The latest Quinnipiac poll of Connecticut voters is out, and while it is (standard disclaimer) only one poll, it shows bad news for Chris Dodd, good news for his strongest challenger, Rob Simmons, and bad news for President Obama’s health care plan.

Here’s the topline result on Simmons vs Dodd:

Former Connecticut Congressman Rob Simmons has an early lead in the Republican primary race for the 2010 U.S. Senate contest and runs better than any other challenger against Sen. Christopher Dodd, topping the Democratic incumbent 49 - 38 percent…

Former World Wrestling Entertainment executive Linda McMahon gets 43 percent to Sen. Dodd’s 41 percent…

Even potential Republican contenders with almost no name recognition and almost no Republican primary voter support give Dodd a run for his money.

Simmons leads a Republican primary matchup with 28 percent, followed by McMahon with 17 percent. No other contender tops 9 percent and 36 percent are undecided.

Connecticut voters disapprove 54 - 40 percent of the job Dodd is doing, compared to a 49 - 43 percent disapproval September 17, and say 53 - 39 percent that he does not deserve reelection.

The poll shows Dodd with a favorable/unfavorable rating of -15 (38-53) among men and -25 (34-59) among Independents, and a re-elect number of -24 (34-58) among men and -32 (30-62) among Independents, the latter mirroring the showing of Jon Corzine and Creigh Deeds among Independents.

It’s still somewhat early to judge whether any of the other Republicans in the race would be electable against Dodd; clearly, Simmons, as a moderate former Congressman, has a very real shot of winning this race, as he’s polling basically where Chris Christie was polling at this stage against Corzine. And bear in mind, this was a poll of registered, not likely voters; the likely-voter screens almost always help the GOP candidate, especially since 2010 will be an off-year election in which polls are consistently showing that voters on the Right are far more motivated and energized. Here’s the poll’s sample:

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Senator Chris Dodd (D, Irish Mansion CT) is having a time of it with this sweetheart Countrywide loans thing.  First off, the Senate Ethics investigation somehow managed to avoid going after him for his activities, which meant that Dodd thought that he could start repairing the damage to his fundraising reputation (H/T: Instapundit):

U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd is saying it’s time to move on from the long-running Countrywide Financial VIP loan scandal.

[snip]

“I feel the matter’s behind us,” Dodd said. “We ought to move on.”

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The Orwellianly-titled American Health Choices Act, a health care overhaul bill the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee passed Tuesday with a 13-10 party line vote, contains a two-pronged mechanism for increasing government’s already enormous footprint within the health care market, and for driving private insurance into the ground.

When the first public draft of the American Health Choices Act (AHCA) was released at the beginning of June, it contained language mandating that employers with 25 or more workers offer health insurance to their employees or face a federal fine. The level of that fine, as with almost every other penalty and tax increase provided for in the bill, was to be left to the discretion of the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This new ability to impose taxes and levy fines of an amount entirely at her discretion would be a breathtaking expansion of the appointed HHS Secretary’s power.

When an evaluation by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found the AHCA’s net cost – that which would have to be spent above built-in revenue increases and offsets – to be around $1.6 trillion (a number that many experts and outside evaluators find to be reminiscent of the Medicare forecasts at its inception, which put the cost of the now-$37 trillion program at less than $10 million), while only extending health coverage to approximately a third of the 45 million American uninsured, public backlash was significant enough that the HELP committee members writing the bill took steps to bring that projected cost down from a trillion and a half dollars into the hundreds-of-billions range.

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I can’t say I blame them; it’s hard to have confidence in a crook.

WHEREAS Senator Dodd has violated either in fact or in appearance or both, in the several ways herein elaborated, the trust placed in him by his constituents,

THEREFORE We the members of the Kent Democratic Town Committee conclude that it is the legitimate responsibility of the people to intervene and to reject those political representatives who have become enamored with achieving and maintaining their own position and power at the expense of the citizens,

WE RESOLVE that Senator Dodd does not deserve our support, and that through his pattern of behavior, he has become a symbol of what is wrong with our electoral system and deserves our vote of NO CONFIDENCE.

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It almost makes you wonder if Barney Frank isn’t just dating that dude from Fannie Mae, but Chris Dodd too.

