OK, new “Occupy” number: The city says it’s spent $400,000 on police surveillance of the protest, including overtime and uniformed and undercover police on Dilworth Plaza. We’ve heard protesters publicly share their grievances about undercover police more than once.

This is how he’s getting the votes! Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey introduced legislation that he says will make Pennsylvania’s dairy farmers more competitive in Thomas Friedman’s “global economy” where everyone has an iPad and their mom loses daily online chess games to Chinese toddlers! His legislation is called the Dairy Advancement Act and includes milk pricing reforms and, uh, improved reporting at farms…iPads!

Hey, remember the City curfew law? That thing, that no matter how you felt about it, was a lose-lose for all the city’s youth? (The temporary law worked well, so now they’re trying to make it permanent. But what if it didn’t work? What if kids went even more crazy and there were more flash mobs during the “temporary curfew”? Would they have completely ditched the idea in favor of nothing?) City Council moved to give preliminary approval to the permanent bill yesterday. It will apparently expire in two years. In which time, if it works, they’ll renew it. If it doesn’t work, they’ll…renew it.

Of course Governor and future President Donahue Tom Corbett signed a letter to President Barack Obama with 10 other governors, asking him to withdraw proposed emissions rules, originally mandated in the Clean Air Act. What a swell.

Update: The homeless man who raped a woman at the Bean Exchange on 7th and Bainbridge in March has pleaded guilty to one count of rape, two counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and robbery. He could get 40-80 years in jail.

Karen Brown was so mad when Mayor Michael Nutter got a free infomercial about his awesomeness and Tweeting some weeks back. She went outside NBC 10 studios while they aired “Ask the Mayor”—NBC’s highest rated show now that Law & Order was cancelled and Stabler “retired” on SVU—with some pals and protested. Well, turns out, sometimes protests work (wink, wink, Occupiers) because on Tuesday, October 18, NBC will air “Ask Karen Brown,” which will be their third highest-rated show, right behind something called “Karaoke and voting and cooking and judging.” It’s a new show and new TV genre called “mixed reality/we don’t even know what we’re doing anymore.”