“This is not how we do business in Massachusetts.”
 
BOSTON - At a press conference today, U.S. Sen. John Kerry called on Scott Brown to tell his out of state supporters to put an end to the bullying and intimidation tactics of the past few days.
 
Recent media reports have described a range of these outrageous tactics, ranging from the theft and burning of lawn signs to threatening comments posted on the Facebook pages of Coakley supporters to death threats posted on Coakley’s own Facebook page.
 
Meanwhile, at a West Springfield event on Saturday, when a Brown supporter yelled “Shove a curling iron up her butt!” in reference to Coakley, Brown himself smiled in acknowledgment of the threat.
 
“I'm no stranger to hard fought campaigns, but what we’ve seen in the past few days is way over the line and reminiscent of the dangerous atmosphere of Sarah Palin's 2008 campaign rallies.  This is not how democracy works in Massachusetts.  Scott Brown needs to speak up and get his out of state tea party supporters under control.  In Massachusetts, we fight hard and win elections on the issues and on our differences, not with bullying and threats,” said Senator John Kerry.
 
“He stoked the fires himself - smirking at threats against the Attorney General, busing scores of paid ‘supporters’ into his events, and standing by while his supporters call his opponents ‘Nazis.’  But what we’ve seen over the past two weeks is these out of state supporters coming in and engaging in tactics we’ve never seen here before.  Now, as Election Day approaches, it’s become increasingly clear that Scott Brown has lost control of his campaign, and we are calling on him to tell his out of state supporters to stand down,” said Coakley spokesman Corey Welford. 
 
 

John Kerry sent this email out to his list today in support of Martha Coakley:

Hello Brian,

Not a lot of time left, so here are the three quick reasons why I need you to dig deep and help Martha Coakley in these final crucial days in her slugfest down to the wire battle against the national Republican Party and the powerful special interest bankrolling his campaign:

1. It's not the Massachusetts way to see the seat Ted Kennedy served in for 47 years handed off to someone who has pledged again and again to destroy Ted's life's work - health care reform.

2.  It's wrong to allow Republican money to pour into Massachusetts at the last moment to distort, deceive, and divide the way to a Republican win. But the anonymously funded, shadowy right wing groups are blanketing the air with ads attacking Martha Coakley. they're counting on you taking a pass on this race.

3. Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month under George W Bush, and Martha Coakley's opponent didn't stand up and fight. Now he says he'll be "independent." Where was he when people were hurting the most? Martha will fight for jobs in Massachusetts and across the country - and she'll do what she's done as Attorney General: stand up to the scam artists and the sub-prime mortgage pushers and all those who drove our economy into the ditch. We need her in the Senate to fight alongside us.

Those are the stakes - I need you to contribute what you can to help.

National Republican groups - including some of the people who funded the attack ads against me in 2004 - are bringing their lies to this race in Massachusetts.

The GOP is looking at next week's election as a key contest in their drive to stop reform,  so please, give $20, $50, or $100 dollars to Martha Coakley for this vital election.

The Republican Party drove us into a ditch, and we're not going to let them stop us as we climb our way out of it.

Thank you for all you've done.

Sincerely,
John Kerry

Today, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent an email from John Kerry to their email supporters, asking for support in fighting for the truth:

Hello,

We need to fight back against the lies, fight back with the truth.

The pattern is always the same. Right-wing front groups spend weeks or months peddling a distortion, putting millions of dollars behind ads, pushing out chain emails, misleading millions into believing lies. And then they push it into the center of the debate.

The health care fight has been marked by outragous distortions -- from so-called "death panels" to lies about the public option. And the battle to stop climate change and build a clean energy future is shaping up the same way. We need to fight back before the debate gets to that point; we need to spend as much time building support for the truth as they do building support for lies.

That's why I'll be launching TruthFightsBack.com to fight back against the lies from Big Oil and other forces of the status quo. And I need your help. They are already putting millions of dollars behind the distortions; we need to do all we can to give the truth a fighting chance.

