This short clip is from part of Warren's speaking tour in Andover, Massachusetts. Impressed, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post had this to say about it:

Republicans are planning to paint Warren as a liberal Harvard elitist — they’re already referring to her as “Professor Warren” — because they believe that she will have trouble winning over the kind of blue collar whites from places like South Boston that helped power Scott Brown’s upset victory.

But as this video shows, Warren is very good at making the case for progressive economics in simple, down-to-earth terms. Despite her professorial background, she sounds like she’s telling a story. She came across as unapologetic and authorative, without a hint of the sort of defensiveness you hear so often from other Democrats when they talk about issues involving taxation and economic fairness. This is exactly what national Dems like about Warren.

Transcript via rumproast.

I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No!

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear.

You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.

You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.

You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.

You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.

But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

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(Gingrich suggests Ryan Medicare plan is 'right-wing social engineering')

Conservative talkie Laura Ingraham interviewed Rep. Paul Ryan the other day and she got him to side with Rick Perry's ludicrous assertion that Social Security is nothin' but a Ponzi scheme.

Speaking on conservative radio on Tuesday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) agreed with Texas Gov. Rick Perry's (R) claim that Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme."

When asked by host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday whether the country's social insurance program is a Ponzi scheme, Ryan replied, "That is how those schemes work."

Ryan: "So if you take a look at the technicality of Ponzi -- I would -- it's not a criminal enterprise," he said, according to a transcript. "But it is a pay-as-you-go system where ... earlier investors or, say, taxpayers, get a positive rate of return and the most recent investors -- or taxpayers -- get a negative rate of return."

A Ponzi scheme that's worked incredibly well since its inception back in 1935. Ryan is one of the Conservative young guns, someone they hope will articulate their vision for the future. Or, to put more realistically, he's a typical Wall Street corporate shill. His budget that was passed by House Republicans is designed to kill off Medicare by turning it into a voucher system. He hemmed and hawed responding to Ingraham, but finally agreed. I don't know why he just didn't endorse the idea immediately. So, as my pal Howie thinks. Will Perry pick Ryan to be his VP?

Right now he's playing it pretty even keeled as to who he will endorse:

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The Federal Reserve is mandated "to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates." So, unlike the GOP at least the Fed is doing the job their supposed to do.

The NYTimes reports:

The Federal Reserve announced a new plan Wednesday to stimulate growth by purchasing $400 billion in long-term Treasury securities with proceeds from the sale of short-term government debt, defying Republican demands to refrain from new actions.

In extending its campaign of novel efforts to shake the economy from its torpor, the Fed said that it was responding to evidence that there was a clear need for help.

Yes, it's a children's campaign, and poorly organized to boot. But those kids are doing something when so many people are doing nothing. (If you want to go, there's a Facebook ride board here.)

It's inevitable that Occupy Wall Street becomes less than peaceful, but it doesn't make it any easier to watch kids being knocked around by cops for remaining in the same place police corralled them. How ironic, that the cops whose jobs and pensions are being attacked are the very people arresting the ones trying to protect their jobs:

NEW YORK — Police have arrested seven more people at an ongoing protest on Wall Street.

A New York City police spokesman said Tuesday that one of the seven suffered a minor leg injury while resisting arrest. He was treated by paramedics at a police station.

The seven were part of a group of a few hundred protesters who have gathered in lower Manhattan to target financial firms. They're challenging political connections between the firms and Washington lawmakers.

From OccupyWallSt.org:

The first arrest was a protester who objected to the police removing a tarp that was protecting our media equipment from the rain. The police said that the tarp constituted a tent, in spite of it not being a habitat in any way. Police continued pressuring protesters with extralegal tactics, saying that a protester on a bullhorn was breaking a law. The protester refused to cease exercising his first amendment rights and was also arrested.

Then the police began to indiscriminately attempt to arrest protesters, many of them unsheathed their batons, in spite of the fact that the protest remained peaceful.

