Thousands of anti-abortion demonstrators marched in Washington to protest the 40th anniversary of landmark decision that legalized abortion, Roe v. Wade.

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And with the new expanded playoff system the Major Leagues adopted this year we have one more shot to get into the postseason.

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An interesting thing happened on Morning Joe Thursday. Joe Scarborough said something about communism that you rarely hear on MSNBC or any venue where the left holds sway. He referred to it as:

“..the most repressive, the most evil political movement in the history of man responsible for more deaths than any other movement.”

and he hit both China and Cuba on it.

Of course his real target was Allen West for his answer to a question concerning Communists and socialists in congress, but any chance for the leftist viewers of MSNBC to get the message of the evils of Communism should be celebrated.

As for West, perhaps unlike the Morning Joe crew he read this interview with the American Socialist Voter at the Lonely Conservative or Gateway Pundit:

Too bad “socialist” doesn’t appear on the ballot when you vote. It might make things easier.

American Socialist Voter–
Q: How many members of the U.S. Congress are also members of the DSA?
A: Seventy

Q: How many of the DSA members sit on the Judiciary Committee?
A: Eleven: John Conyers [Chairman of the Judiciary Committee], Tammy Baldwin, Jerrold Nadler, Luis Gutierrez,
Melvin Watt, Maxine Waters, Hank Johnson, Steve Cohen, Barbara Lee, Robert Wexler, Linda Sanchez [there are 23 Democrats on the Judiciary Committee of which eleven, almost half, are now members of the DSA].

Now in fairness the list is from 2009 and quite a few democrats lost in 2010 so some of the people on the base list might no longer be in congress, so one might quibble about the numbers, but I didn’t see anyone rushing to disavow this stuff when it came out, but then again, during that time people still believed the Obama 2008 wave was permanent change.

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Speaking of Change Rick Santorum decided to end his presidential campaign on Tuesday. It was a tough call but the overwhelming monetary advantage of the Romney crew combined with establishment support was just too much for a shoestring campaign to cope with.

While Santorum has bowed to the Reality of the situation Newt Gingrich who has not won a race since Georgia is trying to make hay as the “last conservative left in the field” and despite overwhelming debt and little support Gingrich is fundraising based upon that.

I suspect that Mr. Gingrich would be able to make a quick buck by selling the list of those who contribute based in that new solicitation to people who sell the Brooklyn Bridge for a living.

I understand what he is doing but I find it unseemly.

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Thursday Night I attended a meeting of the Fitchburg Republican Committee. They hosted a forum for the two GOP congressional candidates Jon Golnik.

And Tom Weaver

who are running to oppose Niki Tsongas in the new 3^rd Congressional District.

That might not seem like an exciting development but a few years ago the entire idea of a Fitchburg Republican Committee would be a pipe dream and really you’ve gotta love the banner.

————–

Ann Althouse has this to say about the democrats war on women:

The Democrats don’t really believe anything. They’re just working on various voting blocs. They started this “war on women” theme, but it was a means to an end.

That was illustrated dramatically as Hilary Rosen had this to say about Ann Romney:

“She never worked a day in her life”

The firestorm has been spectacular, democrats have been running from her like the plague, David Axelrod in an interview with CNN stressed: “She’s your employee not ours.”

That will be news to the Democratic Party and the keepers of the White House visitor log:

What’s striking about Rosen’s latest ideological sniper attack is that she is not some lone-wolf operative on the fringes of Beltway influence. She works with former White House communications director Anita Dunn at the D.C.-based strategic communications consulting firm SKDKnickerbocker. That’s the same company that promoted the anti-Palin smear movie “Game Change” and that represented liberal Georgetown law school student activist and manufactured War on Women poster woman Sandra Fluke. Smack dab at the intersection of progressive agitation and Democratic Party campaign-season maneuvering.

White House visitor logs (which nonpartisan watchdogs point out are woefully incomplete) show that “Hilary B. Rosen” or “Hilary Rosen” has visited 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. at least 35 times, including several direct meetings with President Obama (5); White House senior adviser and consigliere Valerie Jarrett; senior adviser David Axelrod; senior adviser turned 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina; and a parade of communications/media team officials in both the West Wing “surrogate booking” office and the East Wing.

And while the President’s argument that “families were off limits” might surprise anyone who has paid attention to the left’s treatment of Sarah Palin, the profane tweets attacking Ann Romney by liberals will come as no surprise at all. I’d hate to be the owner of one of those tweets when an employer googles them during the job interview process.

One last thing on the subject, JWF wonders when Media Matters will be calling for a boycott of CNN until she is “fired”

Which reminds us, every time a conservative steps in it, be it on TV or radio, the stormtroopers from Media Matters, along with their partners from the White House and DNC, leap into feigned outrage and begin their tiresome boycotts.

