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Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar, who is facing a highly competitive GOP primary challenge, today was ruled ineligible to vote in his home precinct, the Indianapolis Star reported. The Marion County Election Board voted 2-1 along party lines that Lugar and his wife, Charlene, who own a home in Virginia, had effectively abandoned their residence in the county and therefore could no longer vote there. Only the panel’s lone Republican voted to let the Lugars keep their eligibility. The newspaper, however, cited election board attorneys who said the Lugars could resubmit voter registrations using an address of a family member or...

A rare case in which Democratic shenanigans might end up helping tea partiers. The Election Board has voted 2-1 along party lines to find Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican, and his wife ineligible to vote in their former home precinct. The two Democrats found that the Lugars abandoned that residence and no longer reside there. However, according to Election Board attorneys, there may be an easy fix — the Lugars could submit new voter registrations that are based on a physical address in the county with which they currently have a connection. That could be a family member’s home or,...

NDIANAPOLIS -- An Indiana tea party group is accusing U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar of voter fraud and wants him removed from the ballot. Hoosiers for Conservative Senate is asking Gov. Mitch Daniels to act on a complaint over Lugar's residency that was filed in November. The tea party umbrella group supports state Treasurer Richard Mourdock in the GOP primary that poses Lugar's toughest election challenge in years. Mourdock held a news conference Wednesday morning in front of the northwest side home that Lugar uses as a voting residence, even though he sold the home in 1977.

<p>Sen. Dick Lugar said challenges by Tea Party candidates are partly to blame for the Republicans not having a majority in the Senate.</p> <p>“Republicans lost the seats before in Nevada and New Jersey for example and Colorado where there were people who claimed that they wanted somebody who was more of their Tea Party aspect, but in doing so they killed off the Republican chances for majority,” he said. “This is one of the reasons why we have a minority in the Senate right now.”</p>

A trio of Senate Republicans on Monday strongly urged House Republicans to embrace the payroll tax cut extension bill passed in the Senate over the weekend. Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) joined Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) and Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) in calling for the House GOP to back the two-month extension, which overwhelmingly passed the Senate by a vote of 89-10 on Saturday. All three senators are up for reelection in 2012. "There is no question we need to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance for the entire year," Heller said in a statement. "The American people deserve...

1. Ben Nelson, D-Neb. 2. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. 3. Jon Tester, D-Mont. 4. Scott Brown, R-Mass. 5. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah 6. Dick Lugar, R-Ind. 7. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio 8. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. 9. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine 10. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee gave $43,100 to Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch’s campaign, despite recent pleas from Tea Party activists that the organization wait until a Republican nominee is selected before supporting a candidate. New filings show that the NRSC also contributed the same amount to Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar, who is also facing a GOP primary challenge. That candidate, Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, also enjoys the support of Tea Party activists. A spokesman for the NRSC said its standard practice for the organization to give money to incumbent senators. “The NRSC would not exist were it not...

Club for Growth President Chris Chocola gave six-term Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) some unsolicited advice Tuesday: Retire. Chocola, a former Congressman from Indiana who served in the House from 2003 to 2007, told ABC’s “Top Line” that his fiscally conservative organization is considering getting involved in Lugar’s 2012 re-election campaign in the Hoosier State. The club has already met with Lugar’s primary opponent, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R). “We are looking at that race very closely,” Chocola said. “We do have some concerns about Sen. Lugar and his service. We think it would probably be best if he would retire...

The collapse of communism brought an end to many of the world’s command-and-control economic systems and central planning by government bureaucrats. But a notable exception is the United States government’s sugar program. A complicated system of marketing allotments, price supports, purchase guarantees, quotas and tariffs that only a Soviet apparatchik could love, the U.S. sugar program has actually lasted longer than the Soviet Union itself. It imposes a hidden tax of billions of dollars annually on consumers and businesses and has destroyed thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs. It substitutes the federal government for the private sector in basic decisions about...

Freshman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) lashed out at the Obama administration's Libya policy on Thursday, saying that the United States looked weak and naïve in hoping that the U.N. Security Council would act to protect the Libyan people. "The United States, quite frankly, looks weak in this endeavor, it looks unwilling to act," he said at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Thursday, highlighting that Britain, France, the Arab League, and the Libyan opposition are all calling on the United States to support stronger measures to stop Libyan leader Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi's assault on rebels and civilians. "The president...

