Saw this over the weekend, one guy writes in saying he’s surprised I didn’t come up with this. No - but I’m happy to pass it along.
This is Frank Rich in the NYT, writing about the race in upstate New York - where it looks like Conservative (not Republican) Party candidate Doug Hoffman is going to win […]

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Fight!
Last night on Fox News’ On the Record, host Greta Van Susteren asked Gingrich about the “heat” he’s been getting for endorsing Scozzafava, especially from Beck. Gingrich fired back, saying the right-wing support for Hoffman is based on “misinformation” and an abandonment of conservative values:
GINGRICH: I just find it fascinating that my many friends who […]

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Hooooo-boy…
So DemocracyCorps, the firm run by James Carville, among others, and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research has just completed a study titled “The Very Seperate World of Cosnervative Republicans: Why Republican Leaders will have Trouble Speaking to the Rest of America.” It shows, among other things, that the Republican base’s dislike of Obama dwarfs the left’s hatred of […]

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Excellent post by Glenn Greenwald on how conservatism and the GOP under Bush devolved into a cult of personality and how liberalism can avoid the same - and to a large extent already has, in that liberals are far more liable to criticize Obama than conservatives were to criticize Bush.
It’s interesting that one of the right’s […]

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So there’s this big teabag protest going on down in DC today, more of what we’ve seen. But this photo in particular, from the Washington Independent, really struck me:

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Spent the weekend camping up at Knoebel’s with seven other families, all with elementary-age (and younger) kids, a nice break from the intensive politics/online realm that consumes so much time and thought.
Still, politics intruded. One of the dads was a real conservative, and around the campfire the final night we got into it - mildly […]

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Via Nate Silver, a fascinating piece from Richard Posner:
My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, […]

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It’s amazing to me how quickly the tea party business dropped almost completely off the radar screen.

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Via Sullivan, Kristin Soltis at Pollster.com offers some advice to Republicans who might want to reach out to voters who aren’t are old and white:
Fundamental principles of the Republican Party - smaller government, lower taxes - are not embraced by younger voters at the same level as voters overall. Fiscal conservatives and Republicans have quite a bit […]

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The poor conservatives. They spent eight years defending the surveillance state, and screaming that anyone who dared say something against it had something to hide and was probably a traitor.
Now they are the targets of that surveillance. And wouldn’t you know - their opinion has changed!
So what’s the problem?  As the National Review/Bush-following-Right has been telling us […]

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One wonders if Eric Cantor and his fellow traveler conservatives were as concerned when a certain other party ruled the roost in Washington.
But I suppose it’s only “fascism” when the other guy does it.

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Update: Placed at the top rather than the bottom because this report comes from PF, one of our staffers who was there last night:
The tv stations WAY inflated the number of protesters at the ayers thing. when i left the speech, there were two, TWO, protesters (and they seemed to be just MU students) with signs standing […]

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Just stumbled into this one, “a five point plan for turning things around for conservatives. It won’t happen.” But it’s pretty good, particularly the last segment:
Like It Or Not, Government Is Part Of The Free Market
Regardless of who first noted that democracies can exist only “until the citizens discover they can vote themselves largesse out […]

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Or, why the GOP really is hosed:
Consider some of the components of the new demography. Between 1988 and 2008, the minority share of voters in presidential elections has risen by 11 percentage points, while the share of increasingly progressive white college graduate voters has risen by four points. But the share of white-working class voters, […]

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Why do right-wingers continually send me apocryphal stories, thinking that they’re going to change my mind?
The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America. The government keeps pushing us toward Communism/Socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax […]

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Remember David Vitter?
Earlier this year, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), who was named in the DC Madam prostitution scandal, co-sponsored the Marriage Protection Amendment, which would amend the Constitution to declare that marriage “shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.” Now, “as he seeks to shore up his bona fides with […]

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Atrios:
Oh, and conservatives? Thanks for giving Obama the power to tap your phones! bwahahaha
Which actually segues into a more serious thought here (hat tip: JN):

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Hm:
Top Democrats believe they have struck political gold by depicting Rush Limbaugh as the new face of the Republican Party, a full-scale effort first hatched by some of the most familiar names in politics and now being guided in part from inside the White House.
The strategy took shape after Democrats included Limbaugh’s name in an […]

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Reader mail:
I read you article today in the Lancaster paper
I think you and many liberal Democrats do not realize that most of us on the other side…do not like these new policies….
of giving bailouts to those who OVER BOUGHT…
my husband and I are retired, earn under $40,000.00 a year…..
we have seen our 401 go down […]

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This would be Rush at CPAC:
Everybody asks me — and I’m sure it’s been a focal point of your convention — well, what do we do, as conservatives? What do we do? How do we overcome this? … One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat them is with […]

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