Reuters “reporting” on a Bloomberg story has the article Clinton to name former financial regulator as CFO -Bloomberg.

Bloomberg cited in its report an unnamed Democrat familiar with the decision. Gensler, whose five-year term as the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ended in January 2014, came to embody President Barack Obama’s push for Wall Street reforms in the trillion-dollar derivatives market.

A one-time Goldman Sachs swaps trader, he transformed the watchdog from a relatively sleepy agriculture-focused regulator to a powerful overseer of Wall Street.

He proved a polarizing figure with his aggressive interpretation of swaps reforms after the financial crisis, irritating both Wall Street and international counterparts.

Despite, or maybe because of, his Wall Street background, he does seem to have been an effective regulator.

The WikiPedia article on Gary Gensler, has pretty high praise for him.   I checked one of the sources referred to in the article which did not expose any holes in the WikiPedia write-up.  You can tell that I am skeptical of Clinton’s appointees, so I will wait to hear what William Black has to say.  Except for just fining Barclay’s bank over the Libor scandal instead of jailing the offenders according to The New York Times article Libor Case Energizes a Wall Street Watchdog, I can’t find anything else that Elizabeth Warren would complain about.  That is a pretty big exception, and one of my major knocks against Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. I just don’t know what Elizabeth Warren or William K. Black will say about his record.  At least there is a possibility that he is really as good a guy as some people make him out to be.

Time Magazine has the article Martin O’Malley Criticizes Hillary Clinton for Flip-Flopping. I haven’t been following Martin O’Malley, and this article isn’t much to go on, but he looks promising.

“Leadership is about making the right decision, and the best decision before sometimes it becomes entirely popular,” he continued.

Clinton has adopted a more populist tone than she has in the past during her recent tour this week to Iowa, where she made her first stops on the 2016 campaign trail.

Since this is a democracy, leadership is more than just about making the right decision.  It is also an effort to make that decision popular by explaining it to people.  You may not succeed  in making it popular, but the effort to do so is important whether you succeed or not.

What I realized from this article is that Clinton may finally be coming around to my positions, but I would love to have a President that was in the vanguard of progressive ideas, not reluctantly trailing behind.  Of course, reluctantly training behind is probably better than refusing to keep up or going in the other direction.

Reuters has the article Clinton endorses Elizabeth Warren for Time magazine. Now there is a headline that I bet you never expected to see.  While it is not true, as some Clinton supporters have said, that Warren endorses Clinton, the endorsement in the other direction may be true.  Though, Warren isn’t running for any position at Time magazine.

From the Reuters article:

“She never hesitates to hold powerful people’s feet to the fire: bankers, lobbyists, senior government officials and, yes, even presidential aspirants,” Clinton, the clear front-runner to win the Democratic nomination for president, wrote in an apparent wink to herself.

The article further goes on to say:

Warren has a relatively small but vocal and politically active group of supporters, and her speeches denouncing Wall Street recklessness have sometimes been swapped enthusiastically on social media websites.

In this vein, I can imagine a Reuters story about the subject of my previous post Einstein’s Universe Turns 100.

That Einstein fellow is remembered for a few good scientific ideas that he had.

That’s Reuters for you, masters of understatement.

Ok, here’s another whopper from the Reuters article:

It was not immediately clear on Thursday how Clinton came to write the blurb for Time about Warren.

Maybe if Reuters had given you the link to the Time Magazine article, The 100 Most Influential People, you might have had an inkling of how this blurb came to be.  Although Reuters did say the following:

“Elizabeth Warren never lets us forget that the work of taming Wall Street’s irresponsible risk taking and reforming our financial system is far from finished,” Clinton wrote in Time after the magazine named Warren, a former Harvard law professor and a senator for Massachusetts, one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

So why is Reuters so surprised at how Clinton came to write this?  Is it because they never thought to ask Clinton about her opinion of Warren as Time Magazine apparently did?

NPR has the article Einstein’s Universe Turns 100. I do not know how to better convey the gravity of the situation other than to quote the starting words of the article.

One hundred years ago, a 36-year-old Albert Einstein presented the complete formulation of the General Theory of Relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Across the world, events and conferences will be celebrating what is considered, without hyperbole, the most beautiful of physical theories, marrying mathematics with physical concepts in deeply meaningful and elegant ways. Some consider it the highest intellectual achievement in history.

You can probably get a grasp on the theory if you don’t think about it too deeply. Once I start thinking about what the typical illustration of the theory really shows you, that’s when I lose my understanding, somewhat.

I really have to wonder at this illustration I chose at random from a Google search. I don’t think that ridge at the rim of the canyon belongs there. Terry Steiner, can you explain this to me?