Free Republic

The conventional wisdom among the political punditry is that 2012 Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney will be hamstrung by the health-insurance plan he helped craft as governor of Massachusetts, which included a mandate to purchase insurance. That may not be true. In conservative circles, the health-insurance mandate has become shorthand for government overreach. But while each GOP presidential hopeful has disavowed it on the campaign trial, in recent days two of Romney’s top competitors — former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who hasn’t declared his candidacy, and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, whose Iowa barnstorming tour is well underway — have faced...

A network is being created to help illegal immigrants avoid that dreaded knock on the door in the wee hours. In a recent two-week sweep touted as the largest of its kind, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, arrested 1,300 illegal immigrants in the Southland at their homes, in jails or at work. Antonio Bernabe, an organizer for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, hopes to prevent ICE from ever again rounding up that many people during its large operations. "The raids are supposed to be targeting the criminals but they are breaking up families,...