New York couple tries to trademark ‘Occupy Wall St.’

A Long Island couple wants to trademark the slogan “Occupy Wall St.” with the intent to sell sweatshirts, T-shirts, bumper stickers and hobo bags, among other merchandise.

“I’m no marketing genius, but when you got something that’s across 50 states, it’s a brand now,” said 44-year-old Robert Maresca of West Islip, New York.

Maresca’s wife, Diane, filed a trademark application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 18 and paid a fee of $975.

Cheer-up, America! The Case for American Optimism

Look for moments of maximum pessimism. To the legendary value investor Sir John Templeton, this was the secret to learning how to buy low and sell high.

In recent months, I’ve been feeling the pessimism in a big way. You probably have too. Watching the scroll of headlines on cable news channels this summer, I thought I was in an overdone disaster film. Riots break out across the globe, screamed a Drudge headline. Markets were crashing. An earthquake cracked the Washington Monument. In my hands, Mark Steyn’s new book After America — a rollicking read that makes a strong case that we should prepare for the apocalypse — arrived perfectly timed with the S&P’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating. The end, surely, seems nigh.

Christie gets it wrong on OWS and Tea Party

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s attempt to liken Occupy Wall Street protesters to Tea Party activists demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of both movements.

In a video from a town hall meeting, which my colleague Charlie Spiering posted below, Christie responds to a question on the Wall Street protests by arguing that, “I think if you look at the Occupy Wall Street folks and the Tea Party folks, that they come from the same perspective, they just have different solutions. ”

Herman Cain: Runaway Slave

I keep having images of Herman Cain barefoot, covered in sweat and mud, wearing an old patchwork shirt and handmade burlap pants held up by a rope rather than a belt, out of breath and frantically running for his life; to freedom. Menacing sounds of barking dogs in the distance focused on Cain’s scent. Not far behind, hot on Cain’s trail, are black overseers determined to keep their fellow black slaves in check for their white liberal Democrat massas.

FACT CHECK: Are rich taxed less than secretaries?

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama makes it sound like there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries.

“Middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires,” Obama said Monday. “That’s pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against that.”

The data tells a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

The Union Myth of Representing ‘Working People’

Unions and their mouthpieces continually bombard us with the catch phrases about standing for “working people,” “working families,” and the poor, oppressed and exploited “working” classes. Truth is, unions represent a privileged minority, a politically connected class, the aristocrats of middle-class workers. And the mainstream of American workers, the real working people agree; it’s why only 6.9% of private sector workers are in unions and union membership overall has decreased from nearly one-third of all workers in the 1940s.