Talkingpointsmemo.com has an interesting catch from this weekend’s CPAC convention:

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told a crowd at CPAC on Saturday that he could “empathize” with the suicide bomber who last week attacked an IRS office in Austin, and encouraged his listeners to “implode” other IRS offices, according to a witness. source: TalkingPointsMemo.com

As I said later last week I believe it is incredibly dangerous to hold different standards of terrorism based on relatively minor attributes of the perpetrator of the violence.   If Republicans want to reduce the tax burden on citizens, do the obvious reduce the size of government — all government including military spending, as Ron Paul advocates.

[...]

Ron Paul, the 2008 Republican candidate for president won the 2010 CPAC straw poll. Ron Paul is a congressman from Texas who has run for president as both a member of the Libertarian and Republican parties.

I find it quite interesting that Paul won the straw poll given his outspoken views on military non-interventionism — that pretty much puts him in an anti-thetical position to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (Cheney received a rousing reception at CPAC). Given Cheney is probably the most pro-interventionist foreign policy person in the previous Bush administration, this really seems like a stark turn.

Additionally, Paul Broke Mitt Romney’s streak of winning CPAC. I wonder if this had to do more with the pool of voters this year as opposed to a change in the direction of CPAC itself.

Here’s the summary of the voting:

Ron Paul 31%

Mitt Romney 22 %

Sarah Palin 7 %

Tim Pawlenty 6 %

Mike Pence 5 %

Newt Gringrich 4  %

Mike Huckabee 4 %

Update I: 2,935 votes (out of 10K+ attendees), evidently Ron Paul was booed when he was announced as the winner.

The NYtimes “The Caucus” blog catches an interesting speaker at CPAC…

How can conservatives win the youth vote that overwhelmingly went for Barack Obama in 2008? At the Conservative Political Action Conference, apparently, some are betting on using racial stereotypes.

In a panel appealing to conservatives under 30, Jason Mattera, author of a forthcoming book called “Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation,” likened the gathering to “our Woodstock.”

NYtimes the Caucus

It’s interesting CPAC still chooses to go after people in such stark racial terms and all the while talk about freedom and liberty. While I don’t think this speaker is representative of CPAC, you wonder how comforting these sorts of images are to non-Evangelical candidates like Romney.