Free Republic

Mitt lost the Bigfoot vote, and perhaps the felons-who-are-voting vote, but batted away the Bain and super-PAC attacks with ease and delivered some superb general-election answers. Newt regained ground — and then gave it back. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum made steady progress — after the felons stuff, which just doesn’t make any sense to me at all. (In eleven years with a nationally syndicated talk show, I don’t recall the subject ever coming up, so it simply cannot be salient in any meaningful way.)

The GOP is crazy to allow its presidential nomination process to be mediated by a left-of-center to hard left MSM. I interviewed John Harris of Politico today, one of the designated "moderators" of the proposed Reagan Library debate, now moved to September, and traditional conservatives and Tea Party activists alike will get no comfort from our conversation. (The transcript is here.) Harris is an experienced and respected journalist, and a genuinely smart and nice guy who always agrees to interviews, but his responses to my questions confirm the blind spot the MSM has with regard to its own deep biases...

Examiner columnist and talk radio host Hugh Hewitt ruffled feathers Monday by noting that most of the 29 Republican members of the House Appropriations Committee are "content to labor away spending, spending, spending in national obscurity but powerful within the Beltway where their control of trillions of tax dollars makes them very popular indeed." Understand that Hewitt is nobody's fool when it comes to the ways of Washington, having served as general counsel at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during the first Bush administration. He's also a constitutional law professor at Chapman University. What sparked Hewitt, he wrote Monday,...

Mitt Romney, my personal favorite front-runner for 2012 on our side just performed a rare *suuuuuhuuckification* on the Hugh Hewitt radio show this afternoon in Hewitt's second segment. (Holy God Hugh, if you ever bore me again as you did in that first segment teasing a Romney appearance, I swear it will be worth my time to drop everything and drive to the OC so I can personally explain to you my displeasure.) No kidding, I think Mitt is the only one who even stands a chance against Zero. (Will save how he would have mopped the floor with Zero...

What we have been covering all week on the radio show has finally burst into the view of the MSM. Even CNN has now figured out that the debate over spending within the House GOP caucus is hugely important. The vast class of House freshmen know that if they budget cuts delivered in the final CR are not more than $100 billion they will be either primaried in less than 20 months or flogged with "broken promise" charges in their campaign for re-election in districts newly redrawn because of the census. My new Townhall.com column deals with the specifics, but...

Talking to Megyn Kelly.

I know, I know, Hugh's not my favorite guy in the world for his bashing of my guy Tancredo, but he has excellent election night coverage. You can listen live at the Colorado Springs station at

Hugh Hewitt: Pelosi and Obama's agenda down in flamesBy: Hugh Hewitt Examiner Columnist October 31, 2010 It takes a powerful collective repugnance to propel a national political rebuke. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and President Obama have accomplished an extraordinary thing. Tomorrow they will enter the history books as the most spectacularly failed partnership in modern American political history. Never in the last 100 years have two American politicians squandered so much political capital and achieved so complete a rejection as this duo. (I omit intentionally the hapless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is very much the Lepidus in...

Any fair account of last night's debate between Sharron Angle and Harry Reid concludes that the GOP challenger won easily, because she provided reassurance to Nevada voters that she is a mainstream conservative even as the format showcased Harry Reid's halting, often confused and non-responsive answers to direct questions. Reid needed Angle to stumble. She didn't. He did. I suspect the donations are flowing again to www.SharronAngle.com. I did watch with amazement the CNN hatchet job on Angle on Anderson Cooper's program when I got back to my hotel after a townhall meeting I conducted with Mike Gallagher in Scottsdale...

Gloria Allred may be doing Meg Whitman a favor with her ridiculous stunt accusing Meg Whitman of knowingly employing an illegal alien housekeeper. The story is so full of holes that it is transparently bogus, and will serve to discredit not just Allred and the housekeeper, but possibly Jerry Brown, California's Attorney General. Hugh Hewitt, law professor, writer, and talk show host, had Gloria Allred on his radio program yesterday, and probed some of the major weaknesses in the case, and wrote about it on Townhall. First, he sums up the charges: Turns out that Whitman had hired a housekeeper...

HH: Special edition of the Hugh Hewitt Show, which I am going to spend entirely with Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair columnist, author of the bestseller, God Is Not Great, and a new extraordinary memoir, Hitch-22. And Christopher Hitchens, welcome back, it’s great to talk with you. CH: Very nice of you to have me. HH: Now Christopher, since we last spoke, your illness you disclosed on the web, and people will want to know off the bat how you are doing, and how your treatment is going. CH: Oh well, I have, in case people are just tuning in, I...

