Excuse me... excuse me ladies and gentleman... [sound of microphone squeaking with feedback, then several thumps, until sound clears]... Hello, can I have everyone's attention for a moment? Thank you.

I'd like to welcome everyone to the first annual Pentagon bake sale. This event was made necessary, of course, because Congress pulled the "trigger" on cutting a half a trillion dollars of the Pentagon's budget over the next ten years. [audible booing from crowd] We all know the Pentagon simply cannot accept this slower rate of the growth of their budget, which in the same period is going to total at least six or seven trillion dollars -- and more, if we have anything to say about it! [loud applause]

Since the politicians quite obviously won't patriotically support the healthy growth of our military-industrial complex any more, we are going to have to make up the difference ourselves. At first, we thought this would be a simple matter of asking for donations. After all, if Warren Buffett doesn't think he's taxed enough, he should just sit down and write a check to the U.S. government, right? We felt certain that there would be a tidal wave of such checks coming in from the hawkish folks on the Right, to preserve the American defense industry's God-given right to make a fortune no matter what else is going on in the world. Unfortunately, to date, we've only received $1,379.42, mostly in coins collected in elementary schools with zip codes near military bases.

This still leaves us about $45 billion in the hole for the first year alone. Or, to be strictly accurate, only $44,999,998,620.58 to go! Which is why we decided to hold the first annual Pentagon bake sale! So welcome to you all! I can see you're eager to get to the goodies, so I'll keep my remarks short.

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It's pretty common in America, these days, to hear denunciations of various outlets of the media, or even of the media universe as a whole. From a Lefty excoriating Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, or just Fox News in general, to a Righty heaping scorn on Rachel Maddow, Arianna Huffington, or even more generically, "the liberal press," you don't have to look too far to find people expressing the opinion that our media conversation is too coarse these days, and that partisan screaming fills the airwaves to our collective degradation. Gauzy memories of some "Golden Age" of media often go hand-in-hand with these statements.

It's all bunkum, of course. America has always enjoyed a rousing good political fight, and our media has almost always reflected this (to their profit). Read the following excerpt, if you have a problem believing this, and see if you can put it in context. When, in other words, was the following written?

When an instrument [the media] so potent is committed to the weak, the ignorant, and the vicious, the most baneful consequences must be anticipated. When men of small talents, of little information, and of less virtue, undertake to be ... directors of public opinion, what must be the result? We may expect to see the frivolity of weakness, the errors and malignity of prejudice, the misrepresentations of party zeal, the most corrupt doctrines in politics and morals, the lacerations of private character, and the polluting language of obscenity and impiety, daily issuing from the press, poisoning the principles, and disturbing the repose of society; giving to the natural and salutary collisions of parties the most brutal violence and ferocity; and, at length, consuming the best feelings and noblest charities of life, in the flame of civil discord.

I'll even make it easier. Try to guess the decade this was written. I'll offer no hints, other than to say it was written in a book on history -- the author had devoted a chapter to the press in America. It could be recent history, and it could be further back.

I'll post the answer in the comments tomorrow, but I am interested to see who even comes close to guessing when this was written. The language is a bit dated (although not much), but with a few minor word and sentence updates, the exact same sentiment could have easily been expressed by anyone looking at the past decade of the American media. OK, that's one hint: it wasn't written about any decade in the twenty-first century, how's that to get you started? [Note: No fair cheating by using Google!]

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

The race for the Republican presidential nomination has certainly been anything but dull this year. Every time you turn around, it seems another name pops up as the alternative to Mitt Romney.

I treated this satirically last week, with a suggestion that the seven major Republican candidates band together and run as "Anybody But Romney, Incorporated," so if you're not in the mood for a sober analysis of the Republican field today, I suggest you read last Monday's column instead.

I've been viewing the Republican field so far as a national contest, taking into account their standings in national polls of Republican primary voters. But, as we all know, primaries are not national, they are state-by-state. Meaning we must transition from surveying national standings to looking at the state polls in the first primary states. Before we do this, a final wrapup (as things stand today -- although these have been so volatile that we'll doubtlessly mention them in the weeks to come if they radically change) of the national standings is in order.

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We're going to try something new here today. Well, before we get to that, we have to apologize for not warning readers last week that we were taking a break for Veterans' Day. Which brings up a related subject: there will be no Friday Talking Points next week, either (the day after Thanksgiving), as we plan to be lounging on the couch in a tryptophan haze. Consider yourselves warned, this time.

Back to today's column, though. We're going to try an experiment today, and try to tighten these columns up significantly. They started off as very simple columns which didn't run all that long, and now they've grown to monstrous proportions. So we'll be (mostly) doing away with this introductory bit here, and moving straight to the awards and the (hopefully, shorter) talking points. We'll see how it goes, and we'll see what readers think. Let us know in the comments, as always. Comments which start with: "You know, it's really annoying how you revel in the editorial 'we' during these columns..." will, as usual, be ignored (by us). We, to coin a phrase, will not be amused.

