Dr. Ben Carson is an up-and-comer among political conservatives.

He’s a brilliant neurosurgeon … but he needs an education on political decorum.

Dr. Carson spoke recently at the National Prayer Breakfast and used the occasion to criticize President Obama’s policies while the president was sitting nearby.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/288583-ben-carson-controversial-conservative-figure-hints-at-run-for-office

Carson responded to critics of his speech this way: “I don’t believe that expressing your opinion, regardless of who’s there, is being rude.” Actually, doc, it is rude. But it’s not really about the company you keep when you say these things. It’s the location and the setting that deserves attention.

The National Prayer Breakfast is meant to bring people of all faiths together for a time of prayer and ecumenical fellowship. It’s not a place for political posturing. Many other venues exist for such speechmaking. How about, say, a national political convention, a political action conference (such as CPAC), or a street-corner rally?

The doctor is said to be considering a run for office. He will give up his medical practice, reports indicate, and devote his time to public-policy-improvement pursuits. More power to him. I wish him well in that endeavor.

But let’s lay off the politics at the National Prayer Breakfast. As the saying goes: It ain’t the time or the place …

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush might have demonstrated Friday why he could face a rough road to winning his party’s presidential nomination in 2016.

He spoke of the Republican Party’s need to avoid be against everything and everyone.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/other-races/288569-jeb-bush-gop-cant-be-anti-everything

Bush delivered his admonition to the CPAC conference, which has heard from a lengthy list of political clowns. Jeb Bush isn’t one of them. He’s a serious fellow who every political pundit in the country believes is considering a run for the presidency in 2016.

Yes, he is packing some baggage, such as the legacy of big brother George W. Bush’s two terms as president. But his message to the conservative faithful is plain enough. The party needs to stand for something constructive and end the perception among voters that it is composed of obstructionists exclusively.

Bush said this, among other things, to CPAC: “Way too many people believe Republicans are anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-gay, anti-worker, and the list goes on and on and on. Many voters are simply unwilling to choose our candidates even though they share our core beliefs because those voters feel unwanted, unloved and unwelcome in our party.”

If people believe such things about your party, then you need to (1) change your message if that’s indeed what is being conveyed or (2) develop a whole new marketing strategy to persuade voters that their perception of you is incorrect.

It appears to me, though, that the hardliners are winning the intraparty struggle at the moment within the GOP. They likely don’t want to hear what Jeb Bush is trying to tell them.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s time has run out, as blogger/columnist Paul Burka notes here.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/perry-cpac-candidate-i-am-no-more

But I’m wondering about his assertion at the CPAC meeting that the Republican Party didn’t nominate two “true conservative” candidates in 2008 and 2012. Had John McCain (2008) and Mitt Romney (2012) been “true conservatives,” one of them would have been elected president, Perry suggested.

Didn’t Romney describe himself as a “severely conservative” governor of Massachusetts? And didn’t McCain insist repeatedly four years earlier that he’s always been staunchly pro-life on the issue of abortion and has been consistently conservative on other social issues?

I don’t think their nominees’ conservative credentials were the problem. The quality of their respective campaigns hurt them both badly.

When the financial crisis slammed into the nation’s economic infrastructure in 2008, McCain’s response was to suspend his campaign at a critical moment, return to Washington in search of answers, only to deliver nothing in the way of a solution.

And Romney’s campaign? Oh my. Let me count the stumbles: the ghastly debate performances with his GOP foes, such as when he offered to bet Perry $10,000 on something; his “self-deportation” answer to solving the illegal immigration problem; the infamous 47-percent remarks at a fundraiser in Florida. I’ll stop there.

What the Texas governor and other conservatives are saying at their conference essentially is that they hate compromise. They don’t want to work with moderates within their own party, let alone with those who represent the other party.

They want public policy crafted on their terms, ignoring the nation’s immense racial, moral, social and economic diversity.

I would suggest that John McCain and Mitt Romney, both of who are fine men, were conservative enough. They just didn’t know how to campaign for the presidency of a changing nation.

The late House Speaker Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., was fond of saying that “all politics is local.”

Let’s take that statement a bit further. Sometimes politics can get personal, very personal indeed.

Just ask U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/15/17323938-gops-rob-portman-announces-support-for-same-sex-marriage?lite

Portman used to oppose same-sex marriage. Now he favors it. Why? Portman’s son has disclosed he is gay. That changes everything, according to the senator, who cannot deny his son the right to marry who he loves simply because he loves someone of the same gender.

