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When Mitt Romney's second book, No Apology, came out a year ago, it looked like he was moving away from the far-right demagoguery of his 2008 bid for the presidency, and toward a more moderate centrism for the 2012 election cycle. (See "New and Improved Romney," Talking Politics, February 10, 2010.) But times change, and so does Mitt. A year later, with the Tea Party–fueled extremism of the 2010 midterms foretelling a rightward tilt to the GOP presidential primaries, Romney is tacking back — as evidenced by changes made to two sections of the text in the new paperback edition...

The elections of Nikki Haley, who is poised to become the first female/first Indian governor of South Carolina and Tim Scott, poised to become the second black Republican congressman to serve in Congress (and who won against a segregationist's son, Paul Thurmond) were momentous and historical for all the obvious reasons... That being said, I do not expect the lamestream media to give these stories as much coverage as they deserve mainly because their "conservatives want segregation back" mantra is quite frankly the only age-old tactic liberals have to rely on for any hope of keeping their shackles on the...

MESA, Ariz. (AP) —Once bitter rivals for the presidency, Mitt Romney and John McCain campaigned together as friends on Friday, one gearing up for a likely presidential bid and the other fighting to hold onto his seat in the U.S. Senate. The two Republicans fielded questions from a largely supportive audience of several hundred people, touching on issues including immigration and the environment while heaping criticism on President Barack Obama. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, battled with McCain in 2008 for the Republican nomination for president, then aggressively campaigned for McCain in the general election. He has endorsed the Arizona...

One of Bill Ayers’ courses at the University of Illinois includes Pedagogy of the Oppressed as required reading. Author Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist, declared: “This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.” It turns out that the Freire book is required reading in “Raza Studies” or Mexican-American courses in the high schools in Tucson, Arizona, where students have been protesting Arizona’s new immigration law. Other required books are Occupied America by Rodolfo Acuña, a professor emeritus of Chicano studies at California State University in Northridge (CSUN), and...

Sometime around the time Barack Obama won the White House, I started wondering who would inherit the Republican Party. I have to admit I felt a little schadenfreude when George and Dick drove the GOP off a cliff, but I also named this space “Common Ground” for a reason. We need to focus on what unites us more than the things that divide us. Here’s some common ground: We need two functioning political parties to continue to meet the challenges of our times. Unlike Karl Rove, I don’t want one party to run the country. Hammering out public policy through...

We’ve done a million posts about this three-way match-up but I don’t think we’ve done one yet about a key swing state. Not what I would have predicted. Florida’s the first really important stop on the GOP calendar that we’ve looked at, and Romney’s lead there is overwhelming. He gets 52% to 21% for Huckabee and 18% for Palin. It’s closer, but still a double digit advantage, in Colorado. There Romney gets 44% to 25% for Palin and 17% for Huckabee.

Various representatives of the Barack Obama administration were out on the Sunday talk shows in the U.S. today, trying to spin the election of Senator Scott Brown (R -MA) [and how often do you see that abbreviation?] as being an endorsement of the Obama agenda, particularly with regard to health care. I witnessed the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, on "Fox News Sunday," trying to do this very thing. Gibbs was making the very same kinds of arguments to host Chris Wallace as Howard Dean tried making a few days ago to MSNBC's Chris Matthews. Wallace was a lot...

The upper echelon of Republican Scott Brown’s Senate campaign in Massachusetts is filled with staffers who once worked in former Gov. Mitt Romney’s employ. But with the eyes of the nation on the state’s Jan. 19 special Senate election — and with other Republican luminaries such as Rudy Giuliani traipsing through Massachusetts for Brown in recent days — Romney himself has been conspicuously absent. Despite his status as one of the GOP’s most prominent national figures and a prospective 2012 presidential candidate, the former Massachusetts governor hasn’t appeared publicly with Brown since late October. Back then, when almost no one...

A poll of GOP insiders suggests that ex-AK Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has little support among the party's professional class -- and maybe that's just how she wants it. In a survey of 109 party leaders, political professionals and pundits, Palin finished 5th on the list of candidates most likely to win the party's '12 WH nomination. Ex-MA Gov. Mitt Romney (R) was the overwhelming choice of the Voters were asked to rank 5 candidates in the order of likeliness to capture the GOP nod. The results: Likely To Win WH'12 Nomination (First place votes) Ex-MA Gov. Mitt Romney 81...

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will make two stops in Iowa in March as part of his nationwide book tour, following visits by fellow 2012 GOP hopefuls Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty. Romney’s second book, “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness,” is due out March 2, and the promotional tour will take the former GOP presidential candidate to 18 states. Romney will visit first in the nation Iowa on March 29, signing books at the Des Moines Central Library and making a speech at Iowa State University, located in Ames.

Mitt Romney - that rare political breed, a Republican elected statewide in Massachusetts - told supporters yesterday that if Scott Brown can pull off a similar feat next month in the US Senate special election, it “would shock the country and send a strong message that business as usual in Washington is coming to an end.’’ “He would bring badly-needed fiscal restraint to an out-of-control budget process that is adding trillions of dollars to our national debt,’’ said Romney, the former Bay State governor who gives every indication he’s preparing a second presidential bid in 2012.

The American Revolutionary War began in Massachusetts with the Battles of Lexington and Concord, on April 19th, 1775. Following what Emerson referred to as the “Shot heard ‘round the world”, a small fledgling colony stood up against the tyranny of the greatest military force on earth… And won. Great men and women stood up in perilous times and prevailed against what appeared to be unconquerable odds. Some have referred to the present day as perilous times, and once again the people of Massachusetts have an opportunity to set into motion a political revolution. On January 19th, a special election will...

Just before yesterday’s White House jobs summit, Mitt Romney minced no words in blasting President Obama’s economic policies. “Like other presidents before him, Barack Obama inherited a recession. But unlike them, he has made it worse, not better,’’ Romney wrote in an opinion piece published yesterday in USA Today. The former Massachusetts governor - who made his name and fortune at private equity firm Bain Capital, ran for the GOP presidential nomination last year, and could very well run again in 2012 - derides Obama’s economic know-how. “His failure to stem the unemployment tide should not have been a surprise....

Reversing his previously stated belief that none of the Republican candidates for the GOP presidential nomination have all three legs of the conservative stool, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners Monday that Mitt Romney is indeed a three-leg conservative. Describing the three legs as "national security/foreign policy, the social conservatives, and the fiscal conservatives," Rush said, "The social conservatives are the cultural people. The fiscal conservatives are the economic crowd: low taxes, smaller government, get out of the way... The foreign policy crowd is obviously what it is. I don't think there's anybody on our side who doesn't care about national...