http://theartfuldoddger.blogspot.com/2008/11/challengers-for-2010.html

More recently, Pete Schiff has emerged as a potential challenger. You can check out his site at http://www.schiff2010.com/. Though he hasn’t officially announced, it seems there is a pretty strong push being made to convince him to. He could be a good candidate, but his connection to Ron Paul could hurt him up here in Connecticut, where many CT voters think of Paul as a kook. Of course, these are the same people who think it has been a good idea to keep re-electing Dodd, so their judgment isn’t really worth much.

Governor Rell would probably give Dodd a run for his money, but that would almost certainly leave the Governor’s mansion to current AG Richard Blumenthal (D), which would really suck.

Rob Simmons and Chris Shays are currently looking for work. Simmons I think would be good. I was never a Shays fan, but just about anything is better than Dodd.

And I’ve mentioned it before, but I think Kevin O’Connor would be an interesting candidate. He was Connecticut’s US Attorney from 00-08, served as AG Gonzales’ COS post-scandals, and then as Mukasey’s Associate AG. He has campaign experience from a Congressional run in CT-01 in 1998. He’s a young, clean cut guy with no ethical baggage like Dodd, who has good name recognition and will be looking for work in a matter of days.

I am strongly in favor of potential challengers getting their names out there ASAP. Dodd is so vulnerable right now, it would be a shame to give him the opportunity to rehabilitate his image before the campaigning kicked in, and the media isn’t going to do enough to hold him accountable. So whoever it is, I hope they step up soon.

The bigger point is that a place like red state should be creating its own version of the 50 state strategy by thinking aloud and vetting possible candidates.

Conrad in North Dakota is another sweetheart deal and we should be ready to respond.

You can’t expect establishment groups like the Senate GOP campaign committee to think outside the box. But people at red state can and should.

It would be a huge contribution CTVoter, if you could post from time to time on possible Dodd opponents

As Francis Cianfrocca stated in his superb diary Obama Reinterprets the TARP–Dont Be Fooled

The TARP was a break-glass-in-case-of-fire program, originally conceived as a last-ditch response to an extreme emergency. That emergency materialized in mid-September as the institutional money markets crumbled in the wake of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

IMO, the Prime Directive, avoid a global financial collapse of catstrophic proportions, was achieved. (And surely a stronger surge in the socialist weenie sentiments this country has come to hold.) Which raises the question: Are we in a break-glass-in-case-of-fire today in January? I think not. And we can always break the glass later if necessary.

Francis went on to opine

It’s true that the implementation of the TARP plan was improvised. But for all Obama’s cheap criticism, there’s no way he could have done any better. In the end, the plan of forcing large banks to give issues of preferred stock to the Treasury in return for TARP cash was a fairly reasonable way to assure market participants that these banks would not fail.

If we had allowed that to happen, we might today be looking out at a world in which quite a few of the largest banks in the world were out of business and simply gone. Barack Obama’s stimulus plan would have been a nonstarter because there wouldn’t have been anyone to even give the stimulus money to. Things really were potentially that bad.

And remember, that in any transaction, as long as it’s not a give-away, you trade one item for another. With the TARP, taxpayers are trading cash today for rights to our cash back in the near future. (Yes, bearing some risk.) But with stimulus spending items, taxpayers are trading our cash today for items of dubious value, that localities have (defacto) decided not to fund is like blowing someone else’s money at the county fair. You come home w/ a lot of junk.

Think about if you had $500 and you blew it on dinner, movies, and presents for some girl you’re trying to impress. That’s one kind of spending. The other way you could spend it is to buy stock in a business corporation.

…(that’s) how the TARP funds are being used. They’re not being used to fund spending, consumption or pork-barrel projects. Those monies have been added to the balance sheets of financial institutions. They represent senior claims on the assets of the institutions. Yes, there is the potential for losses on these capital positions, but it’s not the same as ordinary spending.