People seem to get upset when Elizabeth Warren gesticulates in her TV ads. I hear that they think she is acting like a teacher and a scold.

Compare her described behavior to that of our esteemed Governor Deval Patrick.

Why can’t Elizabeth Warren be more like a man? Or is it “Why can’t the people of Massachusetts give her the same respect as a man gets automatically?” Even an effeminate man like Scott Brown gets that respect, at the same time he is whining about how that mean woman is hurting his tender feelings because she talks about his record.

How come a five and a half foot tall, 100 pound woman frightens a self-deluded he-man like Scott Brown? He was similarly frightened by Martha Coakley’s treatment of him. No wonder Republicans like Scott Brown seem to feel like they have to wage war against women.

Elizabeth Warren is no shorter than I am although she weighs a lot less, and she doesn’t frighten me in the slightest.

In the better late than never category, The Boston Globe has published the article Warren’s extended family split about heritage with the subhead Some recall, others deny any links to Native Americans. This is the article The Boston Globe should have published instead of initially falling for Scott Brown’s attempt to make this an issue with which to challenge Warren’s credibility. The damage the newspaper did in the beginning may be impossible for it to erase now.

It is an extensive article which you ought to read for yourself, but I have chosen the following excerpt to give you an idea of the conclusion.

The article starts off with a story about Ina Mapes.

Mapes, a mother of four who volunteers in a clothing bank, is a second cousin to US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. The two women, who have never met, share more DNA than most second cousins: Not only were their grandmothers sisters, their grandfathers were brothers. Those brothers — a team of carpenters named Harry and Everett Reed who plied their trade in the Indian Territory that would become the state of Oklahoma — are believed by some family members to have roots in the Delaware tribe. Mapes, who said she was unaware of her cousin’s candidacy until contacted by a reporter, said she does not doubt her heritage.

Surprisingly, early on in the article it says:

But other cousins, some of whom also do not know Warren, say they know nothing of Native American blood in the family. According to one family biography, on file at the California State University at Fullerton, one of Warren’s relatives once shot at an Indian.

What are they implying? It is not as if one Indain never shot at another Indian, or no Christian ever shot at another Christian, or no Jew ever shot at another Jew, or no European American ever shot at another European American.

Sharon’s great-grandfather wrote in his brief autobiography A Brief Sketch of The Life of a Confederate Soldier AND THE UPS AND DOWNS During Pioneer and Indian Warfare in Texas:

I am American born, aboriginal American by birth. On my fathers side am of Black Hawk and Tecumcie, on my mothers side Grey Horse and Wyandott, of the Tribes and Decendants of Minnini.
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On joining Winfield Scott at Marshall, father, my brothers and myself, I was promoted to Major and hold that rank to this day. I put in six years, nine months and two days under Winfield Scott, Bowie, General Sam Houston, Sickle and Deaf Smith, in the Mexican or Frontier War (what I term the “cut throat war”).
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Lieutenant Cummons and I not only fought together in the War between the States but in the Spanish and American War sixteen months, having come in close contact with each other during the Pioneer or Indian War.
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The Yankees were wanting men to fight Indians. They would come around every day, trying to get us to sign up, offering us $100.00 in real green back if we would desert the Confederacy and go with them and fight the Indians and $25.00 a month for two years, and if the war was not ended and we wanted a discharge at the end of two years we could get it.

My mess mate and myself caught a hole open after we had signed up for our bounty. Of course we became trusties. We were doomed at the time to be Yankee soldiers, being detailed as Quartermaster and Assistant. I played asleep, my pal being on guard. Finally the Captain of the bunch lay down and being sound asleep my pal came to me saying “now is our time to get away.” So that ends our career in the Rock Island prison camp, by an old Confederate soldier.

I infer from these passages that Sharon’s Native American great-grandfather may have shot at other Native Americans or at least worked on the non-Native American side in some wars against them.

The Real News Network has PT2 The Fed and the Crisis. If you have not looked at part 1 yet, you will find it in my previous post The Fed and the Crisis.

