My first rection to seeing the article title Why the Left Won’t Accept Success was, “What success?”  However, I clicked through and read on.

It appears that some don’t want to accept that the anti-war movement has won a hard-fought victory and that Obama’s election was a factor. It’s almost as if the fact that something has been achieved through the deeply flawed U.S. political system threatens a preferred political analysis, which holds that nothing good can happen.

The conclusion states,

Like Kennedy, Obama has faced a steep learning curve as president and has made his share of mistakes. But his completion of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and his timetable for phasing out a U.S. combat role in Afghanistan by 2014 suggest that he is following a JFK-like trajectory.

Except this time, what might reverse the course of history would be Obama’s electoral defeat in 2012. Republican front-runners, including Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, have made clear that they would again pursue a muscular neocon agenda with higher military spending and insistence on U.S. global dominance.

There is still plenty of time for Obama to inspire me to work for him as much as I did the last time.  If he fails to do that, then Romney, Cain, or whoever the Republicans choose might inspire me to work hard for Obama.  With Elizabeth Warren added to the Senate to push Obama in his second term, we might see a better term than the first one.

The article President Obama picks a worthy enemy comes from the Salon web site.

If Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t want to be portrayed as a “villain,” he should stop acting like one. On Sunday, McConnell complained about President Obama’s efforts to make Republicans the bad guys for blocking his jobs bill. Now Obama’s taking the fight directly to McConnell, and it’s about time.

The video has an interview with the Joan Walsh, the author of the article.

As a previous post shows, I do not believe in fairies, but I can still be captured by a good fairy tale. So maybe this fight is the face of the real, new Barack Obama.

Listen to this audio from BBC’s Radio 5, broadcast Oct. 24, 2011.

“So, he might actually just believe that. That may be just the sad, sad part about Barack Obama, that not that he’s too timid or that he’s too compromising, but he actually believes in a lot of what they believe in. I hate to say that.”

Michael Moore is coming around to a horrible thought that I have entertained. In July, I posted Barack Herbert Hoover Obama.

As I have been surmising, President Obama cannot forcefully stand up for the right economic policy for today because he believes in the wrong one himself. My thesis is that Obama’s mind has been poisoned by the remnants of Milton Friedman that still reside in the University of Chicago where Obama was a professor.

The article ‘Junk DNA’ Defines Differences Between Humans and Chimps explains,

“Our findings are generally consistent with the notion that the morphological and behavioral differences between humans and chimpanzees are predominately due to differences in the regulation of genes rather than to differences in the sequence of the genes themselves,” said McDonald.

There is a web site for Citizens Intervention – Enough is Enough Rally Oct 29, U.S. Capitol.

In the above video Annabel Park mentions Thomas Paine. I wonder if she knows that Paine was a socialist. I wonder if you know that.

From Chapter Two “A Broader Patriotism” Thomas Paine and The Promise of Red Republicanism” in the book The “S” Word: A Short History Of An American Tradition… Socialism.

[The] many socialist Paineites …and their affiliation to every species of radicalism in the land boded evil to the future of our republic.
-New York Times, 1856

Things they never told you in high school history class.

I first heard an allusion to her supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement on network news.  I am trying to track down a more complete report of exactly what she said.

For now, I will just use this Daily Kos post as a placeholder for more information to follow.

Elizabeth Warren has embraced OWS.  In fact, she was fighting Wall Street long before it was cool.  🙂

Elizabeth Warren is running for office in the most high-profile race in the country not involving Barack Obama. It’s a position that calls for some tact. So what does she think about the Occupy Wall Street protests that are roiling the country?

“I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” she says. “I support what they do.”

Warren’s boast isn’t bluster: As a professor of commercial law at Harvard and the force behind Obama’s consumer-protection bureau, Warren has been one of the most articulate voices challenging the excesses of Wall Street.

No one else has Warren’s gift to send the right into a sputtering frenzy.

The story Warren Takes Credit for Occupy Wall Street comes tantalizingly close to explaining the origins of her remarks. This comes from The Daily Beast blog which is part of Newsweek. Upon further research I find that this post on The Daily Beast is the source of all the news stories and the quote.

