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However, Rubio is still the loser of this debate. Unlike the Florida man, Cruz never co-sponsored immigration reform with Chuck Schumer, but instead opposed that legislation. And Cruz, though he seems to have favored amnesty (in the sense of a path to legalization), never favored a path to citizenship, as Rubio did. To me, and probably a great many other Republicans, granting citizenship to those who violated our immigration laws is significantly more egregious than permitting them to remain here with legal status. But this doesn’t mean Cruz is the winner. Why? Because Donald Trump has insisted that illegal immigrants...

After insisting that enough damage had been done and swearing off future insults toward Jeb Bush, Donald Trump on Friday returned to badgering his favorite presidential foe. In the fallout of CNN's Republican debate in Las Vegas, Trump has once again taken up needling the former Florida governor. Bush, eager to energize his sagging campaign, brought the fight to Trump on the debate stage, repeatedly talking over the billionaire as the pair tangled. "I have an idea for @JebBush whose campaign is a disaster. Try using your last name & don't be ashamed of it!" he tweeted Friday. I have...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote: “Let’s not mince words, Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist.” I cited a long list of incidents in which he targeted women, Latinos, African Americans, Muslims, Asians and the disabled. Here’s what I heard back from Trump’s defenders: “Let’s not mince words,” somebody tweeted under the name Helios Megistos. “Milbank is an anti-white parasite and a bigoted kike supremacist.” “[Trump] may well be a bigot and a racist,” one Michael Banfield wrote me via email. “But one thing is certain: The only thing missing from your photo is a [vulgar word...

Digging into the Opinion Savvy/FL poll where Trump leads 29-20% over Cruz, and beating Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio combined, some rather stunning details popped out from the internals Trump leads among black Republicans with 39% supporting him (Cruz has 20%) Cruz leads very slightly over Trump among Hispanics (22-20) On the question of whether you "strongly approve" or "somewhat approve" of Trump's proposal to ban new Muslim immigration, 70.5%. Wow.

Globe political reporter James Pindell made a smart, under-appreciated point in his Ground Game newsletter Thursday (subscribe to it here: bostonglobe.com/groundgame): When it comes to the establishment lane, most candidates are looking to New Hampshire for clues. Sure, if someone like Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Ohio’s Governor John Kasich, or Rubio wins the Granite State, then Republicans will likely have an establishment option in March. But here’s the current trajectory of the race: US Senator Ted Cruz has the momentum to win Iowa, and Donald Trump is on a similar path to win...

A new Fox News poll finds 50 percent of voters favor Trump’s ban, while 46 percent are opposed. However, when Trump’s name is removed from the question, support for the plan goes up five points and opposition goes down six: 55 percent favor the unnamed proposal, while 40 percent oppose it. So while voters favor the “Trump” ban by a 4-point margin -- that increases to 15 points when the same ban is not associated with Trump. There are stunning shifts in the responses among Democrats: 45 percent favor banning Muslims if Trump’s name is not mentioned, yet when the...

Donald Trump, a candidate even Republicans once considered a side show, increases his lead yet again in the nomination race, according to the latest Fox News national poll. The poll also finds Ted Cruz ticking up, Marco Rubio slipping, and Ben Carson dropping. Trump hits a high of 39 percent among Republican primary voters, up from 28 percent a month ago. The increase comes mainly from men, white evangelical Christians, and voters without a college degree -- and at the expense of Carson. ... The favorites among white evangelical Christians are Trump (39 percent), Cruz (26 percent) and Carson (12...

Florida Republican Primary voters continue to be fake as hell. They're letting the men they elected at one point to serve as our senator and governor linger in polls of their home state. In the first poll of Florida Republicans taking since this week's debate, it turns out that our state's GOP voters still have a thing for ol' Helmet Hair but now have a growing fondness for Texas-brand Rubio, Ted Cruz. The survey, conducted by Opinion Savvy and sponsored by the Jacksonville Times-Union and Fox 13 Tampa Bay, called up 555 registered Republicans in Florida on Wednesday. Here's the...

Jihadists, Yes, Pro-Israel Jews, No. If you're a member of a Islamic terror group, you can and will get security clearance. If you're working at Fort Hood, you can run slideshows supporting terrorists and handing out Soldier of Allah business cards, and there's no problem. But if you're an elderly Jewish dentist volunteering at a Naval clinic, it's another story, as Bret Stephens reports. When Gershon Pincus turned 60, he decided he wanted to give something back to his country. The Brooklyn-born father of four had maintained a successful private dental practice in New York City for 35 years. As...

Last week’s Crystal Ball repeated its refrain that Donald Trump is very unlikely to get the Republican presidential nomination. However, it issued the caveat that “[i]t would be easier to make our argument if we could explain precisely how and by whom the real estate tycoon will be dethroned.” Who can and will defeat Trump? The answer is obvious, but also not obvious because the question seems to beg the name of another candidate. The “who” that will defeat Trump is not another candidate but is most likely to be the Republican voters who actually turn out in Iowa, New...

