The Daily Kos has the article The Official Michael Brown Autopsy Report Doesn’t Say What the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Says It Does.  In the article there is a list of discrepancies between what the newspaper said the expert said and what she actually said.  I picked one which may or may not be representative.

The article claims the expert said the autopsy didn’t support witnesses who said Michael Brown was shot while running away or with his hands up. She apparently said nothing of the sort.

The Daily Kos article mentioned interviews and reports by Lawrence O’Donnell.  Rather than read second, or third hand info, I decided to look up those broadcasts. The two segments are ‘Inaccurate and misleading’ on Brown autopsy and Paper obtains official Michael Brown autopsy.  Each one of these segments may be way more than you want to listen to.  O’Donnell certainly pinpoints the issues of incompetence by reporters and newspapers.

In one of the video segments O’Donnell interviews the expert, Dr. Judy Melinek, who was so badly misquoted by the newspapers.  She does a good job of clarifying exactly what she did say and what seh didn’t say.  At first O’Donnell seems to be scrupulously separating what you can learn from an autopsy from what you can’t by getting the expert to talk about these issues.  Unfortunately toward the end, even O’Donnell wants her to say things that she cannot say from the autopsy report she was given to review.   However, if you listen to what the doctor says in answer to his questions, she just refused to play along and give him the answers he wants that are just not concusively proven by the evidence she had at her disposal.

Even though O’Donnell seems to be orders of magnitude more careful in what he says than the newspapers were, he still falls down a little.

I think this is a perfect example of how important it is to get to original sources if you want to know what was really said.  Even this expert  who reviewed the autopsy report, and is trying to be extremely cautious in what she says, is not an original source.

Vox has the article 6 reasons Elizabeth Warren should run for president.

4) What else is she going to be doing between 2015 and 2016?

If Warren were, say, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, and if Democrats controlled the House and the Senate and the presidency, then there would be a good argument that Warren could do more as a legislator than as a candidate. But Warren is, in real life, the second-most junior senator on the Banking Committee. And she’s likely to be serving in a Senate controlled by Republicans, at a time when the White House is controlled by a Democrat, and absolutely nothing is getting done.

So it’s not just that running for president could do an enormous amount to push Warren’s issues forward. It’s that hanging around the Senate isn’t going to do anything for Warren’s issues at all. It’s hard to imagine two better years to spend away from the Senate than 2015 and 2016.

This would be the most delicious irony of all time.  Elizabeth Warren is a Senator because the Republicans wouldn’t let her be the head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.  If the Republicans do manage to take over the Senate, wouldn’t it be great if this were the very factor that made Elizabeth Warren our next president?

The Boston Globe has the article Charlie Baker jumps 9 points in new Globe poll.

Baker’s standing has improved from last week’s poll, which showed the two candidates dead even. It can be attributed largely to the gains he has made in voters’ perceptions of who would improve the economy and manage state government, areas that already were tilting his way.

It only takes about 2.5 seconds for the big lie to be said. Here is the antidote to the big lie. Martha Coakley has a better jobs plan than Charlie Baker has, yet he wants to claim that she has no plan.

My October 19, 2014 post A Vision for Massachusetts shows a comparison table between Coakley and Baker that tells exactly why Coakley will be better for the state than Baker will be. Coakley has the first part of the item below, Baker is hoping for the second part. He will actively seek to give away our precious tax revenue to the wealthy, oligarchic corporations in a continuation of the Republican class warfare.

Has an economic development plan that focuses on building from the ground up, not hoping that tax breaks for businesses will trickle down.

The reason the state can’t seem to afford to do many of the positive things it needs to do is exactly the fact that we give away the tax revenues it collects as incentives to bring in corporations. Instead we need a governor who recognizes that we have many resources in our state that corporations are eager to get. We need to invest in enhancing these resources, not give away tax money so we cannot afford to have these resources. I think this principle of the Martha Coakley administration will be the key factor in stopping the race to the bottom that Charlie Baker seems to want to win.

Martha Coakley’s web site has the page on Jobs and the Economy.

Here is the suggestion I just emailed to the Martha Coakley campaign

I hope you are planning to run an ad that says,

“Martha Coakley wants to enhance what’s great about Massachusetts that makes corporations want to get in on the action.

“Charlie Baker wants to give away our tax revenues to these corporations so that we cannot afford to invest in what makes this state so attractive in the first place.

“He will end up driving away the very corporations we seek to attract and impoverish us at the same time.”

/Steve

Use this email address, office@marthacoakley.com, to reinforce my message.