Here is a video of Scott Brown mentioning his model for an excellent Supreme Court Justice.

How come Clarence Thomas doesn’t get the respect he deserves?

That said, now you have another reason not to vote for Scott Brown for Senator. There will be Supreme court vacancies in the 6 year tenure of the next Senator from Massachusetts. I know I’d much rather have Elizabeth Warren voting on these choices instead of Scott Brown.

Apparently the rest of the world went to a different debate from the one that Sharon and I saw. I guess it turned out much better than the one we saw (at least half of) by sitting in some place that we thought was the Tsongas Center in Lowell. Coincidentally, there were 5,000 in the audience where we were, too.

If you have not seen the debate, at least the first 33 minutes of it, don’t bother. Just take Andy Hiller’s word for how it turned out.

If you saw the movie The Fighter about the boxer Mickey Ward from Lowell and you saw the endorsement of Elizabeth Warren from a coach at the gym where Ward learned to box and continued to train, then maybe you come away with an understanding of the Warren strategy. According to the movie, Ward won a lot of fights by just standing there and taking such a terrific beating that his opponents wore themselves out delivering the beating. When Ward delivered the knockout punch, they had no energy left to defend themselves.

Well, I have seen Warren take beating after beating. I am just hoping that Brown is wearing himself out so that he won’t be ready when she finally punches back.

I suppose I am like most of the people portrayed in the movie who thought Ward was nuts to use this strategy, but it all worked out in the end. Here is hoping life follows art.

NECN had coverage of the pre-debate festivities in Lowell in the article Brown, Warren supporters convene in Lowell, Mass.

Steve Greenberg, a Warren supporter from Sturbridge, Mass. said, “I hope they get back onto the issues and not the silly side show, but I don’t know, but I think Elizabeth will be prepared to handle anything that gets thrown her way.”

They left out the part where I told them that Elizabeth Warren predicted exactly how the housing bubble would burst several years before it happened. I told them that she understands how this all happened far better than Scott Brown ever would. They chose to leave that out and instead quoted a person who said that she didn’t think Elizabeth Warren understands the middle class.

As proof of Elizabeth Warren’s understanding the middle class, read her book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi (Aug 17, 2004) .

If you are in the middle class and read this book you will find out information on how you got into the predicament you are in that you might never have seen expressed quite so well.

As the debate turned out, I am embarrassed by my remarks that did make it on air.

This is the poster we are taking with us to the debate in Lowell tonight.  We won’t bring it into the arena, but will be standing in front of the arena for a few hours before the debate.

You can use this poster where ever you find it appropriate.

The Boston Globe has the article Banks’ Record-Low Interest Rates Frustrate Nation’s Savers on its front page today.

Neil Silverman, a Framingham engineer, diligently saved for decades, accumulating a nest egg worth more than $1 million.

But when Silverman reached retirement age, he encountered an unexpected hurdle: interest rates so low that his savings are generating little income. Even $1 million in the bank at 1 percent interest yields just $10,000 a year — not much to live on.

In my reaction that I posted on the web site of The Boston Globe, I said:

What is a retiree with over $1million  nest egg doing investing in CDs?  With high quality companies with decades long records of paying increasing dividends now paying at rates from 3 to 5%, that $1million could bring in $50,000.  Along with Social security, Silverman could be taking in $70,000 per year, and the increasing dividends would also lead to capital gains.

Just shows that the idea of people taking care of their own retirement investments is not such a good idea even for people as smart as a retired engineer.

I am a retired engineer also.  My nest egg is almost back to pre-2009 levels and I have been living off the income from this nest egg for over 6 years.

They say that the worst thing that can happen to your retirement savings is to have a severe loss of value in the first years of your retirement.  Well, that is exactly what happened to me.  However, my diversified portfolio of high quality, dividend paying stocks has kept my income at a comfortable level quite independent of the current market value of my stocks.

Maybe the Globe could do all retirees a favor by researching and then explaining how this type of strategy works.  I’d be glad to help the Globe, if they were interested.

