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Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli took Obamacare to court today in U.S. District Court in Richmond. Judge Henry Hudson, a Bush appointee and former U.S. Attorney in the high-profile ‘Rocket Docket’ in the Eastern District of Virginia is a very solid judge. Many Virginia lawyers, including your truly and Doug Mataconis, practiced before him when he was a Circuit Court judge in Fairfax County. I agree with Doug that regardless of the outcome of the ruling itself, it will be very well thought out. To put it bluntly, Judge Hudson is no slouch.

So now free speech goes to the highest bidder? From Politico via Weasel Zippers. The Philadelphia public television station WHYY-TV12 is airing a new documentary on the Iraq surge made by two prominent Republican admen, Russ Schrieffer and Stuart Stevens, among others. The Inquirer reports, however, that an accompanying panel featuring Liz Cheney was just scrapped: The decision to scrap the panel came in the second week in June, according to a publicist for the film, and followed a protest by retired psychology professor Curtis Thomsen of Doylestown, a member of the station’s Mercury Society Silver Circle, open to those...

When Prince William County in Northern Virginia cracked down on illegals a couple of years ago, like a squeezed tube of toothpaste, the ‘migrants,’ well, migrated in droves across the Potomac to bright blue Maryland. Self-deporting worked like a charm in that case. When a Northern Virginia task force targeted gangs, almost half of which were illegals, they also went over the river. . . . Now New Mexico gets to put its money where its mouth is. The illegals are coming.

Presuming the House passes the Senate bill, the House will then pass a reconciliation fix to the bill, after which the Senate will then try to pass that fix, too. At this point Senate GOPers will repeatedly invoke the Byrd rule to ask the parliamentarian to strip individual provisions (ones fixing this or that in the original bill) out of the fix, on the grounds that they are policy fixes. If individual provisions are stripped, it would change the Senate’s version of the overall fix. That would force the House to vote on it again and again, stalling the process...

Last night at CPAC, Clyde and I had a terrific interview with conservative Republican Senate candidate Mike Lee from Utah. He is trying to knock off sitting Republican Senator Robert Bennett. As in Florida with Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist, there is a conservative v. establishment split in the Utah race. The NRSC and Newt Gingrich (who apparently didn't learn from his disastrous endorsement of Dede of Scozzafava in NY-23) are supporting Bennett, the 76 year-old RINO who supports things like TARP and the unconstitutional individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Conservative groups like Club for Growth have come out...

What a great story. The Warmers are going the way of the flat-earthers. In our search for the reasons why that might be, we can start with pics of the 24 inches of snow that fell in my backyard in Virginia yesterday.

This master plan was clearly hatched in super-secret, high-level, eyes-only briefings. But the wait is finally over. The plan to prevent every single last Democrat from being bodily thrown into the Capitol fountain on November 2, is, wait for it . . . to be more bipartisan. Obama is going to offer to include Republicans in the governing process, and if they don't vote for his legislation, he'll call them obstructionists. . . . Sounds great . . . and rather familiar. Let's take a stroll down memory lane. This was from one year ago, February 11, 2009.

The bipartisan blowback against our junior-varsity president's decision to try terrorists in federal court is reaching gale force. New York politicians were able to kick the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial out of Manhattan, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that not a single member of Congress wants the trial held in their home town either.

Hensarling didn't appreciate being called a liar by the president, so he went on Morning Joe to have his own Joe Wilson moment to prove the president, who welcomed the fact-checking, was, in fact the liar. Transcript: Well, either the President misunderstood the point or he just hasn't been well informed. If you look at the 12 years when Republicans controlled the Congress, the average annual deficit was about $104 billion. I'm not proud of that number. That's too high. But in the three years that Democrats have controlled Congress, the average annual deficit is now $1.1 Trillion. Do the...

There is no way to spin this. With his stunning victory tonight in Massachusetts, Scott Brown accomplished the unthinkable: He now sits in Ted Kennedy's old seat. The White House will blame the crappy candidate. The crappy candidate will blame the DSCC. Congressional Democrats will blame obstructionist Republicans. And some idiots will still blame Bush. But nobody on the left will admit the truth: Americans loathe their agenda.

