“Extremely Deceptive”: Scott Brown Is Lying About His Reproductive Rights Record
Running for Senate in a deep-blue state—where support for abortion rights has been measured at nearly 70 percent—Republican Scott Brown needs to make it clear that he supports reproductive rights. That’s why he’s telling reporters that he “promise[s]” never to vote in the Senate to curb reproductive rights, and why he has a new ad airing statewide today with this script:
NARRATOR: Scott Brown is pro choice, and he supports a woman’s right to choose.
WOMEN: I like that Scott Brown is independent, he really thinks for himself. His record shows that he supports women, he supports families. When my daughters grow up, I want to make sure that they have good jobs with equal pay, and I know Scott Brown will fight for that. I support Scott Brown because I know he wants to get our economy moving forward again. I’m a mom, I have a family, and I know that Scott Brown will fight hard for families.
BROWN: I’m Scott Brown and I approve this message.
Sounds nice. And it’s true Brown did object to the GOP platform language on abortion. But his actual record—touted in the ad—directly contradicts the new message.
Consider:
Brown was a co-sponsor of the Blunt Amendment earlier this year, which would have allowed employers to deny women preventive care options under the company plan—including contraception, mammograms, pre-natal screenings, cervical cancer screenings. (It was written broadly enough to allow any employer to do this, not just religious ones). This would have jeopardized the preventive health services of 20.4 million women nationwide, and 517,000 in Massachusetts alone.
Brown voted to defund Planned Parenthood last year when he supported House Resolution 1, the Republican spending plan that was ultimately defeated in the Senate. It would also have removed funding under Title X for health centers for low-income women.
Brown may have supported the Stupak-Pitts Amendment to the Affordable Care Act, which would have stripped any funding for abortions by any health insurance product subsidized by the government. It wasn’t included in the Senate version that Brown voted on. But his staff told the Associated Press in November 2009 that Brown would have supported it—though he told Boston’s WBUR that same month that he would have opposed it.
It’s extremely deceptive, then, for Brown to pretend he supports a woman’s right to choose, as the ad claims. Or in the words of said Stephanie Schriock, President of EMILY’s List: “Scott Brown is straight-up lying to Massachusetts voters with his latest ad. Brown does not support a woman’s right to choose – his anti-choice voting record has earned him the support of an anti-choice organization in this very campaign.”
Indeed, Massachusetts Citizens for Life has endorsed Brown in his race against Elizabeth Warren. “We consider him a senator who votes prolife,” Anne Fox, the president of that group, told the Boston Globe last month. (Though Republican Majority For Choice has also backed him).
Brown is also misleading about his record on women’s issues elsewhere in the ad. For example, a woman featured says that “I want to make sure [my daughters] have good jobs with equal pay, and I know Scott Brown will fight for that.” But in November 2010, Brown supported a Republican filibuster of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have required employers to prove that any gender disparities in pay were directly related to job performance. That bill was passed by the House two years ago, but has never cleared a Senate filibuster.
BY: George Zornick, The Nation, September 14, 2012
“A Wall Street Democrat”: Michael Bloomberg’s True Colors
After last week’s Aurora massacre, Michael Bloomberg emerged as something of a liberal hero by almost single-handedly forcing gun control into the national debate.
Within hours of the tragedy, the New York mayor said in a radio appearance that “soothing words are nice, but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country.” He made the same call in a national television appearance over the weekend, leading a crusade on an issue that the Democratic Party once championed but essentially abandoned a decade ago. President Obama’s call last night for “violence reduction,” hesitant and non-specific though it was, is testament to the traction Bloomberg’s shaming campaign gained this past week.
And now, to follow this all up, Bloomberg is going to host a fundraiser for … a Republican senator who expressed his opposition just this week to reinstating the federal ban on assault weapons.
Granted, Scott Brown, the beneficiary of the Aug. 15 New York City fundraiser Bloomberg is planning, is unusually flexible on Second Amendment issues, at least by the standards of today’s Republican Party. As a state legislator in Massachusetts, he voted in 2004 to extend the state’s assault weapons ban (though he sided against banning the sale of weapons purchased before the ban went into effect). And as a U.S. senator, he broke with the NRA to oppose a bill that would require states to recognize concealed carry permits from other states.