Please contribute what you can to help the truth fight back.

TruthFightsBack.com will do more than give you the truth; it will give you the tools you need to push the truth, to raise the volume of the truth loud enough to drown out the shouting of the lies. And millions of activists can be our eyes and ears to make sure everyone knows the distortions that are coming.

We need to buy ads on search engines, hire researchers to fight back in real time, build the best tools to push the truth in every way we can, from letters to the editor to influencing social media like Facebook and Twitter to email networks. This is the way debates in the 21st century will be won, and we need to make sure we can win them.

So please do what you can to help. Whether it's $25, $50, $100 or more, every contribution will give the truth more of a chance to fight back.

The stakes are too high to let distortions and lies twist our debate. Our planet is endangered by ever-increasing carbon pollution. We need to fight for a clean energy future where America is in charge of our own power.

Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

Senator John Kerry

TruthFightsBack.com, the innovative website that empowers activists to fight lies with the truth, will be relaunching soon as part of the JohnKerry.com community of websites. This time, it will focus solely on the vital issue of global climate change and the efforts to get a new, clean, American energy economy.

We'll need all the help we can get to make this site work. The forces of the status quo are putting millions of dollars behind distortions and lies, so we need to all join together to fight back with the truth.

Here's a personal look ... I was driving through Indiana way back in September, a month before the Kerry-Boxer climate bill was introduced, and months before the full Senate will consider it, and already I saw billboards saying that Democratic Senator Evan Bayh "kills jobs" because of support for climate legislation. Now, even leaving aside the fact that Evan Bayh hasn't announced any support for the legislation, the billboard is flat out wrong. Dealing with our dirty energy economy will unleash a wave of innovation and creating millions of good-paying jobs that can't be outsourced overseas. It - along with health care reform and reform of our financial industry - is a vital step to reforming our economy and making it ready for the challenges of the 21st Century.

So please do what you can to help:

TruthFightsBack.com

A number of blogs and other sites have highlighted Senator Kerry's grilling of AEI's Kenneth Green during a Finance Committee hearing. Here's Joe Romm at Climate Progress:

Steven Hayward, the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently said, “The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining.”  He may have had in mind his AEI colleague Kenneth Green, whose lack of knowledge on climate was laid bare for all to see by Sen. John Kerry in today’s Finance Committee hearing [...]

Green’s lame defense of himself is no surprise since he regularly spouts stuff like, “No matter what you’ve been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly” — from a 2008 speech AEI later removed from their website (excerpts here).  And last month, he weirdly compared EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to Clint Eastwood and carbon polluters to criminals.

Kudos to Senator Kerry for exposing this American Enterprise Institute “expert.”

Joe embeds the video, so go watch ...

As you probably saw, there's a big link on the home page right now encouraging you to give to the PanMass Challenge and the Jimmy Fund and help the fight against cancer. This fight is extremely important to John Kerry; he lost a father and the mother of his children to cancer, and he's a cancer survivor himself.

I don't know if anyone who hasn't had a family member or close friend striken by cancer. We've made a lot of progress against the disease, and it's organizations like the Jimmy Fund and events like the PanMass Challenge who are leading the fight.

So please do what you can by following this link:

Give to support the PanMass Challenge

Today in the Senate Commerce Committee, John Kerry will chair a discussion on the issue of the exclusive deals wireless providers enter into with handset manufacturers. He'll look at whether these are good for consumers, competition, and innovation. The hearing is at 2:30, and you can watch at the committee website, here:

Hearing: The Consumer Wireless Experience

[John Kerry posted the following yesterday at SaveTheInternet.com ]

Northern Massachusetts, Southern New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine were hit by a terrible ice storm Thursday night/Friday morning. Trees, overburdened by heavy ice, crashed through power lines and buildings in the affected area. An federal emergency disaster declaration has been declared in nine Massachusetts counties, and FEMA has been authorized to release emergency assistance. The affected MA counties are: Berkshire, Bristol, Essex, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Middlesex, Suffolk, and Worcester. The devastation is especially bad in the Worcester and Fitchburg area and across the Merrimack Valley to Lawrence and into Northern Essex county.

