rank-and-file occupiers feel isolated in their lives, and appear to lack basic community ties such as are provided by participation in clubs, churches, and strong families. Indeed, much of the report could have come from the early chapters of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. They thus attach to their political causes with something like a religious fervor. For many, a commitment to “social justice” is “not the end, but rather a means to an inflated sense of self and purpose in their own lives.” Crucially, involvement with others who agree with them provides an “overwhelming feeling of being part of a family.” I noticed this on my first trip down to Zuccotti Park, when I saw a telling sign adorning the entrance to the tent city: “For the first time in my life, I feel at home.” On subsequent visits I was struck by the importance of the commune to the project. As much as anything else, vast swathes of occupiers were simply looking for a new club. This group, Frontier Lab dubs the “Communitarians.”

The second group, which to all intents and purposes forms the leadership, is less existentially lost, and derives its fulfillment from the “prestige,” “validation,” and “control” afforded by the movement’s coverage in the media. Frontier Lab calls this group the “Professionals.” Its members fill the ranks of the professional Left and boast long histories of attending and organizing protests. For them, indignation is quotidian, “community action” is a career, and they feel “validated by the fame and attention” and “rewarded for their life choices.” Unlike the Communitarians, the Professionals actually want tangible change, or a “win,” but politics is still playing second fiddle to self. There is nothing spontaneous or organic about the movements they lead. They are waiting for the revolution and hope to be in its vanguard. Their careers depend upon it.

I’ll bet there’s quite a bit of overlap between the Occupy “Professionals” and the folks identifying as “Team Dorner” on social media.

Brandon Darby notices that:

Occupy Los Angeles has chosen to honor Chris Dorner in the wake of his death, despite the body count he apparently amassed. . . . The statement of support and solidarity was posted on the Occupy Los Angeles’ official Facebook page Wednesday. The statement came in the form of a posted picture captioned with the phrases “Rest In Power Chris Dorner” and “Assassinated By The Police for Trying To Expose LAPD Corruption.”

This affirms the theme in today’s Morning Jolt:

What Drove People to Identify With and Root For Christopher Dorner?

What’s going on with this strange cult of personality that sprung up around Christopher Dorner, the former LAPD officer who went on a killing spree? Why are a small but vocal group of people self-identifying as “Team Dorner”? Dennis Prager argues that this is perhaps even more horrific than the Sandy Hook kindergarten shooting, because after that, nobody was twisted enough to argue that the shooter was the hero of the story.

Shock value? A yearning for attention? Clearly, there’s no cost or consequence to saying ridiculous, shocking, or offensive things on Twitter and other social media. You can say, “I hate oatmeal, oatmeal is the work of the devil, all producers and consumers of oatmeal should be rounded up into camps and exterminated” and no one will blink.

Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks:

Before any of us board the “folk hero” train, we ought to remember that Dorner is charged with murder in the death of a Riverside police officer and suspected of killing a young Irvine couple. The young woman, Monica Quan, was the daughter of a retired LAPD officer who was targeted for revenge by Dorner.

Still, Dorner’s lengthy online manifesto left me with a lump in my throat. It is alternately frightening, painful, funny, smart and terribly disconcerting.

He lays out his grievances against the LAPD in excruciating detail. He lost his job and his dignity, he says, because of cowards, racists and liars.

But he goes further, giving us a peek at the man behind the violence and threats. He backed John Huntsman for president, but likes Michelle Obama’s bangs. He admires Ellen DeGeneres and Charlie Sheen, Tim Tebow and Colin Powell. He remembers the first time he was called [the n-word]. He fought back, in first grade, and was punished for it.

He plays on themes that resonate in many people’s lives: social isolation, workplace slights, the feeling of being marginalized. And he validates those who mistrust law enforcement with his diatribes.

A sort of kinship was clear in online comments from readers, like the mother whose sons are “harassed” by cops, and the guy “railroaded” out of a job he loved.

If you read the manifesto of a guy who (allegedly, but who are we kidding?) murdered three people, and your primary reaction is, “Hey, he felt marginalized and slighted in the workplace, and so do I! We’re kindred spirits, the two of us!” you’ve managed to miss the point on a scale best measured by astronomers. To look at the horrors going on out in Los Angeles and feel sympathy for Dorner’s workplace grievances is an amazing ability to empathize with precisely the wrong person in these circumstances.

Am I crazy for sensing a general overlap between the Dorner’s-a-hero crowd and the Occupy Wall Street crowd?

You’ll have to forgive me here; at this point I’d like to cite a report I read that put together a psychological profile of the leaders and rank-and-file of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but for some reason, it has completely disappeared. I’ve Googled like mad and been unable to find it. So, feel free to take the following with a grain of salt, since I’m describing something I read probably a year ago and can’t find now; if you happen to know who wrote this and have a link, please send it along.

The report said that your average member of Occupy Wall Street sleeping in a tent somewhere was primarily driven by a need for a sense of community. Yes, they had passionate beliefs about the economy and fairness and opportunity and the ills of society and so on, but that generally, what kept them staying in those leaky tents night after night as the weather chilled was a sense of being part of something greater, a sense of connection with all the other folks around them. For whatever reason, these folks had found the other, traditional forms of connection — family, neighbors, friends, religious groups — lacking, but in Occupy they had found what they felt they needed.

