Free Republic

Conventional wisdom is that whoever wins the Iowa caucus has an encouraging boost to get the Republican nomination for president in November’s vote. Never mind that Mike Huckabee crushed Mitt Romney in the 2008 Iowa caucus, and neither went anywhere; in the 2000 caucus George W. Bush easily beat Steve Forbes and went on to win his party’s nomination; or that in 2000 Robert Dole edged Pat Buchanan and both fell by the wayside. So while winning in Iowa is a morale booster it doesn’t mean much, and will quickly be forgotten after New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. This...

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in danger of losing his 2012 Republican primary front-runner status, Wednesday tweaked his position on global climate change, saying he does not know if humans are the primary cause. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, also said he would not place restrictions on carbon emissions if elected and did not favor spending heavily on climate solutions. He was asked about global warming at a town hall meeting in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and said he believed the world is getting hotter and humans contribute in some way to the change. "Do I think the world's getting hotter? Yeah,...

(CNN) -- Catholic, Orthodox and Evangelical Christian leaders last week issued a bold political statement. They intended to target the Obama administration. Inadvertently, they may have also hit probable Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney ought to rank atop the Republican candidates for president in 2012. He finished second in votes cast in the primaries of 2008. He is a candidate with immense private-sector economic expertise in a time of urgent economic debate. But Romney has a political problem: his Mormon religious faith. A Gallup survey in December 2007 found that 18 percent of Republicans would not vote for...

Depictions ‘took place entirely in her imagination,’ says Wallace. NBC NEWS and NEWS SERVICES NEW YORK - Former McCain campaign senior adviser Nicolle Wallace says Sarah Palin's book "Going Rogue" is "based on fabrications," and that the basis for Palin’s depictions of her and former McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt as villains "took place entirely in her imagination." In a statement to The Rachel Maddow Show, the former McCain spokesperson repeatedly used the word "fiction" to describe Palin's narrative and echoed criticisms by other former McCain staffers. "She [Palin] probably has a legitimate complaint that things could have been better...

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Fewer than three in 10 Americans think Sarah Palin's qualified to be president, according to a new national poll - the least of any of the five potential candidates included in the survey. But another woman tops that list in the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday: two-thirds of the public thinks that Secretary of State HIllary Clinton's qualified for the Oval Office. That's more than Vice President Joe Biden, who's currently next in line for the presidency. According to the poll, 28 percent of Americans say Palin is qualified to run the White House, with seven...

<p>In her new book, according to the Associated Press, Sarah Palin alleges that the McCain campaign gave her a $500,000 bill to pay for the campaign vetting her for the VP nod. She also makes the charge that the McCain camp said they would have paid all the bills had they won, but since they lost, the bills were her responsibility.</p>