Welcome to March! It’s finally starting to feel like spring is coming. The temperature’s warming up, the sun stays out longer and my daffodils have started peaking up from the ground. Are you ready for an open thread? I am!
Blanche Lincoln, probably the Senate’s most endangered Democrat, is getting a primary challenge. Lincoln is one the conservaDems, who is pretty much hated by both the left and the right. She has alienated her base and thinks she can appeal to the teabagging birther contigent in Arkansas. Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter has finally announced a primary challenge:
Lt. Gov. Bill Halter says he is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Sen. Blanche Lincoln this fall.
Halter’s spokesman provided a statement Monday in which the one-term lieutenant governor said he would file papers for the U.S. Senate this week. Halter is the only Democrat to formally announce a challenge to Lincoln as she seeks a third term.
Buh-bye Blanche.
Jim Bunning may have been a good baseball player, but he’s a lousy senator. He single-handedly put 2000 people out of work today (from his 1-man filibuster of unemployment benefits extension). That bill also contained continuing funding for the Department of Transportation:
Two thousand federal transportation workers will be furloughed without pay on Monday, and the Obama administration said they have a Kentucky senator to blame for it.
Federal reimbursements to states for highway programs will also be halted, the Transportation Department said in a statement late Sunday. The reimbursements amount to about $190 million a day, according to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
The furloughs and freeze on payments were the result of a decision last week by Republican Sen. Jim Bunning to block passage of legislation that would have extended federal highway and transit programs, the department said. Those programs expired at midnight Sunday.
I’d like to see Senator Bunning tell these 2000 people to their face “tough sh*t” and how awful it was that he had to miss the basketball game because he was too busy filibustering their funding.