From the New York Times:

President Barack Obama on Wednesday will make clear that he opposes any compromise that would extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy beyond this year, officials said, adding a populist twist to an election-season economic package that is otherwise designed to entice support from big businesses and their Republican allies.

Mr. Obama’s opposition to allowing the high-end tax cuts to remain in place for even another year or two would be the signal many Congressional Democrats have been awaiting as they prepare for a showdown with Republicans on the issue and ends speculation that the White House might be open to an extension.

The choice is pretty clear. Republicans are braying loudly, but they just want to drag us back to the policies that got us in this mess in the first place. Let's keep move forward away from the mess of the past, not back into it.

The Hill reports:

Say goodbye to the 10-point lead Republicans enjoyed in last week's Gallup poll of generic congressional preferences. 

Gallup's weekly tracking poll of the generic ballot, a key predictor of voters' actions in elections, showed Democrats and Republicans tied at 46 percent -- down from the 10-point lead the GOP held just a week ago.

What this really means is not that the parties are tied, but that the election is very volatile. There's a lot of economic pain out there, but people are disgusted by the GOP. It will take a lot of work, but we can win this race in the fall.

“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