Free Republic

..............Incredible as it may seem to most outside observers, Mitt Romney is actually what currently passes for a moderate in today’s Republican Party..... Romney was sold – in the teeth of opposition from a significant section of the Republican grass roots – as the pragmatic choice, the compromise they had to make with ideology to secure victory. And when he loses, those activists are going to go as vengefully crazy as Cain’s Rhode Island Reds. Anyone who doubts the reaction of the GOP stalwarts to Romney’s impending defeat should bear in mind this single, if chilling, fact. Most of them...

One of the most interesting aspects of the 2012 election is how the tea party movement has proven more politically mature than the center-right’s self-styled elites, and those who spent much of the Republican primary season chiding swathes of people for being insufficiently pragmatic have turned out to be far more childish than the conservative base. For the past several weeks, Mitt Romney has been surrounded by critics from the DC-Manhattan elite who’ve denounced him for a lackluster, unfocused campaign, teeing off on Team Romney in the wake of the 47 percent comments for a number of issues—but mostly, in...

Ann Romney says fellow Republicans who’ve criticized her husband need to “stop it” and realize “how lucky” the party is to have Mitt Romney as its nominee. Ann Romney spoke late this afternoon to about 200 people, mostly women, who’d gathered for a rally in the store room of a central Iowa furniture business.

Mitt Romney's comments about 47 percent of Americans being dependent on government and locked in to vote for President Obama highlight a fundamental reality in American politics today: The gap between the American people and the political class is bigger than the gap between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C. Romney's remarks are the GOP equivalent of Obama's notorious comments about small-town Pennsylvania voters bitterly clinging to their guns and religion. Both Romney and Obama highlighted the condescending attitude that political elites hold of the people they want to rule over. A National Journal survey found that 59 percent of...

Was listening to the re-run of the Glenn Beck Radio Program this morning. Beck mentioned something about "a miracle" concerning the GOP-establishment capitulating to the Tea Party, and that he could say more because "it isn't our story."

The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan is criticizing Mitt Romney’s response to the death of a U.S. diplomat in Libya, telling Fox News today she doesn’t feel that the Republican presidential nominee “has been doing himself any favors” in the past few hours. “I was thinking as he spoke, I think I belong to the old school of thinking that in times of great drama and heightened crisis, and in times when something violent has happened to your people, I always think discretion is the better way to go,” Noonan said. “When you step forward in the midst of a...

Latinos are religious, morally conservative and tend disproportionately to join the military. They also tend to be hard working and entrepreneurial. Do we really have too many of them? Do we really want to pack them up, forcibly, by the millions in the greatest forced migration in human history? How many are there, 15, maybe 20 million? No one has ever moved 15 million people against their will. No one has ever moved half that many without concentration camps, forced marches of one form or another and mass death through plague. If there’s another way to do it, please tell...

Rick Tyler, former advisor to Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign and current advisor to Missouri Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin, appeared on MSNBC on Tuesday where he slammed the GOP for turning their back on his candidate. Tyler said that the Republican party would only have themselves to blame and warned of a “revolution in the Republican party” if Akin loses to Missouri’s Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. MSNBC host Alex Wagner said that, in her previous discussions with Tyler, she said that he had chosen an uphill battle by joining Gingrich’s campaign. She said that he appeared to have doubled down...

By Mr. Curmudgeon:Many reading this column are no doubt familiar with the shocking, embarrassing, and very public fight that occurred on the floor of the Charlotte Convention Center when President Obama called for a hasty re-inclusion of God and Jerusalem into the Democratic Party platform. When convention chair, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, put the president's motion before the delegates for a voice vote, those shouting "No!" carried the day. Villaraigosa disingenuously ruled that, in his "opinion," the "ayes" won and the president's motion was carried.Critics charged that overriding the delegate's wishes was a cynical attempt by Democratic Party elites...

Guys, I am the first to jump on the GOP-elite when they backstab conservatives. I'm even sometimes at the front of the parade. But I have certain information that might show that the GOP-e wasn't all too keen on some of the rules changes that got us so upset. In fact, Romney's team might have been trying to avoid some of this stuff. I need to do more homework (there is a freeper who is my main source for this, and he's NOT GOP-machine whatsoever. If he wishes credit, I will be glad to give it to him). Wait for...

