Free Republic

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would have won the presidency if the white and black turnout rates had stayed at their 2004 levels, according to a new analysis of 2012 election. “The battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Colorado would have tipped in favor of Romney, handing him the presidency if the outcome of other states remained the same,” according to The Associated Press’s summary of research by William Frey, an expert at the Brookings Institution. Overall turnout declined from 62 percent in 2008 to 58 percent in 2012, Frey reported. The drop-off reduced the overall turnout by...

In an almost-impossible-to-believe collapse of principle and political smarts, the House GOP appears committed to stalling out the bipartisan effort to repeal the onerous, job-destroying medical device tax.In an interview with me on Thursday, House GOP Deputy Whip Peter Roskam attempted to explain why the House Republicans would not be moving a stand-alone repeal bill, even though the Senate’s test vote on repeal passed by a 79-20 margin the week before the Easter recess began.The transcript of my interview with Roskam is here.A week ago Roll Call’s David Drucker had reported that House Ways and Means Committee Chair David Camp...

Watching "Time" editor Rana Foroohar in action on Morning Joe today, it was quickly evident how, on a range of issues from gun control to gay marriage, she toed a predictable liberal line. But it wasn't until talk turned to health care that it became apparent just how far out Foroohar is on the left. She sang the praises of single-payer on steroids--the socialized system in the UK. Willie Geist had cited a USA Today article reporting on a non-partisan study projecting medical claim costs to rise an average of 32% under ObamaCare, and as much as 80% in Ohio....

Women in Britain are dying quicker of breast cancer than in comparable countries, even though they are being diagnosed at the same time, suggesting care on the NHS is not as good as it is elsewhere. Academics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found the proportion of women in the UK surviving at least three years after being diagnosed was 87 to 89 percent, which was similar to Denmark. In Australia, Canada, Norway and Sweden three-year survival was 91 to 94 per cent for the period examined, between 2000 and 2007. Britain’s breast cancer survival rates have...

Why did the Tea Party–backed governor of Ohio just say yes to a key part of President Obama's health care law? Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) is the latest governor to accept the hefty Medicaid expansion authorized by President Obama's health care overhaul. He's not the first Republican to do so — Brian Sandoval (Nev.), Susana Martinez (N.M.), Jack Dalrymple (N.D.), and Jan Brewer (Ariz.) have, too — but Kasich's opt-in is a bigger deal. As House Budget Committee chairman during the Newt Gingrich years, the "fiercely conservative" Kasich "built his political identity arguing for smaller government," says David Nather...

With Scott Brown backing out of the special election to the Senate in Massachusetts, some wondered whether former Governor and erstwhile presidential candidate Mitt Romney might take a shot at filling the rest of John Kerry's term in office. Instead, the Boston Herald reports that the task might go to the next generation of Romneys: Tagg Romney is considering a run in the special Senate election now that Scott Brown has opted out, the Truth Squad has learned.Calls for Romney, 42, to join in the short campaign to replace Secretary of State John F. Kerry have increased since the Herald...

Mitt Romney promised that he won’t vanish from politics during a meeting in Washington Friday morning with a group of former campaign donors and aides. Two people at the meeting told Politico that Romney said he will help Republican candidates in upcoming elections.

Just before the Christmas break the Boston Globe published a lengthy postmortem on Mitt Romney’s massive failure as a presidential candidate. Between this, and the constant hand-wringing by Geniuses of the GOP™, I think we have beaten this dead horse to a pulp, but there was one thing that came out of this article that has me as angry as I have ever been over a politician. Before we get to that, let’s step back in time to 2008. Like 2012, the Republican Party didn’t exactly put forth an all-star field of candidates for voters to choose from. In the...

Until recently Mitt Romney has been telling us he intends to get rid of Obamacare. Until recently, that is. Now we learn of reports that Romney wants to preserve "parts" of Obamacare such as coverage for pre-existing conditions and coverage of "at home children" through twenty-six years of age. Trust me. This isn't good. All vestiges of Obamacare MUST GO! Socialized medicine in America whether Obamacare or Romneycare is a curse on freedom and liberty and there is no place for either in a free society. Back in June, 2012, I wrote the following: As we suspected, all along, Obamacare...

