SO LOTS OF PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT HERMAN CAIN ON MEET THE PRESS, but what I noticed is that David Gregory doesn’t seem to understand the difference between state taxes and federal taxes. Here’s what he said:

MR. CAIN: We replace capital gains tax. We replace the payroll tax. We replace corporate income tax, replace personal income tax, and replace the death tax. It is a replacement tax structure.

MR. GREGORY: But where do state taxes go? You’re saying they’re going to be repealed?

MR. CAIN: If you–with the current structure, you have state taxes, right? So with this new structure, you’re still going to have taxes–state taxes. That is muddying the water.

MR. GREGORY: How so?

MR. CAIN: Because today, under the current tax code, state taxes are there if they have it. If they don’t have a state taxes, they don’t have it. It has nothing to do with this replacement structure for the federal tax code.

MR. GREGORY: But that doesn’t make any sense to me. If I’m already paying state taxes, and I have a new Cain administration national sales tax, I’ve got more state taxes.

No, you don’t have more state taxes, you have the same state taxes — unless, that is, you don’t know the difference between a sales tax and a state tax, which would seem to be the case for Gregory. If Sarah Palin made such an error, it would be seen as proof that she was unfit for the national stage. For Gregory, well . . . draw your own conclusions.

MORE ON THOSE UNDERFUNDED / OVER-GENEROUS PUBLIC PENSIONS:

In fall 2006, voters narrowly approved an upgraded pension plan intended only for uniformed officers in the Knox County Sheriff’s Office.

A committee that met outside public view later expanded the eligibility rules, according to records. Key decisions were made in small committee meetings — meetings that some members today said they can’t even recall.

Little notice went out to the public as the plan came together, except for a piece of paper tacked onto a wall down a hallway of the City County Building.

And when it came time to bless the final package, one of the county’s biggest expenditures in decades, the Knox County Commission approved it without deliberation. Some of those who voted for it directly benefited by it or had family members who would benefit by it.

And now, the Uniformed Officers Pension Plan, or UOPP, costs taxpayers $8.2 million a year — almost three times what was first projected, figures show. Funding costs are expected to rise even more.

They always tell you it’s for police and firemen, but somehow when all is said and done the money goes somewhere else. “What a small few cautioned about five years ago has indeed come to pass in 2011: Knox County is carrying a multimillion-dollar burden. And some county leaders wonder if it’s even worth keeping.”

Related: Widely cited study on law enforcement mortality turns out not to exist:

When the local Fraternal Order of Police lobbied local leaders and the public for a better pension plan to benefit county deputies, members hammered on law enforcement mortality rates. They told commissioners, residents and the media that the average police officer lived to be just age 59. They said the information was based on a report by the U.S. Department of Justice. No one questioned it.

Even today, on law enforcement message boards across the country, commenters continue to cite age 59 as unadulterated fact and with little or no attribution.

The DOJ, however, says it never conducted such a study.

Read the whole thing.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Halloween Shop.

I LOVE IT WHEN I BLOG ABOUT STUFF AND PEOPLE SEND ME REPORTS. Matt Welch emails: “Hi Glenn! Re: Your calls for the Occupiers to protest the White House. So I was walking by the front of the White House with my 3-year-old on Sunday, and there was a smallish spur march of Occupiers who came over from McPherson Square to protest the president. This short iPhone video captures just about all of it, and I’m guessing you will enjoy Izidora’s commentary at the end.”

UPDATE: Reader Mary Anne Yeager writes: “I watched the video and it brought to mind the one issue that the main-stream media is ignoring in its coverage of the Occupy Wallstreet game. And that is anti-war protest. These are people who went crazy over war when Bush was president but not so much now. Now in the video, I saw a banner about the Obama wars but no one is pushing that agenda in the news reports. Democrat wars are good, apparently. And not too much of this comes up in the so called movement.”

NO LOVE FOR THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT OR THE PRESS THAT COVERS (FOR) THEM:

The mainstream media’s cameras can’t get enough of these pierced protesters, with their crudely written signs proclaiming their unfocused discontent and general anger at society’s selfishness in failing to satisfy their every want and desire.

Of course, those cameras discreetly turn away when the placards demanding socialist revolution and blaming the Jews come out. The protesters’ function is to demonstrate inchoate outrage simply by being there. When they start talking, they start alienating the normals.

These are Potemkin protesters, community organized by government worker unions to allow liberal Democrats a way to triangulate to the center next year. Only the rebel media outfits will actually stick a mic in the protesters’ dirty faces and let them talk.

Indeed. Related: “Andrew Breitbart tweets a question: given the anything goes baseline established by the MSM when ‘reporting’ on the Tea Parties right from the start, ‘Which propaganda & guilt by association tactics that you use against TeaParty are off limits for us,’ when reporting on Occupy Wall Street and its myriad spinoffs?” All of them, of course. But simply letting the protesters talk seems sufficient.

