Lamar Alexander endorses Blackburns U.S. Senate bid

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Senator Alexander always hides behind his 'centrist' persona....not anymore.

U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander is endorsing Marsha Blackburn’s bid for the U.S. Senate.

The former governor and longtime Republican senator made the announcement on social media Thursday, saying Blackburn, a Brentwood-based congresswoman, has served the state well.

“I look forward to working with her to make the Senate a more effective institution,” he said on Twitter, using his official campaign account.

Alexander’s announcement came hours after Middle Tennessee State University released a poll indicating that the Blackburn is down 10 percentage points to former Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat.

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/05/lamar-alexander-endorses-marsha-blackburns-u-s-senate-bid/491257002/


Marsha Blackburn Is the Result of 40 Years of Republican Lunacy

by Charlie Pierce

There is a real problem in sharp relief here. Bredesen is a former mayor and governor and a fairly standard Democratic candidate. Blackburn is a Tea Party loon and she is the most likely nominee the Tennessee Republican Party could find to hold onto a seat to which Corker was first elected in 2006. This has the potential of turning the Republican side of an important campaign into a real carnival. Blackburn launched her campaign with an announcement video that was so nutty on the phony issue of the sale of "baby parts" that Twitter 86’d it almost immediately. This allowed Blackburn to bleat—on Twitter, natch—about how the liberals who run “Silicon Valley” were out to squash her proud conservatism.

Blackburn is the pre-eminent drum-banger on the whole sale-of-baby-parts fable, as well as several other issues guaranteed to gin up the rubes for several years now. In 2014, as Joan Walsh detailed at Salon, Blackburn even briefly had delusions of running for president. I guess we should be glad she’s adjusted her ambitions to be a little more, ah, realistic. Nevertheless, when Blackburn announced her intention to run for the Senate, according to Steve Benen at Maddowblog, the Tennessee Republican establishment dove for the bourbon bottle.

Blackburn’s most recent slide into the spotlight had to do with a very weird and useless “investigation” into Planned Parenthood, and what Blackburn believed was that organization’s fetal-parts mail-order business. This turned into a burlesque that embarrassed even the current House of Representatives. From MSNBC:

Twelve states have looked into allegations that Planned Parenthood broke the law. Those states brought no charges. Another eight declined to investigate. Instead of charging Planned Parenthood, a grand jury convened in Harris County, Texas, by an avowedly anti-abortion prosecutor brought charges against Daleiden and his associate.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19695474/marsha-blackburn-tennessee-senate/