Since the subject of the article lives in Framingham, maybe I should have mentioned my cousin in Framingham who could do an excellent job of explaining the investment strategy that I mentioned.  He is a better practitioner of that strategy than I am, and I am doing well enough with the strategy to be satisfied.

The New York Times has the David Brooks column The Conservative Mind.

… there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now. This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government.

Who could argue with the definition of a political philosophy like that?  If you want to label that a style of conservatism, then it is one to which I could subscribe.

Later on, he comments,

The two conservative tendencies lived in tension. But together they embodied a truth that was put into words by the child psychologist John Bowlby, that life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.

That really describes something that I believe.  I get frustrated with the really radical left that wants to throw everything out and start again from scratch.  No system is perfect, but my hope is that a system can be improved to become nearer to perfection.  If you have something that has worked pretty well for hundreds of years, you are taking a mighty big risk to throw the whole thing out and think you can replace it with something better.  I don’t say for sure that it can’t be done, but at this point I don’t think it is worth the risk.  At some point in the future things might get so bad that it does become worth the risk.  Let us hope that the people currently driving it in the race to the bottom for the middle-class some how wake up and realize to what their drive will ultimately lead.

Thanks to RogerS for the link that lead to my initial reading of the article.  And thanks to RichardH for urging me to get off my duff and post this.

I wish there were a G rated version of this, but it is too good to pass up if you are willing to put up with the language.

From wtfu2012.com there is this partial transcript:

Sorry my friends but there’s no time to snore

An out-of-touch millionaire has just declared war

On schools, the environment, unions, fair pay

We’re all on our own if Romney has his way…

This is all sponsored by the Jewish Council for Education and Research.

Thanks to JimG for bringing this video to my attention.

One of the things that I frequently hear is that “I work so hard, that I just don’t have the time.” Also, “I have to work two jobs to keep my head above water, so I don’t have the time.”

I understand that problem, and I have no immediate solution for the people suffering this problem. I know it doesn’t help to notice that making people work this hard to make ends meet is a great way to keep them from being politically active and demanding their rights. If you look down the road to where this spiral is taking us, you might see that when it gets so bad that people have nothing else to lose, then they will find time to get active. Right now, people think they might be able to save something of the American dream, and don’t want to risk getting off the treadmill to protest.

The Daily Kos has the article, Romney to teacher “I didn’t ask you a question”.

The Daily Kos article provided the transcript:

When I was asked to speak with Mitt Romney it seemed like a very important thing to me, and I wanted to put a lot of careful thought into what I would say. So, I went to the round table discussion very optimistic and interested in hearing what he had to say.

When he sat down, one of the first questions he asked was, he said “I understand there is a teacher here today, which one of you is a teacher?”

So, I raised my hand, thinking that’s a good thing, he’s interested in education, but it wasn’t a good thing. I felt like his view was a little old-fashioned and I was surprised by it. He went on to kind of lecture me about schools and how bad they are. He talked bad about the teacher’s union. He was talking about the importance of private schools and voucher systems.

At one point, I said to him, “I have an answer for that.” And he said, “I didn’t ask you a question.”

Perhaps the lack of listening skills shown here explains why Mitt Romney thinks jet airplanes should have roll down windows. I’ll provide a link to the roll down windows brouhaha when and if I can find a video of him making these remarks. Until then, I don’t really know if he was serious or if he was joking.

A local newspaper is quoting Scott Brown:

Brown insisted the Native American issue is not critical to his reelection strategy.

“No, no, no, but it’s certainly an issue,” he said. “The ad that we’ve run is a fair ad. It’s accurate. It’s reflective of what you all have said for months now, that she needs to come straight . . . it goes to her character.”

So it may be true as shown in the Brown ads that the media in the Boston area fell for his original tactic, hook, line, and sinker, but as the quotes below show, some in that media pool came clean themselves and started to report more deeply about the issue. Rather than just be stenographers for the politicians, writing down and repeating what they said, some in the local media started to do their own independent research into the story.  I guess Scott Brown stopped listening after he had heard confirmation of what he said by seeing his own words echoed in the local media.  Nice trick

Scott Brown: Media, you reported these stories yourself.
Media: We were only reporting what you said.

