HOW DOES RUSS FEINGOLD STAY IN SHAPE? By dodging Obama when he comes to Wisconsin. Again, and again. Well, looking at West Virginia and Connecticut and Ohio and . . . well, pretty much everywhere, it’s easy to see why.

TALKING CARS with the Car Lust guys.

WOW: Rasmussen: West Virginia Senate: Raese (R) Eases Ahead of Manchin (D). “Manchin, despite his popularity with voters in the state, faces an electorate that is even unhappier with the national Democratic agenda than voters in most other parts of the country.”

UPDATE: Connecticut Senate Race Moves to the Margin of Error. Democrat’s Lead Cut to 3 points in Q-Poll. “Mr. Blumenthal will feel a particular dismay at one Q-Poll finding: His favorable rating among likely Connecticut voters continues to erode, descending to 51%, down another 4 points in two weeks. His unfavorable rating is at 41%, a chilling change for the man who was long enjoyed being the state’s most popular politician.” Maybe Blumenthal’s lies about Vietnam service are starting to register. Or maybe it’s just contagion from the Obama Administration’s unpopularity.

Meanwhile, Moe Lane wonders who the DSCC will abandon to “firewall” Connecticut?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Don Surber: “Barack Obama is the Official Albatross of the 2010 American Election. . . . From Safe Democrat — no way Joe Manchin can lose — in July to biting nails 5 weeks away from an election that is looking redder by the hour.”

MORE: Connecticut reader Mike Latina says it’s not the Vietnam stuff:

The Vietnam stuff has faded into the background. The real surprise is that she’s beating him (in liberal CT!!) on the issues. She’s hammering him with one negative and one positive ad right now which have been very effective. The negative one calls the Cap n Trade bill “Dick Blumenthal’s Energy Tax” and says that residents’ electricity and gasoline bills will go up ($968/yr and $0.68/gallon, respectively.) The positive one uses stock footage of JFK from 1961 expounding on the virtues of tax cuts to grow the economy. It ends with an old story board that says something to the effect of: “good idea then, even better idea now” followed by, “I’m Linda McMahon and I approved this message.” Don’t know if she can pull it off, but it’s going to be very close. Made sure my son got his absentee ballot at school.

Stay tuned. But don’t get cocky!

MICHAEL LOTUS: The Insurgency, Part II: The Road Ahead.

REDUCTIO AD SOMALIA: “This post by Michael O’Hare is an example of the sort of rhetoric that seems appealing–nay, irrefutable!–when you are crafting it over drinks with like-minded friends, and that falls entirely flat when you deploy it against people who don’t share your priors.”

We see a lot of those — surprisingly from the people who claim to possess a keen awareness of nuance, and who charge others with “epistemic closure.”

AN INTERVIEW IN THE HILL of the pseudonymous David Kahane, author of Rules for Radical Conservatives: Beating the Left at Its Own Game to Take Back America. The book’s out today.

THEY’LL BE GOING AFTER “HOARDERS AND WRECKERS” NEXT: Savers Told To Stop Moaning And Start Spending. I predict that this will produce precisely the opposite of the desired effect. What, are they using Atlas Shrugged as a policy manual?

UPDATE: Bob Krumm emails:

The Bank of England (and by logical extension, the US Fed) admits that they have purposely kept rates low to disincentivize saving. This follows a decade of near-record low interest rates and concomitant record low personal savings rates–and look where that got us.

Over-borrowing, under-saving, and over-spending by both individuals and governments is what got us into this mess. And the “elites” tell us that to get out, we have to do even more of the same???

That’s all you need to know to understand why the Tea Party is so popular.

Oh, I noticed that.

POLL: Nevadans Favor Balanced Federal Budget, Letting States Repeal Federal Laws.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Special Report: Democrats got 96 percent of Big Green campaign contributions.

UPDATE: Charlie Martin on Green Power and “Long Green.” “This is how the big money in the environmental activism industry translates into political power.”

