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DES MOINES, Iowa — Looking past Iowa, Mitt Romney defended his conservative credentials Tuesday as he anticipated escalated attacks in New Hampshire and beyond from his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. “Perhaps people forget that I ran for president four years ago, you may recall that along with Mike Huckabee I was the conservative alternative to John McCain,” Romney said on Fox News Channel. He was responding to rival Newt Gingrich, who had accused Romney of lying about his moderate record. Romney said Gingrich, who has fallen in polls in the face of negative attack ads by Romney’s allies,...

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Sarah Palin may have been making the case for herself with a Facebook post last night arguing that a president must be "a strong chief executive [who] has been entrusted with real authority in the past and has achieved a proven track record of positive measurable accomplishments." But she also sounds an awful lot like Tim Pawlenty, whose indictment against Michele Bachmann is that three-term member of Congress gives a good speech but hasn't actually accomplished anything. Wrote Palin: "Leaders are expected to give good speeches, but leadership is so much more than oratory. Real leadership requires deeds even more...

According to the latest polls, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s political popularity trajectory is heading south. It was inevitable given our 24/7 fame-obsessed culture which feeds on new personalities and controversy to fuel the celebrity media machine. Once Sarah Palin resigned from her office as Alaska governor, she left that respected “higher platform” reserved for our elected leaders and crossed over into celebrity jungle. There, she willingly subjected herself to the unforgiving forces of media pop culture, where the masses are easily bored. And now, without a new hit show, movie, book, clothing line, charity cause, or fragrance, Palin is...

Delaware’s Republican Party both violated its own Bylaws and caused the Delaware Republican Party’s losses in the November 2, 2010, general election, a new analysis reveals. The Bylaws of Delaware’s Republican Party require in Article X, Section 1 that: “These rules of the Republican Party of the State of Delaware shall be in compliance and consistent with the Rules of the National Republican Party….” However, Rule No. 11 of the Rules of the National Republican Party states: “(a) The Republican National Committee shall not, without the prior written and filed approval of all members of the Republican National Committee from...

(CNN) - Sen. John Cornyn is expected Tuesday to formally make a bid for another two years as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. GOP sources confirm to CNN that the Texas Republican will put his name up for nomination for re-election as NRSC chairman, as the Senate Republican Conference meets behind closed doors. According to the sources, the two-term senator is not expected to face any opposition in his bid to remain as NRSC chairman, and has already secured the support of a number of new Republican Senators, including Marco Rubio of Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Rob...

Sarah Palin, the biggest loser. That seems to be the consensus of the grandees inhabiting Washington and New York and pockets of glitter beyond. There is a variety of interpretations of the midterm Republican wave emanating from the wine bars of upper Manhattan and the salons of Georgetown, but most include the notion that for Sarah Palin, this election was the political equivalent of the hit ABC show "The Biggest Loser." When push came to shove, she stood on...principle? Media and political elites may disagree on the many consequences of what the president called a "shellacking" by the voters, but...

You know it is a slow news week when something which happens on CNN’s dreadful “Parker & Spitzer” show makes “news,” but that is what happened when I appeared on the not-long-for-this-world program last Thursday. The full story behind the appearance may be even more interesting than why it was deemed by many to be “buzz worthy.” The reason I was asked on the show was that my latest documentary film, “Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted,” is in the process of being re-released nationwide in a truly unprecedented fashion (a major development that is being...

In the promo fluff for its future flop, CNN calls Kathleen Parker a "conservative" commentator. So what's a "conservative" in CNN's book? Someone who, when accused of taking part in the media assassination of Sarah Palin, brags that she didn't merely take part—she "led it." Supposed conservative Kathleen Parker made her bizarre boast on this evening's Parker Spitzer. It came in the course of her interview of John Ziegler, creator of the documentary "Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted.” While denying she had been "duped" by Obama, Parker admitted that during the campaign she "bought into...

WASHINGTON — A leading House Republican says Sarah Palin cost the GOP control of the Senate. Questioned about those comments on Tuesday, a spokesman for Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama said the remarks had been taken out of context but didn't retract them. Bachus, in line to become chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, initially blamed Palin last week at a local Chamber of Commerce luncheon. According to the Shelby County Reporter, he said the Senate would be in Republican hands if not for losses by tea party candidates endorsed by the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential...

