Free Republic

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...

A day before a campaign rally in Georgia, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum won a suburban Atlanta straw poll with 40-percent of the vote. The straw poll was conducted Saturday, Feb. 18 by the Coweta County GOP. Continue reading on Examiner.com Santorum wins straw poll in advance of Georgia rally - Atlanta Political Buzz | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-atlanta/santorum-wins-straw-poll-advance-of-georgia-rally#ixzz1mrzjmeiA

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's struggles in Michigan are fueling speculation that Republicans might have to resort to a doomsday scenario and launch a frantic search for a 2012 savior at their nominating convention in late August. Rare in the modern age of U.S. politics, a "brokered convention" could result in Republicans ditching their current crop of candidates and turning to someone else who they feel would have a better chance of defeating Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 6 election. How did Republicans get to this point? Romney's failure to get conservatives fully behind him and put down yet...

A prominent Republican senator just told me that if Romney can’t win in Michigan, the Republican Party needs to go back to the drawing board and convince somebody new to get into the race. “If Romney cannot win Michigan, we need a new candidate,” said the senator, who has not endorsed anyone and requested anonymity. The senator believes Romney will ultimately win in Michigan but says he will publicly call for the party to find a new candidate if he does not. “We’d get killed,” the senator said if Romney manages to win the nomination after he failed to win...

(TheDailyCaller.com) Rick Santorum is smoking Mitt Romney in a Rasmussen poll of Ohio Republican voters released on Thursday. Santorum gets 42 percent in the swing state, a crucial one in the general election, while Romney sits 18 points behind at 24 percent. Newt Gingrich is in third at 13 percent and Ron Paul is at 10 percent.

KENTWOOD – Jerome Bush, an 81-year-old lifelong Republican, shook GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s hand Wednesday, recalling doing the same with his father, George Romney, during his campaign for governor more than 40 years ago. “I voted for his dad,” said Bush, the former supervisor of Fillmore Township in Allegan County. “Right now, I’m still undecided if I’m going to vote for him.” It illustrates the difficulty the former Massachusetts governor is facing on the 2012 campaign trail. Three polls released Wednesday show Rick Santorum ahead of Romney in the state where he was born and raised, a place once...

Mitt Romney didn't just lose. He lost to Muhammad, Jugdish, Sidney, and Clayton—the archetypal losers from Animal House. The story of Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado is the stunning weakness of Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum's impressive victory in the nonbinding Missouri "beauty contest" began an ugly night for Romney. Mitt, who garnered 29 percent in Missouri in 2008, limped in with 25 percent—fewer than half the votes Santorum earned (55 percent). Then came Minnesota, where Romney lost again. Big time. He won the state four years ago—earning 41 percent, But Tuesday night, he won only 17 percent, for a stunning third-place...

LAS VEGAS—It’s Donald Trump’s world. Mitt Romney just diminished himself in it. That’s the lasting impression left by Thursday’s media frenzy in Las Vegas, where Romney steered his increasingly momentous drive for the Republican presidential nomination into the cartoon arms of a clearly delighted Donald. Endorsements come, endorsements go — and in most elections, they don’t mean all that much. Especially coming from self-aggrandizing hype factories on the sidelines. But in making the pilgrimage for what was essentially a ring-kissing ceremony inside Trump’s gilded hotel on the Vegas strip, Romney appears to have gone carnival barking up the wrong tree....

If you asked me even a couple of weeks ago whether the Republican Party could heal from the wounds of this election cycle in time to unite against Obama, I would have said ”Yes.” I’m not so sure anymore. After the South Carolina primary the Republican establishment, and media supporters like Matt Drudge, launched Scorched Earth II on Newt, while pro-Romney pundits like Ann Coulter heaped scorn on the conservative and Tea Party voters who sided with Newt. It may just be “not-beanbag” to the Romney campaign and its supporters, but people hear them loud and clear. Two lines of...

