MANY CHOICES UP TO THEM
Result may 'depend . . . on where you live'

By Lori Montgomery and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 1, 2009

The debate over whether to let states opt out of any government-run health insurance plan overlooks a key facet of the health-care measures being assembled in Congress: When Washington is done, the shape of any new health-care system is likely to be finalized in Lansing and Boise and Baton Rouge.

By JOHN STEELE GORDON

Epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting: The Pelosi health bill has it all.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she's prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that's what it takes to pass ObamaCare, and little wonder. The health bill she unwrapped last Thursday, which President Obama hailed as a "critical milestone," may well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced.

By GERALD F. SEIB

Americans have concluded within the past year that their financial firms and auto companies don't work very well.

Many now seem to be drawing the same conclusion about their government, which, ironically, has been charged with saving those financial firms and auto companies.

Joel Kotkin, 11.03.09, 12:01 AM ET

For the past decade a large coterie of pundits, prognosticators and their media camp followers have insisted that growth in America would be concentrated in places hip and cool, largely the bluish regions of the country.

by Mike Flynn

Stephen Dinan and S.A. Miller

The independent voters who powered President Obama and Democrats to victory in 2008 fled to Republicans in Tuesday's elections, helping the GOP romp to a ticketwide sweep in Virginia and a stunning victory over an incumbent Democratic governor in New Jersey.

By Tom Infield

Inquirer Staff Writer

Chester County Republicans haven't lost a row office election in, oh, about 150 years.

To Joseph E. "Skip" Brion, the GOP chairman in one of the state's most affluent counties, that can mean only one thing: The party must be doing something right to hold voter trust for that long.

And that's the message the party will carry into the elections on Nov. 3 for county controller, treasurer, clerk of courts, and coroner.

On paper, the 23rd congressional district in upstate New York, way up near the Canadian border, is solid Republican territory - so solid, in fact, that this particular hunting and fishing region hasn't elected a Democratic congressman since the era immediately preceding the invention of the telephone. That would be circa 1869.

Dan Gerstein