Dave Dayan has a great post on this at FireDogLake. Check it out.
Here’s Warren’s announcement video:
I have to say that I’m a little bit surprised by the Eeyore comments I’m seeing around the web. They go something like “she’s a sacrificial lamb” to “it’s the wrong year for her to jump into this”. The last one doesn’t make any sense at all. This is almost an open Senate seat. Scott Brown took Kennedy’s seat when the Senator died of brain cancer a couple of years ago. Elizabeth Warren can totally take this seat, provided she resists the standard homogenization procedure for Democrats seeking to run for office.
Snagging my comments from myiq’s Crawdad site, here’s why she can pull this off:
Can she make her case in terms easy enough for a Tea Partier to understand? Yep, I think so.
Can she separate herself from the current Obama administration screwups? Well, Tim Geithner hates her guts. That’s a plus.
Is she passionate enough? Heck, did you hear that interview she had on Planet Money with Adam Davidson?
Scott Brown might be a good senator but does he represent the people of Massachusetts as well as she would?
Her strength is that she is genuinely on the side of the middle class.
There’s some weird concern that she’s going to come off looking like an Ivy League elitist.
I don’t see her as an ivy league elitist despite her job. She’s pretty plain spoken, a strong advocate for the middle class and has demonstrated a clear understanding of the challenges it faces.
One other thing is that she won’t be running to represent Cambridge. She’s running to represent Massachusetts.
What potentially makes her candidacy so strong is that no one in congress is representing the failing middle class and in debate, she’s going to wipe the floor with Scott Brown on those issues. She can effectively argue against austerity.
I’m glad she’s running. Her candidacy could be a real plus next year.
Let’s hope that Elizabeth Warren can motivate voters to take control of their government again. She should be passionate, define the issues and compare/contrast (see Hillary Clinton’s techniques for this), and she must propel voters to put aside their learned helplessness. Start by pointing out that big corporations can purchase politicians and comandeer the airwaves but they do not have a vote. Those votes are like Dorothy’s ruby slippers. Voters have always had the means to take power away from the rich and well connected. This is the point that Elizabeth Warren has to make.
Oh, and if Warren needs paid help on her campaign, I am available. 😉
Filed under: General | Tagged: Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts, Scott Brown, Senate |
The Confluence 
Correct, she can absolutely win!
I am going to send her money, but there is a scenario which I hope she DOESN’T win. If the DNC FINALLY comes to there senses and dumps Obumbles, there is no better Secretary of the Treasury right now in the States than Dr. Warren would be. In that case, i would hope that she loses. Otherwise my check will be in the mail……
Hillary 2012
Warren’s better than most. But on policy, she’s about making mortgage applications more readable. I’d rather she were about getting banksters in orange jumpsuits doing the perp walk. If Eric Schneiderman does that, he can run and win.
RD, amateur electrician. Just put a new bathroom vanity light fixture up. The old one was a pain to get out of the wall. Whoever put it in drywalled right over part of the junction box. An hour later, after chip, chip-chipping away, I got the new sucker mounted and wired. Put the light bulbs in. Is it just me or do bathroom light fixtures resist lightbulbs? The lamp on the right felt not quite right when I screwed it in. Flipped the switch on the fuse box and turned it on. Just as I thot, the right side lamp is dead. Great. Now I have to either fiddle with the lightbulb or check the wiring. In the dark. With a headlamp. In a cramped, hot and humid bathroom, on a ladder.
Taking a break in the basement where *somewhere* down here, a cicada has made itself at home. The sound is driving me nuts.
Ack! Electricity scares me to death. You are fearless in more ways than one!
Me too. That’s why I usually shut it off in the while house before I go poking around in it. But I rewired the garbage disposal, so that wasn’t too bad. The first one is always the hardest and scariest. The rest are just pains in the ass.
F}%^. It’s the wiring.
I now see the value in electrical tape. There’s a roll of it around here somewhere…
there is WAY too much of this stuff going on….. Even mister and I have been sucked into it. You have my deepest sympathies.
The good news is that the basement suffered minimal damage. The dehumidifiers have been going gangbusters for two weeks now and its dry as a bone down here. No lingering smells. The cable modem had to be replaced but the other electronics seem to have survived. While cleaning it out, I got rid of a lot of stuff. For once, the association made it easy for us to throw things out. It rented a giant dumpster and that sucker filled up. It seems like everyone had flooding. So glad I put vinyl plank flooring down here. All I had to do was mop it up. It’s in great shape. The baseboards need paint but there are no watermarks on any walls. You’d never know there was 8″ of water down here. It was a freak occurance. Probably will never happen again, knock wood.
