It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town

One of the sharpest shots Scott Brown landed on Elizabeth Warren in Thursday night’s Massachusetts U.S. Senate debate concerned her defense of Travelers Insurance in an asbestos case several years ago.

Brown whacked her pretty good in the debate, and continued the same yesterday, as the Boston Herald was happy to trumpet this AM (via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages):

Inside story:

SCOTT ON LIZ: SHE CAN’T HIDE

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown said Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to answer questions about her lucrative work defending an insurance giant against asbestos victims will not stand — and vows to hammer her about it in their next debate.

The non-response from Warren, who touts herself as a consumer champion, in a Thursday debate has dominated the buzz after the clash.

(To be fair, the Herald did give Warren’s subsequent response a perfunctory, if dismissive, mention in this editorial.)

The Globe, meanwhile, provides a bit more balance in its piece today:

As the Globe reported in May, Warren did represent Travelers in the 2009 asbestos case, but at the time, the company was seeking to unlock a $500 million settlement account for victims, a step many victims supported. After Warren’s work on the case had ended, however, Travelers won a separate court ruling that allowed the company to avoid paying out the settlement. That ruling is under appeal.

“Elizabeth Warren got involved to protect the settlement,” against a challenge from another insurance company, said David J. McMorris, a lawyer at Thornton & Naumes in Boston, who represented victims in the case.

McMorris and several officials from an asbestos workers’ union showed up outside Brown’s headquarters to  defend Warren’s role in the lawsuit.

“It should be very, very clear the victims would have no chance to get paid by Travelers were it not for the work of Elizabeth Warren,” McMorris told reporters. “She’s been with the victims then, and she’s with the victims now.”

McMorris has donated $467,435 to Democratic politicians, according to the Brown campaign, which sent out a press release about McMorris’s contributions minutes after his comments.

Warren has been inexplicably inept in handling this issue. The Herald, on the other hand, has been predictably adept at avoiding both sides of it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2012 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.