what have been her chief accomplishments as our senator? serious question.

She has voted to fund the Irag invasion everytime, and voted against making the US car companies raise gas mileage. It's time to elect someone that lives in the real world.

Accomplishments: The Columbus Center. How long has that sat vacant?

I shudder to think of Dutch as a Senator. Yikes.

She's a incumbent left-wing liberal in what is now an even more left-wing liberal state. Of course she'll win, and she'll win in a landslide.

Marylandhas some of the most useless federal politicians. Mikulski has done zero since being in the Senate. Cummings is even worse. I say this as a life long democrat who consistently has voted a straight democratic ticket. But listening to the empty-headed Cummings rail on about $500K getting wasted at AIG on some junket--as if that's the end of the world--and being entirely unable to grasp the ongoing economic crisis i almost painful. Mikulski is a joke who has been in the senate for over 2 years and has championed exactlynothing. She needs to go. Someone needs to grow a pair and aggressively take on this fossil and put her out to pasture in the dem primary. She needs to go. Cummings only has his seat because it was drawn pretty much to ensure a powerbase in west baltimore and pre-empt any attempt to unseat him in a primary. We dems are reducing this process to a joke.

Here's some information on Mikulski from the Almanac of American Politics, an exhaustive, non-partisan source of political information:

"Mikulski is the Senate's chief superintendent of the space program and an enthusiast for space exploration. She has paid close attention to the Goddard Space Center, the Wallops Flight Facility and Johns Hopkins's Applied Science Lab in Maryland, and secured them additional funding on occasion...

"She voted against higher CAFE standards -- there are still auto assembly plants in Maryland -- and, mindful of her Polish heritage, urged that Poles be allowed into the United States without visas...In 2004 she helped to fund over $1 billion of Maryland projects, including highways, HOPE VI mixed housing, homeland security at the Port of Baltimore, Chesapeake Bay cleanup, research on oyster bed reseeding and a crab hatchery at the University of Maryland."

I apologize that the passages are from the 2006 version of the Almanac; the 2008 version is on my desk in Washington, awaiting retrieval.

thank you david. i can get behind the funding of these projects.

isn't she the most senior female senator and yet she doesn't chair any of the major committee's? why is that? and i remember reading recently that she was voted as the meanest person in congress.

Mikulski has a reputation as being prickly to work for. Ask around, and you'll hear tales of staff members who have endured her wrath. Still, even those who have been on the receiving end of rants maintain a level of respect. My colleague Matt Brown, who has covered Mikulski for the past two years, says she has many friends among Senate colleagues. There's no single, clear-cut reason for why she doesn't chair a committee, other than the fact that the leader (currently Harry Reid) who makes such assignments has determined that other senators are better suited to those positions.

Liberal? Mikulaski? She voted for the FISA bill that gave immunity to the phone companies that helped illegal spying on US citizens.

I'll gladly vote for almost anyone other than her.

Mikulski will easily win re-election for one reason: Maryland voters like her job performance. As someone who has lived in the area for more than two decades, it is clear to me that Mikulski connects with Marylanders because she consistently puts Maryland’s interests first. Maybe that doesn’t make her the top pick for the national Sunday morning talk shows, but I am glad that she spends the majority of her time fighting for our federal labs and research centers, our treasured Chesapeake Bay and bread-and-butter issues that matter most to ordinary people like health care. Also, as a woman, I have no doubt that some of the “meanness” reputation has sexist overtones.