President Trump threw a potential wrench into congressional budget discussions Friday morning, threatening to veto the omnibus package that Republican leaders pushed to his desk just hours before to avoid a government shutdown.
Mona Charen shook this year’s Trumpified CPAC by the shoulders.
Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore made his first public appearance in nearly two weeks Monday night, dodging press and refusing to take questions at a rally in Henagar, Alabama, as he railed against “malicious and false attacks which reflect the immorality of our time.”
There’s a secret society in Silicon Valley. “Imagine an engineer at Google, let’s say he’s a conservative—a red meat conservative. Does he want to go work at the Heritage Foundation? Probably not,” Aaron Ginn, age 29, tells me at a “hacienda-style” D.C. bar called Mission, apparently in reference…
"I'm for the most conservative outcome that we can get,” Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told Politico’s Manu Raju last summer. House speaker John Boehner would agree with that goal. But critics to their right disagree. They are for the most conservative outcome they cannot get.
"The winner,” ABBA advised in 1980, “takes it all. The loser has to fall.” But not in Swedish politics, where proportional representation has created a smorgasbord of parties and has now contributed to a crisis of democracy.
Republicans have been slow in recognizing the real damage Donald Trump is doing to their party. The harm is not to the party’s image. What Trump has done is exacerbate the increasingly bitter rift between the party’s leaders and its grass roots. He’s made the GOP’s future dicey.
If you harbor any doubts that “conservative” is an all-purpose epithet in the press, then Simon Denyer, the Washington Post’s China bureau chief, will happily erase those doubts. Writing last week about threats to freedom of speech and scholarly inquiry in the former British colony of Hong Kong…
Roger Williams, a two-term congressman from the Dallas suburbs and longtime GOP fundraiser, will be the new chair of the House Conservatives Fund, a federal political action committee that’s been practically dormant for several cycles. The 65-year-old Williams, who cut his political teeth as a…
"So-called ‘sand movies,’ the term Hollywood sometimes uses for films set in Afghanistan and Iraq, have a terrible box office track record,” noted the New York Times. Or rather, they had a terrible box office track record. The release of American Sniper, a biopic about Iraq war veteran and…
It's a daunting moment for conservatives. To have even a chance for a semblance of a conservative future in the United States, we probably need (1) to elect a GOP Congress in 2014, which (2) does well enough in the majority for the next two years to (3) allow a Republican to win the White House in…
Lewes, Sussex
Darrell Issa asked Lois Lerner a serier of devastating questions about her involvment in the IRS's targeting of conservatives.
The boss made the argument this morning on ABC's This Week that conservatives have to be serious about making work pay:
Laura Ingraham, writing in the Washington Post:
Another conservative organization has endorsed congressman Paul Broun in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Georgia. The Madison Project, headed up by former Kansas congressman Jim Ryun, endorsed Broun over four other major GOP candidates.
Nineteen conservative activists have signed a letter to Republican leaders in Congress urging the body to fight to delay all of the provisions of Obamacare set to go into effect in 2014. (Update: the number of signatories has increased to 33.)
Can you name the attorney general of your state? I’m betting most folks can’t. There’s a reason. Campaigns for attorney general get scant media attention, causing voters to ignore down-ballot races. This is unfortunate, especially if you reside in a red state. Because in the past few years…
Career IRS employees have testified on Capitol Hill that the federal agency's chief counsel played a part in the scandal of targeting conseratives, the House Ways and Means Committee announced today in a press release. As a result, House Ways and Means Committee chair Dave Camp, House Oversight and…
Democrat Rep. Jim McDermott says the IRS should continue to use "BOLO lists," the Be On the Look Out lists that had agency officials targeting conservatives:
The IRS commissioner said today at a Capitol Hill hearing that the IRS's internal review doesn't contradict the inspector general's report that says progressives weren't targeted by the federal agency:
Charles Moore, writing in the Telegraph:
The Wall Street Journal reports
A longtime friend and savvy D.C. veteran emails with these worthwhile thoughts:
Kimberley Strassel, writing for the Wall Street Journal:
When the IRS went fishing for information from those Tea Party groups, it cast a very wide net.
Spokesman Jay Carney said some at the White House "were aware" of reports that IRS was targeting conservatives, but that nobody bothered to do anything about it:
Acting Labor Secretary Seth D. Harris addressed the Annual Legislative Conference of the International Association of Firefighters (IAFF) on Monday. As part of a scathing attack on attempts to reform public employee labor unions, Harris told a joke that he said was “making the rounds a few years…
Peter Wehner, writing for Commentary:
Ross Douthat, writing in the New York Times:
Are conservatives ready to coalesce around a presidential candidate? A new poll commissioned by the Committee for Work Families PAC finds that a vast majority of grassroots conservatives want the Republican party to unite around one particular candidate: Rick Santorum.
A new poll from Gallup today finds that a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents find Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney "acceptable" nominees for the GOP. For Gingrich, 62 percent of those polled said the former House speaker was an acceptable Republican nominee, while 54 percent…
Against Reform by John Pepall Toronto, 176 pp., $19.95
Who’s the most powerful conservative leader in the Americas, north and south? That may sound like a trick question, but it’s not. The answer is Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister who triumphed last week in an election that all but destroyed two opposition parties, the Liberals and the Bloc…
Mary Katharine Ham wonders if Krugman's Ph.D. is in Epistemic Closure, not economics. After reading this squib from Krugman, it's a legitimate question:
Conservatives are fond of denigrating Barack Obama as a foreign policy wimp, a president determined to demonstrate American weakness around the world, one begging for dialogue with dictators, and apologizing for past American sins, real and imagined. Even if overdrawn, there has been justification…