Free Republic

With all the chaos surrounding the Republican nomination race, one thing is very clear: somewhere along the way, Mitt Romney made a Damn Yankees-like pact with Satan to score this group of individuals to run against. It is certain that a vast majority of Republican primary voters do not like Mitt Romney. In fact, we can go further – they can’t stand him. That’s why he’s never broken 30 percent in any national poll of Republican primary voters. That’s why Tea Party support has shuffled from Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry to Herman Cain. Sadly, though, none of those candidates...

George W. Bush-era energy policy wonks are finding a new home with Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor can count on support from a who’s who of former Bush officials willing to raise money, brainstorm policy ideas and generally help spread the word among the ranks of like-minded GOP energy experts. Already on board the Romney train are Jim Connaughton, who ran Bush’s White House Council on Environmental Quality for all eight years; former Assistant Energy Secretary Andy Karsner; former EPA air chief Jeff Holmstead; and former EPA congressional affairs liaison Edward Krenik. The former Bush officials all told POLITICO...

Despite Mitt Romney's consistently placing at or near the top in polls of the GOP presidential field, Governor Haley Barbour, R-Miss., says he's "not a true frontrunner" - even if he is "the best known of our candidates." Barbour, in a Sunday appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation," said there is no real frontrunner amid the 2012 GOP candidates, in part because he thinks Republicans are more focused on unseating President Obama than picking a candidate who shares their views. "This [election] reminds me of a lot of past Democratic presidential contests, like Jimmy Carter in '76, Bill Clinton in...

Link only, per FR posting rules

Mitt Romney was firm and direct with the abortion rights advocates sitting in his office nine years ago, assuring the group that if elected Massachusetts governor, he would protect the state’s abortion laws. Then, as the meeting drew to a close, the businessman offered an intriguing suggestion — that he would rise to national prominence in the Republican Party as a victor in a liberal state and could use his influence to soften the GOP’s hard-line opposition to abortion. He would be a “good voice in the party” for their cause, and his moderation on the issue would be “widely...

Romney is No Conservative “We don’t intend to turn the Republican Party over to the traitors in the battle just ended. We will have no more of those candidates who are pledged to the same goals as our opposition and who seek our support. Turning the Party over to the so-called moderates wouldn’t make any sense at all.” “A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency or simply to swell its numbers. Don’t give up your ideals, don’t compromise, don’t turn to expediency —...

Mitt’s GOP Plank – Talking Points Mitt Romney opposed the two most successful conservative policy efforts of the last 30 years… the Reagan policies of the 1980`s and the Contract With America of the 1990`s. I have always been impressed with any so-called ‘self-proclaimed conservative’ or ‘Republican’ who parrots discredited Keynesian economic thinking, believes in man-made climate change and embraces government ‘mandates’ and social engineering. There is nothing in Mitt Romney’s record that indicates that he is anything other than a liberal progressive Republican ‘masquerading’ as a palatable conservative. Mitt Romney represents everything that is wrong with the Republican Party...

Mitt Romney, under fire from all sides on the strength of his political convictions, said Thursday he has been as consistent as a person can be during his political career. "I've been as consistent as human beings can be," the presidential candidate said in a meeting with the editorial board of New Hampshire's Seacoast Media Group. "I cannot state every single issue in exactly the same words every single time, and so there are some folks who, obviously, for various political and campaign purposes will try and find some change and try to draw great attention to something which looks...

This is a collection of links to bolster my contention that Dick Marriott, former treasurer and former head of the National Restaurant Association, maintains connections with the NRA. I apologize for the the sporadic way in which I will be posting links. I am baby-sitting for my adorable grandson and will be cooking for guests today. Dick Marriott is a close friend of Mitt Rommey, who is named after Dick's father, J. Willard Marriott.

Could this be a watershed week in the Republican presidential primary? Joe Scarborough seems to think so. On today's Morning Joe, he said something remarkable: that in the last week, stalwart conservatives and "Republican leaders" have told him that they would rather lose" than elect Mitt Romney. View the video here.

In an email to POLITICO this afternoon, Robinson admitted that the site routinely blocks Romney supporters from posting -- and offered no apologies for the practice: Free Republic is a pro-life, pro-family, pro-gun, pro-small government, pro-constitution, pro-liberty site. Governor Romney is none of the above. His record is that of an abortionist, gay rights pushing, gun grabbing, global warming advocating, big government, mandate loving, constitution trampling, flip-flopping liberal progressive with no core values. That and the fact that he is the chief architect and advocate for ObamaCare disqualifies him for any consideration whatsoever on Free Republic as a potential nominee...

