This video gives you Elizabeth Warren’s story in her own words.

I know, she can’t really say stuff like this.

Several people have posted this on the real Elizabeth Warren’s Facebook page.

Here are a few snippets from the article A New Bush Era or a Push Era? by Amy Goodman posted on Nation Of Change,

Back when Barack Obama was still just a U.S. senator running for president, he told a group of donors in a New Jersey suburb, “Make me do it.” He was borrowing from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used the same phrase (according to Harry Belafonte, who heard the story directly from Eleanor Roosevelt) when responding to legendary union organizer A. Philip Randolph’s demand for civil rights for African-Americans.

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When forces used to having the ear of the most powerful person on earth whisper their demands in the Oval Office, the president must see a force more powerful outside his window, whether he likes it or not, and say, “If I do that, they will storm the Bastille.” If there’s no one out there, we are all in big trouble.

That last paragraph in particular, that’s all I have been saying, folks.

It may come as no surprise that the story by Harry Belafonte was told to Amy Goodman in an interview I have posted on this blog, Harry Belafonte Discusses President Obama.

I wish that Elizabeth Warren would acknowledge that Occupy Wall Street is doing her and Obama the favor that both FDR and Obama asked for.

This is our Elizabeth Warren speaking out the way we like to hear her.

Now if she could just say, “That too big to fail problem that I said needs to be corrected, that’s exactly the point that the OccupyWallSt movement is trying to make. If their activism is needed to help get the message across, then I am all for it.”

Raw Story has provided the transcript for Robert Reich’s video 7 Lies.

1. Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else.
2. Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow job growth.
3. Shrinking government generates more jobs.
4. Cutting the budget deficit now is more important than boosting the economy.
5. Medicare and Medicaid are the major drivers of budget deficits.
6. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.
7. It’s unfair that lower-income Americans don’t pay income tax.

Van Jones: ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protesters have moral clarity provided the replay of the video and these quotes:

In an interview with MoveOn.org, former Obama adviser Van Jones said that “Occupy Wall Street” may lack message clarity but had great moral clarity.

“They’ve got moral clarity,” Jones, leader of the new American Dream Movement, said “They’re as clear as a bell, and that’s what’s been missing.

This is one of the best videos from Cenk Uygir that I have seen.  It is the best analysis that I have seen about anybody who claims to be a self-made rich person by using food stamps and welfare.  They shout “get the government out of  my food stamps and welfare.”

Common Cause Massachusetts announced the results of their Redistricting Olympics contest last week with gold, silver, and bronze medals going to young people (and a few not so young) across the state who used their website to draw House, Senate, and Congressional maps.

Click here to see their maps and to read about the contest and the winners.

Congressional Map Gold Medal Winner: Nick Rossi

Nick came to work on this project as part of a larger study that he is doing this semester as an undergraduate student at Clark University on minority influenced districts in Massachusetts. Nick is a senior at Clark University, majoring in Geography with a minor in Political Science. He plans to graduate this spring.

The judges felt that Nick’s map presented the best balance of low deviation, municipal integrity, and representation for cohesive communities of interest, including minority communities.

Is stretching the truth any different from lying?  And since when has the truth had much to do with politics?

If you are one of those odd people for whom truth matters, there is the Bloomberg article Republicans Stretch Truth in Debate Salvos. Of course, I am not saying that Bloomberg always sticks to the truth either.

There is some truth to the thought that systems involving human beings don’t just respond to what is true.  They also respond to what people perceive to be true.

There is no single lie whose correction I can quote to give you a general sense for the content of the article.  The lies and corrections are wide ranging.

Occupy Wall Street shifts from protest to policy phase by Michael Hiltzik is an analysis from outside the movement, I believe.  However, I think this analysis gets many things right.  Just a small sample follows below:

Progressives plainly hope that Occupy Wall Street will help give concrete form to a political narrative that so far has remained abstract in the public mind: That the financial industry has so far gotten a pass on its responsibility for the 2008 crash and escaped sufficiently stringent regulation, while government assistance to banks and Wall Street firms has left consumers in the dust.

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For one thing, the concerns of the protesters are considerably more focused than their critics acknowledge. They involve the extreme inequality of wealth and income that has hobbled the U.S. economy over the last few decades, the imbalance between the government assistance given big banking institutions and that offered the homeowners who are their customers, and the failure to implement meaningful reform on elaborate financial strategies and instruments.

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Implicit in the protests is the idea that the banks have resumed their old practices with barely a hiccup, while pleading that the modest regulatory changes that have been passed have somehow hobbled their ability to do business. How do we know this plaint is a sham? One only has to look at the handsome resurgence of profits in the financial industry since 2008. According to the government’s bureau of economic analysis, those profits reached an annualized $438.9 billion in the second quarter this year, up from $122.2 billion in calendar 2008.

More telling, they accounted for nearly 32% of all U.S. corporate profits in the second quarter, up from 13.4% in 2008. That’s important, because it documents an unhealthy domination of economic activity in the U.S. by financial transactions, many of which, as we’ve come to learn, contribute little to economic productivity. That ratio is not only too high, incidentally, it’s way out of line with the historical norm, which is closer to the range of 8% to 12%.