Now that Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has conceded, she has become the latest victim of a growing trend: Appropriations Committee members who have lost this year.

Once thought of as a powerful committee for members wanting to "bring home the bacon," in today's political environment, sitting on an appropriations panel seems to be an albatross.
"Earmarking is a corrupt practice, plain and simple," says Andy Roth, a vice president at the conservative Club for Growth. "Voters understand that, but insecure politicians do not. And that's why the old adage that pork buys you votes doesn't work. It costs you votes."

Earlier this year, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who also sits on the committee, lost her primary challenge to Gov. Rick Perry. Perry's strategy was to run against Washington spending -- and it worked.

t's also worth noting that U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett, who was ousted at a Utah GOP state convention earlier this year, also sat on the panel.

Other committee members are leaving the Senate on their own. New Hampshire's Judd Gregg is retiring, as is Ohio Sen. George Voinovich. And Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback recently won his state's GOP gubernatorial primary. ...

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Democrats thought things couldn't get much worse on the electoral front — and then they went home to campaign.

A new Gallup poll released Monday shows Republicans with a record 10-point edge over Democrats on the "generic ballot" test — the question of whether voters prefer a Democratic or Republican congressional candidate. It’s the largest GOP polling edge at this stage in the 68 years of the generic ballot poll.

While party optimists say Democrats may cling to a small majority after the November election, an increasing number of Democratic strategists now say privately that they fear the House is already lost.

The Gallup poll, coming at the end of a brutal August for Democrats and President Barack Obama, reinforces the rapidly forming prevailing view that the horizon is as bleak for Democrats as it ever has been.

Indeed, the Republicans' 51 percent to 41 percent for Democrats on the generic ballot poll represents the largest Republican edge heading into a midterm election since the poll was first conducted in the 1942 election cycle, giving them greater reason for optimism than in the weeks leading up to their 1952 and 1994 House takeovers. It also represents a stunning reversal from the 6-point lead Democrats posted in the poll mid-July.

Worse for Democrats, the news comes after they've spent most of the last month on the campaign trail, touting their accomplishments for local communities and trying to remind voters of what life was like when George W. Bush was president. ...

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President Obama's top education official urged government employees to attend a rally that the Rev. Al Sharpton organized to counter a larger conservative event on the Mall.

"ED staff are invited to join Secretary Arne Duncan, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and other leaders on Saturday, Aug. 28, for the 'Reclaim the Dream' rally and march," began an internal e-mail sent to more than 4,000 employees of the Department of Education on Wednesday.

Sharpton created the event after Glenn Beck announced a massive Tea Party "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where King spoke in 1963.

The Washington Examiner learned of the e-mail from a Department of Education employee who felt uncomfortable with Duncan's request. 

Although the e-mail does not violate the Hatch Act, which forbids federal employees from participating in political campaigns, Education Department workers should feel uneasy, said David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute.

"It sends a signal that activity on behalf of one side of a political debate is expected within a department. It's highly inappropriate ... even in the absence of a direct threat," Boaz said. "If we think of a Bush cabinet official sending an e-mail to civil servants asking them to attend a Glenn Beck rally, there would be a lot of outrage over that." ...

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When he announced his policy expanding federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, President Obama was not timid about proclaiming its benefits. It would, he announced, hasten "a day when words like 'terminal' and 'incurable' are finally retired from our vocabulary."

You thought Obama wanted to establish death panels? Actually, he seems to think he can confer immortality.

That announcement, made in March of last year, dismantled the limits imposed by the Bush administration. The change, in Obama's view, was a triumph over ignorance and ideology.

His executive order was, the president claimed, "about protecting free and open inquiry" and letting scientists "do their jobs, free from manipulation and coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it's inconvenient." When science wins, he led us to believe, we all win.

Conspicuously absent from those declarations were facts that Obama would prefer to omit because they are -- well, inconvenient. But those facts did not elude U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who on Monday said the revised policy violates federal law.

What facts? A restriction approved by Congress in 1996, and repeatedly renewed, says federal money may not be used for "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed." But the point of Obama's new policy was to pay for experiments using stem cells harvested from embryos that are killed in the process. ...

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Gov. Charlie Crist (I) said on Central Florida News 13 TV Friday that he "would have voted for" the health care reform bill, contradicting numerous previous statements including a pledge to lead the fight to repeal the law.

"I think what we need to do is go ahead and repeal this thing," said Crist, while on "Fox News Sunday" on March 28. "Let's start over. Let's take an opportunity to do what's right for the people."

After switching parties, Crist softened his rhetoric on the issue. In a July 14 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said the law "should be modified," and didn't support repealing it.

