Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad sounds like the Republicans on spending and debt.

Tom Coburn sounds like he understands labor law. The most dangerous part of card check, he says, is the mandatory arbitration since it will encourage labor to make exorbitant demands in hopes of setting up a final compromise.

Will John Murtha get the boot or will he drag more Democrats down with him? “A Pennsylvania defense research center regularly consulted with two ‘handlers’ close to  Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) as it collected nearly $250 million in federal funding through the lawmaker, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and sources familiar with the funding requests. The center then channeled a significant portion of the funding to companies that were among Murtha’s campaign supporters.”

Politicians have learned to use March Madness to worm their way onto your computer screen. (It used to be you could waste time at work in peace and quiet.) The Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate and his two sons will even play a three-on-three basketball game with the winner of his bracket contest. But, really, wouldn’t it be more fun to see them face off against the three Democratic contenders?

Is Eric Holder the one afraid to talk about race in America? Apparently he doesn’t much want to talk about a major voting rights victory for the Justice Department — in which the victims were whites and the discriminator was African American.

A really good point: the Obama team excuses AIG because of the sanctity of contracts but has no problem abrogating the same in bankruptcy court. There is a legal difference, of course, since the judge in the latter situation is authorized to void the agreement, but the policy issue is the same. You either think contracts need to be protected to support the rule of law and provide certainty in the economy or you don’t.

Rob Simmons is in the race for U.S. Senator from Connecticut. And it’s already tied.

No wonder they want to talk about Rush Limbaugh: “President Barack Obama’s approval rating has slipped, as a growing number of Americans see him listening more to his party’s liberals than to its moderates and many voice opposition to some of his key economic proposals. Obama’s job approval rating has slipped from 64% in February to 59% currently, while disapproval has jumped from 17% to 26% over this period.”

The RNC has a new communications director but it’s probably a bad sign he didn’t send out an announcement via the press email list, and conservative new media outlets had to read about it elsewhere. Here’s a thought: do Republicans really need an RNC?

James Capretta explains that, even in the New York Times’s telling, Massachusetts should warn us about health care “reform”: “If we don’t rely on market principles to allocate health-care resources, the country will inevitably turn to the government to keep premiums in line with income. And, as some anonymous ‘experts’ candidly admit in the Times piece, government-written ‘payment practices’ are highly unlikely to do the trick. Instead, these ‘experts’ say, ‘the state and federal governments may need to place actual limits on health spending, which could lead to rationing of care.'”

Rabbi David Wolpe affords Roger Cohen the opportunity to make a fool of himself.

And the Rabbi explains it all, in case there was any doubt how impervious Cohen is to history and logic. I await Walter Pincus’s insightful report on the reaction from Tehran (or the Inter Press Service).

When he stops waffling, it turns out the Democrat running in the NY-20 race is pretty liberal — on taxpayer-funded abortion, card check and cap-and-trade.

Uh oh: “A big jump in foreign sales of long-term U.S. securities raised concerns Monday that the U.S., in the midst of a massive debt issuance to fund its economic revival plans, may run into trouble getting other countries to finance its deficit.” Seems like foreigners do not after all have an unlimited appetite for our Treasury debt. Well, there’s going to be plenty more of that soon if the Obama administration gets its $3.9 trillion budget.

Not depressed yet? “U.S. Industrial output fell to its lowest level in almost seven years in February according to data that pointed to a deteriorating economy.”