As Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition for 15 years, Tomas de Torquemada presided over the interrogation, torture, imprisonment and execution of thousands, for the “crimes” of religious heresy and pretended conversion to Christianity. Historian Sebastián de Olmedo titled him “the hammer of heretics.”
Today Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) are pursuing their own inquisition against perceived “heretics.” Thankfully, they don’t have Friar Torquemada’s torture devices or sentencing options. But they are vindictive and effective nonetheless – abusing their congressional powers to silence critics of their policy agendas, often with the help of media, White House, Justice Department, Internal Revenue Service and Big Green allies.
Warren’s latest coup was sacking economist Robert Litan from his position as a scholar with the liberal Brookings Institution, for having the temerity to criticize financial rules she was championing. The fact that Litan is a “progressive” Democrat and former Clinton administration official was irrelevant.
Whitehouse wants the Justice Department to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to investigate and prosecute organizations and individuals who challenge his view that mankind’s use of oil, natural gas and coal is causing climate catastrophes. He has targeted “skeptical” organizations and scientists, while alarmists like Michael Mann and Jagadish Shukla have their own enemies lists.
Their attitudes and actions epitomize today’s liberals, who cannot stomach anyone who disagrees with their views or policies. These modern “hammers of heretics” refuse to debate and instead do all they can to silence critics and destroy their careers. As Fox News commentator Kirsten Powers observes, too many liberals support tolerance only for themselves and only to advance their intolerant agendas.
More than ever before, says political analyst George Will, they are “aggressively and dangerously … attacking the theory of free speech, the desirability of free speech, the very possibility of free speech.”
They compound the outrage with double standards. Senator Whitehouse rages about climate skeptics – but utters not a peep about biased government-funded science, models and propaganda; not a word about EPA’s far-fetched “social cost of carbon” estimates and refusal to even mention how its regulations kill jobs and reduce living standards, health and welfare. Senator Barbara Boxer disgraced Congress when she excoriated physician, medical researcher and author Michael Crichton, for daring to suggest that “double blind” studies be required for climate research, just as FDA does for medical research.
Senator Warren’s intolerance and double standards make her colleagues look like pikers.
Former Brookings VP and economic studies director Robert Litan is highly regarded as an expert on the unintended effects of regulations on businesses, workers and families. But when he testified before Congress last July, saying a proposed regulation would deprive poor and middle class investors of valuable financial advisors and advice, Ms. Warren was livid. She had vigorously supported the Labor Department rule, even though many Democrats and virtually all Republicans in Congress oppose it.
In September, Senator Warren suddenly discovered that the Litan study behind his testimony had been funded in part by the Capital Group, a major investment management company whose business would likely be affected by the regulation. Both the study and testimony made the arrangement crystal clear.
But Senator Warren saw her chance to pound the heretic. Instead of trying to rebut his testimony, Wall Street Journal columnist Gordon Crovitz observed, she decided to punish the witness. At 8:30 am September 29, the Washington Post posted her letter to Brookings criticizing Litan and claiming his funding disclosure was somehow “vague.” An hour later, spineless Brookings president Strobe Talbott threw Litan under the bus, despite his loyal and productive decades of service to the institution.
The senator is on a roll. She has also prevented economist Antonio Weiss from getting a senior Treasury position, and former Harvard president and Clinton and Obama official Larry Summers from becoming Federal Reserve chairman, because their views on certain issues offended her ultra-liberal sensibilities.
She is fortunate that the lofty, inflexible standards she inflicts on others are not applied to her.
OpenSecrets.org reveals that Warren has accepted over $600,000 from securities and investment firms, including some $6,000 from Capital Group executives! Law firms that stand to benefit from her legislation, advocacy and policy interventions have lavished $2.2 million on her campaigns – and the education industry that benefits from her constant promotion of increased education subsidies has given her a hefty $1.4 million, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Even more outrageous is the BFF relationship Ms. Warren has with Better Markets. This tax-exempt 501(c)3 “educational” organization in Washington, DC is funded almost entirely by multi-millionaire hedge-fund manager Michael Masters, via some $3 million a year that flows from him or his Marlin Fund to his Spring Foundation charity to Better Markets – which testifies and lobbies persistently, consistently and quite successfully for legislation and regulations advocated by the progressives’ favorite senator.
