I’ve got a stack of books I am reading and two websites I am redesigning right now, so I haven’t been posting at all for the past few weeks. I did want to alert readers to a Good Read that was just released today, former Senator Bill Bradley’s new book, We Can All Do Better.

I am about half way through my review copy and have to say it’s one of the best and most inspiring political books I have read in sometime. The following is an excerpt from We Can All Do Better:

In the 21st century, the intelligence of people will determine the future. Our free society can be the magnet for some of the world’s brightest minds if we deliberately, carefully, and intelligently open ourselves up. Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, has said that while China has a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, the U.S., given its history openess, can draw talent from all 7 billion people in the world. We should welcome the arrival of doctors, scientists, writers, mathematicians, computer specialists, language teachers, and other such talented professionals from abroad. Anytime a foreign student gets an advanced degree from an American university, he or she should automatically get a green card. We should also be open to those with entrepreneurial spirit who have the resources and want to start a business. Finally we should welcome not just the brightest or those with resources but also, as we always have done, those in limited numbers who just want a better life and show the ambition to seek it here. Surely, in a land as large as ours, we can make room for the energy, drive, and optimism that immigrants bring to our shores.

Ever since the Great Depression, the economic prospect that has most terrified policymakers has been a labor surplus — unemployment. Even now, when unemployment remains at an unacceptably high level, it’s difficult to imagine that within fifteen years we will have a labor scarcity. The magic number needed to maintain a stable population is 2.1 children per woman. In 2010 we were at 1.93. As baby boomers retire over the next decade, we will need new workers to make the economy grow, pay the Social Security and Medicare taxes necessary to fulfill our promises to the elderly, and produce the goods that they will demand. We either increase our birth rate, or accept more immigrants, or settle for slower economic growth. Look at Japan or Russia, which are both losing population because of low birth rates and hardly any immigration. They are committing slow-motion national suicide. Demographics don’t lie.

Since passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, which abolished the national origins quota system, the face of immigration has changed; there are fewer Europeans and more Central Americans, Asians, and Africans. We have absorbed these immigrants into our larger culture with a minimum of negative repercussions. When I heard a recent radio interview with Linda Sarsour, an Arab-American woman preparing to run for the New York City Council from a Brooklyn district that is heavily Moroccan, Algerian, and Palestinian, I was moved by her obvious devotion to the sense of possibility that is the birthright of all Americans. Newcomers have always added value to America. Look at New York or Jersey City or San Jose or Houston or Miami or Chicago in the last thirty years; each has been revitalized by immigrant communities who have come to America to build lives they couldn’t lead in their homelands. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur I know, a Pakistani Muslim married to a Hindu woman from India, once remarked to me, “Where else in the world but America could we be happy and accepted?”

Our history shows that each wave of immigrants added definition to what it meant to be an American. America is not static but constantly changing. Having overcome the deep racism of its history and integrated successive waves of immigrants, the United States, more than any other country, should welcome the pluralism that is growing in the age of the Internet and whose successful management could inspire admiration around the world.

Adapted excerpt from We Can All Do Better by Bill Bradley. Published in May 2012 by Vanguard Press. Copyright © 2012 by Bill Bradley.

The controversy over Trayvon Martin’s death continues as his father Tracy Martin, described “the police version of events in a meeting Wednesday with Washington Post reporters and editors,” and he told them “he did not believe the official account, which was conveyed to him two days after his 17-year-old son was killed Feb. 26.”

From his new Wrecking Ball tour, Bruce Springsteen is performing an updated version of “American Skin (41 Shots)”. “This is for Trayvon,” Springsteen said last night in Philly…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via David Remnick on The New Yorker…

Suddenly, the mood went sombre and Springsteen said, “This is for Trayvon.” I first heard “American Skin (41 Shots),” at Madison Square Garden a dozen years ago, but now the lament, as the circumstances changed from the shooting of Amadou Diallo, in New York, to Trayvon Martin, in Florida, was less subdued, far tougher, as if to underline the outrage. Like “Born in the U.S.A.” and the new “We Take Care of Our Own,” “American Skin” belies its easy reading; it attempts to get at the complexity as well as the grief and fury of its subject.