The leaders were a different story. The leaders weren’t driven by a need for connection; the leaders were sitting on a massive psychological stockpile of rage. They were consumed by grievances by a society that they believed had ignored their obvious genius and talents, believed that every corner of modern American society shared in the guilt for the injustice against them, and were ready to lash out, oftentimes violently, against those who they deemed their enemies. They found leadership of the Occupy movement thrilling and invigorating, and saw it as an opportunity to settle the scores against a world that had done them wrong. Frightening stuff.

Look, we’ve always had murderous people among us, we’ve always had the insane, and we’ve always had those who would see their encounters with standard-issue hardships of life (or worse) and see some grand, cosmic injustice that must be avenged. But it does feel like the ranks of those folks are growing, doesn’t it?

Perhaps it’s a reflection of the well-intended “you are a special snowflake” message of parenting in the past two decades or so. (I say well-intended because to a parent, their child IS a special snowflake.) Young people go through their childhood and teen years, believing that they are uniquely gifted and talented and wonderful and believing that their adult life will be one fabulous victory and success after another. And then at some point they depart the protected simulation of life that is childhood/high school/college . . . and the real world just kicks them in the crotch again and again. (This is a bit of what Adam Carolla talked about in his rant about Occupy Wall Street.) And so instead of concluding, “Oh, achieving my dream is going to be a lot harder than I thought, I had better redouble my efforts,” they deflect the hard truth of responsibility and conclude that somebody else, somebody out there — society — is to blame. They can take no joy in anyone else’s success, because that just reminds them of their own failure to achieve what they had envisioned all of their lives. And their attitudes quickly become one more obstacle — short-tempered, incapable of taking responsibility, quick to blame others, perhaps paranoid, concluding others are out to sabotage them.

And that resentment and anger curdles and boils until one day they find themselves rooting for the homicidal maniac instead of the folks trying to stop the homicidal maniac.

Having now depressed the heck out of you, let me offer this cherry on top of this sundae of grim: What if the next person who feels this way, who sees Dorner as a Robin Hood hero type, etc., decides to play the part to the fullest and decides to constantly update us all on his horrific exploits by uploading new manifestos, videos, and so on?

It’s the May Day edition of the Morning Jolt. According to Wikipedia, May Day “has been an important official holiday in countries such as the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, Cuba and the former Soviet Union” — and of course, with company like that . . . the Occupy Crowd.

It’s May Day — well known as the two words uttered most often by out-of-work Americans during this presidency.

To Protest a Lack of Economic Opportunity, Occupy Crowd Skipping Work

Prepare for chaos today! Or, considering the level of organization, diligence, and dedication that the Occupy crowd has brought to most of their efforts, you may not notice anything at all:

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, whose anti-greed message spread worldwide during an eight-week encampment in Lower Manhattan last year, plan marches across the globe today calling attention to what they say are abuses of power and wealth.

Organizers say they hope the coordinated events will mark a spring resurgence of the movement after a quiet winter. Calls for a general strike with no work, no school, no banking and no shopping have sprung up on websites in Toronto, Barcelona, London, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, among hundreds of cities in North America, Europe and Asia.

In New York, Occupy Wall Street will join scores of labor organizations observing May 1, traditionally recognized as International Workers’ Day. They plan marches from Union Square to Lower Manhattan and a “pop-up occupation” of Bryant Park on Sixth Avenue, across the street from Bank of America’s Corp.’s 55-story tower.

“We call upon people to refrain from shopping, walk out of class, take the day off of work and other creative forms of resistance disrupting the status quo,” organizers said in an April 26 e-mail.

“That’s sure to help the 99% make a living,” observes the Lonely Conservative.

“Refrain from shopping”? Have they seen the consumer confidence numbers lately?

I take that if you’re out of work, a call for a general strike is . . . less than fully energizing.

I suppose to protest I should buy extra things . . . wait a minute. Maybe this is some brilliant Obama-Leftist reverse-psychology trick to stimulate the economy. If it is, let’s give them credit; it can’t do much worse than the stimulus.

At the American Thinker, Rick Moran notices a comment from one of the organizers.

“If the banks anticipate outrage from everyday citizens, it’s revealing of their own guilt,” said Shane Patrick, a member of the Occupy Wall Street press team. “If they hadn’t been participating in maneuvers that sent the economy into the ditch, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

If banks are “guilty” of anything, it is preparing to resist the vandalism and mayhem caused by the radicals in OWS. Protecting property — and the health and safety of their employees and customers — from the ravages of the modern day Visigoths and anarchists in the OWS movement is simple prudence. Not acknowledging the danger is either disingenuous or naive.

I’m sure the usual tactics of trying to provoke the police into a violent response will be used, and the media will report every demonstration as proof of the “power” of this movement — even though the numbers of protestors are likely to be as paltry as they were over the winter.

In short, we’ve seen it all before. And we’re likely to keep seeing it as long as the press gives outsized attention to these reprobates and miscreants who resent their betters and have nothing to do except complain about how miserable their lives are.

More details on the day’s planned events:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that law enforcement is ready to manage what is expected to be a day of wide-ranging demonstrations throughout the city, including possible bridge and tunnel blockades, dozens of smaller pickets and a “pop-up” occupation of Bryant Park across the street from the headquarters of Bank of America. Officials in other cities, such as Seattle, have warned of the possibility of vandalism and violence.

