Free Republic

WASHINGTON — In the year since he stepped down from Congress, Steven C. LaTourette, a Republican from Ohio, has emerged as one of the top generals in the establishment Republicans’ war against the Tea Party. It is a role that has benefited the Main Street Partnership, a corporate-backed advocacy group he runs, and its effort to raise millions of dollars to protect centrist Republicans from Tea Party challengers. It has also helped draw clients to a separate lobbying office Mr. LaTourette and his wife have set up across the street from the Capitol. But this blitz of activity has led...

I’m afraid everyone missed the point surrounding the Ms.NBC-Melissa Harris-Perry controversy over this absolutely charming picture of the Romney family patriarch and matriarch taken with their 21 grandchildren. The criticism has centered around the show’s host and guests mocking of little Kieran Romney, the adopted black grandson of Mitt Romney. Butt it’s worse than that. Look closely at this picture: Kieran is the little black baby on Mitt’s lap in…pink. As Ms.NBC’s Managing Editor of Outrage pointed out, all the other little grandsons are wearing…blue, while all the granddaughters are wearing…pink. “One of these things is not like the others”...

To the progressive liberal, all politics is personal, which means several things. First is that any time and situation is a good place to push their ideological agenda. It can be at Thanksgiving, over Christmas dinner, or just sitting back and watching tv. "Wow, that receiver really got popped going across the middle to catch that pass. Thank Gaia that he now has ObamaCare in case he needs it." The other facet to the politics is personal is the act of destroying one's opponents on a personal level, not one based upon debating the merits of opposing viewpoints. While publicly...

After being chastised by Sarah Palin, defender of Phil Roberton's homophobic and racist remarks, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry is now apologizing for joking that Mitt Romney's grandchild might marry Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's daughter. “As black child born into a large white Mormon family I feel familiarity w/ Romney family pic & never meant to suggest otherwise," Perry said over Twitter. "I apologize to all families built on loving transracial adoptions who feel I degraded their lives or choices," she added. Perry was the target of Palin's, RNC chair Reine Priebus's, and many others' ire after she and guests...

Speaking with Don Lemon over MSNBC’s mockery of Mitt Romney for having an adopted black grandchild, Marc Lamont Hill defended Melissa Harris-Perry’s racist jokes by explaining that it’s okay because the Romneys are white. Lemon and Hill began talking about why Hill believes it’s okay to make fun of Romney for having an African American grandchild, and if it would be racist for white people to make fun of black people. According to Hill, it’s not okay for whites to make fun of African Americans, but it’s okay for Harris-Perry to make fun of Romney hand his grandchild. Why? Romney...

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry apologized Tuesday for openly mocking Mitt Romney's black adopted grandson, after Sarah Palin led the chorus of conservatives who criticized the cable news host. The Romney family Christmas card was among the items featured in the "2013: The year in political ridiculousness" segment on the cable news show Sunday.

Host of eponymous “Melissa Harris-Perry Show” is under fire for making the race of Romney’s adopted grandson a punchline. MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry concluded the “What’s So Funny About 2013?” segment of her Sunday show with a chorus of laughter at the black grandson pictured in former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s family Christmas photo. The chuckles were directed at baby Kieran – who was adopted by Romney’s son Ben and his wife Andelynne in September. Also read: The Year in Cable News: Bashir, Baldwin Exits Cap Year of Turmoil for MSNBC “One of these things is not like the others,...

Marc Lamont Hill: “Some would say maybe that it’s an exploitative picture that they’re exploiting the kid by hauling out this black person …” [crosstalk] “They were pointing out the fact that the picture itself was sort of a spectacle and they were sort of making fun of the Republican party. I don’t think they were making fun of the baby. If they were I’d be right on your side. This was a light moment making fun of Mitt Romney” Clear? This was just good old-fashioned, harmless, light, fun-poking based on the self-evidently silly and mockable notion of Mitt Romney...

In a “Photos of the Year” segment of MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry” program on Sunday, several members of the host’s panel decided to poke fun at former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his adopted black grandson.

On Sunday’s Melissa Harris-Perry show, the eponymous host led a panel of entertainers in a rundown of the “photos of the year,” which somehow included a Romney family picture that “a lot of people had emotions about,” according to MHP. The setup seemed to leave room for unlimited comic potential, but the panel immediately honed in on the race of Kieran Romney, adopted grandson of former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who is black. The baby, not Mitt.“Everybody loves a baby picture,” Harris-Perry said, “and this was one that really, a lot of people had emotions about this baby picture...

