Free Republic

Peter Schweizer on Life, Liberty and Levin: "money that Hunter Biden connected overseas, directly benefited not only Hunter Biden, but Joe Biden himself"

The George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations agreed to accept $5 million from a group with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and China's international propaganda efforts, according to a report Saturday. The group, which was founded by Neil Bush, a brother to former President George W. Bush and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, goes by the name Bush China Foundation for short. Its goal, according to its website, is to build "a constructive relationship" between the U.S. and China. But a written agreement published by Axios reveals that the Bush China Foundation agreed in 2019 to accept $5...

GOP VOTERS NOW THINK OF TED CRUZ AS ESTABLISHMENT - HuffPollster: “Here’s the latest proof of how strange this primary cycle has become: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who’s long tried to leverage his colleagues’ loathing into a version of outsider cred, is overwhelmingly viewed by his party as an establishment candidate. In a new HuffPost/YouGov survey, 62 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters say that Cruz is more of an establishment candidate, while just 29 percent describe him as an outsider. That’s a marked shift since December, when just 36 percent considered him part of the establishment….While that might help...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on campaign 2016 (all times Eastern): 8:15 a.m. Donald Trump says he believes transgender people should be able to use whichever bathroom they choose. Speaking at a town hall event on NBC's "Today" Thursday, Trump said North Carolina's so-called "bathroom law," which directs transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificates, has caused unnecessary strife.

If you think the Trump campaign is full of amateurs, you are correct. Donald Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino, eager to prove that his boss was an expert on tax reform, posted a link to an appearance Trump made in 1991 before the House Budget Committee: There’s one problem: in his testimony, not only did Trump bash Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986, calling it a catastrophe and saying income taxes should be raised to increase investment in real estate, but Trump actually compared the United States to the Soviet Union. Why, you’d almost think Trump is a...

On April 13, ABC’s World News Tonight correspondent Tom Llamas devoted most of that night’s report to chilling death threats against the Colorado state Republican party chairman, angered at how Donald Trump failed to win any delegates at the weekend party convention. Besides that one report, and two minor mentions (one on ABC’s Good Morning America and on Thursday’s CBS Evening News), that’s all the broadcast news attention given to reports of actual death threats in this increasingly nasty presidential race: 110 seconds in total, not a moment of which was on NBC. But since the Colorado convention through Thursday...

On March 1, the Colorado Republican party prepared for 60,000 voters to arrive at nearly 3,000 precinct-caucus sites across the state. Those voters would select men and women to attend the party’s county assemblies and congressional district conventions, in the first step of a multi-part process that determined 34 of Colorado’s 37 delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. To hear Donald Trump and his fans tell it, those tens of thousands of Republicans never arrived, never made their choices, and never had the chance to play a role in selecting the party’s delegates. Matt Drudge, the populist Right’s...

Donald Trump has repeatedly labeled his political opponents liars. He dubbed Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) Lyin' Ted when it became clear that Cruz was a serious rival for his nomination; he called Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) an "even bigger liar" than Cruz. He dubbed Dr. Ben Carson a "pathological liar" and said former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's lies were almost as bad as Cruz's. Trump has termed virtually every mildly adversarial media member a liar, too. But there's only one truly massive liar in this race: Donald Trump. When Politico attempted to measure how many lies Trump told over the...

Donald Trump is right: The system is rigged. It’s rigged in favor of front-runners. That’s why Trump, who is leading the Republican nominating contest, has a larger percentage of delegates (46 percent) than of votes (37 percent). Unsurprisingly, Trump never mentions when the rules have helped him. He much prefers to whine and peddle conspiracy theories when they don’t. Trump’s latest tantrum is over Colorado, where Ted Cruz just swept all 34 of the state’s available delegates. Trump is calling the results “totally unfair” and on Twitter he asked: “How is it possible that the people of the great State...

You see, contrary to the impression that many people have been left with over the past couple of days, Colorado’s traditional caucus-night poll had never been a binding, primary-like election. That’s not how it worked. It was a simple straw-poll — nothing more, nothing less. It wasn’t the process used to distribute delegates to the candidates. The nomination procedure in this state has been driven by the election of representatives for over a hundred years (except for from 1992 to 2002). It starts with grassroots caucus attendees from local precincts voting on congressional-district delegates (their neighbors) to represent them, and...

