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I have no clear idea whether Pastor Robert Jeffress is correct in referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more colloquially known as the Mormons, as “a cult.” There do seem to be one or two points of similarity. The Mormons have a supreme leader, known as the prophet or the president, whose word is allegedly supreme. They can be ordered to turn upon and shun any members who show any signs of backsliding. They have distinctive little practices, such as the famous underwear, to mark them off from other mortals, and they are said to be...

No Newt, no thanks. He's fun to listen to in a debate, but he doesn't belong on the ballot or in the Oval Office. Because a brilliant bad man is still a bad man, and Newt Gingrich is a bad man. He is not good for the Republican Party, and he is not good for the United States. And his popularity in the polls is both troublesome and inexplicable. A big-government career politician, an only sporadic conservative, he has somehow caught the attention and affection of just enough Republicans to be the top contender for the party's presidential nomination. That...

As the merry-go-round of the GOP primary continues, the present darling of fickle voters is Newt Gingrich, Like a phoenix he’s risen from the ashes to claim, with typical humility, “I’m going to be the nominee,” dismissing all other candidates as a trifling irrelevancy. Unfortunately the belated choice of Gingrich is no choice at all, for there can be little doubt how the questionably conservative and enormously polarizing Gingrich would fare against a personally popular Obama in the General Election. There is, at present only one real choice to make regarding the next president. It’s either Romney or Obama. A...

I had a friend once who amused herself thinking up bumper stickers for states. The one she made up for California was brilliant. "California: It's All True." It is so vast and sprawling a place, so rich and various, that whatever you've heard about its wildness, weirdness and wonders, it's true. That's the problem with Newt Gingrich: It's all true. It's part of the reason so many of those who know him are anxious about the thought of his becoming president. It's also why people are looking at him, thinking about him, considering him as president. Ethically dubious? True. Intelligent...

When I first clicked on this video, I thought for sure that it couldn’t really be as awkward as some were saying. I was wrong. Your toes will curl. The video features a younger Mitt Romney being interviewed by a young man during Romney’s failed 1994 senate campaign. It’s old for sure, but it’s going viral again (and it’s easy to see why). To be sure, the awkwardness is not from Romney — it comes from the teen interviewer, who successfully turns what could have been a fun, local interview into a painful exchange about music.

Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain and Rick Perry have all received a little love (and by “love,” I just mean attention) at HA this weekend, so I thought I’d remind everybody of another runner by the name of Mitt Romney. For much of this primary season, he’s been the erstwhile frontrunner of a race nobody wants him to win and, every so often, I ask myself, “Why is that again?”Then, I remember Romneycare and the oh-so-condemning ads that have already come out of the Democratic National Committee. It’s hard to make a case, as Charles Krauthammer recently so brilliantly explained, that...

It’s Iowa minus 32 days, and barring yet another resurrection (or event of similar improbability), it’s Mitt Romney vs. Newt Gingrich. In a match race, here’s the scorecard: Romney has managed to weather the debates unscathed. However, the brittleness he showed when confronted with the kind of informed follow-up questions that Bret Baier tossed his way Tuesday on Fox’s “Special Report” — the kind of scrutiny one doesn’t get in multiplayer debates — suggests that Romney may become increasingly vulnerable as the field narrows. Moreover, Romney has profited from the temporary rise and spontaneous combustion of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry...

Romney and Gingrich, From Bad to Worse By George F. Will December 2 Republicans are more conservative than at any time since their 1980 dismay about another floundering president. They are more ideologically homogenous than ever in 156 years of competing for the presidency. They anticipated choosing between Mitt Romney, a conservative of convenience, and a conviction politician to his right. The choice, however, could be between Romney and the least conservative candidate, Newt Gingrich. Romney’s main objection to contemporary Washington seems to be that he is not administering it. God has 10 commandments, Woodrow Wilson had 14 points, Heinz...

RAMESH PONNURU DECEMBER 2, 2011 Romney’s the One Even though nobody has yet cast a vote in the primaries, Republicans are increasingly resigned to Gov. Mitt Romney’s winning the party’s presidential nomination. Every week he gets a few more endorsements from Republican officeholders. He has never had a commanding lead in the polls, but one by one the other candidates who have occupied the top tier with him — first Rep. Michele Bachmann, then Gov. Rick Perry, then Herman Cain — have fallen back out of it. The current surge for Newt Gingrich looks like one last fling before Republicans...

If the Republican presidential contenders wish to remain truthful to their rhetoric of decentralization of power in Washington, they should take a break from wooing social conservatives and stand for states' rights in regard to gay marriage. Because many likely Iowa caucus-goers describe themselves as very conservative on social issues such as gay marriage and abortion, many candidates feel they need to reach out to the far-right if they plan to get the presidential nod. However, a staunch, conservative position on social issues will likely hurt them in the long run, because it undermines their more-appealing small-government policies.... The three...

