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Georgia's senior senator Saxby Chambliss has always been a special member of the U.S. Senate -- special in the sense of those special education classes offered at most public schools.

The trend has been evident for quite some time, but the latest poll should remove any doubts: Charlie Crist is dead meat in the Republican primary for Florida's Senate seat.

He's a little late to the game, but Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine has called for the allocation of more money and more independence for the chronically underfunded and legislatively hamstrung State Ethics Commission.

Massachusetts Democrats -- most especially Martha Coakley -- have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and managed to give away a U.S. Senate seat that had been held by Democrats for more than half a century. With Republican Scott Brown headed to Washington, let's speculate on what some of the long-term effects might be.

What are our legislative leaders up to? Let's look at what Sen. Mitch Seabaugh (R-Sharpsburg), the majority whip in the Senate, is introducing in the way of public safety legislation.

The General Assembly kicked off a new session on Monday with much of the legislative leadership reeling from media exposes of scandals and ethics controversies, some of them involving female lobbyists

Time will tell whether Roy Barnes can win another term as governor, but one thing's for sure -- he still knows how to raise money, even during the depths of the worst recession since the 1930s.

The vote was taken and the deed is done: healthcare reform legislation passed the U.S. Senate in the early morning hours of Christmas Eve with every Democratic and independent senator voting for it and every Republican voting against it. No big surprise there. It is also no big surprise that we will continue to hear the big lie from right-wing blowhards that this piece of legislation is so bad that it will knock the Democrats out of power in 2010.

Tom Price, the Republic congressman from Roswell, has become quite the political attack dog since he left the Georgia Senate for the U.S. House. He has reached that point in his political maturity where, if Nancy Pelosi were to make the comment that the sun rises in the east, Price would issue a statement insisting that the sun rises in the west and smearing Pelosi as a fascistic communist for daring to suggest otherwise.

A few days before Republican members of the Georgia House caucused to nominate a replacement for the lobbyist-romancing Glenn Richardson as speaker, a Democratic strategist summed up the worst-case scenario for his party:

"The worst thing that could happen to Democrats is for Republicans to elect someone honest as speaker," he said.