Meet Elizabeth Warren

So The New York Times deems, and so it shall be: It is time to meet Elizabeth Warren:

Among all the dramatis personae of post-financial crisis Washington, there is no one remotely like Ms. Warren, 60, who has divided the town between those who admire her and those who roll their eyes at her ….

…. Ms. Warren has two roles here: officially, as head of Congressional oversight for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and unofficially, as chief conceiver of and booster for a new consumer financial protection agency. Fusing those projects and her academic work, she has become the most prominent consumer advocate in years.

In a blitz of television appearances, she offers a story of how 30 years of deregulation has rewarded the financial industry but led to abusive practices and collapses that have hurt ordinary Americans — the same taxpayers who are paying for bank bailouts.

Ms. Warren’s climactic hour begins now: three years after she hatched the idea for the agency, the White House has backed it, the House of Representatives has approved it and it is a top Democratic priority in the Senate.

Many fans, including Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, hope Ms. Warren will run it. But even if the agency is approved, it might be far weaker than what she envisioned, thanks to fierce opposition from the financial industry.

Her admirers are many, including President Obama and House Financial Services Chairman Rep. Barney Frank. As Jodi Kantor’s story for the NYT hits the newsstands, Professor Warren is already well-known to fans of Bill Maher’s Real Time, on HBO. Her two appearances to date have shown her endearing, such that my first response was like that of a child to a puppy: “Can we keep her?”

The obvious answer that nobody likes

Well, Glenn, now that you mention it—

Can anyone reconcile Obama’s homage to “our legal traditions” and his professed faith in jury trials in the New York federal courts with the reality of what his administration is doing: i.e., denying trials to a large number of detainees, either by putting them before military commissions or simply indefinitely imprisoning them without any process at all?

—actually, yes, I can.

1. Suspect is actually guilty.
2. Evidence of guilt is too “classified”.
3. Evidence of guilt is theoretic.
4. Suspect cannot be reasonably convicted by any functional standard.
5. Obama is an elected politician.

Do we really need it spelled out like that? Look, for whatever reasons—blame Bush if you want—President Obama finds himself in a position where (A) he’s not going to win bringing some guilty people to trial; and (B) as an elected politician, the one thing he apparently cannot do in such a circumstance is the right thing. The American people simply won’t stand for it.

Now, look. I’m glad we’ve got people like Greenwald doing what they do so well. But nobody’s perfect, and on this occasion it might be useful to admit that not everything in this nation is the fault of the government or press. Some of it is actually our fault. Voters, taxpayers, consumers, citizens—whatever word sounds most noble and heroic to your ears. I don’t care which; we’re all damned.

We keep electing these people. The American voter is neurosis in motion. We’re sick of incumbents who take their office for granted, yet we freak out if a candidate doesn’t have enough experience as a politician. We are upset with politicians who are out of touch with Americans, yet we demand higher standards for them. Now, let’s be clear on that one: Lie to us and you can start a war. But don’t you dare cheat on your wife.

Or, as Bill Maher put it, free beer and vagina trees.

So I’ll say it clearly for Mr. Greenwald and anyone else asking the obvious questions: This is what we wanted. Maybe not you and me individually, but Americans. This is what we voted for. What we failed to protest against. Hell, conservatives can find eighty-three random reasons to mobilize against a black man in the White House but we on the left couldn’t manage to find our voices against war and torture. Sure we had one or two politicians (McDermott, Kucinich), and the news media certainly didn’t like our kind, but we also spent the Bush administration being lazy, not going to jail, not holding mass demonstrations, not getting higher than Jesus and celebrating the American promise.

I get it, Mr. Greenwald. Many people out there do. But we cannot continue to rail against the political and private institutions that promote such injustice without ever looking to the people who empower them and asking what the hell is up.

And I recognize that it is unpopular in this country to acknowledge the things we do wrong. It’s a death knell for the politician, a blackball for the press. Yet we continue to reward liars and thieves with our votes.

Some days we even admit it to ourselves: This is the best we have; better to sound off in support than have no voice at all.

But for those things that make this nation so special and important, that fuel our leadership of the world? It’s all the same. If it’s bad for business, it’s bad for America. And that means truth, justice, and the “American way” are nothing more than inconvenient myths that people—Americans—are just about done with.

Do we play along? Fill up the Molotovs and fight? Maybe we should simply shut up and pretend this is still—or ever was—the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Cow farts!

Argentine scientists are strapping plastic tanks to the backs of cows. (Reuters)

Yes, that is exactly what it looks like. Scientists in Argentina—one of the world’s leading producers of beef—are studying bovine flatulence as part of that nation’s effort to combat global warming. According to Rupert Neate, for the Telegraph:

The Argentine researchers discovered methane from cows accounts for more than 30 per cent of the country’s total greenhouse emissions ....

