Finding common ground. They agree about the problem, which is corporatism. They disagree about the solution.

Trust me, this doofus is not really representative of my home state. I love the way he points to his hand to show where Saginaw is.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sorting out the “extremists.”

“Extreme” is a funny word these days. It’s often used by mainstream news outlets to describe the tea parties and the tea-party-friendly caucus in the GOP.

For instance, when those hotheads in tricorn hats were trying to get the government to borrow slightly less than 40 cents for every dollar Washington spends, the conventional wisdom among enlightened liberals, the Obama administration, and the other usual suspects was that they were “extremists.”

Senate majority leader Harry Reid blasted said extremists as “heartless” for daring to suggest that the exploding federal debt might require cutting subsidies for “cowboy poets.”

Meanwhile, the sock-headed spokesman for the protesters wants to “overthrow the government.”

And yet, if you peruse LexisNexis, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone calling him or his more radical confreres “extremists.”

You also won’t hear them being called racists, even though the Occupy Wall Street movement is mostly white. Personally, I don’t think the racial composition of the “99 percenters” is relevant, but the fact that the tea partiers are mostly white has been cited time and again as evidence of nascent racism. After all, what other explanation could there be for a mass movement opposed to the first black president’s policies? (Never mind that the most popular tea-party politician these days is Herman Cain, who, in case you hadn’t noticed, is black.)

[Update later morning]

Protesters freak out when questioned by reporters.

It’s all about the narrative.