'The people have spoken, the bastards." That would be how Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill are feeling. The last two years of their leadership have been rebuffed. The question for the Democratic Party: Was it worth it? Was it worth following the president and the speaker in their mad pursuit of liberal legislation the country would not, could not, like? And what will you do now? Which path will you take? The Republicans saw their own establishment firmly, sharply put down. The question for them: What will you do to show yourselves worthy of the bounty?...

Thanks Karl Rove. Thanks Mike Castle. Thanks GOP elites. Conservative Christine O’Donnell carried the tea party voters. She bested the bearded Marxist with independents. But, she did not carry enough REPUBLICANS to win in Delaware tonight. What an absolute shame.

For many Republicans, the bright, golden haze of Election Day is marred by a thunderhead on the horizon -- the increasingly erratic political interventions of Sarah Palin. In the past, Palin embodied the populist style of the Tea Party movement while espousing a fairly mainstream Republican ideology. On economic, social and foreign policy, Palin seldom strayed from a simplified, popularized Reaganism. The mama grizzly may have been ferocious, but her talking points came from the Heritage Foundation instead of from darker corners of the right. But this election season has called that perception into question. Palin's endorsement of Christine O'Donnell...

Check out the video with the Greta interview to see Palin's response to the latest Politico "anonymous source/GOP insider" hit-piece: The page also has full videos of Palin's interview with Wallace this morning and Megyn Kelley with Bret Baier earlier this evening. Original Article: Next for GOP leaders: Stopping Palin http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/44449.html

Top Republicans in Washington and in the national GOP establishment say the 2010 campaign highlighted an urgent task that they will begin in earnest as soon as the elections are over: Stop Sarah Palin. Interviews with advisers to the main 2012 presidential contenders and with other veteran Republican operatives make clear they see themselves on a common, if uncoordinated, mission of halting the momentum and credibility Palin gained with conservative activists by plunging so aggressively into this year’s midterm campaigns. There is rising expectation among GOP elites that Palin will probably run for president in 2012 and could win the...

Top Republicans in Washington and in the national GOP establishment say the 2010 campaign highlighted an urgent task that they will begin in earnest as soon as the elections are over: Stop Sarah Palin. Interviews with advisers to the main 2012 presidential contenders and with other veteran Republican operatives make clear they see themselves on a common, if uncoordinated, mission of halting the momentum and credibility Palin gained with conservative activists by plunging so aggressively into this year’s midterm campaigns. There is rising expectation among GOP elites that Palin will probably run for president in 2012 and could win the...

Karl Rove, Republican political strategist and the general behind George Bush's presidential victories, has been taking pot shots at some conservative favorites. His latest target, former Alaska governor and Tea Party darling, Sara Palin. Palin, Mr. Rove told Britain's The Daily Telegraph, lacked the "gravitas" to be president in 2012. He dissed her new Alaska reality series as a bad political move. “With all due candour, appearing on your own reality show on the Discovery Channel, I am not certain how that fits in the American calculus of 'that helps me see you in the Oval Office’,” Rove told the...

Karl Rove, the former senior adviser to George W Bush, has cast serious doubt on Sarah Palin's viability as a White House candidate, questioning if the American people thought she had the "gravitas" for the "most demanding job in the world". Expressing the strongest public reservations about the conservative star made by any senior Republican figure, Mr Rove said it was unlikely that voters would regard someone starring in a reality show as presidential material. In two weeks, the former governor of Alaska launches a cable television series exploring her home state's wilderness. "With all due candour, appearing on your...

I've been assuming for a while that Sarah Palin is fairly likely to run for president, and reasonably likely to get the nomination if she does, and then if the economy is still bad she could win and then the country will crumble and suffer some apocalyptic disaster and the survivors will envy the dead. Anyway, Jonathan Martin has a terrific piece collecting some reporting about the flakiness, bordering on total dysfunctionality, of Palin's political operation. This is a huge relief: Take, for example, the case of Palin’s interaction with the campaign of Sen. Chuck Grassley, an iconic figure in...

Conservatives need to understand what is at stake and get their act together. The misunderstandings revolving around Sarah Palin and the Tea Party appear to be ubiquitous. Canada, where I live and write, is no exception to this tarnished rule. Sarah Palin is generally regarded as a hyper-emotional hussy whose message is purely reactive rather than proactive, while the Tea Party is supposedly vitiated by a lowest common denominator of right-wing vehemence, unbecoming religiosity, and a simplistic attitude toward political reality. This is strangely the case among many conservative intellectuals as well. The acclaimed commentator and beltway insider David Frum,...