Where are the Soros flying monkeys today? Not a peep about this assault on stay at home mothers and Ann Romney. An off-color remark about a DNC plant whining about contraception costs and there’s weeks of national headlines. The biggest story in America this day? Meh.

Well the White House can always switch gears and talk about the economy

Last month’s disappointing jobs report got some disappointing company this morning from the Department of Labor. The number of initial weekly jobless claims jumped up 23,000 over the level announced last week, which was itself adjusted upward by 10,000 in today’s report

…or not

Ann Romney managed to push the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case off the front page for a day or two. A special prosecutor charged Zimmerman with 2^nd Degree Murder in the death of Trayvon Martin. Famed defense lawyer Alen Dershowitz is not impressed:

“this is so thin it won’t make it past a judge on a second degree murder charge…it’s not only thin but it’s irresponsible. What you have here is an elected public official who made a campaign speech last night for re-election.”

I watched the presentation of the charges the prosecutor, Angela Corey seemed much too perky considering the seriousness of the matter, but what really struck me was this.

There is an old saying that you can indict a ham sandwich yet Corey rather than going to a grand Jury decided to take care of this herself. If they had a 2^nd degree Murder Case why wouldn’t simply present said case to a grand jury? I think the answer lies in this statement from Al Sharpton’s press conference which followed

I will say publicly, that I did not trust Governor Scott, I did not trust the appointment. I want to congratulate him and the prosecutor for being what they should be. If we did not get this far we would condemn them, we must say that despite the fact we are of different political parties and different persuasions that tonight maybe America can come together and say: ‘Only the facts should matter when dealing with a loss of life.’

In my opinion the goal of the Governor, the goal of the special prosecutor was not charges against George Zimmerman it was this statement by Al Sharpton. If the grand jury did not indict then Sharpton and his allies would have gone to the mattresses so to speak. By giving him this charge the Governor and the state have given themselves cover and statement has given them further cover no matter what the result is.

The problem I see here is this. If I’m right and this was all done out of fear of racial violence, what makes anyone think that the judge might not base his decision on that same fear, or that a jury with the eyes of the country and the New Black Panthers might do the same?

George Zimmerman is betting the rest of his life on it, I wouldn’t take that wager myself.

Finally I was remembering how so many engineers were inspired by James Doohan’s portrayal of Mr. Scott and scientists by Russell Johnson portrayal of the Professor on Gillian’s Island. This year the Big Bang Theory went into syndication and will be shown for years on TV.

I wonder how many future Physicists head in that direction because of that show?

One quick note, there will only be a single: Under the Fedora next week due to Blogcon in Charlotte North Carolina. See you then.

For the same three days there have been protests for and against the law.

I attended the AFP protest at the Capital which drew a fair amount of Congressional stars to the stage.

Meanwhile the Daily Caller reports that the SEIU protestors I saw where paid to be there.

I think congressman Allen West nailed it when asked about the lack of congressional presence at the pro-obamacare marches:

I don’t think they have the courage to come out. That’s the argument in a nutshell, if this law was worth the paper it was printed on the Democrats would be rushing to embrace it instead of running away from it.

….

Of course all the cool signs and the protests outside the court has nothing (and should have nothing) to do with how the court rules. The Justices are paying attention to the arguments and not the protesters and from all of the analysis it appears the government made a very poor case in defense of the law. Ann Althouse has even suggested that due to the unpopularity of the law that might have been deliberate

Although it might help the president in his re-election efforts, I suspect Obamacare off the table would be a bigger help to Mitt Romney than to the administration

Of course all of this is idle speculation. The court will give its decision in due time and until it does all we can do is wait.

While I was in DC I visited Scott Brown office with the group I was with. We met with an aide to the Senator and then ran into Senator Brown himself as he returned from his lunch break walking his dogs.

Harry Truman famously said: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. Since on occasion Sen Brown annoys both side of the aisle I guess he needs two of them.

(Oh and it goes without saying that I support him against Former Obama Administration official Elizabeth Warren).

One more DC story? I have a regular feature on my show called the Saturday Diners, while covering protesters in front of the Supreme Court I asked a capital policeman where I could get breakfast and he suggested the Supreme Court’s café. It’s pretty good and likely one of the more reasonable priced meals you will get in DC outside of a McDonalds.

Ok just one more. Scott Brown’s office gave us tickets to the Senate and House Galleries. I didn’t have time to hit the house but attended the senate during a vote. Two things stood out.

The Actual Senate chamber is a lot smaller than it seems on TV.

