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So after being sick a few days, I start my crash course exposure to the weeks' news and saw this printed in the New York Times about these little anti-capitalist rallies that got started out on Wall Street recently:

A loose-knit populist campaign that started on Wall Street three weeks ago has spread to dozens of cities across the country, with protesters camped out in Los Angeles near City Hall, assembled before the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago and marching through downtown Boston to rally against corporate greed, unemployment and the role of financial institutions in the economic crisis.

With little organization and a reliance on Facebook, Twitter and Google groups to share methods, the Occupy Wall Street campaign, as the prototype in New York is called, has clearly tapped into a deep vein of anger, experts in social movements said, bringing longtime crusaders against globalization and professional anarchists together with younger people frustrated by poor job prospects.

Populist campaign?  Tapped into a deep vein of anger?  Could someone remind me, please...were these the characterizations that were being offered by the New York Times to the town hall protests and Tea Party rallies that began being held a few years ago? 

Clay Waters of Newsbusters remembers things a bit differently:

While the Times's coverage of conservative Tea Party rallies pointed out the most extreme and "fringe" elements present, the paper has thus far eschewed labels like "far-left" or even "liberal," and ignored the cadre of Communists and offensive posters decrying "Nazi bankers" in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan.

 

And while the massive-yet-peaceful Tea Party rallies were seen as ruptures of inchoate and ignorant anger orchestrated by conservative think tanks that constantly threatened to explode into violence, the young, arrest-prone leftist campers near Wall Street are portrayed as the thin edge of an uprising of justified citizen anger.

Another great lesson in the objectivity of the American media.  Communists marching around with Nazi signs don't even get labeled "far left" or "liberal," but instead "populist."  Despite 700 of them being arrested for blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, they get credit for being tapped into a national sentiment.

However, remarkably peaceful taxpaying and hard-working American citizens angry that the government continued to rob from them and borrow from their grandkids to waste on out of control government spending get hammered as violent, radical, racist nuts who are intent on escalating their vitriol until someone got hurt.