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Extra, Extra! Republican Paul Ryan is an advocate for political correctness! That’s right. In commenting about Trump’s remarks concerning Judge Curiel, Ryan told George Stephanopoulos: “That comment is beyond the pale. That’s not political correctness. Suggesting that a person can’t do their job because of their race or ethnicity… that’s not a politically incorrect thing to do; that’s just a wrong thing to say.” For decades, conservatives and other decent, law-abiding Americans, have labored under the yoke of political correctness. They have been publicly shunned, lost jobs, had careers ruined, and been kicked out of universities. Why? Simply for exercising...

Reports are circulating that Meg Whitman, a high-profile Republican donor, is considering supporting Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump. Whitman reportedly attended an exclusive Republican summit hosted by Mitt Romney on Friday. A source told ABC that Whitman asked, "'Is it not reasonable to support Hillary Clinton?' given all the awful things Trump has said." Whitman, the CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, has a long history with the Republican Party. She was the finance co-chair for Romney's and Chris Christie's presidential campaigns,and she launched an unsuccessful bid for California governor in 2010.

The most disturbing part of the Donald Trump phenomenon is the abysmal reaction of others on the right and across our political-media landscape. It is not merely left-wing protesters who turn violent or Trumpkin racists and anti-Semites on social media who should alarm us. Rather, it should concern us when so many wake up to say, "Let's do the wrong, cowardly thing." Imagine if: • Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus never went on bended knee to Trump with his worthless pledge but instead routinely denounced his utterances. • Republican candidates with no real chance to win chose not to...

None of this strikes me as true. How has Trump’s entry changed the race?It created a false zombie front-runner. He’s dead politically, he’ll never be president of the United States, ever. By definition I don’t think you can be a front-runner if you’re totally un-electable. I think there’s there an a-priori logic problem in that.Has he been dead since he got in?I think so, yeah. So there’s no meaningful outcome to it. But the question is what kind of catalyst is it? It’s a huge amount of noise and so we’re trying to find the signal in all this. You’ve...

The irony of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) is that he claims to be the champion of outsiders, yet he is as conventional a politician as you will find. For starters, he’s got two Ivy League degrees and worked outside government (Senate, Texas solicitor general, Bush 43 staffer, court clerk) for a fraction of his adult life (less than 30 percent or five of 18 years). He is as much a cause of partisan gridlock and dysfunction as anyone, taking joy in riling up the base and blaming liberal elites, fanning the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment (both his own determination to...

A top establishment Republican donor reportedly wants Donald Trump banned from the first presidential debate... And that is not sitting well with some of the party’s top donors, many of whom favor pro-amnesty legislation and do want to see their establishment darlings like Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) 80% challenged on the issue. According to an Associated Press report, “Republican donor John Jordan said Monday that GOP leaders should take steps to block Trump’s access to the first presidential debate in early August.” “Someone in the party ought to start some sort of petition saying, ‘If Trump’s going...

Rupert Murdoch apparently won't be supporting Donald Trump's presidential campaign. The Australian-born media mogul, who became a U.S. citizen in 1985, on Sunday became the latest to decry the Republican candidate's comments about Mexican immigrants in a message posted to Twitter.

Rick Santorum may have his faults as a potential presidential contender, but he is dead right about Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.): “Do we really want someone with this little experience? And the only experience they have basically — not [Sen. Marco] Rubio, but Cruz and Paul because I don’t think Rubio is going to go — is bomb throwing? Do we really want somebody who’s a bomb thrower, with no track record of any accomplishments?” Cruz may suffer from a lack of consistency, an erratic foreign policy and a grossly inappropriate temperament, but he does, to...

In the wake of the vote reelecting John Boehner as House speaker, it is worth noting a statement put out by rock-rib conservative Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.): Some people wrote me encouraging me to vote for Louie Gohmert. I like Louie, but let’s be clear: Louie Gohmert was – is – never ever going to be Speaker of the House. I respect his passion, but he isn’t a credible candidate. That was proved today by the fact that he got three votes, despite all the national media attention he managed to grab. My colleague who got the most anti-Boehner votes...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) is on a roll. First, his team insists Republicans can win the presidency without independent voters (we really must be failing to teach math in this country), and now he says he is an innovative start-up: On Fox News’s Special Report on Tuesday, host Bret Baier asked the senator how he’s handling the criticism. “You know, in some level, I’ll agree with what they said,” Cruz said. “I am not trying to play the rules of Washington. Because I think Washington’s broken — I think it’s profoundly broken — and I think the only answer is...

At the National Rifle Association's annual meeting on Saturday night, Sarah Palin told the crowd that she approves of torturing prisoners — and maybe converting them? "If I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists," she said, to raucous applause. Problem is, Palin's not in charge anymore. Though the NRA devotees appreciated her sentiment, Palin just doesn't command crowds the way she used to, The Washington Post's Robert Costa reports on Monday. "These days many followers ... have moved on," and she's a "diminished figure in the Republican Party," Costa writes. "Even as she...

Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz, a Tea Party favorite, slammed Newt Gingrich today as an “unreliable conservative” and a “convenient conservative.” Speaking in a conference call with reporters arranged by the Romney campaign, Chaffetz, who has endorsed Romney, pointed to an audio clip from 2009 unearthed by Verum Serum this weekend that shows Gingrich supporting an individual mandate as a reason the former Speaker was less conservative than Romney. “For all the rhetorical barbs, Speaker Gingrich has thrown at Gov. Romney, this certainly leads one to believe that he’s fairly hypocritical on this issue,” Chaffetz said. “He was advocating an individual...

After Gingrich Newt scored a surprise blow-out victory in South Carolina last week, the former Massachusetts governor not only unleashed a political broadside of epic proportions. "It not about winning here anymore," one Romney staffer told BuzzFeed. "It's about destroying Gingrich — and it's working." After two standout debate performances that put him up 9 points in recent polls, Romney is keeping the pressure on Gingrich, looking to score a blow-out victory of his own here. To that end, Romney has rolled out a team of surrogates in the Sunshine State to take the fight to Gingrich in person: from...

MIAMI — Facing the unthinkable here just seven days ago — a second loss in a row to Newt Gingrich — Mitt Romney’s campaign team hatched a two-part plan to win in Florida: make Newt mad and Mitt meaner. [snip] If Mr. Romney does win here on Tuesday, it will have been through a blistering and unrelenting series of attacks. His campaign has pressed everything at its disposal into service to eviscerate Mr. Gingrich, painting him as an erratic, unreliable Washington insider in mailings and television advertisements, at two critical debates here (where his team made sure Mr. Romney had...

Port St. Lucie, Fla. -- Whether or not he wins Florida, Newt Gingrich says, "I will go all the way to the convention. I expect to win the nomination." Mitt Romney's surrogates have been appearing at every one of Newt Gingrich's rallies in the Sunshine State, but the tactic hasn't seemed to draw much reaction from the former House speaker, who on Saturday turned most of his attention to President Obama on the stump. He focused on three things "that matter to Florida ... jobs, housing, and space." (snip) "People ask me what can we do about getting more jobs...

Forget the indirect attacks and distant exchanges between the Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich campaigns through the media. The Romney campaign pledged this week to run a “a full racketing operation,” right in Gingrich territory. A source close to the campaign told ABC News there will be a Romney surrogate at every public Gingrich event in Florida standing by to rebut Gingrich’s speeches to the media. “The campaign is entering a phase now where we are defining the terms of the Florida race,” a Romney staffer said. The staffer said it wasn’t a sign of fear on the Romney campaign’s...

As Mitt Romney increasingly mixes it up with his primary rivals, he's unleashing Chris Christie to help take on the competition. The New Jersey governor was on the campaign trail for Romney in Florida on Thursday, and had some choice words for his new chief antagonist in the GOP race, Newt Gingrich. "Speaker Gingrich has never run anything," Christie said when asked to compare the two candidates, according to FLDemocracy2012.com, a Scripps Media project. "He's been a legislator. I have to tell you – I don’t think being a legislator is the best calling card." "Look at the guy we...

A journalist yesterday asked me a thought-provoking question: Why does Sarah Palin command so much media attention? By most measures, she currently stands about equal in the Republican field alongside Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and only a little ahead of Newt Gingrich. Yet the cable shows do not erupt when Mitt Romney makes a speech. Newt Gingrich is on Twitter almost every day, but his messages don’t make news. So why Palin? Five guesses. 1) She polarizes. Modern media culture favors contrast and conflict. Sarah Palin serves both up by the bucketful. Most presidential candidates present themselves as gracious and...

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown — a sometime Tea Party darling who’s been tagged as a potential 2012 target after the Bay State’s Democratic landslide in last week’s elections — yesterday downplayed the importance of the controversial conservative movement and its new foothold in Washington. “I’m not sure who they are,” said Brown when asked about the election of senators with reported Tea Party ties. Brown said he’s known U.S. Sens.-elect Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) before the election and, “They don’t come and say, ‘Hey, I’m a Tea Party member.’ They come and say, ‘Hey, I’m a U.S....

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) cost the GOP control of the Senate, a powerful House Republican said. Rep. Spencer Bachus (Ala.) said that Tea Party-backed candidates whom Palin endorsed underperformed against their Democratic rivals, costing the GOP key pickup opportunities. "The Senate would be Republican today except for states [in which Palin endorsed candidates] like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware," Bachus said at a local Chamber of Commerce event last week, the Shelby County Reporter wrote Sunday. "Sarah Palin cost us control of the Senate." Bachus' is one of the most visible Republicans to criticize Palin for her political activity...