Shocking News: Elizabeth Warren Doesn't Like Larry Summers

GottaLaff has some great quotes of Elizabeth Warren mocking Lawrence Summers. Warren shared her disdain for Summers with journalist Ron Suskind.

Warren criticized the Obama administration for not cracking down on big banks, and she compared his advisers — including Summers specifically — unfavorably to a country in South America that decades ago used government funds to try to prevent banks from going under.

“Tim [Geithner] and Larry’s whole plan is just like Argentina in the 1980s,” Warren told author Ron Suskind in September 2009, while he was working on “Confidence Men,” a book on the aftermath of the financial collapse. “There was this giant hole marked ‘Banks’ and the government just dumped money in that hole, as much as they had, while they lied about it. That’s what Larry thinks: that the US is Argentina!”

While Warren and Suskind were waiting at a terminal in Washington’s Reagan National Airport, Warren began to sing, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” Several started to applaud, and she modified the verse, with Summers in the role of Eva Peron.

“Why not?” Warren said with a laugh. “He might understand things better as a woman.”

Romney's Fantasy-Based Campaign

The Romney campaign falsely believed that The Drudge Report and the late Andrew Breitbart's media empire was going to replacement mainstream media. Anyone who saw Karl Rove's meltdown on Fox News knows that is not going to happen. You can only bullshit people for so long before reality comes crashing down. Lenny Alcivar, spokesman for the Romney campaign thought otherwise.

When this election is over, one of the lessons that will be learned by the mainstream media is that they no longer have a toe-hold on how Americans receive their news. Never before –in a way that has taken Democrats off stride –have we seen the confluence of an aggressive online community, led by Breitbart, and an aggressive campaign team not willing to cede an inch of ground to Democrats. This combination has created a new political reality. We no longer allow the mainstream media to define the political realities in America. The rise of Breitbart, Drudge and others, combined with an aggressive Romney campaign is a powerful tool in the arsenal of the conservative movement. If I talk to Breitbart about an issue, thousands more will hear our message than if we give a quote to one of the hill rags.

Alcivar's interview with Breitbart News reminds me of an infamous encounter journalist Ron Suskind had with a President Bush staffer. That staffer is believed to be Rove.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he define d as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment priniples and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality --judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Just like the Bush administration, the Romney campaign wanted to create their own reality. That is why they believed in skewed polls and bogus political consultants. The result was Obama winning a second term. Living a in fantasyland is what people do when they don't have empirical evidence on their side.

Glenn Hubbard Must Not Become Treasury Secretary

Glenn Hubbard is a political hack of epic proportions. It would be a disaster for America if Mitt Romney won the presidency and appointed Hubbard as Treasury Secretary or chairman of the Federal Reserve. Hubbard has argued for the Federal Reserve raising interest rates during the the economic downturn.

Hubbard served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the beginning of the Bush administration. Former Treasury Sec. Paul O'Neill told Hubbard that the surplus needed to be used to shore up entitlements.O'Neill also warned that the surplus would disappear with the tax cuts Hubbard was drafting. Hubbard has convenient amnesia about the conversations O'Neill had with him.

HUBBARD: "I don’t ever recall Paul O’Neill sharing that observation at the time. I will say that early on in the Bush campaign for president, while he was still governor, Social Security reform was an issue that came up in any discussion of budget surpluses. However, it was Governor Bush’s conclusion that, politically, using the surplus for Social Security was not likely to happen."

O'Neill told Ron Suskind of the level of Hubbard's hackery in the book "The Price of Loyalty." Hubbard pushed for tax cuts after the September 11th attacks shook the financial markets and the likelyhood of America paying for war in Afghanistan.

"I believe that any large tax cut proposal that is not a product of consultation with Democratic leadership will begin to unravel the fragile trust and bipartisanship we are currently experiencing," Weinberger wrote. After opposition from O'Neill, Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin to acting before facts about post-Sept. 11 economic effects became clear, a cut of $48 billion was passed six months later. But an internal administration debate about whether the Sept. 11 attacks should be used to carry forward a partisan agenda had begun.

Hubbard is an extremely unpleasant man who wishes to hide his ties to the financial sector. This scene from the movie Inside Job should give people pause about Hubbard serving again in government.

Hubbard worked as an adviser for Goldman Sachs. Hubbard co-wrote a study with then Goldman Sachs economist William C. Dudley that urged for selling toxic derivatives for mortgages.

“The capital markets have helped facilitate a major transformation of the U.S. mortgage financing system over the past 25 years. … The result has been a dramatic decline in the cyclical volatility of housing activity.”

The short answer is Hubbard and Dudley were encouraging Goldman Sachs to sell garbage mortgage-backed securities to their investors and then bet on mortgages to go bad. The investors lose money, but Goldman Sachs makes a killing.

An example of how big of economic hacks are Hubbard and Dudley. The stupidity of this would be laughable, if it wasn't for the 2008 crash.

“This use of derivatives leads to improved economic performance,” they wrote, insisting, “The capital markets have also acted to reduce the volatility of the economy. Recessions are less frequent and milder when they occur.”

Is there anything this man hasn't been wrong on? Hubbard is now going around claiming Mitt Romney will explain the tax base and create 12 million jobs in 4 years. Hubbard and the Romney campaign are adding the numbers of jobs from three studies to come to the magic number of 12 million. One study says that if China starts honoring U.S. patents it would create two million jobs. Good luck getting China to do that.

If Romney wins, Democrats need to block Hubbard from ever getting confirmed to head Treasury or the Federal Reserve. There isn't a more greedy, fantasy-based and incompetent economist out there. Hubbard is unfit to serve in government.

Fall Out of Confidence Men

"Just read "Confidence Men." It's good. It's smart. It rings true. It's a tough read for Team Obama."

Journalist Marc Ambinder, on Ron Suskind's new book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President."

The book portrays President Obama as weak in handling conflicts with his staffers and getting steamrolled by his Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner and Rahm Emanuel. This was told to Suskind by staffers on-the-record and with the cooperation of the administration. Team Obama is now trying to do push back. The problem is Suskind has these conversations on tape. Anita Dunn denied she claimed the White House was sexist towards women. Suskind revealed a tape to the Washington Post that made Dunn's original on-the-record quote even more damning.

"I remember once I told Valerie [Jarrett] that, I said if it weren’t for the president, this place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” Dunn is heard telling Suskind. “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women."

A White House that gives complete access to a well-known muckraking reporter and then have staffers show incredibly poor message discipline. This is not a smart administration.

Suskind appeared on Morning Joe to discuss a meeting female staffers had with the President about sexism from Summers and Emanuel. Obama told them he wouldn't fire them because he needed them. I have yet to figure out what positive things did Summers and Emanuel do in the Obama administration.

Summers was such an egomaniac that he was telling people in the administration that he was smarter than Obama.

According to Orszag, Summers says, "You know, Peter we're really home alone. There's no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes." Later, Orszag says to Suskind, "Larry just didn't think the president knew what he was deciding. Was this [obstruction of the president's wishes] outright and willful?" In other words, asks Orszag, was Summers saying, "I know more than the president flat-out? That strikes me as ... likely."

Joy-Ann Reid tweeted me that I just attacked Summers because I hated him. I tweeted her the Summers quote. Reid never tweeted me back. The thing about Obamabots such as Reid is they never want to talk about the substance about the criticism.