Free Republic

Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist slammed for radicalizing Washington Washington is more dysfunctional than it has been in 40 years, and while Democrats have deserved their share of the blame over the years, today "the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party," write Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein in the Washington Post. What makes their column particularly interesting is that Ornstein is not liberal, but a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Together, they call the GOP an "insurgent outlier in American politics" because of the...

While billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson may have rescued Newt Gingrich’s campaign in its early days, today, he may have just buried it. Bloomberg News reports that Adelson, who has donated $11 million to Gingrich’s Super PAC, does not plan to send any more money Gingrich’s way. Bloomberg is citing an anonymous source “familiar with their deliberations,” though an Adelson spokesman declined to comment. The move seems to be weeks in the making. After poor showings by Gingrich in the last several races and the re-resurgence of Rick Santorum, the former House speaker has once again been pushed to the...

Rick Santorum accused rival Mitt Romney on Tuesday of running a “dirty politics” robocall campaign in South Carolina to discredit the former Pennsylvania senator and mislead voters in the state’s fiercely contested Republican presidential primary Saturday. Campaigning at the Yorktown aircraft carrier museum in Charleston Harbor, Santorum slammed the former Massachusetts governor for an automated call that plays a tape of Santorum endorsing Romney’s 2008 run for the GOP presidential nomination. “Gov. Romney, out there playing a recording from four years ago, and suggesting that I’m endorsing him, is another example of Gov. Romney misleading the public about my record...

Santorum's so-called surge is all but gone. Huntsman is catching up.

Don't be conned into nominating Mitt Romney.

All I'm hearing from those-who-like-to-tell-us-how-to-vote (MSM/GOP establishment/Ann Coulter) this week is how Romney is "feeling confident" while Rick Santorum is soaring  (an unsinspiring politician Romney/Obama would love to face), yet Reaganite warrior Newt Gingrich (of whom they are both terrified) is now 'demoralized', with 'little chance of winning', etc... and all this derived from a vote count representing of just 4% of Iowa's tiny, rural population.  Yes, MSM/Left know perfectly well that this is the flakiest GOP primary electorate in history -and Santorum not even 10% as brutally-vetted/slandered as Bachmann, Cain, and Gingrich have been: might be good to consider at this point why some...

MSNBC's Financier – Mitt Romney Are you curious how former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney became a very wealthy man? Apparently, his investment company, Bain Capital, is bankrolling the President Barack Obama White House news network, MSNBC, a leftist cable news network that is floundering in TV ratings compared with Fox News. Politico reports that, “starting on last night’s Ed Show with Ed Schultz, MSNBC anchors are now disclosing their parent company’s ties to Bain Capital, the buyout firm co-founded by Mitt Romney.” For an approximate $3.5 billion – a business relationship that MSNBC anchors have not disclosed until recently, according...

Which Newt Gingrich would show up? That was the question on most people’s minds — OK, mine — as we waited for him to appear at a town hall event at St. Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics Wednesday evening. Would it be the calm, above-the-fray political sage that Gingrich has lately tried to will himself into being? Or the partisan bomb-thrower of yore that we all know from the 1990s? After his fourth-place finish in Iowa the night before and his subsequent concession speech/declaration of war on Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, my own expectation was on the...

Rick Perry’s presidential campaign released a tough new ad Thursday targeting Rick Santorum and his history of supporting earmarks in Congress. Why is Perry attacking a candidate who has been mired in single digits in Iowa despite living there for most of the past several months? Simple, Santorum is surging. A CNN poll of registered Iowa Republicans released Wednesday puts Santorum in third place with 16 percent of the vote – his highest share yet. It’s not an outlier. In fact, data from Perry’s internal daily tracking polling shows that the Santorum surge is real and that he has the...

GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has rocketed ahead of President Obama and taken his biggest lead yet in a national head-to-head matchup, a new poll showed today. Romney topped Obama 45 percent to 39 percent in the Rasmussen Reports survey. “It’s also the biggest lead a named Republican candidate has held over the incumbent in Rasmussen Reports surveying to date,” said the pollsters. Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney greets supporters at J's Homestyle Cooking in Cedar Falls, Iowa Thursday. A week ago, Romney trailed Obama 44 percent to 41 percent and the week before that held...