The panelists start laughing the moment the photo is on the screen, because obviously. Then the first response is Pia Glenn off-camera sing-songing “one of these things is not like the others, one of these things just isn’t the same” and the rest of the panel chuckles along. It’s funny because Romney is white and his grandson isn’t, which is obviously hilarious. Because as everyone knows, the races should not mix. But it’s even better than just hilarious, it also makes you think! ...

The Boy Scouts of America will accept openly gay youths starting on New Year’s Day, a historic change that has prompted the BSA to ponder a host of potential complications—ranging from policies on tentmates and showers to whether Scouts can march in gay pride parades. Yet despite their be-prepared approach, BSA leaders are rooting for the change to be a non-event, comparable to another New Year’s Day in 2000 when widespread fears of digital-clock chaos to start the new millennium proved unfounded. “My hope is there will be the same effect this Jan. 1 as the Y2K scare,” said Brad...

It’s early for a palate cleanser but I’m not sure this doesn’t qualify as legit news. I … did not expect to find myself eager to revisit the Romney 2012 campaign on film, but here we are, my friends. Here we are. It’s true that the trailer is more humanizing than anything Romney’s campaign did for him, but the deck is stacked. The bio video that the GOP produced for the convention was solid but nothing as stage-managed as campaign propaganda will ever have the disarming charm of behind-the-scenes footage of the candidates in unguarded moments. Plus, the trailer’s cheating...

Congratulations to 2008 and 2012 also-rans Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney, both of whom will be the subjects of upcoming TV/Netflix shows, one of which looks like it might be the best of this rapidly-growing genre. This is Palin's second bite at the apple. We all remember Sarah Palin's Alaska, which ran for a season on TLC. Her new show is called Amazing America with Sarah Palin and is on something called The Sportsman Channel. On the show, Palin will "take viewers into the life of those living the American dream," in part by exploring the "coolest and most original...

SALT LAKE CITY — Josh Romney says he helped four people after a vehicle crashed into a house Thanksgiving night in suburban Salt Lake. **** He also tweeted about the wreck, along with a picture of himself next to the vehicle.

As many of you know, I spent a good part of 2012 trying to get the Mitt Romney campaign to give me a shot at writing, co-writing or re-writing his speeches. Alas, I never managed to scale the castle wall. So it wasn’t my fault that the only things he said that anyone ever remembered were that 47% of the people would never vote for him and that 20 million illegal immigrants should self-deport. Over the past 12 or 13 years, I have written over 1,300 articles and six books from a conservative perspective, but every time I turn around,...

If voters had been aware last year that they might lose their health-care plans when Obamacare went into effect, Republican President Mitt Romney would be sitting in the White House today, according to a poll released Friday. A Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research survey conducted from Nov. 18-20 asked voters who supported President Barack Obama in 2012: “As you may know, millions of Americans have lost their insurance plans despite President Obama’s promise that, quote, ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it.’ If you knew in 2012 that this promise was not true, would you still have voted...

Trumpeting the ever-increasing weight of outside political organizations, Karl Rove's campaign groups out-fundraised the Democratic National Committee during the 2012 election cycle, according to a draft tax return obtained Friday by the Wall Street Journal. American Crossroads and its nonprofit arm, Crossroads GPS, together raked in more than $325 million during the 2012 campaign. The DNC, by contrast, raised $316 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. -snip- Expenditures for Crossroads GPS included donations to other conservative groups like Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, and a $538,000 salary for its president, Steven Law.

link only: http://weaselzippers.us/2013/11/23/if-voters-had-known-theyd-lose-their-insurance-theyd-have-voted-for-romney/

SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ. — Many Republicans, with eyes trained on the presidential election in 2016, have sorted through the wreckage of the 2012 elections to figure out how and why the GOP suffered such heavy losses, including the White House. But at the Republican Governors Association conference in Arizona on Wednesday, one theory dominated at an early panel discussion: That the X-factor Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lacked might have been a more compassionate tone. "People have to know that you care about them," said Ohio Gov. John Kasich, one of the governors believed to be weighing a presidential bid in...