Go for her. Frankly her biggest problem imo will be the National Dem party and their lackeys in what passes for a left press….which are already doing the concern troll number and who wanted her to go into the primary Obama buzz saw weeks ago….
Doesn’t the left side of the media machine (what little there is) have any fricking sense?? She’s perfectly suited to run a senate campaign. Even though it’s not exactly an entry level job, she has a ton of experience running a congressional style committee and some partial experience with an executive branch department.
But she’s as qualified to be president as Obama was when he ran. It’s just fricking stupid. Yes, let’s replace one hopeless inept neophyte with a better woman who has never run for office. That makes no sense. I take that back. It makes about as much sense as the lefties pining away for Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich. Matt Stoller wants Tom harkin from east bumfuck jahonga, Iowa. I’ve got nothing against Tom harkin but most people don’t know who the f#%^ he is. (although, I’ve got to hand it to Matt. He’s starting to get the picture with the election vs selection primary problem. So, kudos to Matt for starting to understand where we’re coming from).
Anyway, Warren is running the right race and if she can channel the rage effectively, she’s got a great shot at winning.
Doesn’t the left side of the media machine (what little there is) have any fricking sense??
All they have to know is Obama Inc (aka Wall St) doesn’t like her and ran her out of DC and won’t like her coming back there and will sand bag her when they can. She seems all the wiser for her earlier DC adventure however. No one has to tell her:” Liz, steer clear of the WH , it’s a Dem defeat machine ” ( and no joke)
If Warren gets to the point of requesting donations, I will send some. I know who Harkin was. I wanted Harkin to be the Dem nominee in 1990. I believe he dropped out just before Michigan’s nominee selection procedure that year.
Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism (a very good blog) is disappointed to see Warren running. The way she put it is : ” Elizabeth Warren has decided to accept the poisoned chalice priepared for her by the Democratic Hackocracy.” And she goes on from there. But since Warren is going to do it, I have to think that Yves Smith will offer help and assistance and so will at least some of her blogreader community.
Everyone whose basement has not flooded recently might want to take
Riverdaughter’s reports about what went UNdamaged in her basement and why . . to heart and make the necessary pre-emptive changes in their own basements. The future holds more of these global warming raindump events, and floods will happen where nobody ever thought floods were possible. Basement owners be warned.
My recommendations;
1.) if you finish your basement, make sure your French drains remain unsealed. My neighbor’s basement isn’t finished but her drains were sealed. She pumped water for hours while mine receded naturally by the afternoon.
2.) get a backup battery for your sump pump in case the power goes out. Don’t know if that would have helped actually since the amount of
water was impressive so…
3.) have a generator and extra sumo pump on hand just in case and a wide diameter hose. The garden hose won’t cut it.
4.) don’t put wall to wall carpet in your basement. Put vinyl flooring on the concrete and add easy to clean area rugs
5,) if you’re going to store things in your basement, put them in rubbermaid type containers on open shelving. The water will go through the shelves, not against them.
6.) get dehumidifiers. Use them regularly. Mine are always on and set as low as possible. Empty frequenly or attach a hose to the drain.
7.) have fans to circulate air. It helps the drying out process.
8,) waterproof your concrete walls. We plugged all if the cracks and put two coats of drylock on the walls before drywalling them
9.) make sure your homeowners policy covers backwash through the sump pump. Mine did. The cost was trivial. I’m glad I didn’t have to use it but it was nice to have that extra security.
10.) clear your gutters and add gutter extensions to direct water away from your foundation.
If you can think of anything else, add it.
Argggggghhh! Where are my wire strippers??? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Random:
1. It’s very interesting that Dayen cites to Yves at NC. In general, the econobloggers are far more interesting as writers and analytically than the “progressive” blogs, who are to various degrees all infested with D shillery anyhow.
2. OT, but You can report Obama thought crime here (hat tip, Votermom). I reported the New York Times because they were not fully on board with Obama’s “HAMP for the Jobless” program. Have fun!
Yves Smith in particular is deeply offended by the fraud machine designed by the FIRE sector and by Big Banka in particular; with intellectual support and cover from the Academic Economics bussiness. A lot of her articles reach the depth of granular detail and analysis that Riverdaughter has applied to pharmaceutical industry affairs. And so sometimes do some of the comments by some of her commenters.