On the first day of July, the House of Representatives passed a "budget enforcement resolution" that "deemed as passed" a $1.12 trillion budget. Thirty-eight House Democrats voted no, perhaps because they sense in this year of the Tea Party Movement it isn't good politics to engage in such a sham. But pass it did. More tricks from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that hide nothing but actually bring great clarity to the next four months. House Democrats might have thought they were deeming as passed a budget, but what they were really doing is deeming their defeat in November. ~snip~ Pelosi's...

Democrats expect voters not to notice, or care if they do notice, that legislators have not passed a budget for next year's federal spending. The Pelosi-Reid "leadership" team have "gone off the grid" of congressional practice and not even pretended to care about spending targets and deficit projections. Humming "que sera sera, what ever will be will be," they twirl toward summer vacation and the November elections beyond. President Obama and his congressional allies expect to be assisted in their casual shuffling off of the most basic of Article I duties by a Manhattan-Beltway media elite, quick to assure their...

CBS News Live is streaming live tonights 710 KNUS Evening with Sarah Palin, Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager appearance in Denver . It is streaming right now. http://wcbstv.com/cbsnewslive

Nov. 2 is 10 months away, and if the Republican Party stays focused on three big issues, voters may reward it with a chance to check the huge lurch to the Left that President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid engineered in 2009.First, the government takeover of private life is deeply alarming. The massive thrusts of Washington, D.C. into the control of health care, the car business, the banks generally and the home loan industry specifically -- all these are obvious and disquietingly huge intrusions of the federal government's presence into private life.Americans hate to...

My radio pal Hugh Hewitt said to me on the air the other day that Barack Obama "doesn't know how to be president." It was a low but effective crack, and I didn't pay it much heed. But, after musing on it over the last week or so, it seems to me frighteningly literally true. I don't just mean social lapses like his latest cringe-making bow, this time to Their Imperial Majesties The Emperor and Empress of Japan — though that in itself is deeply weird: After the world superbower's previous nose-to-toe prostration before the Saudi King, one assumed there'd...

Eight Democratic senators stand between the Medicare and the destruction of the senior health care program as well as the ruin of American medicine generally.

"SCF is a political action committee dedicated to electing strong conservatives to the United States Senate," the PAC's website declares. "We do not support liberal Republicans and we are not affiliated with any Republican campaign committee."

The contests for statehouses in New Jersey and Virginia are the best referenda the country could ask for on Obamacare, and Congress would be wise to wait to see how these two states vote in November before it takes any final vote on the president's plans to radically rewrite the rules of American medicine. Recent polls show that Republican Bob McDonnell in Virginia leads his opponent Creigh Deeds by double digits. An anti-Democrat trend is also shaping up in New Jersey where GOP nominee Chris Christie is also far ahead of incumbent Jon Corzine. Both New Jersey and Virginia went...

Hugh Hewitt talks health care with former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. AUDIO HH: Joined now by former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney. Governor Romney, welcome back to the program, always a pleasure.  MR: Thanks, Hugh. It’s good to be with you, Hugh.HH: Tell me what your thoughts are as we watch the debate over President Obama’s proposed radical revisions to American health care are.MR: Well, I think he’s going way beyond what the American people think is right, and way beyond what’s necessary. I think we all recognize that we have a problem, that people are worried that if they...

President Obama's decision to unleash his operatives at the DNC,  surrogates like Barbara Boxer, and his staff like Linda Douglas to slander and attempt to intimidate opponents of Obamacare not only has badly backfired, it has opened another front the president now finds himself fighting on:  Does he intend to be the new Nixon, rather than the new FDR? Like Nixon, will he unleash a political operation that spirals out of control and ends his presidency? More than a million people have signed a petition to stop Obamacare, and the president and his Chicago-rules enforcers have serially insulted each one of them and every...

A glimpse into the future if the DNC controls talk radio, too.

Hugh Hewitt talks with Charles Krauthammer regarding the Gates matter.

HH: Because it is Thursday and we are lucky, we begin with Columnist To the World, Mark Steyn. You can read all of Mark’s work at www.steynonline.com. Mark, an amazing press conference today by the Speaker of the House, who apparently is not opposed to waterboarding, depending upon what year you talk to her in. MS: Yes, it’s interesting to me the evolving defense mounted by Mrs. Pelosi. She’s effectively digging down, I think, here, and absolutely denying what would seem to be the version of events recounted by the CIA and other parties that she was aware not only,...

My Fellow Texans, I will be moderating a very special event, Monday, April 27th, as Dallas/Ft. Worth based News Talk 660 KSKY Radio welcomes nationally syndicated talk hosts Mike Gallagher, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt for their kickoff of the "Obama First 100 Days" National Tour at the Special Events Center in Garland, Texas. America has seen significant change since January 20th and Texans, like you and I, have a lot to say about the direction we’re currently headed. I am honored to have been invited to moderate this significant event, one that gives everyone an opportunity to voice their...

