It is in this light that we view the conflict between the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the Senatorial campaign of California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore on which I am privileged to serve as communications director. Enough has been written about it here at RedState and elsewhere, and it’s sufficient to note two things: first, that the conflict was consciously chosen by the NRSC when it decided to recruit and sustain Carly Fiorina as a moderate-pragmatist alternative to the conservative stalwart; and second, that this conflict is not the foundation for conservative victory in California in 2010.

It is therefore over as far as we’re concerned.
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The war was one of diminishing returns for the DeVore campaign anyway. Did it buy DeVore any more votes and any more fundraising dollars?

Doubtful……

Ben Nelson’s “Cornhusker Kickback,” as the GOP is calling it, got all the attention Saturday, but other senators lined up for deals as Majority Leader Harry Reid corralled the last few votes for a health reform package.

Nelson’s might be the most blatant – a deal carved out for a single state, a permanent exemption from the state share of Medicaid expansion for Nebraska, meaning federal taxpayers have to kick in an additional $45 million in the first decade.

But another Democratic holdout, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), took credit for $10 billion in new funding for community health centers, while denying it was a “sweetheart deal.” He was clearly more enthusiastic about a bill he said he couldn’t support just three days ago.

I am a baby boomer, which is to say my life has coincided with turbulent and awesome times. From the Cold War to Vietnam, from Watergate to Monicagate, through the horrors of 9/11 and the stunning lifestyle advances, my generation's era has been historic and exciting.

Yet for all the drama and change, the years only occasionally instilled in me the sensation I feel almost constantly now. I am afraid for my country.

I am afraid — actually, certain — we are losing the heart and soul that made America unique in human history. Yes, we have enemies, but the greatest danger comes from within.
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Either America corrects the mistake of Obama and the LEFT in 2010 or we continue to sink into the abyss of socialism.

With Obamacare, you get the good, the bad, and the ugly — except for the first part.

The Congressional Budget Office's score is in for the final Senate health bill, and it's amazing how little Americans would get for so much.

The Democrats are irresponsibly and disingenuously claiming that the bill would cost $871 billion over 10 years. But that's not what the CBO says. Rather, the CBO says that $871 billion would be the costs from 2010 to 2019 for expansions in insurance coverage alone. But less than 2 percent of those "10-year costs" would kick in before the fifth year of that span. In its real first 10 years (2014 to 2023), the CBO says that the bill would cost $1.8 trillion — for insurance coverage expansions alone. Other parts of the bill would cost approximately $700 billion more, bringing the bill's full 10-year tab to approximately $2.5 trillion — according to the CBO.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) corrected its estimate of the Senate health bill's costs on Sunday, saying it would reduce deficits slightly less than they'd predicted.

In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf said that the nonpartisan budget office had overestimated the extent to which the legislation's new Independent Payment Advisory Board would bring down the deficit.

While the CBO's estimates of the board's and overall bill's impact in its first 10 years of the legislation are correct, Elmendorf wrote, the program's effects on deficit reduction during the second decade of the program were overestimated.

California's death row has swollen to 697 inmates, with 29 new death sentences in the state this year, despite a nationwide trend that in 2009 saw the fewest execution verdicts since capital punishment was reinstated in the state in 1976.

Los Angeles County alone sent more people to death row than the entire state of Texas, with 13 capital sentences from the nation's most populous county.

A year-end report released today by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center counted 106 death sentences handed down nationwide through mid-December, a number that could go up slightly by the end of the month. In 2008, there were 111 such verdicts, and some years in the 1990s had more than 300.
The number of capital sentences in California grew from 20 last year to 29 so far in 2009, despite the state’s lethal injection chamber having been idled by legal challenges for four years and any resumption of executions still at least a year off.

The table below compares the White House's February 2009 projection of the number of jobs that would be created by the 2009 stimulus law (through the end of 2010) with the actual change in state payroll employment through November 2009 (the latest figures available). According to the data, 49 States have lost jobs since the stimulus was enacted as unemployment has skyrocketed to 10 percent. Only North Dakota and the District of Columbia have seen net job creation following the February 2009 stimulus (though both fall short of seeing the promised level of job creation). While President Obama claimed the result of his stimulus bill would be the creation of 3.5 million jobs, the Nation has already lost over 2.6 million – a difference of 6.1 million jobs.

Minorities don't seem to have much doubt about their investment in this debate. In November's Kaiser Family Foundation health care tracking poll, two-thirds of non-white Americans said that their family would be better off if health care reform passes. Though the evidence suggests that non-college whites could also receive a disproportionate share of the bill's spending (since they constitute more of the uninsured), they are dubious: just one-third of them believe they would be better off, a reflection of the mounting skepticism about government such blue-collar whites are expressing across the board. Yet the most skeptical group is the college-educated whites, the same constituency that has the most access to health insurance today: only about one-fourth of them expect to be better off under reform.
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And, why American oppose Obamacare because it is social and racial redistribution = socialism.

