Here is Rachel Maddow expressing her outrage.

To single out President Obama from all previous Presidents who sent similar cards is not racist, I assure you. If you can’t believe Faux Noise, who can you believe?

In The Progressive magazine article An Interview with Elizabeth Warren, there is a segment I want to emphasize.

Q: You have an amazing anecdote in The Two-Income Trap about Hillary Clinton and the bankruptcy bill, which she called “that awful bill” and opposed when her husband was President but voted for in 2001, though it didn’t pass then.

Warren: I give Hillary Clinton a lot of credit. When she was First Lady, I sat down with her in a hotel in Boston. I had all these graphs and charts, and she was crunching through a hamburger, listening, and asking a lot of questions, and she really got it. At first, she was resistant. After all, the White House was quietly supporting the banks’ bankruptcy bill. But boy, by about the third or fourth slide she was starting to say, “Oh,” and she could jump ahead. She got it.

Someone later told me there were skid marks on the floor in the White House from people reversing position on that bankruptcy bill when Hillary Clinton got back from Boston.

Q: And then those skid marks turned the other way again when she went to the Senate and soon thereafter voted for a similar bill.

Warren: That was the interesting thing. She stayed in the same place so long as she was in the White House. I believe that Mrs. Clinton was responsible for President Clinton’s veto of that bankruptcy bill. Ultimately, Congress passed the bill again in 2005 and George Bush signed it into law. But in that five-year period in between, eight million families went through the bankruptcy system, while the law was still intact. So the veto was important, and I believe she was the cause. And that’s what’s so disheartening. She changed her vote in the Senate. If Hillary Clinton, one of the strongest, most independent politicians of her generation, felt that she needed to conform her voting to the desires of the banking industry once she held elective office, what hope is there for the rest of the politicians?

This same anecdote is discussed starting at 56:35 in the video in the previous post Elizabeth Warren – The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.

The lesson Elizabeth Warren gave to Hillary Clinton was the explanation of how bad the bankruptcy bill was.

The lesson Hillary Clinton gave to Elizabeth Warren is that even if you understand the horrors of the bill and you convinced President Clinton to veto it, you may still eventually give in to the lobbying pressures once you become a Senator.

I would love to hear Elizabeth Warren’s plan to resist this pressure when she becomes the Senator from Massachusetts.  Unfortunately President George H. W. Bush made the “Read my lips” assurance null and void.   I have no idea what plan Elizabeth Warren could have to make sure she does not succumb.

There is still some technical jargon in this discussion. Is there anything in here that Elizabeth Warren says that you cannot understand? Let’s get it out on the table.

As part of my Elizabeth Warren research, I came across the video below.  See if you can detect Elizabeth Warren going easy on the Obama administration’s handling of the bailouts.

Is this why Tim Geithner opposed making Elizabeth Warren head of the Financial Consumer Protection Bureau?

Would you want this woman in the Senate asking probing questions about where our tax dollars are going?

Imagine me putting on my best Andy Rooney impersonation (if I had one).

Why is it that Newt Gingrich can run around miseducating people with his cockamamie theories of history, governance, and economics? He can brag about being an historian and professor of history who wouldn’t know an historical fact if he fell over one? Given this, the people of his party just love him. If it weren’t for his corruption and other peccadilloes, he might be running away with the race for nomination as Republican candidate for President.

At the same time, Elizabeth Warren’s opposition gets away with casting being a Harvard Professor who actually knows about the financial problems of this country as being something to apologize for. Whereas Gingrich has been wrong about almost every policy proposal he has ever put forth, Elizabeth Warren correctly predicted the economic collapse and the nature that it would take at least 5 years before it happened.

Do the Republicans know something about defending their position despite attacks from the opposition that Democrats never seem to learn?

I might as well put on my own blog some of the things I have been posting on Elizabeth Warren’s Facebook Page.

With regard to the hit piece broadcast on NPR, Mass. Senate Race A Battle Over Who’s More Populist : NPR, I commented as follows:

What can you expect of NPR? To get their money from Congress they have been moving rightward for years.

What bothers me about the Warren campaign is that they are trying to fight Brown on his turf of hard luck. She made that pitch, and now she should move on.

The two videos I posted are her best arguments for why she should be our Senator, not Scott Brown, yet the campaign refuses to use them. I even told Elizabeth Warren at a party in Westborough that she should highlight these videos on her website. She said she would speak to her staff about the idea which sounded good to her.

I gave up waiting, and posted the videos myself.

I think Warren’s professional political advisers are not serving her well.

As I mentioned in one of the comments about the videos, she actually predicted in 2004 how the economy would collapse. Even most of her fervent admirers are unaware of her foresight. And yet, her campaign won’t use this potent information.

I cannot blame NPR for that. She has evidence to disprove everything they say, but she won’t use it.

It is up to her supporters to insist that she play her best game. The one she knows in her gut she needs to play, but bad advice is stopping her from doing it. Do we have to Occupy Elizabeth Warren Campaign to change this?

When I posted the video of The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class, I added the comment:

Do you suppose that Scott Brown has a clue as to what Elizabeth Warren is talking about in this video?

When I posted the video of Elizabeth Warren – The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, I added the comment:

If you watch the video, you can see Warren in 2004 predict the collapse of the economy. Did Scott Brown have the foresight to predict this while Bush was still in office? Does Elizabeth Warren therefor have a better chance of knowing how to fix what is wrong than Scott Brown?