There is a plethora of good information in the above video, but I shoose to pull out this one section for emphasis. It explains a little appreciated, but important part of the Dodd-Frank bill.

So what other macroprudential possibilities are there? Actually, there is one in Dodd–Frank, which will come into effect at the end of July 2012, and that is section 610, which goes back and corrects an enormous error made by a controller of the currency at the end of the Clinton administration, who acceded to the request of the banks to remove their requirement in the sense that loans to a single borrower had to be a given percentage of capital, if that affected financial institutions. In other words, the commonsense notion of don’t put your eggs all in one basket, which had been part of the National Bank Act since 1865, was to be waived if that basket was another financial or group of financial institutions. What section 610 does is say, no, the law requires you to break it all up, to distribute your lending across the spectrum in relation to capital.

Moreover, it does something else extremely important. It recognizes, unlike the Federal Reserve, that the financial sector has changed. It now doesn’t speak of banks lending; it speaks in the statute of credit exposures. And the credit exposures include repurchase agreements, reverse repurchase agreements, derivatives, securities lending, etc.—in other words, all those exciting things that brought us into crisis.

The Real News Network has the article The Fed and the Crisis. This is “a commentary by Jane D’Arista assessing the actions of the Federal Reserve in managing the economic crisis.”

I want to particularly emphasize the following quote even though the commentary is filled with other good information, too.

The configuration which we face now, all the other institutions—mutual funds, investment banks, asset issuers, insurance companies—contribute three times as much credit to the system as does the Federal Reserve—or, excuse me, as does the banking system.

I have been trying to make this point in the blog from its inception, but this is the first time I have heard an expert provide quantitative figures. The factor of three is probably even larger than I have been assuming. Remember the factor of three is not a comparison between the private sector and the Federal Reserve Bank. It is a comparison between the enumerated parts of the private sector — mutual funds, investment banks, asset issuers, insurance companies — and the banking system. The Federal Reserve bank is only part of the banking system. The private sector banks create a lot of the credit that is created by the banking system.

So the next time you hear some politician or some business news medium railing against the Federal Reserve “printing” money, just remember that the private sector “prints” money at more than three times the rate of the Federal Reserve Bank. In other words, less than one third of the credit being created is being created by the Federal Reserve Bank.

In a press release from the University of California San Diego, Facebook Boosts Voter Turnout, there is a description of an interesting experiment.  Do not underestimate the impact you have by liking political articles and Facebook pages on Facebook, and increasing traffic to political web sites.

In 61-million-person experiment, researchers show online social networks influence political participation, with close relationships mattering most
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Published in Nature, the massive-scale experiment confirms that peer pressure helps get out the vote – and demonstrates that online social networks can affect important real-world behavior.

“Voter turnout is incredibly important to the democratic process. Without voters, there’s no democracy,” said lead author James Fowler, UC San Diego professor of political science in the Division of Social Sciences and of medical genetics in the School of Medicine. “Our study suggests that social influence may be the best way to increase voter turnout. Just as importantly, we show that what happens online matters a lot for the ‘real world.’”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, voter participation was about 53 percent of the voting-age population for the presidential election in 2008. For the Congressional election in 2010, which this study focused on, the turnout was 37 percent. The numbers are clear: Many more people in the United States could vote than do.

In the study, more than 60 million people on Facebook saw a social, non-partisan “get out the vote” message at the top of their news feeds on Nov. 2, 2010.

The message featured a reminder that “Today is Election Day”; a clickable “I Voted” button; a link to local polling places; a counter displaying how many Facebook users had already reported voting; and up to six profile pictures of users’ own Facebook friends who had reported voting.

About 600,000 people, or one percent, were randomly assigned to see a modified “informational message,” identical in all respects to the social message except for pictures of friends. An additional 600,000 served as the control group and received no Election Day message from Facebook at all.

Fowler and colleagues then compared the behavior of recipients of the social message, recipients of the informational message, and those who saw nothing.

