Things we care about: Occupy Atlanta participant is a felon who owns a house

Tim Franzen has kind of become the face of Occupy Atlanta. When he's not occupying public parks, he's a community organizer, so he figured that made him well-suited to join Occupy's media committee. He's not an official spokesperson exactly, but he has taken charge of a lot of the group's communication.

This week, certain media outlets and Occupy critics decided Franzen's inadvertent emergence as a leader in the otherwise leaderless movement made him worth a closer look. What did they learn? That Franzen has a criminal record, and that he owns a house in Marietta that he does not currently live in.

WSBTV on Wednesday reported that fifteen years ago, when Franzen was a teenager, he was charged with and did time in prison for felony burglary and possession of a controlled substance. And yesterday, right-wing blogger Andre Walker of Georgia Unfiltered hit Twitter hard when a review of public records revealed that Franzen owns a house in Marietta, but rents in Reynoldstown.

Here's Walker's outrage in Tweet form:

Franzen's take on the sudden attention: "This type of stuff, this garbage, is designed to take the focus off the issues."