Moderate Republicans’ Threat: Paul Ryan for Speaker—or We Quit

Some Re­pub­lic­ans are so des­per­ate for Paul Ry­an to step up as the next speak­er of the House that they’ve star­ted talk­ing about re­tir­ing if he doesn’t, ac­cord­ing to a group that works on be­half of the House GOP’s more mod­er­ate mem­bers. --After Ry­an, those mem­bers have no second choice or even a second tier of po­ten­tial speak­ers, said Sarah Cham­ber­lain, chief op­er­at­ing and fin­an­cial of­ficer for the Re­pub­lic­an Main Street Part­ner­ship, a group that backs “main­stream” Re­pub­lic­ans and plans to spend mil­lions help­ing them pro­tect their House seats in 2016.

Read more at the National Journal
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Heading Right in Nevada

Ron Paul is not the president. He was never going to be the president. He was never even going to be the Republican party’s 2008 nominee for president. This is not disputed. But it’s also true that his perennial and perennially ill-fated presidential bids changed America’s political topography in ways that East Coast political observers may not yet fully understand.

Read more at National Review
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A brawl the GOP needs

WASHINGTON POST, 11/20/2009 by David S. Broder (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler - For Sarah Palin, with her personality and history, to tell Rush Limbaugh that Republicans should welcome primary fights within their own ranks is hardly surprising. As much as it may pain her many critics, she also has a lot of history on her side. ∴ Many Republicans, looking at the recent fiasco in New York's 23rd Congressional District, argue that the endorsement by Palin and her talk-radio buddies of a rigid right-winger running on the Conservative Party ticket cost Republicans a House seat they had held for more than a century. They worry that the populist anti-establishment "rogues" like Palin will kill GOP prospects for a comeback in 2010 by backing ideologues in many other primaries and scaring off independents and moderate Republicans. ∴ They are wasting their breath on Palin, who got to be governor of Alaska by knocking off incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in a Republican primary in 2006. When she told Limbaugh, "What I appreciate about the Republican Party [is] we have contested, aggressive, competitive primaries," she had that fight in mind. Read more at the Washington Post... Read More......