Free Republic

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC) said in an interview with CNN on Tuesday that fellow candidate Donald Trump has tapped into the "dark side" of the GOP. Graham was explaining how his rival has managed to dominate the Republican presidential race, polling as high as 35 percent depending on the survey. Graham said the support still represented a minority of the GOP. “Twenty-five percent of our party that probably thinks Obama was born in Kenya or wants to believe that. There’s 25 percent of our party wants him to be a Muslim because they hate him so much,"...

Tuesday on CNN’s “At This Hour” Republican presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s calls for the deportation of the 11 million illegal immigrants and their American citizen children is “Joseph McCarthy-like” and “illegal” and he added, “he’s a complete idiot when it comes to Middle East Policy” so if he is the nominee the GOP will “lose, and we should lose.” Graham said, “Well, I think Donald Trump’s pretty much an idiot on policy and Jeb Bush is a good man. What Jeb was talking about is birth right tourism. Millionaires from China and other...

Should the Senate sue the president to block implementation of the Iran nuke deal, even if the legislative branch triggers a confrontation between the judicial and executive branches? The rationales for such litigation have accumulated since I first proposed this approach be studied, with the most unnerving affront to rule-of-law having emerged when, on July 28, Secretary of State Kerry did not reflexively say he would “follow the law” governing existing congressional sanctions if Congress voted to override a veto. (“I can’t begin to answer that at this point without consulting with the president and determining what the circumstances are.”)...

Bexar County Republicans who support U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz for president turned out in force Tuesday to hear his wife, Heidi, plead for financial support in a race she described as winnable. The crowd of more than 200 loyalists at Bexar GOP headquarters was already on the Cruz bandwagon in terms of policy. They applauded Heidi Cruz’s denunciations of President Barack Obama’s executive orders, the Affordable Care Act he championed, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, the Iran nuclear deal, gay marriage and Planned Parenthood. So the candidate’s wife — whose professional financial savvy has made her an integral part of...

Trump is “the best of the lot,” Duke says of GOP frontrunner GOP frontrunner Donald Trump can count on at least one die-hard fan: former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Self described “racial realist,” Duke, praised Trump during a recent rant during his online radio show, calling the business mogul a “good salesman.” Duke, who ran unsuccessfully for president as a Democrat in 1988 and later served in the Louisiana House of Representatives, also said he liked Trump because of “the fact that he’s come out on the immigration issue,” adding, “he’s an entrepreneur and he has a...

Jeb Bush's campaign on Tuesday put out a video highlighting his hurricane response record as governor of Florida as the nation marks the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. But at one point, the campaign spot features Bush standing next to then-Federal Emergency Management Agency head Michael Brown, one of the most infamous figures of the George W. Bush administration's widely criticized response to the disaster. The two-minute video features clips of hurricanes and Bush back when he was governor, interspersed with expert testimonials about Bush's leadership during disasters, which frequently affect the state he governed in the early to mid-2000s....

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz was seemingly unhappy with a question on immigration Tuesday night from Fox News host Megyn Kelly, telling her it was something he’d expect to be asked from a “liberal journalist.” Kelly asked the Texas senator the same question Donald Trump faced on the cable-news network Monday. “If you have a husband and a wife who are illegal immigrants, and they had two children here who are American citizens — would you deport all of them? Would you deport the American citizen children?” she asked. Cruz replied that politicians should first tackle immigration by focusing on...

Colorful former Trump adviser Roger Stone thinks 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney is thinking about getting back in the presidential race. Stone tweeted his suspicion, and told CNN he had heard that Romney was considering a run from his sources. The move could indicate Romney sees an opportunity to better confront and challenge front-runner Donald Trump. Some see current establishment standard bearer former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as flailing. Trump has mocked Bush for being "just flat" on the campaign trail and Sunday called him a "low energy" candidate. Romney publicly considered a third run as recently as January, but...

The spin is that Donald Trump cannot be elected because he alienates people. The reality is the Republican Party leadership is the problem. His supporters -- already one in four Republican voters -- already are alienated by the Republican Party. Their grievances are many and they go unheard. In 2008, they went along with a RINO named John McCain as teh presidential nominee, who not only lost but stood by idly while his campaign manager destroyed Sarah Palin with the help of a willing press. In 2010, they elected a Republican House to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care...

At this rate, itÂ’s hard to believe he wonÂ’t be the first mid-major candidate out of the race. His fundraising has been so poor, thanks in part to Ted Cruz soaking up lots of Texas money, that Perry had to temporarily stop paying his staff two weeks ago. The moneyÂ’s since started flowing again as the campaign has begun to outsource operations to his Super PAC, which has plenty of dough in the bank, but thereÂ’s no getting around the perception that heÂ’s struggling. With good reason: HeÂ’s currently at 1.3 percent in RCPÂ’s poll average in Iowa. He hasnÂ’t...