Other big actions are planned for the West Coast, including a large march in the San Francisco Bay area. Organizers said a plan to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge has been scrapped.

Locally, members of Occupy D.C. plan a festival and rally at Meridian Hill Park beginning at 3:30 p.m., followed by a 6:30 march from the park to the White House. Marchers plan to head down 14th Street to New York Avenue to the White House. A D.C. police spokesman said they have no plans to shut down lanes of traffic to accommodate them.

Occupiers have called Tuesday their “coming out party” and the start of their spring resurgence, after the cold weather lull that followed the eviction of dozens of Occupy camps across the country in the late fall and winter.

Much like the Taliban, Occupy plans “spring offensives.”

There’s something to this analysis from Fortune editor and columnist Geoff Colvin that hits both Obama and Romney for offering agendas that are, he contends, ultimately irrelevant to the problems generating anxiety and disappointment for America’s middle class:

. . . in the 1970s, America’s level of education stopped rising. The high school graduation rate peaked at 77% in 1969 and has since dropped to about 69%; college rates, too, stopped rising. The economy kept demanding more workers with advanced skills, but we stopped producing more. At the same time, other countries relentlessly educated their people, so the U.S. workforce fell from No. 1 in the world to the middle of the pack. Result: The minority of workers with advancing skills became more valuable, while the broad middle got flat or even falling pay.

Then things got worse. The infotech revolution is great for high-wage workers because it turbocharges them; an executive with three screens on her desk and an iPhone in her pocket is enormously more productive. Infotech doesn’t much hurt low-wage workers, many of whom do place-based work (cooking in restaurants, pouring concrete) that can’t be done elsewhere. But infotech makes middle-class jobs disappear; software takes over routine back-office tasks, and infotech coordinates supply chains, so manufacturing jobs can be done by lower-paid workers abroad.

It’s clear what the problem is not. It’s not that the middle class got clobbered in the recession — that is, the recession’s end isn’t rescuing the middle class. Nor is the problem that income inequality increased, because it didn’t during the recession; top earners on average got clobbered even worse in the recession than the middle class did. The problem is that the middle class isn’t supplying the new skills that the world is demanding. We can fix that problem. We fixed it in the early 20th century and again in the 1960s after Sputnik by overhauling our education system. That is mainly a state and local job, not a federal one. Above all, it’s a cultural change. Presidents can do a little but not a lot to make it happen.

As we hear the endless sound bites during the coming presidential contest, we as voters need to grit our teeth and remind ourselves that we know what really needs doing, and it’s mostly in our own hands.

At the heart of the populist message — the kind you often hear from Obama, at the Occupy Wall Street protests, and in certain conservative circles — is the reassurance to most Americans that, “you would be doing just fine if it weren’t for those people.” The “those people” vary, but are usually Wall Street, big banks, big companies, greedy CEOs, companies outsourcing jobs to China, cheaper imports, folks who fly private jets, ATMs, etcetera.

But what if most Americans’ problems are their fault, at least in part? What if they gambled and bought a house they couldn’t afford, hoping to be able to sell it for a profit quickly? What if they took on enormous debts to prepare to enter a profession that was extremely competitive and entry-level jobs were few and far between? What if they ran up enormous credit-card debt because they have poor impulse control and unwise spending habits?

Obviously, some folks in America are in dire straits because of forces beyond their control. Your company goes under, you develop unexpected and expensive health problems, the value of your house plummets when the bubble bursts, your 401(k) shrinks when the market crashes. But Americans are not slaves to the whims of fate. We’re not helpless before the shifting tides of economic and social forces, desperately awaiting the wise and expert hand of the federal government to improve our lives. (If we are, we’ll be waiting a long time.) For more than 200 years, the country has been driven forward by brilliant, determined, perhaps even irrationally optimistic individuals who believed they could achieve dreams that others thought impossible.

Can Americans hear that some of the problems in their life stem from their own mistakes and bad judgments? Or it that something that the electorate could never stand to hear from their leaders? And if that’s the case, doesn’t it make the political environment much harder for the party of individual responsibility, self-empowerment, the free market, and equality of opportunity but not equality of results?

If we really can’t face the notion that we, and not the government, are principally responsible for the quality of our lives . . . are we even really Americans anymore?

Jonah finds Time’s selection of “The Protester” to be an astonishingly boring selection.

Last year, in response to the selection of Mark Zuckerberg, I wrote, “many are noting this morning, this continues a trend of odd picks, perhaps driven by a desire for newsstand sales, perhaps driven by political correctness, perhaps by a reluctance to acknowledge picks that are perceived as conservative.” I offered the ones it should have been in the past decade, including Osama bin Laden, Dick Cheney, Saddam Hussein, the Danish Cartoonists, Nancy Pelosi, David Petraeus, Neda, the Slain Iranian Protester, and The Tea Partier.

The trend continues. I’d argue that the persons with the biggest influence on world events and the news in 2011 was, indisputably, the U.S. Navy Seals.

UPDATE: Okay, perhaps not quite indisputably; @CTIronman offers the idea of Steve Jobs.

The Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt features a look at the GOP electorate’s definition of “acceptable,” an examination of the fogotten war, the forgotten victory, and perhaps the forgotten blown victory in Iraq, and then this tidbit of news from the Occupy Wall Street protests . . .

Occupy Wall Street Protester Gets Job . . . Film at 11!