Together, they brought us the financial crisis relating to Fannie and Freddie. Now they want to do the same to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. They’ll greatly enrich Mrs. Dodd too.

Michelle Malkin notes there is placeholder language in the cap and trade bill. In other words, Congressmen are being asked to vote on legislation that will be written after the vote. Frank says this “will deal with regulations of financial derivatives market associated with reducing carbon emissions.”

Over at the Next Right, Ironman points out that Mrs. Dodd will stand to make a killing on this. Mrs. Dodd has business interests related to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that will profit from these new regulations.

As you all know, between now and Friday we are giving away one copy a day of the Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide.

It is the perfect gift for Father’s Day and we’ll FedEx it out to you — no guarantee it gets there in time for the big day though.

In any event, here is today’s contest:

We’re focusing on the corrupt nature of Chris Dodd on the front page of RedState today. It’s very clear the man is a walking indictment waiting to happen.

So the contest today: One copy of Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide. to the person who writes the best user diary today about Chris Dodd.

We’ll be the judge. Our decision is final.

Get cracking. In addition to doing good work taking on Chris Dodd, the best diarist gets a free copy of a cool book.

Now have at it.

There are times when you don’t need to go past the title and subtitle:

Dodd Says Questions About Wife’s Role in Health Care Industry ‘Offensive’
Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., whose wife Jackie Clegg Dodd sits on the boards of four health care companies, disputes the suggestion that his wife’s career could pose a conflict of interest.

It really does say it all, doesn’t it? We’re facing a ‘universal health care system’ scheduled to cost us at least 1 trillion and decrease the number of uninsured by maybe one-third; and the guy who is helping get that boondoggle enacted into law is also the guy who’s been playing games with his financial disclosures. Again.

And yet, bringing up the minor little detail that his wife is on the board of four health care companies is apparently Beyond the Pale, if you’ll pardon the pun. Well, it’s not. This is not an aristocracy, and Dodd is not a Duke: his actions are ultimately accountable to the population of both Connecticut, and the nation. If he cannot grasp that concept, he does not have to keep being a Senator.

Speaking of which…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

False disclosures, conflicts of interest, lying about the implications of his new disclosures… he’s really racked up quite a list of offenses in one financial filing:

A new appraisal of the Irish cottage owned by Sen. Christopher Dodd concludes that it is worth about three times as much as Dodd has been reporting on his financial disclosure forms…

Dodd has been criticized for understating the value of the cottage in his disclosure forms. Questions also have been raised about his original purchase of the cottage with a Kansas City businessman, William Kessinger, whom he met through longtime friend and campaign contributor Edward Downe.

It is unclear when the new appraisal was done, although a spokesman for Dodd said Friday that it was after questions arose in the press about the cottage and its value earlier this year. Courant columnist Kevin Rennie had raised the questions.

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The Connecticut State Senate is rushing through legislation to strip (Republican) Governor Jodi Rell of her power to appoint a successor to Senator Chris Dodd, if he should resign his office:

In another controversial bill, the Senate Democrats voted early Friday morning to remove Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s power to appoint a U.S. Senator in case of a vacancy.

Instead, there would be a special election if one of the two U.S. Senators - currently Christopher J. Dodd and Joseph I. Lieberman - stepped down from office before the six-year term ended…

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Credit where credit is due: this is a nice piece of reporting on Dodd by the Huffington Post. The title (”Dodd Dinner With Online Payday Lenders Transforms Into Fundraiser“) explains a bit already, but the background is this: there’s a lobbying group called the Online Lenders Alliance. Fair enough. They’re throwing a conference this week. So far, so good. There’s a bunch of people from Congress involved or speaking, on both sides of the aisle. Fine*. Senator Dodd was one of the scheduled Senators for the event, except when asked about it first his staff, then Dodd himself flatly denied that he was there on OLA’s behalf at all; it was an independent fundraising dinner. Nothing unusu… wait, what?

Inside the restaurant, Dodd staffers said the dinner, which was not open to press, was not even sponsored by the Online Lenders Alliance.

The dinner “is not an OLA event,” OLA spokeswoman Lisa McGreevy said in a subsequent phone interview. But the OLA agenda lists a Dodd dinner — was there a mixup?

“I don’t think there was any mixup,” she said. “There is a fundraiser tonight for Senator Dodd.”