Users who had received the social message were more likely than the others both to look for a polling place and to click on the “I Voted” button.

Previously, I had received the following in an email from MariaT

From the comfort of our homes, we can improve search results for Warren by visiting her links below.

• ‘Like’ Elizabeth on Facebook www.facebook.com/ElizabethWarren
• Visit her website elizabethwarren.com/elizabeth
• Visit her Wikipedia page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Warren
• NY Times news on Elizabeth topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/elizabeth_warren/index.html
• Warren news on Bloomberg topics.bloomberg.com/elizabeth-warren/
• Her YouTube stuff www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elizabeth+warren&oq=eliz&gs_l=youtube.1.3.0l10.5657.6344.0.9121.4.4.0.0.0.0.119.337.3j1.4.0…0.0…1ac.qjfjCLE3Oy0

Bloomberg has produced the story Fed Undertakes QE3 With $40 Billion MBS Purchases Per Month.

I found Mitt Romney’s reaction to this hysterically funny.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said he wouldn’t reappoint Bernanke when his term ends in January 2014. Lanhee Chen, Romney’s policy director, said the announcement of QE3 is “further confirmation that President Obama’s policies have not worked.”

“We should be creating wealth, not printing dollars,” Chen said in a statement.

Looking at my own investment portfolio and multiplying by how much larger than mine is  Mitt Romney’s portfolio, if Mitt Romney is no better an investor than I am, he made $3,500,000 today.  I guess with Romney’s net worth of $250 million,  making $3.5 million a day isn’t considered real wealth.

All I can say is WOW!!.

Art Ramalho of Ramalho’s West End Gym says we need a fighter like Elizabeth Warren in the United States Senate.

The Boston Globe has the article Brown pushed STOCK Act, but bill Obama signed in ad was not his.

Brown has said that he does his homework and that he reads the bills that come before Congress. But in this instance, Brown’s measure was so hastily drafted that it contained exact language lifted from an earlier House bill on the same subject. And even after Brown’s draft was set aside by the Homeland Security Committee in favor of another version, Brown continued to claim credit in an encounter with President Obama. In January, Brown intercepted the president as he departed the House after his State of the Union speech.

In the greater scheme of things, this would not be a big deal.  However, if Brown is pushing the dishonesty meme on Elizabeth Warren for something that may be even a lesser deal than this, then I thought people ought to know.

At the very least, Scott Brown is claiming credit for something that others accomplished.  In the working world of engineers, having your boss take credit for your work is a pretty obnoxious thing for your boss to do.  When I had engineers reporting to me, I was extremely careful to give credit to the people who deserved the credit.  If something was accomplished by an engineer reporting to me, I thought that would reflect well enough on my management, that I had no need to claim credit for the work myself.

If I felt upper management was attributing work to me that was actually achieved by someone reporting to me, I went out of my way to disabuse upper management from their mistaken notion.  In one instance, that might have been instrumental in keeping someone who was worth keeping instead of potentially letting him look for a job elsewhere.

If I couldn’t keep my job based on the work that I did, then I was not worth keeping.  I felt confident enough never to have to work in a place where I wasn’t wanted.

While I am catching up with my postings on the Democratic National Convention, I really ought to post the most important speech of the convention. As President Obama has begun to call him, Bill Clinton is the administration’s Secretary for Explaining Stuff.

If there is one word of this speech to remember, it is “Arithmetic”.

I was mystified at some of the negative reaction I read about Elizabeth Warren’s DNC speech in the ensuing days afterwards. I was wondering if these people watched the same convention that I did.

Here is a little mix-tape put together by the campaign about the reaction on the night of the speech. Apparently at the time of the speech, the commentary was not all that bad.

If you want to see for yourself, look at my previous post Elizabeth Warren’s DNC Speech.

As I said there, since I watch these events on C-SPAN, I don’t get the displeasure of hearing the words of the commentariat class. If I must hear those words at all, then it is much better to hear them in a context that won’t set my blood to boil.