New Economic Perspectives has the article The Media Fall for Hillary Clinton’s Gensler Gambit by William K. Black. While he does praise Gensler’s work during the Obama administration, he comes to the following conclusion:

Ignore the media crush on Gensler’s appointment.  As campaign CFO for H. Clinton his job is the care and feeding of the DLC’s financial base – the finance industry.  H. Clinton’s Gensler gambit is smart politics, but if you think it means she is seeking progressive advice you are being played – successfully.

You’ll have to read the article to find the details behind this conclusion.

Looking at my previous post Clinton to name former financial regulator as CFO -Bloomberg, you will see that I was almost played successfully.  However, I did show some skepticism about the appointment.  In fact, I said that I was waiting to see what William K. Black had to say about this.

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?

The US edition of The Guardian has the story Hillary Clinton: an empire of progressives strikes back.

Leftwingers hold back their endorsements for Hillary Clinton until she presents a clearer campaign ‘vision’ as the only Democrat in the running so far
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“I was not particularly impressed with it,” said Zephyr Teachout, a New York Democrat who ran for governor in 2014, warning on Twitter it was “surprisingly free of content, lacking autobiography, policy [and] vision”.

Teachout said she had not given up on the chance of more progressive candidates entering the race – or of Clinton taking a more populist approach on issues such as free trade and banking reform, on which Democratic leadership has tended to be more economically liberal in the past.
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De Blasio, who ran Clinton’s 2000 campaign, echoed the view that such pressure may help shape a bolder Clinton agenda, even without the formal entry of more radical opponents like Warren.

“Clearly what’s happening in the progressive [wing] of the Democratic party is a demand for our candidates to come forward with a vision,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “That’s creating some of the same positive pressure you see in the primary process.”

I am proud to be a part of the effort to put positive pressure on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  You wimpy progressives who immediately fell in line without making any demands can thank me later for making sure our values get represented by the Democratic nominee.

I just got an email from End Citizens United.

This weekend, more than 5O,OOO people signed our petition urging Hillary Clinton to focus on ending Citizens United in her presidential campaign.

Today in Iowa, she made it official. Hillary announced her support for a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Citizens United!

Sign your name to thank Hillary Clinton for fighting to end Citizens United:

When she does something right, we should encourage her.

I have just received an email from the town with the final results of the town election yesterday.

I have uploaded the PDF version of the results for you to read.

With only 5% of the electorate voting, and some positions having no official candidates, it is amazing what you can accomplish with a write-in campaign that was organized after the last moment.  After the last moment seemed to me to be  what it was, when I got word of it on Sunday afternoon before the Monday election.  Some of you reading this blog must have helped.

Well it was actually on Facebook, not here that I mentioned the election and the write-in.

As Hillary Clinton starts talking more and more progressive, we will be faced with the quandary of trying to figure out if she really means it, or is just saying it to get our vote.  One way to get a handle on this is to follow the money.

You can access all the candidates’ financial filings with the Federal Election Commission.  I just checked and there is no committee yet on file for Hillary Clinton’s current run for the President.  Since these reports are filed quarterly, we may not see anything until June.

I have experience analyzing this data from the 2008 campaign for President.  I think I will give it a try this year.  Recent Supreme Court rulings seem to make it easier to hide the data, so this analysis might not be as informative as it was in 2008.

You probably don’t even have to know much or any database query language to do the analysis.  However, if it is needed, I have enough experience to get along pretty well.  I also have enough disk space on my computers that this will never be a stumbling block for me.

If you are feeling left out because you don’t have a button to counter your friends’ Hillary Clinton buttons, then here is a little something you can print out and paste on a  button.

This top image is actually large, but I had the browser scale it down to fit on the page.

This bottom button is shown actual size.

Feel free to print out these images to apply to your own buttons.