Posts by David Weigel

Marc Ambinder has a read on which politicos are close to, or advising, Sarah Palin.
Pam Pryor, a former RNC senior adviser, leads Palin’s political action committee and is orchestrating her outreach to social conservatives. Randy Scheunenmann remains her policy maestro, with informal assistance from his Orion Strategies colleague Michael Goldfarb, the former Weekly Standard writer [...]

The death of Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) is a blow to Democratic efforts to pass the Senate version of health care reform in the House — they’re now down one vote from a swing district Democrat willing to make the tough choice.
But what might turn out to be an insurmountable problem is the intransigence of [...]

The new Public Policy Polling numbers on the Texas gubernatorial primary have first-time candidate Debra Medina surging against Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas) and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), from nowhere to 24 percent support.
Medina is clearly riding the wave of discontent with the Republican establishment. Among primary voters who disapprove of the job the GOP [...]

Some important news from Andy Barr:
The South Carolina Republican Party announced Monday that it’s uniting with tea party groups in the state to share resources, coordinate messaging and push the GOP in a more conservative direction.

Here’s an extra anecdote from my National Tea Party Convention notebook. As I reported (and tweeted) on Saturday night, many people arrived at the Sarah Palin-headlined banquet — which they could attend for $549 as convention ticket-holders or for $349 if they only wanted to attend the banquet — with copies of “Going Rogue” and [...]

Two reporters who filed a ton of great, context-building coverage of the National Tea Party Convention were Jillian Bandes of Townhall.com and Lydia DePillis of The New Republic. Archives of their coverage are worth digging into, including DePillis’ observation about how the extremely limited number of African-American speakers and attendees worked hard to absolve the [...]

An interesting revelation from an online reader chat with The Washington Post’s “Washington Sketch” columnist.
My policy in each presidential race is to vote for the best candidate who is not on the ballot… so I voted for McCain in 2000, when Bush and Gore were on the ballot. I voted for Chuck Hagel in 2004, [...]

Last week, white nationalist writer Jared Taylor found himself at the center of a controversy when One People’s Project and Max Blumenthal reported on his 2006 appearance at an event attended by James O’Keefe. I’ve already written about this pretty extensively, but here’s more context — audio of the 2006 speeches from Taylor and National [...]

His son Rand’s campaign for Senate in Kentucky is going better than anyone could have expected — every Kentuckian I met at the National Tea Party Convention backed him — but Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is drawing three primary opponents for his own re-election bid. Ironically, all three are from the Tea Party movement, which, [...]

I’ve got some more interviews from Nashville and the National Tea Party Convention that didn’t make it into today’s story. Here is Roy Moore, the “Ten Commandments judge” who is making a second Republican bid for governor of Alabama this year, musing on a subject he’s had experience with: how talking about “revolution” and “tyranny” [...]