Here is a radio ad from the Elizabeth Warren campaign.

I guess that is the risk Scott Brown thought he could take. He thought he could lie and get away with it. His TV ad is very cute. It shows The Boston Globe article, and the ad highlights certain words that are actually in the article. However, the technique is just like cutting out words from a newspaper to create a ransom note. The words were never put together that way in the article to mean what Brown’s ad pretend that they mean.

The ethics Scott Brown is showing is about on a level of someone who would put together a ransom note from words clipped out of the newspaper.

When Scott Brown said during the debate that Elizabeth Warren’s explanation of her role in the asbestos case was laughable, I would have said to Brown.

“What is laughable is that a man who claims to be a lawyer could read the court documents and misunderstand them so badly that he would come away with an interpretation that is exactly the opposite of what is in the documents.”

When no one thought we could take on the big banks and win, Elizabeth Warren did it. She exposed the tricks in credit cards and mortgages, and led the fight to create a new consumer agency to hold the big banks accountable. President Obama calls her “one of the fiercest advocates for the middle class.” When everybody else backs down, Elizabeth stands up for people.

Then there is the other candidate who was a lawyer for banks who issued mortgages. Did he help create some of those tricks in the mortgage papers?

When asked to name his model Supreme Court Justice, Scott Brown named anti-choice conservative Antonin Scalia.

One measure of a debate outcome could be the fodder it provides for political ads. By this measure, perhaps Elizabeth Warren did a lot better than I gave her credit for.

CNN has the article Fact check: Are half of ‘green’ energy firms helped by stimulus out of business?

The Department of Energy proudly touts that the 2009 stimulus authorized $90 billion “in government investments and tax incentives to lay the foundation for the clean energy economy of our future.”

But not all that money has been spent, and not all of it — in fact, not even half of it — is being directed to upstart green businesses.
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It is fair to say that the 2009 stimulus authorized $90 billion for green energy, as Romney asserted. Whether or not one terms these as “breaks” is subjective, and one shouldn’t assume that all the funds went to specific businesses like Solyndra.

Most of the large projects that benefited from the Department of Energy loan program remain in operation — contrary to Romney’s assertion that “almost half” of them had closed.

This is another example  of Romney’s claims that just do not add up.  In my previous post, Romney’s Magic Plans, I pointed out why it is easy to have a plan that sounds great if you don’t insist that it be feasible.  Another analogy is that Romney is more like the snake oil salesmen that used to travel the country with their medicine shows – a little entertainment and then a hard sell of fake cure-alls.

I must admit, Romney is pretty good at it.  He did build himself a quarter billion dollar fortune selling his medicine to the “investment” world.

Remember that Mitt Romney made his private sector fortune by promising to take over a company, cut its expenses, improve its profits, make fortunes for its investors, and  save the company from bankruptcy.

His secret plan that he applied almost every time was to borrow money to take over the company, strip out and sell all its valuable assets, fire the workers, steal from the pension funds, steal from the health care funds, load the company with all the debt that the temporarily improved cooked books showed, and walk away with a fortune for himself.

The employees lost their jobs and their pensions and their health care, the people who lent the company money lost everything when the company went bankrupt, and all the investors that bought shares to buy Romney’s stake to take the company public again lost their shirts.

Romney’s whole career is about selling people magic solutions.  Magic solutions always sound nicer than real solutions.  The reality in life is that there is no magic.  In the end, the books have to balance, the math has to work out, and when someone steals, someone else loses.

I accidentally discovered that when I tried posting this comment on Politico, that it was secretly  accessing your Facebook account.  It never occurred to me that Politico was doing that.  I thought that signing into my Politico account was enough.  This time I accessed Politico before I separately logged into Facebook. That’s when I discovered that you could not post a comment without also being logged into Facebook.  I guess Politico will just have to do without my brilliant insights.

I may also have to be more careful about logging out of Facebook before I leave a Facebook page and navigate to some other place.

Women’s Voices – Join Women for Obama.

It’s up to all of us to make sure women’s voices are heard in this election. Watch women speak about what’s at stake and why they’re supporting President Obama, then help spread the word by clicking on your favorite graphic below and sharing this video with your friends on Facebook.

Here is a video of Scott Brown mentioning his model for an excellent Supreme Court Justice.

How come Clarence Thomas doesn’t get the respect he deserves?

That said, now you have another reason not to vote for Scott Brown for Senator. There will be Supreme court vacancies in the 6 year tenure of the next Senator from Massachusetts. I know I’d much rather have Elizabeth Warren voting on these choices instead of Scott Brown.

Apparently the rest of the world went to a different debate from the one that Sharon and I saw. I guess it turned out much better than the one we saw (at least half of) by sitting in some place that we thought was the Tsongas Center in Lowell. Coincidentally, there were 5,000 in the audience where we were, too.

If you have not seen the debate, at least the first 33 minutes of it, don’t bother. Just take Andy Hiller’s word for how it turned out.

If you saw the movie The Fighter about the boxer Mickey Ward from Lowell and you saw the endorsement of Elizabeth Warren from a coach at the gym where Ward learned to box and continued to train, then maybe you come away with an understanding of the Warren strategy. According to the movie, Ward won a lot of fights by just standing there and taking such a terrific beating that his opponents wore themselves out delivering the beating. When Ward delivered the knockout punch, they had no energy left to defend themselves.

Well, I have seen Warren take beating after beating. I am just hoping that Brown is wearing himself out so that he won’t be ready when she finally punches back.

I suppose I am like most of the people portrayed in the movie who thought Ward was nuts to use this strategy, but it all worked out in the end. Here is hoping life follows art.

NECN had coverage of the pre-debate festivities in Lowell in the article Brown, Warren supporters convene in Lowell, Mass.

Steve Greenberg, a Warren supporter from Sturbridge, Mass. said, “I hope they get back onto the issues and not the silly side show, but I don’t know, but I think Elizabeth will be prepared to handle anything that gets thrown her way.”

They left out the part where I told them that Elizabeth Warren predicted exactly how the housing bubble would burst several years before it happened. I told them that she understands how this all happened far better than Scott Brown ever would. They chose to leave that out and instead quoted a person who said that she didn’t think Elizabeth Warren understands the middle class.

As proof of Elizabeth Warren’s understanding the middle class, read her book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi (Aug 17, 2004) .

If you are in the middle class and read this book you will find out information on how you got into the predicament you are in that you might never have seen expressed quite so well.

As the debate turned out, I am embarrassed by my remarks that did make it on air.

This is the poster we are taking with us to the debate in Lowell tonight.  We won’t bring it into the arena, but will be standing in front of the arena for a few hours before the debate.

You can use this poster where ever you find it appropriate.