In a closed-door fundraiser at the Republican National Convention, Karl Rove reportedly joked about the murder of Missouri GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin. “We should sink Todd Akin. If he’s found mysteriously murdered, don’t look for my whereabouts!” joked Rove, according to a Businessweek report of the fundraiser. Sheelah Kolhatkar, an editor for Bloomberg Businessweek, was invited to the event as a guest of top Republican donor who was aware she was a journalist. The invite gave her a behind-the-scenes look at the otherwise-private event. At the event, Rove urged attendees to urge Akin to get out of the race,...

On night two of the Republican National Convention, Fox News Channel was once again the network more people went to to get their political fix. That said, every network was down substantially from the same night in 2008, when Sarah Palin made her RNC debut.

The result of the RNC new rules will be to centralize power in the hands of the Republican Establishment in Washington at the expense of the grass roots. It will also have the effect of making a primary challenge to Romney from the right in 2016 (if he wins) more difficult, given that he will control the party apparatus to an unprecedented degree given his new rules. Mark Levin stated that John Boehner ignored the “nos” which were at least as loud, if not louder than the “ayes” so that he could give Romney surrogate John Sununu, standing right next to...

Complete title Floor fight: Grass-roots activists battle attempt to rig RNC delegate rules Updated: Palin: “direct attack on the grass-roots;” RNC power grab showdown 2pm; Rush weighs in; purge underway?; Rules Cmte votes 78-14 for deal; dissidents gather sigs for floor fight; Boehner/Sununu declare”no objections” over massive boos on floor ********************************************************* *snip* Update 3:34pm Eastern Dissidents have until 3:47pm Eastern to gather enough signatures to force the floor vote, according to right-leaning Examiner’s Tim Carney, who is on scene. Left-leaning BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller, also on scene, says it appears dissidents have gathered enough signatures for minority report on Rule 12,...

At 2:00 p.m. today in Tampa, the Republican National Committee, led by Team Romney, is moving to shut down conservative grassroots activists. I’ve been on the phone with several individuals involved in the fight who tell me that the fight is not over, it is only just starting.Specifically, the media is reporting that the rules fight is over because Team Romney is abandoning Ben Ginsberg’s effort to allow candidates to control delegates. Under an initial proposal, delegates would, in effect, be chosen by the presumed nominee’s campaign and not based on votes in the states and delegate selection processes in...

TAMPA, Fla. — Mitt Romney’s campaign has stepped back from a major confrontation with fellow Republicans who were irate over what several ranking party officials had called a “power grab” by the presumptive nominee. The Romney campaign had won approval earlier of a change in the party’s presidential nominating rules that would allow Mr. Romney, if elected president, to veto already elected delegates from the 50 states and five territories to the next GOP nominating convention in 2016 and beyond. Even if Mr. Romney were not president come January, the rules change would have allowed future presidential nomination candidates the...

Zeke Miller is reporting that a set of changes to the convention rules pushed through by Mitt Romney’s team is raising a few hackles among the delegates and could potentially lead to a squabble on the convention floor. The modifications in question deal – among other things – with the method used to select and approve the individual delegates from each state. Frustration over changes to the Republican Party’s rules pushed through by the Romney Campaign on Friday may lead to a fight on the floor of the Republican National Convention on Monday. The Convention Committee on Rules took a...

If one of Mitt Romney's goals in choosing a running mate was to mine the same mother lode of conservative excitement that John McCain tapped by picking Sarah Palin four years ago, there's one additional dilemma for Romney to address: Palin is still around. A day after Romney unveiled House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential pick, Palin suggested in a statement posted by her Fox News colleague Greta Van Susteren that she would not speak at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa.(snip) For this reason, it was notable when she initially offered only a lukewarm reaction...

Palin will not speak at Republican conventionWASHINGTON | Sun Aug 12, 2012 7:36pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin will not speak at the Republican nominating convention in Tampa later this month, she said in statement on Sunday. "This year is a good opportunity for other voices to speak at the convention and I'm excited to hear them," Palin, who was Senator John McCain's running mate in the 2008 election, said in a statement on Gretawire, the blog of Fox News's Greta Van Susteren.

I’m getting sick of the rewriting of 2008 presidential campaign history as K Street Republicans continue to assault Sarah Palin in the fear that a similarly conservative Republican will rise to the top of the VP sweepstakes. It has been so fashionable in D.C. Republican circles to bash the Palin nomination as a mistake, ill-conceived or even disastrous, that even Dick Cheney has gotten into the act. These self-serving attempts to change history are nothing more than a smear campaign designed to influence the Romney VP pick by obscuring the truth that the choice of Sarah Palin to be the...