As political reporter Brendan Bordelon observes in the National Review, “By failing to adequately disclose its relationship with Masters to lawmakers, observers say Better Markets is doing exactly what Warren accused Brookings of doing – covertly taking money from a finance-industry player to influence regulators with the power to approve policies from which that player can earn huge profits.”
Former Obama appointee to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Jill Sommers calls it a “huge” and “unprecedented” conflict of interest. It’s “outrageous,” says a former SEC counsel.
Masters uses market “triggers” to identify stocks whose prices may rise or fall in response to investor anxiety over political events such as proposed financial rules, Bordelon says. In spring 2015, The Marlin Fund held “call options” worth hundreds of millions of dollars in MetLife, CitiGroup and Prudential. A proposed regulation, reclassifying them as “systematically important financial institutions,” would have increased federal controls and driven their share prices downward – giving Marlin and Masters big profits from “short selling” shares, and using their call options as a hedge against unexpected price increases.
Better Markets president Dennis Kelleher testified before Warren’s Senate Banking Committee and filed an amicus brief supporting the rule change. But they never disclosed their obvious self-interest in the change: their sole source of income (Marlin and Masters) stood to profit enormously from the change.
Warren would have gone ballistic if an opponent of the rule had such an arrangement. But she has said nothing about this classic conflict of interest. That’s hardly surprising.
She was a keynote speaker at a 2013 Better Markets meeting, wrote a laudatory testimonial for its website, and works closely with Kelleher and his group to ensure support for her legislative, regulatory and political crusades, Bordelon notes. Campaign contributions may create more ties that bind.
Meanwhile, Kelleher has testified at numerous Dodd-Frank and other Capitol Hill hearings, and is the go-to guy for many journalists who want insights on the finance industry or Senator Warren’s viewpoints.
Ms. Torquemada is clearly not content to have or win debates on policy issues. She intends to prevent debates, penalize anyone who challenges her, intimidate and silence would-be critics, and impose her agenda – regardless of its impacts on the “poor and helpless” she professes to care so much about.
So much for the Senate as “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” or the notion that, despite disagreeing with what you say, liberals would “defend to the death your right to say it.” Torquemada’s reincarnation must not become the new reality for constitutional rights, robust debate, and informed decision-making.
If the above information is true, it would appear that Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) are two of the most dangerous people in the Senate. Using illegal means to stifle dissent. This is just another example of why the American people do not trust politicians and Elizabeth Warren continues to show her colors again and again and people ignore this bad behavior.
Hey Concerned, I wonder if MA and RI voters are/have been Gruberized (spelling)? Seems so. Really sad. IMHO
I thought Sen. Elizabeth Warren was already under a hairy eyeball, or do I have the wrong Warren?
This is the political type the left run for the presidency.
These tactics are what the followers of Sal Alinsky and his Rules for Radicals do. Silence and out shout the opposition and belittle them. Typical stuff we learned from the 1960s and 1970s with the commie lead radical protest.
http:// discoverthenetworks-com
Go to David Horowitz site below for DETAILS on Alinsky and check the Cloward Piven plan to OVERWHELM the U.S. Economy to create systemic FAILURE via economic CRISIS and social CHAOS thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2314
And we wonder how we got to this…
A Country Founded by Geniuses but Run by Idiots!
If you can get arrested for hunting or fishing without a license, but
not for entering and remaining in the country illegally — you might
live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.
If you have to get your parents’ permission to go on a field trip or
to take an aspirin in school, but not to get an abortion — you might
live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.
If you MUST show your identification to board an airplane, cash a
check, buy liquor, or check out a library book and rent a video, but not
to vote for who runs the government — you might live in a nation that
was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.
If the government wants to prevent stable, law-abiding citizens from
owning gun magazines that hold more than ten rounds, but gives twenty
F-16 fighter jets to the crazy new leaders in Egypt — you might live in a
nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.
If, in the nation’s largest city, you can buy two 16-ounce sodas, but
not one 24-ounce soda, because 24-ounces of a sugary drink might make
you fat — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is
run by idiots.