Does the Newt Gingrich polling surge mean that Mitt Romney is finished, or at least in serious trouble? No — in fact, Romney remains a heavy favorite in the race, regardless of what the current headlines lifted from those surveys might say. Gingrich has jumped out in front, sometimes dramatically so, in several polls (see here and here for the latest Florida numbers). One theory of why Romney has fallen behind Gingrich is an oft-repeated myth that there is a “low ceiling” on Romney's support, with Romney unable to rise above 25% or so. But it's just a myth. On...

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa (AP) — Shifting his Iowa campaign into a more aggressive final phase, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is launching his first TV ads in the state with a spot in which he declares, "I've learned something about how it is that economies grow." "The right answer for America is to stop the growth of the federal government and to start the growth of the private sector," Romney says in the 30-second spot set to run Friday. The former Massachusetts governor's decision to start spending money on paid advertising in Iowa five weeks before the Jan. 3 caucuses...

If you haven’t seen the Bret Baier interview with Mitt Romney it is now abundantly apparent why Mitt Romney will not sit in the middle chair and take tough questions from the roundtable — his skin is as thin as Barack Obama’s. (To Bret’s credit, he had the roundtable panel submit questions and Steve Hayes asked an awesome one. You’ll have to watch the interview to see it) Bret Baier asked Romney, “About your book, you talk about Massachusetts healthcare. We’ve heard you many times, in the debates and interviews, talk about how it is different in your mind than...

When he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, Paul Tsongas repeatedly made it clear: He loathed President George H.W. Bush's flip-flopping on abortion and his inattentiveness to what Tsongas perceived as the urgent need for global population control. And he won Mitt Romney's vote in the 1992 Massachusetts presidential primary. "This land, this water, this air, this planet, this rain, this is our legacy to our young, yet the Reagan-Bush years have been a time of cynical avoidance of one environmental issue after another -- acid rain, energy conservation, depletion of the ozone layer, global warming and uncontrolled...

He is the king of flip-flops, the emperor of hypocrisy, the czar of opinions a mile wide and an inch deep. Mitt Romney? Not by a long shot -- because when it comes to core values, conservative or otherwise, Romney tips the top of the belief-o-meter compared with Newt Gingrich. And it is a lesson conservatives should learn now, before the actual primary voting begins. For the Tea Party, for evangelicals, for the ordinary Joe and Jane who believe in American exceptionalism and hard work and God, for the like-minded concerned with the path of the Republic -- no Newt...

Not your grandfather’s Republican Party My lifelong friend and high-school classmate had an wonderful op-ed on iPolitics today. Please consider Not your grandfather’s Republican Party by David Wise. One of the most negative things to have happened to the increasingly dysfunctional political system in the United States has been the transformation of the Republican Party over the last generation into the party of fiscal deficits. At one time, the bastion of balanced budgets and no free lunches, 70% of gross public debt through the last fiscal year was accumulated under the last three Republican presidents who ran deficits twenty out...

<p>SOUTHFIELD, Mich. — As other Republican candidates have stumbled their way toward the presidential primaries, Mitt Romney has put together what would seem to be all the elements of a winning campaign: an effective staff, a robust treasury and smooth, knowledgeable performances both in debates and on the trail.</p>

Southfield, Mich. — As other Republican candidates have stumbled their way toward the presidential primaries, Mitt Romney has put together what would seem to be all the elements of a winning campaign: an effective staff, a robust treasury and smooth, knowledgeable performances both in debates and on the trail. But for months, the threshold of support for the former Massachusetts governor hasn't inched above a quarter of Republican voters in national polls. For many GOP voters in early primary states, hesitation about Romney comes back to one thing: their perception that he has routinely molded his views to suit the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was accused on Wednesday of flip-flopping for comments he made in 2007 indicating he was open to a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Romney's remarks, made on NBC's "Meet the Press" when he was a candidate for president, were circulated by rival Newt Gingrich's campaign the day after the former Speaker of the House of Representatives came under similar fire for suggesting during a debate Tuesday night that he was in favor of such a pathway for immigrants. Opponents of a pathway, a large swath of the early-voting Republican electorate, have...

The LDS Church is politically neutral, as is MDL. Mormons hold elected office and positions of responsibility in both US political parties and various parties worldwide. When we respond to any issue regarding politics, we do so only to correct misinformation and misperceptions about the Church, not in an effort to promote a particular candidate or party. Recently, Politico reported that part of President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign strategy will be to portray Mitt Romney, a Mormon and possible Republican presidential nominee, as “weird.” The Politico report did not specifically tie the “weird” charge to Romney’s Mormon faith, but many...