I just came back from a house party in Worcester for Maura Healey.  Jacquelyn Wells already has some pictures posted on Facebook.

I was inclined to vote for Maura Healey because I knew of her experience in the Attorney General’s office, and because I am not so deep into Massachusetts politics that I knew much about her opponent.  Since I had been so focused on the Governor’s race up till now, I decided it was time to find out more about the candidates for the other offices.  So I jumped at the chance to meet a candidate for Attorney General when Jacquelyn invited me.

I must say that I was duly impressed by Maura Healey.  She had a depth of experience and firm convictions on a wide range of issues that the Attorney General could influence – and there aren’t many issues that the Attorney General does not get involved in.  Not only  does she have experience as an individual lawyer, but she has the experience of managing about half the staff in the current Attorney General’s office.  She has a lot of energy and a lot of issues that she wants to tackle.  As an experienced manager, she knows that she doesn’t do this all by herself.  She has resources that she manages to accomplish the goals she has set forth.

I didn’t find it necessary to push myself to get to talk to her personally, and  the questions I had prepared were already adequately answered.  However, she came over to me to introduce herself and ask me about myself.  We had a very good conversation.

One of the points that I made was that frequently politicians forget that a very important part of their job is to bring the voter along with her on issues where some explaining needed to be done to get people to understand the value in whatever goal she was trying to accomplish.  I was impressed by the way she had spoken to us indicating the fact that she seemed to get this concept very well.  In our one-on-one conversation, she mentioned that one way she would work with the legislature, for instance, was to first go to the public, and then have the public exert the influence on the legislature to get something done.  In a way, the public would give the politician cover to make it politically safe to do the right thing. She also pointed out in her fight to overturn the Defense Of Marriage Act, this process of moving public sentiment was one of the keys to success.

It was at that point, that I knew for sure that she really got it.  I made the same type of judgment about Elizabeth Warren, and I am very happy with the way that turned out.  With Maura Healey as Attorney General, a strong, progressive governor,  and a strong, progressive Congressional delegation, Massachusetts has the prospect of helping to turn this country around for the better.

The Hill has the article GOP: Send Benghazi suspect to Gitmo.

Now that we seem to have captured a suspect in the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, we have insane reactions from Republicans. I’ll give you the most temperate comment I have heard from a certain gang of clowns in our Congress. This is Lindsey Graham being quoted.

Graham urged that the military be allowed to interrogate him before he was read Miranda rights.

“We should have some quality time with this guy, weeks and months,” said Graham. “Don’t torture him, but have some quality time with him.”

What are we to make of calls to send him to the torture chamber, but just don’t torture him. Why is Lindsey Graham so afraid of what could happen in the regular “Justice” system?

How far do we have to travel down this road before the citizens of this country can rise up and make their voices heard that such talk by a politician will just not be tolerated come election time?

Some people might respond to my blog post that nobody suspected of doing what this detainee is suspected of doing should be protected by the once cherished principles of our law. These people will be giving sad testimony to how far we have already traveled down the road to utter depravity.

If we don’t start making it perfectly clear that such talk is not acceptable in this country, it might be too late when we finally do wake up to the danger.

The Real News Network has the interview video ISIS Born from Occupation of Iraq, not Syrian Civil War.

VIJAY PRASHAD, EDWARD SAID CHAIR, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT:
Well, ISIS has had a major breakthrough this week. It took, of course, Mosul, came down south of the Tigris, took Tikrit, which is the hometown of Saddam Hussein and therefore very significant to the three organizations that are working together–ISIS, the Military Council, which is made up of former Iraqi army people, and then the Naqshbandi movement, which is led by a former deputy of Saddam Hussein, Izzat al-Douri. So these three organizations–the Baathists, Iraqi military forces, and ISIS–have taken a vast amount of Iraq in a very short time. But mainly it had been in the north-south axis from Mosul down to near Samarra.

Now they have moved westward. They’ve taken Tal Afar. They’ve already taken small roads that go toward Syria. But the Tal Afar capture has opened a corridor for them that will take them to the major eastern city in Syria of Deir ez-Zor, and from there, of course, right to Raqqah, which is the first major city in Syria that the ISIS organization had taken. So now we have from the borders of Aleppo–major city in Syria–all the way out to Mosul, we have a banner area, a kind of–we have, like, a belt controlled by the group ISIS, helped along in Iraq by former Baathists and former Iraqi military personnel.

