Above. my license to practice politics in Arkansas. And to make it easier for me to flash my credentials, I had it made into a key chain! License is courtesy of my dear friend Shannon, a beautiful multi-talented dynamo from a town called Hope. Yes, THAT Hope.(Her mother grew-up across the street from Bill Clinton.)
Hotline TV, May 4, 2010:
NAME DROPPING: Primary Endorsements, Bandwagon & AR SEN Ad
http://www.youtube.com/user/HotlineTV http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/
I've long felt that Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln was the perfect antidote to almost everything negative I ever saw on Capitol Hill in my many years in Washington: a bright and thoughtful person who got so fed-up with the status quo and the sinking feeling that her own viewpoint was getting short shrift, that she decided to do something both RISKY and POSITIVE about it.
She ran against her former boss -and beat- Beryl Anthony, a popular incumbent Democratic Arkansas congressman in the primary!
In 1998 she was elected to the U.S. Senate, re-elected in 2004, and now faces national liberal poster boy Bill Halter, the Arkansas Lieutenant Governor, for the Democratic nomination, with the primary scheduled for May 18. Halter is beloved in the liberal blogging community -by Ron Gunzburger, for instance- despite the large number of jobs he has sent overseas.
Of course, for all their talk about the common man, the vast majority of Halter's supporters don't actually know anyone in Arkansas whose job went overseas, so they play dumb and instead excoriate Lincoln for not being more liberal in a coal-dependent state that doesn't value either extremist politicians or outsiders telling them what's what and who to vote for.
It's a state that I first visited when I was a kid growing-up in Memphis, but even then, I couldn't help but notice the overwhelmingly friendliness and kindness of the people I met, who'd offer to help you before you ever thought to ask.
Every trip back there has been just like that.
And it's so beautiful, too, in a way that people who have always lived on the East Coast or South Florida can't imagine.
It's also a state where the friendly people who run the charities and civic groups, and who make sure that the ball fields are manicured on weekends for their sons and daughters to play baseball or softball on, are strongly against Obamacare and favors its repeal, and as Rasmussen Reports details below, "By a 61% to 31% margin, Arkansas voters say their views on today’s major issues are more in line with those of the average Tea Party member than with the views of President Obama."
Though I disagree with her position on Obamacare, in every other way, Blanche Lincoln has shown thru her words and actions that she's a true profile in courage, the likes of which does not currently exist in either Broward or Miami-Dade. As is patently obvious when we open the local newspaper or turn on the local news.
http://lincoln.senate.gov/
Which is to say that she's the polar opposite of an Ilene Lieberman, who seems incapable of not always thinking about how she, her husband and their pals can benefit from the existing political system that's riddled with loopholes which someone as smart as her has proven quite adept at manipulating, and not particularly interested in eliminating. Not that Mitch Caesar cares about that, either.
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Rasmussen Reports
Election 2010: Arkansas Senate
Arkansas Senate: Lincoln’s Support Continues to Slide
U.S. News & World Report
http://www.usnews.com/
DeMint, Lincoln, and the Perils of Progressive Purity Politics-
By Robert Schlesinger
Posted March 24, 2010