Housing, education and job training, and other anti-poverty programs have cost some $22 trillion since Lyndon Johnson proclaimed the War on Poverty (WoP) some 50 years ago. Blacks made up some 40% of those living in poverty at the start of the program and now make up some 30% – though that figure may be misleading due to the increasing number of Hispanics living in poverty. In public housing alone, blacks constitute nearly 50% of the occupants. Forty-eight percent of public housing households are black compared to only 19 percent of all renter households.6 Taking income into account does not...

If we somehow build Trump’s silly ‘great wall’ with Mexico, maybe we can finally have a serious debate about immigration. Prepare to be upstaged, China. Here comes the Great Wall of Trump. “We’re building a wall,” Donald Trump told moderator John Dickerson Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “And it’s going to be a great wall. And, by the way, Mexico will pay for it. It’s going to a great wall, because I know how to build. And it’s not going to cost nearly as much as what they’re saying for a crummy wall.” The GOP front-runner has no use...

TUSCALOOSA, AL (WBRC) - Tuscaloosa is preparing to host Republican presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas Tuesday night. Cruz will serve as the keynote speaker at the annual Lincoln Reagan dinner, organized by the Tuscaloosa County Republican Party chapter. The event is sold out. Although the dinner boasts a long list of well-known keynote speakers, chapter president Jim Zeanah says this is first time a current presidential candidate has headlined the event. Zeanah says organizers booked Cruz before they realized just how popular he would be with Alabamians. "The Tea Party folks from all over the state...

(PHOTO-AT-LINK)Donald Trump went to Mobile, Ala., over the weekend, and thousands of people came to hear the Republican frontrunner speak. But the most important thing thing that came out of Trump's appearance was obviously the photo above, taken by Mark Wallheiser, who should immediately be awarded a Pulitzer prize for it. Let's break down this amazing photo person by person. The woman in the pink tank top, holding a baby The look on her face has already launched an Internet phenomenon. Witness this: Thank you, whoever made this pic.twitter.com/NmUCBKAgSD — Akin Unver (@AkinUnver) August 23, 2015 Amazing. Creepy. Creepily amazing....

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — “Nothing disqualifies Trump.” That was the takeaway of Frank Luntz, the public opinion guru, after leading a focus group Monday night of supporters of Donald Trump’s Republican presidential campaign.(VIDEO-AT-LINK) For two and a half hours, Luntz quizzed a group of current and past ardent Trump fans about their views on the businessman. He discussed the candidate’s past liberal stances and played past video of Trump saying provocative things about women. Yet when the focus group was over, not a single person who was planning to vote for him said they had changed their mind. At one point,...

Like many of my comrades, original Black Panther Party members, I have for years watched these strutting caricatures who call themselves the New Black Panther Party and expressed my disgust. First of all, I say there is no such thing as a “New” Black Panther Party. If this group is anything, it is a collective of racist, reactionary thugs and tools of the still-very-much-alive Cointelpro government agency. Like others, I have had to explain to many folks, who are not aware of what the Black Panther Party was about, what our original BPP history and legacy is and what damage...

Civil rights activist and philosopher Cornel West on Monday endorsed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for president. "I endorse Brother @BernieSanders because he is a long-distance runner with integrity in the struggle for justice for over 50 years," West tweeted late Monday night. West went on to say that it's time for Sanders' "prophetic voice to be heard across our crisis-ridden country." While West has been a long time supporter of Sanders (and "not a Hillary Clinton fan at all"), the endorsement comes weeks after Black Lives Matter activists disrupted a Sanders event in Seattle, taking the podium from the self...

This is what happens when you try to trump the Donald. Scott Walker has for two decades won primary elections by refusing to allow any Republican to outmaneuver him on the right. So when Donald Trump, father of the Central Park ice rink, began skating circles around the Republican presidential field with his perfect execution of hard-line conservative positions, the Wisconsin governor tried to keep up by attempting more daring ideological leaps. But in recent days, Walker has spun himself into a triple axel — and landed on his face. First, asked by NBC’s Kasie Hunt whether he supported ending...

On Friday night, while the political media was transfixed watching Donald Trump's in-all-ways-secular stump ramble in Mobile, Ala., Ted Cruz was holding a deliberately religious rally in Des Moines. Evangelical voters were always meant to be a linchpin of Cruz's presidential bid, and as our Katie Zezima and Tom Hamburger write, the Des Moines event was not shy about making that pitch. Blasting Planned Parenthood and lamenting the "persecution" of business owners sued for denying services to same-sex couples, Cruz was clearly trying to do two things: Plant his flag as the Republican crusader -- and prompt religious voters to...

MEDIA ADVISORY, Aug. 25, 2015 /Christian Newswire/ -- In the Bible, Exodus 18:21 teaches Christians when picking leaders to "select from all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness." David Jeffers, author of "Understanding Evangelicals: A Guide to Jesusland" (tinyurl.com/qb63fpr), in his latest video (youtu.be/ZmKeXj91Wfo) says such a man is Ted Cruz. "Ted Cruz has already shown his willingness to defend Christian's 1st Amendment rights, that he will stand for truth by calling the leader of his Senate caucus a liar, and that he will stand against what Cruz calls 'the Washington Cartel.'" Jeffers...