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Troy Davis is scheduled to be murdered by the state of Georgia tonight at 7pm EDT. I say "murdered" rather than "executed" because murder is what it really is. It is the intentional taking of another person's life by the state. There is no bigger government than this. None. And yet, it is because Georgia is a conservative state that it is more or less assured that a man who may possibly be innocent, around whose guilt there is much doubt, will not receive any mercy from the state.

Slate:

The Troy Davis case was staged—pure theater. I do not mean "staged" because the case has attracted worldwide attention and high-profile supporters. Nor do I refer here to the drama surrounding the Georgia Board of Pardons, which at the 11th hour denied clemency again this morning, so that Davis faces execution tomorrow—despite powerful evidence of his innocence. By "staged" I mean that the eyewitness evidence at the core of his original criminal trial was, quite literally, staged by the police.

The federal court that finally reviewed evidence of Davis' innocence agreed "this case centers on eyewitness testimony." Yet that court put to one side the fact that seven of the nine witnesses at the trial have now recanted, and new witnesses have implicated another man. The court did so while failing to carefully examine how eyewitnesses ultimately came to identify Davis as the man who shot a police officer intervening in a fight at a Burger King parking lot. The Troy Davis case—which raises a wide array of flaws in our death penalty system, our post-conviction system, and the politics of criminal justice—is thus also a case about malleability of eyewitness memory and police misconduct.

I will personally attest to the fallibility of eyewitness testimony. I had the order of events right, I had one of the players right, but I had the victim wrong. And I had pictures taken in real time!

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I realize the term "economic sabotage" is a loaded one. But what else do you call this?

Robert Reich:

Today, in advance of a key meeting of the Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee to decide what to do about the continuing awful economy and high unemployment, top Republicans wrote a letter to Fed Chief Ben Bernanke.

They stated in no uncertain terms the Fed should take no further action to lower long-term interest rates and juice the economy. “We have serious concerns that further intervention by the Federal Reserve could exacerbate current problems or further harm the U.S. economy.”

[...]

Translated: You try this, and we rake you over the coals publicly, and make the Fed into an even bigger scapegoat than we’ve already made it.

Top Republicans believe they can block all or most of Obama’s jobs bill. That leaves only the Fed as the last potential player to boost the economy. So the GOP will do what it can to stop the Fed.

After all, as Republican Senate head Mitch McConnell stated, their “number one” goal is to get Obama out of the White House. And that’s more likely to happen if the economy sucks on Election Day.

To say it’s unusual for a political party to try to influence the Fed is an understatement.

So these lunatics think they can block the jobs bill, rake the Fed over the coals, continue to oppress the economy, and get elected on that platform in 2012?

Magical. Just magical. These people don't care about real people in the least. Not even a little bit. Unemployed since 2008? Screw you. That's what they're telling you. They're taking every single person who isn't wealthy or employed and telling them they can shove it.

Explain to me again how this is patriotic, or defends the Constitution, please?

(Full text of the letter here)

Here's a history lesson from the fall of 1973: it's been very, very hard for the right to bamboozle the country into agreeing with them that big government is bad for their well-being. Their progress has been halting, fragile, and easily reversed. Because, of course, it is not bad for their well-being—it is imperative—for really, people are not all that stupid. But they keep trying, and they will keep trying, with far too many assists from people in our own beloved and benighted Democratic Party—because weakening government is all too good for the well-being of powerful interests that, well, are not good for the the well-being of the country at all.

In 1973 Ronald Reagan got really got serious for the first time about running for President. His vehicle, Team Reagan decided, would be a ballot initiative designed to show the world that the people of California agreed with their governor: government wasn't the solution to our problems. Government was the problem. Then, once the ballot initiative passed, he would barnstorm the country selling the idea to other states, and be hailed as a hero.