Hugh Hewitt, a political pundit radio personality, wants the Mormon presidential election runner Mitt Romney in the Whitehouse—very badly. He casts his pre-election vote in writing A Mormon in the Whitehouse? (Regnery, 2007). In defense of Romney, Hewitt also defends Mormonism better than some Latter-day Saints (LDS). This is strange for a Presbyterian, as what Hewitt claims for himself. It is possible and logically consistent that Hewitt could defend Romney as a republican without defending Mormonism, but he chooses otherwise. The reason that I find this strange is that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, claimed that God appeared to...

I'd like to know where to file my application to become one of the president's appointees to join the remade Board of Directors of General Motors. I don't know a lick about making or selling cars, but I think I have a pretty persuasive case to make for membership nonetheless. First off, in the new era biography is everything, and I grew up in a car town --Warren, Ohio. It was home to the old Packard Electric and still is the next door neighbor to Lordstown, still turning out excellent GM cars and slated to produce the Cruise in the...

HH: It’s Thursday, that means we begin as we do on every Thursday when we are lucky with Mark Steyn, Columnist To the World. You can read all of Mark’s work at www.steynonline.com. Mark, the Senate Budget Committee today passed a plan that calls for a deficit of $1.2 trillion for 2010, and then crowed that it’ll be all the way down to $508 billion in 2014, which is more than double, it’s actually triple what George Bush’s 2007 budget deficit was. I guess elections have consequences. MS: Yes, they do, and if you remember, the Democrats were scathing about...

"I won." When President Barack Obama used those words to reply to Republican objections to the massive spending bill working its way through Congress, he did much more than deliver a good laugh line and declare the GOP proposals irrelevant.

President George W. Bush departs with low approval ratings. Appraisals of presidents sometimes change over time, and sometimes they don’t. *snip* No doubt the Internet dervishes will pepper this and other assessments of Bush with their standard displays of anonymous ferocity. There are a lot of 14-year-olds with Internet connections. But when the Jon Meacham of 150 years from now goes about his task with Bush, that historian will have as much material and more, as did the author of “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” And the verdict will be nearly the same: Here was an extraordinary...

HH: I begin this hour as I do most Thursdays when we are blessed and thankful with Columnist To the World, Mark Steyn. Mark Steyn, you got much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving? MS: Yes, I think so. I’m thankful to be blessed to live in one of the greatest nations on the face of the Earth, and the reasons for that blessing, those blessings, are somewhat in dispute between Republican and Democrat voters, but I think we should all be able to agree that we are nonetheless blessed for whatever reason. HH: I agree. Now I do want...

The last thing you want to think about right now is the 2012 GOP primary calendar, but I am afraid you have to, if you want the RNC chairmanship contest to have meaning and the GOP to have a good chance of recapturing the White House four years down the road. Each would-be RNC leader should be asked about the 2012 presidential primaries they will be overseeing. Specific questions need to be posed, and concrete answers delivered. The RNC must begin now to consider overhauling the presidential nominating process three years hence for the simple reason that the process as...

Wednesday Nov 19, 2008 H1: Christopher Hitchens, Mitt Romney Hugh Hewitt Hewitt: Hour 1 - Hugh catches up on politics and the shape of the Obama (Clinton) administration taking shape with Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens, and then talks Big 3 auto bailout and what the Republicans need to do next with former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

Hugh Hewitt just announced that Dean Barnett has died.

The latest round of polls from the very reliable Strategic Survey shows John McCain ahead of Barack Obama in Ohio and Florida, but behind by seven points in Pennsylvania. McCain is likely to lose formerly red states Iowa and New Mexico, may pick up New Hampshire, and is battling for Colorado to the finish. With ten days left and the markets continuing their extraordinary volatility, voters' stomachs are churning and the country is at a decisive crossroads. Obama represents a huge, very sharp turn left. Will the voters reconsider, especially the "racist rednecks" of Pennsylvania? Democratic icon Congressman Jack Murtha...

HH: Joe the Plumber is under the skin of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. To discuss the amazing Joe, Columnist To the World, Mark Steyn. Mark, what do you make of the Joe the Plumber episode in the campaign now? MS: Well, I think this is actually critical. I think Joe the Plumber is worth more than all the expensive campaign consultants that John McCain has got on his payroll, because he’s usefully crystallized what’s at issue here. You know, McCain didn’t actually explain it very well last night. Joe the Plumber does a rather better job of it. But...