Last night a police video of Zimmerman taken after Trayvon was killed was released casting doubt on Zimmerman’s “I was attacked” defense. But, Zimmerman’s defense team continues to double down, with his father now doing an interview.

America is still waiting for answers and justice…

I’m a white woman from a small town in Massachusetts, but I spent 19 years living in Los Angeles. I raised my only child, my white daughter in inner city L.A. schools where she was a minority. Many of her school friends were black, many of my friends in L.A. are black with black sons, and every time I read another piece on Trayvon Martin, my heart breaks a little more.

We lived in L.A. during the Rodney King riots… I’ve seen up close and personal the way black men were targeted in the inner city by white cops. I abhore racism. I abhore gun violence. And I abhore laws that allow guns in the hands of the wrong people. I get the whole 2nd amendment argument, but I don’t get organizations pushing laws like Stand Your Ground, in states like Florida and other states pushing for similar legislation. Where does it stop?

Charles Pierce said in Esquire:

We executed children in this country until long after the rest of the world — except Iran — thought that was a good idea. Almost six million children live in poverty in this country. Almost six million of them are without health insurance of any kind, and that’s reckoned to be an improvement. None of this is accidental. These children are expendable because the people we elect make policy decisions of which we approve — or, at least, of which we do not disapprove. The Republicans in Congress — behind the “leadership” of zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan — would like to zero out the SCHIP children’s health-care program. If they do that, it will not be done by accident. The Florida legislature, behind the leadership of the National Rifle Association, passed the “stand your ground” law, despite the fact that even police and prosecutors were warning that it amounted to a hunting license for anyone who had both a gun, and the ability to concoct a good story. Trayvon Martin is not dead by accident.

Charles Pierce is right, “Trayvon Martin is not dead by accident,” and by now everyone should know that. The outrage that Zimmerman has not been charged with a crime is beyond palable, yet we wait to see if he will be charged. And in the meantime so many of us feel the pain, the frustration, the heart break and the sick feeling in our guts that things are so dreafully wrong in our country:

I am sick to death of people who celebrate “the family” making excuses about why other people’s children are expendable. I am sick to death of politicians who are more concerned about protecting zygotes than about the teenagers on whom they seek to balance their budgets and advance their careers. (Barney Frank’s line about conservatives’s believing that life “begins at conception and ends at birth” was not entirely a joke, although it’s always been treated as one.) I am sick to death of opportunistic yahoos who can look at this country’s unhealthy attachment to firearms and declare that the actions of George Zimmerman, while unfortunate, were pretty much what the Founders had in mind. I am sick to death of the steady drip-drip-drip of all the topical anesthetics we mix up whenever something like this happens. Had Emmett Till been killed in 2012, there’d be at least three people sitting in the CNN Green Room right now — and probably 15 of them sitting offstage at Fox — waiting to explain how unfortunate it was that the lad so transgressed against local custom that circumstances dictated that he be beaten to a pulp and tossed into the river tied to a cotton-gin fan. I am sick to death about how we can argue about anything simply to argue about it, and then move along to the next argument, as though anything at all has been settled.

Trayvon’s tragic death has become a political football in the midst of election season that clearly draws lines in the sand showing the racial discord in America. Our President speaks out and says, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” and shortly after, Republican Newt Gingrich is verbally assaulting Obama calling his comments “disgraceful.”

Disgraceful? What is “disgraceful,” is Newt Gingrich’s lack of respect, respect for our president and respect for Trayvon’s family.

I am sick to death, as Charles Pierce is, that this country does nothing but argue and those agruments somehow lead to the death of innocent children.

When will it end.

Actor, activist George Clooney was arrested and handcuffed a short time ago, outside of the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C. for protesting Sudan’s blockage of “food and aid from entering the Nuba Mountains area of the country, as well as its treatment of its people.”

Clooney’s father, journalist Nick Clooney, 78, was with him and was also arrested, as were Martin Luther King III, NAACP President Ben Jealous, Rep Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and former Rep. Tom Andrews (D-Mass.). They were taken away in a Secret Service van.

Speaking before the large crowd that gathered to watch the protest, Clooney said the group wanted “the (Sudanese) government in Khartoum to stop randomly killing its own innocent men, women and children. Stop raping them, and stop starving them.”

