The article headline is Revealed: Former Goldman Sachs VP Turned Issa Staffer Supervised Scheduling Of Elizabeth Warren Incident.

I’ll put a few of the sentences of the article together so that you can quickly get the gist.  You can read the whole article to see if I have been fair and balanced in my editing.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) hired Peter Haller, a former Goldman Sachs vice president, as one of his top aides.
…
Haller oversaw the scheduling of the Warren testimony. Haller reportedly changed the time of the hearing at the last minute, then misled Warren staffers by promising to end the testimony by 2:15 pm that day.
…
McHenry, with Haller sitting behind him, accuses Warren of trying to evading the committee by trying to leave at the agreed-upon time. When Warren noted that McHenry’s aides had agreed upon the schedule, McHenry elicited audible gasps in the room by declaring Warren a liar: “You’re making this up, Ms. Warren. This is not the case.”

How much do you want to bet that Scott Brown will try to make the false claim a campaign issue?  Of course he won’t tell you the claim is false when he brings it up.  When he throws this into a debate, try to remember where you saw the refutation.

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.

So now Obama admits economic message unsatisfactory.

“I don’t think we’re in danger of another recession, but we are in danger of not having a recovery that’s fast enough to deal with what is a genuine unemployment crisis for a whole lot of folks out there — and that’s why we need to be doing’ more,” he said.

Reminds me of the old burlesque bit that I saw reenacted on I Love Lucy,  “Slowly I turn and step by step,  inch by inch …”

Maybe in a few months Obama will be able to say, “Yes, a double dip is likely because of that lousy deal I made on the debt ceiling.  It may have taken me months to see this, but the stock market got it the day the deal was signed. They started taking their money out of stocks, before the ink was dry. They kept telling me they didn’t believe the Keynesian economic prediction that the economy would tank if we started cutting deficits now, but that’s not how they acted. ”

For those few people who have not seen the bit, either in the original airing or in the multitude of reruns, here is the video below:

Thanks to MardyS for bringing PIMCO’s Bill Gross: Stimulus Now to my attention.

You can also read the story as PIMCO Founder To Deficit-Obsessed Congress: Get Back To Reality.

According to both versions, Bill Gross said:

“Solutions from policymakers on the right or left, however, seem focused almost exclusively on rectifying or reducing our budget deficit as a panacea,” Gross writes. “While Democrats favor tax increases and mild adjustments to entitlements, Republicans pound the table for trillions of dollars of spending cuts and an axing of Obamacare. Both, however, somewhat mystifyingly, believe that balancing the budget will magically produce 20 million jobs over the next 10 years. President Obama’s long-term budget makes just such a claim and Republican alternatives go many steps further. Former Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota might be the Republicans’ extreme example, but his claim of 5% real growth based on tax cuts and entitlement reductions comes out of left field or perhaps the field of dreams. The United States has not had a sustained period of 5% real growth for nearly 60 years.”

In the first version, which is from firedoglake, the blogger says

Literally, the only people warning about the dangers of short-term budget cuts are the conservative former head of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Bill Gross. Everyone else believes in the confidence fairy.

This statement is patently untrue as can be attested to by the collection on my politics blog, here, of all the people warning about the dangers short-term budget cuts.

Here is the video of MSNBC – Ed Show – GOP Criticizes Obama on jobs, having created none  interviewing Sen Bernie Sanders.

You can contribute to Senator Sanders on his web site.

I agree with everything Sanders says about infrastructure and the need for a bold plan.

Where he loses me is when he goes off on free trade. With regard to all the jobs outsourced from this country, I am afraid the horse is out of the barn on that one. I cannot imagine a sensible piece of legislation that would bring back jobs from other countries that are being done very well by workers who work for less than American workers.

Unless the balance of incentives in this country are changed to favor manufacturing over financial manipulation, even work for which we would be competitive will not be done here.

The effort to improve our competitive situation will not be changed greatly by tinkering with free trade agreements.

The problem lies in our tax structure. We shouldn’t have a tax system that makes it far easier to make huge profits in financial games rather than in useful lines of endeavor such as manufacturing, engineering, and infrastructure repair.

Our income tax gives highly favorable treatment to unproductive financial manipulations. Not only should this favorable treatment of these activities not be rewarded by treating hedge fund ordinary income as capital gains, but the tax code should be changed to put a little friction in the rapid trading of financial instruments such as stocks and possibly other items such as futures, derivatives, and other fancy financial instruments.

Here is one by Simon Johnson, The Tea Party’s Modest Proposal.

The irony of the Tea Party revolt, of course, is that it undermines the private sector more than it reins in “big government.” The S&P downgrade resulted in a “flight to quality,” meaning that investors bought US government debt – thus increasing its price and lowering the rate that the federal government pays to borrow.

It was the value of the stock market that fell sharply – which makes sense, given that counter-cyclical policy is now severely constrained. The government part of the credit system has been strengthened, relatively speaking, by developments over the past few months. It is the private sector – where investment and entrepreneurial activity are needed to generate growth and employment – that has taken a beating.

Unless and until America’s private sector recovers, investment and job creation will continue to stagnate. But today’s atmosphere of fear and aggressive budget tactics are combining to undermine private-sector confidence and spending power.

As Jonathan Swift put it in 1727, “Party is the madness of many, for the gain of the few.”

I highlight the above paragraphs partly because it expands on something that I have noted.  The Republican politicians, the Tea Party, and Financial talking heads on “news” shows  may not believe in Keynesian economics.  Maybe not consciously, but viscerally, the market does seem to believe in Keynesian economics.  The market sees the government austerity coming.  They know this will lead to a second dip recession, and they want out of stocks and into safe US Government bonds in a big way.

Will it never end? Is Capitalism Doomed? provides some commentary on Nouriel Roubini’s recent comments. The story on The Real News website offers some reader comments after the following video:

Nouriel Roubini actually has a post titled Is Capitalism Doomed?

It is time to bring a little humor into the discussion.

That video was the center piece of the article Is Warren Buffett a Socialist? in where else, The Wall Street Journal blog?

I wonder if the blogger caught the irony of posting an attack on Faux Noise in the Murdock owned Wall Street Journal.

Scars Left by ‘Great Recession’ Will Be Hard to Erase on Yahooo!  Am I repeating myself often enough?  See the video below.

An excerpt from the article:

But there is hope, says Peck. There are things that can be done to erase these permanent stains and turn the economy around by putting people back to work: invest in infrastructure that is crumbling anyway, and create a Manhattan type project to create breakthrough innovation that will make the U.S. more globally competitive.

Unfortunately, these two ideas likely fall on deaf ears because it seems the current U.S. Congress is more prone to playing visceral partisan politics vs. working towards the good of the American people

Well, not really all of Congress. Just the Republican minority is bent on ruining the country for political and their own economic gain.