Lizzy

This morning on Morning Joe, they played a video tape of yesterday's Senate Banking Committee hearing ... Senator Elizabeth Warren's first ... in which she "hammered" a bunch of banking regulators with the repeated question, "When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial?" (as a result of the 2008/2009 financial debacle.)  These regulators were visibly embarrasses and forced to respond that no bank had been indicted and put on trial in the last four years. See: Huffington Post Story

As a result of this tough questioning, Mika Brzezinski grabbed her pompoms and was audibly cheering in the background for Senator Warren's line of questioning.  And I have to admit, despite my stated animus toward this fake Indian from Massachusetts, I was cheering too. The fact that no one on Wall Street or from the financial community in general has gone to jail over the sub-prime mortgage crisis is one of the more egregious sins of the Obama administration.  Even Jon Corzine is still walking free after his company, MF Global, lost track of 1.6 billion dollars of its customer's money.

This aggressiveness on Senator Warren's part spawned the following strange thought on my part -- what if the reason Warren wasn't considered in 2011 to head up the Consumer Protection Agency wasn't because of Republican opposition, but rather because of the Obama administration's chariness ... its fear that she might start turning over stones in Washington?  She certainly has started out by upending a huge Obama bolder.

Keep it up, Lizzy!  I may end up liking you afterall.

The Upcoming Debates -- Obama

In the upcoming debates, there are ten questions I would like to be asked of Barack Obama:

1) It's been speculated that you have a borrowed Social Security number since it was issued in Connecticut, a state in which you never have resided, and at a time when you were a child in Hawaii.  How do you explain away this enigma?

2) You have played golf nearly 120 times during your White House tenure ... about once every 10 days. Add this to your many vacations, your pick-up basketball games, your recent constant fund-raising trips, your frequent White House celebrations, and your many other distractions.  Do you believe that you have paid sufficient attention to your job-one during these difficult times?

3) Do you still believe that Israel should return to its 1948 borders ... and is Jerusalem Israel's capital?

4) Since your well-over one trillion dollars of government pump-priming spending has not caused an economic recovery in the United States ... do you still believe in Keynesian economics?

5) Seeing that the U.S. Supreme Court has decreed that the penalties specified under Obamacare are a tax, do you still claim that you have not raised taxes on the middle class?  Or, to the contrary, if you endorse the Court's decision, are you then willing to reform this legislation to remove this tax?

6) You formed the Simpson-Bowles commission to help solve our burgeoning national debt crisis.  You then ignored their recommendations and have instead proposed raising taxes on those earning more than $250,000 as your only solution.  Have you any other suggestions ... such as some specifics for reforming the U.S. federal entitlement programs?

7) You have been widely quoted as saying "you didn't build that" and accused of being a statist.  Did you, in fact, write your two books by yourself ... or did you have ghostwriter help?

8) In order to move toward a balanced federal budget, would you pare back spending in the discretionary portion of the federal budget … if so, where ... and how far will you still go with Defense Department cuts?

9) The Consumer Protection Agency was created by Congress and Elizabeth Warren over two years ago to eliminate the risks to our financial systems like those created by the sub-prime mortgage crisis.  Recently, two new financial shocks have occurred -- J.P. Morgan’s over five billion dollar trading loss and the Libor interest rate fixing scandal.  Is more regulation really the answer to such shenanigans?

10) Two of your foreign policy initiatives that have not succeeded have been your and Hillary Clinton’s “reset’ attempt with Russia ... and reestablishing diplomatic relations with Syria … only weeks before the current savagery began there.  What foreign policy initiatives then are you most proud of?