Clooney has been in Washington. D.C. over the past few days in effort to bring more awareness to the situation in Sudan:

On Thursday, the actor testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about what he saw in Sudan; then met with Secretary Hillary Clinton and President Obama in the Oval Office. The Washington Post later reported that Clooney said Obama promised to push China’s president to aid in forcing Sudan to open its southern region to relief effots.

He later told reporters that “people turn on the news and see an awful lot of bad stories,” but added that the United States “is still the most generous country in the world and truly the most compassionate.”

On Wednesday, Clooney appeared on TODAY with Ann Curry and discussed how he came under rocket fire in the Sudan on a recent trip there.

Clooney had announced his protest at the Sudanese embassy in advance and no doubt, intended to be arrested.

I really admire Clooney’s dedication to bringing awareness and help to the people of the Sudan.

Kerry swipes Romney again today over Iran foreign policy…

I have little interest in inserting myself, as a former nominee of my party, into this presidential campaign season. But as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which has a vital role in issues of national security, I feel compelled to respond to the ways that, in pursuit of the Republican nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has put himself front and center in debates that have serious consequences.

And on “CBS This Morning” today, Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee for president,  said that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner for nomination, was “‘behaving like a irresponsible candidate’ in criticizing the president’s Iran policy.”

Senator Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee talked with Charlie Rose “about a Washington Post column in which he rebuts a Romney op-ed published earlier in the week.”

Although Kerry wrote that Mr. Obama was already doing what Romney proposed to do to Iran, he wouldn’t say the two men’s views were similar.

“I see a profound difference,” said Kerry. “The difference is President Obama is acting like a president, a commander in chief and like a, a statesperson, and Mitt Romney is behaving like a irresponsible candidate, frankly, because everything that he laid out in his op-ed President Obama is already doing.”

Kerry dismissed Mitt Romney’s attacks on the Obama administration’s Iran foreign policy as “election-year politics.” 

“What he’s doing is setting up straw men, basically trying to just argue a case, say, ‘I’m strong, you’re weak,’ without any evidence supporting it whatsoever, Charlie,” said Kerry. “I mean, everything that Mitt Romney laid out that he said he might do President Obama has done or is in the middle of expanding.”

Two days ago Kerry rebutted Romney’s OP/ED on Iran on the Senate floor. Kerry’s OP/ED in the WaPo and appearance on “CBS This Morning,” mark Kerry’s second swing at Romney on Iran foreign policy.

Jessica Winter debates in TIME Ideas: Are Women People?

Winter says, “in the past couple of months, certain powerful figures in media and politics have cracked open that certitude,” that “women are fully autonomous human citizens—who vote, even.”

I can fully understand the questions Winter is posing given the recent increase in the War On Women, by members of the Republican Party and Clergy.

In her article, Winters recapps “recent instances of powerful men from the fields of law, politics and literature tackling the question that has captured America’s imagination: Are Women People?”

It’s a must read on this International Women’s Day.

Iran has been the hot topic of the day with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney beating the Iran war drum with an OP/ED today titled: “How I would check Iran’s nuclear ambition“.

Note Romney’s closing statement in which he beats the drum harder…

My foreign policy plan to avert this catastrophe is plain: Either the ayatollahs will get the message, or they will learn some very painful lessons about the meaning of American resolve.

Senator John Kerry, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, took to the Senate floor today to deliver remarks on Iran and took time to rebut Romney’s OP/ED in his floor statement: 

“We’re going to have a bruising election season. And so we should. That’s how we decide big issues in the United States. We always have. But let’s have an honest debate, not a contrived one. Governor Romney can debate the man in the White House instead of inventing straw men on the op-ed pages. He should be armed with facts instead of empty rhetoric. And if we are to succeed as the American people want us to in order to avoid a nuclear Iran, then at some point we must all act like statesmen, not candidates. We must be clear-eyed about what we have accomplished and what we have yet to do. That’s what Americans expect from their Commander in Chief, and they deserve no less.”

