Slow news day, and one I put to use with other pursuits. I’m on Virtually Speaking Sunday tonight at 9pm ET/6pm PT with Stuart Zechman. You can tune in here. Also…

• Just weeks out from the Iowa caucuses, the polls are starting to matter. And Newt Gingrich has a solid lead according to the historically most accurate poll from the Des Moines Register. Gingrich has 25% of the vote, and Ron Paul and Mitt Romney trail with 18% and 16%, respectively. Nobody else is in double digits, and Gingrich is a frequent second choice.

• More signals that the Occupy movement is evolving. LA protesters took to the streets and then disrupted a foreclosure auction, a prelude to a nationwide day of anti-foreclosure events on Tuesday. It was inevitable that the movement would find other ways to fight after the also inevitable breakup of their encampments by the state.

• Kent Conrad hinted at a compromise measure on the payroll tax cut that will be delivered by the Senate Democratic leadership tomorrow. We’ll be waiting.

• Gretchen Morgenson discourses on the secret Fed bailouts, revealed by a Bloomberg News investigation.

• Italy’s stage-managed government of technocrats has agreed to a range of austerity measures that include an increase in the retirement age (the most important measure is a crackdown on tax evasion). Meanwhile, the US may fund the IMF with loans that would cycle into the Eurozone.

• The truth is that there never should have been a Eurozone. [cont’d.]

• Barney Frank is absolutely right when he says that a majority of Democrats will vote to amend the defense triggers. It’s hard to play hardball on those cuts, even though there’s no reason that the military wouldn’t survive with their budget at FY2007 levels, when both parties agree that the cuts should be scaled back.

• A state Supreme Court case in New Jersey could determine the future of foreclosures in that state.

• This week will feature copycat Occupy-type protests from liberal groups, labor and unemployed coalitions, with encampments in Washington, DC.

• Scott Lemieux offers a kind of defense of the SEC, not necessarily of their practices, but of the concept of deferred prosecution agreements as a plan B for a cash-strapped agency.

• Turns out that, contra the anti-Solyndra bloody shirt-wavers, those Energy Department loan guarantees mostly went to safe investments and are paying off for the sector.

• Darcy Burner speaks forcefully on the need for the Justice Department to prosecute the banks for wrongful military foreclosures. The proven violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act have prison sentences right in the statute. It’s a dereliction of duty not to prosecute.

• Andrew Cuomo appears to have changed his tune on tax hikes for the wealthy, which he allowed to expire earlier in the year.

• More leaks at Fukushima. This is so sad.

• I know we’re supposed to scoff at celebrity activists, but it’s Mark Ruffalo’s own residence being overrun by fracking contamination.

• Nobody seems to mind that Leon Panetta commutes home from DC to California every weekend at taxpayer expense.

• I got this class action notification from Ticketmaster as well, and I had similar thoughts about it being total garbage, a payoff for lawyers with virtually no benefit toward the people who were scammed.

• I still cannot fathom why a Defendant Protective Services program has come in to take Jerry Sandusky’s lawyer away from him, because he continues to provide the awful advice of having him repeatedly appear in the media.

• This is genius.