Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: Scott Brown calls family members of asbestos victims 'actors'

Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here. Leading Off:

' MA-Sen: This strikes me as a major unforced error by Scott Brown:

"Let Scott Brown tell me to my face that I am nothing but a paid actor, and I'll set him straight on what it was like to watch my father suffocate to death," English said.

What's this all about? Well, this:

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown suggested Wednesday that his Democratic opponent Elizabeth Warren used actors in her advertisements defending the legal work she did on asbestos-related lawsuits.

But three of the people in the advertisements have said that's not the case.

That first quote comes from one of the people Brown slurred, and that's really, really not the kind of thing you want hounding you as you trail in the polls with less than three weeks before election day. That's why Brown issued a hasty apology on Wednesday night, but really, who put this bug in his ear in the first place? Was it an incompetent staff who didn't realize they were playing with fire? Or did Brown drink his own kool-aid and conclude that everything Warren does is somehow phony? And I have to wonder how much damage Brown just did to himself. I mean, this stuff is heart-breaking:

"Sam and I were childhood sweethearts and we had been together since I was 15 years old," Jackson said. "I came forward in this campaign because Massachusetts voters need to know the truth about what Elizabeth Warren did to help families like mine who were affected by asbestos poisoning, rather than Sen. Brown's misleading attacks."

You can view the ads here and here. I'm dumbfounded that anyone watching these could conclude the people in the ads were actors. But given how devastating these spots are, I can certainly see why Scott Brown wished they were.