I’m so tired of the refrain that a critique of Mitt Romney’s work at Bain is “an attack on capitalism.” Capitalism means that you RISK capital, so that you will profit if things go well and you will incur a loss if things go poorly. Private equity firms, like Bain, are in the business of maximizing profit for investors (not to “create jobs” as characterized by Romney supporters), which is perfectly reasonable and legal. To do that, private equity firms often make investments then extract “consulting fees” and “special dividends” in excess of the original investment to ensure that no...

Romney Supervised Medical Testing Company Guilty Of Massive Medicare Fraud In 1989, Bain Capital purchased controlling interest in Damon Corp., a medical testing company located in Needham, Massachusetts. During the time that Bain held its ownership of the company, Mitt Romney personally sat on the Board of Directors. And during that same period, Damon Corp. was busy submitting fraudulent reimbursement claims to Medicare to the tune of millions of dollars charged for unnecessary blood tests.

After wondering aloud yesterday whether the Romneys converted Mitt's dead father-in-law to Mormonism...Yes. They did. Edward Davies, Ann Romney's father, was an atheist who was also strongly anti-religion. By the time he died, he was the only member of Ann Romney's immediate family to not convert to Mormonism. Fourteen months later, in 1993, he was baptized in a special ceremony at a Salt Lake City church. This practice requires a living person who has already been baptized to undergo the immersion in water again on behalf of the dead. No word on who this person might have been in Davies'...

Mitt Romney Leading Polls in Florida Mitt Romney has pulled ahead of Newt Gingrich in Florida with a nine-point lead, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. 'I think if Romney wins this, it's over for Newt,' one pollster says. Fearful GOP leaders pray Newt Gingrich can be stopped in Florida By Paul West January 27 — After months of gyrating front-runners and inconclusive voter tests, a victory by Mitt Romney in the looming Florida primary would send the 2012 campaign down a well-worn path — pointing the most established GOP contender toward a highly competitive race against President Obama in...

Was Elliott Abrams Deceived on Newt? January 27, 2012 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I mentioned his name yesterday --Jeffrey Lord was in the political office of the White House during the first term of Reagan, maybe both terms. Jeffrey Lord now writes at the American Spectator.Jeffrey Lord, like me, didn't understand all this stuff at Newt yesterday. AP has a story referring to me now as "conservative radio titan."And they describe me as trying to defend Newt on this yesterday, and in the process, nevertheless, recounting all of the things that Newt had said. I wasn't trying to defend Newt,...

A combative Mitt Romney on Monday broadened his call for Newt Gingrich to release records from his work as a consultant, speculating that those documents and records from a House ethics investigation from his time as speaker could show “potentially wrongful activity of some kind.” “We could see an October surprise a day from Newt Gingrich,” Romney told reporters at a media availability here. “And so let’s see the records from the ethics investigation, let’s see what they show. Let’s see who his clients were at the time he was lobbying Republican congressmen for Medicare Part D.

One of the things fellow Republicans and political observers have never liked about Mitt Romney is the wholesome piety he exhibits on the stump, while his hacks and PACs engage in some of the ugliest politics around. He can flash that plastic smile and pretend all he wants, but people know the cold fish doesn't shy away from the politics of personal destruction. If anything, his campaigns embrace it more than most, while feigning ignorance and pretending otherwise himself.This is why so many people in the GOP have come to dislike Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney backer and New Jersey Gov....

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV)-- Mitt Romney took the stage in front of hundreds of supporters and thanked them for their help in taking second place in South Carolina. "Thank you so very much," he said to the crowd. "You should hear it when we win!" He went on to thank South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and his campaign staff and told the people of South Carolina that he owed them "so much." But in the end, it was another candidate who walked away with the primary win. "I want to congratulate speaker Gingrich for a hard fought race," said Romney. "Tomorrow...

If you were trying to come up with the atrocious candidate imaginable to go toe-to-toe with Barack Obama in 2012, you couldn't do much worse than Mitt Romney. He was an unpopular, moderate Governor who has lost 2 out of the 3 major elections he's run in and whose signature issue, Romneycare, was an enormous failure. Moreover, he's so uninspiring that he makes Bob Dole look like Ronald Reagan and that's before you consider that his incessant flip-flopping that makes it impossible to really know where he stands on any issue. Romney's candidacy also runs counter to almost every political...