Yesterday, as the Romney campaign was drowning in revelations and nagging questions about his time (and maybe-time) at Bain Capital, mysterious “sources” apparently decided it was an excellent time to call Matt Drudge and dangle a shiny pseudo-scoop in front of him. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he breathlessly reported at 7:30 p.m., is “now near the top of the list” to be Mitt’s vice-presidential choice. Why? Well, apparently because she gave a real nice speech at the Romney retreat in Utah recently.

In April, Rick Perry traveled to North Texas for a taping of televangelist James Robison’s TV show, Life Today. For six months, starting as soon as he was re-elected Texas governor in November 2010, Perry had been crisscrossing the country to promote his second book, Fed Up!, while testing the presidential waters with potential donors and conservative activists. His visit with Robison, a hellfire-breathing pastor known as “God’s hit man” (for “giving ’em so much hell nobody will ever want to go there”), had the potential to pay serious dividends.

Congressional Republicans are really eager to destroy any confidence foreign investors might have in the U.S. political system:

House Republicans are considering a plan to grant only incremental increases to the federal debt limit in a bid to extract more concessions on spending cuts and budgetary reform from the Obama administration.

The idea has a champion in Grover Norquist, the conservative activist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, who says he is “building allies” in the House Republican Conference to push for extending the debt limit every two months.

In addition to what Paul said about Grover Norquist's ridiculous interview with Ezra Klein, I'd like to add my appreciation for this bit of candor:

In 1993, when Bill Clinton's first budget was being debated, Republicans said over and over again that the tax provisions -- cuts for the middle class, increases for the wealthy -- would cause a "job-killing recession." You heard that term hundreds of times. Of course, that didn't happen. So how does a conservative interpret the events that ensued? This is from Ezra Klein's interview with anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist:

I doubt anyone would deny that at the moment, the Republican Party takes a harsher view of apostasy than their Democratic counterparts. This is partly because they represent a narrower ideological spectrum of constituents and officeholders, and partly because the party's conservatives recently discovered that they had a good deal of power to purge, which serves not only to get candidates more to their liking but also to make everyone else in the party live in fear of them. The Politico tells us that there's a potential problem in this area for some 2012 presidential candidates:

Look, I know this is easy pickins, but here's Michelle Malkin trying her best to paper over the false "constitutionalism" of the Mount Vernon Statement given the modern conservative movement's love for torture and disgust for due process. Essentially, Malkin wants to know that the signatories, who are supposed to be adherents to "constitutional conservatism," aren't so devoted to the Constitution that they'd want to follow it in the case of suspected terrorists.