Again, huge asshole here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Sen. Mark Pryor's (D-Ark.) re-election campaign blasted challenger Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Wednesday for touting disaster aid for Arkansas farmers affected by floods, even though Cotton voted against the 2014 and 2013 Farm Bills.
"I appreciate Secretary Vilsack's quick approval of Governor Beebe's disaster declaration request for the 23 impacted counties," Cotton said in a joint press release with the Arkansas congressional delegation. "I have heard from many farmers about the impact of the recent flooding, and I look forward to working with our friends in Arkansas to make sure farmers are able to access the emergency funds they need."
Cotton has previously defended his 2014 vote by saying that the bill "was a bad bill for farmers, it was a bad bill for taxpayers, it was a bad bill for Arkansas." He specifically expressed concerns with the food stamp program, saying that "a millionaire can receive food stamps in America today ... there are a lot of people who do a lot of fraudulent schemes against the federal government."
The Pryor campaign nonetheless argued that Cotton owes farmers an apology.
"It takes a special kind of arrogance for Congressman Cotton to take credit for disaster relief funds that he consistently and recklessly opposed," Pryor campaign spokesman Erik Dorey said.
"If Congressman Cotton wants credit for disaster recovery programs he voted against, he first needs to admit he was wrong when he opposed the Farm Bill and apologize to Arkansas’s farmers and ranchers for siding with his out-of-state billionaire buddies against our state’s rural economy," Dorey added. - Huffington Post, 7/24/14
Yep, Cotton's just doing everything he can to dupe voters and he brought in this clown to help him rile up his base:
http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/...
Former U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., continues to go all out for U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who is running against U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, R-Ark., in November.
West sent out an email to supporters on Tuesday in which he agrees with national pundits’ assessment that the GOP needs to beat Pryor to flip the Senate.
“If Tom Cotton loses, Harry Reid will remain majority leader and Mark Pryor will continue to be a rubber stamp for Barack Obama in the United States Senate," West insisted, before noting Reid’s PAC had already spent $1.4 million in the race and various Democratic and union groups have spent an additional $2.5 million in Arkansas, mostly used in attack ads.
“As a fellow veteran and former member of Congress, I know what it's like to be under fire. And so does Tom Cotton,” West added. “The way to defend the Constitution is to tip the scales away from Obama and his socialist agenda and back toward conservative leadership. We can do this by aggressively campaigning for candidates like Tom Cotton. I'm preparing a massive barrage of advertising that's designed to put liberal super-PACs in retreat and carry our slate of conservative candidates to victory." - Sunshine State News, 7/22/14
But the Arkansas Times did not highlight Cotton in the best spotlight:
http://www.arktimes.com/...
Of course, while many things in life can be won by outworking the other guy, likability isn't one of them. Cotton can be stiff in public appearances and in front of the camera. He always hits his talking points, but he's still working on mastering the skill that has made more than a few Arkansas politicians famous: making all those talking points sound like aw-shucks empathy.
"He's a little more professorial," a former teacher of Cotton's who saw him recently at a fundraiser told me. "I don't see Tom as ever being the backslapping politician at the chicken fry."
One of the people Cotton met in Corning was Betty Foster, a retired resident of Knobel, sitting in a lawn chair near the stage. (Actually, he came to shake her hand twice — "He forgot the first one," she said. "Most of them have better memories than that.") Foster said that Cotton was polite and friendly, but she wasn't planning on voting for him. "He scares me," she said. "He's a little bit radical. There's too many people in this country who depend on Social Security and Medicare. They have got to be protected."
For all the talk of personality, it's Cotton's votes — and the bombardment of advertising over the last few months pointing them out — that seemed to be influencing the voters in Corning still skeptical of the challenger. Many Democratic operatives believe that Pryor got a lifeline drawing an opponent with Cotton's record.
Cotton voted against funding for disaster relief, against the farm bill and against bills to make student loans more affordable. He voted for a bill that would have eventually raised the retirement age for Medicare and Social Security and moved toward "voucherizing" Medicare. He was in the middle of the government shutdown fight and voted against the omnibus appropriations bill that kept the government running this year and included funding for Arkansas Children's Hospital and countless other local interests. The list goes on.
Team Cotton has arguments about why he did so, but the broad picture is hard to dispute: Cotton is an ideological purist on the far right end of the American political spectrum. He believes in an aggressive reimagining of the role of government and the social safety net in modern American life, and is more than willing to stand by his principles, even at the cost of federal dollars flowing into Arkansas. The Pryor campaign has been attempting to paint him as an extremist and "reckless," and his voting record gives them plenty of material.
Cotton believes so fervently that the federal government should no longer be involved in subsidizing student loans (despite the fact that he took Stafford loans at Harvard) that he voted against bills that would have lightened the burden of loan repayment for more than 200,000 Arkansans. He is such a hard-liner on the debt that he was willing to drive right off the fiscal cliff into national default, a potential economic catastrophe that he called "short-term market corrections," saying, "I'd like to take the medicine now."
Voting against the Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief Bill, Cotton said, "I don't think Arkansas needs to bail out the Northeast." He said that it was larded up with pet projects, but he also voted against a Sandy bill that included only funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Cotton complained that it wasn't offset with corresponding spending cuts).
