The Democratic Party moved a step closer to embracing the Occupy Wall Street movement as its own with the top campaign arm for House Democrats sending around a petition urging people to "stand with" the movement.

In an email sent Monday morning, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Director Robby Mook appealed for signatures to an online petition in support of those who want "to let billionaires, big oil and big bankers know that we're not going to let the richest 1% force draconian economic policies and massive cuts to crucial programs on Main Street Americans."

White House spokesman Jay Carney today downplayed statements by two political allies who are backing away from President Barack Obama’s top legislative priority, his $447 billion “American Jobs Act.

Obama ally and stock market billionaire Warren Buffett backed away from the “Buffet Rule” tax increase Friday. And one day before, top Senate Democrat Dick Durbin said his Democratic Senate majority doesn’t yet have the votes to pass the bill.

These top-level former endorsers put distance between themselves and the White House as wealthy Americans and many Democratic-leaning professionals recoil from what they see as President Obama’s anti-business attitude, and as the general public’s distrust of government reaches record levels.

President Obama’s smooth path to the Democratic nomination may have gotten rockier Monday, after a group of liberal leaders, including former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, announced plans to challenge the incumbent in primaries next year.

The group said the goal is to offer up a handful of candidates from various fields and areas where the president either has failed to stake out a “progressive” position or where he has “drifted toward the corporatist right.”

“Without debates by challengers inside the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries, the liberal/majoritarian agenda will be muted and ignored,” Mr. Nader said in a news release. “The one-man Democratic primaries will be dull, repetitive, and draining of both voter enthusiasm and real bright lines between the two parties that excite voters.”

Mayor Bloomberg warned Friday there would be riots in the streets if Washington doesn't get serious about generating jobs.

"We have a lot of kids graduating college, can't find jobs," Bloomberg said on his weekly WOR radio show.

"That's what happened in Cairo. That's what happened in Madrid. You don't want those kinds of riots here."

In Cairo, angry Egyptians took out their frustrations by toppling presidential strongman Hosni Mubarak - and more recently attacking the Israeli embassy.

As for Madrid, the most recent street protests were sparked by widespread unhappiness that the Spanish government was spending millions on the visit of Pope Benedict instead of dealing with widespread unemployment.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said her campaign is among those that may have been "wiped out" by a Burbank-based Democratic campaign treasurer who was arrested on federal fraud charges earlier this month.

Kinde Durkee is accused of taking thousands of dollars from the campaigns of several elected officials, including Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove), Rep. Susan A. Davis (D-San Diego) and Assemblyman Jose Solorio (D-Santa Ana). The Los Angeles County Democratic Party reported that more than $200,000 had been taken from its fund.

Durkee, head of Durkee & Associates, was arrested by the FBI on Sept. 2. A federal affidavit said she admitted misappropriating clients' funds for years and filing false federal campaign forms.

Durkee, who has not entered a plea on federal mail fraud charges, was released Friday on $200,000 bond.

It’s been a tough summer for swing-district Democrats seeking reelection in 2012 with a president at the top of the ticket whose approval ratings are in the weeds.

As these members begin to focus on their reelection bids after Labor Day, they are increasingly calculating how close is too close to an unpopular President Obama.

Take Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., who represents a district that nearly went for Republican George W. Bush in 2004. In a recent local TV interview, DeFazio said of Obama that the word “fight” isn’t “in his vocabulary” -- and he then repeated the criticism to constituents at a town hall. Or Rep. Bill Owens, D-N.Y., who won a Republican-friendly district in a special election last year and pointedly declined to endorse the sitting president last week.

The president’s dismal poll ratings, should they continue into next year, could sink Democratic hopes for reclaiming ground in the House and retaining control of the Senate

The Homeland Security Department said Thursday it will halt deportation proceedings on a case-by-case basis against illegal immigrants who meet certain criteria such as attending school, having family in the military or are primarily responsible for other family members’ care.

The move, announced in letters to Congress, won immediate praise from Hispanic activists and Democrats who had chided President Obama for months for the pace of deportations and had argued he had authority to exempt broad swaths of illegal immigrants from deportation.

“Today’s announcement shows that this president is willing to put muscle behind his words and to use his power to intervene when the lives of good people are being ruined by bad laws,” said Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, Illinois Democrat.

In the letters to Congress, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said her department and the Justice Department will review all ongoing cases and see who meets the new criteria on a case-by-case basis.

