Free Republic

Don’t expect Mitt Romney to backtrack on his Massachusetts health-care plan at any point this election cycle. “I am sure there are many people who have calculated, and perhaps correctly, that the healthcare plan I put in place in Massachusetts is not good for me politically, and if I want to encourage my political future, I should say it was a mistake and walk away from it,” Romney told Fox Business Network host Neil Cavuto in an interview set to air later tonight. “You have seen a lot of candidates look at their biggest vulnerability, call it a mistake, and...

Poor Rick Perry. His "brain freeze" is indelible, otherwise it would forever be eclipsed by Herman Cain's more cringe-inducing meanderings on Libya. At a meeting with the editors of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Cain was asked whether he agreed with President Barack Obama's handling of Libya. You would think he had been asked who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, Cain's joshing description of a prototypical gotcha foreign-policy question. What ensued was the longest five minutes of an editorial-board meeting ever. As the inspiring outsider-businessman, Cain needn't sound like he's auditioning for the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But...

No one seems to listen to anyone when it comes to health care policy. Mitt Romney was in favor of something that looked like Obamacare in his state. Down with him. Newt once said something in favor of requiring everyone either to buy health care insurance or post a bond to be forfeited if you get medical expenses you can’t pay. Down with him. But the real world is a bit more complicated. Romney never said his program would work outside Mass. It doesn’t work all that well within Massachusetts either, but that’s another story. As Romney tries to say,...

When Mitt Romney was Massachusetts governor, the state tried to pull the plug on an 11-year-old girl in a coma — only to see her recover. Now the case could become a campaign issue for the GOP presidential frontrunner. On the day Mitt Romney announced the support of social conservatives, the Republican blogosphere buzzed with reports about how a state agency under the former Massachusetts governor tried to pull the plug on a brain-damaged girl who ultimately came out of a coma. The report about Haleigh Poutre surfaced on The Shark Tank blog in a sign that conservatives — and...

Mitt Romney has a growing lead in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, and almost half of the party's voters expect him to be the nominee, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. Twenty-eight percent of Republicans backed the former Massachusetts governor, giving him a lead of 8 percentage points over his nearest challenger Herman Cain in the poll, taken November 10-11.

Another post to try to cheer up the Perry supporters. Not meant as an attack on Bachmann: "Michele Bachmann got stumped and took a 12 second pause to answer a question regarding being a submissive wife at the Iowa GOP debate."

A majority of voters in the three most-important swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania disapprove of the job President Barack Obama is doing and most believe he does not deserve to be reelected. The voters’ most-favored Republican: Mitt Romney, who is statistically tied in theoretical matchups with Obama. Only in Florida, though, does Romney show a lead against Obama by 45-42 percent split. "Of these three swing states President Obama carried in 2008, Florida was the biggest surprise and had the closest margin," Pollster Peter A. Brown said in a written statement. "Florida is shaping up to be the...

Conservatives just need to come to grips with the fact that it's always going to be a Mitt Romney-type who leads the ticket. Conservatives are fired up. Thanks to the Tea Party and Obama’s general left-wing bungling, we’re mad and ready to go for the throat on government spending. So who does Intrade show as having a 70% chance of winning the Republican nomination for president? Mitt “Social Security is just fine” Romney. The left is always shrieking that the Republicans are going to nominate some right-wing nut for the presidency; if only that were true. The Republican base’s perfect...

Conservatives organize to defeat RomneyBy Alicia M. Cohn - 11/10/11 05:15 AM ET A coalition of conservatives is working to organize the disparate groups opposing Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential nominee. While much has been made of Romney’s lack of support amongst conservative Republicans, the sense of malaise has mostly manifested as a lack of enthusiasm rather than outright opposition. That may all be about to change. The new coalition is seeking to push back against the narrative that Romney is the “inevitable nominee," according to spokesman and activist Ali Akbar. The group's website NotMittRomney.com launched this week. Akbar...

Mitt Romney was firm and direct with the abortion rights advocates sitting in his office nine years ago, assuring the group that if elected Massachusetts governor, he would protect the state’s abortion laws. Then, as the meeting drew to a close, the businessman offered an intriguing suggestion — that he would rise to national prominence in the Republican Party as a victor in a liberal state and could use his influence to soften the GOP’s hard-line opposition to abortion. He would be a “good voice in the party” for their cause, and his moderation on the issue would be “widely...

