Originally, Linda McMahon was scheduled to appear on my show today, but when I had the opportunity to do a drive-time morning show for The Patriot this morning (as well as next Tuesday), we changed this to a podcast interview instead.  In the recorded interview, Linda discusses her surprising polling success, chalking it up in large part to the dissatisfaction of Connecticut voters with the political establishment and the need for a fresh, private-sector perspective.  It hasn’t hurt that her opponent, Richard Blumenthal, has made one unforced error after another (about which Jim Vicevich has more today).  In the end, it all comes down to the economy and doing the retail campaigning, Linda tells me today:

As if to emphasize the necessity of keeping Blumenthal out of the Senate and reducing, if not eliminating, the Democratic majority, Barack Obama proved Blumenthal wrong in his assertion that cap-and-trade is “dead.” Obama told Rolling Stone, in a segment of the interview noted by Politico, that Obama fully intends on pushing forward with his global-warming agenda in 2011:

In an interview published Tuesday by Rolling Stone magazine, Obama lamented how the economic crisis contributed to this year’s Senate stalemate over a comprehensive bill to cap carbon dioxide emissions and establish renewable power standards.

But for the first time, Obama publicly committed to trying again next year.

“One of my top priorities next year is to have an energy policy that begins to address all facets of our overreliance on fossil fuels,” Obama said. “We may end up having to do it in chunks, as opposed to some sort of comprehensive omnibus legislation. But we’re going to stay on this because it is good for our economy, it’s good for our national security and, ultimately, it’s good for our environment.”

Obama didn’t elaborate on specific pieces he’d like to see move in the next version of energy and climate legislation, but ideas floating around on Capitol Hill include a nationwide standard for renewables and a limit just on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Well, if we want to make the economy even worse, by all means a limit on energy production is the right policy. If, however, we want our economy to recover, we need to have enough energy production to support an expansion at a price low enough to keep growth from getting stunted. Put that on top of the lack of actual, irrefutable scientific data showing a causative relationship between carbon emissions and global warming — which is now getting renamed global climate disruption precisely because the IPCC and other anthropogenic global-warming hysterics can’t show a causative link — and we have American consumers penalizing themselves into economic stagnation over a hypothesis, supported by computer models that have yet to correctly predict weather patterns at all.

In an election between Leftist hobby horses and economic growth, the latter will win in 2010 — even in Connecticut.