Brown has been leaning on states’ rights to balance his home state’s liberalism on gun issues with the anti-gun control fervor that grips the national GOP, arguing that the federal government has no business passing new laws but that states should be free to do so. This is how he justifies his opposition to reinstating the federal assault weapon ban, which expired eight years ago.
The non-cynical reading of Bloomberg’s decision to raise money for Brown is that the mayor wants to reward what amounts to a modest break with GOP gun control orthodoxy, and to deliver a message to other Republicans that he’s willing to help them if they do the same. At some level, it’s surely a factor here.
But it’s hard to ignore the other major issue that might attract Bloomberg to Brown’s side: Wall Street. This has a little to do with Brown, who voted for the Dodd-Frank reform law but also worked to make it much weaker than it could have been, and a lot to do with his opponent, Elizabeth Warren, whom the Wall Street crowd is treating as its biggest enemy running for office this year.
When the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged last fall, Warren boasted that she’d created “much of the intellectual foundation” for the movement’s top 1 percent/bottom 99 percent messaging. Bloomberg, meanwhile, called the protests “not productive” and said that “what they’re trying to do is take the jobs away from people working in this city.” More recently, Bloomberg argued that President Obama, who is calling for the end of the Bush tax cuts for incomes over $250,000, has “not only embraced the frustration expressed by Occupy Wall Street protesters—which was real—but he adopted their economic populism.”
Bloomberg’s decision to raise money for Brown tells us a lot about his ideology, which is commonly portrayed in the media as centrist and independent. But that’s not really where he’s coming from. On most issues – guns, abortion, gay rights, the environment — Bloomberg is a standard-issue liberal Democrat. On economic issues, he’s a Wall Street Democrat, not averse to raising taxes (he’s even said the Bush rates should expire for everyone) but mindful of and often deferential to the sensitivities of the financial services sector. This puts him on the same page as Bill Clinton, Cory Booker and the many, many other Democrats who’ve cultivated mutually beneficial relationships with Wall Street over the past two decades. Obama himself benefited from Wall Street’s help in 2008, although that won’t really be the case this year.
In this sense, Bloomberg’s support for Brown isn’t really a sign of how independent he is as much as it is an indicator of how far removed Warren is from where most elite Democrats are on Wall Street issues.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, July 26, 2012
“Vote Republican Or The Economy Gets It”: The GOP Threat Behind All The “Fiscal Cliff” Talk
Greg Sargent has a fine post today about how Scott Brown has picked up on the Romney campaign’s effort to spin a mendacious take on the “you didn’t build that” quote, making it a double lie by tying it back to Elizabeth Warren (whose actual words were being paraphrased by what the president actually said). Indeed, Greg puts his finger on the broader message that both Republicans are trying to send:
The whole ”didn’t build that” dust-up is important, because the larger falsehood on display here — that Obama demeans success — is absolutely central to the Republican case against Obama. The Republican argument — Romney’s argument — is partly that Obama’s active ill will towards business owners and entrepreneurs is helping stall the recovery, so you should replace him with a president who wants people to succeed.
What makes this “vote Republican or the economy gets it” tactic devilishly effective is that its major premise—Obama hates “job creators”—doesn’t have to be true to wreak political damage so long as its minor premise—if “job creators” think Obama hates them they’ll stop creating jobs—is credible. And so it all turns into what amounts to blackmail: people like Mitt Romney are not “confident” in Obama’s stewardship of the economy, and if they don’t get ther way in November, they’ll tank the economy. This is also the threat behind all the “fiscal cliff” talk: we’re being told the financial markets will panic if there’s any chance the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy will lapse or that Pentagon spending will be cut at the end of the year. Somehow or another, the prospect of a Republican victory that will lead to very deep federal spending cuts, reductions in consumer buying power, and the elimination of many thousands of public sector jobs isn’t said to be a problem.
Now this is a very, very old game, certainly as old as the threats issued by business leaders at the behest of Mark Hanna in 1896 that votes for William Jennings Bryan would lose employees their jobs, or the eternal threats of non-unionized companies that they’d rather close their doors than submit to the indignity of collective bargaining. In reality, companies stay in business and investors keep investing not because they have the elected officials they’d prefer, but because they are making money. With profits being at near-record levels (even with the apparent recent softening), I don’t think we are really in any danger of capitalists “going Galt” because their executives’ marginal tax rates went back up to where they were when they were also doing very well in the late 1990s, or because their vast moral worth is being underappreciated by Barack Obama or Elizabeth Warren.