Now Harry is very likely to be out of a job come November, so we thought we would help him out with launching his new consulting career. We thought if Harry had a handy chart that he could use that would tell potential Negro clients right off the bat whether they had a chance at being elected, it would prove very useful. We sketched out the idea and gave it to our good friend Arkady Kamenetsky at Right Condition, who is a whiz with Photoshop. Here is what we came up with.

Giving this kind of advice goes against my better judgment because the endangered Democrat up for reelection this fall who gives this speech, will, in all likelihood, keep his or her seat. But given the upside benefit to the country of derailing the current Obamacare bill, and the fact that anyone who doesn't give this speech will likely lose their seat, I am willing to throw the dice. To that brave soul across the aisle who decides to take this advice, I suggest you get a glass a water, clear your throat, approach the bank of microphones and cameras, and...

If Brown loses by single digits in Massachusetts, one of the bluest of blue states, running explicitly on the promise to be the 41st vote to kill Obamacare, what does that tell Blanche Lincoln? How about Ben Nelson? Evan Bayh? They don't represent Massachusetts. Democrats win there by 20-30 points in the big races. Indeed, Kennedy won his last election in 2006 by a margin of 40 points. No other Senator whose vote is at issue in the health care debate wins elections by those margins. If Scott Brown can devour a traditional 20-40 point Democrat advantage and lose (if...

When we talk about seizing an opportunity to knock off RINO's like Kirk, who voted for Cap and Trade and holds a whole host of liberal positions on the issues, this is that opportunity. This is not a three way race like NY-23. Hughes and Kirk square off in the GOP primary on February 2, 2010. That is 3 weeks from today. The winner will likely take on Alexis Giannoulias in the general election in November. Giannoulias is beatable. After you listen to Hughes', you will realize this is an all-hands-on-deck affair for conservatives. Hughes will need lots of help...

Makes you wonder whether his seat is safe in this fall's election. His approval rating is only 46% and falling, dangerous for an incumbent. A poll from October showed Feingold losing to former Wisconsin Tommy Thompson in a hypothetical match-up by 43-39. Thompson hasn't said he's running, and Feingold has two Republicans, Terrence Wall and Dave Westlake, vying for the right to take him down in November.

Ken Cuccinelli won the Virginia Attorney General's race in November. At the time, he was the sitting state senator in the 37th Senate District, which is in Fairfax County and includes Burke, Centreville, West Springfield, Fairfax and Chantilly. The county has recently (though not in November) trended very blue. Today is the special election to fill Cuccinelli's seat. Steve Hunt is the Republican and needs your vote.

This is a red herring. The solution to the "logjam" was already floated last summer when the Senate was debating the Baucus bill. Union members and their families who receive healthcare benefits paid for by their employers would be exempted from a new tax on healthcare under one option being proposed by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mt), according to a report by the Fox Business Channel’s Peter Barnes. Baucus’s plan would tax health care benefits to raise from $161.9 billion to $418 billion over ten years to fund the nationalized “government provider” of health care benefits President Obama and Democrats want....

CFG is putting their money where their mouths are. Bennett's is a safe GOP seat. Regardless of who wins the fight on the right, the Dem won't have a chance. Overall, Bennett is a reasonably conservative (it is Utah after all), but CFG has turned its guns on him for him for proposing a health plan with an individual mandate, supporting Bush's amnesty for illegals in 2007, and voting for the TARP bailout. Of course the NRSC is pledging to back Bennett. And suddenly we have a Rubio-Crist-goes-to-Utah event on our hands.

Back in April of last year, when Obama's approval rating was at 61%, we ran a piece about the effect of the president's approval rating on the midterm election results (yeah, we were thinking about the midterms that early). The statistics show that just to avoid losing seats, a president needs a 65% approval rating. So with 61%, Obama was already headed for losses at that time. According to RCP, Obama currently has a 61% approval rating, and it's falling, with the most recent three polls in the high 50's. That puts The One in Bush (1990), Nixon (1970), and...

Hmmm. He must have seen the polls. If this isn't a full retreat, I have never seen one. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) reached out Thursday evening to South Carolina GOP Attorney General Henry McMaster, the leader of a group of 13 Republican state attorneys general who are threatening to file suit against the Senate health care bill, and urged him to forgo any legal action, POLITICO has learned. According to a copy of a memo sent by McMaster’s chief of staff to other GOP state attorneys general detailing the call, Nelson asked McMaster to “call off the dogs,” a reference...