Free Republic

One of the few Republicans in the country who's been tirelessly pushing for the implementation of Obamacare at the state level has been tapped to head Mitt Romney's transition team, should he become president. Former HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt, and his consulting group Leavitt Partners, are the primary advocates within Republican circles for implementation of Obamacare's exchanges. It just so happens that his consultancy is one of the major beneficiaries of the taxpayer funded gold mine of hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange implementation grants. But that's a coincidence, of course.

While Congressional Republicans have seized on the Supreme Court’s ruling that President Obama’s health care overhaul is constitutional as a tax, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s top campaign strategist undercut that line of argument Monday, saying that the governor agrees with Mr. Obama that the law is not a tax. “The governor has consistently described the mandate in Massachusetts as a penalty,” Eric Fehrnstrom, Mr. Romney’s strategist, said on MSNBC. “The governor disagreed with the ruling of the court; he agreed with the dissent that was written by Justice Scalia, which clearly states the mandate was not a tax.”

Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico has a new article up that addresses one of the biggest liabilities of Mitt Romney’s health care law in Massachusetts: the fact that health-insurance premiums in Massachusetts have skyrocketed since the law was put into place. Even though Romney promised at the time that the law would reduce the cost of health insurance (sound familiar?), today, as Haberkorn reports, Romneycare’s defenders claim that the law was never meant to reduce health costs. Indeed, Timothy Murphy, Secretary of Health and Human Services under Romney, told her that reducing costs was not “the proper role of government.” Huh?...

From the department of unhelpful praise, former President Jimmy Carter tells Rachel Maddow he's a-ok with the idea of Mitt Romney as the GOP presidential nominee..... But this isn't the first time Carter has given generous quotes about one of Obama's challengers. Back in May, he said in a CNN interview that Jon Huntsman was "very attractive to me personally" as a White House contender.

White House hopefuls Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin lead a narrower field of potential rivals for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination, according to a poll released on Thursday. The Gallup survey is the organization's first since Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and real estate mogul Donald Trump opted out of the slowly evolving primary race. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and so far the apparent front-runner, led Palin by 17 percent to 15 percent, well within the poll's 4 percentage points margin of error. Texas Representative Ron Paul ranked third at 10 percent. But the...

The moment of truth has come and gone but the horrified real-time reaction in the conservative twittersphere echoes on. These nuggets from Philip Klein, Jonah Goldberg, and Mollie Hemingway will give you a taste; liberal Ezra Klein came closest to capturing the spirit of the thing while our old pal KP wondered whether Mitt’s ever actually met a Republican primary voter. I’m not surprised that he doubled down, though. Read this post from two days ago about the particular pitfall to Romney in apologizing. Pawlenty can afford to eat crow and say he’s sorry about cap and trade because his...

As governor, Mitt Romney accomplished a feat that most Republicans would have thought impossible. With the single stroke of a pen he convinced the liberal population of Massachusetts that they, too, hate government-run health care. As a health care plan, Romneycare is an unmitigated fiasco. It has caused costs to skyrocket, insurance premiums to soar and nonprofit providers like Blue Cross to suffer hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. But as a political policy, Romneycare is nearly unparalleled in Republican history. It has destroyed one front-runner’s presidential hopes (Romney’s) and helped undermine an entire presidency. For, as Barack Obama’s...