Mitt Romney has now jumped to his biggest lead ever over President Obama in a hypothetical Election 2012 matchup. It’s also the biggest lead a named Republican candidate has held over the incumbent in Rasmussen Reports surveying to date. The latest national telephone survey finds that 45% of Likely U.S. Voters favor the former Massachusetts governor, while 39% prefer the president. Ten percent (10%) like some other candidate in the race, and six percent (6%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.) A week ago, Romney trailed Obama 44% to 41%. The week before that, he held a...

DES MOINES, Iowa: Republicans Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann took veiled swipes at surging presidential rival Herman Cain Saturday as six of the party’s White House hopefuls courted social conservatives at an Iowa forum. Appearing separately before about 1,000 conservative activists, the Republican candidates all pledged to protect the unborn, defend traditional marriage, limit government and bring an end to the presidency of Democrat Barack Obama. But Cain, the former pizza executive, came under indirect fire for seeming to suggest earlier this week that while he opposed abortion, government should not be trying to tell a woman what to do...

In a new website, in a controversial ad that was launched and then quickly pulled, and in the now-infamous touching episode during Tuesday’s debate, Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney is handling rival Rick Perry as if the Texas governor’s poll numbers were not at a paltry single digit. He is, in short, treating Perry more and more like Perry has Herman Cain’s numbers. Why? Because despite the terrible reviews of Perry’s debate performances and the ugly polling data that show him struggling even in his base in the South, Perry is still Romney’s biggest threat. Perry did, after all, best...

Most conservative critics of the Massachusetts health reform have focused on any piece of bad news about the program they can find. After all, if this is the model for the federal legislation everyone calls “ObamaCare” it’s got to have a lot of defects. Right? Not so fast. The real story coming out of Massachusetts is that the whole thing is a yawner. Health reform in the Bay State has been mainly about money: who writes the checks and who cashes them. That shouldn’t be a surprise. That’s usually what health reform is about. But what about the effect on...

One prominent Republican calls on his party to drum Palin out of the 2012 race. Here's why he'll be disappointed. "Morning Joe" Scarborough earned a splash of attention within the politerati this week with a Politico column calling on the Republican Party to "man up" and denounce Sarah Palin. His main point is that Palin is poison for the Grand Old Party: The most-talked-about figure in the GOP is a reality show star who cannot be elected. And yet the same leaders who fret that Sarah Palin could devastate their party in 2012 are too scared to say in public...

Sarah Palin just offered a surprise endorsement of insurgent Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, calling in to Sean Hannity's radio show to offer her support. The news broke mainly on Twitter, after O'Donnell and Hannity tweeted it. Dave Weigel points out some back-story here: O'Donnell's campaign manager, Matt Moran, comes from the campaign of Dave Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate in upstate New York who briefly captivated people who follow special House elections when he ran a campaign, fueled party by Palin's endorsement, that eventually forced the Republican candidate out of the race and handed the seat to Democrats. It...

Just before Thanksgiving last year, a group of former aides to Mitt Romney convened at his salmon-colored Belmont home, many of them gathering for the first time since Romney had disbanded his presidential campaign some nine months before. Romney had invited them for a post-mortem of the election weeks earlier, the type of dispassionate assessment that the Harvard Business School alumnus so enjoyed. But over cookies, they found few of the metrics for success that Romney prized -- Republicans had been decisively thumped at all levels -- and his attention shifted from 2008 to the future.

Former Massachusetts Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney tells Newsmax that the Democrats’ massive stimulus package is laden with “pet liberal projects” that won’t help the economy at all. He also asserts that President Barack Obama is actually hurting the economy in two ways — and said Republicans in the Senate are close to having “no voice whatsoever.”

In all the furor yesterday over Rush Limbaugh's tremendous speech at CPAC, I failed to post video of Gov. Mitt Romney's speech. So the video above is of Romney's speech at CPAC 2009. If you want to skip the introductions, Romney actually begins speaking at the 13:00 mark of the video. Romney turned out to be the winner of the CPAC 2012 Straw Poll, getting 20% of the vote, with Jindal running second at 14%. So, it was a very good day for Romney, who is in a strong position to run again if he chooses to. . . ....

Mitt Romney on "Hannity" discussing the Obama stimulus package, and America's economic future. Aired 2/26/09 on Fox News. Hannity and Romney explain, in a nut shell, why Obamanomics is lethal to America! Indeed, a frightening reality! The Obama budget will destroy the dollar; destroy capitalism, and destroy America. Support a Republican Revolution in the 2010 Congressional elections! It's the only way to protect our future!