In a previous post, Warren’s extended family split about heritage, I link to an article that said:

As a teenager, Warren’s grandmother, Bethanie “Hannie” Crawford, drove a horse-drawn wagon in 1888 from her native Missouri to the Indian territory that would eventually become Oklahoma, drawn by the prospect of land and opportunity. Several of her then four siblings came with her and several more would be born in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, in the following years, according to the US Census of 1900. The Crawford sisters married the Reed brothers on the same June day in 1893, according to their marriage records. Laura and Everett had one son, Charles Reed, who was born in 1906, the year before Oklahoma became a state. He fathered one daughter, Ina Mapes.

Both the Reeds and the Crawfords are identified as “white” on federal Census forms in the early 20th century that rely upon self-identification. While that may have been a simple statement of fact, they may also have been trying to obscure their ethnicity. At the time, the federal government was attempting to break up reservations by granting land allotments to individual Native Americans, pressing them to assimilate into white society and leave their tribal ways behind. The goal, as one officer bluntly put it, was to “kill the Indian and save the man.” Those who could pass for white — or convince the census taker that they were — sometimes did.

“If someone was not white, they were a little bit less of a citizen,” said Matt Reed, the curator of the American Indian Collections at the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City, whose mother was a Pawnee Indian. “If you had darker skin, you were a lesser human. So, if your skin was light enough to pass as not being Indian, then you just passed as white and your life was a lot better off. A lot more people did that than you might think.”
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Robert C. Boraker, a retired journalist and amateur genealogist who said he is Warren’s fourth cousin — their great-great-grandfathers were brothers — said his father often told him that his grandmother, a Crawford, was one-eighth Indian. “It was Cherokee blood,” said Boraker, who lives in St. Albans, England, and publishes a family newsletter that includes the Crawford line. “There was no documentation, but it was what we knew, what we were told.”

Warren’s brother David, eight years her senior, calls the public controversy over the subject “a bunch of baloney.” He remembers relatives cautioning him when he played cowboys and Indians as a child. “My aunts said, ‘Be careful shooting the Indians because some of them are your relatives.’ ” But most shied away from the subject of the family’s heritage, Herring added, because “it wasn’t something you were proud of.”
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At the Northwest Classen High School in Oklahoma City that Warren attended, many students had been told stories about their Native American relatives just as Warren said she had . Garrick Bailey, professor of anthropology at the University of Tulsa, who attended school in Oklahoma City in the 1950s, estimates that as many as 50 percent of the students at Classen possibly had Native American blood, based on an informal census taken at his own school.

Bob Hammack was one of them. A member of the class of 1966 along with Warren, Hammack said he is one-16th Cherokee and his wife is one-16th Apache.

His Cherokee grandmother never enrolled, he said, “because she and others were afraid if they gave their name they would be shot.”

Scott Brown must realize that Elizabeth Warren is far more qualified to be a US Senator than he is. That must be why he keeps trying to distract us with non-issues.

Still, if Elizabeth Warren has to keep assuring us that she knows what is important in this campaign, she can do a good job of it, as shown in the video below.

Elizabeth Warren sets the record straight about her family’s Native American heritage.

Elizabeth Warren may have had her struggles growing up, but she seems to have overcome them nicely. Scott Brown, according to his own biography, suffered with an abusive family. Perhaps that is why he is so suspicious of any authority figures. He is so unable to imagine a nurturing family, that he doesn’t see the good a family, or a community, or a government can do. Or maybe his issue is that he never grew up in a family where he felt he could trust what adults told him. Maybe that is why he cannot believe that when Elizabeth Warren’s parents told her about the family history, she didn’t ask for proof.

I know two cases don’t make a scientific study, but I have seen another case of an adult male having suffered an abusive father. This other adult male also seems to have the same attitudes as Scott Brown about people banding together in their government to accomplish something for the good of society. They just seem so suspicious that anybody would want to do something good for anybody else.

I feel sorry for Scott Brown having to suffer his affliction, but that doesn’t mean we have to allow him to foist his problems on us by his insisting on government policies that punish us. That won’t help him, and it surely won’t help us.