Free Republic

DAYTONA BEACH -- At the Florida Tea Party Convention Saturday, you could find buttons calling for Marco Rubio to be on the presidential ticket, t-shirts declaring that Barack Obama has made communism cool again, and freeze-dried foods to last up to 25 years in case society collapses. Scarce among the hundreds of conservative activists gathered in Daytona Beach? Any enthusiasm for Mitt Romney, the man widely expected to win the Republican presidential nomination. “The party establishment has wanted Romney all along, and they’ve been pushing him on us,” lamented James Koll of Fort Dodge, Iowa, who said he would support...

Fifty-two percent of Republicans want a major third party to compete with Democrats and the GOP, according to a Gallup poll released Monday. An even larger percentage of Tea Partiers, 60 percent, want a new party. The portion of Americans who want a third party has been at or above 50 percent since mid-2006, but this is the first time a majority of Republicans have felt that way since Gallup began asking the question in 2003. This is news Donald Trump can seize on--he's flirted with running as an independent once he's done flirting with running as a Republican in...

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) stressed Friday he has no intentions of following down the path of his Utah colleague, Sen. Bob Bennett (R). During an appearance on Bloomberg's "Political Capital With Al Hunt" set to air this weekend, Hatch, who's up for reelection in 2012, talked down the prospect of losing to a conservative primary challenger the way Bennett did earlier this year. “I like Bob Bennett. I felt like he was a great senator. But I'm no Bob Bennett," Hatch said of his colleague, who lost at a state party convention to Mike Lee, the new GOP candidate for...