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Not only does Erick Erickson want Mitt Romney to restart a search for a third-party candidate to challenge Donald Trump, he also wants Romney to consider being that person. The conservative blogger wrote for The Resurgent on Friday that he would "gladly work for a Romney Presidency given the choices between" Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and Trump. . . . Romney has also refused to back the presumptive Republican nominee, attacking Trump for refusing to release his tax returns and previously saying "Trumpism has become associated with racism, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity and, most recently, threats and violence."

Good luck with this argument, Axe: Axelrod Says Their Attack Ads Aren't Why People Think They're Running Negative CampaignScarborough's chuckle is perfect.  The Obama campaign has outspent Romney overall, besting the Republican by a 3-to-1 margin on battleground television ads thus far.  More than three-quarters of those ads have been negative, and many of those negative ads have been debunked as false by independent fact-checkers.  Now that Romney and his allies have hit back with ads correcting the record and pointing out the death of 'hope and change," Axelrod is blaming them for the public perception that Obama's gone mega...

Romney is Obama-Lite. Take the simple pledge: I will not vote for Romney for any reason.

A visit to a therapist might be necessary to help conservatives work through their issues with the current frontrunner. What if Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination for president in 2012? A vast majority of conservatives become anxiety-ridden at the mere posing of this question, and many go ballistic at the thought of it actually happening. So a quick visit to a therapist may be helpful. Imagine yourself lying on a couch in the spring of 2012 with soothing music playing in the background. News breaks that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has clinched the Republican nomination for president. Your...

During the 2008 election cycle, Mitt Romney was often accused of treating politics more like a consumer-focused business than an exercise in leadership. “My view is, we ought to double Guantanamo,” he said, radiating the sense that if primary voters wanted something, anything, he’d be willing to sell it. His strategists obsessed about creating and selling “Brand Romney.” To many, these efforts made him look like a crass twit, a market researcher’s caricature of the perfect Republican candidate, even as he came in second-place for the GOP nomination. This election, however, Romney may have to compete with Donald Trump.

I highly doubt Donald Trump is presidential material, but he sure makes for one great Republican attack dog. Finally a celebrity big enough to get the attention of Americans outside of the conservative community is speaking out against Obama’s shady past. After once again raising legitimate concerns over Obama’s sham “birth certificate” during an appearance on the Fax News program Hannity, Trump expressed alarm over Obama’s real estate dealings with convicted Chicago influence peddler Antoin “Tony” Rezco. For those of you who still haven’t heard, Obama’s Chicago home that he bought in 2005 was located on a property split into...

To hear The Donald tell it, he totally trumps President Barack Obama as a messenger and far outweighs Mitt Romney as a businessman. Riding a surge in the polls recently, Donald Trump let loose on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, blaming Mr. Obama for soaring oil prices and disparaging Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and his potential rival for the 2012 Republican nomination, as “basically small business guy.” Showing his usual flair for letting it rip, Mr. Trump said the U.S. had become “a laughingstock throughout the world” under Mr. Obama. Were he president, Mr. Trump said,...

I've been amazed at some of the support given to Donald Trump from readers and Republicans throughout the country. The man is a joke people. A complete and utter sham. Stop wasting precious time and support for this fraud. A new poll supposedly shows that he is leading the pack....not so fast: PPP took a sloppily-designed poll and is spinning it to make Republicans look as crazy as possible. This may be comforting to partisan Democrats (like, say, the people who work at PPP), but there's no reason for the rest of us to take it seriously. Mark Levin...

This time, Mitt Romney has a clear pitch: I'm the strongest Republican to challenge President Barack Obama on the country's single biggest issue — the economy. "He created a deeper recession, and delayed the recovery," Romney said Saturday, previewing his campaign message before Republicans in this influential early nominating state. "The consequence is soaring numbers of Americans enduring unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcies. This is the Obama Misery Index, and it is at a record high." "It's going to take more than new rhetoric to put Americans back to work — it's going to take a new president," said the former...

