conservatives

David Hart has the scoop: The National Organization for Marriage spent more than $100,000 on get-out-the-vote efforts for the failed (yes, really) campaign of Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate in NY-23. NOM’s work for Hoffman — it also paid for hand-outs distributed by the Susan B. Anthony List — was a minor blow to [...]

Why has MSNBC embedded one of its top on-air talents with Sarah Palin’s book tour? That’s a good question, but I thought Norah O’Donnell’s grilling of a young Palin fan was a fair use of the network’s time. O’Donnell asked Jackie (no last name given), who was wearing a T-shirt criticizing the bailouts, if she [...]

Rand Paul, who has surprised a lot of people by becoming a real contender for a U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky, bows to political reality — he’s blasting the Obama administration’s policy on terror trials and proposing to “try, convict, and lock up terrorists in Guantanamo.”
Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), is one of the [...]

Rasmussen Reports finds Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) clinging to a two-point lead over a possible challenger, former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.). Chris Simcox, the leader of the anti-illegal immigration Minuteman Project who’s already in the race, scores 4 percent. All of this puts McCain, who has never been seriously challenged since he came to the [...]

A moment I nearly missed, from last night’s Sarah Palin appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show:

HANNITY: Look, you supported [Conservative Party candidate] Doug Hoffman in the New York 23. And when you did that, though, it was a big jolt to his campaign. As a matter of fact, according to the latest numbers [...]

That would be former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.).
Via Ben Smith, Thompson says the problem with the Afghanistan war isn’t the seven years that the Bush administration presided over its deep and thorough decline, but the seven weeks that the Obama administration has taken to review how to reverse the Bush administration’s errors. It’s a mystery [...]

Markos Moulitsas leaks (on Twitter) the results of the latest Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll, which has Marco Rubio surging against Gov. Charlie Crist (R-Fla.) in the 2010 GOP Senate primary. The trendlines:
Charlie Crist – 47 percent (-10)
Marco Rubio – 37 percent (+26)
Likely Democratic candidate Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.), according to Kos, is a non-factor in [...]

I wish that the results of this new survey from Public Policy Polling, via Eric Kleefeld, were more surprising.
Among Republicans… only 27% say Obama actually won the race, with 52% — an outright majority — saying that ACORN stole it, and 21% are undecided. Among McCain voters, the breakdown is 31%-49%-20%. By comparison, independents weigh [...]

The author of “The Persecution of Sarah Palin” gets a friendly profile in Doublethink, the in-house magazine of the libertarian America’s Future Foundation. (Disclosure: I’m a member and am speaking at an AFF event tonight.) If there’s a revelation, it’s that Palin’s biggest defender inside the beltway is less an ideologue, more a reporter who [...]

So what is defeated Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman doing by casting doubt on the results of the NY-23 special election? The most obvious answer, suggested by that letter, is fundraising. It was an expensive race, and Hoffman put some of his own cash on the line, so that makes sense. Why, though, make claims [...]