Another post I made was:

Some middle class people are willing to give up their lives for their country to fight wars in Iran and Afghanistan.

If a rich person taking in $90,000 a month in income won’t consent to paying an extra $200 a month to support our country’s needs, what does that say about the patriotism of the rich? This is what the House Republican Tea Party is fighting over.

At least Scott Brown finally has the guts to recognize the injustice of one thing his party is fighting for. Even he is urging the House to come to its collective senses.

Another post was:

One of the things that most politicians, at least progressive ones, seem to forget is that the most important job of a politician is to educate the voters on the crucial matters that the country faces.

If through this education process, they have a large majority of the voters backing the solutions that they want to implement, then the electorate will be inoculated against the crazy propaganda that will be used to stop their efforts to solve the country’s problems in ways the 1% don’t like.

Obama has failed miserably in this. He has gone into the fight with the Republicans, but has left all his troops at home.

With Elizabeth Warren’s background and all the research, book writing, and lecturing she has done on the economic ills of this country, I figured shoe was perfectly equipped to do the job most progressive politicians fail to do. This is why I was in favor of her run for Senate even before she knew she wanted to do it.

It is frustrating for me to watch her at a gathering where people are anxiously trying to explain to her the economic problems they face when she knows far more about what has been done to them to cause their problems than even they know.

So when Elizabeth Warrren fails to use this information that she has been talking about for years, I am completely dumbfounded.

She must remember that not only does she have to win this election, but she has to be an effective Senator when she wins. Educating the public is part of the job she must do in order to be able to help govern effectively.

Somehow the professional political advisers know all about winning elections, but seem to know nothing about laying the intellectual foundations for governing effectively.

Why else would they have prevented her from explaining what intellectual foundation she laid so that the OWS would know what they needed to fight against.

One of the things I have not posted yet is the wish that she would use a polished version of the following sound bite:

It is not because I am a Harvard Professor that I understand the economic forces working against the middle class. It is because I have researched, written, and lectured about the economic forces working against the middle class, that I am qualified to be a Harvard Professor.

Well, I just posted it.

This is an excerpt that tries to give you the heart of the 1 hour interview presented in my previous post Elizabeth Warren – The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.

If you don’t think you have the time to watch the full hour interview, you will at least get something out of this less than 3 minute excerpt.

After watching this excerpt, you may suddenly discover that you can find somewhere in your schedule the hour to devote to listening to the full interview.

Here is the description that goes along with the YouTube video below:

Elizabeth Warren discusses how the dreams of the middle class american family are being depleted by the dramatic increase in bankruptcies and foreclosures. Warren discusses the role that credit card companies and ballooning interests rates have played in rapidly increasing mortgage rates as well as the how the over consumption myth is clouding our understanding of the average middle class family, who is in fact experiencing a lower standard of living than their parents and still finding themselves one payment away from losing their home.

Remember the interview occurred in 2004. The prescience of some of the things that Warren predicts is just amazing.

I have previously posted a lecture Elizabeth Warren gave about another of her books, The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class. As I listened to this interview, I recognized a lot of the same material. However, because of the interview nature instead of lecture there are aspects that come out that are new ans surprising.

Whenever I think I know all of the good things about Elizabeth Warren that make me want her as my Senator, I stumble across something new that makes her even better.

This is an hour interview, although you can skip the commercials, but please stay for the final anecdote that she tells about Hillary Clinton and her. It is amusing, shocking, and perhaps terribly foreboding about the future.

The Talking Points Memo article Watch GOPer Literally Walk Out On Dem Attempt To Push Payroll Tax Cut has some context and a partial transcript for the video below.

You don’t suppose that this video clip will appear in some Democratic campaign ad, do you?

I really appreciate the Republicans’ giving us this photo op and at the same time saving us from having to accept the Keystone-XL pipeline deal.

It is not often the Republicans give us two good outcomes from one stupid behavior.

The article Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us by Jonah Lehrer was brought to my attention by reader RichardH. The take away from the article is:

And yet, we must never forget that our causal beliefs are defined by their limitations. For too long, we’ve pretended that the old problem of causality can be cured by our shiny new knowledge. If only we devote more resources to research or dissect the system at a more fundamental level or search for ever more subtle correlations, we can discover how it all works. But a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot. And this is why, even when we know everything about everything, we’ll still be telling stories about why it happened. It’s mystery all the way down.

I find the title of the article to be way overblown, but the story the article tells is worthwhile.  The article focuses on medical research.  However, as I read it, I  kept thinking of the investing world.  The Nightly Business Report on PBS is typical of all business reporting.  When the stock market has a big move (or no move at all), they come up with specific stories as to what made the market move the way it did (or didn’t).  These stories are mostly fantasies made to explain the cause and effect that is really almost totally unknown.  To quote the article again:

We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts.

In the previous post Mike Capuano: The Pragmatic Reformer, I mentioned the lessons learned from the books “How We Decide“, by Jonah Lehrer and  “Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable“, by Nicholas Taleb.  Jonah Lehrer is the author of the article that is the subject of this post.  In Nicholas Taleb’s book, he takes pains to warn us that when we are describing the facts of what happened we may be on safe ground, but when we descend into explanations of why it happened, we are more like being on thin ice.

In rereading my comments on How We Decide I notice the irony of Jonah Lehrer falling victim to just the problem he is highlighting in the article Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us