Something of a happy story, so far:

Down-on-her-luck protester Tracy Postert spent 15 days washing sidewalks and making sandwiches at Zuccotti Park — then landed a dream job at a Financial District investment firm thanks to a high-powered passer-by who offered her work.

“I never thought I would be doing this,’’ Postert admitted to The Post.

The Upper West Sider, who has a Ph.D. in biomedical science specializing in pharmacology, was unemployed and had all but given up on finding work in her preferred field of academia when she joined the movement in October.

She held signs that read, “Reagan [crude euphemism for stinks],” and, “I’ll vote after the revolution.”

But she said she still needed to get a real job. So she made a new sign.

On the front, she wrote, “Ph.D. Biomedical Scientist seeking full time employment,” and on the back, “Ask me for my resume.”

It caught the eye of Wayne Kaufman, chief market analyst for John Thomas Financial Brokerage. The exec wasn’t looking to hire, but he took Postert’s résumé anyway.

That was Oct. 22, Postert’s Day 10 as an Occupier.

The next day, Kaufman, impressed by her CV, sent her an e-mail asking if she’d like to come for an interview.

I don’t mean to rain on Postert’s parade, but Ronald Reagan has been dead since 2004. Her age in the article is only listed as ‘in her 30s’ but there’s a good chance he was out of office when she was in grade school. Holding up a “Reagan [crude euphemism for stinks]” in response to a current inability to find a job makes about as much sense as a “David Hasselhoff [crude euphemism for stinks]” (and the former Michael Knight and “Baywatch” star also believes he deserves credit for ending the Cold War).

(That’s right. I hassled the Hoff. What are you going to do about it?)

Ed Driscoll: “Wall Street hiring someone who despises Republicans? Oh sure, like that’ll ever happen. Next, you’ll be telling me that gambling is going on at Rick’s Cafe.”

The Jammie Wearing Fool scoffs, “She’ll probably wind up getting death threats from her former ‘Occupy’ pals. Yet let this be a lesson to the protesters. If you have actual skills and clean up well, you too can find a job in America. They ought to try it sometime.”

The final Morning Jolt of the week examines latest rattle in the engine of the Herman Cain campaign, Andy Stern’s love letter to Chinese management of the economy, and some much-needed lighter notes to close out the week . . .

Occupy Wall Street Protesters Are Still Waiting for Their Participation Trophy

Ah, our end-of-the-week levity. A lot of folks on the Right have enjoyed an off-color rant from Adam Carolla, a comedian and former television talk show host, ripping into the Occupy Wall Street protests. A clean version can be found at The Blaze; in the below excerpts, I’ve cleaned up it a lot:

“We’re now dealing with the first wave of participation-trophy, ‘my fecal matter doesn’t stink,’ empowered, I feel so good about myself, everybody-gets-a-trophy, everybody’s-a-winner [badword]s . . . This has been going on for about twenty-five years.

. . . We created a bunch of [badwording] self-entitled monsters. People are so far out of it in what they expect and what is realistic and what the rules should be for them and for the other guys. I want my Most Valuable Player trophy . . .

They think the world owes them a living . . . They grew up and it’s fine if you grow up in this little snow globe of a life where everything is awesome and there are no losers. But then you get into the real world and you realize, ‘I’m a [badwording] loser,’ you’re not doing well and you’re not making much money and no one’s giving you a participation trophy. Instead of looking in the mirror and going, ‘Why am I not doing better?’, you find somebody who’s got more stuff than you and say, ‘Hey, man, what do you need all that stuff for?’ This is what’s going on. They’re feeling shame. They’ve been shamed by life, because they haven’t been prepared for life.

The real world doesn’t care how pretty you are or what you do, all those lies told to you by your parents about how special you are. In the real world, you’re just peon number twenty-seven who’s putting in an application. And your plan is to put a rock through my window. That’s your plan!

It is envy and shame, and there’s going to be a lot more of it.

At Hot Air, Tina Korbe is greatly amused, and finds an echo of the argument in an unusual place:

This is indispensable audio just as Leon Cooperman’s open letter to President Obama is required reading — for both very similar and very different reasons.

First, the fundamental similarity: Both Carolla and Cooperman invite the United States (Carolla addressing the OWS protesters, Cooperman addressing the president) to be again what it once was — not merely a land of opportunity, but a land in which ordinary people rejoice at the opportunity of others and seek not to tear down but to build up. Both Carolla and Cooperman expose the corrosive and corrupting influence of envy, which, as C. S. Lewis once said of pride, “gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.” Perhaps the better way to phrase it would be to say envy “gets no pleasure out of having something unless it was first had by and then taken from the next man.” Both Carolla and Cooperman prophesy the inevitable outcome of an envy-eaten society — an impoverished economy and culture, in which no one is so prosperous as he could be.

Now, the fundamental difference: Whereas Cooperman conveys a tone of stern and sober disappointment, Carolla sinks all-too-often into crass-and-brash. But the disparate styles reveal that, whoever the messenger, whatever the method of delivery, truth is truth. And the truth is, both the president and the Occupy Wall Street protesters have bought into the lie that success is a zero-sum game, that the more someone else has of it, the less another can achieve. But, in the United States at least, there need not be a limit to how much we accomplish in the way of creating prosperity and a rich, supportive culture.

Adam Carolla: Who would have thought such a great advocate for the old-fashioned American values of hard work and discipline and individual responsibility would come from The Man Show?