I watched John Kerry enter the chamber and was amazed to see that he carried himself with the same arrogance among his fellow senators as he does among the voters. I guess that’s just him.

Attended another meet and greet this week for a congressional candidate in Massachusetts, this one in my soon to be 3^rd district (I haven’t moved the district lines have) this one for a candidate named Tom Weaver

At that meet and greet the Mayor of Gardner Mass pointed out that under the EPA rules he can drink the water that comes out of his tap, but if he dumps it in the sewer he is committing an environmental violation.

There are a lot of tyrannies in history but one of the most annoying is the tyranny of a bureaucracy.

Both Marco Rubio and the first President George W. Bush have endorsed Mitt this week. As a rule endorsements like these are banked until they can have the greatest possible use. I suspect Mitt intends this to be the Coup de Grase to Rick Santorum, but for me I’m with Santorum as long as he is in it.

You might recall last time I pointed to the primary race in the 4^th district between Sean Bielat and Elizabeth Childs to face Joe Kennedy. I’m a big fan of Bielat but even if I wasn’t I would be ethically compelled to support him due to his stance on Abortion vs Childs. Apparently this must be more common than the media would is letting on because Jimmy Carter dropped a bombshell on the subject:

“I’ve signed a public letter calling for the Democratic Party at the next convention to espouse my position on abortion which is to minimize the need, requirement for abortion and limit it only to women whose life are in danger or who are pregnant as a result of rape or incest. I think if the Democratic Party would adopt that policy that would be acceptable to a lot of people who are now estranged from our party because of the abortion issue.”

He is correct about the political reality but what strikes me is this. In the same interview Carter said one of the problems he had when president was having to uphold Roe v. Wade.

Problems? What is the problem? You were the president of the United States and had the bully pulpit. You were willing to stand up and boycott the Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan because it was to you a moral issue, but you were unwilling to stand up and make the moral objection to abortion at a time when it could have made a big difference in the democrat party? There were still prominent pro-life democrats who would have had your back including the speaker of the house Tip O’Neill. It was a question of moral courage vs political courage and moral courage lost but now that you see the political calculation change suddenly the moral argument looks better?

Listen if the Democrats change their position on Abortion I won’t care why, but just remember this business when you hear the “Jimmy Carter the Good” and “Jimmy Carter the religious” stuff.

…..

Oh and if this is the case perhaps Susan Komen fell for a media line when it backed down over abortion. It wouldn’t be the first time the media created a reality that didn’t exist.

Speaking of phony media narratives, remember how the left insisted that Rush was losing advertisers by the bushel and this boycott was going to destroy them. Well after weeks of frantic coverage on the supposed exodus from Rush the Washington Post wrote a story bowing to reality:

Carusone said most of the advertiser exodus over the past month appeared to be among companies whose ads aired only in regional or local markets, he said. “Fewer than five” nationwide sponsors of the program actually pulled out, he said…

Fewer than five and two of those five tried to come back and were rejected.. Even more interesting is that once this story came out and was quoted by places like Hotair, the sentence “Fewer than five” disappeared from the original post

Meanwhile Rush’s audience? Up, way up.

Bottom line from Legal Insurrection:

The biggest damage has been to Media Matters, which put its reputation for intimidating advertisers on the line, and failed.

Media Matters wasn’t defeated by Limbaugh. Media Matters was defeated by tens of thousands of conservatives who recognized that this was not about Limbaugh or what Limbaugh said.

Pitty the poor fools like Kohler who fell for the Media Matters line.

Finally a quick word about the business between Stacy McCain and Tabitha Hale, they are both my friends and I find myself in the position of El Cid in the 1961 movie:

El Cid: I swore allegiance to Sancho.

Princess Dona Urraca: And to Alfonso. And to me!

El Cid: I can only help one brother by breaking faith with the other. – I can help no one.

Princess Dona Urraca: But Sancho would kill Alfonso.

El Cid: Whatever happens… must happen without me.

I have one piece of advice for both of my friends and it comes from scripture:

Pride goes before disaster, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Proverbs 16:18

Remember there is a reason why Pride is first on the deadly sin list.

