Daily Archives: April 9, 2014


Presidential Prospect or Not, Elizabeth Warren Has a Lesson for Democrats

The Nation has the article Presidential Prospect or Not, Elizabeth Warren Has a Lesson for Democrats.

Yes, yes, Warren has said that she is not running for the Democratic nomination in 2016. And there are plenty of polls to suggest that, were she to enter the race, she would not have an easy time competing with a prospective Hillary Clinton candidacy—although, notably, Warren’s numbers rise rapidly in hypotheticals that do not feature Clinton.

But let’s put the polls aside for now.

Let’s recognize that a necessary politics does not just reflect public opinion, it anticipates concerns and answers them in bolder and better ways than pollsters and pundits can calculate. Those who would lead the nation ought to offer much more than a set of approved talking points. There must be a vision, a language, that explains the crisis, and inspires a response.

This article does a wonderful job of explaining why Warren’s speech that I posted in Elizabeth Warren’s 2014 Minnesota DFL Humphrey-Mondale Dinner Speech is so important.

We Democrats can fix it so that Hillary is not in the mix. I think I would rather lose with someone who will set up the party for an eventual ascendancy, than win with someone who will slowly let our principles be eroded until the point that there is no use for the Democratic party. However, looking on the bright side, we might actually have a better chance of winning with Warren than with Hillary.

What Obama and all the Democrats after Johnson forgot, is that it is not only a matter of winning on one small issue by finding a winning compromise, it is a matter of educating the voters and changing their minds on big issues so that the path is paved for the future. Obama seems to forget after he wins or loses today, there are many tomorrows to worry about. If you win once today, but lose 10 times in the tomorrows, then you have the wrong strategy.

We should have been working on the terms of debate 30 years ago.  You can’t say, well I guess it is too late to do it now.  If we don’t start working on changing the terms of debate the way that Warren and Sanders are doing, we’ll find ourselves 30 years down the road wishing we had done this back then.  How many generations can we waste before we finally do what is necessary to save the country?

I have to thank LlandaR for finally convincing me to read The Nation magazine.  I know I am supposed to read the Bernie Sanders article Bernie Sanders Is Thinking About Running for President, but that article is only available to subscribers.


West Looks to Carve Up Ukraine & Privatize Industries Held By Kleptocrats

The Real News Network has the interview West Looks to Carve Up Ukraine & Privatize Industries Held By Kleptocrats posted on YouTube.

Michael Hudson: The financial grab for Ukraine industries is simply war by another name, as other Eastern Europe countries have experienced similar fates.


You may or may not think that this post is the serious one that I promised in the previous post.

I am quite willing to believe that the west has the evil motives that Hudson claims. I am also willing to believe that Russia has a right to feel threatened by western actions. I am still a little skeptical that Russia’s motives are as pure as Michael Hudson may seem to imply.

It may just be a matter of deciding whose Kleptocrats are more desirable. It seems that no matter which side you choose, it is an issue of concentrating wealth in someone’s hands.


New Boston Globe Mapping Service Finds The Political Center 2

The Boston Globe has the article Governor’s race has all Democrats leaning left.  The story is on the front page of the newspaper.  I think it would have made an excellent addition to the comics pages.

Missing from this year’s crop, though, is a candidate who fills a long-running role in previous Massachusetts Democratic primaries: a prominent centrist alternative.

This is where the new Globe mapping service must come in.  They have found the center, and they can tell you who is there and who is not.

The candidates need to capture 15 percent of the delegates at the June party convention to qualify for the September primary ballot. In jockeying to obtain the minimum percentage of delegates, La Raja said, Democrats are being forced to prove their left-leaning credentials, often the case in primary races of both parties.

That must mean that the Democrats are so unified ideologically that you cannot even find 15% of the delegates who aren’t way left.  Did you ever see a group of Democrats that could be that uniform?

In 1990, the last time Democrats ran to succeed one of their own as governor, the party nominated Boston University president John Silber, who ran to the middle before losing to Republican William Weld.

If they think John Silber was toward the middle compared to William Weld, I start having doubts about the new Globe mapping system.  John Silber may have been more to the middle than Ted Cruz, but that is not saying much.

The campaign’s only self-proclaimed fiscal moderate, Wellesley biopharmaceutical executive Joseph Avellone, identifies as a social liberal and backs what he calls a revenue-neutral carbon tax long sought by environmentalists.

He is the field’s leading skeptic on other new taxes. But he trails in both public polling and delegate commitments, according to tallies maintained by other campaigns.

I don’t suppose that the fact that nobody knows who Joseph Avellone is could be responsible for why he trails.  I am pretty sure he hasn’t been out to Sturbridge.  See if you can find a picture of Avellone among all the other Democratic contenders for the governors office in the photo album 2014 SDTC Scholarship Brunch Honoring Senator Stephen Brewer.

It might help to refer to RichardH’s post on this blog Diversion–Highway Fatalities and Lemons. The Globe writers and editors could use a good dose of the debunking of the fallacy that correlation is the same as causation.

At the same time, the last decade has brought a cascade of left-leaning policy changes, from same-sex marriage to health care expansion to marijuana decriminalization.

So I guess you can call Mitt Romney left-leaning because the Massachusetts health care reform was started during his administration.  He even claimed the authorship of the idea.

“Eight years of the Patrick administration and a lot of his successes in terms of his political achievements have moved the party to a more left agenda,” said state Representative Aaron Michlewitz, a North End Democrat unaffiliated with any gubernatorial campaign. “And I think our candidates in this race are a microcosm of that.”

How could the Democrats be so ideological that they would want to propose anything that has been “successful?”  Does the Globe think you would get more votes for proposing things that have been failures.  It seems to work for Republicans on a national level.  Then again the national Republicans have the Koch brothers who have been propagandizing for these failed policies for over 30 years.  Maybe The Boston Globe is envious because it has not been as successful as the Koch brothers in gulling the people here as the Koch brothers have been almost everywhere else. You may remember that Marilyn Vos Savant once said in the pages of this newspaper that “You won’t find the word gullible in the dictionary.”

Well, enough hilarity for one day.  Maybe I’ll find something more serious to post.