Portman isn’t the first politician to confront this most sensitive issue. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, described by many liberals as the “prince of darkness” because of his staunch conservatism on so many matters, including some critical social issues, shares Sen. Portman’s dilemma. Cheney has a gay daughter. The former VP has declared that “equality for all” means precisely that and he cannot tell his daughter – who is rearing a child with her partner – who she can love.

Another conservative former vice president, Dan Quayle, once was asked how he would react if his unmarried daughter became pregnant and decided to have an abortion. Quayle, a staunch pro-life politician, said he would support whatever decision his daughter made. That statement, at that very moment, turned him into a pro-choice politician … even though I believe he still considers himself to be pro-life.

These matters, despite how we feel about them as they apply to perfect strangers, take on entirely new meaning when they involve those who are closest to us.

Thus, politics often is more than just “local.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., this week might have delivered my favorite retort to a fresh-faced upstart to date in the 113th Congress.

She did so Wednesday when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, seemed to lecture her on what he believes is the sanctity of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the one that guarantees people the right to “keep and bear arms.”

http://thehill.com/video/senate/288141-panel-approves-assault-weapons-ban-amid-cruz-feinstein-fireworks

Cruz has been in the Senate all of about two months. Feinstein has served there for a couple of decades. Feinstein favors a law that bans assault weapons. Cruz believes the legislation as written is too restrictive and he wondered whether Feinstein would react the same to restrictions on the First, Fourth or Fifth constitution amendments. Feinstein said she didn’t need a lecture from someone such as Cruz, noting that she’s voted on enough law, studied the Constitution extensively and is “reasonably well-educated” enough to know what she’s talking about.

It is true that Cruz is no dummy, either. He once served as Texas solicitor general. But his constant preening and posturing in front of more experienced and seasoned colleagues seems oddly pretentious — even for a Texas politician.

All these histrionics over President Obama’s Cabinet selections – John Brennan at CIA, Chuck Hagel at Defense and John Kerry at State – got me thinking about something.

If congressional Republicans are so up in arms over these guys, wait’ll an opening comes up on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court right now has a narrow conservative majority. There are four reliably liberal justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer. The court has four equally reliable conservatives: Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and the chief, John Roberts. Then you have Anthony Kennedy, a so-called “swing justice” who tilts mostly to the conservative side.

Sotomayor and Kagan are Obama selections, so they won’t go anywhere. Of the liberals on the court, Ginsberg seems the most likely to depart, given her frail health. Were she to go, Obama would pick another liberal to replace her. The battle would be stout, but not as ferocious as it could get.

I keep thinking about what might happen if one of the right-leaning justices were to leave the court. It’s a decent bet that none of them would leave with a Democrat in the White House, just as left-leaning justices would wait were there a Republican serving as president.

Still, I keep envisioning the apoplexy that would engulf conservatives if, by the strangest circumstance imaginable, one of their political brethren would leave the Supreme Court before Barack Obama leaves the presidency in January 2017.

The world would spin off its axis. The planet would be pummeled by meteors. The sun would rise in the west. Martians would hijack the Rover rolling across their planet and fly it back to Earth.

Any confirmation hearings involving a Democratic president replacing a Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice would make the Kerry-Hagel-Brennan hearings in the Senate look like a Tupperware party.

If only …

You have to say this about the College of Cardinals that elected the newest pope: They know how to play to the strength of their church.

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio is now Pope Francis I, chosen in the most secretive balloting process anywhere on Planet Earth. This pick is intriguing in at least one important sense: Pope Francis comes from a part of the world where the church is ascending, not plummeting. Francis is the first Jesuit pope and the first from a continent other than Europe.

He is the son of Italian immigrants who moved to Argentina, where young Jorge was born. Indeed, the church is growing throughout Latin America, unlike in Europe, where church numbers have been falling precipitously for decades.

The 266th pontiff is known as a man of extraordinary humility who rode the bus to work in the Vatican and who routinely visited slums to comfort the afflicted. I don’t think he’ll be riding the bus or touring shanty towns very often in his new role as head of one of the world’s pre-eminent Christian denominations.

The 115 men who chose the pope, though, know the political landscape to be sure. Even though the previous two popes were non-Italians – from Poland and Germany – they represented a region of the world where the church is in decline. By reaching across the ocean to the southern reaches of Latin America, the cardinals have picked a man who symbolizes the strength of the worldwide flock he now will lead.