(snip) Among other criticisms, Tea Party activists have taken Lugar to task for supporting the new START nuclear arms treaty with Russia, claiming the U.S. is giving up too much and Russia is not giving up enough. "I've been working systematically for 20 years going to Russia trying to help direct a situation in which we're taking warheads off of missiles every day, destroying missiles that were aimed at us; destroying submarines that carried misslies up and down our coast," said Lugar. "I've got to say 'Get real'. I hear Tea Party or other people talking about they were against...

President Obama’s call for Congress to pass a mandate that includes both traditional renewable energy sources like wind and solar as well as GOP favorites nuclear and “clean coal” may be the driver needed to bang through the most aggressive and politically feasible means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions on Capitol Hill this Congress. Obama set a new goal in his speech Tuesday night, calling for 80 percent of U.S. electricity to stem from “clean energy” sources by 2035. “Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal, and natural gas,” Obama said. “To meet this goal, we...

In spite of the Administration’s insistence that the New START does not constrain testing, development or deployment of U.S. missile defense programs, the Russians believe that it does and they point specifically to the text of the treaty. In a recent article from The Voice of Russia , Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Russian parliament International Affairs arm says “…The first thing is that our American colleagues do not recognize the legal force of the treaty’s preamble. The preamble sets a link between strategic offensive arms and defensive arms. . .” Alexei Arbatov, a member of the Carnegie Scientific Council,...

Washington (CNN) - Hoping to head off a primary challenge from the right, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Indiana, sat down with Tea Party leaders last month but did little to persuade them of his conservative credentials. The two-hour meeting, which took place over breakfast on Dec. 13th at a Marriott hotel in downtown Indianapolis, was described by participants on both sides as "cordial," but the Tea Party activists left vowing to oppose Lugar's bid for a seventh term. "The Senator said he hoped he could earn the support of the Tea Party, and that he is conservative," said Greg Fettig, the...

SOUTH BEND - Republican leaders in the Senate, anxious to hinder President Obama, no matter the cost, turned what they could have hailed as a Republican success into a major victory for the president, a stinging defeat for them.      Ratification of the New START treaty is really a victory for a Republican senator, Indiana’s Richard G. Lugar, a leader in the fight for ratification of the treaty with Russia for mutual reduction of nuclear warheads.      Ratification is really a victory also for the dozen other Republican senators who put country ahead of divisive politics and provided the needed...

(RTTNews) - A prominent Tea Party group sent a message to members on Monday identifying five current Republican Senators that they intend to target in 2012. Tea Party Nation named Sens. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, Scott Brown, R-Mass., and Bob Corker, R-Tenn., as Republicans that need to be sent into retirement, accusing them of being Republicans In Name Only, or RINOs. The message cited Lugar's vote against a ban on earmarks as well as a his votes in favor of the DREAM Act and the START Treaty. Hatch was also criticized for being a "pork...

When Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill recently went to war over the budget, press coverage suggested that pork-barrel earmark spending is still a bipartisan problem, that after months of self-righteous rhetoric about fiscal discipline, both parties remain equal-opportunity earmarkers. It's not true. A new analysis by a group of federal-spending watchdogs shows a striking imbalance between the parties when it comes to earmark requests. Democrats remain raging spenders, while Republicans have made enormous strides in cleaning up their act. In the Senate, the GOP made only one-third as many earmark requests as Democrats for the still-unpassed 2011 budget, and...

GREEN MAKE BELIEVE: Van Jones Admits Left is “PRETENDING” Need for Regulations And Cap & Trade in Green Movement http://www.theblaze.com/stories/green-make-believe-van-jones-admits-left-is-pretending-need-for-regulations-and-cap-trade-in-green-movement/

Richard Lugar has become the leader of the rampaging RINOs.  Ever since the November electoral repudiation of liberalism, Lugar has voted for the FDA farm takeover, Amnesty for illegals, and co-sponsored the child nutrition law.  Lugar also opposed the moratorium on earmarks.  He has also been the chief architect of the near confirmation of the START, unilateral disarmament treaty in the Senate.  In fact, he is so incorrigible in his quest to carry water for America's enemies that he even voted against the McCain amendment to the treaty. The McCain amendment would have clarified the language of the treaty to...

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