Sen. Chuck Schumer, says that America has “tried the theory” that the country can prosper by shrinking government.

When was that, exactly?

Schumer also says that the flat economy will help Democrats in 2012, and that the Democratic Senator with closest ties to Wall Street is wholeheartedly embracing the Occupy Wall Street protests:

“It’s intuitive that we’re more interested in those issues, but obviously we have to focus on them like a laser,” Schumer continued. “If we do I believe the 2012 election, despite the economy being flat, is going to be a good one for us.”

Pressed on whether he thought Occupy Wall Street could become a liability for Democrats, as Republicans are trying to make happen by linking Dems to the protests, Schumer said focusing on the protests themselves misses the larger point.

“Occupy Wall Street has resonance far beyond the protests,” Schumer said. “Whether middle class people agree with the protests or not, the vast majority believes that they’re part of the 99 percent and that something should be done to help them.” Republicans who think this tactic will work with “swing voters,” Schumer said, are “inside their own bubble.”

This is the same Chuck Schumer who took roughly $8.8 million in campaign donations from Wall Street donors since 1989. The only political figures who have accepted more from Wall Street donors during their careers are Hillary Clinton ($10.3 million), John McCain ($10.5 million), George W. Bush ($13.3 million), and… Barack Obama, at $17 million.

The Tuesday Morning Jolt features the rise of Newt-mania, the Supercommittee failure fallout, and this latest surprising poll result . . .

America to Occupy Wall Street: Okay, You’re Starting to Bore Us, Kids

Wait, riots, body-painted naked hippie girls, lunatic losers pooping on police cars, all of this occurring in what is best described as lice-infested, Nazi-endorsed rape camps, and the American people deem it . . . boring?

This is one of those moments where if I were a pollster, I would be hitting the computer tabulating the results on the side as if it were a static-filled old fashioned antennae television and yelling, “What is WRONG with this thing?!?”

I can understand feeling like we’ve seen variations of this since at least the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, if not all the way back to the 1960s. I can understand finding the whole thing tired and tiresome. But to see all this and to genuinely not have any flicker of an emotion, pro or con, about the whole thing? Really?

Read it and . . . shrug?

A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows that the “Occupy” movement has failed to capture the attention of a majority of Americans, indicating either ambivalence toward it or lack of interest.

The poll finds that 56% of Americans surveyed are neither supporters nor opponents and 59% say they don’t know enough to have an opinion about the movement’s goals.

The survey, however, does show an increase from 20% to 31% in disapproval of the way the protests are being conducted.

Results are based on phone interviews Saturday and Sunday on the Gallup Daily tracking survey, with a random sample of 996 adults, ages 18 or over, living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, chosen using random-digit dial sampling.

At the sympathetic Village Voice, Rosie Gray decides this just means the American people are ignorant: “A straight-up media circus has developed around the protests over the last couple months, which makes it seem surprising that people don’t know enough about OWS to have an opinion. But before drawing big conclusions from this, keep in mind that this is the same country where in 2006, 37 percent of respondents to a National Geographic poll couldn’t find Iraq on a map and a full 50 percent couldn’t locate New York. Not knowing stuff is what we’re all about, and isn’t the best indicator of whether or not said stuff is important.”

Of course, things may get really interesting at the end of the week. Jill Krasny at BusinessInsider gives us the bad news: “Apparently Occupy Wall Street wants to stock up on linens and cookware this season. The Wall Street movement is setting its sights on Black Friday, with the goal of ‘hitting the 1% where it hurts — right in the wallet,’ according to its website StopBlackFriday.com. This means going medieval in your local Target, and the rest of America’s ‘large chains and publicly traded retail.’ Consumers, you’ve been warned.”

Part of me wants to see those punks try to get between the Black Friday Über-shoppers and their Friday-morning-only deal on a big flatscreen at Buy More. (That link brought to you by outspoken Hollywood conservative Adam Baldwin.) You thought it was rough-and-tumble when Cabbage Patch Kids hit the shelves.

John Lilyea writes at This Ain’t Hell, “Yeah, that’ll work. Think the 1% can’t weather one bad sales season, think they’ll all go bankrupt because of one day’s sales? Besides, the 99% are already ‘camping out’ at the retailers so they can spend their money. Oh, yeah, ever hear of Internet sales? How are you planning to interrupt those without breaking some terrorism laws? And who is really going to be hurt? If sales are down, it’s the employees who’ll lose their jobs, starting with the newest and the lowest paid. So who is the inspiration for this Occupy movement? This gathering the young Americans?”

The Massachusetts Republican party is calling Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren the “Matriarch of Mayhem.”

Somewhere, Stan Lee is thinking, “Why didn’t I think of that name?”

The numbers on Occupy Wall Street haven’t moved much since their debut. Neither is familiarity breeding contempt nor is the country warming to their cries.

Rasmussen Reports, October 5: “Thirty-three percent (33%) have a favorable opinion, 27% hold an unfavorable view, and a plurality of 40% have no opinion one way or the other.”

On October 13, Time found that 80 percent of respondents had heard of the protests, and that of those respondents, 37 percent tend to support the movement, and 18 percent tend to oppose.

On October 18, Gallup found 22 percent approving the movement’s goals, 15 percent disapproving, and 63 percent not knowing enough to say.

