During a live web cast, Carly Fiorina announced her intention to run for the California Senate seat currently occupied by Democrat Barbara Boxer. However, she will have to make it through a tough primary race against fellow Republican Chuck DeVore.

Claiming to have a new lease on life after her nine-month battle with breast cancer, Fiorina stated that “Boxer isn’t so scary, after my chemo-therapy treatments.”

In a calm and determined manner Fiorina talked about the current economic crisis and understood that it was difficult to remain optimistic. “California faces historic unemployment levels and out-of-control spending,” she explained. “Instead of investing for growth in Washington, we get talk, partisanship and back room deals.”

What would a campaign speech be without targeting the opposition? “Boxer has been Senator for 17 years and she’s delivered three pieces of legislation; a name of a river, a name of a courthouse in Fresno and some seismic technology to the Bay Area. I guess one piece of legislation in 17 years isn’t so bad.”

This political jab will be a staple on the campaign trail for Fiorina.

However, Boxer’s prized jewel of her 17-year career will definitely be the Cap and Trade Bill she co-sponsors with Senator John Kerry-D-MA.

The 800-plus page Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act has already met with fierce opposition and is expected to garner few if any votes from the Republican side of the isle.

“We need simple logic and common sense when it comes to the environment. We can save the environment and protect jobs with innovation and entrepreneurs,” she explained.

Fiorina, who worked her way through the male-dominated technology sector with Hewlett Packard, pointed to her years of running a large corporation as her template to get Washington back onto the right track and give Californian’s the voice they deserve.

“D.C. needs to start with the obvious thing first – live within your means.”

Wasting no time on her first day of campaigning, Fiorina signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge.

She also turned to a few issues her campaign will focus on. Audience favorite was the no new taxes, followed by additional funding for small businesses who didn’t receive any bailout money.

“We also need to look at our regulation framework. It’s been around for a century and it needs to fixed,” she explained.

If Fiorina is successful in her Republican primary race, she will face an incumbent who has been described by the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s Brian Walsh, as "Ineffective, polarizing and partisan."
With an even tone, Fiorina said, “She (Boxer) has taken the low road to reach higher office every election cycle.”

Sounds like Fiorina is ready to rumble.

After more than a decade of public health care with mandatory coverage, so many Canadian doctors have left the practice and so many young people have entered other fields that Canada ranks 26th of 28 developed nations in its ratio of physicians to population. Once, Canada ranked among the leaders in the number of physicians -- but that was before government health care drove doctors out of the practice in droves.

The fundamental fact is that we cannot cover 36 million new patients without more doctors and nurses, much less with the declining census of medical professionals the Canadian experience points to.

A recent survey of doctors by the Pew Institute found that 45 percent of all practicing doctors would consider retiring or closing their practices if the Barack Obama health care bill passes. This scarcity of medical personnel heightens the likelihood of draconian rationing, lengthy waiting lists and lower quality medical care for all of us, particularly for the elderly.

This physician shortage leads to massive and never-ending waiting lists. In 1993, for example, there was an average wait of 9.3 weeks from the time a patient got a referral from a general practitioner to the time he could see a specialist in Canada. By 1997, the wait was up to 11.7 weeks. Now it's 17.3 weeks -- over four months just to see a specialist!

In Canada, unions control the entire health care process. In Manitoba, for example, there is an eight-month wait for colonoscopies, yet the unions do not permit weekend or evening procedures, thereby extending the waiting lists.

The unions are doing to health care in Canada what they have done to education in America -- stifling creativity, reinforcing bureaucracy and extending waiting times.

Because of these long waits for colonoscopies, there is now a 25 percent higher incidence of colon cancer in Canada than in the United States. And, because the leading drugs that we routinely use to treat the malady in the U.S. are banned in Canada because of their high cost, 41 percent of Canadians who get the cancer die of it, compared with only 32 percent in the United States. Overall, the cancer death rate in Canada runs 16 percent higher than in the United States. Cancer does not wait for waiting lists to clear.

The potential of health care changes to shrink the doctor population, exacerbating scarcity and extending waits, is even worse now that it is apparent that we have overestimated the number of doctors in the U.S. Where we once thought there were 840,000 doctors, the total is now estimated to be only 760,000.

The proposed $400 billion cut in Medicare raises the probability that more and more of those doctors who do practice will refuse to accept Medicare patients, aggravating the doctor shortage among the elderly, the population that needs them the most.

As Obama's program moves through Congress, despite the fierce opposition of a majority of American voters in virtually all the polls, it becomes clear that those moderates who vote for it will face harsh retribution at the polls from their outraged constituents. A kind of suicide-pact mentality is gripping the Democratic majorities in Congress, akin to that which came over it when Congress passed President Clinton's tax package in 1993.
This disregard for the will of the marginal voter may make sense for those who come from safe districts -- it makes none for those who come from swing districts. For them, suicidal conduct leads to political demise.

A few times a year, Congress sits in a "joint meeting" to hear from a foreign leader.  (You can get a list of recent guests here.)  Part personal seal of approval, part testament to a country's stature, these addresses are highly coveted by heads of state.  Letter campaigns by Members of Congress to the Speaker of the House requesting that fill-in the blank leader get a shot at the podium are not uncommon, and many are denied.  Sometimes, though, we do the winners no favor.   

Yesterday, it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel's chance to address the members.  Ostensibly, this was to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as her recent re-election as chancellor.  A Washington Post column on Tuesday labeled Merkel as the "de facto leader of Europe."  There wasn't a lot of sparkle.  Workman-like.  It didn't help that this notoriously low-key leader, though fluent in English, spoke in German, I guess to play better at home.   

One who won't be getting a joint meeting anytime soon is Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai.  The just "re-elected" president got his shot before Congress in 2004, but was no stranger to Washington, before or after.  He often met with President Bush, doing Rose Garden appearances, and seeing members of Congress.  Karzai must know Washington far better than regions of Afghanistan.  He always put on a good show with the cape and furry hat and played the press well, speaking English.  Anyone remember when GQ named Karzai one of the best dressed foreign leaders?  Meanwhile Rome burned. 

The GQ subscription has run out.  According to this morning's Washington Post ("Karzai is wild card for U.S. strategy,") then Vice-President elect Biden warned Karzai on a trip to Afghanistan that he would only speak with the President "a couple times a year."  This reflects that "Biden and other Obama advisers believe the relationship that Bush developed with Karzai masked the Afghan leader's flaws and made it difficult to demand accountability."  It seems likely that Karzai's royal treatment has fostered the impression among fiercely independent Afghans that we have our man.  This is one note that the Obama Administration may be getting right on Afghanistan.  Unfortunately, the symphony is still badly out of tune. 

Here is one of the loudest messages of the 2009 off-off-year elections: Conservatives in America will no longer let their opponents define them as outside of the mainstream. They will not submit to Democrats. Or to the media. Or to Beltway Republican capitulationists. They will not "rebrand." They will not sit down. They will not shut up.

Just this past weekend, Democratic Rep. Jim Moran attacked the Republican candidates for governor and attorney general in his state of Virginia as the "Taliban ticket."

New York Times columnist Frank Rich decried the right's "Jacobins" and "Stalinists" who he said joined a "putsch" by supporting Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman instead of ACORN-embracing, Big Labor-promoting, pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, tax-and-spend Republican Dede Scozzafava in New York's 23rd congressional special election.

And senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett told ABC's "This Week" that the grassroots conservative-vs.-GOP leadership battle over NY-23 showed that the Republican Party leadership was "becoming more and more extreme, and more and more marginalized."

Let's talk "extreme."

Jarrett is the White House official who bragged openly about recruiting disgraced Marxist rabble-rouser Van Jones for the green jobs czar post. She lavished praise on his public career and said she had followed him "for as long as he's been active out in Oakland." In Oakland, Jones was working to dismantle California's juvenile justice system, pitting minorities against police officers and crusading to free death row cop-killer Mumia abu Jamal.

Who are you calling "extreme"?

Jarrett's White House colleague Patrick Gaspard, Obama's political director who intervened in the race to convince Scozzafava to endorse the Democratic candidate Bill Owens after she dropped out, was a top organizer at the militant Local 1199 chapter of the Service Employees International Union and an activist/organizer for the New Party and the Working Families Party -- both ACORN/Democratic Socialists of America front groups.

Who are you calling "extreme"?

"It's rather telling," Jarrett sniffed, "when the Republican Party forces out a moderate Republican, and it says, I think, a great deal about where the Republican Party leadership is right now." It's rather telling that the White House persists with this pointless marginalization strategy as Gallup polls show conservatives continuing to outnumber moderates and liberals across America.

