US Senator Arlen Specter seized headlines in April last year by quitting the Republican party to become a Democrat. This week he may grab them again by losing the very re-election bid he had hoped to save.
Specter could become another high-profile casualty of angry US voters eager to punish incumbents in a handful of primaries tomorrow, ahead of November elections in which being “from Washington” may be potent political poison.
The races in Arkansas, Kentucky, Oregon and Specter’s home state of Pennsylvania, and a special election in Hawaii on Saturday, come as recent polls show that the climate for incumbents has not been this toxic since 1994.
US President Barack Obama’s Republican critics, who routed Democrats that year, have high hopes but face an internal party insurrection by arch-conservative “Tea Party” activists irate over policies like the government’s 2008 bailout of big banks.
Democrats face an historic pattern of the sitting president’s party losing about two dozen seats in mid-term elections — and have more swing seats to defend because of wins in 2006 and 2008.
And just one in three US voters wants to send their representative back to Washington, according to a Washington Post/ABC survey conducted late last month that spelled trouble for both parties.
Republican Kentucky voters are set to hand “Tea Party” darling Rand Paul the party’s Senate nod over Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked favorite, Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s secretary of state.
Paul — whose father, Republican Representative Ron Paul, ran for president in 2008 — has openly capitalized on disaffection with Washington, repeatedly urging voters to “send some different Republicans” to the capital.
“Being an incumbent this year, of either party, is not a happy thing,” former Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott told reporters last month.
Specter, 80, has the support of Obama and Pennsylvania’s Democratic establishment in his neck-and-neck race against Democratic Representative Joe Sestak, a retired admiral who enjoys the backing of the party’s liberal base.
“We’re in a dead heat,” Sestak said, predicting that Democratic voters in Pennsylvania “do not want to send back to Washington a career politician who will pursue the broken deal-making” that soured them on politics.
Angry voters “are saying ‘a pox on both your houses.’ They are voting in response to broken politics, not policy,” Sestak said.
Recent polls show both Specter and Sestak running behind Republican hopeful Pat Toomey.
The closely watched fights follow a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll packed with grim tidings for Democrats, who have hemorrhaged independent voter support since the 2006 election that gave them control of the US Congress.
Overall, respondents are evenly split on which party should hold Congress, but voters most committed to casting ballots in November prefer Republicans by a lopsided 56-36 percent margin.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS