2010 ELECTIONS WATCH:
In the congressional races for 2010, keep an eye on Indiana's 2nd District. That seat is currently held by Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly, a relatively conservative Democrat who will be hard to beat no matter what. But the Republicans need to recruit good candidates and make the Democrats work for every seat and spend every resource possible--and the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee is on the road to doing just that in Indiana's 2nd, as they appear to have recruited a great campaigner and good conservative, Indiana State Representative Jackie Walorski, to run against Donnelly next year.
That's one to watch.
SURE IS NICE THE RECOVERY HAS BEGUN DEPT:
I see in recent days that lots of news stories tout "experts" who claim the recession is over and the recovery has begun.
Well, don't tell that to people in Michigan--there, the unemployment rate has crept up again, to 15.3%. I have this feeling there are lots of folks out there who are sick of hearing pro-Obama experts seeking to help the president by declaring the recession over and done with. They might still be sick of it in 2010, by the way.
HEALTH INSURANCE REFORM UPDATE:
Thomas Sowell today reminds us the price we may have to pay to reduce the number of the "uninsured":
"The magic number du jour is the number of Americans without health insurance. Apparently getting more people insured is another “good thing” — which is to say, it is something whose costs are not to be weighed against the benefits, or whose costs are to be finessed aside with optimistic projections or a claim that these costs can be covered by eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.”In real life, people weigh one thing against another. But in politics, one declares one thing to be imperative, so the issue then becomes how we do it. In real life, all sorts of desirable things are not done, either because other desirable things would have to be sacrificed or because the dangers incurred in achieving the desired objective are worse than the problem we want to solve.Almost never are the dangers of having uninsured people weighed against the dangers of having government bureaucrats overruling doctors and deciding whether money would be better spent saving the life of an elderly person or paying for an abortion for some teenager.The crowning irony is that the problems caused by insurance companies’ refusing to pay for certain medications or treatments are to be solved by giving government bureaucrats that same power..."
Read the whole thing. Remember--there are plenty of younger, healthy people who CHOOSE, with knowledge, with their eyes wide open, to go without health insurance. Conservatives need to keep pointing out to people that we need to have very, very good reasons to deny persons that freedom--and that we haven't heard such reasons yet.
IS THE GOP/CONSERVATISM DEAD? DEPT:
Two pieces of news today: first, two different polls show conservative Republican Pat Toomey continuing to run pretty well against incumbent (and now a Democrat) Senator Arlen Specter.
Meanwhile the New Jersey governor's race now appears to be a dead heat between Christie and Corzine. But remember, every poll shows Corzine's approval/disapproval numbers to be very bad for him--nearly 60% of New Jerseyans disapprove of him. That always comes back to bite the incumbent in the end; undecideds in that environment almost always break big for the challenger. Look for Republican Chris Christie to still have a great chance to win that race.
Polls concerning both races found here.