 

Elizabeth Warren would be a catastrophe in the Senate, but she is hell on wheels when it comes to directing human traffic, which is no small thing at the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in Boston. She goes bulling her way through a crowd of faces the color of 2 percent milk, sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Southie Irishness, or rendered rosy by the effects of seriously draining down a full bar that opened at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, plowing through like she’s just graduated from a seminar in Advanced Executive Body Language, all exaggerated masculine gestures and “Yes! I am very seriously paying attention to you!” head bobs and vigorous “This is what Sincerity looks like . . . approximately!” power nods, complemented by “Move along, sir!” shoulder grips followed by quick and vigorous “Back the Hell Off” chest pats when some florid Southie denizen moves in for a hug — she is like Moses parting the kelly green sea. She is a populist in search of a people, and the wall-eyed gang shout-singing “Southie Is My Home Town” and chasing their eggs and rashers with Jameson on the rocks isn’t it. St. Patrick’s Day, as state senator Jack Hart (“Senator Hot,” in the local pronunciation) reminds the crowd, is also celebrated in Boston as Evacuation Day, and Warren looks like she is in dire need of an emergency airlift back to Cambridge.

The breakfast is a political roast, which puts Warren at a disadvantage: As with cancer and feminism, there is nothing funny about Elizabeth Warren. Once she has traversed the beshamrocked riff-raff and been seated on the dais, she fades away — hardly anybody takes notice of her. Whether this is because her fellow Democrats regard her as a fragile little thing or because they can think of nothing to say about her, almost nobody makes an Elizabeth Warren joke. Even her Republican opponent, Senator Scott Brown, barely acknowledges her, merely spitting over his shoulder, “Professor Warren, it’s good to see you. You were a little late, but I’m glad you were able to get out of Cambridge and find your way up here.”

Most of the rest of the morning’s humor isn’t so subdued. Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray, who recently honored Massachusetts’s long tradition of fishy car accidents involving Democratic nabobs by totaling a state vehicle in the very most wee hours of the morning while barreling down icy roads at 108 miles per hour — and then claiming he was just up bright-’n’-early to get a cup of coffee and inspect snowstorm damage — enters in full NASCAR regalia, bearing a tray of Starbucks. Brown made headlines by quipping that Rick Santorum’s new Secret Service detail represents “the first time he’s ever actually used protection,” and now makes a few jokes about himself and his fellow Republicans: “Mine the moon? Newt Gingrich ought to mine whatever planet Ron Paul is from.”

Elizabeth Warren doesn’t do self-deprecating — she just can’t. Her humor is of the self-aggrandizing sort: In mockery of Brown’s famous Cosmopolitan spread, she shows an image of herself as a centerfold in Consumer Reports. She opens with: “I’m the daughter of a maintenance man, who became a professor and fought against big Wall Street Banks. If that doesn’t ring a bell, you might remember me as the elitist professor from Hollywood who’s running against Scott Brown.” And then there are crickets.

The joke goes down like a Soviet airliner in no small part because she told precisely the same joke yesterday at another St. Patrick’s Day event, in front of a lot of the same people. But that isn’t the only problem: The point of the roast is to laugh at politicians, not to be reminded by politicians of how awesome said politicians are. Behind every rolled eye and polite cough that greets Warren’s foundering attempts at humor is the unspoken thought: “Yeah, we know: You grew up in modest circumstances in Muskogee or wherever and think of yourself as a consumer advocate. Super. Say something funny, you insufferable snoot.” But she does put in the work, clapping along unrhythmically like a poorly trained SeaWorld porpoise while the band plays “Whiskey in the Jar” — a song that, like most of the Southie anthems sung this morning, she plainly does not know the words to.

“Shrill.” “Hard.” “Wound-up.” These are the first three adjectives offered by a group of observers asked why Warren is having a tough time against Brown in a state in which Republicans are about as welcome as head lice. The young ladies in question are wearing Elizabeth Warren buttons.

The hard thing about being a populist? The damned people.

Elizabeth Warren is what Thomas Jefferson would have recognized as one of nature’s aristocrats, which is one of the reasons she is so manifestly uncomfortable around hoi polloi, a Democrat who does not want to be so much as downwind from the demos in the flesh. Life can be cruel to natural aristocrats, especially in politics. Also high school. She makes much — too much — of her humble background, particularly of her father’s having worked as a janitor. Brown had it pretty rough as a young man, too: His mother was none too capable a parent, he spent part of his childhood on welfare and a great deal of it surrounded by domestic violence of varying degrees of intensity, and he was sexually abused by a camp counselor when he was a child. Warren’s story is a bit more complicated than she lets on: Her father was employed as a maintenance man, and before that he had held a number of middle-class jobs, including one as a salesman at a department store. At one point, he had saved up enough money to start a promising business — a car dealership — but, as Warren tells the story, he got swindled out of his life’s savings by an unscrupulous business partner. Later, a heart attack cost him another job. Warren’s mother went to work and was bitter about it, and a few missed car payments meant that the family’s Oldsmobile, that sturdy mid-century symbol of middle-class life, was repossessed. Young Elizabeth, wracked with status anxiety, made her father drop her off a few blocks from school so that her fellow students would not see their new, less prestigious car. Her family’s story is not one of hereditary poverty and privation but one of a downwardly mobile middle-class family hit by bad luck and bad decisions.

