Happy Sunday everyone. I hope that you all had a good weekend. Even on a lazy Sunday, there’s still plenty of news that doesn’t have to conform to the Primary horse race that the media loves to cover. Here are today’s batch of stories.

Update on Occupy DC: Agent Provocateur This is an update on the ongoing controversy that happened yesterday in DC. Patrick Howley, an editor at the conservative magazine The American Spectator, has announced that he infiltrated the Stop the Machine protest to discredit the movement for ‘journalistic reasons.’ He posted a blog for the American Spectator where he referred to the Air and Space Museum as ‘the scene of my crime.’ This raises real concerns whether the protest march would have attempted to enter the museum without Howley’s coaxing. His leadership role is clear because he was the first one into the museum. This biased, dishonest excuse for ‘journalism’ does more to discredit Howley and his tactics than the larger Stop the Machine and Occupy Movements.

The Mainstream Media Begins to Back OWS For quite a while, Occupy Wall Street has only been endorsed by liberal heroes like Michael Moore and Naomi Klein. This liberal support was tempered by the mainstream media’s mocking and derision. The New York Times’ evolution in their coverage of Occupy Wall Street and the larger 99 Percent Movement. Initially, on the 23rd of September, Ginia Bellafante put out an article that derided the protest as aimless and silly. It took a couple weeks, but finally the NYT put out an editorial that essentially agrees with the motivations for the protest… and actually back it up with facts and statistics. The Washington Post also had a column today calling for the Obama Administration to listen to and join the OWS movement. If media as mainstream and concerned with the Washington conventional wisdom can get behind this movement, the sky might be the limit. Populism is pretty damn popular.

Republicans Continue to Support Wall Street Over The People Remember when Rick Santorum said that he understood the motivation behind the OWS protesters and that, of course, Wall Street should pay for the consequences of their actions? Well, that didn’t become a trend by any means. Fire Dog Lake has accumulated a few of the recent quotes from Republican leaders denouncing the protest, notably House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Presidential front runner Herman Cain. I feel the need to comment on the success of Herman Cain. Are you serious? The pizza mogul and the guy who’s economic plan has a name (The 999 Plan), but no explanation or details as to what this radically new tax structure would be? Republicans must really hate Mormons to even be considering electing this guy. Anyway, beyond the quotes, there is a new ‘movement’ that is beginning from the Right. They call it the 53 Percent Movement, named for the 53 percent of people who pay income taxes. I find these tactics of painting the rich as small business owners so disgustingly inaccurate. Read the article in Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze, with several grains of salt. (Thanks to Carlos from The Progressive Playbook for pointing me to the article!)

Some Semblance of Sanity In California, Governor Jerry Brown has just signed the DREAM Act for the state. This act, which failed to pass federally last year, would make children of illegal immigrants eligible for financial aid for higher education. This is such an obviously reasonable step. Why would you punish children by not letting them go to college and get the education that would help them become both successful citizens and taxpayers? Successes like this or Vermont’s recent vote to start a single payer health insurance system show us that positive changes are possible legislatively – at the state level at least.

More Details on the Legal Memo for Awlaki Glenn Greenwald’s latest post on the al-Awlaki killing brought a new fact to my attention. The legal memo that justified the killing of Awlaki was drafted several months after Obama had already designated Awlaki for assassination. This makes it look even more dubious than it already had. Greenwald continues to describe the legal minutiae and explain why these explanations are wholly inadequate and the killing of Awlaki shouldn’t have been covered under the authorization of the War on Terror, thus it was illegal. It’s a bit dry in terms of a read, but very informative.

Thanks for reading and staying informed! Keep reading The Progressive Playbook and come back tomorrow for another Daily News Drop!

Sources: Fire Dog Lake, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Blaze, Digby’s Hullabaloo, Salon