See the Massachusetts Democratic Party web site for Scott Brown’s Top Five ‘Etch A Sketch’ Moments.  I’ll give you the list, you have to follow the above link to see the details.

1. The Blunt-Brown Amendment threatening health care coverage for women and everyone
2. “One of Wall Street’s favorite Senators” brags about Wall Street reform
3. Tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires instead of jobs for Massachusetts
4. LGBT rights
5. Ending Medicare with the Ryan Budget

Need some talking points about Scott Brown?  See the web site RethinkBrown.com.  The front page has a slide show and related videos for each slide.  Below is just the first video.

Ellen Brown has written a very revealing article Oh Canada! Imposing Austerity on the World’s Most Resource-Rich Country.  The summary of the article is:

Even the world’s most resource-rich country has now been caught in the debt trap. Its once-proud government programs are being subjected to radical budget cuts—cuts that could have been avoided if the government had not quit borrowing from its own central bank in the 1970s.

Let me see if I can capture the most damaging part of the story in the following quoted paragraphs:

The debt shot up only after 1974. That was when the Basel Committee was established by the central-bank Governors of the Group of Ten countries of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which included Canada. A key objective of the Committee was to maintain “monetary and financial stability.” To achieve that goal, the Committee discouraged borrowing from a nation’s own central bank interest-free, and encouraged borrowing instead from private creditors, all in the name of “maintaining the stability of the currency.”

The presumption was that borrowing from a central bank with the power to create money on its books would inflate the money supply and prices. Borrowing from private creditors, on the other hand, was considered not to be inflationary, since it involved the recycling of pre-existing money. What the bankers did not reveal, although they had long known it themselves, was that private banks create the money they lend just as public banks do. The difference is simply that a publicly-owned bank returns the interest to the government and the community, while a privately-owned bank siphons the interest into its capital account, to be re-invested at further interest, progressively drawing money out of the productive economy.

Actually, I have failed.  There is even worse stuff in the article, but I can hardly quote the whole thing here.  You’ll just have to follow the link to the article, and read it yourself.

The Los Angeles Times has the column A telling GOP defection by columnist George Skelton.  The subheadline is “Loss of Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher should be a wake-up call for party in California.”

While this is about California politics, it might be a spreading phenomenon.

Fletcher says his frustration is aggravated by the war experience.

“Any combat veteran wrestles with a sense of survivor’s guilt,” he told me. “I wasn’t any better a Marine than those who didn’t survive. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That gives me a real sense of obligation.

“You shouldn’t waste your life. It is a gift, and you ought to do something of meaning…. I just have a lower threshold for some of the pettiness and silliness that goes on. If the [Democratic] speaker of the Assembly has a good idea, we shouldn’t oppose it just because somebody says he’s the enemy.

“I know what an enemy is. I’ve watched people die. I’ve been to car bombing scenes and seen little sandals where children were killed. I don’t see the other side [in politics] as the enemy just because we disagree.”

Also, he continues, “in the Marine Corps, if you have a mission, you just have to get it done. When I came into elected office, I had that same sense of obligation. I feel that’s missing in the current environment. It’s good to have some on the ideological extreme. But we need more people who want to be pragmatic and figure how to make it work.”

The tipping point for Fletcher came last fall when he negotiated with Gov. Brown to eliminate a corporate tax break that rewarded companies for not building facilities and creating jobs in California. The $1-billion savings would have provided tax breaks for small businesses, buyers of manufacturing equipment and income tax payers who don’t itemize. Republicans blocked the bill.

GOP colleagues told Fletcher, he says, that “‘it may be the right thing to do, but we can’t let Jerry Brown get a win,’ which is just dumb.”

There comes a time when good politicians figure out what it is they really want to accomplish.  They realize that political games just for the sake of the game is not why they got into politics.