The full text of Chairman Kerry’s floor statement, as delivered, is below:

Mr. President, several of us here in the Senate have run for President. Two of us have been our Party’s nominees. Dozens of others have played major roles in tough campaigns. None of us are strangers to the rough and tumble of politics. I think we all understand on a personal level what the humorist said at the turn of the century when he wrote, “politics ain’t beanbag.” You have to have a thick skin and a strong backbone to survive in this business. You have to be able to take a punch. We all understand that.

So it is not as an innocent that I say I was troubled to read an op-ed in this morning’s Washington Post by the likely Republican nominee for President, Mitt Romney – an attack on the Administration’s Iran policy as inaccurate as it was aggressive.

Every candidate for the Oval Office has the right to criticize the President. But, particularly this week, while Prime Minster Netanyahu is in Washington meeting with the Administration to chart a path forward, we should all remember that the nuclear issue with Iran is deadly serious business that should invite sobriety and serious-minded solutions, not sloganeering and sound bites. This can’t become just another applause line on the Republican presidential stump. Talk has consequences, and idle talk of war only helps Iran by spooking the tight oil market and increasing the price of the Iranian crude that pays for its nuclear program. And to create false differences with the President just to score political points does nothing to move Iran off a dangerous nuclear course. Worst of all, Governor Romney’s op-ed does not even do readers the courtesy of describing how a President Romney would do anything different from what the Obama administration has already done.

If we’re going to disagree, let’s do so responsibly – and honestly.

Just look at this op-ed. From his opening paragraphs, Romney garbles history. Going back to the Iranian revolution, he calls President Carter “feckless,” saying he did nothing for over a year while Iranian revolutionaries held Americans captive. In fact—it was the months of President Carter’s negotiations and the all-night session before the inauguration on January 20, 1981 that freed the hostages.

But I bring the hostage crisis up for another reason — because when those helicopters went down in the desert during the failed rescue attempt in 1980, the United States not only lost an opportunity to get our people back sooner, President Carter lost any chance he had at reelection. And yet, President Obama, whom Governor Romney calls “the most feckless president since Carter,” threw that lesson out the window and authorized the gutsy and dangerous raid in Pakistan that finally killed Osama bin Laden.

Despite everything that could have gone wrong with that raid, the mission was ordered with confidence, executed with courage, and the man who plotted the September 11 attacks was finally held accountable for the murder of thousands of Americans. George W. Bush may have said “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” but President Obama delivered. I don’t know if Governor Romney has checked the definition of the word “feckless” lately, but that ain’t it.

The rest of Romney’s argument doesn’t get any better.

In fact, he goes on to propose action after action that President Obama has already taken. Look, this is not just my analysis. Let me read you the first sentences from an article in today’s New York Times:

“To rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, Mitt Romney says he would conduct naval exercises in the Persian Gulf…. He would try to ratchet up Security Council sanctions on Iran, targeting its Revolutionary Guards, and the country’s central bank and other financial institutions. And if Russia and China do not go along, he says, the United States should team up with other willing governments to put such punitive measures in place. As it turns out, that amounts to what President Obama is doing.”

Ambassador Nick Burns, President Bush’s lead negotiator on Iran, said, “The attacks on Obama basically say, ‘He’s weak and we’re strong.’ But when you look at the specifics, you don’t see any difference.”

So let’s go point by point through the Romney plan.

He writes that he would proceed with missile defenses to protect against Iran. He ignores the fact that one of the first things that the Obama administration did was to issue its plans for the Phased Adaptive Approach—so that we would be able to sooner protect our friends and allies against the Iranian missile threat and to provide increasing levels of capability as the technology advances. During the debate over the New START treaty, the Senate heard in great detail—including from the commander of Strategic Command and the director of the Missile Defense Agency—how this system would work and how the administration planned to proceed with it. In fact, the president sent the Senate a letter affirming his commitment to missile defense, and over the past year he has stuck by that promise.

Then Romney goes on to say that President Obama doesn’t understand the seriousness of the threat from nuclear terrorism. Again, just look at the record: For the first time, the President set as a national goal securing all vulnerable nuclear material around the world in four years. He won international endorsement of that effort at the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit. Last year alone, the Department of Energy removed or eliminated over 250 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from places like Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia, and Kazakhstan. And in the budget request before Congress, the Administration plans to remove or eliminate highly enriched uranium from 9 countries, including Vietnam, Ukraine, and Mexico.

