Free Republic

When Sarah Palin became the surprising vice presidential choice for the Republican ticket in 2008, a lot of people thought she was kind of loony. When Palin said she could see Russia from her house and couldn't name a single newspaper in a Katie Couric interview, some people were quick to write her and her opinions off. So when she made a few remarks about the Russia-Ukraine situation in the fall of 2008, a lot of people ignored her. Specifically she said, "After the Russian army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral...

Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist slammed for radicalizing Washington Washington is more dysfunctional than it has been in 40 years, and while Democrats have deserved their share of the blame over the years, today "the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party," write Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein in the Washington Post. What makes their column particularly interesting is that Ornstein is not liberal, but a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Together, they call the GOP an "insurgent outlier in American politics" because of the...

Newt Gingrich plans to formally suspend or end his presidential campaign next Tuesday, senior Gingrich aides told Fox News.

The future of Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign seems to hinge on the Delaware primary early next week. "Tuesday is a big day," a source close to the Gingrich campaign told NBC News. "Newt is just waiting to see what happens on Tuesday." Up until now, Gingrich has promised to take his campaign all the way to the Republican convention in Tampa at the end of the summer, although the odds are not in his favor. The former House speaker has been spending the majority of his time the past three weeks in the First State. Gingrich has made at least...

The organization that ignited the tea party as a national mass movement gave Mitt Romney perhaps his biggest victory yet, deciding to drop its opposition to his candidacy, a top executive in the group told The Washington Times. FreedomWorks, which organized the Sept. 12, 2009, mass demonstration on the Mall, says that while it will not give an explicit endorsement, the time has come for Republicans to unite around the former Massachusetts governor and focus on defeating President Obama. “It is a statistical fact that the numbers favor Mitt Romney,” FreedomWorks Vice President Russ Walker told The Times on Tuesday....

Don't be conned into nominating Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney broke through the tea party barrier Monday, winning that segment's vote in a New Hampshire poll. Romney beat Ron Paul among tea partiers, 29 percent to 21 percent, the Public Policy Polling survey reported. It was the first time Romney has carried a plurality of tea party voters, with whom the former Massachusetts governor has had chilly relations. And in a possible leading indicator heading to Florida, Romney garnered 50 percent of the senior vote in the New Hampshire poll conducted by the Democratic-leaning PPP. Overall, Romney was the choice of 35 percent of PPP respondents. Paul garnered...

The “unlike some people” is merely implied, but this one’s so heavy-handed that he might as well have tacked on a few shots of Newt with his ex-wives framed by a torn “heart” graphic. I’m tempted to say this will do Romney as much harm as good simply because it stinks of desperation driven by Gingrich’s surge, but in truth it probably will help him a bit. For every Iowa political junkie who long ago priced Newt’s personal issues into his stock, there are probably two or three socially conservative caucusgoers who haven’t paid much attention yet and are just...

Mitt Romney's campaign leapt just now on Rick Perry's restatement of his view that Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme" and that promising to maintain it in its current form is a "monstrous lie." "PERRY DOES NOT BELIEVE SOCIAL SECURITY SHOULD EXIST," read the headline of Romney's press release. Romney adviser Stuart Stevens emails: He has lost. No federal candidate has ever won on the Perry program to kill Social Security. Never has. never will.

(CBS News) The Labor Day weekend marks the unofficial start of the presidential campaign season, and many of the leading candidates for the Republican nomination have started to take shots at each other, not just at President Obama, reports CBS News political correspondent Jan Crawford. Several jabbed at Texas Gov. Rick Perry, perceived by many pundits as the latest frontrunner. That list included Sarah Palin - who's managing to keep speculation alive about whether she's going to toss her hat into the GOP ring. At a Tea Party rally in Indianola, Iowa, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential...

(09-04) 05:55 PDT Berlin, N.H. (AP) -- Bulling its way into 2012, the tea party is shaping the race for the GOP presidential nomination as candidates parrot the movement's language and promote its agenda while jostling to win its favor. That's much to the delight of Democrats who are working to paint the tea party and the eventual Republican nominee as extreme. "The tea party isn't a diversion from mainstream Republican thought. It is within mainstream Republican thought," Mitt Romney told a New Hampshire newspaper recently, defending the activists he's done little to woo, until now. The former Massachusetts governor...