And now, today, CNN:

Among those who have an opinion, the public is split on how they feel about Occupy Wall Street. Thirty-two percent of Americans say they have a favorable view of the movement that has spread from Wall Street to Chicago, and that even cropped up at the most recent CNN presidential debate in Las Vegas. Twenty-nine percent of the nation says they have an unfavorable view of Occupy Wall Street.

Sure, it’s different pollsters with different methods and sample sizes, but the results are surprisingly consistent in their proportions. In all of these, the Occupy Wall Street crowd can console themselves with slightly more folks liking them or supporting them than opposing them. But after three weeks of pretty intense media coverage, a significant number of Americans have no opinion on the movement or its goals. In the CNN poll, 26 percent volunteered that they had never heard of it and another 13 percent said they had heard of them and simply didn’t have an opinion of them.

UPDATE: Throw another one on the pile, this one from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Washington Post, conducted October 20–23 among 1,009 adults:

About four-in-ten Americans say they support the Occupy Wall Street movement (39%), while nearly as many (35%) say they oppose the movement launched last month in New York’s financial district.

As Sen. Harry Reid declares that private-sector job growth is doing “just fine,” the AP poll finds that the percentage of Americans who describe the economy as “very poor” has reached a new high.

A sizable majority — more than 7 in 10 — believe the country is headed in the wrong direction and, in a new high, 43 percent describe the nation’s economy as “very poor,” according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll. Among those surveyed, less than 40 percent say Obama’s proposed remedies for high unemployment would increase jobs significantly.

The pessimism is not a good sign for the nation’s recovery hopes and presents a more urgent challenge for Obama as he mounts his re-election bid.

About 4 in 10 think unemployment will rise in the coming year; just 23 percent expect it to decrease. And few expect the government to be able to help. Only 41 percent say the government can do much to create jobs, and less than 40 percent say the main elements of Obama’s jobs proposal would increase employment significantly.

What’s more, expectations for the coming year have not improved, with 41 percent believing the economy will remain the same, 27 percent saying it will get worse and 30 percent saying it will improve.

Until now, much of the analysis of the political impact of the Occupy Wall Street protests has focused on whether they can get Americans to blame Wall Street instead of the administration for the state of the economy, or whether the Democrats will marginalize themselves by wholeheartedly embracing a bunch of loons who poop on police cars and sneak into others’ tents to sniff their feet.

But maybe we’ve been missing another ripple effect from the protests, and more broadly, the “We Are the 99 Percent” argument showcasing tales of economic woe: In this environment, it makes it all but impossible for Obama or any other Democrat to argue that the economy is in recovery and that better times are just over the horizon. Obama’s election was heavily driven by the sudden onset of economic hard times; now he cannot really argue that we have recovered (at least not in a way most Americans can feel) and he can’t argue that a real recovery is just around the corner.

President Obama already knows he’s almost certainly going to be in a tough spot on the “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” question. But even worse for him, he now can’t argue that his policies just need a bit more time, and that 2013 will see the significant recovery Americans have been waiting for. The one indisputable message of the OWS/We Are the 99 Percent crowd is that economic opportunities are few and far between and that the basic goals of modern American life — getting a good education, finding a job, providing for one’s family, buying a house, being able to afford insurance and take care of one’s health — seem increasingly difficult or even impossible. Even Americans who have education, jobs, houses, and health insurance see the daily coverage of the protests and are reminded of their own economic anxieties.

That’s about as far from a “stay the course” message as you can imagine, and toxic for any cry of “four more years.”

Everyone made a stir when the DCCC started tying themselves politically to the Occupy Wall Street protests, with good reason.

The National Republican Congressional Committee likes their odds of getting more support by standing on the other side.

It sounds like the DCCC move has consequences:

Banking executives personally called the offices of DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and DCCC Finance Chairman Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) last week demanding answers, three financial services lobbyists told POLITICO.

“They were livid,” said one Democratic lobbyist with banking clients.

The execs asked the lawmakers: “What are you doing? Do you even understand some of the things that they’ve called for?” said another lobbyist with financial services clients who is a former Democratic Senate aide.

Democrats’ friends on Wall Street have a message for them: you can’t have it both ways.

To their credit, the Occupy Wall Street crowd has clarified their demands: “I don’t want to work. I want to bang the drum all day. I don’t want to play. I just want to bang on the drum all day.”

As I mentioned in the Morning Jolt, a big factor in the latest bit of fury over the economy is TARP, and the perception that while millions of Americans endure hard times, the federal government was willing to hand over billions upon billions in taxpayer money to save wealthy bankers from the consequences of their own bad decisions.

In a way, TARP may be one of the most consequential political decisions of modern times, spreading cynicism and distrust like a bioweapon, an obliteration of the benefit of the doubt to anyone who could be considered “elite.” You saw further fallout in the debate earlier this week. Mitt Romney tried to walk the tightrope, suggesting that he hates bailouts, but the TARP may have been necessary, and that he’s almost certain to never do something like that again, unless it was needed to “to make sure that we don’t lose the country and we don’t lose our financial system and we don’t lose American jobs, and that all the banks don’t go under.” Cain echoed that opposition of TARP as enacted but not in theory, and Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich pummeled them for it.

So, a quick quiz: How much did the TARP give to banks? And how much did the taxpayers lose on all that?

