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Donald Trump attempted a dramatic boardroom takeover at this weekend’s high profile conclave of conservative activists, pulling the chair out from under Mitt Romney and setting the tone before a packed house at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I want to stop our nation from being the whipping post for the rest of the world,” Trump said at the unofficial kickoff of the 2012 Republican presidential sweepstakes. For Romney, it was if the New York real estate mogul was sending him a message made famous by his hit TV show, “The Apprentice” — You’re fired! And many in the crowd...

There more things change the more things change the same. For the second year in a row, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Tex., emerged as the potential presidential candidate that an active group of conservative activists want to see at the top of the Republican ticket in 2012. Paul won this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll by a healthy margin, getting 30 percent of the vote. His nearest competitor was former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who won 23 percent of the vote. Most of the other possible candidates wound up in the low single digits. Still, Romney's finish was relatively...

The results of the CPAC straw poll of presidential candidates are in, and the winner is Ron Paul, with 30% of the vote. Mitt Romney was the runner-up with 23%, and all other candidates tied with about 6% each. 84% of the voters identified themselves as fiscal conservatives, placing their highest priority on economic growth and restraining the growth of government.

Just five years ago, the Conservative Political Action Conference still had a Doris Day feel, like a time warp to 1978, when everyone was still filled with nostalgia for 1961. Pat Boone was the musical act, and he played before a screen that showed flapping flags, rhyming the word “God” with the word “God.” It was an old stale act. This year, I have seen several attendees with earlobe-stretching hoops, and Gary Johnson, a former New Mexico governor, got rousing applause from the main hall for declaring, “Legalize marijuana.” When Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, two icons of old conservatism,...

Just how much of a draw is Sarah Palin among conservatives? A Palin impersonator drew dozens of excited, mostly young CPAC attendees around her in the hotel lobby here just as Mitt Romney, the GOP's ostenisble frontrunner, was taking the stage. Continue Reading Informed that it was not Palin, many of the gawkers shrugged and kept pushing forward with cameras and cellphones raised in the air just to glimpse the Alaskan doppleganger. And from a distance, the impersonator did look the part - the hair, the glasses, the red suit. Up close, though, was a different story. She resembled Palin...

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is the latest Republican to decline an invitation to next month's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual gathering that typically attracts the nation's most prominent conservative names. A spokesman for Rubio said the conference isn't on the senator's schedule, telling the St. Petersburg Times that Rubio will be focused on his work in the Senate during CPAC week and will then "return to Florida for a working weekend."