Congressional Republicans are worried that Rick Perry's campaign has become a gaffe machine that may endanger the party' chances of unseating President Barack Obama, POLITICO reports. As the Texas governor takes on the role of front-runner, his statements, like the one critical of Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, have GOP lawmakers concerned that his campaign will self-destruct — or worse, win the nomination, but alienate the independent voters needed to win the general election. “You can’t be calling Bernanke a traitor and you can’t be questioning whether or not Barack Obama loves America, that type of thing,” Rep. Peter King (R-NY),...

Ex-Massachusetts Gov. Willard “Mitt” Romney has a two-to-one lead in New Hampshire over newly announced, much-ballyhooed Texas Gov. Rick Perry, according to a new poll for the New Hampshire Journal. Romney scores 36 percent to 18 percent for Perry in the test heat for the first-in-the-nation primary. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, scores 14 percent and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., is at 10 percent. Bachmann has built a following among Iowa caucus-goers, but may not do so well when she arrives in the Granite State. Both registered Republicans and Independents are allowed to vote in New Hampshire. Romney, who owns a...

WATERLOO, Iowa — Rick Perry came to Michele Bachmann’s hometown Sunday evening and schooled the newly minted Iowa front-runner in her native state’s demanding retail political culture. The day after Perry announced his candidacy and Bachmann won the Ames Straw Poll, the two candidates spoke to the Black Hawk County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner, the sort of endless regional event that is a staple of the long Iowa campaign. Both candidates offered conservative standards, promising to slash government spending and ease regulations to jump-start the private sector economy. Perry promised to use his presidential veto pen “until all ink...

Sen. Jim DeMint, whose push for more conservative senate candidates in the 2010 cycle lead to several primary challenges, is open to endorsing Mitt Romney. “I endorsed Romney last time, and I think he’s a good candidate,” DeMint tells National Review Online today in an office visit. “I’m not going to hold any one or two things against a candidate that they’ve done. I’ve had some bum votes in my life.” Instead of a perfect voting record, DeMint is looking for “the ability to inspire and show some courage and I think, take on our own party in some cases.”...

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown (R-Wrentham) raised a whopping $1.98 million this quarter, far outpacing his Democratic challengers and bringing his total campaign funds to $9.6 million. Brown, who will need every dime to fend off a national Democratic coup for his seat, more than doubled the fundraising of Democratic challenger Alan Khazei, who raised 920,000 and Newton Mayor Setti Warren, who raised $122,000. “We are encouraged by the strong show of support for Scott Brown’s re-election. People are responding to his pro-jobs message and his leadership in controlling spending and reducing debt,” said John Cook, Senator Brown’s finance director, in...

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney maintains his wide lead among GOP presidential candidates in New Hampshire, according to a poll released Tuesday evening. But in what may be the real race in the state, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has crept into a distant second. In the poll, conducted by WMUR and the University of New Hampshire, Romney received support from 35 percent of likely New Hampshire Republican primary voters, down from 41 percent from last month's WMUR-Univ. of N.H. poll. Bachmann was backed by 12 percent of those polled, a 8-point jump since the last poll, before strong debate performance...

Rasmussen released the second part of its GOP primary polling this morning, this time concerning those potential candidates not in the race. The survey of likely Republican primary voters does not indicate a massive desire for more candidates to jump into the race, but support for bids by Rick Perry and Rudy Giuliani exceeds opposition. That isn’t true for Sarah Palin: A plurality of Republican primary voters think it would be good for Texas Governor Rick Perry to jump into the party’s presidential race and bad for the party if former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin joined the field. They are...

ABC News' Amy Walter reports: A new ABC News/Wash. Post poll finds that in a head to head match-up against President Barack Obama, 70% of those who say they are Tea Party supporters say they'll vote for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for president--compared to 69% for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Seeming Tea Party favorites like former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, meanwhile, draw 61% and 60%, respectively....

Sarah Palin's record as governor of Alaska has largely gone unchallenged by conservatives, despite the fact that one of her signature legacies was imposing an oil profits tax -- a distinctly liberal idea. Now, Republicans in the state Legislature and Palin's own Republican replacement, Gov. Sean Parnell, have scored a victory in an attempt to reverse her tax hike. Democrats, though, stood strong with Palin in opposing any rollback on the tax hike.