Free Republic

ORLANDO — Former Godfather Pizza CEO Herman Cain won the Presidency 5 straw poll here Saturday, delivering a blow to Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s frontrunner status and a victory for a candidate who has struggled to transform his grassroots popularity into strong showings in national polls. “Tonight’s winner is Herman Cain,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced. “It shows you something, the road to the White House come through Florida, and it pays to spend time here.” He received 37 percent of the more than 2,600 votes cast. “Thank you to the Republican voters for this incredible honor of being named...

ORLANDO, Fla. — Rick Perry went out on a limb Thursday by refusing to back off his support as Texas governor for granting in-state tuition to some of the children of illegal immigrants, and painting critics of the law as heartless — remarks that landed him in the crosshairs of his GOP rivals. The three-term Texas governor said he still supports the program "greatly" and that the Lone Star State needs "to be educating these children because otherwise they’ll "become a drag on society." "If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for...

House Republicans on Wednesday jump-started the immigration debate, pushing through the Judiciary Committee a key immigration-enforcement measure to require businesses to check new employees’ work status against a government database — (The) bill would invalidate those (however, those state and local) laws, which prompted Democrats to accuse Republicans of overriding states’ rights. “Until we step up and do the job, I don’t think we should be pre-empting anybody trying to deal with this issue,”

The Fox commentators noted that Rick Perry's best moment was his anecdote about a cancer survivor whose "lobby[ing]" convinced him to mandate Gardasil. It appeared to be his one good moment in an otherwise dreadfully bad debate performance. Unfortunately, as National Review Online contributor Katrina Trinko exposes, it was all a fib: When Michele Bachmann lobbed the crony capitalism charge at Rick Perry, he said that the lobbyist who had impacted him was 31-year-old Heather Burcham. “I got lobbied on this issue,” Perry said. “I got lobbied by a 31 year old young lady who had stage 4 cervical cancer....

Mitt Romney is an incredibly vulnerable Republican candidate, from his numerous policy reversals to his championing of the Massachusetts health care law that served as the basis from Obamacare. But for him to lose, somebody else has to beat him. And like Tim Pawlenty before him, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is blowing his chances to exploit Romney’s weaknesses. The defining moment in this debate may well have been the point at which Perry went on the attack against Romney for being a flip flopper. As I noted earlier, there’s a long file to choose from. And Perry had clearly rehearsed...

Full title: Perry: "I Don't Think You Have a Heart" If You Oppose In-State Tuition for Children of Illegal Immigrants Perry's response was forceful and personal. "I don't think you have a heart," Perry told his critics. "If you say that we should not educate children who come into our state for no other reason than that they've been brought their through no fault of their own, I don't think you have a heart," Perry said. "We need to be educating these children because they will become a drag on our society. I think that's what Texans wanted to do....

Dueling pitchers Rick Perry and Mitt Romney will face off tonight for the third time in three weeks in Republican presidential debates. Perry won the first game by throwing plenty of heat and Romney prevailed the second time with finesse pitches and lots of help on offense from other players. Now, it’s time for the rubber game? As they head into the FOX News/Google debate ahead of the Republican Party of Florida’s straw poll, the stakes for Romney and Perry are huge. Romney has seen his own support solidify following Perry’s blazing entrance to the race last month. But the...

Romney: Palin Candidacy ‘Would Be a Good Thing’Danny Yadron September 22, 2011Public opinion polls show most Republicans think otherwise, but former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said he hopes Sarah Palin joins the 2012 presidential fray.“I think it would be a good thing if she did,” Mr. Romney said in an interview with USA Today. “She would make the race that much more exciting, bring more people to watch the debates, and I hope she gets in.”What Mr. Romney didn’t mention is that Ms. Palin’s entry into the race could siphon support from Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Recent national public opinion...

After his bludgeoning in the Monday, September 12 GOP Debate, Texas Governor Rick Perry has lost more than half his lead over Mitt Romney in the polls. Perry's position as front runner makes him vulnerable by ganging up by the other contenders and his missteps on Social Security, immigration and the Papalloma virus have made him even more so. After Thursday's FOX News presidential debate, he and Romney should be about even - with Romney on the way up and Perry on the way down.

......One was born into a privileged family in a tony Michigan suburb; the other, onto a flat expanse of West Texas dirt with no indoor plumbing. One spent his youth tooling around his father’s car factory; the other, selling Bibles door-to-door so he could afford to buy a car. One excelled at Harvard University, simultaneously earning law and business degrees and swiftly climbing the corporate ladder; the other, his hope of becoming a veterinarian dashed when he flunked organic chemistry at Texas A&M University, joined the Air Force. [Perry graduated from A&M] Where Mitt Romney is obedient and cautious, Rick...