"Our House Editor, David Wasserman, estimates, based on what we know today, that Republicans will make a 20-30 seat net gain in the House. A month or so ago, he judged that it would be a 15-25 seat pickup for the GOP. To hit a 41-seat net gain, which would flip control of the House, would necessitate more Democratic retirements in tough districts. There would need to be perhaps seven to ten more members like John Tanner and Bart Gordon of Tennessee, Dennis Moore of Kansas and Brian Baird of Washington."

"Our Senate/Governor Editor, Jennifer Duffy, currently estimates that the range of outcomes in the Senate could run from a wash, with neither party gaining a net seat on the other, up to a three seat gain for Republicans. In the gubernatorial races, she sees the same likely outcome, a wash to a GOP gain of three seats."

"We've done what we can here," a senior White House official in Copenhagen, Denmark, tells ABC News. "The Chinese are dug in on transparency and are refusing to let people know they're living up to their end of the agreement."

After landing in Denmark early this morning, President Obama met with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao during a bilateral at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to press the case that China needs to allow for transparency.

A visibly angry Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet at China and other developing nations Friday, declaring that the time has come "not to talk but to act" on climate change.

Emerging from a multinational meeting boycotted by Chinese Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Obama warned delegates that U.S. offers of funding for poor nations would remain on the table “if and only if” developing nations, including China, agreed to international monitoring of their greenhouse gas emissions.

"I have to be honest, as the world watches us… I think our ability to take collective action is doubt and it hangs in the balance,” Obama told the COP-15 plenary session as hope for anything more than a vague political in agreement faded.
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Hell, Obama cannot manage the American economy and now this? Get real, Mr. President

The Mercatus Center analysis also found that Democratic congressional districts received on average almost double the funding of Republican congressional districts. Republican congressional districts received on average $232 million in stimulus funds while Democratic districts received $439 million on average.

“We found that there is a correlation [relating to the partisanship of congressional districts],” de Rugy said. Her regression analysis found that stimulus funds are expected to decrease by 24.19 percent if a district is represented by a Republican.

“During the appropriations process, you're not surprised to see the Democrats are getting more money, but in this case a lot of the money we're looking at is going through HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development], or Department of Education, Department of Transportation etc. and they're following a formula,” she said. “But the correlation exists, and not only does it exist — when you look at how much money we're talkin

Recession-wracked California saw one of the lowest population growth levels in history during the fiscal year that ended June 30, the state Department of Finance reported today.

California's population grew by less than one percent, adding an estimated 353,000 new residents, during the 12-month period, the department's demographers believe. The only years of lower growth since 1900 were during another period of deep recession, 1994 to 1996, when an estimated million-plus Californians left the state.

A sharply decreased level of foreign immigration, both legal and illegal, was apparently the major reason for the dropoff in population growth. The department says net migration – those moving into the state minus those that moved out – was just 37,000. It estimates that 179,000 foreign immigrants came to California during the year while 142,000 residents left for elsewhere. But the state's production of babies, its primary source of growth, remained high at 547,000, offset by 231,000 dea

Centrist Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.) said Thursday he won't vote to advance the Senate healthcare bill unless it's changed.

Nelson said more stringent restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion must be included in the bill if it is to win his vote.
"If it's not at the point where I think it needs to be with the improvements that I'm pushing — and they've made a lot of them — then I will not vote for cloture on the motion to end debate," Nelson said in an interview on KLIN radio in Nebraska.

"There's a lot of improvement on the legislation but the basic question on funding for abortion hasn't been answered yet," he said.

Twitter is once again “frozen in time” this morning as users’ timelines fail to display the most recent tweets of those they follow. Instead, users are seeing tweets from about 10 minutes ago, and very few of them at that.

We’ve been noticing the problem for at least 30 minutes (as of 11 a.m. ET), both on Twitter’s website and in third-party applications. Twitter search, however, seems to be showing at least some tweets as they happen (and you can see all the people complaining about their timelines).

Campbell’s thinking seems driven by two realities; he doesn’t have enough money to compete in the GOP gubernatorial primary, and the nomination may be worthless anyway as some polling shows Attorney General Jerry Brown poised to win in a landslide.

But if he shifts to the Senate contest, he will have one huge impact – and it is not his nomination, but that of Assemblyman Chuck Devore. A Campbell candidacy probably finishes off the GOP establishment favorite, businesswoman Carly Fiorina. Her base is among the Silicon Valley GOP types, as is Campbell’s, and with the declining Republican Party in California, there is simply not room for two Silicon Valley Republicans.
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Three flaws in the analysis:
1. Carly Fiorina is MORE conservative than Tom Campbell on abortion and gay marriage
2.In the latest USC poll, Campbell and DeVore derive support from the same base – lower income GOP'ers
3.Carly Fiorina will have campaign cash to run ads; Campbell, DeVore won't.
Campbell won't switch.

Former eBay honcho Meg Whitman continues to lead the two other Republican candidates for governor next year and trails presumptive Democratic nominee Jerry Brown by only a few points, a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California has found.

Whitman's 32 percent support level among Republican voters is a big lead over either former Rep. Tom Campbell at 12 percent and state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner at 8 percent, but the highest proportion, 44 percent, are the undecided Republicans.
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Steve Poizner is in a dismal third position. Will he withdraw?