Senator Warren Eats Her Wheaties
That’s the senator we helped elect, and that’s precisely why we helped her. Elizabeth Warren is already shining on the Senate Banking Committee, grilling bank regulators again and again over their dereliction of duty in enforcing laws and regulations.
This time, though, Senate Republicans are the deserving target of her stinging rebuke.
(Source: youtube.com)
Rock on, Warren!
SPRINGFIELD — With 50 days left until Massachusetts voters decide who will represent them in the U.S. Senate for the next six years, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren has pulled ahead of Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, according to a new poll.The survey of Bay State voters conducted Sept. 6-13 by the Western New England University Polling Institute through a partnership with The Republican and MassLive.com, shows Warren leading over Brown, 50 to 44 percent, among likely voters.
The gap among registered voters is even larger, according to the survey, which concluded Warren leads 53 to 41 percent. The poll of 545 registered voters has a 4.2 percent margin of error, while the sample of 444 likely voters has a 4.6 percent margin of error. (via Poll: Elizabeth Warren opens 6-point edge on Scott Brown in Massachusetts Senate race | masslive.com)
Tix for US Senate Debate on Flickr.
I got my tickets for the upcoming debate between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren! Faculty were supposed to be able to reserve four, but there were eleven thousand requests from the general public. Has apathy faded? (Faculty can request to be waitlisted for an additional two, and so I have.)
Mitt Romney, man of character. Ah, but what kind of character, may you ask?
Of course, Republican politics is replete with politicians who broke with GOP orthodoxy when a loved one was hurt by it. These “asterisk Republicans” include Dick Cheney, who supported marriage equality for his family members, and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, who came to advocate for stem cell research after he was touched by one young boy’s tragic story.
That’s what makes Mitt Romney’s abortion about-face all the more stunning and a disturbing window into the character of the man who may yet become the 45th president of the United States. For him, the political trumps the personal. To put it another way, on his road to the White House, Mitt Romney threw his “dear, close family relative” under the bus.
(via How the newly ‘pro-life’ Romney betrayed a ‘dear, close family relative’)
“Our kids owe a trillion dollars in student loan debt. That’s more than all the credit card debt in America combined. Our kids are crushed by debt and they didn’t go on a shopping spree - they got an education. America ought to be investing in education and building a future for our kids. But Washington’s giving billions to Big Oil and tax breaks to millionaires.”
This is absolutely reprehensible behavior, an insult to the memory of those who have died and who have suffered.
In Michigan, the State’s Republican-controlled Senate has passed an anti-bullying law named after a gay victim.
Good thing you might think. Except it’s not.
The Republicans put in a clause, introduced in secret, which is a cop out for anyone who can provide a religious or moral reason for their action.
Apparently to not grant this get-out clause is to act, as Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan, puts it, as “a Trojan horse for the homosexual agenda.”
The Michigan bills are known as ‘Matt’s Safe School Law’ and are named for Matt Epling, an East Lansing gay teenager who committed suicide after being bullied.
Michigan Republicans only agreed to consider an anti-bullying measure — for one of the only three US states without them — that did not require school districts to report bullying incidents, did not include any provisions for enforcement or teacher training, and did not hold administrators accountable if they fail to act. They wanted no mention of any groups at high risk of bullying, in particular gay students.
Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/michigan-republicans-allow-bullying-if-religiously-or-morally-motivated-video.html#ixzz1dJ6E6JNI(via Michigan Republicans allow bullying if ‘religiously or morally motivated’ | Care2 Causes)
Consumer advocate and Democratic candidate for Senate, Elizabeth Warren (AP) One test of political candidates is how they react to criticism. Warren got a test like that last week at a volunteer meeting in Brockton. About 200 people crowded into a VFW hall there. Warren was about to launch into her stump speech when a middle-aged man near the front of the room stood up and interrupted. The man said he was unemployed and asked about Occupy Wall Street and whether Warren takes credit for the intellectual foundation of that movement. “Is that true?” he asked. “Sir, let me say two things,” Warren replied. “I’m very sorry to hear that you’ve been out of work. I’m also very sorry that the recent jobs bill, that would’ve brought 22,000 jobs to Massachusetts, did not pass… I’m also, since you asked, I also want to say about Occupy Wall Street, I’ve been protesting what’s been going on on Wall Street for a very long time. “It is, as I’ve said, it is an independent and organic movement. They must of course obey the law like everybody else, but they have their own agenda and they will develop it as they develop it.” “Well, you’re the intellectual creator of that property, as far as I’m concerned, you’re a socialist whore, I don’t want anything to do with you, and your boss is a foreign-born Marxist pig,” the man said. With that, the man walked out as Warren’s supporters told him to leave. “It’s alright,” Warren responded. “So, we are here to do work, and I think we have a reminder that we have a lot of work to do.” “She dealt with him and then she moved on, and that’s what we need to do as Democrats,” said Kristina Meservey, who saw the exchange online. She’s a retired nurse practitioner on Cape Cod, and came out to see Warren at a campaign stop in Orleans. “Democrats have wasted a lot of energy. The Democrats need to talk about positive things, proactive things,” she said.
Well played, future junior Senator from Massachusetts.
Run, Warren, run!
A poll released tonight confirms what the much-ballyhooed Public Policy Polling survey showed a week ago: Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown are running neck and neck, and Warren remains far ahead of her primary opponents.
The poll, jointly commissioned by the Boston Herald and UMass Lowell, showed Brown leading Warren 41-38 with 14% undecided – inside the poll’s 3.8% margin of error. So that’s two polls in a row that have had Brown in a dead heat with the Democratic front-runner. And for Brown to receive only 41% in a survey like this must be extremely concerning for Team Brown, particularly because 37% of the poll’s respondents say they have never heard of Warren (8% say they’ve never heard of Brown).
Interestingly, Brown’s favorable/unfavorable ratings are much better in this poll than in the one released last week (this one has him at 52/29, while in last week’s he was underwater at 44/45). But also interesting is the fact that Brown’s fav/unfav numbers are not meaningfully different than those of Deval Patrick (52/31) or Martha Coakley (50/32). For a long time, it could be said that Brown was without question the most popular elected official in MA; that no longer appears to be true.
A senate run by Prof. Warren would be the most exciting political news I’ve heard all year. This post by her on Blue Mass Group seems to be a foreshadowing of that. I love the nod to new media. I hope that means she will run a smarter run for this seat than the old guard Democrats ran the last time. I know she will fight for the middle class because she already has.
We have a lot of work to do in our commonwealth and our country. We need to rebuild our economy family by family and block by block. We need to create new jobs and to fix our broken housing market. We need to make sure that there is real accountability over Wall Street and that the greed and recklessness that created the last financial crisis do not create the next one. We need to restore the hope of a secure retirement and the promise of a good education. We need to stop measuring our economy by profits and executive compensation at our largest companies and start measuring it by how many families can stand securely in the middle class.
I am glad to be back home. And I’m looking forward to discussing with you what we can accomplish together.
The Senate plan appropriately calls for meaningful cuts in military spending and ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But it does not ask the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations to make any sacrifice.
The Reid plan is bad. The constantly shifting plan by House Speaker John Boehner is much worse. His $1.2 trillion plan calls for no cuts in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it requires a congressional committee to come up with another $1.8 trillion in cuts within six months of passage.
Those cuts would mean drastic reductions in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. What’s more, Mr. Boehner’s plan would reopen the debate over the debt ceiling, which is now paralyzing Congress, just six months from now.
While all of this is going on in Washington, the American people have consistently stated, in poll after poll, that they want wealthy individuals and large corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. They also want bedrock social programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to be protected. For example, a July 14-17 Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 72% of Americans believe that Americans earning more than $250,000 a year should pay more in taxes.
In other words, Congress is now on a path to do exactly what the American people don’t want. Americans want shared sacrifice in deficit reduction. Congress is on track to give them the exact opposite: major cuts in the most important programs that the middle class needs and wants, and no sacrifice from the wealthy and the powerful.
Is it any wonder, therefore, that the American people are so angry with what’s going on in Washington? I am too.
| — | U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont) ”Why Americans Are So Angry - Newsroom: ” 7/28/11 originally WSJ |