Happily, that rough spot didn’t last forever. The Oldsmobile was gone, but by the time she was 16 years old, Warren had a car of her own, and there were two more in the family — not too shabby for Oklahoma in 1965. Her family struggled, but they were also able to buy a house in a nice neighborhood, which allowed young Elizabeth to attend an elite public school, a springboard to her later education and smashing professional success. She’s written popular books and served in government, while her endowed chair at Harvard Law pays her more than $350,000 a year. Her husband also occupies an endowed chair at Harvard Law. The two share a multi-million-dollar home in Cambridge, a multi-million-dollar investment portfolio (including a large position in notorious corporate-income-tax minimizer IBM, which recently paid an annual net effective rate of 3.8 percent), and a net worth of up to $14.5 million, according to Warren’s financial-disclosure statements. The Warrens’ net worth dwarfs that of the Browns, which is at most $2.3 million. (Yeah, pity.)

But though she is much wealthier than he, Warren and Brown resemble each other far more than they resemble most of their constituents. Each is a testament to the fact that in the brutal meritocracy that is the United States of America, smart and energetic people rise, almost unstoppably, and the increasingly high returns to individual performance mean that those at the top live lives very different from that of Joe Median. Neither Warren nor Brown attended an Ivy League university, neither had family connections or social standing. Both worked in professions that they would later abandon: Warren taught public school briefly and then quit rather than go through the obligatory, despair-inducing credentialing rigmarole (a fact that speaks better of her than almost anything else you’ll learn), and Brown was, famously, a model. Both gravitated toward the surest shortcut to wealth and security in this litigious republic — law school. Both took an interest in politics in their early years, and both have made ugly concessions to political reality: Warren may rail against Wall Street wagering and the “army of lobbyists” in Washington, but her campaign is run by a particularly grim casino lobbyist.

And therein lies the critical contrast between the two: Brown is a moderate Republican, a member of a party that believes, to the extent that it believes anything, that in a free and competitive economy, talent and drive will in most cases bring success, and Brown is a gold-plated example of the fact that this is true. Warren is a member of a party that believes, to the extent that it believes anything, that the deck is impossibly stacked against the middle class, and she is a gold-plated example of the fact that this is false. Brown’s implicit message is: “I did it, and so can you.” Warren’s implicit message is: “I did it, and you don’t have a prayer.”

Warren’s view is exaggerated to the point of falsity, but there is grain of truth in it, even if it is a truth that Warren cannot understand or will not admit.

The fact is, Warren’s career model is not available to the great majority of the middle class, to say nothing of the poor. She has written a boring little financial self-help book (heavy on phrases such as “the Lifetime of Riches investment strategy”), but her path to prosperity, if she were to document it honestly, would look like this: 1) Get born with an XXL brain; 2) become an endowed professor at Harvard with a salary in the middle six figures and another six-figure payday from speaking and consulting fees; 3) marry same. The secret to a 1 percent lifestyle is, in Warren’s case as in so many others, having a 1 percent brain. Most people are not packing the cerebral heat to do what Warren has done, no matter how much they want it, no matter how hard they work. You can rail against the iniquities of Wall Street, but there is a scarcity of college graduates who have the quantitative skills to fill even grunt-level back-office jobs in financial firms.

Warren wrote an(other) unimpressive little book, The Two-Income Trap, in which she argues that contemporary two-income families are in many ways worse off than single-income families were a generation or so ago, back during the golden years of the post-war boom, with less financial security and less disposable income. That is true: Men’s inflation-adjusted incomes peaked in 1973, and household incomes have risen in real terms since then only because so many women have entered the work force, making single-income families into two-income families. Household incomes per capita have climbed, too, but mostly because the size of households has decreased as Americans have had fewer children. (What else happened in 1973 that might in part explain decreasing household size? Discuss among yourselves.)

She and her co-author (who is also her daughter — because the 99 percent hates nepotism) cite all kinds of financial pressures on the middle class — rising child-care costs, college tuition, health-care expenses — and offer an array of policy prescriptions ranging from the mild (decoupling public-school assignments from geography) to the Swedish (subsidizing stay-at-home parents) to the authoritarian (a government-imposed freeze on college tuitions, drastic credit-market restrictions of the sort that Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was empanelled to dream up some years later), but the two show themselves to be shockingly shallow in their analysis of the underlying economic facts: The post-war era was an extraordinary economic period, for the United States and for the world. Just as Warren’s career path does not represent much of a realistic recommendation to the individual striver, the post-war era does not offer much in the way of policy guidance to the 21st-century politician, unless we are seriously willing to entertain replicating the conditions that obtained in 1950 and thereafter, which would necessitate the rest of the world’s destroying its industrial infrastructure in a war that was pretty much the worst thing to have happened to the human race up until that point, with the United States and Canada practically alone in surviving unscathed. You don’t get the post-war boom without the war, and in any case it doesn’t last forever.

