From The Hill:

Former Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Dan Danner, the chief executive of the National Federation of Independent Business, signaled Wednesday that taking some of the regulatory load off smaller companies would help in the current battle against high unemployment.

“The message that we’re trying to leave is that if we want to create more jobs and make the economy better, how do we somehow get this disproportionate burden of ever increasing new regulations off the backs of the people who create the jobs?” Danner said at an event launching his group’s Small Businesses for Sensible Regulations campaign.

According to the Small Business Administration, regulations on American small businesses, which comprise 60 percent of all private-sector jobs and account for about two thirds of jobs created each year, deprive the American economy of $1.75 trillion annually. By reducing – or at least compromising – on current regulations and letting go of the nearly 4,200 regulations on the table right now to be passed this session, Congress could stimulate one of the fastest-growing American industries. Unfortunately for Blanche Lincoln and her team of American business owners, Congress will be hard to convince.

Lincoln is trying at a very unique time, though, when quick action could prevent a lot of further harm to the American economy. As we stated, 4,200 regulations are in the pipeline, just waiting for Congressional approval. Of those, 845 directly affect small businesses. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are also 330 new EPA regulations coming down the pipe, all of which are designed to specifically regulate how American small businesses do their job. Without expensive lawyers to fill out regulatory paperwork, and expensive lobbyists to fight the fight on their behalf, small businesses usually just take the regulations sitting down, devoting time and money they could spend growing their businesses and hiring more out of work Americans to doing dirty work provided to them by the US government.

Although not perfectly conservative, Lincoln and her organization are proposing a set of guidelines that would help Congress and the Obama administration curb regulations and more closely analyze the impact of their actions on small business owners.

She wanted to win reelection and knew that card check was political poison in almost entirely non-unionized Arkansas.

Big labor decided to teach her—and all Democratic members of Congress who were quailing at the prospect of voting for card check—a lesson. The lesson would be that, however much a vote for card check would reduce your chances of winning a general election, opposition to card check would result in your defeat in a Democratic primary. Their ready and willing instrument was Bill Halter, whose path to higher office seemed otherwise occluded. At the beginning of March he announced his candidacy and proclaimed himself the champion of the working man. Blanche Lincoln, in agonized response, proclaimed herself the target of outside interests. In a matter of weeks labor unions and moveon.org—originally formed to defend Bill Clinton against impeachment—sent millions to Bill Halter’s campaign. Lincoln, recently elevated to the Chairmanship of the Senate Agriculture Committee, sponsored a bill to shut off all derivative trading. The Obama White House carefully protected this bill from defeat while the primary and runoff contests were pending, while Bill Clinton campaign gallantly for Lincoln and against his appointee Halter.

The Clinton intervention may have proved decisive. Although the Clintons have left Arkansas, Arkansas voters still have warm feelings toward them, as witnessed by Hillary Clinton’s 70%-26% defeat of Barack Obama in the 2008 Arkansas Democratic presidential primary—the biggest percentage win in her campaign. Lincoln won the runoff by a 52%-48% margin—hardly inspiring but a whole lot better than a defeat.

It’s a huge defeat for the unions. White House political operatives are already complaining, as Ben Smith notes in Politico, that “Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members’ money down the toilet on a pointless exercise,” [a senior White House] official said. “If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November.” But the unions are not just interested in maintaining Democratic majorities. They’re interested in making sure that all Democratic incumbents will vote when bidden for card check. The message they wanted to send to Blanche Lincoln, and to all other Democrats, was: the minute you announce against card check, your career is over. Even in a state like Arkansas, with few union members and with all the major employers solid opponents of unionization, we can defeat you in the Democratic primary. You may very well fear likely defeat in the general election if your support card check. But we can promise you certain defeat in the primary if you oppose it. And to national Democratic strategists they could say this: Lincoln was going to lose the general election in any case. We just made her path to defeat more unpleasant.

