College campuses across the country organized a nationwide walkout Wednesday to show solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protests that are spreading to several other states, including Minnesota, over the next week.

Occupy Colleges, the student-led version of the ongoing New York City-based protests, continued the theme of economic justice and an end to corporate influence in politics, but added a call for improving equality within higher education.

There was a planned walkout effort at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus, according to the Minnesota Daily, although it doesn’t appear to have impacted the operation of the University. Demonstrations also took place in neighboring states, including at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, according to the Badger Herald.

In other parts of the country, students voiced their grievances about rocketing student debt and spiraling job opportunities. Students in New York left class to join the Manhattan Wall Street occupation, the Huffington Post reported. Those New York protests drew tens of thousands of people, according to NPR.

At the University of Texas in Austin, roughly 50 students holding signs and chanting slogans mimicked protests of rising unemployment and corporate welfare in other cities like Boston and Chicago, according to our sister publication the Texas Independent. But the students also focused on higher education issues, like rising tuition costs, program cuts and staff layoffs.

Jonathan Cronin, a lead organizer of the citywide Occupy Austin protest planned Thursday, told the Texas Independent that the Occupy movement is in the spirit of Egypt’s Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring protests, as well as the labor rallies that took place earlier this year in Wisconsin. Cronin said the protests signal a fundamental desire to reevaluate American priorities as it applies to representing the working class, or the “99 percent” — a term which refers to the country’s elite one percent who carry home with them some 24 percent of the national income.

“While the extreme excess and wealth continues to grow, the vast majority of Americans are just trying to make ends meet without being weighed down by increased financial burdens,” said Cronin, who is also a student at Austin Community College. “The protests deliver a sense of empowerment to show we need a political process that benefits us all equally.”

A Minnesota branch of the Occupy Wall Street movement plans to occupy a site in downtown Minneapolis Friday. Organizers said they’re holding planning meetings Thursday. The movement has earned the endorsements of a number of big unions, as well as the support of U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison.

The Huffington Post says Rep. Michele Bachmann is among many congressional Republicans who have taken talking points from the GOP and used them in public statements, often without any changes and without acknowledgment that they were actually statements by the GOP. HuffPo conducted an “extensive review” of both Democratic and Republican floor speeches, campaign websites and other public statements using plagiarism detection software.

The authors found that Bachmann’s blogging on health care contains the exact content put out as “talking points” by the GOP.

While HuffPo did find some instances of Democrats lifting talking points verbatim, they didn’t find many. “But if Democrats show less of a penchant for blatant copying, it may reflect their traditional unwillingness to follow the party line more than any higher ethical standards,” the authors wrote.

The article also points out that a sizable chunk of the House Tea Party Caucus, which Bachmann founded earlier this year, has posted GOP talking points to their websites verbatim.

Bachmann’s campaign spelled America wrong in the metatags for her website. And, the presumption that Bachmann is not only Minnesota’s 6th Congressional district congresswoman, but is in fact congresswoman for all of America seems to be a play off of supporters of Rep. Joe Wilson. When he called President Obama a liar in 2009, right-wing conservatives dubbed him “America’s Congressman” complete with t-shirts, bumper stickers and a Facebook fan page.

The interview happened “recently,” Sam Stein reports. The story is the first news of FBI investigations into Coleman’s affairs taking place in Minnesota.

It’s also the first resurfacing in months of allegations that Coleman’s friend and benefactor Nasser Kazeminy bought suits for the former Senator when he was still in office.

Coleman has denied the story, which if true would likely mean a violation of reporting rules or gift limits.

The Federal Election Commission will decide within two months whether Coleman’s campaign can pay lawyers who dealt with complaints about the allegations.

The Huffington Post’s anonymous source provided business cards left by the FBI as proof of the alleged interview and also offered other details — including that agents also asked about a different set of allegations in Texas.

In December news reports said the FBI was looking into separate charges raised in civil lawsuits filed in Texas and Delaware that Kazeminy had funneled $75,000 to Coleman via transfers from a business he controls in Texas to the St. Paul insurance firm where Coleman’s wife, Laurie, works.

The Colemans aren’t named as defendants in the lawsuits, which are mostly concerned with broader business issues having nothing to do with them.

In March the U.S. Secret Service said it was investigating a leak of private financial information, including credit card numbers, from a database of donors stored at Coleman’s campaign Web site.

Update: The Pioneer Press has now reported on the same story, independent of HuffPo, with several new details. The “main topic” of agents’ interest were suits, according to the anonymous source, who couldn’t offer them information based on direct knowledge of the matter. The interview took place within the last two weeks, the PiPress said.

Photo: Jill Brady (via The Vigil)

FBI whistleblower-turned-activist Coleen Rowley is on a roll. She ripped into the City of St. Paul’s report on Republican National Convention law enforcement in a commentary that appeared Friday at MinnPost and today at The Huffington Post. Tomorrow, as court hearings start in the cases of the RNC8 protesters, Rowley and individuals from Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) and other groups will file formal complaints against the city, state and Ramsey County over police tactics. And Rowley’s inquiries into what she suspects was overbroad surveillance during the RNC are starting to bear fruit — or at least what she calls a first “non-responsive” response from Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher’s office.

