“If the Republican Party wins every senate seat in which it now holds a lead, according to Rasmussen’s polls, it will capture eight Democratic seats while holding all of its own.

The two remaining pickups, to assure control, could be in Indiana where former Senator Dan Coats may run against Senator Evan Bayh and in California. Even if Coats does not run, former Congressman John Hostettler is only behind Bayh by 44-41. And, in California, former Hewlitt Packhard CEO Carly Fiorina is also only three points behind Senator Barbara Boxer.

(This assumes that former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson takes on Senator Russ Feingold).

Here’s the data:

In these eight races, the Republican is ahead:

State	Contest	Latest Polling	Date
Delaware	Castle v Coones	Castle +29	Jan
ND	Hoeven v unknown	Hoeven +20 (v Dorgan)	Dec
Ark	Lincoln v 4 opps	Repub (Baker) +19	Feb
Nev	Reid v 3 opps	Repub (Tarkanian) +8	Feb
Colorado	Norton v Bennet	Norton +14	Feb
Penn	Toomey v Specter	Toomey +9	Jan
Illinois	Kirk v Giannoulias	Kirk +6	Feb
Wisconsin	Thompson v Feingold	Thompson +3	Jan

And, in these two states, the results are close:

State	Contest	Latest Polling	Date
California	Boxer v 3 opps	Boxer (v Fiorina) +3	Jan
Indiana	Bayh v Hostettler	Bayh +3	Jan

If Republicans take all ten seats, they take control in the Senate.

In addition strong challenges may be shaping up in New York against Kirsten Gillibrand and in Washington State against Patty Murray.”

“Immediately following the news of his death, election analysts rated the race as competitive for the GOP.

While Murtha has held the seat since 1974 with few re-election scares, the Johnstown-area district outside of Pittsburgh has right-leaning roots, and a special election contest will be targeted by House Republicans. With Murtha’s death, Democrats now control the House by a 256-178 margin.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) won the district by a narrow 1,000 vote margin against President Barack Obama. It was the only district in the nation, however, that voted Democratic in the 2004 presidential race that was carried by McCain four years later.

Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell must set a date for a special election within the next ten days, according to state law. A likely date is May 18, when the state’s primary elections will take place.

The House Democratic campaign operation is in better shape financially to wage a costly special election battle against their Republican counterparts, with a five-to-one cash on hand advantage.

But first they will have to find the kind of centrist Democrat who can compete in a district with conservative leanings. While Murtha was closely allied with liberal lawmakers, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he did not share their progressive leanings. He was known for championing defense spending and was socially conservative on matters including abortion.

There were already two Republicans in the race: businessman Tim Burns and unsuccessful 2008 Republican nominee William Russell, who Murtha defeated 58%-42%. Murtha had also drawn a primary challenge from veteran Ryan Bucchianeri, although there will likely be no shortage of local elected officials and other Democrats interested in making a bid.”

“Just in case there’s any confusion out there, I am not going to walk away from health care reform. I’m not going to walk away on this challenge. I’m not going to walk away on any challenge. We’re moving forward.”

Apparently, he wants the Republicans to have a filibuster-proof majority in 2011…

1. Attorney General Eric Holder or

2. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel?

The Right hates Holder. The Left hates Emanuel. Who’ll be the first to go? Click Comments and discuss.

The poor, on the other hand, are screwed. You can tax the crap out of them and it only makes them poorer and less able to get away from the taxes. Phoenix is going to implement a food tax. San Francisco’s Muni is raising fares three times in a row. How many poor people in Phoenix can escape to a better place? How many Muni riders can really telecommute or buy, maintain, fuel, and park a car instead?

Europe had this figured out a long time ago. Instead getting so much of their revenue from high marginal personal and corporate income taxes, they have VAT (sales) taxes that keep the poor poor and keep revenue rolling in to feed the government beast.

This just a couple years after going heavily Democratic as a repudiation of Bushism.

If the two major parties are paying attention, they should be aware that the huge, moderate/independent swing vote hates two things: 1) religious/social conservatives imposing their morals on others; and 2) tax, spend, and borrow leftists mortgaging our country’s future.

It’s a jump ball for the fiscal conservative, socially tolerant middle. So far, the Republicans are reaching for it. They are burying social issues and focusing 100% on the fiscal disaster. I recently attended a fundraiser that featured both a moderate Republican Congressman and a social con Republican Congressman. Both swore to a skeptical Republican audience that the social stuff was so far on the back burner that it wasn’t even an issue. Democrats, not so much. They are doubling down on burying our children in debt.

“Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health-care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”

This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid, and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking “in the plain words of plain folks,” because the people are “suspicious of complexity.” Counseled Blow: “The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’”

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are “a nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive.”

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself “for not explaining it [health care] more clearly to the American people.” The subject, he noted, was “complex.” The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

…

For liberals, the observation that “the peasants are revolting” is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism.”

“There are a couple of points to be made about this race and how it turned out.  First, Kirk’s win was not the result of some nefarious party or NRSC conspiracy to suppress conservative candidates.  Mark Kirk simply was the best representative for GOP primary voters in Illinois, in the considered opinion of those voters.  You can’t even blame his win on a failure of the anti-Kirk sentiment to coalesce around a single candidate; Kirk comfortably topped 50 per cent, which means that even if it were a heads-up race between Kirk and Hughes, Kirk would have won comfortably.  For many years, Kirk has been successfully cultivating his political fortunes with Illinois voters (yes, even the Republican ones), and his win was deserved on the merits, and was accurately reflective of the Illinois GOP.  This is NOT a case where the primary system was short-circuited or where the “establishment” spent a bunch of money to flood out an equally-viable conservative alternative.  The primary voters in Illinois have spoken, and spoken loudly, and their choice should be respected.

Second, although Kirk can cast some pretty terrible votes, my impression of him is that he has a pretty good set of instincts and is far more loyal to the party than many current sitting GOP Senators. I think – although I am not sure – that a pretty significant part of his less-than-perfect voting pattern is due to electioneering.  I believe that, at least 4 years out of 6, Mark Kirk will be a pretty good Senator.  If not good, far better than many people are expecting, at least, especially for someone who will occupy a seat in Illinois.  [Democrat nomineee] Giannoulias, on the other hand, is a crook, and a liberal one at that, and moreover is a close and longstanding ally of both Obama and Blagojevich.  He will be a horrible, graft-grabbing Senator 6 years out of every 6 he is in office.  Even though I can’t personally support him, it’s facially obvious to me that Kirk winning would be the clear best result in this race, and anyone who tries to tell you there’s “no difference” between Kirk and Giannoulias needs a reality check. 

Third, if you (like me) simply can’t bring yourself to root for Kirk, or even to spend your energy kicking Giannoulias like the walking pinata that he is, spend your energy instead working to help someone you can support (like Rubio or Toomey) elected.  The wailing and gnashing of teeth in this case is counterproductive and – since there was a legitimate primary – completely uncalled for.  Here at RedState, we have work to do, and if you can’t get rowing for Mark Kirk, we want to encourage you to get rowing for someone else, instead of rowing against a result that can’t be changed at this point.”

“This is a tough time for climate science. The Guardian’s new revelations about the hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia might help to explain the university’s utter failure to confront its critics. They could also explain why the head of the unit, Phil Jones, blocked freedom of information requests and proposed that material subject to those requests be deleted. He has been spared a criminal investigation only because the time limit for prosecutions has expired.

The emails I read gave me the impression that Phil Jones had something to hide. Now we know what it might have been. The Guardian has discovered that Jones appears to have suppressed data that undermines a paper he published in Nature in 1990. The paper claimed that Chinese weather stations show that local heating caused by urbanisation has very little effect on the temperature record. It now seems that much of the data they used is worthless and the documents required to validate it do not exist. The paper might be 20 years old, but in a way that makes the scandal worse: Phil Jones has had 20 years in which to issue a correction. Even after the hacking in October last year, he has still not done so.

When the emails were first published in November, I called for Professor Jones’s resignation as head of the CRU. Though he has stepped down temporarily, his position is now even less tenable. The longer he leaves it, the worse this will get.

…

The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, is also in hot water. In November he dismissed as “voodoo science” a report for the Indian government showing that the IPCC’s date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers was wrong. It’s now clear that, actually, the IPCC’s claim was voodoo science. It reproduced a speculative suggestion – that the glaciers were going to disappear by 2035 – that had not been published in any peer-reviewed journal. Pachauri’s immediate dismissal of the Indian government’s refutation was unscientific as well as wrong.

Now the Sunday Times alleges that he first heard that the glacier date was wrong in November, and failed to act. Pachauri was busy preparing for the Copenhagen summit, so perhaps it’s not surprising if he didn’t pay much attention, but someone at the IPCC should have done so, rather than letting the issue fester.”

Obama and Creigh Deeds

Obama and Corzine