Free Republic

ATLANTA -- A day after his defeats in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota, Mitt Romney pounded Republican presidential rivals Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich on Wednesday as big-spending Washington insiders whose careers show scant evidence of fiscal restraint. The Republican Party, he said, "lost its way" by borrowing and spending too much, particularly on the pet projects "earmarked" by members of Congress, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Santorum and former House Speaker Gingrich deserve some of the blame. "Under Newt Gingrich, earmarks doubled," Romney told reporters here on an airport tarmac. "Rick Santorum was a major earmarker and continues to defend earmarks."...

Mitt Romney wants to be the next president of a country in need of serious and sweeping economic reform. And here are the first two points in his 59-point economic plan: 1. Maintain current tax rates on personal income 2. Maintain current tax rates on interest, dividends, and capital gains Now imagine private-equity boss Romney back at Bain Capital sitting down to read his team’s 59-point turnaround plan for some troubled widget maker. And imagine if the first two action items started with the phrase “Maintain current ….” Romney probably wouldn’t bother reading any further before tossing the report in...

TIME FOR A NEW REPUBLICAN PARTY BASED ON CONSTITUTIONAL CONSERVATISM If Mitt Romney is the 2012 Republican nominee for President, I will not vote. Romney and political operatives like Karl Rove represent an element of the Republican Party that has become indistinguishable from the Democrats. Both parties practice elective despotism. It is a scheme, whereby Republicans and Democrats lie to voters and, through elections, compete for the authority to treat ordinary Americans as serfs; those providing the labor, producing the revenue and spilling the blood to maintain the conditions for political elites and their financial backers to plunder the economy...