Free Republic

Somewhere former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker are having a good laugh. “The onetime friendship between Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul has grown frosty as they both vie to become the leading conservative in the 2016 GOP presidential primary,” the Hill reports. “The Kentucky senator stepped on his Texas colleague’s campaign rollout this week by questioning his electability, a move that Cruz’s allies saw as a deliberate attempt to distract from his message.” Well, duh. This is a contest after all. Did Cruz expect his opponents to lay off? Paul says Cruz has no appeal...

On Monday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) became the first major contender to announce his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Dan Balz has written that Cruz’s candidacy “tests the limits of conservatism,” and based on his congressional roll call voting record, Cruz is the fourth-most-conservative member of the Senate. But how does his ideological position compare to those of Republican primary voters, especially in early states such as Iowa and New Hampshire? Very favorably, as we will see. We use data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). The 2014 CCES asked respondents to place themselves and several...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was on “The Kelly File” tonight to react to the news that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) will seek the Republican nominee for president in 2016. Megyn Kelly asked Paul about some of his supporters who were in the audience at Cruz’s announcement, sporting “Stand With Rand” shirts. “We were glad to see them there and organized and excited about the possibility of me running,” he said. Paul said that he didn’t hear much that he disagreed with during Cruz’s speech today. “We kind of come from the same wing of the party,” he said. “If you...

Liberals across the country rejoiced today as Ted Cruz announced that he is officially running for president, thus ensuring a plentiful gaffe harvest for progressive writers like myself to feed upon for months. The GOP has pretty much nothing to gain from Cruz’s decision to throw his hat in the ring. In fact, if anything, it will probably hurt them, as Cruz will only serve to solidify the idea that Republicans are anti-women, anti-LGBT, and anti-immigrant. Yes, Ted Cruz, the son of an immigrant from Cuba, is anti-immigrant. As a Latino, I can tell you right now that Latinos won’t...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)For many conservatives, the fight against Obamacare has been the defining battle of President Obama's years in the White House. For them, and probably a majority of the Republican base, fighting first against the passage of the Affordable Care Act and later pressing to repeal it have been so important because: A) they strongly oppose the substance of the law, and B) they see opposition to Obamacare as the best way to resist the president's overall expansion of government. That the struggle has so far been a losing one has not changed the fact that conservatives require their presidential candidates...

Someone had to be the first to jump into the 2016 presidential race, and it seems only fitting that that someone was US Senator Ted Cruz, leapfrogging over his likely opponents to launch his campaign early with a Jesus-soaked speech at the world's largest fundamentalist college. Cruz is a long shot for the GOP nomination, partly because he lacks experience, and mostly because no one likes him. But tucked into his speech Monday, in between stories about sin and redemption and abolishing the IRS, Cruz offered one reason he actually thinks he can win. "Today, roughly half of born again...

On Monday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz taught the Republican Party a lesson it desperately needs to learn. Mr. Cruz taught the GOP something about winning. The Republican Party, at least at the national level, is pretty pathetic. The Republicans have lost four of the last six presidential elections. Republicans have actually lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Even the two races that George W. Bush won were close. The 2000 election was not decided until weeks after Election Day and even in 2004, Democrat John Kerry kept it close enough that he did not...

Before he became the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson sat down to compose the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” he wrote. At the time, he was a slave-owner. Hypocrisy aside, there’s a “duh” factor in saying “all men are created equal,” but Jefferson must have found value in the proclamation of a self-evident truth. The fact that he needed to spell it out might have reflected the reality that we didn’t then live in a world where all men were treated equally—and we don’t now. On...

Peggy Noonan says Clinton is Democrats presumed nominee, while Bush, Cruz, Walker and Paul will battle for GOP nod.Peggy Noonan is an author of several books on politics, religion and culture, and a conservative-leaning weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal. She is perhaps best known as the primary speech writer for President Ronald Reagan, for whom she had kind words while addressing a full house Tuesday at The Society of the Four Arts’ 700-seat Gubelmann Auditorium. “Mr. Reagan was the last great gentleman of American politics, in terms of personal grace and a lovely public dignity and warmth,” Noonan...

There are few people I do not take seriously in politics. Or to put it more specifically, there are few people I fully discount in the context of national elections. Ted Cruz is one of those people. By contrast, I think it is highly unlikely that Rand Paul can make it in the GOP primaries, let alone a national election. There are so many intra-party disputes, so many iffy stories lurking in the background for him and his father and a lot more. But there are enough unexpected and cross cutting aspects to Paul that I can't be sure. Always...