And Reuters ran this pic, but I doubt many newspapers front-paged it as they would have a similar photo of masked Tea Party protesters proclaiming some sort of war — had any such thing ever happened. When lefties want to make the Tea Party fit their preconceptions, they have to make things up. When righties want to exercise their preconceptions about the Occupy movement, on the other hand, they just have to take a picture.

WHEN IT’S OKAY to take a pay cut.

SELF-DEFENSE: “Nothing causes criminals to back off more hurriedly than does the presence of a shotgun.”

WHERE IS “OCCUPY HOLLYWOOD?” Reader Stephen Judkins writes:

Here’s something I posted to my facebook page. It was, in part, inspired by watching Travis Smiley on PBS talking to blacks about racism in Hollywood. It was also inspired by some of your posts on Instapundit.

It’s dominated by a bunch of white men.
Sexual harrassment is commonplace for women getting jobs.
There are few opportunities for minorities, especially in the top jobs.
Physical appearance guides hiring.
They squeeze subsidies and tax breaks from local goverments under the threat of moving jobs overseas.
Top talent rakes in tens of millions of dollars while plenty of work is done by unpaid interns.
They practice shady bookkeeping to prevent paying people.
Why aren’t we hearing about an Occupy Hollywood group?

Well, I’ve certainly called for one. And I’m not alone:

Hollywood accounting is crooked on a scale that would make any Wall Street firm blush. David Prowse, the very tall actor who wore the Darth Vader costume in the original Star Wars trilogy, recently remarked in an interview that according to the studio, Return of the Jedi has never made a nickel of profit, so Prowse has never been paid any residuals. The film grossed over half a billion dollars worldwide, but the studio rigged the books to show zero net profit, almost thirty years later. In the course of explaining why this sort of thing is commonplace, Atlantic magazine notes that even Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is currently on the books as a net loss.

As a fascinating article at Film School Rejects chronicles, movie studios engage in all sorts of viciously “unfair” practices, such as using their muscle to virtually extort theater owners, stealing intellectual property, and marketing their lesser films with fraudulent “reviews.” Any of these practices from a Wall Street firm would prompt a rush of patchouli-scented basement-dwelling youth that could only be stopped with pepper spray and plastic nets.

Read the whole thing. Three examples — I think that according to Kaus’s law of punditry that’s enough to call this a “groundswell!”

UPDATE: Popular Bittorrent site The Pirate Bay is joining in the fun, with a logo that links to this article on the Obama Copyright Czar’s coziness with industry. Thanks to reader Robert Mounce for pointing this out.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A Morgan Freeman angle. At last, something the Tea Party Movement and the Occupy movement can agree on!

JEN RUBIN: One entitlement down, one to go: CLASS goes kaput. “Democrats insisted that not only was this problem sustainable but that it was going to make money and thereby offset the cost of the rest of Obamacare. This was ludicrous, and the administration finally came clean on Friday. . . . CBO said that CLASS was going to save us money, CBO worshipers told us. Well, never was the phrase ‘garbage in, garbage out’ so appropriate. . . . To say that this is an embarrassment for the gang in the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership, who we already knew could not shoot straight, would be a gross understatement. The failure of CLASS, predicted by conservatives, sprang from the Democrats’ insistence to pass some ‘historic’ health-care bill, any such bill, and deal with the consequences later. Well, later is now.”

MORT ZUCKERMAN: What Democrats say about Obama when he’s not in the room is amazing.

SAN JOSE’S SANTANA ROW: The Future Of Shopping?

“I WASN’T AROUND IN BERLIN IN 1939.” That does seem to be the tone.

“SMART DIPLOMACY?” Stacy McCain, future ambassador to Vanuatu? Sure. What could go wrong?

EMPIRE OF THE EAST: Putin And Russia.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The $62,000 a year bachelor’s degree.

THIS IS INTERESTING: A woman with no arms who earned an unrestricted pilot’s license.

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Personal Finance.

MORE ON the 2013 Chevy Spark.

WELL, ISN’T EVERYTHING NOW? Martin Luther King monument made in China. But there’s also this: “The creator is a state artist who has made dozens of heroic depictions of Mao Zedong, the brutal founder of Communist China. Seen this way, the statue is a corruption of King’s liberation message and a PR coup for the Chinese government. . . . Concerns have also been raised about the antiquated and dangerous working conditions of Chinese quarries where the MLK Monument stone was unearthed, the muscular Socialist Realist style that mirrors landmarks more common in totalitarian countries, and Lei’s lifetime pension from the Chinese government – a regime that continues to take a hard line against dissenters.”

REQUIRING DRUG TESTS FOR BUYING A GUN? Right after they start drug tests for voting.

U.S. COAST GUARD goes to the aid of Tokelau.

FASTER, PLEASE: Destroying cancer cells by incorporating an artificial biological computer. Also: Magnetic nanoparticles to cook brain cancer go into trial in patient.

CAN BRAIN STIMULATION reduce anti-social behavior? If coffee counts as “brain stimulation,” definitely.

HEH: “I am healthier than whole, but not as much as skim. I am the 2%.”