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These are local races, there's 18,000 lifetimes between now and next November.

Yesterday in response to my post on the Greeneyeshade Blog, a reader made a very observant and pithy comment that I wanted to share with the rest of you:

“So, let me make sure I get this correct…We're going to pass a health care plan written by a committee, whose head says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn't read it but exempts themselves from it, signed by a president that also hasn't read it, and who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that's nearly broke.

What possibly could go wrong?”

I also want to draw your attention to a new tool that House Republicans are using in the debate on Speaker Pelosi’s government takeover of healthcare.  This website allows you to scrutinize the 1,990 pages of Pelosi’s bill right along with Members of Congress.  I think you will find it particularly useful. See the link below.

http://healthcaretruth.amplify.com/

This Friday, the tax payer funded Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) is hosting a briefing for Members of Congress and their staff on their new study: Online Town Hall Meetings: Exploring Democracy in the 21st Century. The CMF study consisted of 21 townhall meetings where Members of Congress and CMF provided a moderator: “spoke via voice over IP, and constituents asked questions and made comments by typing them. Only off-topic, redundant, unintelligible, or offensive questions were screened, and only questions asked by people who had not yet asked a question were prioritized.”

CMF does not say what qualifies as offensive, but if this summer is any indication that definition would include anything that the Congressman did not want to talk about. In other words, this report urges Congressmen not to actually interact with their constituents, but to avoid them altogether by holding safe townhalls they can completely control. And what did CMF find where the results of these Potemkin townhalls?

The online town halls increased constituents’ approval of the Member. Every Member involved experienced an increase in approval by the constituents who participated. The average net approval rating (approve minus disapprove) jumped from 29 before the session to 47 after. There were also similar increases in trust and perceptions of personal qualities – such as whether they were compassionate, hardworking, accessible, etc. – of the Member.

The lesson: avoid your constituents’ inconvenient questions and your approval ratings will rise. And this is a taxpayer funded study. Here is the grant from the National Science Foundation.

Congress is actually using your tax dollars to pay social scientists to find ways they can avoid actually talking to their constituents while improving their chances of reelection.

Whatever the outcome of this year's New Jersey and Virginia governor's races, the results will depend on conflicting factors that are unlikely to be replicated in many contests next year. Beware, then, of drawing sweeping conclusions.

Losing the seat would be a bit painful for the GOP but would not signal much about the party's 2010 prospects elsewhere. After all, how many states have a viable Conservative Party and how many times next year will the GOP nominate someone as liberal as Scozzafava?

This surprising (unsurprising?) story coming out of New Jersey:

How would you like to be a New Jersey police officer and look out your window and see several known criminals, including a man you arrested several weeks ago and another who had just been released from prison for shooting a cop?  And then find out that the men were sent into the neighborhood by the Democratic Party for GOTV operations - complete with lists of voters names, addresses and phones numbers!

Shockingly, this isn’t the first time New Jersey Democrats have used gang bangers for GOTV.  According to this story on PolitickerNJ, the Bloods Street gang stole $6000 from the NJ Democratic State Committee through a check fraud scheme.  NJ Democratic Party Chairman Joseph Cryan said “that checks were copied from payments sent out for the party’s 2006 field operation.”

I went to vote today at the same time I usually do (somewhere between 7-8am) regardless of whether it's a primary or general election. There are always people there voting at that hour whenever I've gone. At both the 2008 Virginia primary (Republicans and Democrats have their primaries the same day in VA) and the 2008 general election, there were lines out the doors -- for the general election there were lines down the block. Today there were people voting, but no lines at all and there were no organized party events / protests / meet-and-greets by the lower level Alexandria / Virginia politicians to try to talk to lined-up voters, as there usually are at my voting place. What the "no lines" and "no polls" communicated to me was that in one of the most reliably liberal, affluent and very heavily politically active communities of NoVA, there's not a lot of excitement or plans or effort today for Deeds.

In reality, this race is about much more than one House seat.  It is a proxy battle in the long-running war between establishment Republicans and grassroots conservatives.

If conservatives have their way, Dede Scozzafava is merely the first casualty of this war.

As RedState's Erickson told me, "The establishment has now learned it can be beaten from within its own base . . . If the GOP wants to fight the base in California and Florida, game on."

Lest there be any doubt about whether the new Pelosi Health Care Bill is more costly, more controlling, and closer to socialism than the previous iteration, here is your fact of the day:

You may remember that the ‘original’ health care bill introduced before the August recess, H.R. 3200, would have created 53 separate bureaucracies, commissions, boards etc... The new Pelosi Bill, which the House may vote on as early as this week creates a whopping 111 new boards, bureaucracies, commissions, and programs….wow….if this isn’t a massive government intervention into our health care system, I don’t know what is.

Today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal has a scathing editorial of the legislation introduced by Speaker Pelosi. It notes the creation of a new ‘Health Choices Commissioner’ that will decide “essential benefits” which all insurers will have to offer. This sounds like something straight out of Aldous Huxley’s, A Brave New World or George Orwell’s, 1984.

Thanks to the House Republican Conference, I have included a list of names of these proposed new bureaucratic entities along with the corresponding page numbers.

Click Here to Read all 1,990 pages.
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