A super PAC supporting Jeb Bush's presidential campaign unveiled a new ad on Thursday promoting the former governor as "tough enough." Right to Rise's ad highlights Bush's conflict with Donald Trump during Tuesday night's GOP presidential debate. "One candidate tough enough to take on the bully," a narrator says as the ad shows Bush in a split-screen with Trump from the debate. "One candidate tough enough to take on [the Islamic State]. Jeb will destroy ISIS and keep America safe." The ad closes with the narrator saying "tested and proven leadership matters."

The Iowa Republican Caucuses are about 6 weeks away and 3 candidates are firmly positioning themselves to be among the handful left standing after Super Tuesday. Donald Trump still maintains a significant lead over Ted Cruz by 5 percentage points (31-26%), while Marco Rubio rounds out the 3 candidates with double digit support at 13%.

Each of the Republican presidential candidates brings something good to the race for the GOP nomination and some things not so good. In the fifth and final GOP debate of the year, the candidates on the main stage, and even a few on the "undercard," presented ideas and positions that many Republican voters would consider far better than those we have now under the president we have now. Donald Trump continued to channel Republican voter anger on several issues, including the feeling that the U.S. is no longer "great," a word Trump does not define, but which resonates with the...

A massive appropriations bill expected to be approved by Congress would provide more than $1.6 billion to resettle illegal immigrants arriving at the U.S. border through 2018. Congress would award the massive check to the government just as the U.S. is experiencing a surge in arrivals of immigrant children at the southern border. Last week, federal agencies said they were opening two temporary shelters with 1,000 beds in South Texas to cope with the surge. A 400-bed shelter is also to be opened in Southern California. “Out of an abundance of caution, the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department...

The Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker discusses his new film 'Where to Invade Next,' gun violence in America, the Sandy Hook anniversary, and his anti-Trump campaign. Trump Tower is, in many ways, a 68-story monument to the hypocrisy of Donald Trump. The Midtown Manhattan monstrosity, whose gold entryway sign bearing his name screams off-Strip Vegas casino, used concrete from a firm owned by the Genovese and Gambino crime families. It was built by 200 undocumented Polish immigrants who claimed they were paid meager off-the-book wages. And if that weren't enough, Haitian dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who massacred thousands of his people,...

Published on Dec 16, 2015 BACKGROUND: In the dead of night after 2am this morning, Congressional leadership unveiled a more than 2,000 page 'omnibus' year-end funding bill which would, among other things: fully-fund the President's refugee expansion; fully-fund sanctuary cities; fully-fund the resettlement of illegal aliens youth and their families crossing the border; lock-in tax credits for illegal aliens; and quadruple the highly controversial H-2B foreign worker visa being used to replace Americans as truck drivers, construction workers, theme park employees, and in blue collar jobs across the nation. Sessions, the Chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee, issued a statement about...

IT'S TIME FOR THE OTHER 13 CANDIDATES TO DROP OUTDecember 16, 2015 At what point in Donald Trump's inaugural address do you figure the GOP establishment will finally grasp what's been happening? The establishment -- not "elites," because they're mostly bland functionaries who went to third-rate schools -- have thrown absolutely everything they have at Trump. I've never seen so many Republicans featured on MSNBC. At least no one will be able to say the Republican National Committee didn't give it the old college try (and, again, that would be third-rate colleges). Trump is a runaway hit with Americans for...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Cookie went and rolled off the answer Trump gave to the question from Hugh Hewitt about whether he will run third party or not. This is what I talked about at the opening of the program where Trump drops the performance persona and communicates. This is an example of many; these things happen frequently in his personal appearances. I'm only illustrating this, or mentioning it, because so many people still wonder how it is that Trump doesn't get hurt by what some people think are the stupid things he says or the ignorant things he says or...

A Middle Eastern woman was caught surveilling a U.S. port of entry on the Mexican border holding a sketchbook with Arabic writing and drawings of the facility and its security system, federal law enforcement sources tell Judicial Watch. The woman has been identified as 23-year-old Leila Abdelrazaq, according to a Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) report obtained by JW this week. Abdelrazaq appeared to have two accomplices, a 31-year-old man named Gabriel Schivone and a 28-year-old woman named Leslie Mcafee. CBP agents noticed the trio "observing the facilities" at the Port of Mariposa in Nogales, Arizona on December 2. Schivone...

President Obama’s proposal raised immediate concerns that ISIS, which vowed to infiltrate refugee camps, could use forged documents to enter the U.S. White House assurances that refugees would be carefully screened met with renewed skepticism after it was revealed that terrorist Tashfeen Malik obtained a fiancée visa despite notable red flags. Malik, who together with her husband killed 14 and wounded 21 in a terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., Dec. 2, listed a phony Pakistani address and reportedly had a history of posting jihadist messages on social media platforms. Malik’s entry into the U.S., combined with so many Syrians...