Free Republic

After a month without Lines -- on Friday or any other day -- Fixistas need their, um, Fix. And, of course, we aim to please. So this week we are doing two Lines -- one today looking at the ten most influential Republican leaders in the party and then one tomorrow ranking the ten Senate races most likely to switch parties in 2010. Republicans have seen something of a reversal of fortune since we last penned a Line looking at their relatively meager list of leaders. (snip) 10. John Cornyn 9. Sarah Palin 8. Mitch Daniels 7. Mike Huckabee 6....

With Saturday’s conservative-dominated Iowa straw poll nearing, Mitt Romney is frantically trying to convince the G.O.P. grassroots that his well-timed conversion from pro-choice Massachusetts moderate to devoted anti-abortion conservative was sincere, and not motivated by his ambition to play on the national Republican stage. I was not always pro-life,” he told The New York Times this week, “but I’m proud I made the same discovery that Ronald Reagan did and Henry Hyde and George Herbert Walker Bush.” Mr. Romney is politically smart to wrap his transformation in the conversions of those G.O.P. lions. But his 13-year public career tells a...