Arlene Specter...you can have him, take Collins and Snowe too!

Come on! Please tell me NONE of you were surprised!

With last weeks report that Pat Toomey was leading by 21 points in the polls against Arlen Specter was ...lets see what is that saying "the straw that broke the camels back", yes that's it!

Yes please understand Democrats...we hand you Arlen Specter on a silver platter. Indeed WE DO NOT WANT HIM. While we are jumping the aisles you might want to go ahead and take Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, as these two lovely ladies will also be up for re-election and when that happens they will also find themselves in the same position as Mr. Specter....yes indeed...losing their re-election to a REAL republican.

I found the article in yesterdays Washington Post very interesting:

The night before the Senate vote on President Obama's $787 billion stimulus bill, one question echoed through the West Wing: Where is Arlen Specter? The Republican senator from Pennsylvania would not answer his phone. Not for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell (D) or Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), the Senate majority leader.

The president, a senator himself only a few months before, had spent weeks courting Specter. Obama had invited him to his Super Bowl party days earlier, gently teasing the prickly lawmaker about wearing a coat and tie to a relaxed social gathering. He had also brought Specter in for a 15-minute, one-on-one session in the Oval Office.

"This is the first president I've ever met alone," Specter would later say of the meeting. "I'm just searching for the right word -- it was unique."

With the vote only hours away, the job of finding the senator fell to Vice President Biden, who reached him by phone on the morning of the Feb. 13 vote. Soon after, Biden called Emanuel, who had been operating on virtually no sleep for several days, with the news: Specter would vote yes. In return for his support, Specter, who has Hodgkin's disease, won a large increase in cancer research funding for the National Institutes of Health. lol and you guys thought it was all about democracy and that the democrats were calling him, no sorry it was about what Arlen Specter would get for himself. Oops! he sold out the people he represented all for personal reasons. No wonder he is 21 points behind in the polls!

"The dominoes," a senior adviser involved in the lobbying effort recalled, "began to fall into place."

Hours later, the Senate delivered the filibuster-proof 60 votes needed in favor of a measure that senior White House officials noted among themselves was more costly than the New Deal. For Specter, the vote represented a major step toward leaving the Republican Party, a defection he announced yesterday, putting Obama closer to being able to force his will in the Senate.