Reporter Matthew Boyle discusses how Senate Indian Affairs Committee Democratic staffers are billing taxpayers for their trip to Maui for a field hearing.

While continuing to cast doubt on the credibility of Standard & Poor’s, several Democrats on Sunday said there is an even greater culprit in the downgrade of the nation’s credit rating: the tea party.

“I believe this is, without question, the tea party downgrade,” Sen. John F. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, a day that also saw mounting anxieties in world markets over the downgrade among myriad other economic woes worldwide. Some of the world’s top financial ministers issued a joint statement Sunday night committing themselves to preserve the stability of financial markets and their economies.

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Obama, used the exact same phrase in dubbing the credit rating drop the “tea party downgrade,” as Democrats tried to position themselves as reasonable, pragmatic leaders and conservative Republicans as irresponsible ideologues who caused the downgrade by refusing to accept any new taxes.

As backers of several high-profile ballot measures hit the streets looking for signatures, a new radio ad has surfaced warning listeners that signing initiative petitions puts voters "at risk for identity theft."

The 60-second spot, which is airing on at least one Southern California radio station, features a man telling his spouse she should not have signed a petition at the grocery store.

"The Legislature called it an identity theft starter kit. Now we really need to watch our bank statements and credit information," he says.

"That's it, I'm not singing any more petitions," the woman responds. "I guess the lesson here is not to give our name and address to anyone we don't know."

The identity of the group behind the ad remains a mystery, but the timing of the launch suggests its aim is to derail one of several high-profile measures currently trying to qualify for the 2012 ballot.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office announced Wednesday morning that Senate Democrats' plan to raise the debt ceiling would save the nation $2.2 trillion over the next ten years -- $500 billion less than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed when he introduced the plan.

The news follows the CBO's report late Tuesday that the House Republicans' proposal also fell short of claims: The CBO said that plan, which is broken into two steps, would initially save only $850 billion over a decade, not the $1.2 trillion claimed by House Speaker John Boehner. (The plan would seek more spending cuts in about six months.) Boehner decided to retool his plan following the CBO report.

California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law on Monday a bill allowing illegal immigrants to receive privately funded scholarships to attend the state's public colleges and universities.

The bill, dubbed the California Dream Act, passed the state Legislature earlier this month and aims at helping illegal immigrants who have earned a high school diploma after attending at least three years of high school in the state.

"At the end of the day, if we're going to continue as a powerful, equal-opportunity society, we're going to have to invest in our people," Brown, a Democrat, said at the signing ceremony in the library of a Los Angeles community college.

The state law is named after a national bill introduced in Congress last year to give young, undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for at least five years a path to citizenship through college or military service.

With no debt deal done and both sides racing an Aug. 2 deadline, Democrats and Republicans on Sunday readied separate backup plans to try to raise the government’s borrowing limit and cut spending.

House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, pitched his colleagues on a plan to raise the borrowing limit by about $1 trillion and match that with similar sized spending cuts — enough to last through the rest of the year, and leaving for later the heavy lifting on taxes and bigger spending items.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he is working on a plan to raise the debt limit by $2.7 trillion, coupled with an equal reduction in projected future spending. In a concession to Republicans, he said that plan would not include tax increases, but that the new debt level would last through the 2012 elections.

That date has become a critical marker for Democrats — so much so that President Obama’s advisers said he would veto any bill that doesn’t last that long.

Senate Democrats have drafted a sweeping debt-reduction plan that would slice $4 trillion from projected borrowing over the next decade without touching the expensive health and retirement programs targeted by President Obama.

Instead, Senate Democrats are proposing to stabilize borrowing through sharp cuts at the Pentagon and other government agencies, as well as $2 trillion in new taxes, primarily on families earning more than $1 million year, according to a copy of the plan obtained by The Washington Post.

With debt-reduction talks under way between Obama and congressional leaders, Senate Democrats are unlikely to adopt the blueprint. However, it has gained broad support among those eager to chart a path to solving the nation’s budget problems without making politically painful cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) files a cloture motion on Senate bill 1323, a "Sense of the Senate" bill on "Shared Sacrifice." Here are the details of this resolution:

SECTION 1. SENSE OF THE SENATE ON SHARED SACRIFICE.

(a) Findings- Congress makes the following findings:

There is history — a chronicle of human events — and then there is perceived history. So often, the two are wildly at odds.