.... Guillermo Berra, a researcher at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology, said every cow produces between 800 to 1,000 litres of emissions every day.

Guns or butter? (A slippery question)

There is a certain lesson that echoes from childhood about priorities. I shan’t trouble you with a sketchy recollection from the dusty book of Things My Father Said; you might start to think I have a complex about him.

I probably do.

Er … anyway, moving right along, a question of priorities. British commentator Mark Steel, writing for The Independent, notes,

It’s so difficult, apparently, to work out how to solve the food shortages in Africa. Because the price of food has just gone up, the way prices do sometimes, caught by a freak gust of wind or flare from the sun or something and whoosh, up they go, whether it’s oil or an Olympic Games or rice and it’s just bad luck.

Combined with the growing population, it means there’s no simple way of stopping millions of people starving. But fortunately the same laws don’t apply to other essential items, such as arms. That’s why you never get reports saying: “What with the booming population and rising prices, there just aren’t enough weapons to go round.

“The crisis is so deep there are now allies of America without access to a single cluster bomb, and in one region of the Congo warlords have to share one flamethrower between two. Charities have sent out truckloads of Tomahawk missiles to Uzbekistan but the queues of government officials go back across the hills, and the fear is that for some this shipment may have come too late.”

And aid programmes require summits lasting several days, followed by statements about tying aid to trade deals, that begin: “You don’t solve the problem of hunger simply by giving people food.”

So while getting food to the hungry seems impossible, there has been a 37 per cent increase in global arms spending in the past 10 years, which raised last year’s tally to $1,204bn. Those of you who don’t understand economics might wonder why there can’t be an agreement to only spend $1,203bn instead, then wander round Sainsbury’s buying a billion dollars’ worth of food and take it to people who are starving, especially as Sainsbury’s currently have a special offer of a free box of Shredded Wheat if you spend a billion dollars or more.

Vocabulary: Premillennial dispensationalism

This is not a comic strip:

This is just one of those phrases that has escaped me. I knew there was a term for the scheme, but never knew what it was. Bill Maher raised the issue a few years ago on Larry King Live in 2003, and on his own show, Real Time, the next night. I mention Maher because I remember that episode. And I remember the Larry King appearance.

And that’s why I love the web. From Larry King Live, August 28, 2003:

MAHER: They don’t want what President Bush is trying to push for in the Middle East. They don’t want a peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Because then, if you had a peace then the Palestinians, the Arabs would have part of Jerusalem.

And we can’t have that, because when Jesus comes back, which he’s going to any day now, it has to be the way he left it. It has to be that the Jews control Jerusalem, because when he comes back to take all the good people up to heaven, the Jews have a place in that situation. Which of course, Larry, is to die. Or to convert. So in other words, they want the Jews to retain all of Israel. Because when Jesus comes back down, the Jews have a job to do, which is to die.

KING: You lump Mel Gibson in that group?

MAHER: Oh, yes. He’s even further to the right than that. He’s truly in the wacko. He’s in part of that group, I forget what they call them, not conservative Catholics or something, but they don’t believe in Vatican II. In other words, Pope John and the reforms are no good. Do the mass in Latin. The Jews are the Christ killers.

And Real Time With Bill Maher, August 29, 2003:

MAHER: This is also the week when a little boy was killed because he was autistic, and his parents thought he was possessed by demons. So during the exorcism, they smothered him. This is all just to make the case, as I always love to do, that religion is stupid. [laughter] [cheers] [applause]

Now, in addition to this, with all the press Mel Gibson has been getting about making his movie about Jesus, I think people would like to know that the road map to the Middle East which our president is trying to put forth – and I agree, it’s a good plan – is opposed by some people in our government, including Tom DeLay – they call themselves Friends of Israel. And what they really are, are people who do not want to share the Holy Land, because in the Bible, the Jews have the Holy Land, and when Jesus comes back, the Jews have a part to play, which is, of course, to die.

As a punch-line delivered during unsettled times, I remember thinking it had some weight. The audience reaction noted in the Real Time transcript was not entirely comfortable. It sounded like a really crass joke, which it is, except that it’s not.

Enter Salon.com political writer Michelle Goldberg. In 2006, W. W. Norton published her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. No, I’ve not read it yet; I only heard about it yesterday.

Which, incidentally, is the reason I bring any of this up. Earlier this year, Ms. Goldberg spoke in Seattle at Elliott Bay Bookstore, and KUOW, on Thursday’s edition of Speaker’s Forum, broadcast portions of those remarks. It’s a fascinating talk, and finally introduced me to the phrase “premillennial dispensationalism”.

Seriously. I knew there had to be a word for it.