Glenn Greenwald from Tom Dispatch takes a look at the Occupy Wall Street pretests and asks, why now? Income inequality, he says, has always been present in America. The difference now? Inequality manifests not through free-market success, but rather through the corrupt marriage between private industry and government.

Pat Buchanan reflects on what it has meant, and what it now means, to be a conservative. If America has lost her way so utterly, what are we now trying to conserve?

Daniel Larison dissects the bellicose rhetoric of the Weekly Standard’s Lee Smith. He says Smith doesn’t seem to understand what collective action means, and wants to see an aggressive, unilateral U.S. action against Syria and Iran.

President Obama is busy making the rounds for donor support in the financially precarious land of California. After mingling with all the pretty people in Hollywood on Monday, he’ll be holding a $7,500 dollar fundraiser in San Francisco today. A liberal president mingling with Hollywood-types isn’t atypical, but it is worth nothing that he will not be allowing local reporters to cover the San Francisco event. Instead, only the White House traveling press pool will cover the event. Whatever the reason for the ban, he’s catching flak for it. Former Bush Press Secretary Nicole Wallace went as far as to call the ban “idiotic.”