I was looking at Google News and saw the headline Why, That Must be Nancy Pelosi! by David Martinez.

Google had used the first paragraph of the article as a teaser.

If any one ever needed a better reason to throw the Democratic Party into the garbage can of history, last Tuesday night’s “Town Hall Meeting” in Oakland, California, was a perfect example of the party’s pathos, duplicity and outright arrogance.

I thought, “Oh, another right wing diatribe against Pelosi.”  I hesitated, and then I thought, “OK, let me see what they have to say, this time.”

When I read the next two paragraph, I knew I was in for quite a different post from what I had imagined.

The night had been billed as a chance for people to “tell their stories” directly to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland.

I was asked by my friend Leslie to take photos of an action planned by a group she organizes with called USUncut, a direct action group fighting public budget cuts and targeting corporations who avoid billions in taxes. She and three others from the group planned to attend the Town Hall Meeting and use the opportunity to confront Pelosi on her having signed off on the recent debt-ceiling deal, and to unfurl one of their “Tax The Rich” banners.

RichardH pointed me to the column A Republican voter seeks answers from Brown by  Professor Charles Fried, a Republican friend and Harvard colleague of Elizabeth Warren.  This is not quite a ringing endorsement of Warren, more like a dull thud.

Fried goes on to explain why it is so difficult to be a Republican with the current crop of Republican politicians now in power on the national scene.  He poses a  number of questions to Scott Brown to help Fried get a sense of why he should vote for Brown over Warren.  Toward the end of the article, he made the following comment:

On the other hand, is he [Brown] willing to stand up to Nancy Pelosi – who keeps me in the Republican Party – and forthrightly admit that it makes sense to raise the age for Social Security eligibility and to adjust the unrealistic annual cost-of-living increase? Medicare must be disciplined, so which specific measures would he support to do that? And what about insurance companies’ rejection of applicants because of pre-existing conditions?

I left the following comment in response to the article and some of the anti-Warren vitriol of the other comments:

It’s not so much that as a Liberal, I don’t think it is right to talk about modifications to Social Security and Medicare. It’s just that I don’t think we need to have those discussions until we fix the problem of the government mandated shift of wealth to the wealthy over the last 30 years. When we solve that problem, we can see where we are with Social Security and Medicare, and then decide what needs to be done.

Much of Social Security’s near term problems will be solved by an economic recovery.  President Obama tried to start on the road to fixing Medicare problems by his health care reform bill which was eviscerated by the Republicans.  Instead of focusing our efforts on fixing problems that may or may not go away before they materialize many years down the road, let us focus on the economic problems that are preventing recovery right now.  If we get a recovery and there are remaining long term problems, then we can address them  when we see which of those problems remain to be solved.

The distortion of our tax system and regulatory system since the advent of Ronald Reagan is the most immediate problem that needs to be addressed.  Doing so might fix a whole bunch of other problems before we even get to address them directly.