OK, enough silliness, let's get on with the show.

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Washington is all abuzz these days with talk of the deficit reduction committee (the so-called "supercommittee"). The deficit committee has a deadline which is now less than a week away to produce legislation to cut $1.2 trillion out of the next ten years of federal budgets. Pundits have been predicting they'll fail almost from when the committee was set up, during the last round of brinksmanship over the budget this past summer.

I have no idea whether they'll come up with anything next week or not. Betting on failure seems to be the popular thing to do, but the committee members have been showing some willingness to move closer to a solution in the past few days, so maybe they actually will get seven votes for some plan or another.

If the committee fails, though, there are supposed to be "triggers" pulled -- automatic cuts to both domestic spending and military budgets. But you know what? I am confident that these triggers will never be pulled. To put it another way, these automatic cuts are never going to happen. Oh, sure, there may be some noise about them, accompanied by handwringing and teeth-gnashing inside the Beltway, but I remain confident that the actual budget cuts will never take place.

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The big question for the Occupy protests has now become: What next? With the multiple evictions across the country, the Occupiers have been given an ultimatum of sorts by the powers-that-be: protest and rally all you want, but you can't "occupy" these places any longer by erecting tents and making them your residences.

Of course, this could wind up being a silver lining. Because a lot of the Occupations were getting bogged down in the minutiae of the occupation itself, which seemed to draw the focus away from why they were there in the first place. If the cops and the mayors aren't going to tolerate an encampment, then that (in a way) solves all the problems arising from that encampment itself. Which could free up the protesters to focus more on the larger movement, rather than the details of each individual protest.

There is no guarantee, though. This could still wind up very badly, if the Occupiers decide that occupying is more important than any other goal. Which could easily lead to even uglier confrontations between police and protesters than we've already seen. And if the protest devolves into just fighting cops, it is going to lose both support and legitimacy among the general public. The protesters may be OK with this, but it certainly would be a shame.

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[Sorry for the repeat column today, but I have been too busy to keep up with the fast-developing situation with Occupy Wall Street. So I felt anything I wrote about it today would have been inadequate. I will be addressing the subject in detail soon, but for now wanted to run a column from a few weeks ago, which has some generalized advice which still seems to be appropriate to offer up. Once again, this is kind of generic and has nothing to do with addressing recent developments, which I'll be doing soon.]

[Originally published 10/27/11]

The "Occupy Wall Street" movement seems to be at a crossroads. The path it chooses to take next may be the deciding moment for whether it declines into irrelevance or grows beyond its current boundaries into something larger.

As always, addressing the subject of what I prefer to call the "99 Percenters" movement should or shouldn't do next is fraught with emotion, because one of the strong messages emanating from lower Manhattan is "Don't tell us what to do -- we're doing fine on our own, thanks." Which is why I don't write about the subject all that often, as it can be a minefield for anyone who can't claim street cred of camping out overnight in the park. But several disturbing trends seem to be emerging, which if not addressed could doom the movement to irrelevancy. So I feel it's time to offer some unsolicited (and possibly unwanted) advice.

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In a surprise move today, the seven major Republican candidates for president (who are not named "Mitt Romney") decided to merge their campaigns, and run as a single corporate "person" they are now calling "Anybody But Romney, Incorporated."

Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum held a joint press conference to announce the formation of "ABR, Inc." This move is unprecedented in the history of presidential campaigns, but all seven candidates spoke of it as the natural reaction by Republicans to avoid nominating Mitt Romney, who is just not trusted by roughly three-fourths of the Republican electorate. By joining forces, the field of non-Romney candidates said, they can assure Republican voters that Romney will not be their party's standard-bearer next year.

While the concept of a corporation running for the highest office in the land seems to be unconstitutional on its face, the group stated that the Supreme Court's ruling in the Citizens United case has opened the door for such a move. "If corporations are persons," said Herman Cain in the press conference, "then why shouldn't they run for president? It just makes sense."

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There will be no Friday Talking Points column today.

Happy Veterans' Day to all, and have yourselves a good weekend.

-- Chris Weigant

Herman Cain is, if he can be believed, convinced that a conspiracy from the Left is responsible for the accusations of sexual harassment against him. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous.

In Cain's eyes (and in Cain's supporters' eyes), a grand conspiracy of the Left and those faithful minions of the Left, the Liberal Media, are undermining him because he is a strong black conservative. The Left can't stand strong black conservatives, this thinking goes, and so must do everything in its power to attack and destroy his chances of becoming president.

As I said, this is just patently ridiculous, because of one simple fact: the Left would dearly love to see Cain as the Republican nominee next year. Beating Cain would be a lot easier for President Obama than beating Romney. Polls have consistently shown the truth of this -- Obama polls much much better against Cain than against Romney. This was true before the sexual harassment charges were made, by the way. So why would the Left want Cain gone? Why would the Left choose a harder route to keeping the White House? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

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