On foreign policy, Cotton is an unreconstructed neoconservative. "George Bush did largely have it right," he said.
Cotton co-sponsored a bill that would likely ban certain forms of birth control, such as IUDs and the morning-after pill. He voted against the Violence Against Women Act and against the Paycheck Fairness Act.
Around half a million Arkansans get food stamps, but Cotton advocates for massive cuts to the program, claiming that "we've all been in a situation where we stand in the grocery line at Walmart" and see someone using a food stamp card with "steak in their basket, and they have a brand new iPhone, and they have a brand new SUV."
Cotton voted for the Paul Ryan budget, which would cut benefits for seniors, including preventative care, and eventually transition Medicare into a voucher-like system; he was also the only member of the Arkansas congressional delegation to vote for the Republican Study Committee Budget, which would eventually raise the eligibility age for both Social Security and Medicare to 70. Both budgets would give tax cuts to the wealthy and cut trillions of dollars in programs serving low-income Americans.
Cotton seems to be a true believer on all of this. He is resolute and uncompromising. He's not pretending to be someone he's not. It will be up to Arkansans to decide whether they like what they see. - Arkansas Times, 7/24/14
We shall see indeed. Meanwhile, Pryor is up with a new ad:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/...
Capt. Samson Luke, who died during a weekend of duty with the Arkansas National Guard in 2010 is the subject of 30-second spot for a six-figure statewide ad buy announced on Tuesday. The ad features Luke's widow, Miranda (pictured), who said in the ad that the senator was the only one to respond after the Army denied benefits and "took our cause on personally."
Capt. Luke, a decorated veteran who served two tours in Iraq, was assigned to do weekend work with the state's National Guard on Jan. 9 and 10, 2010, and was given permission to spend the night at home (saving the military money on a hotel), a mere 12 miles from Fort Chaffee, when he died of a heart attack.
After the funeral, the family's casualty officer was reassigned and Miranda Luke was told the military wouldn't pay death benefits due to the fact that her husband wasn't on the base when he died. Her issue became a cause célèbre, and she told Fox News in 2011, "I would like them to do what's right and not only give me and my four kids back the benefits that my husband died for."
Pryor then attached a provision to the National Defense Authorization Act in 2011 to change the provision that allowed the U.S. Army to deny the Luke family their benefits. Pryor also invited Miranda Luke to the State of the Union speech this January. - TPM, 7/22/14
I also like this:
http://www.politico.com/...
Syria’s civil war echoes in Arkansas’ own political battles this summer and fall.
Incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor is no boat-rocker when it comes to foreign policy. But last week he irritated colleagues on the Senate Appropriations Committee by forcing an awkward vote on an amendment denying President Barack Obama funds to arm rebel forces fighting the Assad regime.
Pryor lost handily—21-9. But his fellow Arkansan, Republican Sen. John Boozman joined him in support as did Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kans.), chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. And these GOP votes stand to help Pryor as he tries to isolate his young Republican challenger, Rep. Tom Cotton, as too aggressive, too impetuous for the likes of Arkansas.
Indeed, Cotton, an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, has raised his national profile and won headlines by supporting greater U.S. involvement in the three-year Syrian conflict.
In May 2013, he went on network television, calling for not just arming the opposition but creating a “no-fly zone” over Syria to reduce the advantage enjoyed by Assad’s air power. In September last year—when Obama was threatening a military strike against Syria—Cotton penned an op-ed calling on Republicans to support the “use-of-force” resolution sought by the White House.
“No question, people in Arkansas do not want to be involved in Syria,” said Pryor of what he has heard from voters. It was this public sentiment together with his longer-term concerns about weapons proliferation, Pryor said, which drove the decision to force last week’s vote. - Politico, 7/22/14
And he has a familiar face out on the campaign trail with him:
http://www.couriernews.net/...
Former U.S. Sen. and Arkansas Gov. David Pryor, along with his wife, Barbara, and their grandson, Adams, are hard at work campaigning for Pryor's son, and current U.S. senator, Democrat Mark Pryor, who's up for re-election this year against Rep. Tom Cotton.
Pryor and his team stopped in Blytheville Wednesday morning to speak on behalf of his son. The elder Pryor said this race for the Senate is important, not just for Arkansas but for the nation as a whole, adding that his son is what the nation needs at this point -- a bridge builder who is willing to work with "conservatives and liberals, rich and poor, black and white" to do what's best for Arkansas as well as the rest of the country.
While David Pryor admits that the use of new technologies and methods of campaigning can have a positive impact on the race, he said he and his wife are campaigning the only way they know how, "Town to town. Store to store. Street to street." As the two, accompanied by their grandson, Adams, who is Mark Pryor's son, travel across the state, Pryor said he's enjoying seeing old friends and making new ones and admits that while he may not be able to "hit the streets" as hard as he once did he's sure to give some of the younger guys a run for their money. - Blytheville Courier News, 7/23/14
It's a tight race but one we can still win. Click here to donate and get involved with Pryor's campaign:
http://pryorforsenate.com/