Whether you believe Vijay Prashad or not, could his analysis be any worse than that of John McCain and Lindsey Graham? See my previous post Mess O’Potamia – Now That’s What I Call Being Completely F**king Wrong About Iraq.

Maybe Jon Stewart can get through to our Lame Stream Media and to the public for which it stands.

Have they no shame at all?

The Real News Network has the concluding segment Ugly Money Politics – Robert Johnson on Reality Asserts Itself (8/8) in its series. My previous blog post Reality Asserts Itself – Robert Johnson covers the first 7 segments.

The first topic is the problems with the city of Detroit.

Well, in particular in Detroit there are always–I mean, there are many factors in Detroit, demographic decline in the aftermath of the ’67 riots, long periods of white flight, etc. But going back to your perspective on finance, what sends them over the waterfall are very, very large, questionable derivatives trades guaranteeing what are called certificates of obligation that lead to penalties.
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What you’ve seen since the crisis of 2008 is federal cutbacks to state and local governments, which causes the states to, how you say, tighten their belts and cut off the cities or diminish transfers to the city. You then see diminished income tax revenue, sales tax revenue, and property tax revenue associated with the slump. So you go into a budget crisis and you tend to, quote, underprovision for the pension. The annual required contribution is not made. As the funded assets fall in relation to the value of obligations, the tendency is to throw the Hail Mary pass, reach out to higher-yield investments. But that despair is what makes what you might call the temptation to resort to things that turn out to be frauds or, how you say, too good to be true more and more prevalent, which tends deepen the losses.

My point in choosing the above excerpts is to drive home the point of how the financial collapse has drive the federal government to lower aid to the states and localities, and this has driven these entities to either cut back or go bankrupt, or even fall victim to the financial fraud that started it all.

People who don’t understand this path to ruin are often led to believe that it is the fault of the innocent pensioners that the city cannot pay their pensions anymore.

The Real News Network has the interview Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (1/3).  For those with an aversion to Chris Hedges, there is very little of him in this video.  It is mostly Noam Chomsky.

The first–it partly was government. The first government commission was the British Ministry of Information. This is long before Orwell–he didn’t have to invent it. So the Ministry of Information had as its goal to control the minds of the people of the world, but particularly the minds of American intellectuals, for a very good reason: they knew that if they can delude American intellectuals into supporting British policy, they could be very effective in imposing that on the population of the United States. The British, of course, were desperate to get the Americans into the war with a pacifist population. Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election with the slogan “Peace without Victory”. And they had to drive a pacifist population into a population that bitterly hated all things German, wanted to tear the Germans apart. The Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn’t play Beethoven. You know. And they succeeded.

Wilson set up a counterpart to the Ministry of Information called the Committee on Public Information. You know, again, you can guess what it was. And they’ve at least felt, probably correctly, that they had succeeded in carrying out this massive change of opinion on the part of the population and driving the pacifist population into, you know, warmongering fanatics.

And the people on the commission learned a lesson. One of them was Edward Bernays, who went on to found–the main guru of the public relations industry. Another one was Walter Lippman, who was the leading progressive intellectual of the 20th century. And they both drew the same lessons, and said so.

The lessons were that we have what Lippmann called a “new art” in democracy, “manufacturing consent”. That’s where Ed Herman and I took the phrase from. For Bernays it was “engineering of consent”. The conception was that the intelligent minority, who of course is us, have to make sure that we can run the affairs of public affairs, affairs of state, the economy, and so on. We’re the only ones capable of doing it, of course. And we have to be–I’m quoting–“free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd”, the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders”–the general public. They have a role. Their role is to be “spectators”, not participants. And every couple of years they’re permitted to choose among one of the “responsible men”, us.

I have been listening to Noam Chomsky for years now.  For most of that time I thought of him as an over the top old crank.  Lately, I have begun to see how much closer to reality he was than I was when I used to think about him the way I did.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I now realize that I have bought a new exercise machine that I can and do use for hours on end.

Yesterday, I had it loaded up with about 480 pounds of people (including myself) and I was the pusher. My calves are really feeling it today. We walked our standard walk about 2% faster today.

Naked Capitalism has reprinted the story Central Banks Goose Stock Markets.