Then, Romney lays out the greatest willful avoidance of the facts in his entire article. He calls for ever-tightening sanctions on Iran. Mr. President, what exactly is it that he thinks we’ve been doing for the past three years? When President Obama took office, Iran was ascendant. As the Vice President used to say when he chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, freedom wasn’t on the march – Iran was on the march. Its reach through proxies like Hezbollah threatened the United States, its allies and the region. The international community was divided; diplomacy—both multilateral and bilateral—was stalled.

But in June 2010, with a decisive push from President Obama, the United Nations put in place the most comprehensive and biting international sanctions the Iranian government has ever faced—imposing restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities, ballistic missile program, conventional military exports to Iran, Iranian banks and financial transactions, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

What’s more, in coordination with allies such as the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada and others, the Obama Administration put in place additional measures, ratcheting up pressure on the country’s petrochemical industry, oil and gas industry, and financial sector. Recently, Europe announced the ban of oil imports from Iran, which will further pressure Iran’s economy.

And that’s just on the multilateral front. President Obama also worked closely with Congress to pass the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act, which strengthened existing U.S. sanctions, and made it harder for the Iranian government to buy refined petroleum and modernize its oil and gas sector. And, recently, we imposed tough new sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran. Don’t take my word for it – Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is the one feeling the pressure. As he said last fall, “our banks cannot make international transactions anymore.”

Today, all of these sanctions are beginning to bite. Iran is now virtually cut off from large parts of the international financial system. Almost $60 billion in energy-related projects in Iran have been put on hold or discontinued. Iran has started to lose oil sales to key customers in Europe and Asia, and those losses could reach up to 40 percent of its daily sales, according to the International Energy Agency. Banking sanctions have prevented several of Iran’s customers from paying for its petroleum products, leaving the Central Bank short of hard currency and driving down the unofficial foreign exchange rate by 40 percent in a single month.

Just yesterday, the deputy chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was quoted as saying: “The regime is at the height of isolation and in the midst of a technological, scientific, and economic siege. We are not in a situation of imaginary threats and sanctions. Threats and sanctions against us are effectively being pursued.”

Iran is also divided internally and isolated diplomatically like never before. Iran’s most important ally, Syria, is facing regime collapse, which a former director of Israel’s Mossad recently said could be a bigger strategic setback for Iran than a military strike against it. And, to talk about Israel for a second, we should all remember that President Obama has provided record amounts of security funding to help Israel maintain its qualitative military edge. Prime Minister Netanyahu has spoken of President Obama’s ironclad commitment to Israel’s security. He said “that our security cooperation is unprecedented… And [that President Obama] has backed those words with deeds.”

So when you add it all up, Mitt Romney is just trying to ignore, twist, and distort the Administration’s policy to drive a wedge in our politics.

Mr. President, let us be crystal clear: we must prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. That is why President Obama, even as he builds pressure for a diplomatic solution, keeps reiterating that all options are on the table. And he’s underscored that – as he said – “I don’t bluff.” And you can ask Osama bin Laden what he means when he says that. Mr. President, we’re going to have tough debates. We’re going to have a bruising election season. And so we should. That’s how we decide big issues in the United States. We always have. But let’s have an honest debate, not a contrived one. Governor Romney can debate the man in the White House instead of inventing straw men on the op-ed pages. He should be armed with facts instead of empty rhetoric. And if we are to succeed as the American people want us to in order to avoid a nuclear Iran, then at some point we must all act like statesmen, not candidates. We must be clear-eyed about what we have accomplished and what we have yet to do. That’s what Americans expect from their Commander in Chief, and they deserve no less.

In related news during his presser today, President Obama spent sometime rebuffing “criticism that he has been weak on Iran,” and he accused his “Republican rivals of “beating the drums of war” amid rising concerns about the prospect of Iran’s developing a nuclear weapon.”

Conservative’s caustic internet mouth-piece Andrew Breitbart died shortly after midnight, this morning, he was 43. He is  “survived by his wife Susannah Bean Breitbart, 41, and four children.”