McGreevy added: “There may be some OLA people there.”

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Because you can tell the difference between pouring water on a towel held over the mouth of three separate individuals (and under very carefully controlled conditions), and sending 17 million people to the gas chamber*.

(H/T: Melissa Clouthier)

But, do you know something? Don’t get mad.

Get even.

More here.

Moe Lane

*For the record: this comment does not mean that I deny you your right to disapprove of the former. Merely that Dodd’s equation of it with the latter neatly shows why we have Godwin’s Law in the first place.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Chris Dodd Chairs the Senate Banking Committee - a position that made him important enough to become a Friend of Angelo, and allowed him to influence the porkulus conference committee to allow AIG to award bonuses to senior employees. It led AIG executives to strong arm employees into donating to Dodd. It also gave Dodd disproportionate influence in killing efforts to clean up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before they collapsed. In other words, Dodd’s position on the Banking Committee is largely responsible for making him an underdog for re-election next year.

So what’s Chris Dodd’s plan to save his lucrative government gig? Remind people of his spot on the Banking Committee:

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), facing increasingly difficult odds in 2010, is spending the two-week recess barnstorming his home state to try to improve his political standing…

The appearances are part of a series dubbed “Banking for Change,” meant to highlight Dodd’s work on consumer protection issues as chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.

Seriously?

Dodd thinks he’s helped by reminders of what he’s done with his Banking Committee spot? He might as well run television ads bragging about his Countrywide Mortgage and his wife’s former spot on the Board of an AIG company. Connecticut Republicans are being handed a golden opportunity to remind voters of Dodd’s ethical lapses, and his leadership role in the housing crash and current recession. They ought to attend Dodd’s events in state and ask him why he’s bragging about legislative malpractice and crony capitalism.

Rob Simmons has announced that he’s running for the Senate against Senator Chris Dodd in Connecticut. http://www.joinrobsimmons.com/

Simmons is a retired member of our armed forces, served in Vietnam and served in the CIA for 10 years. He joined the staff of Senator John Chaffee in 1979.

Mr. Simmons also has a Twitter feed at : http://twitter.com/robsimmons

Good luck, Rob Smmons. Dodd needs to go down.

Senator Dodd, there’s been a lot of attention recently to your relationship with AIG. You’re the top Congressional recipient of their political donations, they have a major presence in your state, and you sponsored a provision that allowed them to deliver bonuses to many of your constituents. And yet even as you’ve sworn up and down that you never wanted to protect AIG, and you have no reason to wish to do so, we learn that your wife served on the board of - and was compensated by - an AIG subsidiary?

From 2001-2004, Jackie Clegg Dodd served as an “outside” director of IPC Holdings, Ltd., a Bermuda-based company controlled by AIG. IPC, which provides property casualty catastrophe insurance coverage, was formed in 1993 and currently has a market cap of $1.4 billion and trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol IPCR. In 2001, in addition to a public offering of 15 million shares of stock that raised $380 million, IPC raised more than $109 million through a simultaneous private placement sale of 5.6 million shares of stock to AIG - giving AIG a 20% stake in IPC. (AIG sold its 13.397 million shares in IPC in August, 2006.)

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If you’ve been thinking of buying a quaint little retreat near Galway, Ireland, you might want to ask Chris Dodd for advice. He’s made off quite well on his (pictured).

Here’s the quick-and-dirty: find a convicted felon and get him to put up two-thirds of the purchase price, then 8 years later - when the value of comparable real estate has quadrupled - buy him out at around the same amount he bought in for.

Voila! Before you know it, you own an Irish ‘cottage’ worth about a million dollars, but whose value you claim on ethics forms is as little as $100,000! The Wall Street Journal reported on the specifics not that long ago:

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Tim Geithner should probably start packing his stuff. Now. Because what we have in the article in today’s Washington Post called “How the Fed Failed to Tell Obama About The Bonuses” is nothing more or less than an attempt to load up Mr. Geithner with unique responsibility for the AIG bonus fiasco, set him ablaze, and send him drifting out to sea.

