State Senator Stephen M. Brewer represents my town in the Senate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  He is Chair of the Senate committee on Ways and Means.  As such, he has been a counterweight to some of the investments that our Governor Deval Patrick has wanted to make in transportation infrastructure in our state.  I sent him a note about a “very difficult decision” he is going to be making about his political future.

I sent the note using Senator Brewer’s contact web page.

I understand that you are making a “very difficult decision” about politics in the next month.  If it has to do with running for reelection, then I must ask you to please consider how strongly you can back Progressive Democratic principles in your next term.

The next Democratic governor is going to need strong support from the Democratic legislative leaders of the state.  If you feel that you must be a counterweight to the initiatives of our next governor, then I strongly urge you to consider retirement.

It is time to turn the reins of power to someone looking toward the future of this state, not its past.

Feel free to communicate your thoughts to Senator Brewer, no matter what they may be.

The Think Progress article Democratic Members Of Congress Slam Obama For Massive Cave To Republicans On Judges starts off with the following:

Last November, Senate Democrats invoked a procedural maneuver that allowed them to confirm judicial nominees by a simple majority vote, thus cutting off the GOP’s ability to maintain control over a key federal appeals court by simply refusing to permit anyone to be confirmed. So it’s a bit odd that, just over a month after Senate Republicans effectively lost their ability to veto nominees from the minority. President Obama decided to outsource selecting nominees to most of the open judicial seats in Georgia to two Republican senators.

Read the article to find out why the Republicans want President Obama to talk to them more often.  I’ll give you a hint. Whenever he does talk to them, he sells the rest of us down the river.  On the other hand, maybe this is the kind of deal that made Harry Reid decide he needed to use the “nuclear option” to stop our President from doing his style of bi-partisan negotiation.

The Real News Network in the post Is This The Dumbest Talking Point Ever? has highlighted the video below.

Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and other Republicans are calling the extension of unemployment benefits a game of politics by Democrats, who actually want to distract from the rocky rollout of Obamacare. Politicians playing politics? The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

The Real News Network could not improve on the TYT headline, and neither can I.

The Real News Network has the story Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets: ‘The Greatest Heist You’ve Never Heard Of’. The video is actually from The New York Times and its story Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows.

One night in 1971, files were stolen from an F.B.I. office near Philadelphia. They proved that the bureau was spying on thousands of Americans. The case was unsolved, until now.

It is amazing how angry the FBI became when ordinary citizens used the same techniques as the FBI did to get their information.

The Naked Capitalism post Diagrams and Dollars: Modern Money Illustrated (Part 1) by Yves Smith  highlights the article published on New Economics Perspectives by J. D. Alt.

Quoting from Yves Smith’s introduction:

Yves here. I continue to get requests to explain Modern Monetary Theory. It isn’t easily done in a few words, but fortunately, the academics and writers associated with the New Economics Perspectives blog keep publishing primers of various sorts. This one takes a different approach in using visuals to help illustrate the difference between how most people believe the money system operates versus how it really works.

WARNING: The diagrams start out by illustrating the faulty perception of money as understood in the halls of Congress, by the main stream media, and, by infection, most of the public.

If you are going to read this article, do not stop at the explanation of the first diagram, and think that you have learned something.  You have to read further to understand what is wrong with the first 7 or so diagrams.

There is also a part 2 of the story – DIAGRAMS & DOLLARS: modern money illustrated (Part 2). Your goal should be to understand the final diagram. It is very well explained in the article.

If I have any quibble at all with the presentation toward the end it would be about the following statements in the article:

If Congress runs a “budget surplus” for long, the Private Sector will either have to diminish its economic activity in general (go into recession)—or plunge hopelessly into debt (borrowing bank money it can’t repay, possibly causing a banking crisis)—or both.

This sentence could be enhanced by admitting to the possibility of deflation as another alternative. In fact, the problem is that deflation alone won’t occur for reasons that can be discussed. Deflation will happen in concert with recession and borrowing. If we could create deflation without the other two, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for the PS pot as a whole.

We might have to talk about the PS pot in terms of the sectors within the PS pot and the transfers among them that is implied by any particular set of government policies. Deflation transfers wealth from borrowers to savers. Inflation transfers wealth from savers to borrowers.