The idea was born because that year, some bad accounting and an improving economy had left the state of California with a nearly $1 billion fiscal surplus. Reagan's announced intention was to "return the money to taxpayers," writing into the California constitution a cap on both taxes and government spending.
The architects included an economist named Milton Friedman and his gubernatorial chief of staff Edwin Meese—appropriate names, because in every respect "Propostion 1" was a perfect template for a generation of conservative movement appeals to follow that—well, let's quote Ronald Reagan himself:

"Are we automatically destined to tax and spend, spend and tax indefinitely, until the people have nothing left of their earnings for themselves? Have we abandoned or forgotten the interests and well-being of the taxpayer whose toil makes government possible in the first place? Or is he to become a pawn in a deadly game of government monopoly whose only purpose is to serve the confiscatory appetites of runaway government spending?"

Ronald Reagan put everything he had into selling Proposition 1. It was a brilliant, deeply Reaganite political performance. The leader of the anti-Proposition 1 forces, Democratic Assembly Speaker Robert Moretti, said he was in favor of lowering taxes too, just like he was "in favor of motherhood" and "against sin." He just thought turning the state Constitution into an iron corset was madness. He, too, marshaled an array of statistics to demonstrate why Proposition 1 could not do what it was intended to do, and challenged the governor to debate. Reagan refused him. Moretti explained why he thought Reagan was ducking him: because in any tax limitation program that included, as Reagan's did, an expenditure ceiling, programs would have to be cut, and "He knows he cannot answer the questions we raise as to which programs will be cut." So he challenged the governor again and again and again and again—and five times Reagan refused him.
Reagan was playing an entirely different game.

When he made statistical claims, he blithely let them contradict each another. For instance, they said his plan would create deficits. He responded it would produce $41.5 billion in 15 years in new money. But then he also stated as the plan's fundamental intention giving the state less money to spend. His critics would scratch their heads—and unveil another brace of statistics. Then he would respond with moralistic perorations, making them look like pedantic asses—which was the game he was playing: "When the advocates of bigger and bigger government manage to get their hands on an extra tax dollar or two," he would quip, "they hang on like a gila monster until they find some way to spend it."

Again, his opponents opponents threw up their hands. If Reagan wanted to cut taxes and spending, what of his last seven years as governor? California's secretary of state, who was also the son of the governor Reagan replaced in 1966 and who himself hoped to succeed him in 1974, pointed out that he'd increased both dramatically. And already had a line-item veto, which he had never effectively used. "How can a magic formula, written by invisible lawyers," Jerry Brown asked, "do what Ronald Reagan has been unwilling or unable to do?" The same services Reagan had been refusing to cut in the last seven years as governor, critics would logically observe, would suffer. Reagan would indicate the emergency fund would protect them. But then he would say he didn't even want to protect government bureaucrats anyway.
But if government employees were all money-sucking monsters, why was the state budget in surplus in the first place?

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This just gets better and better. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy -- except maybe Paul Ryan:

When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker took a phone call that he thought was from billionaire campaign donor David Koch, he described the secret meeting of his cabinet at which he outlined the “budget repair bill” that stripped collective bargaining protections from public employees and teachers, replaced civil servants with political cronies and made it possible to sell off public utilities in no-bid deals with out-of-state corporations.

Walker was talking himself up as a new Ronald Reagan, in hopes of impressing one of the primary funders of conservative projects in the United States. But his comments revealed the previously unknown details regarding the political machinations behind a piece of legislation so controversial that it would provoke mass demonstrations, court battles and legislative recall elections.

“This is an exciting time,” the governor told “Koch“ in late February. “This is, you know, I told my cabinet, I had a dinner the Sunday, excuse me, Monday right after the 6th, came home from the Super Bowl where the Packer’s won, that Monday night, I had all my cabinet over to the residence for dinner. Talked about what we were going to do, how we were going to do it, we had already kind of doped plans up, but it was kind of a last hurrah, before we dropped the bomb and I stood up and I pulled out a, a picture of Ronald Reagan and I said you know this may seem a little melodramatic but 30 years ago Ronald Reagan whose 100th birthday we just celebrated the day before um had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air traffic controllers and uh I said to me that moment was more important than just for labor relations and or even the federal budget, that was the first crack in the Berlin Wall and the fall of Communism because from that point forward the Soviets and the communists knew that Ronald Reagan wasn’t a pushover and uh, I said this may not have as broad a world implications but in Wisconsin’s history—little did I know how big it would be nationally, in Wisconsin’s history, I said, this is our moment, this is our time to change the course of history and this is why it’s so important that they were all there.”

