Of course you would have to pay the iHippies. They need the money to pay their iPhone and iPad bills and to get the ear piercings, body piercings and tattoos. It costs money to look as stupid as they do.

To the extent that this is true, you should be breathing a sigh of relief that the movement isn't really so radical at all, and isn't based on anyone's willingness to act purely on ideas and principles - they'll only be there until they get arrested or their funding runs out.

That, or you should be applauding them for their willingness to engage in paid labor with no regard for the rightness or wrongness of what they do (just like the Wal-Mart buyers who see to it that the Disney and Nike products keep flowing into the stores from various international sources of sweatshop and child labor). IIRC, didn't Steve Hayward leave NLT for PowerLine because they could actually pay him (and let's hope that a good conservative such as him doesn't keep his personal budget in such a precarious state that he needs a paid blogging gig on top of his other think tank jobs in order to pay the mortgages on his two homes)?

What %age of them are being paid by American Conservative magazine to act as overzealous agents provocateur?

I almost took that route as a comment.

Just a heads up: Wal-Mart does not sell Nike products *

*As a Wal-Mart shopper I relied on my experience. It does turn out that Wal-Mart.com sells Nike golf balls. Nike golf balls have to be a tiny fraction of Nike sales.

You can't buy Nike shirts or shoes or team jerseys at Wal-Mart...thus the disparaging comment: "Wal-Mart Wolverine" (Michigan fans too dumb and too poor to go to the school or buy the right gear). (Also an epidemic in Toledo...the Wal-Mart wolverines are last years Wal-Mart Buckeyes.)

You can buy Levi's at Wal-Mart...but not the premium brands... You can certainly buy Disney products at Wal-Mart...and obviously a lot of these are made in China, or other places with suspect labor laws. On the other hand I had not heard or suspected that Disney was a big offender, in part because the IP component of Disney products is so high, and the manufacturing is pennies. i.e. A $15 DVD is only about 50 cents production and packaging cost.

It used to be that Wal Mart was a huge Buy American supporter. Source for the idea that Disney is a big offender?

Okay, sorry for that inaccuracy. So, remove Nike from my claim and insert whatever OTHER huge global shoe brands they sell (perhaps there's a Wal-Mart brand of its own?) and which use gloriously unregulated or minimally regulated ("Workers must be given 300 ml. water and 800 calories of food per shift") labor of various sorts to bring the wholesome family shoppers of Wal-Mart their cornucopia of consumer delights.