Still, the more aggressively ideological business leaders won’t lose a dime by issuing threats, so they and their political allies will keep doing so, reinforcing the GOP’s many efforts to convince persuadable voters that somehow or other, their jobs or their nest eggs depend on a Republican victory in November.
BY: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer,Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 23, 2012
“Corporations Are Not People”: Elizabeth Warren Rips Mitt Romney
Democrat Elizabeth Warren is running to unseat Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, but she took off today after Mitt Romney when she ripped the “Romney-Brown vision” of economic policy.
“Corporations are not people,” she told the crowd at Netroots Nation, an annual event. “People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they love, they cry, they dance, they live and they die. Learn the difference. And Mitt, learn this. We don’t run this country for corporations. We run it for people.”
Romney, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, was widely criticized for telling an Iowa crowd last year that “corporations are people, my friend.”
Warren is the biggest political star to speak at this year’s gathering of liberal bloggers and activists, and she drew an ovation both before and after her talk.
Warren and two other women candidates — Rep. Mazie Hirono, who is running for the Senate from Hawaii, and Darcy Burner, a Washington state congressional candidate — said Democrats need to make a better case to voters in favor of the Obama administration’s health care overhaul – and against Republican legislation on abortion and contraception.
“How much have we gotten out there and sold it? Not very much,” Warren said.
Republicans have pushed back on Democratic rhetoric about the Blunt amendment, which would have allowed employers not to cover contraception in health insurance, and a pay-parity bill rejected by the Senate last week. Both have been characterized as attacks on women.
“I do see this as a war on women. I don’t use these words frivolously,” Hirono said. “It’s so clear that there is an all out frontal assault on reproductive rights. Are people not paying attention?” Drawing a laugh from the audience, she added, “Do they not watch Rachel Maddow?”
Even an event centered on women in politics was not safe from sports analogies. Citing her role in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, Warren compared financial markets to football: It requires rules “and an official with a whistle to enforce them,” she said. “Without rules and a ref, it isn’t football, it’s a mugging.”
By: Martha T. Moore, USA Today, June 8, 2012
“Elizabeth Warren Is No Martha Coakely”: Another Imaginary Democratic Crisis, In Massachusetts
If you’ve been following either conservative or MSM coverage of the Massachusetts Senate race, you are probably under the impression that the recent brouhaha over Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren’s occasional self-identification as a Native American has taken over the contest and vastly boosted Scott Brown’s prospects for reelection.
Now comes a new poll from Suffolk showing (a) Warren making significant gains since the last Suffolk poll in February, and (b) voters not paying much attention to the “Cherokee” flap, despite saturation coverage in local and national media.
The Politico story on the poll by David Catanese notes that respondents adjudged it as “not a significant story” by a 69-27 margin. A lot of this sentiment reflects the usual partisan polarization, but if you look at the crosstabs, self-identified independents (over half the sample) called the story insignificant by a 66-29 margin, and even 40% of Republicans didn’t think it mattered.
That’s pretty interesting, since anyone reading the Boston Herald the last few weeks would have though the “controversy” doomed Warren, doomed affirmative action, and doomed Barack Obama, the supposed beneficiary of affirmative action.
As Catanese notes, the poll is generating sighs of relief from Democrats in Massachusetts and in Washington, particularly given the general impression that Warren’s campaign hasn’t handled the attacks terribly well:
The Suffolk poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent, produced a result similar to an internal poll taken by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to quash speculation that Warren was hemorrhaging support due to the ancestry flap.
The DSCC survey, taken by Harstad Strategic Research May 8-10, resulted in a deadlocked race at 46 percent.
While Republicans argue that Brown has been outspent by Warren on advertising over the past month, Democrats are heartened by the pair of surveys showing the damage to their candidate to be minimal.
“When you look at the last month or so that Elizabeth Warren has had, you have to say she weathered the storm. The fact that she’s picked up 8 points shows she’s a better candidate than people think, a more resilient candidate than some would’ve thought,” said Boston-based Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh.
There’s a long way to go until November, but it’s increasingly likely that Warren will be able to get back on track and on message, promoting economic themes where she has a natural advantage over Brown. In the end, MA is a heavily Democratic state; Scott Brown is in the Senate thanks to a flukey victory in the general election; and as a candidate, Elizabeth Warren is no Martha Coakely.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 24, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 