Susan Collins

Election day is two weeks from next Tuesday. I’m sure you either know there’s a lot at stake or just don’t care. Blue America isn’t trying to save the Democratic Party. That isn’t our job and it isn’t possible anyway— not with them working against themselves the way they have this cycle. Instead we have focused on a small handful of races where we feel there’s a legitimate shot to replace a conservative with a progressive. One of those races is for the Maine senate seat that Susan Collins has occupied for 18 years.

In the video above, Bernie Sanders was addressing the Culinary Workers Union at their convention in Las Vegas yesterday. He made a powerful speech about how the right wing oligarchs and plutocrats divide working people up so that they can dominate American politics. “We are not living in a democracy when 60 percent of Americans are not voting, while billionaires like the Koch brothers are spending hundreds of millions to buy the United States Senate. That's called oligarchy, not democracy… The Koch Brothers are trying to buy the Senate. This is not what democracy is supposed to be about.

Yesterday Marianne Williamson endorsed Shenna Bellows for the U.S. Senate seat occupied by Susan Collins. "We desperately need candidates who carry the banner of new possibilities for America,” she wrote to her supporters, “and we need to support them in every way possible when they appear. Shenna Bellows represents such a banner.

It's almost the end of the quarter-- and you know what that means-- hundreds of e-mails from the DCCC and DSCC and their careerist candidates begging for money. Please tell them you already gave-- through Blue America-- to individual candidates whose agendas you believe in and whose values you share.As you probably know, we’ve supported Shenna Bellows' entirely grassroots campaign for Senate in Maine this cycle more than any other candidate, and now we’re asking you to step up again.

My two favorite senators are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They both have phenomenal records, not just on voting, but on leading. No one's perfect though. Bernie, for example, endorsed anti-choice Michigan reactionary Jerry Cannon, the former commandante of the Guantánamo gulag. What does that say about Bernie? Not much; just that he's human and makes mistakes.

Maine Republican Susan Collins makes $174,000 a year, along with great retirement and health benefits-- the same as the boys make. And that's the way it should be. But yesterday Collins, a millionaire, joined the Republican Party filibuster seeking to prevent a simple up-or-down vote on Barbara Mikulski's Paycheck Fairness Act, S.2199.

Although Rick Santorum has reassured his far right-wing allies that Collins has to occasionally make believe dh's a moderate to trick Mainers, she never betrays the GOP when push comes to shove, voters still expect her to come through for the mainstream when it's important. Yesterday it was important, very, very important.

Grayson's amendment to stop funding the over-militarization of local police forces never made it to the Senate. The House Republican leaders-- Boehner, Cantor and McCarthy-- teamed up with the House Democratic leaders-- Pelosi, Hoyer, Clyburn (along with Wasserman Schultz, Israel and Crowley)-- to urge their caucuses to vote against it.

The LGBT equality movement has been successful with the help of dedicated allies like Shenna Bellows and Marianne WilliamsonMaine Senator Susan Collins doesn't have a bad voting record on LGBT rights… for a Republican. Fir a normal human being, though, her record is awful-- and disgraceful.

There's supposed to be this huge chasm in the Maine Republican Party between the business-oriented moderates and the far right extremists (with another split in their for the Ron Paul libertarian branch). The moderates have been the home base for respectable political leaders like Senators Margaret Chase Smith, Bill Cohen, Olympia Snowe.