If an 80-year-old woman or a three-year-old girl who is confined to a
wheelchair can be strip-searched by the TSA at the airport, but a woman
in a burka or a hijab is only subject to having her neck and head
searched — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but
is run by idiots.
If your government believes that the best way to eradicate trillions
of dollars of debt is to spend trillions more — you might live in a
nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.
If a seven-year-old boy can be thrown out of school for saying his
teacher is “cute,” but hosting a sexual exploration or diversity class
in grade school is perfectly acceptable — you might live in a nation
that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.
If hard work and success are met with higher taxes and more
government regulation and intrusion, while not working is rewarded with
Food Stamps, WIC checks, Medicaid benefits, subsidized housing, and free
cell phones — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses
but is run by idiots.
If the government’s plan for getting people back to work is to
provide incentives for not working, by granting 99 weeks of unemployment
checks, without any requirement to prove that gainful employment was
diligently sought, but couldn’t be found — you might live in a nation
that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.
If you pay your mortgage faithfully, denying yourself the newest
big-screen TV, while your neighbor buys iPhones, time shares, a
wall-sized do-it-all plasma screen TV and new cars, and the government
forgives his debt when he defaults on his mortgage — you might live in a
nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.
If being stripped of your Constitutional right to defend yourself
makes you more “safe” according to the government — you might live in a
nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.
If the media panders to your openly socialist leader while the IRS targets groups with dissenting views— you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.
If your government ‘cracks down’ on legal gun sales to law abiding citizens while secretly supplying illegal guns to Mexican drug cartels— you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.
If your local government (Chicago) outlawed gun ownership for ‘the safety of its citizens’ and now boasts the worst murder rate in the country — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.
What a country!
How about we give God a reason to continue blessing America?
This was borrowed from another blog, author unknown, please spread it far and wide!
Wait, are you saying that Fauxchahontas could be disingenuous?
When Free Speech is destroyed so is Real science, religating any nation that does it to a third world country that has no advanced weapons or the scientific ability to develop them leaving them defenceless ! Think the Iron Dome of Israel was developed by Spanish Inquisitionest ?? How would that be possible when they burn true science at the Stake ???
Once again they return from our past to deny us a future ! As If Reincarnated for our Torment ! They were the Flat earthers attempting to discourage Columbus. They were all over Europe, as now, with a different agenda Stopping these Wright Brothers from proselytising Europe into believing Man could fly ! Changing their tune from,” Flight is impossible for man” To You will never be able to stir those aircraft ” The Wright Brothers Took off in the Eiffel tower Park flew Turned, turned, and turned again to land in the same spot they took off from, And a previous Generation of the Inquisitionest changed their tune like today’s change from Global Warming to Climate Change Because 75 years of their foolish Prophecies Failed !!
I read somewhere that any Senator can say pretty much whatever they want from the well of the Senate and have immunity from everything. Harry Reid lied all the time and insulted R’s from the well all the time. I am from the old school. They swing at me I swing back harder. I guess I’m a Trumpster.
About the statements – “Pursuing an agenda of intolerance and retribution against critics of their ultra-liberal policies”.
A few decades ago, such people would have been correctly called as communists who detest the America way of freedom and democracy granted under the Constitution.
So let’s stop calling these people liberal or ultra-Liberal. Peel back the skin and you’ll see their true calling … communism.
Melons even, green on outside, but red inside.
Democrats are totalitarian qunts sorely in need of a boot tot he face.
Clearly there is still a market among the Faux “News” faithful for claiming that:
Has there ever been – ever – a less likely conspiracy theory ever than this one? In the history of the world?
Best,
D
Or a more silly theory of how and why warming takes place when it clearly does not?
I love your dispatches from an alternate universe.
Best,
D
I couldn’t get past the first paragraph and the usual stupid anti-Catholic lie about the Spanish Inquisition! Do your research, and NOT from the usual Protestant suspects!
Use of the RICO act should be applied to Obama/Valerie Jarrad/Hillary/John Kerry/Holder and the present dept of lack of Justice.
If this was not a conspiracy to “transform” America what else could it be. Orange jumps suits for all of them!
Remember, Voting has consequences….so many fraudulent voters out there that are dependent of entitlements……