In 1963, a popular Democratic president was assassinated by a Marxist named Oswald, who had actually defected to the Soviet Union and returned to the U.S. with a Soviet wife, was an active member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and had attempted to assassinate a right-wing general named Edwin Walker earlier in the year.

Yet those who write history found these facts inconvenient. They created a different history in which the "atmosphere of hate" in the southern city of Dallas, Texas, led to the terrible political violence. In other words, it was political conservatism that led to John F. Kennedy's assassination. This perceived history was recycled as recently as the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Democratic leaders called on Wednesday for additional spending to boost the sluggish U.S. economy, setting up a fresh hurdle for bipartisan efforts in Washington to head off a government debt default this summer.

Democrats' demand for new stimulus spending is at odds with the work of negotiators, led by Vice President Joe Biden, who are trying to find trillions of dollars in savings as part of a deal that would allow Congress to sign off on new government borrowing before the U.S. runs out of money to pay its bills.

Those talks, which resumed on Wednesday, have largely focused on spending cuts over the next 10 years. Senate Democrats want the deal to include more money for highway construction, a payroll tax cut and clean-energy subsidies to bring down the 9.1 percent unemployment rate.

"Get the recovery right before you get in this deficit-cutting mode," Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Dick Durbin told reporters. "Get people back to work. Let's start moving in that

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) saw her net worth rise 62 percent last year, cementing her status as one of the wealthiest members of Congress.

Pelosi was worth at least $35.2 million in the 2010 calendar year, according to a financial disclosure report released Wednesday. She reported a minimum of $43.4 million in assets and about $8.2 milion in liabilities.

For 2009, Pelosi reported a minimum net worth of $21.7 million.

Members of the House Democratic leadership have talked repeatedly to Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-New York, to try to get him to end what several Democrats call an unwelcome political distraction, a member of the party's leadership tells CNN.

"It's frustrating because we'll talk to him, and say clean it up, and then he goes out and does stuff," said the member of the House Democratic leadership, who declined to speak for the record about private discussions with Weiner.

"He's got to put the period at the end of the sentence," said the Democratic source, "it's painful."

Americans break into two roughly evenly matched camps on the question of whether the government should enact heavy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth in the U.S. Forty-seven percent believe the government should redistribute wealth in this way, while 49% disagree, similar to views Gallup found four years ago.

Republicans and Democrats have sharply different reactions to the government's taking such an active role in equalizing economic outcomes. Seven in 10 Democrats believe the government should levy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth, while an equal proportion of Republicans believe it should not. The slight majority of independents oppose this policy.

The question also provokes different reactions from men compared with women, whites vs. nonwhites, and upper-income vs. lower-income Americans. Consistent with their more Democratic political orientation, women, nonwhites, and lower-income adults are all more supportive than their counterparts of government redistribution

Wow! The AP poll has Obama’s approval rating hitting 60 percent! And 53 percent say he deserves to be reelected!

And on the economy, 52 percent approve of the way Obama’s handling it, and only 47 percent disapprove! He’s up 54–46 on approval of how he’s handling health care! On unemployment, 52 percent approval, 47 percent disapproval! 57 percent approval on handling Libya! Even on the deficit, he’s at 47 percent approval, 52 percent disapproval!

It is a poll of adults, which isn’t surprising; as I mentioned yesterday, you don’t have to be a registered or likely voter to have an opinion on the president.

But then you get to the party ID: 46 percent identify as Democrat or leaning Democrat, 29 percent identify as Republican or leaning Republican, 4 percent identify as purely independent leaning towards neither party, and 20 percent answered, “I don’t know.”

It looks like Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., is going to get his wish – $2 million in taxpayer funding for a library commemorating his 37 years in the House of Representatives. The Charles B. Rangel Center for Public service will serve as a repository for

Mayors along the Texas-Mexico border have begun a quiet protest of the federal government's plans to build a fence along the border: They are refusing to give access to their land. Mayors in Brownsville, Del Rio and El Paso have denied access to some part

The furor erupted after agents rounded up 186 people last week in what was billed as a crackdown on gang activity on Long Island. Federal authorities said many of the people arrested were gang members, but local officials believe that claim was exaggerate

Leading Democratic presidential candidates are signaling that they will return to the thorny issue of immigration reform faster than their party colleagues on Capitol Hill would like. The campaigns of Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (

Democratic presidential candidates wooed Hispanic voters on Saturday with pledges to keep working for immigration laws that would allow more of those already in the United States to become citizens and voters. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and five other