Free Republic

No Trump campaign buttons or bumper stickers for me. I’m part of the new silent majority: those who don’t like Donald Trump but might vote for him anyway. For many of us, Trump has only one redeeming quality: He isn’t Hillary Clinton. He doesn’t want to turn the United States into a politically correct, free-milk-and-cookies, European-style social democracy where every kid (and adult, too) gets a trophy just for showing up. Members of this new silent majority, many of us front-wave baby boomers, value hard work and love the United States the way it was. We long for a bygone...

Sen. Marco Rubio is sticking by his former attack line that Donald Trump can't be trusted with the nuclear codes, despite having previously come around to support Trump as the nominee. In an interview with The Weekly Standard, Rubio reaffirmed his statement from February — when he was still in the throes of a nasty primary battle — that America can't give "the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual." "I stand by everything I said during the campaign," Rubio said on Thursday. Rubio's wobbly support of Trump comes after the presumptive Republican nominee's comments about Judge...

Donald Trump may be a runaway train. He has blasted through his 50 percent “ceiling,” outperforming his polls and winning a clear majority in the last six states to cast ballots. All that success occurred in the Northeast, however, so here’s the question: Is Trump wrapping up this nomination, or is he just really strong in the Northeast? We’ll get some answers in Indiana on Tuesday. It’s a culturally conservative state where many political observers (including yours truly) thought Ted Cruz had a good shot at coalescing the anti-Trump vote. Indiana is also, in terms of demographics, slightly below average...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://chronicle.com/article/When-Everyone-Goes-to-College-/236313?key=Km5VaSwSOs9-HKfuI3FnkvBnLNgCDGedRc3dh4ndFUdfaEt3dWVzN2RDVG50MnowVjFjazJiaHBNN3JUd3FnR3o3UzhkSEF1WUZF

Since Trump’s entirely predictable sweep of the liberal Republicans in the Eastern primaries, the conservative as well as liberal media under the banner of “Trump the Inevitable” have been endlessly repeating their wishful thinking that Cruz is officially DOA. Which brings to mind the truly hilarious spoof Cruz himself does on YouTube of the epic scene in “The Princess Bride” in which Billy Crystal as Miracle Max declares the Dread Pirate Roberts only “mostly dead.” But the Dread Pirate didn’t have the unpledged Republican Convention delegates, and Cruz just might. If the media clairvoyants who tally up delegate “projections” would...

You'd be excused if you tuned out in previous years when the actual nominating part of a political convention occurred. Usually it's a pro forma exercise with little suspense, as each state ticks off its vote for the eventual nominee. And that nominee has been known well in advance — at least for the last 40 years, anyway. But this year a contested convention actually seems possible, if not probable, on the Republican side. It's the stuff of journalists' dreams and political consultants' nightmares. Donald Trump got a big win in New York Tuesday, and he leads in the delegate...

“Cruz was the earliest to organize here and unquestionably had the deepest connections on the ground. His top local organizer, Bette Grande, has been supporting him for months, dating back to when Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, came to her house last September during a North Dakota campaign swing.” How do you not love this? Literally eight months ago, he was already having his father campaign in North Dakota. And not just doing events, but going to the house of top local organizers in, again, not Iowa, not New Hampshire, not South Carolina, but North Dakota. And it’s not like Ted...

Donald Trump's final push for the GOP nomination starts Tuesday in New York, where the front-runner is heavily favored over rivals Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. The burning question is not whether Trump wins New York — if he doesn't, it will be among the biggest polling surprises ever — but whether Cruz and Kasich can pick up enough delegates to derail his nomination before July's convention in Cleveland. Since Trump's last victory in Arizona's March 22 primary, Cruz has won a competitive race in Wisconsin, as well as a series of sweeping victories in North Dakota,...

Donald Trump’s national field director quit late last night as the billionaire businessman made changes to his campaign apparatus on the eve of an important primary vote in New York. Stuart Jolly is a retired Army Lieutenant who came to the Trump campaign as a close ally of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski . They both worked at Americans For Prosperity and joined the Trump campaign during it’s infancy. The New York Times interprets the shake-up as a bad sign for Lewandowski: But the resignation was seen as a sign of distress among those loyal to Mr. Lewandowski about recent changes...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/readers/2016/04/16/indiana-voters-should-back-hillary-clinton-ted-cruz/83099646/