As the Plum Line reported yesterday, State Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate special election on Tuesday, voted on October 17, 2001 to deny financial aid to Red Cross rescue workers who had volunteered with 9/11 recovery efforts. As a state representative at the time, Brown was one out of only three legislators who had opposed the overwhelmingly bipartisan measure.

At a campaign rally today in Hyannis, ThinkProgress caught up with Brown for comment on why he voted against the measure:

TP: In 2001, you voted against 9/11 recovery workers, giving them aid, do you have any comment on this story?

BROWN: Yes, it was a time when our budget was down. We had a lot of cuts unfortunately, and we had to take care of our own priorities first.

Watch it:

During the same month Brown was voting down efforts to support 9/11 rescue workers, he was pushing a bill to appropriate a tax-subsidized bond to build a golf course in Norfolk, a city in his district. “Priorities,” indeed.

Also during the same period, he was busy fighting for tax subsidies for corporate interests. According to a 2002 article in the Lowell Sun, Brown scored a perfect pro-corporate tax subsidy rating in the months following his anti-9/11 rescue workers vote:

House members who supported decreasing the minimum corporate excise tax which was rejected were also given credit. Positive marks were also given to representatives who voted in favor of term limits for the speaker, voted against increasing the auto excise tax, and voted in favor of freezing the unemployment insurance rates. [...] Rep. Scott Brown, a Wrentham Republican, and Rep. Brad Hill, an Ipswich Republican, were the other two lawmakers to receive 100 percent taxpayer friendly ratings.

For Brown’s “priorities,” golf courses and corporations are above the Massachusetts Red Cross volunteers who rushed to the site of the twin towers after the terror attack.

Despite his controversial remarks this week tying Haiti’s devastating earthquake to the country’s “pact to the devil,” televangelist Pat Robertson still attended Bob McDonnell’s gubernatorial inauguration prayer breakfast today. McDonnell, who was sworn in as Virginia’s new Republican governor today, attended law school at Robertson’s Regent University and took some heat on the campaign trail over his graduate thesis. Although Robertson went to McDonnell’s prayer breakfast this morning, he was not given the honor of sitting behind the governor on the podium during the actual ceremony:

However, according to McDonnell’s aides, Robertson has not been given the honor of an invitation to sit behind McDonnell on the portico of the Capitol during the swearing-in. Despite McDonnell’s long time friendship with the Virginia Beach televanglist, this marks a departure from the Inauguration of Virginia’s last Republican governor, when Robertson was seated not far behind incoming Gov. Jim Gilmore. He also attended the inauguration of Gov. George Allen in 1994.

The Washington Post notes that at the prayer breakfast, “a line of well-wishers formed to have a few words or a picture taken with Robertson. Asked whether he regretted his remarks about Haiti, Robertson flung up his hands and replied: ‘This is Bob’s day! I’m talking about Bob McDonnell today!‘”

McDonnell has said that he disagrees with Robertson’s comments on Haiti.

Yesterday, for the first time in a decade, the Justice Department intervened in a gay rights suit. In August, an openly gay 14-year-old student named Jacob — with the help of the ACLU — sued the Mohawk Central School District in upstate New York because officials “did not appropriately respond to relentless harassment, physical abuse and threats of violence” that Jacob received because of his sexual orientation. NPR reported on some of the harassment to which Jacob alleges he was subjected:

Long before Jacob came out of the closet at age 14, he was harassed for being effeminate. According to court papers, kids threw food at him and told him to get a sex change. One student pulled out a knife and threatened to string Jacob up the flagpole. A teacher allegedly told Jacob to “hate himself every day until he changed.”

One day, Jacob came home from school limping. That evening, he called his father from a party and said he had sprained his ankle at the party.

Sullivan described taking his son to the hospital: “It was a really bad sprain. They put a cast on it, gave him crutches. And shortly after that, I found out that it didn’t happen at the party. It happened at the school, because somebody had pushed him down the stairs.”

Over two years, Sullivan went to his son’s school three or four times a week to talk with the principal. According to court papers, officials did nothing.

The Justice Department is citing Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which protects people against gender discrimination — in its Motion to Intervene. However, the Obama administration is relying on a “broad reading” of Title IX, arguing that “the law also covers discrimination based on gender stereotypes.” In the Motion, the Justice Department argues that the Mohawk District officials also violated the Equal Protection Clause. On Jan. 7, the Assistant Attorney General authorized the federal government’s invention “by certifying that this is a case of general public importance.” Conservative lawyers are arguing against the Obama administration’s approach, saying that it is “making up a legal violation where there hasn’t been one.”

Under Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, the Justice Department has had a dramatically different focus than it did during President Bush’s terms. While the Bush Justice Department was focused on installing political cronies, going after mythical voter fraud cases, and the suppression of minority voters while looking out for the voter disenfranchisement of whites. The Obama Justice Department, by contrast, recently announced that it would also start aggressively going after “banks and mortgage brokers suspected of discriminating against minority applicants in lending.”