He then issued a "fact check" on his website on July 29, after people were understandably confused about where he stood on the issue.

"The Obama health care bill was too big, too expensive, and expanded the role of government far too much," Crist wrote. "Had I been in the United States Senate at the time, I would have voted against the bill because of unacceptable provisions like the cuts to the Medicare Advantage program."

Ex-FL House Speaker Marco Rubio's (R) campaign is all over Crist's various positions, emailing reporters a detailed summary of Crist's health care stands. But this is not the first issue that Crist has done a complete flip on a policy issue. Hotline On Call detailed in June a history of Crist's switches, and predicted that Crist would move to the left on the health care issue as well. ...

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Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" -- this part is less remembered -- "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."

That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the tea party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia. ...

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Voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on all 10 of the important issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports.

The GOP has consistently been trusted on most issues for months now, but in July they held the lead on only nine of the key issues. 

Republicans lead Democrats 47% to 39% on the economy, which remains the most important issue to voters. Those numbers are nearly identical to those found in June. Republicans have held the advantage on the economy since May of last year.

But for the first time in months, Republicans now hold a slight edge on the issues of government ethics and corruption, 40% to 38%. Voters have been mostly undecided for the past several months on which party to trust more on this issue, but Democrats have held small leads since February. Still, more than one-in-five voters (22%) are still not sure which party to trust more on ethics issues.

Government ethics and corruption have been second only to the economy in terms of importance to voters over the past year. ...

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In what will rank as one of the all-time presidential PR disasters, we're now well over half way through what the White House called "the summer of recovery." And what a recovery it's been.

Earlier this month, first-time claims for unemployment hit a nine-month high. The unemployment rate remains at 9.5% and 18.4% of workers are out of a job, can only get part-time work, or have given up looking for a job altogether. Sales of existing homes dropped 27% from June to July, hitting the lowest point since data were first collected in 1999. The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index fell to 50.4 in July, continuing a slide that started in February. And the stock market is down 11% from its peak in April.

All of this has helped shatter public confidence in the president. In early May, Mr. Obama's approval on the economy in the YouGov/Polimetrix poll was 42%. By mid-August, it was 35%—a frightening number for Democrats less than 70 days from a midterm election. According to this week's Reuters poll, 72% are "very" worried about jobs and 67% "very concerned" about government spending.

Mr. Obama's credibility is crumbling, and for good reason: He and his people are saying things people don't believe. At the start of his summer of recovery road show, the president flatly asserted that last year's massive stimulus package had "worked." Vice President Joe Biden, not to be outdone, promised monthly job gains of up to 500,000 and insisted that the recovery's pace "continues to increase, not decrease" as stimulus spending was "moving into its highest gear." ....

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Tuesday’s Republican primaries showed that Sarah Palin's power should not be discounted.

Four candidates backed by the former Alaska governor pulled off primary victories, while a fifth, Alaska attorney Joe Miller, appeared to be on the verge of pulling off a major upset by defeating Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Miller led Murkowski by less than 2,000 votes with 97 percent of Alaska’s precincts reporting at noon, according to the Associated Press. Even if Murkowski pulls off a come-from-behind victory, Miller’s strong showing suggests Palin will continue to have an influence in her home state and beyond.
 
Miller credited Palin with his performance. 

“I’m absolutely certain that was pivotal,” he said of Palin’s support, according to The Anchorage Daily News. 

Palin, who endorsed Miller in June, recorded a last-minute robocall for the campaign that went out to voters Monday. She also posted a fundraising appeal on her Facebook page the day before the primary, trumpeting Miller's efforts to raise $30,000 for a late TV buy.

It's unclear whether Palin was a decisive factor in Miller's strong showing. Palin did not campaign with him, and the former governor, who resigned her position mid-term, has seen approval ratings in her home state fall to about 40 percent. A ballot measure that would mandate parental notification of abortion for teenagers age 17 and younger might have brought out more conservative voters who supported Miller.  ...

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Every 10 years it's time for reapportionment and redistricting. The Framers of the Constitution created the first regularly scheduled national census and required, for the first time that I am aware, that representation in a legislature be apportioned according to population.

Reapportionment is automatic: A statutory formula takes the census figures and apportions the 435 House districts among the 50 states. Wyoming and five other states will each get one, California will probably get 53 and the rest some number in between.

Seven states, according to projections by Polidata Inc., will gain a House seat, and Texas will gain four; nine states will lose a House seat, and Ohio will lose two. Overall, states carried by John McCain in 2008 will gain a net seven seats (and electoral votes) and states carried by Barack Obama will lose seven.

