Earlier today, Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Penn., tweeted under his twitter handle “@SenArlenSpecter”: “Called Senator Grassley to tell him to stop speading (sic) myths about health care reform and imaginary ‘death panels.’” (more)

Specter Becomes Reliable Democratic VoteNate Silver notes that since Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) announced he would almost certainly challenge Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) in a Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, the formerly Republican senator has voted with his new party on 28 out of 29 contentious votes, or 97% of the time. (more)

Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak has all but formally announced a Democratic primary challenge to recent convert Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, but a new Quinnipiac poll gives the senator a healthy advantage over the junior lawmaker, 50%-21%. (more)

How badly did Sen. Arlen Specter (D) hurt his reelection prospects over the past week? Photo by Gerald Martineau of the Washington Post A series of odd incidents that have proceeded from Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter's party switch last week have raised questions about whether the newest Democrat has permanently damaged himself in the eyes of the state's voters. The White House is concerned enough about the developments that deputy chief of staff Jim Messina and Ron Klain, a senior adviser to Vice Pr... (more)

When the opportunistic Specter switched parties, Democrats cheered the move -- even though a few dissenting voices questioned whether his decision would advance the party's interests. Yesterday, Senate Democrats denied Specter seniority and relegated him to junior status on the Senate Appropriations and Judiciary Committees. The Democrats might revisit the matter after the midterm elections in 2010. Specter recently caused a flap when he implicitly supported Republican Norm Coleman's exhaustive effort... (more)

This weekend, weasely Senator Specter popped up on TV to blame Republicans for not funding cancer research and thus making it more likely that people like Jack Kemp and himself would die. That, of course, ignored the fact that he has purportedly recovered from his bout with Hodgkin's Disease and is now healthy enough as a 79-year old cancer survivor to run for six more years in the Senate. Some American medicine must have helped him or did he seek his medical care out of the country? But the Wall Stre... (more)

As I said last week — Democrats, you can have this old coot. He’s not only an arrogant and selfish SOB, it sounds like he’s crazy now (or more crazy than usual). “Well, I was sorry to disappoint many people. Frankly, I was disappointed that the Republican Party didn’t want me as their candidate,” Mr. Specter said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “But as a matter of principle, I’m becoming much more comfortable with the Democrats’ approach. And one of the items that I’m working on, Bob, is funding for medi... (more)

Weekend, yo! Here’s some quick, solid commentary from Zo on 9/11, Obama, and RINOs: (more)

Arlen Specter has kept his promise. As he told me over a week ago in an exclusive for The American Spectator, he was going to play "hard hardball." Yesterday, staring at polls that had him losing a Republican primary to his 2004 rival former Congressman Pat Toomey, Specter did just that. Stunning the political world in both Pennsylvania and Washington, Specter became a Democrat (more)

Sen. Arlen Specter’s party-switching has sent reverberations through the political world and the Republican Party. And the blame game has begun already. A political food fight of a sort has broken out between Club for Growth (the organization which Specter’s challenger Pat Toomey previously headed) on one hand, and Ramesh Ponnuru and Sen. Lindsay Graham on the other. The latter two blame Club for Growth for narrowing the Republican Party. Club for Growth responds that the GOP is better served by vibra... (more)