A group of tea partiers is hoping Sarah Palin will challenge Democratic Sen. Mark Begich in 2014, when he is up for reelection. “We know that, with Sarah in the Senate, conservatives across America can rest a little easier at night knowing that she’s at the watch,” said Todd Cefaratti of the Tea Party Leadership Fund, in a fundraising email to supporters.”You and I both know that Sarah Palin is a fighter who will stand up to Harry Reid and his pals in the Senate to protect our Constitution in issues like amnesty, gun control and our nation’s crushing debt,” Cefaratti wrote.But the Los Angeles Times, which obtained the email, reports that Palin might not have the “clear path” to victory that the Tea Party Leadership Fund says she does. A February PPP poll had Begich’s approval rating at 49 percent, and winning in a potential match-up against Palin by a margin of 54-37 percent.Continue Reading… … Read More
Tea Party Caucus to relaunch
Now that she’s safely back in office after a tough reelection fight, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., the chair of the House Tea Party Caucus, is relaunching the group on Thursday, after an extended period of inactivity that began around July.From Roll Call:About a dozen representatives and several senators are expected to attend the event in the Rayburn House Office Building at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, organizers said. Co-hosting the event is TheTeaParty.net and helping organize it is consulting firm kellenPROJECTS. Also, a competing tea party caucus founded this Congress by South Carolina Republican Rep. Mick Mulvaney was abandoned when the lawmaker realized Bachmann would be restarting her caucus after all.The event will focus on “how to effectively educate the public on Tea Party ideals and discuss the Tea Party’s legislative activities for the year,” according to Roll Call, which obtained the invite.Continue Reading… … Read More
Rematch for Bachmann
Jim Graves, the Democratic hotel magnate who fought Rep. Michele Bachmann to within 4,500 votes last year, announced today that he’s gearing up to challenge the firebrand conservative again in 2014. “These days Congress is all about and scoring political points rather than actually solving problems and Minnesota’s 6th District — my home — is losing out because of that more than anywhere. I’m not interested in celebrity, only in solutions,” Graves said in a press release. “As a businessman who has balanced budgets and created jobs, I’m running to work with both sides to find ways to balance the budget, keep our promises to seniors, create jobs and strengthen the middle class.”Continue Reading… … Read More
Sarah Palin thinks she’s Margaret Thatcher
Here’s how a former half-term governor described Margaret Thatcher in National Review today. Sound familiar?She was at heart a populist taking on the Conservative party’s old guard, who disdainfully referred to her as “That Woman.” The disdain was mutual. She referred to them as “the not so grand grandees.” As Thatcher later said, “It didn’t matter what they called me as long as I got the job done. I mean, to me they were ‘Those Grandees.’ They just don’t know what life is like. They haven’t been through it. And eventually if they didn’t help our cause, they had to go. But it didn’t bother me too much that they were patronizing like that. Frankly, the people, who are the true gentlemen, deal with others for what they are, not who their father was. Let’s face it: Maybe it took ‘That Woman’ to get things done, and the real reason why they said it was because they knew they just hadn’t got it within them to see things through.”Continue Reading… … Read More
Colonial Williamsburg: Where the Tea Party gets schooled
So I just got back from a family vacation at Colonial Williamsburg, the Virginia granddaddy of all American “living history” museums. (They hate the term “theme park,” and those people in 18th-century costume are “actor-interpreters,” not characters.) The first thing to say is that we all had a great time: My kids studied up on Revolutionary War spycraft, watched several terrific programs of 18th-century theater, and delivered orations from the Declaration of Independence late at night in our hotel room. We learned how bricks and barrels were made in that pre-industrial age, and my nine-year-old daughter signed up in the Virginia militia to fight the British. (Historical accuracy be damned: One of her drill sergeants was female too.)Continue Reading… … Read More
What is Marco Rubio up to?
It was the mystery left in the wake of the Sunday shows: just before Sen. Chuck Schumer was set to tell “Meet the Press” that the so-called “Gang of Eight” is on the verge of a deal on immigration reform, Sen. Marco Rubio sent out a statement headlined: “Rubio: No Final Agreement on Immigration Legislation Yet.” It read, in part, “Reports that the bipartisan group of eight senators have agreed on a legislative proposal are premature.”Schumer went ahead and kvelled about being close to a deal, anyway. “With the agreement between business and labor, every major policy issue has been resolved on the ‘Gang of Eight,’” he told NBC’s Chuck Todd. A GOP Gang member, Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, sounded more cautiously optimistic. “We’re much closer with labor and business agreeing on this guest-worker plan,” Flake told Todd. “But that doesn’t mean we’ve crossed every ‘I’ or dotted every ‘T’ or vice versa.” They were referring to a deal on the status of low-skilled immigrant workers brokered Friday night by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and U.S. Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donohue.Continue Reading… … Read More