When one cuts through all the hooey, this is the narrative that the White House and its media accomplices would like for you to believe: the risk-averse bureaucrats in the Fed made a unilateral decision to allow AIG to award bonuses to the guys who nearly brought AIG down. They did so without consulting with the White House, or much of anyone else. They did so without realizing that it would be a political disaster. The guy at the Fed who did this was Tim Geithner, who, by the way, is now at Treasury and still screwing up royally although The One retains complete confidence in him.

This is nonsense on its face.

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After twenty-four hours of denials, Senator Chris Dodd is admitting that he added a provision to the stimulus package to protect the bonuses AIG intended to pay executives.

Dodd, you will recall, is the single largest recipient of AIG employees’ campaign funds in the United States Congress.

Here’s the thing though: the amendment had to be added before it went into conference with the House. Senator Dodd was not one of the Senate representatives in the conference.

Inside Conference, the participants go over all the amendments. They have to in order to make sure the House version and Senate version are identical. Someone had to do Chris Dodd’s bidding in the Conference Committee.

Who was it?

The Senate representatives were Senators Reid, Inouye, and Baucus. Which of them worked with Senator Dodd to make sure AIG was protected?

Here’s video of Sen. Chris Dodd (DEMOCRAT) telling CNN he wrote the bonuses-are-OK loophole into the Porkulus bill that not one Senator nor Representative read before voting on:

So…what now? Congress and the president are talking about having those executives who, under this law written by Democrats and lobbyists, passed by House Democrats without one single Republican vote, passed by the Senate with only Benedict ArnoldArlen Specter, Benedict ArnoldSusan Collins, and Benedict ArnoldOlympia Snowe favoring it from the GOP side, and signed by President Obama with great ballyhoo and fanfare, received “retention payments” fork that money back over to…well, the government, I suppose.

You know what’s funny? All those Democrats voted for this bill and the president signed it into law, and only now are they finding out they voted to preserve an act they are now trying so hard to appear outraged by. Barack “I Won” Obama even called the passage of this Porkulus an “emergency” that couldn’t wait for “a moment” before disappearing to Chicago for a long weekend between Congress’ passage of the bill and his signing of it.

Whatever he was doing on that vacay, we can be sure he wasn’t reading his own emergency legislation, as he’s a shocked as everybody else who helped ram it through the system to see what was actually in there.

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With all the news about about the AIG bonuses, there are a couple of things worth remembering.

First, the GOP voted against the stimulus. Why? Because it won’t stimulate anything and the Democrats decided to rush it through without letting anyone read it.

This is what happens when you write legislation in secret then rush it through.

Second, will federal prosecutors indict Chris Dodd? Dodd sneaked in a provision to protect AIG bonuses. Congress, via Dodd’s last minute amendment, specifically granted AIG permission to give the bonuses.

Dodd, you will recall, got more money from AIG than any other elected official.

Obama was the second largest recipient. Did Obama know about the provision?

The GOP should just be sitting back and watching this mess play out. They voted against the Dodd provision. They voted against the stimulus.

The Democrats own this. They own the bonuses. They own AIG. Let them deal with it.

Senator Barack Obama received a $101,332 bonus from American International Group in the form of political contributions according to Opensecrets.org. The two biggest Congressional recipients of bonuses from the A.I.G. are - Senators Chris Dodd and Senator Barack Obama.

The A.I.G. Financial Products affiliate of A.I.G. gave out $136,928, the most of any AIG affiliate, in the 2008 cycle.  I would note that A.I.G.’s financial products division is the unit that wrote trillions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps and “misjudged” the risk.

The Washington Post reports a “mob effect” at A.I.G financial products division:

A tidal wave of public outrage over bonus payments swamped American International Group yesterday. Hired guards stood watch outside the suburban Connecticut offices of AIG Financial Products, the division whose exotic derivatives brought the insurance giant to the brink of collapse last year. Inside, death threats and angry letters flooded e-mail inboxes. Irate callers lit up the phone lines. Senior managers submitted their resignations. Some employees didn’t show up at all.

With the anger and rage that is being exhibited against A.I.G., perhaps the bonuses Obama received from A.I.G. explain Obama’s A.I.G crocodile tears.

Now that the Wall street Journal has revealed that A.I.G. paid bonuses of $1 million or more to 73 employees, it’s time to ask if recipients of A.I.G. “bonuses,” including President Obama, will give back what now ought to be taxpayer money?