First of all, I want to say that everyone feels just awful about the polite woman who lives in Harbor Towers, and who had to sit in traffic for a full half-hour one day last Fall on account of Occupy Boston marching down Atlantic Ave. In a way, she's a bold representation of all the apathetic martyrs who've been inconvenienced by the countless people who are standing up for jobs and civil rights.

Chris Faraone, our fabled staff writer, embedded Occupy correspondent, and author of the newly-published 99 Nights with the 99 Percent -- out now, get a copy tonight when he reads at Brookline Booksmith -- was sparring with WRKO's Tom & Todd this morning when they called in reinforcements: for the last ten minutes of an hour-long talk-radio battle over the Occupy movement, Faraone went mano-a-mano with right-wing provocateur and all-around awful human ANDREW BREITBART, last seen outside CPAC screaming at Occupy protestors to "stop raping people

The best way to comprehend the nuts and bolts of the American political machine is to work for it. And so I did. For Newt Gingrich.

Situated in downtown Manch next to a cigar shop, the office broadcasts the message that Newt wants you to know that the good people of New Hampshire like him. Really like him.

Enough with all the bullshit about how much New Hampshire residents know about politics. And about how everyone who lives here has had numerous dinner dates with each of the candidates, in which they've discussed Iranian nuclear proliferation over porterhouses. It's nonsense, and if you don't believe me, then ask any average “undecided” voter what they think of Rick Santorum's foreign policy, or Ron Paul's vintage collection of Nike Airs.

Dispatch from Boston Phoenix New Hampshire correspondent Dan McCarthy:

MANCHESTER – Rick Santorum wants to be like Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign New Hampshire Primary. He wants to compare his plight here against Mitt Romney to how the Gipper came around and whooped George H. W. Bush, who eventually conceded and accepted the VP nod.

Yesterday was a pretty busy day for #OccupyBoston: arguing the constitutional merits of Dewey Square in state court, getting their sink bogarted by BPD. So we totally understand if you missed that our easter-egg meme from last week's paper -- #OCCUTAN, created by Phoenix design director Kevin Banks -- was declared "winner of the internet" by some dudes on Reddit

About 40 members of Occupy Boston met in a working group last night at a Chinatown location to discuss strategy. The main topic of discussion: given that Occupy has a looming court date on Thursday, how should the Dewey Square tribe deal with a potential eviction?

But 20 minutes into the discussion, the group interrupted proceedings to take a vote on a different issue: how they felt about having a journalist present.

This is what a democracy-teepee condom looks like.

"They never told me I couldn't build a 30-foot teepee greenhouse temple of democracy," says Sage Radachowsky.

Duly noted. And so sometime this afternoon he'll start building one.

We first met Radachowsky in the midst of Occupy Boston's first snowstorm, when he showed up with a plan to keep the camp warm all winter: small, cheap, coffin-sized tiny-house trailers

Our sister paper, the PORTLAND PHOENIX, has been covering #OccupyMaine. This morning they published news of a Sunday morning attack on the #Occupy camp at Lincoln Park -- no one was injured, but an IED was lobbed into the camp, and Portland police are reportedly searching for a silver four-door sedan thought to have been used in the attack.

Photo credit: Shorenstein Center

One of our favorite old-media curmudgeons, the New York Times columnist DAVID CARR, got together over at Harvard over the weekend with one of the smartest people on the internet, DANAH BOYD, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the SHORENSTEIN CENTER FOR PRESS AND PUBLIC POLICY

I arrived at Occupy Baltimore just in time to see a young man with purple hair getting walked like a dog. On the other end of the leash, a sexy brunette activist in heels – the “cruel mistress of capitalism,” as her cohorts jokingly called her – snickering at the audience. Of course I would have expected nothing less at the “Military Industrial Complex S&M Pageant,” which had already delivered an explicit scene depicting horrors that companies like Bechtel inflict upon all of us.