The numbers are better than the popular perception might suggest:

Most banks have repaid their TARP money. As of Aug. 31, the Treasury had received $183 billion of the $205 billion distributed to financial institutions. The Treasury also got $26 billion from dividends, interest and stock, resulting in a slight profit for the program.

Now, mind you, this is the portion dealing with banks. As Kevin Williamson noted last year,

Citigroup paid back less than half of its bailout and the government took equity for the rest. We own a fifth of the company (and I wonder if that fact has anything to do with this.) . . . We still have billions of dollars’ worth of warrants on equity in 280 companies, almost all of them banks and insurance firms.

The parts of TARP dealing with insurance agent AIG and carmaker GM are worse ($14.9 billion for GM, based on the latest stock price).

Yet you don’t see much talk of Occupy GM or Occupy AIG. Instead, the protesters target David Koch and Rupert Murdoch — CEOs of companies that didn’t take taxpayer bailouts. What’s more, Barack Obama voted for TARP, offered no objections when it was proposed, and administered it — and yet he’s largely been immune from the fury over bailouts, at least from the Left.

Defenders of TARP have always argued, and will continue to argue, it was necessary to prevent a national credit freeze and a catastrophic domino effect of businesses collapsing because they couldn’t get loans for operating capital. But that financial market-saving move came at enormous political and social cost, accelerating a corrosive distrust of almost everyone even remotely associated with banks, big business, wealth, or the political system.

Today’s Morning Jolt looks at a New Hampshire primary and a late addition to the list of little-known Rick Perry Facts, but focuses mostly on what’s driving the “We Are the 99 Percent” folks — who may not completely overlap with the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

So I went through the photos of the “We Are the 99 Percent” crowd, in which they take pictures of themselves looking forlorn and hold up notebooks describing the life circumstances that make them so angry. Sometimes you get some laughable cases, like the guy who wants a bailout for his art school student loans. But as you go through them, there are some genuinely heartbreaking tales of woe. A point that hasn’t come through in much of the protests in the park in New York City is how often people say, “I consider myself lucky, I still have a place to live and my loved ones” or some other expression of gratitude.

In a lot of cases, they describe working part time, often more than one part time job, and struggling to get by. These are actually the faces to the monthly figure we get from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Last month, BLS calculated that 9.3 million Americans were working part time because they couldn’t find the full-time work they desired; in September, an additional 444,000 Americans entered this category. Part-time work is better than no work, but it often doesn’t include benefits and one inevitably gets the stress and challenge of two separate work schedules, added with whatever other responsibilities one has (family, etc.).

The world has always had young people who majored in studies that don’t easily lend themselves to entry-level jobs. What it also often had was enough entry-level jobs for them to make a living doing something else that pays the bills while they figure out how to turn that sociology or classical studies or drama or whatever degree into an actual career. Since 2008, the American economy has had fewer and fewer options, and more and more folks looking for those jobs. And while we’ve certainly had recessions before, we haven’t had multiple years of unemployment at 9 percent or so, at least not since the Great Depression.

I think two big factors are driving this — the first is the realization that electing Obama, the Munificent Sun-God, didn’t actually do much to fix many of the problems young people were upset about in 2008. The job market still stinks, wage growth is a distant memory, the drop in housing prices hurts current homeowners and not enough young earners have the resources to take advantage of lower home prices and oh, by the way, gas is $4 per gallon instead of $3 per gallon.

The second big factor is TARP; the common cry from a lot of these folks is a whiny, “where’s my bailout?” The other night, HBO replayed Too Big to Fail, their star-studded depiction of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s actions during the 2008 financial meltdown. It was good for what it was, watching Hollywood stars reenact semi-public figures in annotated versions of their meetings during events of not too long ago. (Paul Giamatti made a strangely plausible Ben Bernanke; Billy Crudup plays as a suspiciously noble and well-reasoning, if fidgety, Tim Geithner. I kept yelling, “He’s the mole! He’s the mole! Somebody stop him!” but then I remembered I was thinking of Mission Impossible 3. Or was I?) Whether you think TARP was necessary or not — the movie clearly makes TARP opponents in the House GOP out to be reckless villains, but the closing text portrays the program as failing most of its fundamental goals — I think TARP and the Three Four Years’ Recession have taken a one-two punch to the average Americans’ sense of how the world works. To see the Feds giving hundreds of billions of dollars to immensely powerful banks with few strings attached is baffling and incongruous; to see such a fortune spent to save banks from the consequences of their bad decisions, while so many ordinary Americans suffer worse — i.e., mass layoffs that have little to do with the work quality of those laid off — persuades a lot of folks that the whole system is rigged and that the American Dream is a con. I don’t think that’s true, but as we inch into our fourth year of hard times, I can’t begrudge someone who’s burned through their savings from feeling that hard work and making the right decisions doesn’t really pay off in modern America anymore. Few economists expect much of an improvement in the year to come; I wonder how many Americans will feel even angrier, and even more eager to lash out at a scapegoat, a year from now.

Patrick Hynes, a political strategist specializing in online communication formerly with the Tim Pawlenty presidential campaign, warns that while conservatives are laughing at the Occupy Wall Street protests occurring in Manhattan and elsewhere, they shouldn’t completely dismiss them as a political player in 2012.

***

NRO: You posit that the protests are changing the debate. How so?

