February links

NYT endorses Warren and Klobuchar. (Didn't do any good for Warren.)

Virginia gun rights rally. Virginia Beach after mass shooting. Gun rights view. WaPo coverage. White supremacists arrested before arriving. Capsule report: it was peaceful. Solid people taking the issue seriously.

Questions for witnesses in abuse of power.

Strategy for Dems. Clear list, but do I agree?

Child abuse? A terrifying case of investigative abuse against a family.

Analysis on national-wide injunctions as judicial activism.

Bernie loves campaigning and hates governing. Oy, another one.

Did socialism ruin Venezuela? The article hedges, but it seems like it did. Moderate depth.

Trump is trying to demoralize his opponents so they give up.

US federal budgets continue to be smoke and mirrors and red ink. WE'RE DOOMED.

Written by socialists, this article tells why Bernie is just the beginning. Probably a fair representation of socialists, including their intense dislike of capitalism. Are we doomed again?

Image: latimes.com

Short: Elizabeth Warren forgets her math

I know Liz Warren is a smart person. She's got a background in bankruptcy, consumer finance, overseeing the management of TARP assets, etc. I bet she knows numbers pretty well.

But now she's pretending the equations don't have to equal, that increased spending doesn't have to be balanced with increased, um, what was that other thing? Warren, the great hope of the progressive wing of the Democratic party, wants to expand SS benefits, not consider reform that would reduce their rate of growth. And where will that extra money come from? Warren forgot to mention that.

Reminder for Professor Warren

Image: microsoft.com

Reflections on the Warren/Brown contest

This election campaign could be filled with important issues, but it's been a disappointment, both nationally and in my state, Massachusetts. In the Warren/Brown contest, the biggest issue has been trying to figure out how wrong it was for Elizabeth Warren to list herself as part Native American. In no way can I understand why this is a major issue.

Maybe Scott Brown is pushing this issue, and he is, to play on class resentments. Now that's an issue with some meat on it. Elizabeth Warren represents a liberal/academic elite that supports higher taxes to fund ever more government programs. Personally, I'm not sure whether Warren in fact supports higher taxes, but I've met enough academics who do, so why should I check out her actual positions? That may not be my attitude, but I bet it's a common one.

 The Real Massachusetts

I realize the Massachusetts is supposed to be a true-blue state where these liberal views should win hands-down. However, Massachusetts actually has a lot of blue-collar workers. (All states do--they perform those important service jobs.) We often elect Republican governors, including from 1990 to 2006. We have a flat state income tax, not a progressive one.

The election of Scott Brown in the special election in 2010 showed that our habit of electing Democrats to the Senate wasn't unbreakable. Brown won a clear victory over Martha Coakley, a decent Attorney General (in that she hasn't had a major embarrassing scandal), but a cold-fish as a campaigner and a typical, uninspiring liberal.

Pluses and Minuses

Elizabeth Warren has a better resume than Coakley as someone who understands financial issues and headed up the reform for consumer credit. However, her academic career and her talking points make her sound like another hack liberal. Nonetheless, I don't think she is. With her solid understanding of financial issues, she could be quite an asset in the Senate.

This isn't to say that Scott Brown doesn't have strong points too. He has been a swing vote on some issues, like the repeal of DADT. However, on other core issues like budget discipline (the sequester) and repealing Obamacare, Brown talks just like any other Republican. He's not a bridge to compromise on those weighty issues, so he's better than a typical GOP senator, but not by much.

So who has more appeal in Massachusetts? If it was a race of a garden-variety liberal against a truly independent moderate, I think the moderate would win. We don't have a majority of true liberals here--just 30.3% according to Gallup. However, Brown isn't as moderate in his votes as he pretends, and that may be his undoing.

The race may hinge on personality, not issues. If that's the case, Brown will win if Warren continues to sound like a hectoring liberal academic. But Brown's supporters better stop acting like spoiled frat boys with their mocking war whoops. I doubt that's the way to convince independents.

Campaign roundup:

• Warren issues
• Brown issues
• Warren assassination
• Stances on the budget and the defense cuts

Elizabeth Warren's stupid lies

I'm happy to shed light on local issues that may have national interest, like Romneycare, but I wish our Senate race wasn't one of them. Besides, being local doesn't make this issue look much different, except compared to a locality, say Texas, where an old-line liberal like Elizabeth Warren would never have a chance at a Senate seat.

The story swirling around her, that she parlayed a family story that she's 1/32 Cherokee into a professorship at Harvard Law, reeks of liberal privilege and hypocrisy to those that have a sensitive nose for that kind of stuff. I'm a little more understanding because my family has its stories too--that the unusual shape of my eyes (and my son's eyes) came from a Cossack raping a woman ancestor, probably in Ukraine. Lovely story, isn't it? So I'm attuned to family lore as lore, not as a lie used for advancement.

Story or Non-Story?

However, to others it stinks of the special favors that the liberal diversity police hand out to minorities and those white liberals who'll talk the diversity jive and even lie to claim some of the spoils for themselves. So if you're a libertarian or conservative partisan, you may love this story.

Me, I hate this story. It's a reminder of a dirty little secret in academia (which is my background), that it's hard to tell which professors are great because there's too much hype about too many of them; most of it undeserved; and all of it deeply envied by professors not benefiting from false hype. I grew up in this hot house world, and happily escaped it for industry at the first possible moment. So this has been a regrettable reminder of that world. (To be fair, it's often hard to tell which executives are good, and which only middling, which employee should get the promotion, which candidate should get the nomination, etc. So this problem isn't just a problem in academia.)

Those Little Lies

This story is also a reminder of how stupid little lies can cost you. Warren should have said that Harvard was (or might be) calling her a Native American right after she talked nationally about having a little Cherokee blood. Instead, she let the doubts surface and grow, whatever those doubts are.

So what are those doubts? That Elizabeth Warren isn't qualified for her position? She has quite a resume, especially work on consumer credit and bankruptcy law. So she herself has provided the easiest ammunition to use against her, distracting from her qualifications.

It reminds me how Bill Clinton gave the Republicans their best ammunition when he got that blow job from Monica Lewinsky. No blow job, no year long distraction, no impeachment. Ms. Warren, please come clean faster, don't fight it, and don't hand anymore noisy stories to the GOP. Hopefully you and Scott Brown can get back to the issues, please!

What's really behind this plain face?

Photo: salon.com