Bill Halter, who remained coy about his own position on card check, was the willing accomplice in this strategy. With not a lot to lose (the lieutenant governorship? give me a break; it was a nice office for a billionaire like Winthrop Rockefeller but doesn’t offer much to anyone else) and something to gain (maybe John Boozman would self-destruct in the general election for the Senate), this may have looked to him like a low-risk candidacy. His willingness to be the accomplice of the big labor unions might foreclose any future electoral career in Arkansas (although Bill Clinton’s rebounds after adversity might give any Arkansas Rhode Scholar hope for recovery). But there are other ways the big unions can help you advance.

Blanche Lincoln’s (narrow) victory leaves the unions’ strategy in ruins. They can’t credibly threaten any Democratic incumbent who opposes card check with political defeat. Some, in states less anti-union than Arkansas, might be vulnerable to a challenge like Halter’s; but others won’t. And in some states or districts there won’t be an opportunistic challenger like Halter willing to go along with the strategy and well enough established to be a serious primary challenger. Give the unions credit for daring, and for putting their money (or the money of their members) on the line. They’re playing for high stakes—for the ability to plunder the private sector for dues money as they have successfully plundered the public sector (i.e., taxpayers) for dues money in states with strong public employee unions like New York, New Jersey and California. They just came up a little bit short.

Read the whole thing here.

Read more at the Washington Examiner:

Today’s elections feature top-tier Senate and gubernatorial races in California and Nevada, as well as a Senate runoff in Arkansas and competitive GOP primary in the South Carolina governor’s race. Those are just the highlights of a full slate of primaries, but there are a handful of intriguing races that will likely fly under the radar as the results pour in tonight.

Here are five races that may not make major newspaper headlines but are certainly ones to keep an eye on:

Iowa’s 3rd District GOP Primary

The Iowa Republican Party is preparing to hold a July 10 convention to decide the nominee in the 3rd district, where no one in Tuesday’s crowded primary is expected to meet the 35 percent threshold to win the nomination. The GOP sees the district has a potential pick-up opportunity, as Democrat Leonard Boswell runs for an eighth term in office.

One could also be necessary in the 2nd district, where four Republicans are vying to take on second-term Democrat Dave Loebsack.

Conventions are in many ways much different animals than primaries. As state GOP Chairman Matt Strawn said last week on local TV, “It’s not the kind of campaign that’s waged on the airwaves, but literally hand to hand and house to house.” The winner will be decided by 422 previously elected district delegates.

By most accounts, the three leading candidates in the 3rd district are aviation security consultant Dave Funk, financial adviser and former Iowa State wrestling coach Jim Gibbons and state Sen. Brad Zaun.

The SEIU issued an e-mail screed a few days ago, entitled “Joe Lieberman will hate this,” exclaiming: “Joe Lieberman is at it again. Jockeying for attention.”

Something tells me SEIU fell all over themselves when Lieberman was on the cusp of being elected vice president in 2000, but that was a long time ago I suppose.

Anyway, Lieberman, along with Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana are named in the e-mail as “targets” that may join a “Republican filibuster” of a Senate health care reform bill that tops the length of Pelosi’s monster 1,990 pager.

And that, to SEIU, is wholeheartedly unacceptable and likely downright un-American.

Announcing a program to deluge those senators with telephone calls, SEIU explains:

We elected Barack Obama, in part, by calling tens of thousands of voters in key “swing states.” This year is no different. Voters in Arkansas, Nebraska, Connecticut and Louisiana need to hear from us about what’s happening on health insurance reform. (emphasis added)

If the four senators don’t play ball, in the words of SEIU:

If that happens, health insurance reform will not move forward. (emphasis not added)

When asked about the consequences of such a filibuster, Lieberman told Politico:

“I don’t think about that stuff. I’m just — I’m being a legislator. After what I went through in 2006, there’s nothing much more that anybody [who] disagrees with me can try to do.”

It’s becoming increasing clear SEIU will stop at nothing, and beat down anyone standing in the way of the socialist Holy Grail of government-run health care.

So the signal from SEIU to these senators is fairly plain to see: You’ve Been Warned.