DAYTONA BEACH -- At the Florida Tea Party Convention Saturday, you could find buttons calling for Marco Rubio to be on the presidential ticket, t-shirts declaring that Barack Obama has made communism cool again, and freeze-dried foods to last up to 25 years in case society collapses. Scarce among the hundreds of conservative activists gathered in Daytona Beach? Any enthusiasm for Mitt Romney, the man widely expected to win the Republican presidential nomination. “The party establishment has wanted Romney all along, and they’ve been pushing him on us,” lamented James Koll of Fort Dodge, Iowa, who said he would support...

Mitt Romney, under fire from all sides on the strength of his political convictions, said Thursday he has been as consistent as a person can be during his political career. "I've been as consistent as human beings can be," the presidential candidate said in a meeting with the editorial board of New Hampshire's Seacoast Media Group. "I cannot state every single issue in exactly the same words every single time, and so there are some folks who, obviously, for various political and campaign purposes will try and find some change and try to draw great attention to something which looks...

......Days after I got into the presidential race in 2007, I was greeted with a website, “PhoneyFred.org,” described in the media at the time as an “anti Fred Thompson smear site.” You couldn’t really tell who was behind it, but we learned of it from the Democratic National Committee, which made ample use of it. We assumed that they had created it. However, a reporter at the Washington Post (of all people) decided to find out who was behind the site. After a lot of effort, she traced it to an executive of TTS Strategies, a South Carolina consulting firm...

Based on a suggestion from a local blogger to look into political donors on the Board of Directors of the National Restaurant Association for potential ties to presidential campaigns, I have attempted to identify anyone privy to inside information about the National Restaurant Association who also has recent ties to any presidential campaign. According to the October 2011 FEC report for ROMNEY FOR PRESIDENT INC. a gentlemen named Steven C. Anderson gave $1,000.00 on July 14, 2011. FEC search function here. Steven C. Anderson is the same gentlemen who took over the helm as Chief Executive Officer at the National...

The funniest scene in the old hockey movie “Slap Shot” might be the one where the Hanson brothers start a fight with the other team before the game even starts. Who knew that could be a parable for President Obama’s reelection campaign? During the scene in the Paul Newman classic, one of the infamous Hanson brothers punches an opponent while they’re skating during warm-ups. Moments later, both teams are covered in blood and standing at attention for the pre-game “Star-Spangled Banner.” The Hansons couldn’t wait for the game to start to throw a punch. And so it is with Obama...

<p>But we are interested in historical accuracy, and Cain urged people to "go back and look at the history and look at Margaret Sanger's own words" to find the evidence that she wanted to "kill black babies."</p> <p>So let's examine what the founder of Planned Parenthood actually said and also whether 75 percent of Planned Parenthood's facilities were built in African-American communities....</p>

In an email to POLITICO this afternoon, Robinson admitted that the site routinely blocks Romney supporters from posting -- and offered no apologies for the practice: Free Republic is a pro-life, pro-family, pro-gun, pro-small government, pro-constitution, pro-liberty site. Governor Romney is none of the above. His record is that of an abortionist, gay rights pushing, gun grabbing, global warming advocating, big government, mandate loving, constitution trampling, flip-flopping liberal progressive with no core values. That and the fact that he is the chief architect and advocate for ObamaCare disqualifies him for any consideration whatsoever on Free Republic as a potential nominee...

Note: This is a long, long piece and I find it impossible to excerpt it in any logical way. ( GF) -SNIP- Romney, like the other prospective candidates for president, will remain under the microscope in the months ahead.His past will be combed, his policies scrutinized, his record examined.How much his Mormon faith plays into his political journey remains to be seen. But whether he likes it, whether his campaign can control it, the fact that he may be on track to become the first Mormon president in U.S. history will garner attention.

Is the GOP co-opting the tea party movement, or are tea partiers taking down the establishment and sending the RINOs packing? A lengthy New York Times magazine article this week quoted several establishment Republicans crowing over what they see as the demise of the two-year-old tea party activism. Bill Kristol, the neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard and a Fox News contributor, said the tea party peddles "an infantile form of conservatism."Veteran Republican strategist Scott Reed took the disdain one step further, saying the GOP is steadily co-opting the grass-roots movement. "That’s the secret to politics: trying to control a...

A dogged freshman lawmaker who refused to budge from the House chambers earlier this month until the Patrick administration came clean on how much taxpayers coughed up last year for free health care to illegal aliens finally got his answer yesterday: a whopping $93 million.