But that doesn't necessarily mean Republicans will gain House seats. That depends on redistricting, how the lines are drawn by the politicians in each state (or in a couple of cases by nonpartisan commissions).

That's particularly true in states with large numbers of districts and densely packed metropolitan areas. You can't do much gerrymandering in a state with only a few districts. But you can in states with more than four or five. ...

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Leading pro-life groups and advocates were quick to respond to a judge's decision on Monday saying the executive order President Barack Obama issued forcing taxpayers to finance embryonic stem cell research violates the Dickey-Wicker law prohibiting paying for the destruction of human embryos.

A U.S. District Court halted the Obama Administration’s
policy of funding research that necessarily entails the destruction of human embryos.

Judge Royce Lamberth issued a preliminary injunction against the Administration’s policy in the case Sherley v. Sebelius.

“Since 1996, Congress has been clear that no federal funds are to be used in research that destroys, or even harms, embryos,” said Charmaine Yoest, the president of Americans United for Life.

“The Obama Administration has attempted to skirt the law by arguing that they are only funding research after the embryos are destroyed," she told LifeNews.com, adding that the "sensible ruling reconfirms what we already knew, that Administration policy is in violation of the law."

On March 9, 2009, President Obama, by executive order, directed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to issue new stem cell guidelines to include the funding of human embryonic stem cell research. ...

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There is no need, this year, to load up negative ads with adjectives painting your opponents as evil, big spenders in the thrall of the D.C. establishment. The simple facts of your opponents' voting records are enough to defeat them. Just the facts, ma'am.

Republican negative ad writers always delight in describing the stimulus package as bloated, wasteful, government-growing, and useless. The adjectives get in the way. The polling we've done indicates that the simple words "stimulus package" convey all that and more.

There is no need to call Obama's healthcare legislation "a government attempt to take over our healthcare" or a bill to "slash medical care for the elderly" or an "attempt to force rationing of care." The simple word Obamacare conveys the same meanings.

Why describe cap and trade as "job killing" or "driving jobs overseas" when the very words say these same things to voters?

Ads are effective for the response they elicit from the viewers. The more they catalyze a response inside the mind of the voter, the more effective they are. Ads that are heavy on adjectives and have the look and feel of an attack ad run into credibility problems with the average voter.

One rebels against a heavy-handed attack and you find yourself fighting against the ad, even if you basically believe it to be true. The more even-handed and credible the ad is, the more it will be believed. ...

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Forty-eight percent (48%) of U.S. voters now regard President Obama’s political views as extreme. Forty-two percent (42%) place his views in the mainstream, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

By comparison, 51% see the views of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as mainstream. Thirty-five percent (35%) think Clinton’s views are extreme. Fourteen percent (14%) are undecided.

Among five top contenders for the White House in 2012, only former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is viewed as more extreme than the president. Just 38% say Palin’s views are mainstream, while 55% regard them as extreme.

Mitt Romney, the ex-Massachusetts governor who unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, is considered mainstream by 45% and extreme by 33%. Twenty-two percent (22%), however, are not sure about his views.

Forty-four percent (44%) say the views of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, another unsuccessful 2008 GOP hopeful, are in the mainstream. Thirty-eight percent (38%) think Huckabee is extreme, and another 18% are not sure.

It’s important to note that the questions did not define “mainstream” or “extreme.” ...

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Say you're a Democratic member of Congress. You proudly cast your vote for Obamacare, you cheered when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hailed it as the achievement of a generation and you scoffed at Republicans who vowed to repeal it. Now you're running for re-election, and a voter asks: What is the most important thing you've done in the last two years?

The answer should be easy. In passing the national health care bill, you accomplished something your party dreamed of for decades. It was your most important vote, and now is the time to take credit for it.

Except it's not.

Recently a number of top Democratic strategists conducted focus groups in Las Vegas, Charlotte, Philadelphia and St. Louis. They also conducted a national poll of 1,000 likely voters and an online poll of 2,000 more likely voters. They wanted to measure the public's feelings about Obamacare and help Democrats make an effective case for the bill they passed in March.

The researchers found what they call a "challenging environment," which is a nicer way of saying "disaster in the making." Voters simply aren't buying the Democratic case that health care reform will insure more than 30 million currently uninsured people and save money at the same time. And when they think about their own health care, people worry that reform will mean less, not more, availability of care, and at a higher cost.

Faced with that bad news, the pollsters came up with several recommendations for Democratic candidates. When talking about Obamacare, Democrats should "keep claims small and credible." They should promise to "improve" the law. They should avoid talking about policy and stick to "personal stories" of people who will benefit from Obamacare. And above all, the pollsters advise, "don't say the law will reduce costs and deficit." ...

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