Tag Archives: 2010

News

What is the most important issue for independent voters?

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From the Weekly Standard.

Excerpt:

What’s the one issue that independent voters most strongly demand that a candidate get right?  According to a survey of 1,000 independents (and likely voters) recently conducted by Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen and commissioned by Independent Women’s Voice, the answer isn’t “national security,” “taxes,” “immigration,” “the size of government and its level of spending,” “putting a mosque near Ground Zero,” “the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” or “the stimulus and bailouts” — all of which were listed as options.  Rather, the answer is “health care reform.”

Nearly half (48 percent) of all independent voters said that even if a candidate otherwise held perfect views (in the eyes of the voter) — even if they “agreed with him on all other issues” (italics added) — they still couldn’t vote for him “if [they] disagreed with him on health care reform.”  (Another 13 percent weren’t sure whether they could abide such a costly error in judgment or not.)

And what must the candidate’s position on health-care reform be?  For 83 percent of the respondents who said their vote would hang in the balance, the candidate must oppose Obamacare.  So, according to the survey, if you support Obamacare, you’ve just lost 40 percent (83 percent of 48 percent) of the independent vote — before any other issue is even addressed.

Upon hearing this result, the 34 Democratic House members who voted against Obamacare must be breathing a sigh of relief that they’re not one of the 219 Democratic House members who voted for it.  (No Democratic senator can breathe a similar sigh.)  And they must be desperately hoping that their Republican opponents don’t force them to voice their position on repeal — for it’s hard to appear opposed to Obamacare when you don’t want to get rid of it.

This is only going to get worse as health insurance premiums go up.

News

Senate candidate indicted for showing obscene materials to teen

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Story here from the Toronto Sun.

Excerpt:

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alvin Greene was indicted in South Carolina Friday on charges stemming from his arrest last year for allegedly showing pornography to a college student.A grand jury indicted Greene, 32, an unemployed Army veteran and campaign novice whose primary win in June stunned political observers, on a felony charge of disseminating, procuring or promoting obscenity and a misdemeanor charge of showing obscene materials to someone without consent.

The charges followed his arrest in November for an incident in which he allegedly displayed obscene or pornographic materials on a computer to a University of South Carolina student and then suggested going to her dormitory room.

Reached at his home in Manning, South Carolina, where he lives with his elderly father, Greene said: “My lawyer is dealing with that. That’s all I have to say.”

The maximum penalty for conviction on the felony charge is five years in prison, with the misdemeanor carrying a three-year maximum sentence, said the office for Greene’s attorney, Eleazer Carter.

Greene, whose long-shot candidacy has attracted intense media scrutiny, won South Carolina’s Democratic Senate primary after a campaign that included no budget, no staff and no verified public appearances.

He defeated former Charleston judge and state legislator Vic Rawl, who had the endorsement of the state Democratic Party. He will face Republican Senator Jim DeMint in the November election.

In several halting interviews with media, Greene has said his platform includes jobs, infrastructure and education and suggested South Carolina’s high unemployment rate could be lessened by manufacturing dolls and action figures of himself.

Greene gave his first public speech last month. He talked for less than 10 minutes and, in a monotone, third-person reference to his legal troubles, mentioned that his anticipated trial had been delayed.

Wow. This is the Democrat Senate candidate for South Carolina running against Jim Demint for a seat in the United States Senate?

News

Swing state Missouri votes 71% in favor of repealing Obamacare

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Here’s the story. (H/T Hot Air via ECM)

Excerpt:

Missouri voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a federal mandate to purchase health insurance, rebuking President Barack Obama’s administration and giving Republicans their first political victory in a national campaign to overturn the controversial health care law passed by Congress in March.

“The citizens of the Show-Me State don’t want Washington involved in their health care decisions,” said Sen. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, one of the sponsors of the legislation that put Proposition C on the August ballot. She credited a grass-roots campaign involving Tea Party and patriot groups with building support for the anti-Washington proposition.

With most of the vote counted, Proposition C was winning by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1. The measure, which seeks to exempt Missouri from the insurance mandate in the new health care law, includes a provision that would change how insurance companies that go out of business in Missouri liquidate their assets. …

Missouri was the first of four states to seek to opt out of the insurance purchase mandate portion of the health care law that had been pushed by Obama. And while many legal scholars question whether the vote will be binding, the overwhelming approval gives the national GOP momentum as Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma hold similar votes during midterm elections in November.

Missouri is a 50-50 swing state.

To find out why they voted against Obamacare, one need one look at the diagram showing the new bureaucracy that Obamacare created. (H/T Hot Air via ECM)

Excerpt:

Senate Steering Committee Chairman Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) called Obamacare “a bureaucratic nightmare. The Democrats’ takeover of health care creates a byzantine network of 159 new federal programs and bureaucracies to make decisions that should be between just the patient and their doctor. It should concern everyone that at the center of this regulatory web is the new CMS chief, Donald Berwick, who has championed rationing and European socialized medicine. Americans were rightly outraged that this big government bill was rushed through Congress before anyone read or fully understood the bill’s consequences. Republicans will fight to repeal this reckless takeover and to ensure health care freedom to American families.”

That thing looks like the labyrinth of the minotaur.