Breitbart’s Big Journalism website broke the news with this, “With a terrible feeling of pain and loss we announce the passing of Andrew Breitbart.”

Breitbart was loved by the right-wing and reviled by the left, as he often relentlessly picked battle with both politicians and the main-stream media. He was a darling of the Tea Party as well.  

Breitbart was a prolific commentator who founded several websites devoted to covering politics, entertainment and everything in-between. Earlier in his career, he worked for the Drudge Report before breaking off to start his own outlets — including Big Government, Big Hollywood and Breitbart.tv.[...]

The Los Angeles coroner’s office said the preliminary evidence suggests a “cardiac event” led to his death. An autopsy is set for Friday.

Breitbart’s father-in-law actor Orson Bean said he ”was walking near his house in the Brentwood neighborhood shortly after midnight Thursday when he collapsed.”

I’ll choose to stay classy on this one, though many liberal and progressive bloggers are reported not to be and goodness knows Breitbart certainly didn’t apply the “stay classy” rule in his internet reporting. Regardless, it’s not my style to speak ill of the dead… I’ll let others have it…

Yesterday, Evangelist Franklin Graham apologized to President Obama for questioning his Christian faith.

Graham had said in a recent MSNBC interview that he “did not know whether Obama is a Christian” and he suggested that “Islamic law considers him to be a Muslim.”

Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, said he now “accepts Obama’s declarations that he is a Christian.”

“I regret any comments I have ever made which may have cast any doubt on the personal faith of our president, Mr. Obama,” he said in a statement.

“I apologize to him and to any I have offended for not better articulating my reason for not supporting him in this election — for his faith has nothing to do with my consideration of him as a candidate.”

His apology came in the wake pressure from ”a dozen members of a religious subgroup of the NAACP had accused Graham of “bearing false witness” and fomenting racial discord.”

“We can disagree about what it means to be a Christian engaged in politics, but Christians should not bear false witness,” the NAACP statement said. “We are also concerned that Rev. Graham’s comments can be used to encourage racism.” [...]

“By his statements, Rev. Graham seems to be aligning himself with those who use faith as a weapon of political division,” the NAACP said. “These kinds of comments could have enormous negative effects for America and are especially harmful to the Christian witness.”

The open letter to Graham ”included presidents of the National Baptist Convention, USA; the National Baptist Convention of America; the Progressive National Baptist Convention; as well as bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.”

I was more than appalled by Graham’s comments about President Obama. Right wing religious zealots need to think before they speak. I am glad to see that pressure was put onto Graham and that he stepped up to apologize.

Maine Republican Senator Olympia Snowe has announced her retirement.

A moderate Republican, who has often voted with Democrats in the Senate cited the extreme partisanship of recent years as her reasoning.

In a statement Snowe said, “Unfortunately, I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term. So at this stage of my tenure in public service, I have concluded that I am not prepared to commit myself to an additional six years in the Senate, which is what a fourth term would entail.”

Notice of her retirement could be a “major setback for the GOP’s efforts to regain a majority in the Senate.” With Maine being a blue state, Snowe was considered as a moderate, to be the GOP’s only hope to hold the seat.

Among the names mentioned as possible replacements on the ballot for the GOP: 2002 gubernatorial candidates Peter Cianchette, 2010 gubernatorial candidate Steve Abbott, state Treasurer Bruce Poliquin, state Attorney General Bill Schneider, and Jock McKernan, Snowe’s husband and the state’s former governor. Businessman Scott D’Amboise was already challenging Snowe in a primary.

On the Democratic side, Reps. Chellie Pingree (D) and Mike Michaud (D) could run, as well as former congressman Tom Allen (D), who unsuccessfully challenged Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in 2008.

The filing deadline is fast approaching: March 15.

Progressives are already crowing that Snowe is retiring and it can indeed be a win/win for Democrats, but let’s celebrate when we win her seat. Snowe has always been an ally on women’s issues, and with the surge in the war on women, we very much need a pro-choice, pro-women’s issues vote to replace her.

On the flip-side Democrats are losing their most moderate member, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Former Senator Bob Kerrey is said to be reconsidering running for Nelson’s seat.