China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange has become “the world’s largest public sector holder of equities”, according to officials quoted by Omfif. “In a new development, it appears that PBoC itself has been directly buying minority equity stakes in important European companies,” Omfif adds.

You didn’t really think they would hold their foreign reserves in a way that bore no interest and no control in other countries, did you?

Of course, there are well founded fears that such intervention, including massive growth in reserves, has led to such a benign period of volatility and the expectation of continued price appreciation is cooking “the goose” that laid the golden egg.

In Europe, two years of stimulus from the ECB has pushed the various bourses to record valuations, as measured by the price-to-earnings ratio, which is also pushing the boundaries of delusion when it comes to chasing yield.

This is the sort of thing that makes me worry about the stock market. I am a follower of Investment Quality Trends which uses the history of dividend yields for each stock it tracks to judge the value of the stock at the moment.

I keep oscillating between two thoughts about IQT and the current market. First, I wonder if the measures that IQT uses need to be adjusted because we have entered a new age of yield environment. An historically low yield might undervalue a stock in today’s environment. Then I say to myself, this time it is not different. The yield environment will return to normal sooner or later, and it will have been wise for IQT to stay with the longer term historical record.

With so few undervalued stocks in the IQT universe of stocks it considers, I have taken to having about twice as much in ultra-liquid investments in my portfolio as I have had historically. Even though I have felt I have had more cash in my portfolio in recent years than I would ultimately want, it is now double the rate it has been since I retired. By the conventional wisdom, I probably have less cash and liquid assets than the normal investor my age would have. The level of cash is just high for me.

This is not investment advice. Keep in mind that two stocks I sold recently because of more than 8 quarters without a dividend increase have jumped over 5% in a single day since I sold them. (That does not change my mind that I did the right thing. You may have a different opinion, and you may very well be right.)

The Daily Show has an extended interview titled in many other places as Jon Stewart Makes Tim Geithner Squirm Through Extended Interview.

The above link will take you to the extended 40 or so minute interview. Comedy Central only allows the embedding of pieces, so I will just embed part 1 below. If you use the link above, you won’t have to watch it a piece at a time.

Jon Stewart made a valiant effort to get Geithner to understand where the Obama administration failed despite the fact of all that the Obama administration accomplished. Geithner stuck tenaciously to the point of all that the administration achieved despite the many things it failed to do.

The argument at the very end was around whether or not the administration could have done more than it did. Geithner stuck to his perception that their were insurmountable roadblocks to their having done more.

The points that Jon Stewart failed to make that would have got this discussion unstuck are the points I have tried to make many times on this blog.

Whether or not the Obama administration could ever have gotten more support from the Congress than they had at the time, they did nothing that would make the voters understand that it was the Congress that needed to be changed. From this failure of the administration, they lost control of the House of Representatives in 2010 and they failed to restore the super-majority of 60/40 that they needed in the Senate to overcome the filibuster.

Jon Stewart and Timothy Geithner kept going around and around in circles about perceptions. The fact remains that the Obama administration put very little effort in changing the perceptions. They failed to take into account how important it was to get the perceptions right. Even more important than winning a single battle with the Republicans, and they did not even win a single battle with the Republicans after all the effort they put in on just this one tactical objective.

Jon Stewart could have asked Geithner why he wrote a book to justify the administration’s failures rather than to promote the efforts to undo the damage that was allowed to happen? That damage is still going on, and Geithner is doing nothing to change it. Six years later, Jon Stewart has to drag it out of him that there were insurmountable roadblocks. Could they have explained that to the American people six years ago, and possibly gotten some help over those roadblocks?

Contrast his current efforts with those of Elizabeth Warren. She is trying with all her might to accomplish the parts the Obama administration failed to accomplish and that administration is still failing to accomplish.

The point about the Obama administration is still failing to accomplish the goals that Geithner agreed should have been the goals is something that Jon Stewart should have hung on Obama.

The Real News Network has featured the video Banned Interview with President George W. Bush on Iraq Invasion.

This is a good time to take a look back in history. One of the many problems with Bush’s theory is the claim that the UN told Hussein to disarm and he refused and hid his weapons. In fact Hussein did allow for inspections and did tell us about his weapons. We just wouldn’t believe him. Nor would we believe our own weapons inspectors.

You might find the links on the YouTube site of some value.