Nick Gillespie should use great care when tipping his hat to hack extraordinaire Glenn Reynolds. Gillespie and Reynolds both think they have caught Elizabeth Warren claiming to not be wealthy based on a clip posted at Buzzfeed. Gillespie employs his wry wit to declaim that “Buzzfeed reports that Warren, like Marie Antoinette and Bruce Springsteen, only likes to play poor.” But pay close attention to what she said:
Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren — the standard-bearer for a combative new progressivism — made the case to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell last night that members of the Senate shouldn’t own stock.
“I realize there are some wealthy individuals – I’m not one of them, but some wealthy individuals who have a lot of stock portfolios” she told him.
Hard to see how Warren wouldn’t be, by most standards, wealthy, according to the Personal Financial Disclosure form she filed to run for Senate shows that she’s worth as much as $14.5 million. She earned more than $429,000 from Harvard last year alone for a total of about $700,000, and lives in a house worth $5 million. [emphasis added]
Warren isn’t calling herself poor, but is saying that she doesn’t own a lot of stock. Buzzfeed put a clarifying update at the bottom of the post, but it requires wading through literally dozens of words to read.
Joe Carter 
Clark Stooksbury 
Matt 
Publuis Cato 
I think you might have mentioned the context that I suspect Ms. Warren was speaking in when saying she didn’t think Congressmen and women shouldn’t own stock, Mr, Stooksbury.
Just a month or so ago I think it was that jailed former lobbyist Abramhoff who was talking very convincingly about how many of the Congresspeople he used to hobnob with would openly brag about how they used inside knowledge gained through their positions on committees and etc. to make killings on the stock market.
And indeed it seems that looking at the insider trading laws Congress has passed against all of us that in fact they have exempted themselves from same, corruptly enough. Plus, only recently again if I’m not mistaken one member couldn’t round up diddly-squat in terms of others to support an amendment to change that.
Per Abramoff all this is sort of an open secret in Congress, and he may even have said it’s an open secret amongst the major media who cover Congress as part of a regular and close beat too.
So anyway I suspect this is where Ms. Warren was coming from, and even if not that exemption from insider trading laws is just breathtakingly corrupt all on its own.
(As is the lack of major media investigation into Abramoff’s charges and that glaring exemption. Maybe due to some reporters doing the same thing?)
One helluva inquiry by *someone* certainly seems merited in any event.