As I pointed out in my Oct. 16 column, there was never anything moderate about Scozzafava. There was no fiscal conservatism to balance her social radicalism. It wasn't merely that she was "pro-choice." She was also a proud recipient of a pro-abortion award named after eugenicist Margaret Sanger.

It wasn't merely that she favored higher government spending. It was also that she supported the stimulus, which every single House Republican in office opposed, on top of her support for the union-expanding card-check bill, on top of her ambiguous statements on the energy tax-imposing cap-and-trade bill.

Newt Gingrich, who foolishly stood with Scozzafava until she threw herself under the bus over the weekend, piously invoked Reagan and condemned the extreme "purism" of unruly conservatives who wouldn't keep quiet about Scozzafava's radical-left agenda.

But conservatives are not demanding "purity." They are simply abiding by Reagan's own wise counsel in 1975: "A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers."

The Republican National Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee threw upward of $900,000 down the toilet for a candidate whose core views and political alliances undermined conservatism's fundamental beliefs in limited government from Day One. It was a reckless expenditure of the GOP base's hard-earned money and a bitter tuition bill for a teachable moment on the perils of political expediency.

The days when immoderate political operatives and feckless Beltway opportunists could define "moderation" by their own warped yardsticks without pushback are over.

In a stunning upset, Republican Chris Christie defeated Democrat Barack Obama ... I mean Jon Corzine ... to win the New Jersey governor's race Tuesday.

Despite spending $23 million dollars and having Barack Obama campaign for him three times, Corzine, the free-spending liberal and Obama doormat, was tossed out by New Jersey voters in a a clear repudiation of the Obama agenda.

Christie's victory in heavily Democratic New Jersey should send shock waves through the Democratic Party establishment. Earlier in the evening, Republican Bob McDonnell won the Virginia governor's race in another litmus test of Obama's failed presidency.

Look for Democrats in Congress to bail out of Obama's big government, big deficit socialist agenda overnight.

Obama himself told New Jersey voters that the Christie-Corzine election was a referendum on his 10 months as president.

Corzine ran a nasty campaign of personal attacks, including making fun of Christie's weight.

The 300-pound Christie told supporters at a victory rally Tuesday night "we are going to pick Trenton up and turn it upside down."

With 97 percent of precincts reporting at midnight, Christie had 49 percent of the vote compared to 44 percent for Corzine. Daggett finished with 5 percent.

In what can only be described as a tremendous boost for Chuck DeVore and his bid for the GOP Senate nomination in California, tonight he picked up the endorsement of the Senate's leading conservative, Senator Jim DeMint.

DeMint has been the most prominent D.C. insider who has consistently been on what conservatives would consider the side of the angels, having already backed Marco Rubio in Florida and tonight's headliner, Doug Hoffman in NY-23.

In what was sure to be an uphill fight for DeVore in terms of fundraising against the well-heeled Carly Fiorina, tonight's endorsement puts DeMint's following and resources--including, presumably, his Senate Conservatives Fund-- at DeVore's service.

Perhaps more interesting could be the impact a move like tonight's has for DeMint himself; if he can help a candidate like DeVore,who's widely considered a longshot, to win the nomination, it will greatly enhance DeMint's national status, perhaps even helping set the stage for what his supporters hope will be his own run at the White House in 2012.

With upwards of 4000 people on tonight's nearly 2-hour call with DeMint at any one time, and a number approaching 20,000 who reportedly connected at least for a short while, there's obviously a national appetite to hear more from DeMint.

At the very least, the timing of this move is clearly meant to ensure that this time, DeMint will be acting first with his endorsement. Recall that in Florida, his backing of Rubio came after Charlie Crist's announcement that he'd be running, and his simultaneous backing by the NRSC.

This time, DeMint gets the jump on the NRSC and its calculating leader, John Cornyn, who will absolutely be backing Carly Fiorina when she officially announces later this week. I can personally assure this because the arrogant Cornyn failed to even mention DeVore's name when addressing a small gathering of Orange County's key GOP donors in August--at a private club in DeVore's own district!

With DeMint backing DeVore, it will be interesting to see whether the NRSC backing will help Carly more than it hurts her, as recent polls in Florida show that something is hanging like a lead weight on Crist's poll numbers.

The Hoffman/Rubio conservative Republicans who have been emboldened by recent events can now be counted on to turn their attention and resources in DeVore's direction. This development alone could make California's Senate primary very interesting.

It's a huge pickup for Chuck DeVore, and a hugely interesting move by DeMint, to say the least.