Around 40 New Black Panther Party members took to the streets of Austin, Texas to condemn recent killings of black civilians. Armed with high caliber weapons, they said they aimed to patrol their own communities and encourage the taking up of arms. The protest in the state capital of Texas on Monday coincided with the SXSW (South by Southwest) festival, which celebrates music and film. However the heavily-armed New Black Panther members, who were carrying Kalashnikov rifles and AR-15’s caught the attention of many, as they chanted songs in their display of force. Showing off their weapons was not the...

COTTONWOOD, Ariz. — One of the nine suspects was killed. Another was shot in the stomach. All eight responding officers were injured, including one 10-year veteran who required surgery. It’s the aftermath of an all-out melee in a Walmart parking lot in Cottonwood, Arizona, a town of 11,000 people about an hour’s drive south of Flagstaff. But details are murky outside of the injury and arrest reports....

Each December since I-don’t-know-when, I enjoy speculating over what the best Super Bowl matchup would be from an entertainment perspective. Oftentimes that doesn’t mean both top seeds from the AFC and NFC making it to February (as was the case last month), but what game will create the biggest buzz, controversy and hype. This year, I saw that matchup not as Seahawks-Patriots (Richard Sherman is so 2014), but Cowboys-Patriots instead. Just the presence of Tony Romo and all the buildup around his legacy (which has taken a very unfair rap as a choker in big spots despite stats to the...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, 44, announced his candidacy for president Monday, March 23, at Liberty University’s weekly Convocation. “Today, I am announcing that I am running for president of the United States,” Cruz said to an energetic crowd in a packed Vines Center, receiving loud applause and a standing ovation. In announcing his bid, the 2016 hopeful, who placed third in this year’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll, skipped the longstanding traditional step of first forming an exploratory committee. “It is time for liberty, it is time for truth, it is a time to reclaim the Constitution of...

After the theatrical launch of his presidential campaign Monday, Sen. Ted Cruz now faces a massive hurdle: raising the tens of millions of dollars it will take to mount a year-and-a-half long campaign. The Texas Republican and tea party darling is months behind his competitors in recruiting the megadonors and bundlers essential to a credible GOP primary bid. He’s not well-liked among cash-flush lobbyists. And his uncompromising policy positions and role in forcing the government shutdown in 2013 didn’t exactly excite the financiers and business executives who make up the elite donor class. Those considerations, along with the need to...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, yesterday Ted Cruz makes his speech at Liberty University, and I shared with you the fact that I had spoken with Mr. Cruz on Friday. And I shared with you additionally that I had told him one thing after he asked. It's important for you to know that he asked. I did not sit there and tell him how to do his business. I warned him, I told him that something I have noticed in the last probably three or four presidential primaries, certainly the last two or three, what happens is that conservatives...

Not bothering with an "exploratory committee," Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has jumped with both feet into the 2016 presidential race. Cruz openly identifies with the Tea Party, and has done so since before his upset victory in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate in 2012, when he garnered big-name endorsements from then-Texas Congressman Ron Paul, Senator Rand Paul, former Senator Rick Santorum, and then-Senator Jim DeMint. In his speech anouncing his candidacy Monday at Liberty University in Virginia, Cruz offered the students and faculty of the conservative Christian college some red meat: Imagine abolishing the IRS.... Imagine a president...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2015/03/24/cruz-job-turn-iraq-switzerland/70391506/

Rush Limbaugh today said he’s not surprised to already see conservatives “coming up with all kinds of creative reasons… to disqualify Ted Cruz” from the presidency. He particularly focused on a point made on Fox yesterday by Charles Krauthammer, that Cruz has the same amount of experience President Obama did when he announced for the presidency and that didn’t turn out terribly well. Limbaugh first brought up how The Five “dumped all over” Cruz and said, “That’s somewhat understandable for reasons I can’t explain.” But then he played Krauthammer’s comments and found it a little ridiculous for anyone on the...

I did … not think we’d be seeing Rand, of all people, making electability arguments at the expense of other candidates, but if there’s any guy in the field whom Democrats would demagogue more gleefully than they would him, I suppose it’s Cruz. The money line here comes when he talks about “not just throwing out red meat, but throwing out something intellectually enticing to people who haven’t been listening to our message before.” That’ll be his core attack on Cruz throughout the primaries, partly of necessity since there’s not much that divides them on policy (by Paul’s own admission)....