The Harvard professor has spooked the right. As she begins her high-profile Senate campaign against GOP star Scott Brown in Massachusetts, the consumer advocate tells Samuel P. Jacobs how she created ‘much of the intellectual foundation’ for the Occupy Wall Street movement. She also talks about her past life as a Republican and the challenges of being a woman on the campaign trail—and says she’s no ‘guileless Marxist.’

For those of you who don’t know much about Elizabeth Warren, below is a video that gives some credence to her claims. For the rest of us, we already know what makes her claims credible.

Here is the Thanks Obamacare web site.

I just found a poster that I had hanging in my office since the 1970s.  I can’t even remember where I got it.

I should have explained to people the purpose of the poster. If they ever heard me saying one of these lines, they were supposed to slap me.

Having read newsletters and other publications from Senator Scott Brown and the literature from and about Elizabeth Warren, I see one vast difference that Elizabeth Warren can use to explain why we should vote for her instead of Scott Brown.

In Senator Scott Browns writings, he has shown a good imagination for the positive consequences of his Republican positions and a good imagination for the negative consequences of the Democratic positions.

On the other hand, Elizabeth Warren has made a career of studying what are the actual consequences of both types of policies.  If what Scott Brown imagined were actually to be what happens, he would be perfectly justified in taking the policy positions that he does.  Elizabeth Warren has discovered by looking at the evidence that Scott Brown’s imaginings are not what really happens.

With the evidence of her research behind her, Elizabeth Warren can explain to Brown and the voters how certain policies actually work out in practice.

I read an article today in a newspaper that is behind a paywall, so I won’t bother to give you the citation or the link.  The article was describing the academic proponents of what is called “law and economics.”

Proponents of law and economics argue that laws should be evaluated in terms of the incentives they create. A law making it too easy for debtors to get bailed out and be given a second chance, as they see it, will encourage reckless behavior; by the same token, an orderly bankruptcy process in which creditors can expect as much of their money back as possible will lead to lower interest rates and more ready lending.

I think that Scott Brown would find himself in favor of what the “law and economics” proponents imagine.

According to this brief summary of the “law and economics” view of the world, the proponents only imagine the possible negative incentives for making bankruptcy filing easy and only the positive incentives for making bankruptcy filing difficult.

Elizabeth Warren’s research, and now obvious public exposure of the actual incentives, paints a quite different picture of what has happened since the laws of bankruptcy have been made more strict in recent years.  This rewrite of the law was paid for by lender’s intense lobbying efforts and the bribes (oh, sorry, campaign contributions) paid to legislators.

The fact that lenders know that it will be very difficult for borrowers to get out of the legal obligation to repay a loan have resorted to reckless lending practices.  They thought that being able to take all the assets of a defaulting borrower including their homes would protect the lender in case of default.  They also thought that they could fob off any risk onto investors by packaging up mortgages into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), that were falsely rated as safe.  The packagers of the loans  bought the safe ratings from ratings agencies that pretended to be objective.

Based on historical rates of mortgage defaults, these safety assumptions were true.  However, by breaking all the rules that have historically applied to mortgage lending, the lenders created a situation in which that past history became a poor predictor of actual results.  The lenders also concealed the fact that they were breaking all the rules by adding fraudulent information to mortgage applications filled out by the unsuspecting borrowers.  They added lies about the borrowers’ income.  They bought phony appraisals that justified larger loans with zero or negative equity as collateral.  No conservative banker of prior years would ever have engaged in such practices.

The proponents of “law and economics”  supposedly never dreamed of these negative incentives.  Was it just a lack of imagination brought on by a severe case of knowing the answers before looking at the data?  Or was it peer pressure to ignore the facts?

Occupy Protest Finds a Home On the Vineyard tells of the movement on Martha’s Vineyard.

As demonstrators in cities and countries around the world take to the streets in the name of Occupy Wall Street, not one but two Occupy movements are taking shape here on the Island, one virtual and one decidedly not.

It’s nice to know that Ellen and Michael aren’t deprived by living on an island.