Donald Trump played up his plans to tax companies that move jobs out of the United States as he tried to appeal to blue collar workers in a New York rally Sunday. Speaking for about an hour Sunday in Rochester, N.Y., Trump recited statistics about the area's loss of manufacturing jobs and economic hardship in recent years. He reiterated his desire to tax goods sold by companies once based in the United States that moved away to find cheaper labor. The plan has been widely panned by economic experts. But the Rochester crowd ate it up. "I'm the only one...

Despite what you may have heard or read, Donald Trump has never filed for bankruptcy. His companies have, four times, but Donald Trump never has.  The purpose of corporations is for investors to put a limited amount of capital at risk in exchange for the opportunity to earn money in any one of a myriad of legal ways. Investor use the corporate structure to ensure that if their bets go south, the most they can lose is the capital they invested in the first place. Corporate bankruptcy laws can give a company an opportunity to restructure its business in a...

If you’ve spent any time on social media, particularly in the politicalsphere, chances are you’ve encountered an internet troll or two. This election cycle has been er, um… interesting. I never thought I’d long for the days the so-called Paulbots would troll my feeds lecturing me about liberty and the Constitution and Dr. Paul. At least most of those accounts were real. Alas… Not so in 2016. The Trumpbots, or accounts that seem to exist solely to attack those with unfavorable views of The Donald, are a special breed of vicious. I’ve learned it’s best to ignore, block, and move...

More than two months after Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump claimed to have raised $6 million for veterans' charities at a fundraiser held on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, most of the organizations targeted to receive the money have gotten less than half of that amount.

If you think President Richard Nixon was paranoid to the point of having an enemies list, consider the Donald J. Trump statement following his crushing defeat by Sen. Ted Cruz in the Wisconsin primary. Trump did not make the statement personally, lest he provide enough ad hominem sound bites to last a generation. Rather he and his myth of invincibility hid from the camera he usually loves. The statement blaming his loss on everybody and everything but himself, and with the first word after his name being a lie, reads...

It's right there in the Washington Post... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-hopes-message-appeals-to-democrats-independents-too/2016/04/02/e55057ba-f945-11e5-958d-d038dac6e718_story.html "The party's presidential front-runner told supporters Saturday that he's out to bring independents and Democrats behind his cause even though 'right now I'm catering to the Republicans.'" Which means, of course, that it's all been an act and, once nominated, he'll be "catering" to the Democrats. Face it, Trumpsters, if Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney had said this, you'd know exactly what it meant. If Cruz or Kasich said this, you'd be wagging your fingers and hammering their supporters over it. But, there it is, plain as Kansas, Trump is "catering to...

Donald Trump is a boor. He's a vulgarian, a liar, an ignoramus. He has only the most cursory grasp of policy, a stentorian voice and a great big set of self-assurance. He's winning the Republican nomination. Why? It is partly because of the Clintons. While the media point and laugh at the Trump reality show carnival, they forget that the Clintons originally took us all to the circus. This week, we found out that Hillary Clinton's email scandal now occupies the attention of 147 FBI agents, and that she will be questioned by the FBI. We found out that her...

The term “gaslighting” comes to us from a play called “Gas Light,” written in 1938 by British playwright Patrick Hamilton. The play focuses on an abusive husband in the 1880s who convinces his wife that she is going crazy. One of his methods is lowering the gaslights and telling her it hasn’t gotten any darker. It’s all in her imagination. Donald Trump has been playing this game on the American people, or at least a meaningful portion of it, for five months now. Telling us that Trump University was a success. Telling us that he only worked with the mafia...

NBC anchor Chuck Todd isn’t buying the National Enquirer hit piece on Ted Cruz. On the March 27 edition of Meet the Press, Todd commented that “there’s more evidence that ties Trump to planting the story, than there is to the story itself tying anything to Cruz.” Todd also accused Trump of taking a page out of the “LBJ playbook.” Discussing the story with NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell, Todd retorted that “Trump is almost trying to borrow a page from the LBJ playbook, when he put out a statement on the National Enquirer – let me put...

The overload factor may be high, but the answer to my title-question is all of the above and more. 1) "More" includes Jeb Bush's endorsement of Ted Cruz this week, making official the merger between Bush, Inc. and the Cruz campaign, which began when the core of the Jeb Bush campaign finance committee, including the tainted Neil Bush (also globalist Boyden Gray) moved over to Team Cruz. Cruz supporters, from Rush Limbaugh (undeclared) to Kellyanne Conway, explain this as proof of how "True Conservative" Cruz has co-opted GOPe. I don't think so. If that were so, why, as the Texas...