Cancer treatment has made great progress in recent decades, but the tragedy is that so much of our effort to combat this scourge is just that: treatment. Once a disease appears, there is only so much that can be done. It would be far cheaper, more effective and less traumatic to prevent it. A vaccine for cancer would be a triumph for public health. Did I say “would be”? Actually, it is. Such a vaccine exists for one of the biggest killers of women. But Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., is against it, and she’s not alone. Two different vaccines block...

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Bachmann is making the case that opposing vaccinations required by the state is fundamentally a conservative issue, which is news to many conservatives given that mandatory vaccinations have been around as long as they have, and, to my knowledge, we haven’t made it a big part of the Republican platform to oppose them. But if you listened to Bachmann last night, it’s clear that she believes this is the type of issue on which a presidential candidate must stand, must do the right thing, and cannot waver in putting this forth as a conservative principle lest we risk infecting millions...

Phil Tetlock and Barbara Mellers were in a race against time to save their 15-year-old daughter, Jenny. As I reported last summer, Jenny developed a degenerative muscle disease nearly two years ago, soon after being vaccinated against the cervical-cancer-causing HPV. She became nearly completely paralyzed, though her mind was perfectly intact and she could still enjoy her pet parakeet, Hannah Montana, and Twilight. I've been E-mailing Phil regularly over the past year, and up until our last E-mail, one week ago, he had been holding out hope that they would be able to find a cure for his daughter—or to...

A month ago, I was “fringe” for spotlighting Rick Perry’s Gardasil problem. As I said then, it’s not just a “single-issue,” one-off problem. It’s about his instincts, judgment, non-apology apology, and ethics. For everyone still catching up, here’s my column from a month ago. Now, Gardasil is the search word of the day. And there’s a new development. After successfully highlighting Perry’s troubling abuse of executive power during last night’s debate, Michele Bachmann risks blowing it with some factually inaccurate assertions. She’s RIGHT on the principles, wrong on some of the details. She needs to stay on message and stick...

<p>Sarah Palin says she is not afraid to call out fellow Republicans when she thinks they have been "part of the problem." On Monday night, Palin accuses Republican candidate for President Rick Perry of engaging in "crony capitalism." Perry, as governor of Texas, mandated that young girls get a vaccination for the HPV virus in an executive order. Perry is criticized for this in part because of his connections to the drug manufacturer Merck.</p>

BASTROP, Texas — Gov. Rick Perry did not show up as expected Saturday at a news conference convened by his office to brief reporters on the Texas wildfires. Perry aides, citing “logistical issues,” said the governor initially had been scheduled to appear at a location with restricted access. The location was changed to an accessible spot, which was a burned-out home and chocolate shop along the main highway, and local officials briefed the media on the fire situation without him. "He's in Austin," said Allison Castle, a spokeswoman for the governor, in response to a flurry of questions about Perry's...

Last weekend the Thinker ran an article by Amil Imani and a blog by Andrew Bostom, both of which gave a stamp of approval to Rick Perry's public-school Islamic school curriculum. The only problem was that both Imani and Bostom were presenting a false argument. Neither Imani nor Bostom was actually evaluating the curriculum at all; rather, they were praising one individual teacher's lesson plan, not the actual curriculum................ The actual curriculum has been scrubbed entirely from the web after I first exposed it a couple of weeks back; not only has it been taken down, but the Google cache...

After Palin gave two speeches this weekend that positioned herself on the side of reform, with a proven and demonstrable record, and squarely against big government and crony capitalism that invoked the outsider spirit of Ronald Reagan​, the GOP establishment, along with Rick Perry​'s cheerleaders, immediately saw Palin as serious threat to their plans. But this was hardly the first time where the GOP establishment and Palin's competitors saw her as a threat. Soon after the 2008 election, in which Palin was forced to basically become a press secretary for a candidate who seemed to not know anything he stood...

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez slammed fellow Gov. Rick Perry over immigration on the Laura Ingraham show today, albeit with only partial facts at her disposal: Ingraham: “I asked you about Rick Perry’s approach to immigration. Is his approach, including that DREAM Act, something that we should be pursuing nationally and is it something that you support?” Martinez: “No, I don’t. It is not comprehensive reform to put people who are here illegally, who violated the law, and put them in front of the line for those folks who have been waiting and doing all the right things to come...