In her commentary, Rowley cites President Obama’s inauguration as an example of a National Special Security Event (like the RNC) that police pulled off “somehow, without tear gas, tasers or thousands of people dragged off in handcuffs.” St. Paul’s Heffelfinger-Luger report, Rowley points out, avoids the question of “whether such aggressive ‘police state’ action during the RNC was actually necessary.” She concludes:

Perhaps the worst mistake made in the RNC Commission Report is falling for the notion of trade-offs between security and liberty instead of seeing them as intertwined. President Obama phrased it well in his inaugural speech statement, when he said “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

After a “Mardi Gras-themed procession” at noon on Tuesday on the state Capitol lawn, Rowley and others plan to file ”Notices of Claim” (pdf) that will contain charges like this:

In the year-long investigation and planning that preceded the RNC and the police enforcement during the RNC, Sept 1-4, 2008, the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office, along with other state, local and federal law enforcement agencies and private corporations and associations of private companies, including the “Department of Homeland Security’s (now defunct) Highway Watch” and presumably the FBI’s “InfraGard” corporate partnerships did produce faulty and defamatory “intelligence” assertions that linked the organization WAMM that I am a member of to “terror networks”. Ramsey County opened an investigation approximately one year before the RNC that provided the basis of the false claims used to defame WAMM and to violate the privacy rights of WAMM members by then disseminating this information to private corporations, associations and other law enforcement agencies.

Rowley’s public-data requests to the FBI (her former employer) and Ramsey County have so far elicited only a brush-off response from Fletcher’s office (pdf).

Her draft response:

1) If I understand correctly, any data gathered on the other organizations and groups (besides the RNC Welcoming Committee) that I inquired about—to include that gained by viewing their websites–is not contained in separate files but in the same investigative file as the one that has led to prosecution of some of the “RNC Welcoming Committee”. Is that understanding correct?

2) If you are saying that the information your Department has collected on other groups and members of other groups, is all contained in one big file, there still would be no reason it cannot be segregated out for release, would there? Since there are no ongoing prosecutions related to these other groups and members of these other groups? For example: the “Women Against Military Madness (WAMM)”; “Troops Out Now”; the “Anti-War Committee”; “Protest RNC 2008” and other peace and social justice groups are charted out in a “Social Network Analysis” and “Power Centrality Ranking” that links them to the “RNC Welcoming Committee” in a Homeland Security-Highway Watch document that has recently come to light. It’s not clear whether this “intelligence” product was only produced as a result of “viewing their websites” but even if that’s so, wouldn’t there at least be notes and copies made from that law enforcement effort of analyzing the public websites?

3) I have a hard time believing that Ramsey County Sheriff Department informant(s) reported information only on the “RNC-8”. It is precisely the other individuals who are not being prosecuted and about whom information may be contained in the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office that is of interest for the research that Mr. Cox and I are conducting. Are informant report files maintained separately?

4) Again assuming I’m correct in believing that the Ramsey Sheriff Department’s information is contained in one big file that also involves the information collected on the “RNC Welcoming Committee,” what is the name of that file? How is it indexed for retrieval and further use? Was the file opened to contain all investigative data collected in the lead-up to the RNC or was it focused solely on the RNC Welcoming Committee? If the latter, why would the information on other groups and members of groups not connected to the prosecution of the “RNC Welcoming Committee” not be releasable at this time? Can you give me an idea of the size of the file and how many other individuals and groups (not being prosecuted) are documented or referenced in the file?

5) Why did you ask for a delay when first responding to my request back in December, telling me you expected my request to take a lot of time to gather up responsive materials?

That simple point seems to be eluding Minnesota Teen Challenge (MNTC), the faith-based drug treatment program which secured a federal earmark in early 2008 arranged by Rep. Jim Ramstad and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, for its “Know the Truth” program which aims to prevent drug use.

Operating close to the border of church and state, the group’s members are unrealistic if they think their work is not going to get attention.

Klobuchar’s deputy chief of staff, Andrea Mokros, explains the senator’s role in requesting the earmark. “The Senator joined several members of the state delegation, including Jim Ramstad and Keith Ellison, in submitting the request for a Minnesota program to prevent drug abuse. As a former prosecutor, she has long been concerned about the impact of drug abuse on both individuals and the community, and she has worked with a range of groups that work to prevent and treat drug addiction.”

MNTC officials were upset by my coverage of their public statements, publicly available employment application materials and publicly available information about their ties to the national organization that spawned the local operation. Maia Szalavitz, a Huffington Post writer with expertise in traumatized youth, also wrote about the Ramstad earmark. While Szalavitz and I published similar articles on the same day, we haven’t ever communicated with each other.

