Free Republic

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus says the RNC has begun “focusing in” on Hillary Clinton as a candidate for 2016 and will continue to do so. Priebus was asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday whether the RNC would work to attack Clinton as the presumed Democratic nominee for president in 2016, according to a show transcript. “We have. So our research shop, along with America Rising, has been focusing in on Hillary Clinton.

With America’s mainstream media taking the week off for the Thanksgiving holiday, the nation’s lonely and underworked pollsters stepped up to feed the beast. -snip- Those two findings, more than everything else above, may point to why 2016 is Mr. Christie’s year — as does this last poll. Just 18 percent of Americans say they are at their “ideal weight.” More than half “would like” to lose some weight; just 25 are “seriously trying” — the highest gap in 11 years. And 36 percent would classify themselves as “overweight.” Good news for Mr. Christie, seriously overweight but “seriously trying” to...

ANALYSIS/OPINION: You know you’re running a lousy presidential campaign when you get bitten by a penguin. The Newt’s presidential campaign has got to be one of the worst ever run in American history. Last May, when Newt was casually campaigning, as is his way, he found himself exhausted. He had, after all, been at it for weeks. So, he did what any pooped-out candidate would do: He split on a luxury cruise to the Greek Islands with Wife No. 3 (22 years his junior — he was already out of college when she was born). Newt rose during the debates...

Rick Santorum was sitting at the center of the Drudge Report's homepage Tuesday afternoon looking like a religious nut. "SANTORUM'S SATAN WARNING," the headline screamed, under a black-and-white photo of the candidate standing behind a lectern with a cross on it. The conservative blogger drives mad crazy traffic, and he's using it to attack the biggest threat to his reported ally, Mitt Romney. This isn't the first time Drudge has gone nuclear on a Republican who threatened Romney's candidacy.

Matt Drudge is the Howard Hughes of the Internet. Like Hughes, he lives in splendid isolation, communicating only through a small group of trusted friends. Like Hughes, his influence has quietly helped shape Republican politics for a generation. But while the eccentric Hughes used money to put his pals in the White House, Drudge has always relied on blogs and Tweets. The Drudge Report, which started life as an emailed gossip column, now receives millions of unique visitors per month. One study found that it drives more traffic than Twitter and Facebook combined. Drudge’s claim to be the authentic voice...

Facing the unthinkable here just seven days ago — a second loss in a row to Newt Gingrich — Mitt Romney’s campaign team hatched a two-part plan to win in Florida: make Newt mad and Mitt meaner. -snip- A team of some of the most fearsome researchers in the business, led by Mr. Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, spent days dispensing negative information about Mr. Gingrich, much of it finding its way to the influential Drudge Report, which often serves as a guide for conservative talk radio and television assignment editors and to which Mr. Rhoades has close ties. The...

Thursday, Bloody Thursday the Day the Drudge Report Sold Out It may be the Drudge Report sold out a long time ago and I was just too blind to see it. No one has ever accused me of being the smartest guy in the room. But if someone of the unwashed masses like myself has come to see that he has sold out, it must be quite clear to everyone. On this day he is maliciously and brutally battering a Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States by the name of Newton Leroy Gingrich. I have read the...

I’d like you to take a look at DrudgeReport. There is an all-out war on Newt Gingrich, not merely by the left-wing media, but particularly on the right side of the political divide. Drudge has run as many as nine negative articles about Gingrich simultaneously, but he is running few negative articles about Romney, and those he does run are only half-negative, so it’s becoming clear that Drudge is trying to manipulate the outcome in the direction of a result he prefers. I surely hope conservatives realize that nobody in media is pure, because everybody has biases. In the case...

So much for Matt being fair and balanced and showing just headlines and stories others will not...no...he has 14 stories front and center all anti-Newt right now. No excuse for this...not even ABC/NBC/CBS have 14 anti-Newt stories on their front page. Bias? What bias? Conservatives can trust about nobody in media today and this proves exactly why.

......The Drudge outburst seems to reflect a growing sense among the conservative opinion commentariat that Gingrich as nominee is a serious liability in a pivotal election year, a fact the GOP base has yet to fully grasp. The pundits apparently view themselves as the sober older sibling warning a starry-eyed sister about the hot guy on the Harley who's been around enough to leave a mark.