Hynes: I was watching Megyn Kelly the other day. She had a conservative free-market type and a typical liberal debating about the scene in New York — the kind of rhetorical match-up in which the good guys almost always win on points. Instead the liberal woman delivered scripted message after scripted message about Wall Street greed bringing our country down against B-roll of protesters at least claiming to represent the majority of Americans. For the first time I thought: Wow, what they are trying to do is working.

I view the OWS thing as another effort to demonstrate manufactured outrage and direct it at (allegedly) conservative institutions, as opposed to liberal ones. The first iteration was the laughable “coffee party.” The second was the even more laughable “No Labels.” I’m not necessarily suggesting that these are the same people as the OWS crowd, but to me each reflects an obvious effort to repurpose long-standing liberal grievances. The one difference is that the OWS effort has been successful tactically in terms of creating meaningful images on television and the front pages of national newspapers and in forcing a debate on cable television and elsewhere on their terms. Such successes have a bandwagon effect that allows them to grow their numbers beyond the core agitators and, in some cases, trained political organizers.

In 2010, we had the people behind us and we could demonstrate it with thousands of YouTube videos of legitimately and justifiably angry tea party activists taking action against idiotic government policies. The Left is now, successfully in my opinion, creating a photo negative of those images that help Obama and liberals in Congress shift blame from their own failed policies to corporate greed on Wall Street.

NRO: Does the lack of a coherent message or agenda hurt the Occupy Wall Street crowd, or does the nebulous, almost contradictory list of demands create an environment where everyone, no matter what their gripe, feels welcome to join?

Hynes: I believe it helps the OWS crowd. Boomlets like this one grow into something bigger when they speak to a general sentiment of frustration and anger and do little more than direct it at a common enemy. Once it becomes about something specific, or worse, comes under the command of someone specific, it loses steam or becomes a pet project. We saw this in 2008 and Barack Obama’s subsequent presidency. People rallies and voted for Obama for countless reasons: He opposed the war in Iraq, he was a popular and credible African American with a legitimate chance of winning, he made outlandish promises that, to them, seemed credible. They embraced a popular ideal of Obama and virtually carried him into the White House on their shoulders. But now that the Obama presidency is about something — the stimulus program, the health care law, etc. — there is less to cheer about, far less.

NRO: There’s do doubt that after three, perhaps four years of high unemployment and lousy economic conditions, Americans are angry. Is it really conceivable that their ire will be mostly focused at the private sector in 2012?

Hynes: What’s the figure? Something like 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income taxes? A similar share actually receives a check from the government? Yes, it is conceivable, in my opinion, that these folks view the private sector as the main focus of their ire. We may be experiencing an entire generation of young people who have no real private-sector experience and therefore don’t see it as worth defending.

NRO: A lot of big private-sector institutions try to avoid being too closely tied to controversial political activity. With the free market being more explicitly denounced than ever before, and with Democrats being more explicit in their belief that they can demand more of the private sector — see Elizabeth Warren — will the story of the 2012 cycle be how America sees the private sector, and whether or not they are independent creators of wealth for their employees and shareholders or whether they are resources to be co-opted and directed by the government in the name of “The People”?

Hynes: I think this is a debate that could happen in 2012. However, I have no idea who’s on our side in that debate. There is a good number of people on Wall Street who benefited handsomely from TARP, directly or indirectly. My guess is that the good people at, say, the Cato institute don’t view these folks as emblematic of the “private sector” but rather partners with the government in this very odd amalgam of government control of the allegedly free market.

I definitely think that the current administration believes “corporate responsibility” means enacting business models — even unsuccessful ones — that mirror the president’s worldview. And his worldview will be the subject of intense debate in 2012. Many corporations and CEOs may be forced to choose sides more publicly than they would normally like.

***

Of course, Patrick later reminded me that he could be overestimating the impact of the OWS crowd, pointing to this article: “Protesters said Park, of Stamford, Conn., had a hard time keeping his hands off the cheap booze and drugs and free food at the encampment — and also off the women.”

Watching the vague, contradictory, and often wildly unrealistic demands from the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, I was reminded of this sketch on Saturday Night Live, from 1992, featuring Bill Clinton (Phil Hartman) interacting with undecided voters (Melanie Hutsell):

[Undecided Female Voter 1 steps forward ] 

Ted Koppel: Ma’am? Do you have a question? 

Undecided Female Voter 1: See, it’s like, you look all around, and you see all this stuff? And, everybody’s got stuff but me! Where’s mine?! Where’s MY stuff?! I’m young, man! I should have stuff, too! WHERE’S MY STUFF?!! 

Bill Clinton: Well, that’s a really good point. I hear this a lot. I think if this election is about anything, it’s about . . . “stuff”. It’s about the fact that, under Reagan, Bush, Quayle, more people are working harder and harder for less stuff. [ Hillary nods and smiles ] 

Undecided Female Voter 1: [ twitching ] Where’s my stuff, man?! 

Bill Clinton: Exactly! Where is your stuff? We’re in danger of raising the first generation of Americans who . . . will have less stuff than their parents. 

Undecided Female Voter 1: Stuff! Yeah! 

Ted Koppel: So, has Gov. Clinton influenced the way you will vote? 

Undecided Female Voter 1: I’m . . . not voting ‘til I get my stuff! 

Ted Koppel: Your lips are moving, but I don’t understand a word you’re saying. Thank you. [she returns to her seat, as another undecided voters steps up ]

More than anything else, these protests are about . . . “stuff.”