In her ceaseless hunt for a villain and in her refusal to account for the facts of economic history, Warren as an economic thinker very closely resembles another progressive lawyer, Robert Reich, and both of these lawyers seem to believe that our economic difficulties are the result of having put the wrong lawyers in charge of things, as though we could pass a law against scarcity and in favor of productivity. To a lawyer, everything is a question of law, and Warren has made her name by putting Wall Street on trial, at least rhetorically. It is precisely this kind of economic romanticism that has made her the marquee candidate of Occupy Wall Street and its economically illiterate sympathizers, and it is why she is in effect running a national campaign for a statewide office. She may laugh off jokes about her being the professor from Hollywood, but look where she goes when she needs to raise money.

But her appeal is not limited to economic illiterates. Some time back, I wrote an essay for The New Criterion in which I argued that a typical American couple making a modest income would do far better in retirement if they invested most of the money that they would have paid in Social Security taxes, putting aside 10 percent of their income with an expectation of a 7 percent return. Among those who took the time to scoff was Susan Webber (writing under her pseudonym, “Yves Smith,” of the blog Naked Capitalism), a highly regarded analyst of the U.S. financial system and a trenchant critic of Wall Street. She argued that both of my assumptions were nuttier than pecan pie: Nobody is going to invest 10 percent, and nobody is going to make 7 percent back. As late as August of 2011, Webber was arguing that Warren should run for president of these United States — as a challenger to Barack Obama, Wall Street stooge and marionette of the 1 percent. If my assumptions were the financial equivalent of unicorns exflatulating distilled sunshine, I wonder what Webber makes of Warren’s model. For my sins, I have recently digested Warren’s schlocky self-help book All Your Worth, in which she suggests that families of modest means should be saving 20 percent of their income and expecting a 12 percent return, roughly doubling down on my optimism. Webber, quelle surprise, has not addressed that proposition. The appeal of us-and-them stories is powerful.

Warren’s advice in All Your Worth is, for the most part, pretty solid — and pretty banal. It is precisely the sort of thinking you’d hear if you walked into the office of any halfway competent personal financial adviser in Poughkeepsie or Springfield: Invest in low-cost index funds, pay down your credit cards and other debt, keep a cash reserve, don’t buy a house unless you can put at least 10 percent down and preferably 20 percent, shop for better mortgage and insurance rates, don’t take out home-equity loans, etc. She’s Dave Ramsey without the wit or the evangelical fervor.

But if you’d taken her advice in 2006, when the book was published, you’d have missed the opportunity of a lifetime. In fact, you’d have been better off taking precisely the opposite of her advice. The one investment that Warren really warns her readers off from is gold, which has returned about 320 percent since her book was being written in late 2005. If you’d taken that 20 percent down payment and put it into gold, the tripling of that investment and the crash in housing prices would have probably allowed you to pay cash by now for the house you’d been thinking about buying.

Does that mean that Warren gives bad financial advice? No, it simply means that financial life is unpredictable, and that it is easy to make a compelling case for what one obviously should have done in retrospect. Unfortunately, nobody gets to invest in hindsight — not homeowners, not Wall Street, not Warren. But that lesson remains entirely lost on the lady from Cambridge, who apparently still believes that Lehman Bros. and the rest of the Wall Street kingpins filled their own books up with radioactive mortgage-backed securities because they thought they were a bad investment, rather than because they thought — wrongly — that they were a pretty good investment. (She repeated that argument as recently as November 2011 during a Morning Joe interview.) Villains must be identified and crucified, plain facts be damned. And that is really the truth that Elizabeth Warren is speaking when she says of Occupy Wall Street: “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do.”

Warren is everything her admirers say she is — smart, tough, principled — and almost everything her critics say — out of touch, ideological, narrow. The one inaccurate barb thrown at her is that she’s homely — “Granny Warren,” Senator Brown’s factota call her. She isn’t. If she were lined up at a party with a representative cross section of 62-year-old American women, Warren would be the one you’d ask to dance. But there is a meanness in her, a nasty little puritanical streak gone left, and her secularized Puritanism is probably the most Massachusetts thing about her. Like Hillary Clinton, she has Methodist roots and cites the Wesleyan approach as key to the development of her political thinking. (How Protestant is she? She was conspicuous in failing to cross herself when the priest at the St. Pat’s event got to the Trinitarian part of his blessing, even though the signum crucis is a common feature of Methodist worship.) It would not be inaccurate to call her political career a crusade.

