Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a fun and safe New Year's Eve. Your responses on the Expand the Map! ActBlue page were phenomenal! Thank you SO much! Currently, Larry LaRocco and Rick Noriega are only $112 and $127 short of the $1,000 mark, respectively, and Tom Allen is only $27 short of $500 on the page. Also, Andrew Rice is just a hair below the $3,000 mark. Can we get these four terrific candidates to those next milestones? Replacing Larry Craig, John Cornyn, Susan Collins, and Jim Inhofe with LaRocco, Noriega, Allen and Rice means four more critically important votes for cloture to put an end to the McConnell Republicans' notoriously historic reign of obstructionism. So please contribute if you can.

Mississippi: Senate-appointee Roger Wicker has been sworn in. And now the legal battle over the timing of the special election will kick into gear.

Nebraska: Remember when the National Republican Senatorial Committee had plans to attack Bob Kerrey, if he entered the 2008 Senate race, for having lived out-of-state for a few years running a school in New York? I wonder how they feel about their big recruit, Mike Johanns, having to publicly go house hunting to return to Nebraska after living out-of-state for a few years. (Well, he was living out-of-state to serve as George W. Bush's Agriculture Secretary, you say? Yeah, and he screwed over plenty of Nebraska's farmers in that role! Some excuse.)

Oregon: Blue Oregon's Kari Chisholm offers Gordon Smith some ideas for New Year's resolutions. The Guru offers an additional one at the top of the comments.

Wyoming: The Casper Star Tribune chronicles the difficulty Democrats are having in finding an opponent for either John Barrasso or Mike Enzi. The article notes that former Gubernatorial candidate Paul Hickey, State Senator Mike Massie, and State Representative Debbie Hammons have declined entreaties to run. 2006 Democratic Senate candidate Dale Groutage was unavailable for comment, though he got 30% of the vote against Craig Thomas in his run. Also out there for consideration is two-term former Governor Mike Sullivan who lost to then-Rep. Craig Thomas in the 1994 Wyoming Senate race and was later appointed Ambassador to Ireland. The article also mentions that Republican former state Treasurer Cynthia Lummis will run for the House seat from which Barbara Cubin is retiring, meaning that Lummis won't challenge Barrasso to a primary.