The answers are “yes,” quite a bit of “probably not” and a little bit of “maybe so.” George Will’s blistering column about Mitt Romney’s candidacy can be split into two parts. The first part explores a few of Romney’s mryiad flip-flops, straddles and waffles on various issues. Is Will right about Romney being the “pretzel candidate”? Yes. Indeed, on this point, Will did not even scratch the salt off the pretzel. However, it’s the second, shorter conclusion of Will’s column that is getting the buzz in political circles: Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser...

Republican candidates for president have been busy for weeks now, laboring strenuously to give the 2012 nomination to Mitt Romney. And he keeps trying to give it back. The former Massachusetts governor could walk to next year's GOP convention without touching the ground, treading exclusively on the bodies of rivals who have fallen on their faces. He's the equivalent of the Alabama Crimson Tide, playing a schedule heavy on Southeastern Louisiana and Middle Tennessee State. He should be running up the score every week. Instead, he keeps finding ways to keep his opponents in the game. Look at the opposition....

The large Republican presidential field, along with the dramatic surges and collapses of several of its candidates, may ultimately be much ado about nothing. That, at least, is the conclusion of the Republican strategists surveyed in this week's National Journal Political Insiders Poll, who almost unanimously identified Mitt Romney as the most likely candidate to win the nomination. In the five times the GOP Insiders have been asked that question in 2011, Romney has never surrendered the top spot.

Mitt Romney is stacking his team with policy advisers from the George W. Bush administration — and it has conservatives up in arms. The Republican right cringes at some of the high-profile people Romney is leaning on for donations and advice, including three former Bush-era officials whose recent records include lobbying for Solyndra and advocating on behalf of cap-and-trade legislation and carbon taxes. Romney’s long-ago environmental associates are also causing him problems, with Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the conservative blogosphere reveling in 6-year-old news releases showing how two current Obama administration officials — Environmental Protection Agency air chief Gina...

Republican candidates for president have been busy for weeks now, laboring strenuously to give the 2012 nomination to Mitt Romney. And he keeps trying to give it back. The former Massachusetts governor could walk to next year's GOP convention without touching the ground, treading exclusively on the bodies of rivals who have fallen on their faces..... ....True, he has been guilty of occasional deviations from orthodox Republican theology,...His heresies on gay rights, abortion and gun control required extensive displays of penance, which he performed the last time out. Besides, the GOP actually tends to nominate candidates closer to the party's...

It might have been Mitt Romney’s most revealing moment in all the Republican debates. Badgered by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who was continually interrupting him, Romney appealed to CNN moderator Anderson Cooper to reassert the rules of the debate: “Anderson?” That one-word plaint could stand for all of Romney’s straight-arrowness. It is a virtue and a curse. “Scandal” and “Romney” are two words you expect never to have to see in a sentence together. He’s every bit as upstanding as you would expect from a former Mormon bishop, a father of five and grandfather of 16. Romney is a familiar...

Pretending that Romney is the real frontrunner, the pundits and the press contend that the 2012 GOP presidential contest will be a re-run of the GOP 2008 race: the establishmentarian who is next in line will win. This is a prejudice masquerading as an insight. Yes, that’s been the Republican pattern, arguably, since 1968. And Romney may well win the nomination: he’s got mountains of money from donors, an impressive team in key primary states, a near-flawless performance in debates and an array of White House-quality policy advisers. Still, Romney seems to hit a ceiling of roughly 25% in nearly...

Today, Mitt Romney refused to take a position on the big battle in Ohio over the ballot initiative to repeal Governor John Kasich’s law rolling back the collective bargaining rights of public employees. The fight is a hugely important one to conservatives, with right wing money flowing into the state, and conservative bloggers erupted in fury at Romney, asking how it is that he can be running for president when he isn’t willing to take a firm stand against the scourge of public employees. [snip] Governors who are willing to risk serious unpopularity in order to roll back the bargaining...

Texas governor Rick Perry, who is embarking on a hard push to recapture the buzz that surrounded him when he first entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination, is doubling down on the "birther" issue and also deeming his rival Mitt Romney a "fat cat." In an interview with John Harwood of CNBC and the New York Times on Tuesday, Perry was asked why he was keeping the "birther" issue alive. During an interview with Parade Magazine published Sunday, Perry suggested he doesn't "have a definitive answer" to whether President Obama was born in the United States. Mr. Obama...