The question is, Does Massachusetts want a crusader? Senator Brown has been anything but one — he’s a deal-making, favor-trading, ideology-eschewing politico about one degree removed from being the new Olympia Snowe. There is an element in Massachusetts that wants to Occupy the Senate, even though the economy of Boston is heavily reliant upon finance. But Warren isn’t about Boston, or Southie, or even Cambridge, much less Pittsfield or Monson. She is the single most important bridge between the Democratic party and the trans-Democratic Left. She doesn’t represent a place, but a state of mind.

You can take the girl out of Oklahoma and, contrary to the proverb, you can take the Oklahoma out of the girl, too, if you work at it long enough. (A notable fact about Warren is that she has never been to a class reunion.) But a scholarly study of “Charlie on the MTA” isn’t going to gain her admittance to the tribe of Jameson-sipping, milk-faced South Bostonians, either. There’s no whiskey in her jar, and for Warren, no politics is local — it’s Occupy Wall Street, Occupy the Senate, Occupy Everywhere.

The extended Republican presidential primary has left many GOP donors paralyzed — unsure of whether to invest in the upcoming battle against President Barack Obama or focus on Congressional races.

Party insiders increasingly believe that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will win the nomination, a development that would likely open the donor spigot for the general election. But a victory by former Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) or ex-Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.) would probably have the opposite effect. A GOP money machine skeptical of the party’s White House prospects would likely spend instead on House and Senate races as the best hope for a November gain.

According to interviews with a dozen mostly Washington-based Republicans, including Capitol Hill aides, fundraisers, strategists and K Street operatives, the GOP’s Congressional candidates and national campaign committees would prefer to avoid such a financial windfall, believing the party’s best chance of holding the House and flipping the Senate is to field a strong, well-funded presidential campaign that runs a sophisticated voter-turnout operation.

“This is a discussion that has been happening in all corners of the GOP consultant class,” a well-placed Republican said Monday.

There are some Republican strategists less concerned with the nominee than the fact that the GOP primary is diverting attention from Obama’s record and allowing the president to rebuild politically. They worry that a stronger Obama could help Democrats downticket.

Republicans are additionally concerned that they cannot produce a coherent, unified election-year message until their primary produces a nominee for them to rally around.

But, but. While hyperbole is expected from politicians, this statement is a bit…rich. The home in question carried a $2 million pricetag and is located on 5 acres in pricey northern Virgina. Moreover, Santorum financed it through a family trust, deliciously named the Creamcup Trust. Not exactly the financing vehicle available to the average steelworker!

Read more at:
The Washington Examiner.

The Ohio presidential primary revealed one key thing about the Republican electorate: They haven’t fallen head over heels for either of the two frontrunning candidates.

While former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania senatorRick Santorum finished first and second, respectively, in the Ohio balloting (and won more than 900,000 votes combined) the support for both men, according to an analysis of the exit polling, was far more tepid than you might expect.

Of Romney’s Ohio supporters, 41 percent said they strongly favored the former governor, while 44 percent said they liked him with reservations, and another 13 percent said their vote for him was more driven by dislike for the other candidates

The story was much the same for Santorum, with 41 percent strongly favoring him as compared to 43 percent who liked him with reservations, and another 14 percent who opted for Santorum due to a distaste for their other options.

That means that majorities of those who voted for Romney and Santorum in Ohio did so for a reason other than that they strongly favored their choice. That’s a remarkable finding three months into the Republican nominating contest.

(Both former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Rep. Ron Paul scored far higher on the passion index in Ohio. It’s worth noting, however, that each man received a far smaller share of the vote than either Santorum or Romney.)

The large number of Romney and Santorum voters in Ohio who cast a ballot for one of the two men with genuine reservations about them speaks to a broader lack of enthusiasm toward the GOP field that has permeated this race almost from its start.

Three take-aways from the results of Super Tuesday’s elections:

1.)  Mitt Romney can’t win conservatives, Rick Santorum can’t win the general electorate…and Ron Paul can’t win either.  As such, if Romney is the nominee, conservatives will sit on their hands – the way they did for McCain, Dole and Ford.  If Santorum is the nominee, independents will flock back to Obama.

2.)  Romney isn’t winning the nomination; he’s buying it.  If he and his super-PAC weren’t outspending his opponents by margins of two-to-one, three-to-one and four-to-one, he’d have been out of this race a month ago.  Not that he’s doing anything wrong; but as Newt Gingrich has been pointing out, if outspending your opponents is your campaign plan, it’ll fail epically against the $1 billion+ Obama warchest.