In response, MNTC executive director Rich Scherber sent a nearly identically worded letter to both the Minnesota Independent and the Huffington Post.

The point of my article was not to suggest that MNTC was not successful or beneficial, as Scherber implies. Rather it was to point out the overtly religious nature of the organization and that the program has historically been controversial. In the interest of brevity, I left some examples out. For instance, MNTC’s stance on Halloween verges on the comical (“Halloween is a day set up totally for Satan … The more people who go out dressed as demons, ghosts, witches and goblins, the more glory Satan receives”). Scherber’s claim that the Holy Spirit told an MNTC bus driver to avoid the 35-W bridge on the day of its collapse in August 2007 is touching but, let us say, unverified.

I don’t question that faith-based programs can be very effective for those that share the programs’ faith. Faith is a huge motivator in people’s lives. I think MNTC has been very effective for the clients it serves. However, I don’t think it’s appropriate for judges, prosecutors or public defenders to suggest the program as an alternative to jail. (Szalavitz, by the way, vehemently disagrees with MNTC’s claims about its success rate).

I also wrote about a local media report that points to the possibility that Know the Truth staff have discussed their religious conversions in relation to their recovery at a local church. That’s not a bad thing in itself, except the Know the Truth program is paid for by people who don’t share that religious faith. Were those Know the Truth representatives telling the same stories in public schools? Scherber didn’t address the issue in any complaint letters.

At least one Twin Cities school has decided to pass on MNTC’s offer to appear. Know the Truth had a presentation scheduled at South High School in Minneapolis next month. The school canceled the appearance after tightening the restrictions on outside groups that speak at the school, a concerned parent told the Minnesota Independent.

One thing is clear. The pressure to keep a positive public image is important to MNTC at this time. As the group’s Web site acknowledges, MNTC invested money in Fidelis Foundation, an institution created by Christian philanthropist Tom Petters, who is now under investigation for organizing a Ponzi scheme and defrauding investors such as the Fidelis Foundation. MNTC lost a lot of money and Klobuchar’s proposed earmark will certainly help ease the burden a little. What else could explain sending form letters to every media outlet that runs an article critical of the organization?

Correction: The article previously read, “According to Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s Web site, the senator is requesting (PDF) an additional $500,000 this year — a sum that would more than double the program’s budget.”

The document on Klobuchar’s site is for fiscal year 2009, although the document itself does not indicate as such. She requested the same earmark as Ramstad. Additional money is not being requested for FY2010.

Out of 209 ballots cast, only 36 directly addressed the issue at hand. A total of 21 voters considered Coleman a wiener, while a dozen opined that Coleman was in fact a whiner. Then there were three overcount ballots on which voters stated that he was both a wiener and a whiner, or else tried to switch their votes, midcomment, from wiener to whiner or vice versa. Those three do not count.

Which leaves a shockingly large number of ballots  – 173, to be precise — as undervotes on the question of whether Norm Coleman is a wiener or a whiner. Drilling down, however, I found that a significant proportion of those comments clustered on the topic of Coleman’s teeth, which had figured prominently in the photo HuffPo editors selected to accompany the story. Drawing more than a quarter of the undervote, dental commentary played essentially the same role in the HuffPo wiener/whiner plebiscite as Dean Barkley’s Independence Party candidacy is playing in the Senate recount. Which is to say, none.

Meanwhile, readers with something serious to say found their way to MnIndy to read the entire article rather than only the three paragraphs HuffPo had excerpted. In MnIndy’s less-crowded comment space, the usual erudition and backbiting focused on energy policy — the ostensible topic of Coleman’s presser. Of the 33 comments, only two seemed to have arrived at the wrong precinct: Wiener and whiner each received one vote at MnIndy. Having exhausted myself tallying the results at HuffPo, I’m going to leave this one an unrecounted tie.

“Our aim is simple: to get a better understanding of how polling is being used across the country, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. We want to get to the bottom of how pollsters conduct their surveys, how they gather and build their stats, how they target who they contact, and, ultimately, how they reach their conclusions – conclusions that often fuel the very races they are supposed to be analyzing.”

Led by OffTheBus — a new media consortium of writers, photographers, video producers, campaign monitors, developers, researchers and fact-checkers — the Polling Project takes aim at the mysterious smoke-filled rooms of political polling.

Amanda Michel, project director of OffTheBus, remarked that it “is also a great example of what can happen when media organizations collaborate in working directly with the public.”

HuffPost’s OffTheBus Polling Project is a crowd-sourced newsgathering effort of The Huffington Post and New Assignment.Net that taps the best of citizen journalism covering the 2008 presidential election.

In addition to the Center for Independent Media, sponsors include: BlogHer, Blue Hampshire, Concord Monitor, Instapundit, Mother Jones, My Silver State, The Nation, New West Notes, Open Left, Pajamas Media, Personal Democracy Forum, Politico, Pollster.com, Talking Points Memo, Winds of Change and WNYC.