I live in Northern Middlesex county. The aftermath of this ice storm resembles the aftermath of a tornado more than anything else.  There were trees down all around where I live. Some were thin, shallow-rooted trees like birch and "junk" maples. Those are relatively easy to clear out or move aside so work crews can collect them later. There were also a lot of big thick pine and oak and other trees that crashed down as well. Many of these trees dropped onto power lines, went through windows or roofs of houses or landed on car tops. Getting these trees or branches removed is a lot harder to do. The cleanup from this storm is going to last a long, long time.

My house was without power from early Friday morning through mid-afternoon Monday. Like so many others in New England, my family dealt with the storm by piling up logs for the wood stove and fireplace, wrapping pipes in the basement and praying that the insulation would keep out the freezing cold. My husband and I surveyed the damage on our lot and gathered information for the insurance adjusters. Our neighbors managed to get through the storm with the same minor damage we did. We were all fairly lucky.  There were many more in Massachusetts who were not so lucky and will be cleaning up from this storm for a long while.

The Lawrence Eagle Tribune has a webpage up simply called Ice Monster. There are pictures there that detail the almost unimaginable destruction the ice storm left behind. It mirrors scenes I saw in my town; roads made nearly impassable by tree branches, huge piles of wood and debris pushed into the side of the road, homes and businesses trying to operate on generators. The DPW workers have been working around the clock to try and clear the worst of the hazards and get schools up and running and roads cleared.  They have done incredible, exhausting work and deserve a lot of thanks and praise for their dedication.

For a lot of people who are already dealing with the effects of the bad economy, this is one more costly blow to absorb. I talked to families who had managed to put some money away for the Holidays who now have to redirect that cash to deal with the affects of the storm. The need is going to be even greater this year at local food pantries and assistance centers as people try to figure out how they are going to recover from the cost of this storm amid other financial hardships. I hope the spirit of generosity, patience and humor that I saw displayed in so many folks this past weekend will extend over the winter.  It will be sorely needed

The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) sent out these tips for dealing with the effects of this storm.  Share these with friends and neighbors who are still coping with storm-related problems.

Post-Storm Tips

MEMA offers safety tips to those who continue to be impacted by the recent Ice Storm.

• During the outage, do not open your refrigerator or freezer door. Food can stay cold in a full refrigerator for up to 24 hours, and in a well-packed freezer for 48 hours (24 hours if it is half-packed). After that time frame, you must consider disposing of this food.
• If you have medication that requires refrigeration, check with your pharmacist for guidance on proper storage during an extended outage.
• To keep pipes from freezing, wrap them in insulation or layers of newspapers, covering the newspapers with plastic to keep out moisture.
• Let faucets drip a trickle of water from the faucet farthest from your water meter to help keep pipes from freezing.
• If pipes freeze, remove insulation, completely open all faucets and pour hot water over the pipes, starting where they are most exposed to the cold. A hand-held hair dryer, used with caution, also works well.
• In order to protect against possible voltage irregularities that can occur when power is restored, you should unplug all sensitive electronic equipment, including your TVs, stereo, VCR, microwave oven, computer, cordless telephone, answering machine and garage door opener.
• Be extra cautious around downed or hanging electrical wires. Expect all wires to be live wires. Never attempt to touch or move downed lines. Do not touch anything power lines are touching, such as tree branches or fences.
• Do not become a 'spectator'. Continue to stay off streets in the affected areas, letting the crews do their jobs.
• Call 2-1-1 for non-emergency storm-related questions.

The Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism releases a new report today on the urgency of dealing with nuclear and biological weapons proliferation.  The Boston Globe, in an article by Brian Bender, notes that President-Elect Obama already has plans to appoint a high-level White House official to oversee the effort to stop these deadly weapons from falling into the hands of terrorist groups.  Bender writes:

President-elect Barack Obama plans to appoint a new White House official to coordinate efforts to prevent terrorists from obtaining nuclear or biological weapons, advisers say, giving the highest priority to thwarting a catastrophic attack that a bipartisan panel warns could come in the next five years.

Naming a top deputy whose sole mission is to oversee the government's wide-ranging programs to stop such an attack would mark a significant break with the Bush administration, which in resisting such a post has maintained that US efforts to reduce nuclear stockpiles and safeguard deadly pathogens are adequate.

In the 2004 Presidential debates, both Senator Kerry and President Bush both agreed that the single most serious threat to the US and the world was nuclear proliferation. However, as noted in the Globe story, the Bush Administration has not increased efforts to combat this growing threat.

 Senator Kerry wrote an OpEd earlier this year that laid out a list of four things that the US could do to reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation.  

First, engage the American people in this cause. Within the first 100 days, the next president should give a policy address demonstrating his commitment to a nuclear-weapons-free world. Generations have grown up never knowing anything but the old order of mutually assured destruction, but the stage is already set for a big policy shift. In fact, 17 of the 24 former secretaries of state and defence and national security advisers support moving towards a nuclear-free world. This bipartisan council of elders includes cold-eyed realists such as Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and defence hawks such as Sam Nunn and Bill Perry. The new president should bring this august group to the White House Rose Garden so Americans can see at first hand the face of a new consensus.

Second, create a new position: a deputy national security adviser to the president, whose sole responsibility is to prevent nuclear terrorism.

Third, empower this individual to lead an accelerated effort - a Manhattan Project in reverse: instead of racing to assemble a bomb, make sure nobody else can. We should aim to secure all "loose" nuclear material worldwide by the end of the next president's first term and establish a global gold standard for their safe custody.

Fourth, the new president should ensure that our nuclear policy reflects the cold war's conclusion almost two decades ago. The US and Russia no longer need a combined stockpile of more than 20,000 warheads, many of them on "hair trigger" alert. We can and should work to extend the 1991 strategic arms reduction treaty, reach a new agreement reducing strategic nuclear forces resulting in no greater than 1,000 deployed warheads, and increase warning times prior to launch.

The points raised by Sen. Kerry are in line with the recommendations contained in the report being released today.  The Boston Globe summarized those recommendations as follows:

Report Recommendations

• Stop nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea, using diplomacy backed by credible threat of force.
• Work with Pakistan and other countries to eliminate terrorist safe havens and secure nuclear and biological materials in that country.
• Do comprehensive review of global nuclear security and restructure relationship with Russia.
• Work with Russia to jointly reduce dangers, including extending provisions expiring in 2009 in strategic arms treaty, upgrading security at sites in Russia, and encouraging China, India, and Pakistan to stop producing fissile material.
• Review and tighten measures to secure dangerous pathogens, including high-risk biolabs; improve rapid response to prevent mass casualties from biological attacks.
• Press for international conference on biosecurity, strengthen global disease surveillance networks.
• Impose penalties for violating nuclear nonproliferation treaty, strengthen International Atomic Energy Agency, ensure access to nuclear fuel for countries without nuclear weapons.
• Designate a principal White House adviser on nuclear and biological weapons and terrorism, restructure National Security Council and Homeland Security Council.
• Reform congressional oversight of nonproliferation and terrorism.
• Accelerate integration of counterproliferation, counterterrorism, and law enforcement agencies.
• More effectively counter the ideology fueling terrorists who might use nuclear or biological weapons.
• Within six months of new administration, develop a checklist of actions for which citizens can hold government accountable.

SOURCE: Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism

What a difference an election can make.  It is encouraging to see this issue being given the prominence it deserves. The Commission report encourages the Congress and President to work together to oversee efforts to contain the spread of nuclear and biological material that could wind up in terrorist hands.This is a very welcome development and heralds a new seriousness on the part of the US to deal with this extremely important issue.