3.)  The Republican establishment, and some in the media, are now calling for a hasty end to the nominating process.  Make no mistake; this isn’t because the nominating process is weakening the GOP’s anointed candidate, Romney, but because the process is exposing just how weak he already is.

Let’s face it; Romney’s strongest wins thus far have been in liberal Northeast states, because he’s a liberal Northeast Republican.  With the exception of Florida, he literally can’t buy a Southern state, where the GOP’s conservative base is strong.  And in Midwest states – such as Iowa, Michigan and Ohio – states with a lot of independent and swing voters – he has lost or only barely won.

As for Santorum – yes, he’s winning over Democrats…but only in Republican “open” primaries.  Come November, those Democrats – who have been trying to sow trouble in the GOP nomination fight – will dance with the one who brung ‘em, Barack Obama.

Worse, if Santorum is the nominee, instead of talking about gas prices, unemployment, the economy and national defense – issues where Obama is weak – we’ll be fighting over contraception, abortion and gay marriage – all important issues to social conservatives, but issues that’ll drive away independents and swing voters.

So…death by hanging, or firing squad?

As the nominating process moves into a string of conservative Southern states, it’s highly unlikely Romney will do well. Santorum is positioned to take most of them – and if he stumbles, Gingrich is poised to step into the breach.  (Disclaimer: I’m a Gingrich supporter/adviser).  And Ron Paul, will continue to win delegates.

All of which means that while none of the three not-Romneys will be able to win the nomination outright, it’s increasingly possible that, combined, they could deny Romney the ability to win the nomination outright.  Which means the ultimate decision will be made at the convention in August.

All for the right to take on the worst president since Jimmy Carter.  Republicans, how in the hell did you let this happen?

CONGRESS: THIS JOB SUCKS – Our own Jonathan Allen writes that for many members of Congress, “the thrill is gone.” “They don’t make national policy anymore. They can’t earmark money for communities back home. The public hates them. And perks little and big, from private jet travel to a little free nosh now and then, have been locked down by ethics rules. As they head for the exits this year, many leaving Congress say the prestigious job of being a congressman sucks now, and that’s why lawmakers young and old are trading in their member pins for a new life in the private sector. …

–“For longer-term veterans, the stature of the office has diminished and the burdens have grown. Pay has been frozen for three years — not that the average American will shed a tear over the static $174,000 salary. Most lawmakers have to live in two cities, and when they don’t — like Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar, who has lived in Virginia for the past 35 years — it becomes the central issue of their campaigns. Fundraising is a much bigger hassle these days, as it costs more and more to run an effective race against the new soft money pouring into congressional contests. … The frustration has been building for some time, and the days of past-their-prime legislators bidding fond farewells to the institution seem anachronistic.”http://politi.co/yZNFHX

–And on a related note, POLITICO’s Manu Raju finds that perhaps big Capitol Hill endorsements just aren’t what they used to be: “Mitt Romney is quick to point to his laundry list of powerful supporters on Capitol Hill who see him as the best candidate to take on President Barack Obama this fall. But in many cases, those endorsements have fallen flat. Romney has been trounced in several states where he has received key congressional endorsements, the latest sign of the waning influence of the Washington establishment on GOP primary voters. On Super Tuesday, Romney had the support of Sens. Tom Coburn, the conservative stalwart from Oklahoma, John Hoeven, a popular former governor from North Dakota, and Lamar Alexander, a longtime figure in Tennessee politics. He lost all three states handsomely to Rick Santorum. That came weeks after Romney lost big in Missouri, a state that in 2010 elected Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, who is the former Massachusetts governor’s chief liaison on Capitol Hill.” http://politi.co/xI23XO

All eyes are on Ohio, the one state above all others on Super Tuesday where Mitt Romney could potential nail down the nomination with a victory — or where a win by Rick Santorum could put him back into contention in the Republican race for president. But beyond tomorrow, the eyes of the country will still be on Ohio, for the general election — both for the presidential race, and for the re-election campaign of Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.

Brown was elected to the Senate in the 2006 Democratic wave, defeating incumbent Republican Sen. Mike DeWine by a margin of 56%-44%. Before that, he was first elected to the Ohio state Senate way back in 1974, at the age of only 22; then Ohio Secretary of State in 1982. He was defeated for re-election in 1990, then made a comeback to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1992, where he served until his election to the Senate.

His opponent is state Treasurer Josh Mandel — whose political career path seems in many ways a younger, Republican version of Brown’s. He was elected to the state House in 2006, at age 29, and was then elected Treasurer in the 2010 Republican wave, defeating the appointed Democratic incumbent by 55%-41%.