Overall: Palin 21% Gingrich 19% Romney 18% Huckabee 16% Conservatives: Palin 24% Gingrich 23% Romney 15% Huckabee 14% Men: Palin 23% Gingrich 23% Romney 16% Huckabee 11% 46-65 age category: Palin 21% Romney 18% Gingrich 17% Huckabee 14% 65+ age category: Palin 23% Romney 19% Gingrich 17% Huckabee 17% This is the first time that Palin has led in any national PPP poll of GOP contenders and among these categories. Could this be a preview of coming attractions? Yes, there is no frontrunner right now as Karl Rove suggests. But could Palin become a clear frontrunner by the end of...

Part 1 & 2 Jay asks Mitt Romney about running for President in 2012, The Bushes and Sarah Palin. Mitt Romney talks about what Republicans should be focused on.

Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, is among the more natural populist politicians of our time, frequently critiquing elites in the press, the Democratic Party, and the Republican establishment. It is one of the reasons — along with her working-class background and the sense of authenticity that she can often convey — that she is so popular with some voters. One potential problem for Ms. Palin, however, is that plenty of well-to-do and well-educated voters — those whom we might think of as belonging to the elite — will be participating in the Republican primaries. Three recent surveys of Republican...

Free Republic is a pro-life, pro-family, pro-liberty constitutional conservative activist web site. Those who cannot live with that should simply stay away!! (saves wear and tear on my zot button - bitterly clinging redneck, Jim) Romney is an unrepentant abortionist/statist lying political whore! Just to be absolutely clear, there will never ever be a RINO Romney campaign on FR!! If he somehow becomes the nominee, FR will be running a full-time campaign to DEFEAT him!! If you wish to support him then I suggest you sign off FR and onto Wankers for Mitt!! Those statments make me worry that FreeRepublic...

Howie thread for the week starting with his Sunday Herald column

Just finished the general election numbers in Delaware and New Hampshire. Not going to release them until Wednesday when we have nominees but in one case the conventional wisdom about who's more electable was confirmed and in the other it was not: -In Delaware Chris Coons polls 26 points better against Christine O'Donnell than Mike Castle. Castle's net favorability is 25 points higher than O'Donnell's. That electability gap is even wider than what we saw a month ago when Castle did 20 points better against Coons than O'Donnell.

Yes, children Sarah Palin really can become president of the United States. Take a look at yesterday's CNN poll. It shows Mitt Romney just three points ahead of Irish American Palin right before the kickoff for the 2012 republican nomination which begins the day after the November mid-terms. That three points is within the margin of error. It is also within the margin of error of those pundits who say that Palin has no chance to be selected. They are dead wrong and this poll bears that out. This poll says otherwise, as do a slew of results, including last...

Via Conservatives 4 Palin, not only is this the best poll I’ve seen for her this year, it comes from the august precincts of The Economist. Dude, is this happening? Sarah Palin 28% Mitt Romney 18% Newt Gingrich 17% Mike Huckabee 13% Mitch Daniels 4% Tim Pawlenty 1% Mike Pence 1% Haley Barbour 1% John Thune 1% No preference 17% That’s a sample of Republicans, natch. Among tea-partiers, specifically, it’s Palin 26, Romney 19, Gingrich 16, and Huckabee 14. (Mitt does better among tea-partiers than among the GOP generally?) She also leads among a sample of all voters, albeit by...

If she does run for president, her path will be more complicated than her true believers realize. Andrew Sullivan has a good roundup of some of the recent punditry about Sarah Palin and the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. I've given my position before: Anyone who thinks she has it locked up is nuts, and anyone who thinks that there's zero possibility of her winning is also nuts. But that does raise the question: What can we know now? What should we ignore? And by the way, how does the nomination process work, anyhow? First: We can't know what's in any...

A new financial report filed Sunday evening showed Sarah Palin’s political action committee has taken its fundraising to a higher level – and suggests that she has begun building a more sophisticated political operation in place of a bare-bones organization powered mostly by her rock star status and scrappy on-line presence. The report, filed with the Federal Election Commission, shows that Palin’s political action committee raised more money in the second quarter of this year – $866,000 – than it had in any previous three-month stretch since Palin formed the group in January 2009. The committee, Sarah PAC, also spent...

Sarah Palin On The Factor with the annoying Bill O'Reilly. He asks & interrupts President Palin discussing Illegal Immigration & Stopping Obama