REACHING OUT to Hamas. “Bradley’s omission of this information about Kifah Mustapha in his report on Sunday is all the more curious since his own station aired an extensive investigative report of Mustapha’s terrorist ties earlier this year.”

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE — BUT TELLING ALL THE SAME: Manchin Comes Out For Partial Repeal of ObamaCare.

TIM LYNCH: “The standard line from police departments is that they ‘vigorously investigate every allegation of police misconduct.’ That is something we want to hear and believe, but it is not always the case.”

PLANE FROM MAINE causes Congresswoman pain.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: President 40/60.

The President does not conduct himself in a sober and judicious manner and neither do those around him. On any given day he can slur Arizonans as wanting to round up innocents on the way to ice cream. He can slander police as stupidly-acting stereotypers. The Attorney General can call us cowards and swear without reading a bill that it profiles the innocent. Legitimate worry over a ground zero mosque translates into anti-constitutional efforts to stifle freedom of worship. Those with money—defined by an arbitrary annual income level of $250,000—owe the rest of us their ill-gotten gains. Surgeons transmogrify into tonsil-loppers, insurers are greedy, investors put back at the end of the creditor line, all worthy of a boot on their necks and a kick in the ass.

The First Lady can likewise say anything at anytime that would earn about a 10% approval rating. “Deign to run”, “raise the bar”, “never been proud before”, “downright mean country” and all that have gone somnolent only because of a fleeting January 2009 70% approval rating. When polls hits 40% , expect the 2008 tropes to return. The result won’t be pretty. Bush was stoic and philosophical at 38% after six years; the aggrieved Obamas will not be after two.

Read the whole thing. And Obama should have taken some lessons on why Presidents act “Presidential.” It’s not because they’re stuffy stick-in-the-muds, but rather because experience has shown that acting otherwise is political suicide.

MICKEY KAUS: Liberal Paper Bites Barbara Boxer.

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: “Is Alan Grayson the most loathsome member of Congress?” As Moynihan notes, he’s up against some stiff competition, but he’s a contender.

UPDATE: An apology from Moe Lane:

Recently, I compared Alan Grayson to an ex-KGB agent who was now engaged in a second career as a Mafia pimp. I don’t know what I was thinking: the KGB tried not to hire babbling fools, and neither does the Mafia.

It’s nice to see a man who’s big enough to apologize when he gets it wrong.

BUSINESS INSIDER: NJ Gov Chris Christie Had An Amazing Week, And He’s Now Set Up Beautifully To Run For President. Well, the Insta-Daughter’s theory of Presidential opposites is working in his favor!

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Tea Party Movement A Political Tsunami, Thanks To Internet.

Related: Leahy Pushes Internet Censorship Bill. Here’s more from the EFF.

SISSY WILLIS: Biden stumbles into the truth again: “It’s not your grandfather’s Republican Party.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, bureaucrats would be burning books. And they were right! I guess I should have voted for a constitutional law professor who appreciated free expression.

Hey, wait — that’s me!

JOHN HINDERAKER: “The situation in Mexico is a disaster, and one that directly threatens our national security. For reasons that I don’t understand, most Americans don’t seem to care, and the Obama administration reflects that apathy. Mexico makes Iraq look like Switzerland. Iraq is, I think, important to our security, but Mexico is much more so.”

UPDATE: A reader recommends the Borderland Beat blog for reports of goings-on in Mexico, many of them rather gruesome.

DVDs as low as $6.49. Thank goodness for the competition from Netflix, Hulu, etc.

MICKEY KAUS: Is Twitter Protecting Ashton Kutcher? “If that happens, why would Twitter want to keep it a secret? Because it would reveal that Twitter’s uncontrolled expressive democracy is a bit of a fake.”

BYRON YORK: Unable to govern, Dems turn to Stephen Colbert.

THEY SHARE A LOVE OF DEMOCRACY AND AMERICA: Iran leader Ahmadinejad met with Farrakhan, New Black Panthers in New York.