Free Republic

There may be a good reason voters can’t get a good bead on Mitt Romney. And it may be because the real Romney has a troubled, sadistic history. High School classmates of Romney recall an incident that’s disturbing to its core. Romney, then a popular senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School in Michigan, disapproved of classmate John Lauber’s long, blond locks, which Romney allegedly took as a clue that Lauber was a homosexual. So Romney assembled a posse of bullies and held the boy down and brutally chopped off his hair. “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look...

Trent Lott famously said "We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples," Lott said in an interview. "As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them." - and I know what I think. I want to know what you think. Has she(Coulter) surrendered to the progressives within the republican establishment?

Mitt Romney was not his first choice for president, but conservative political activist Scott Magill has come to accept that Romney is now his only choice. So Magill is looking for reasons to get jazzed about the candidate he once dismissed. His list so far: Romney is a Republican who would sign into law legislation passed by a GOP-led House. Romney has started to hit the right talking points. If elected, Romney would have to listen to the conservative base - or risk its wrath at reelection time. Also, and perhaps most important, Romney is not Barack Obama. The conservative...

. . . . . What sort of justice to the Supreme Court will Mitt Romney nominate - a Souter or a Thomas? A Miers or an Alito? A Kennedy or a Scalia? His record as governor of Massachusetts gives no cause for optimism. Mr. Romney nominated 36 judges while governor, just nine of whom were Republicans. What he says of this record today is that the Massachusetts Governor's Council had to confirm the nominees, and the members of the council were all Democrats. So his answer was to nominate persons palatable to Democrats. But this all-Democratic Governor's Council is...

No link yet. I'm just seeing it on CNN. Reuters said Fox called it as well.

In state after state, evangelicals have sent Mitt Romney a clear message: We’re just not that into you. Some evangelicals do pull the lever for Romney. But consistently there is a wide gap between Romney’s support among evangelicals and his support among other groups. On average, there is a 19-point difference between Romney’s support among non-evangelicals and his support among evangelicals in Republican primaries, according to ABC News’s survey of primary states with exit- or entrance-polling data available. That’s a sizeable gap — and one that has complicated Romney’s path to the nomination. Evangelical leaders are dismissive of the notion...

Back Stab Sarah Palin As Portrayed By Her Disloyal Staff. MAR 19, 2012, VOL. 17, NO. 26 • BY JOHN PODHORETZ Nicolle Wallace was the onetime consultant to CBS News and media aide to George W. Bush who was assigned to work with Sarah Palin after the Alaska governor was chosen as John McCain’s running mate. It was Wallace who assured the McCain campaign that her dear friend Katie Couric, a committed liberal with a history of interviewing Republicans and conservatives in a quietly nasty way, was the right journalist to conduct a major early interview with the extremely conservative...

The Michigan Republican Party voted to break a delegate tie Wednesday night, awarding 16 delegates to Mitt Romney and 14 to Rick Santorum. The decision, which broke a 15-15 tie that would have resulted under the pre-primary interpretation of the rules, caused disbelief at Rick Santorum’s campaign. A spokesman rejected the decision. Even Romney supporters in the Michigan GOP said the decision was unfair to Santorum. “I have this crazy idea that you follow the rules,” said former Attorney General Mike Cox said after a 4-2 vote by a Michigan GOP credentialing committee, according to the AP. “I’d love to...

For those out there loving the current Republican race but worrying that it has become somewhat orthodox in appearance and stable in candidates and support numbers, fear not: ABC News’ Jonathan Karl has the blind item for you. In the most mysterious and, for the GOP, worrisome dispatch on the Republican field in a while, Karl reports that a “prominent Republican senator” told him that the Party will not stand for a Mitt Romney loss in Michigan, and that he expects a result like that to lead the Senator to “publicly call for the party to find a new candidate,”...

Thanks to some remarkable reporting from Big Hollywood, it has become increasingly clear the upcoming HBO movie "Game Change" is less a political melodrama than an all-out attempt to destroy the person and reputation of Sarah Palin. The movie is based on a poorly researched book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, and it was criticized at the time of its publication by Howard Kurtz, then a media reporter for the Washington Post, and the New York Times for its overreliance on unsourced "deep background" interviews that were difficult to verify. Two of those sources have been revealed, according to...

Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy, raised $7 million in January, topping off its deep reservoir of funds and allowing the group to flood media markets from Sioux City to Sarasota with some $14 million in advertising. Its FEC disclosure on Monday revealed that its extensive effort to elevate Romney and bury the competition relied on a set of donors that runs the gamut from famous heirs and CEOs to the most opaque and controversial kind of corporate interests. Unlike its competitors, Restore Our Future doesn’t have a lone high-profile benefactor, like Newt Gingrich has...