I’ve argued many times that the politician Mitt Romney most closely resembles is John Kerry, primarily due to the Mittster’s legendary penchant for flip-flopping, a trait Kerry is also known for. I stand by my Kerry comparison, but Jonah Goldberg has an excellent point when he compares Romney to another Massachusetts politician: Michael Dukakis. Meanwhile, the Republicans seem to have become Dukakified. It was Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, who insisted that the election should be entirely about “competence, not ideology.” Romney has avoided saying that in so many words, but it’s certainly how he’s campaigning. After running to the right in...

(CNSNews.com) - If Mitt Romney becomes president, he says he won't get rid of Obamacare in its entirety. In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday, Romney indicated he would keep the provisions dealing with pre-existing conditions and young adults: "Well, I'm not getting rid of all of healthcare reform," Romney told NBC's David Gregory. "Of course, there are a number of things that I like in health care reform that I'm going to put in place. One is to make sure that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage. Two is to assure that the marketplace allows for...

Can we stop calling ObamaCare the Affordable Care Act now? A Young America's Foundation activist forwarded an email from the Vice President for Finance at his school, Guilford College (Greensboro, NC), informing him that, "For the 2012-13 academic year, the annual cost of the student health insurance is increasing from $668 to $1,179. This insurance premium has been charged to your student account." Why the increase? "Our student health insurance policy premium has been substantially increased due to changes required by federal regulations issued on March 16, 2012 under the Affordable Care Act." Guilford College has been forced to raise...

Today, on Fox News Sunday: Video at Site

DENVER — Mitt Romney said in an interview Thursday that his plan to provide universal health insurance in Massachusetts was superior to President Obama's own health care plan. "My health care plan I put in place in my state has everyone insured, but we didn't go out and raise taxes on people and have a unelected board tell people what kind of health care they can have," Romney said in an interview with CBS' Denver affiliate, KCNC. Obama's plan was modeled on Romney's, which has made some conservatives wary of the former Massachusetts governor. Some GOP activists were angered when...

....The polls suggesting he’s seven or nine points behind are surely wrong, but given that there is only one national poll that shows him ahead, we have to presume Romney is behind. He should presume he’s behind. And given that there’s no good reason whatever for Obama to be leading, one can only presume that Romney’s strategy in July and now in August is not working. Which is why the “we only talk about the economy” line, while superficially clever, was and is so foolish—stupid, even. Of course Romney wants to focus on that one issue. It’s the one that...

Via Mediaite, the key bit comes at 1:25. Are we sufficiently close to the election yet that we’re obliged to give Team Mitt a pass on this purely in the interest of defeating Obama, or is there still time left to wrist-slap him for touting a deeply problematic statist health-care expansion? (It's not just his spokesman who alluded to RomneyCare this morning but, according to Reuters, Romney himself.) If the answer is the former then I'm not optimistic about holding his feet to the fire from the right once he's elected. The Democrats have formidable challengers lined up for 2016...

Coulter: Romney should fire his spokesman for that RomneyCare response to the steelworker ad Via Mediaite, inquiring conservatives on Twitter are asking: Er, isn’t Ann Coulter herself famously a big fan of RomneyCare? Answer: Yeah, but I’m not sure it’s Andrea Saul’s mention of RomneyCare that’s really bugging her. Mediaite’s transcript: “Her response was not that it was despicable, not that Bain… that Romney had left Bain five years earlier or the woman died five years after the plant closed and didn’t even get her insurance from her husband, her response was, ‘Well, if she had lived in Massachusetts with...

Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul thrust herself into the spotlight today by making a super lame argument against Burton’s outrageous “Romney killed my wife” ad by arguing that if the wife had been in Massachusetts, she would have had Romneycare for insurance. This has enraged Ann Coulter and she rips Saul to shreds, saying that Romney donors should demand Saul is fired or they won’t give another dime.

Last week, I got into a debate with David Frum over his post arguing that Mitt Romney should use his Massachusetts health care law to counter charges that he’s unsympathetic to the middle class. We’ll now have a chance to see how that strategy plays out, as it appears as if the Romney campaign has decided to take Frum’s advice. Andrea Saul’s response here creates a huge opening for defenders of the national health care law. [....] It isn’t too hard for the Obama campaign and his liberal allies to use Saul’s comments in defense of Obamacare. The essential argument...

A Mitt Romney spokesperson offered an unusual counterattack Tuesday to an ad in which a laid-off steelworker blames the presumptive GOP nominee for his family losing health care: If that family had lived in Massachusetts, it would have been covered by the former governor’s universal health care law. “To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care,” Andrea Saul, Romney’s campaign press secretary, said during an appearance on Fox News. “There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President [Barack] Obama’s...