I am not a Catholic. Thus, I don’t have a direct stake in this monumental decision. I cannot comment intelligently on church theology or where I think it should go under Francis’s leadership.

However, I can – and do – applaud the apparent political wisdom shown in the decision rendered by the College of Cardinals.

The wait is over. George Prescott Bush – grandson of a president, nephew of another and son of a former Florida governor – is running for Texas land commissioner.

Just when you thought you’d seen the last Bush seeking political glory in the Lone Star State, along comes George P.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/other-races/287703-george-p-bush-running-for-statewide-office-in-texas

I do not intend to denigrate the young lawyer, who now calls Fort Worth home. I don’t know much about him, other than Republicans all across the state – I’m assuming – are glad to have him in the political family.

The land commissioner’s office is an important one in Texas. The office administers the state’s veterans home loan program and watches over the state’s public lands, although there’s not much public land in Texas, compared to say many other states farther west.

The current land commissioner, Jerry Patterson, has his eyes on another office, lieutenant governor. But as is the case in every Texas election year, 2014 will shake out only after all the state’s constitutional officeholders decide what they intend to do. If the current lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, runs for re-election, that could pit Patterson against a fellow Republican powerhouse. But what if Patterson decides he seek re-election? That means George P. has to challenge a fearless incumbent and it exposes him to losing his first-ever race for elected public office.

George P. is seen as an attractive Republican. He speaks Spanish fluently, which helps in a state with such a huge Spanish-speaking population. It doesn’t hurt that he’s “telegenic.” Nor does it hurt – at least in Texas – that he has last name of Bush, which might be the kiss of death almost anywhere else in America, given Uncle George W.’s record as president.

But if the young Bush has his eyes, also, on even higher political office, he’ll have to settle with boning up on issues pertinent to the General Land Office. I wish George P. Bush good luck as he tries to stay focused. Texas land commissioner might not be a glamorous job, but it’s a big deal to veterans needing a home loan.

The Transportation Safety Administration has come up with one of the goofiest ideas yet in this post-9/11 era of commercial air travel.

It says it plans to allow airplane passengers to pack blades when they fly.

And to no one’s surprise, flight attendants and pilots – pardon the pun – are up in the air about it. They think it’s a nutty idea; they believe it invites tragedy; they’re going to lobby TSA vigorously to take back this cockamamie proposal.

Maybe it should be no shock at all, given TSA’s occasionally awkward enforcement of rules designed to make air travel safer. It has allowed their air terminal agents to frisk old women and babies while looking for bombs, although one can argue that dedicated terrorists think nothing of planting bombs on the very young and very old.

Whatever. TSA brass seems to have forgotten that the 9/11 madmen walked aboard those commercial jetliners nearly a dozen years ago armed with box cutters, which they used to cut the throats of flight crew members before flying the aircraft into buildings – and ushering the United States into a new era of international warfare.

I cannot think of a crazier idea than this, short of letting passengers pack firearms or allowing them to engage in in-flight cellphone conversations on trans-oceanic trips.

I’m with the flight crew members on this one. They have a difficult enough job as it is. Why make it potentially impossible when passengers are armed with weapons?

Crazy …

California businessmen and women are coming to Texas to set up shop, apparently knowing all along that the Lone Star State is among the more business-friendly states in the Union.

And that is why Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s recent foray into California to recruit openly for business owners to relocate to Texas seems so gratuitous and, frankly, rather foolish.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/03/11/polling-center-californias-conservative-migration/

Perry made the showy trip to California, where he chided that state over its difficult economic circumstance. California Gov. Jerry Brown called Perry’s visit “barely a fart.” Perry laughed off the snarky rejoinder.

The evidence, though, is quite clear that Texas is a good place to do business. We have no personal income tax. Our regulatory hurdles are less cumbersome than many other states.

Are we the perfect place to relocate? Hardly. Look at the school financing picture. The courts keep ruling our property tax-heavy public school funding system as being unconstitutional, and the Legislature hasn’t helped matters by cutting so deeply into public education funds to help balance the state budget. That’s hardly a magnet to attract young families with children to educate.

But as the Texas Tribune reports, Texas’s relatively good economic health has helped it attract new residents at a blistering pace, while other states have seen their population stagnate.

It makes me wonder aloud once again: Why did Perry feel the need to prance and preen so publicly when the state is selling itself?