I read that a number of trees which fell on houses and cars fell because the soil got so saturated with water that it softened and huge trees levered themselves right over because the soil had become too water-softened to hold the roots in place. People might want to think about cutting off all heavy limbs pointing towards a house so that all the weight is distributed away from the nearest house. That way if the tree falls over in saturated soil, its weight might pull it over away from the house. (If this comment seems too silly to allow it to stay up, by all means feel free to remove it. I just suspect that the future will make all kinds of things “not silly anymore”. )
Not silly at all. There is a huge evergreen eating my house. I’d love to cut it down but afraid that it will cost a small fortune. I worry everytime we have a nor’easter.
Hey, maybe we should start a home maintenance thread!
You misunderstood the comment about Warren representing Cambridge. If she was running for election to represent Cambridge, she would probably win in a landslide. It’s the people not living in Cambridge she will have a hard time convincing that she is not a member of the Harvard elite a la Summers, Geithner, and Co. And most of the people in Massachusetts do not live in Cambridge. Nor do they want to.
I understood your comment very well. I simply disagree with you. She doesn’t come across as the Birkenstock wearing, Prius driving, organic toilet paper snob type.
Her work on credit and bankruptcy preceded anything she did for Congress or Obama. Her presentation on the declining middle class is clear and understandable by anyone who is sentient. You do not need a masters degree.
Not everyone who lives in Cambridge is an elite commie pinko.
Maybe it would only cost half a small fortune to have a crew cut off only the branches facing the house? That way the branches facing away from the house might weight-bias the tree to fall away from the house . . maybe.
I hadn’t thought about the high winds problem. I was only thinking about the soil saturation problem from the super heavy rains of tomorrow and beyond. And I gather high winds have long been a feature of the Atlantic coast.
I know that some professions allow their semi-advanced students to train on willing guinea pigs who pay very little for the privilege. I got a gold crown put in very cheaply by dental school students under the master’s watchful eye. Do specialty tree-removers/trimmers have to train for their jobs? If so, might old established tree-removal/trimming companies charge you very little to permit their senior students to work on your tree under the treemaster’s watchful eye? (And if not, how big a small fortune is worth spending in order to prevent the loss of a big fortune if/when that tree, or even big pieces of it, hits your house?)
When I have a regular job again, it will be one of the first things I deal with. But for now…
I called a tree removal company a couple of years ago to get a quote. My neighbor across the street had an identically landscaped tree cut down for the same reasons. The company who did the cutting wouldn’t give me a quote over the phone. Not even a ballpark figure. They said they would have to examine it on site, which was really weird because how much different could it possibly be? The houses and landscaping all went in at the same time, grew at the same rate and there were no obstacles to removing either tree except for its size. Nope. No quote. It kind of pissed me off because they, like all contractors and vendors around here, want you at home at their convenience when they bop on by to take a look. But I was working and 4 hour windows were not going to cut it so I said forget it. I looked that kind of removal online and the ballpark was around $2000. But this is NJ so I have to expect to pay more and wait longer. When I had my screens replaced in my windows, it took four months from scheduling an appointment to actually getting the service. I had to call about 20 companies before one would replace my HVAC system It’s ridiculous. So, I was in no mood to play games with the tree people.
And yes, $2000 is a lot of money to remove a tree, even if you are flush with cash. The sucker probably cost a couple of bucks to plant.
If Elizabeth Warren stays true to Democratic principles instead of veering to the Right to appease the Obama-crats, I’ll give to her campaign fund. As of now she is the only Democrat I’m considering supporting.
It has been many years since I was unemployed for a spell, so the memory of desperate money shortage is softened by the mists of time. But yes, that kind of price feels like a real feast of pain just to read about it from here.
Many years ago when we kids were just kids, Dad used us to help take down a tulip tree close to the house which was getting too big for comfort. He threw ropes around it in a certain way and then had us pull the tree away from the house as hard as we could whiile he carefully cut through it in stages. It worked.
What might give this memory the least bit of relevance or usefulness? There is a kind of hand-powered overhead saw which is basically a two foot length of chain saw type chain with a thirty foot rope on each end. It can be thrown over low and semi-low branches and pulled back and forth to cut through them. I wonder whether a few lowest target branches could be selected, ropes thrown over them, and then the branch sawed through by hand while rope-pullers are pulling their hardest on those ropes to pull the branch away from the house. If such a procedure could work for even a few lowest branches within reach, then cutting off those branches growing towards or over or beside the house would reduce the weight on the houseward side of the tree, thereby effectively increasing the weight on the “away-ward” side of the tree. Even handcutting and rope-guiding the fall of just a few lowest branches that way might be enough to raise the chances of the tree falling away from the house if a storm comes before financial recovery permits you to hire a tree service to handle the whole tree at once.
Just a thought, in case it might be useful.