Sarah Palin’s not running for president, but up until this month she has been beating GOP front-runner Mitt Romney in a different kind of race. For the past few months, the ex-Republican vice presidential candidate has been whooping the former Massachusetts governor in one website’s merchandise sales. CafePress.com, which lets customers design and sell their own clothing items and other merchandise, finds that in December, Palin-inspired gear far outsold items featuring Romney, 80 percent to 20 percent. An average of 137,000 designs are uploaded to the website each week. Even last month, people were still picking Palin over the White...

What’s the prescription for a famously brilliant venture capitalist who has trouble connecting with blue-collar voters in his native state? How about bringing in a far more controversial venture capitalist who’s claim to recent fame is in firing people on national television? What could go wrong?With just over a week to go before Michigan voters head to the polls, Mitt Romney is enlisting the help of one of his highest-wattage surrogates: Donald Trump. The real estate mogul is preparing to spread his pro-Romney, anti-Rick Santorum message in a series of radio interviews this week on local stations from Traverse City...

A thousand injuries I suffered Fortunato. But when he turned to insult, I vowed revenge." Those are the opening words to Edgar Allen Poe's short story – “The Cask of Amontillado” – ... For a case of real-life of revenge in real-life American history, think of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. Burr and Hamilton held a duel that led to the death of Hamilton, (who) had said something to someone about Burr being "despicable." Newt Gingrich has a deep and abiding case against Mitt Romney. Romney has spent millions with the single purpose of destroying Gingrich as a candidate. Oh,...

John Hinderaker encapsulates an assumption which has started to take hold among many of Mitt Romney’s backers: that the fault for what appears to be an increasingly likely 2012 election loss lies with conservatives for making this a real primary. Speaking of the see-saw of not-Romney candidates, he writes: The same pattern has been repeated more than once during the current, discouraging presidential nominating process. If the GOP loses this year’s presidential contest, the party will have no one to blame but its own activists. I'm hearing this meme repeated by many increasingly dejected Romney supporters around Washington, D.C. See,...

Back in the thick of the 2008 Republican presidential race, I asked a captain of American finance what he had made of Mitt Romney when they were young colleagues at Bain & Company. “Mitt was a nice guy, a smart businessman, and an excellent team player,” he ­responded without missing a beat. Then came the CEO’s one footnote, delivered with bemusement, not pique: “Still, whenever the rest of us would go out at the end of the day, we’d always find ourselves having the same conversation: None of us had any idea who this guy was.” Here we are in...

On Fox News Sunday this morning, Karl Rove threw cold water on the murmurings by unnamed “top Republicans” that a new candidate could emerge should Romney lose Michigan. Host Chris Wallace outlined a scenario in which a new candidate could still get on the ballots of California, New Jersy, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, and possibly Texas, and win enough delegates to contest the convention. But Rove was skeptical, to say the least. “This proves mental illness is transmittable by contact, personal contact. You’ve been talking to all these people and — look, let’s go. . . . Let’s take...

We’ve all heard the axiom, “as goes Ohio, so goes the nation”. In fact, no Republican has ever won the Presidency without winning Ohio. And for this year’s GOP presidential primary, Ohio is the top prize in what is turning out to be a critical Super Tuesday on March 6th. In fact, just yesterday analyst Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics identified Ohio as the key state between a Romney runaway and the possibility of a brokered convention. So the viability of a three-way split probably comes down to Ohio, which has a fair number of evangelicals, though not to...

Appearing on CNN's State of the Union today, Rick Santorum told host Candy Crawley that his loss yesterday to Mitt Romney in CPAC's annual straw poll was because he didn't pay for votes. From Politico: "Well, you know, those straw polls at CPAC... for years Ron Paul has won those because he trucks in a lot of people, pays for their tickets, and they come in and vote and they leave. We didn't do that, we don't do that. i don't try to rig straw polls." Pressed further on whether or not he felt Romney had rigged the poll, Santorum...

Mitt Romney, in pledging to turn around the Olympics in 2002, had promised to restore the honor and integrity of the scandal-clouded Salt Lake City. The Games captured the world’s attention and became all the more urgent after terrorists attacked us on 9-11. But while Romney invoked the wellspring of American patriotism after the attacks, he neglected their heroes, the fallen firefighters of that early September morning. Romney’s executive assistant, Donna Tillery, twice denied requests to provide free or discounted tickets to widows and orphans of the felled firefighters but gave them for free to Utah legislators just six weeks...