Thanks to the now famous Joe the Plumber, all of America has been served notice of Barack Obama's plans for the American economy. Obama intends to spread the wealth around: From your accounts to those of his friends and supporters. Rarely have we had candor from Obama in this long campaign, and even rarer have been the efforts of the Manhattan-Beltway media elites to tease the details out from the Chicago machine's favorite pol. But in a matter of two minutes, Joe's objections to Obama's soak-the-small-businesses-of-America's tax plan evoked from Obama not just a rebuke about the need to take...

Yes, of course it is. Three weeks ago John McCain was ahead, and a furious attack on Sarah Palin was underway. And Americans were several trillion dollars richer. Our stocks will recover if the American economy, powered by democratic capitalism's relentless innovation and productivity, is allowed to work its magic again. That is the record of our often disparaged but inevitably triumphant attachment to economic liberty. The task for John McCain between now and the time the last vote is cast on November 4 is to speak this truth and articulate this record and thus help repair the damaged confidence...

HH: To discuss it all and get the day started off, the hour started off, Mark Steyn, Columnist To the World. Mark Steyn, another terrible day. We’re now down to about 20% in a week, which is getting to rival the big day in 1987. What’s your sense from the experts you’ve been talking to and listening to of whether or not we’re at the bottom?  MS: Well, a few days ago, there was an argument about these swings and roundabouts in the markets as to whether they were going down because Congress wouldn’t pass the bailout package, or because...

Fired Up Crowd Cheers Warning To McCain Palin About Obama-Pelosi

Hugh Hewitt just reported on his show that Dean Barnett of The Weekly Standard, and Hewitt's substitute on his radio program, is hospitalized in serious condition with cystic fibrosis. Prayers are requested.

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Because the country cannot afford the greatest gamble in its modern history at this moment in time. A confrontation with Iran looms and instability in Pakistan grows. The Islamist threat has been beaten back in Iraq, but continues to nurse its fanatical hatreds in many other places, from Waziristan to London. Israel is ringed not with an enemy that wants a state but by two enemies that want Israel to be destroyed. The world's financial system is teetering, and the estrangement between the American people and their government has never been this deep in modern times. The cost of energy...

In her first radio interview since becoming the Republican vice presidential nominee, Governor Sarah Palin joined Hugh Hewitt on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”  (Listen Here)Hugh Hewitt: Governor, your candidacy has ignited extreme hostility, even some hatred on the left and in some parts of the media. Are you surprised? And what do you attribute this reaction to?Sarah Palin: I think they’re just not used to someone coming in from the outside saying, “You know what? It’s time that normal Joe six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency.” I think that that’s kind of taken some people...

HH: Governor Sarah Palin, welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show. Great to have you. SP: Hey, thank you so much. Nice to hear your voice. HH: Governor, your candidacy has ignited extreme hostility, even some hatred on the left and in some parts of the media. Are you surprised? And what do you attribute this reaction to? SP: Oh, I think they’re just not used to someone coming in from the outside saying you know what? It’s time that normal Joe six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency, and I think that that’s kind of taken...

"I will air an interview with the governor at the top of the first hour and repeat it in the third hour."

Wednesday, September 24, 2008 The Summary Of Today's Events Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 8:59 PM The financial crisis continues and Congress is deadlocked. John McCain leads by suspending campaign, postponing the debate, and urging the president to call a key leaders summit, to include himself and Barack Obama. Obama refuses McCain's call, demands the debate go forward, and sputters about being available if he's needed. President Bush convenes the meeting that John McCain suggested. Obama blinks and agrees to attend. The president addresses the nation, explains the history of the cris, and describes an outline of the proposed action....

Either Obama's dim as can be, or he is angry at having been thrown bckwards week after week. When Obama denies having targeted Palin, keep in mind that everyone instantly made the connection. Is Obama really that clueless? An angry outburst does less damage than his pleading he didn't mean it that way.

There was a lot of audio today, including Barack Obama's tutorial on the Second Amendment, which began with his declaration that he believed the Second Amendment was an "individual right," and which concluded with what was intended to be the reassuring declaration that there was no need to worry because he didn't have the votes he needed in Congress to take away your guns even if he wanted to. Which he doesn't want to. He just wants to take away the guns of kids in inner city Philadelphia. Though he neglected to provide us with the test for determining which...

What a rout. Up early to watch the pundits on parade for a couple of hours, and the lefty talking heads and the MSM anchors are fleeing Sarah Palin like a building on fire. No more chants of "inexperience," and only the most indirect of references to her family. Until yesterday the collective MSM sneer was that Palin was "Hello Kitty," reeling backwards under the pressure. Now she's Gorgo, smashing up the MSM's cars. The dismayed punditry is pondering the "meanness" of her attacks and her lack of details on health care refom. A complete triumph over the Beltway-Manhatan media...