E-mails obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy reveal that the cabinet was indeed present for the meeting. The secretaries and gubernatorial aides who were present are listed. But so, too, is one other key player in the administration: the individual identified in e-mails from key players in the Walker administration as the “point person” for the governor’s push to radically restructure labor relations and state government—a project so significant to Walker that he declared, “This is our moment.”

That person? Cynthia Archer, the subject of last week’s FBI raid, which removed a crate of documents from her Madison home, collected her computer’s hard drive and revealed to most Wisconsinites that a “Joe Doe” probe has targeted key aides to Walker during his service as county executive and governor. The probe remains secret, but leaks associated with it suggest that the focus is political wrongdoing and corruption. One top donor to Walker’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign has already been put on probation after admitting to felony violations of campaign finance and money laundering rules.

The governor says he does not know anything about the inquiry beyond what he has read “in the press.” But Walker’s campaign, which remains a going endeavor, has hired a former US attorney—with extensive experience dealing with federal investigations—to respond to his a subpoena related to the “John Doe” probe for email and other records. And that attorney’s firm has, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, been paid more than $60,000.

Meanwhile, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal has this interesting nugget:

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen was asked months ago to assist in a growing secret investigation of former and current aides to Gov. Scott Walker, but Van Hollen's office declined, sources familiar with the request said Tuesday.

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Yesterday, I was idling behind a seven-year-old Saturn sedan with an anti-Obama bumper sticker reading: “Because everyone deserves some of what you’ve worked hard for.”

There’s a knee-jerk response to dismiss the driver as being some dupe naively parroting slogans not meaningful in his tax bracket. (You’d never see that sticker on a Rolls-Royce.) It’s not just the success of Republican “messaging,” there’s more to it than that:

According to the CafePress page selling these bumper stickers, the five-dollar decal was created on December 4, 2008. For all you history geeks, that was before the Obama presidency. This sentiment even existed before the bank bailout. It was also weeks before reputed capitalist, George W. Bush, approved the $17.4 billion American auto industry bailout. Specifically, for GM, the parent company of Saturn.

“If we were to allow the free market to take its course now, it would almost certainly lead to disorderly bankruptcy and liquidation for the automakers,” said Bush in the Roosevelt Room on December 19, 2008.

After GM took government money – taxpayer money – as an emergency loan to save their company suffering from a disturbing combo of willful blindness and ignorance of the market – the first thing the automaker had to do was downsize. They shut down factories and dealerships, shedding jobs; and even eradicated some brands. One of those was Saturn.

Now this driver can look forward to higher prices for parts and repairs for a vehicle that’s essentially worthless since it was discontinued. The Bush bailout of GM was paid for by this driver at least twice. So the trade-in value losses for putting a sticker on that car? No longer an issue.

Why does this anti-wealth distribution sentiment resonate with him? Why doesn’t he want banksters and CEOs to pay up?

“Because everyone deserves some of what you’ve worked hard for.”

This message was written and uploaded before the tea party, when the economy was still in free fall. And even though “thinkers” like Samuel R. Staley, a fellow at the Reason Institute, wrote the unintentionally hilarious talking point now being repeated by GOP lawmakers: “It appears we are two years into a ‘lost decade,’” the fact of the matter is the middle-class has already had a lost decade – the ‘00s.

In the middle-class wages are flat. The three million jobs Bush created in his eight years in office were moot since the population grew by 22 million. Prices have gone up, salaries have not. Home values have fallen, retirement plans are gone, savings are drained. Not since the 1930s has a generation been less prosperous than the one before. In 2008, the economy for the middle-class went from long-term stagnation to suddenly much worse.

And this reasonably caused a fear reaction in this Saturn driver. What is he concerned about? Wealth distribution. Why?

It’s usually assumed that the reason Americans specifically don’t want to see taxes raised on the rich is because, in spite of driving a defunct GM brand four-door, they think of themselves as the “soon-to-be rich.” But a paper published in the National Journal of Economic Research in July suggests otherwise. They offer that it’s not hoping to be on top that makes us not want the wealthier to be taxed more – it’s the fear of being at the bottom. It’s referred to as “last-place aversion.”

The Economist wrote, “In keeping with the notion of ‘last-place aversion,’ the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the ‘rich’ but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves.”

So taxing the rich isn’t about the fantasy that we’re going to someday be rich – it’s about the very real visceral fear of being, well, the poorest. If the government helps those below you, then they’ll be at your level – that’s the unfairness they’re afraid of.

Named one of the worst CEOs of 2008, GM head, Rick Wagoner received a $20 million dollar retirement package and an owner of one of his beaters has a bumper sticker decrying higher taxes for him.

The driver isn’t fantasizing about being Wagoner – he’s terrified of being driven even lower in the middle-class. And the GOP has successfully exploited that fear.

Because when people are afraid, they do all kinds of irrational things…like vote Republican.

Let's get this out of the way: David Brooks and his colleague Tom Friedman are two of the biggest frauds in the world of punditry. Anyone who claims to speak on behalf of "moderate" and "independent" voters has no idea what they're talking about and are only using the mantle of "moderation" to advance their own personal views. You see this every three weeks or so when Friedman claims that America is just on the cusp of forming a new radical centrist party that just-so-happens to believe everything that Tom Friedman believes.

The reality, of course, is that actual independent voters don't give a damn about what David Brooks thinks and only care about whether they have jobs and whether they feel economically secure. You can read John Judis, who breaks this down pretty well in his piece debunking the myth of independent voters from late last year:

The two other groups, the Disaffected Republicans and the Doubting Democrats, who make up 36 percent of Pew’s sample, are swing voters who are not dependable partisans. They are overwhelmingly white. They are not likely to have graduated from college and many of them have not attended college at all. Most of them make less than $75,000. It’s fair to characterize them as white working-class voters. Why are they independents and not Republicans and Democrats? According to the Pew poll, both groups believe that “parties care more about special interests than average Americans.”

And this is generally true! Actual swing voters generally support parties based on whatever special interest they happen to be angrier at any given time. As I've said in the past, a lot of blue-collar swing voters will support Republicans when they want lower taxes and tough-on-crime/family values sorts of policies while they'll support Democrats when they want to protect middle-class entitlement programs and to kick Wall Street's ass. Most importantly, they vote based on how well the economy happens to be doing. They do not, repeat, not, pick up their copies of the New York Times every day and say to themselves, "Wow, David Brooks and Tom Friedman are reading my mind! We need a third party that coincidentally conforms to every one of their ideas!"

Anyway, back to Brooks. Today he's upset because it seems, it least for the time being, that Obama has realized that taking David Brooks' advice is not actually the key to win over independent voters.

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.

But remember, I’m a sap. The White House has clearly decided that in a town of intransigent Republicans and mean ideologues, it has to be mean and intransigent too. The president was stung by the liberal charge that he was outmaneuvered during the debt-ceiling fight. So the White House has moved away from the Reasonable Man approach or the centrist Clinton approach.

But here's the thing: Obama really tried doing all that crap. He did! I remember slapping myself in the forehead all summer (and being too depressed to even attempt blogging) reading about it! Don't you remember that column you wrote this past July hilariously titled "The Grand Bargain Lives" where you said that Obama and Boehner were "close to a deal" that would cut Medicare and Social Security in exchange for some tax increases? Let's use the wayback machine to find it:

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