Free Republic

Anti-Donald Trump forces are expanding their offensive against the Republican front-runner, releasing a TV advertisement in Florida just days before the state's primary that spotlights a former Trump University salesman who says he was "ashamed" to work for the online school. In the 60-second ad, the employee, named Cliff, describes receiving "nonstop calls with complaints" from customers unhappy with Trump University services. He also talks about the school's low ratings from the Better Business Bureau. "I think I walked away from the job because I couldn't sleep at night," Cliff says. "With Donald Trump, you always have to read the...

Republican elites are begrudgingly embracing Ted Cruz—and hanging Marco Rubio out to dry. Panicked at Donald Trump's dominance and dismayed by Rubio's continued inability to do anything about it, some top Republican power brokers are turning to Cruz, putting aside their policy and personal misgivings to back the candidate they now openly label as their best hope to stop Trump's GOP takeover. "He seems to be the only guy who's got some momentum, and is probably the best situated if there is anybody out there to beat Trump," said Austin Barbour, a prominent Mississippi-based GOP operative. "That's why there are...

Gallup released a fascinating bit of data Tuesday that speaks to Clinton’s trust problem. They asked people to offer up the first word or phrase that came to mind when the name “Hillary Clinton” was mentioned. One in five people — unprompted by the poll taker — offered up some version of Clinton as "dishonest" or a "liar." That's somewhat remarkable given that these open-ended questions typically produce a gigantic muddle of something like 25 words or phrases — all of which garner somewhere between 5 and 8 percent support.

Pakistani police have arrested the imam of a mosque for inciting violence after a 15-year old boy who was told by the cleric that he was a blasphemer went home and cut off his own hand. Shabbir Ahmed was delivering a sermon at a village in the east of Punjab province when he asked the gathering if anyone did not love the Prophet Mohammad. Mishearing the question, the 15-year old boy raised his hand. Ahmed quickly singled him out and called him a 'blasphemer' in front of the congregation, police said. After returning home, the boy cut his hand off...

Trump is in part a reaction to the intellectual corruption of the Republican Party. That ought to be obvious to his critics, yet somehow it isn't. Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you'd have to consider it wasted. Pretty...

The billionaire says that America has been wrecked by immigrant rapists, idiot politicians, is imperilled by Muslim maniacs, and mocked by the rest of the world. Announcing his run at Trump Tower, his Manhattan skyscraper, he lamented: "We got $18 trillion in debt...we need money. We're dying. We need money...Sadly, the American dream is dead." Fortunately, Mr Trump has a plan to "make America great again", a Reaganite phrase he has purloined. He wants to deport 11m illegal immigrants and their offspring, impose a 45% tariff on Chinese imports, kill the relatives of terrorist suspects and bar Muslims from entering...

The Trump rationalizations emanating from the wise old hands are something to behold. We've seen Republican consultants go from trying to organize Stop Trump efforts to declaring Trump inevitable and the best alternative in the space of a couple of weeks. Bob Dole is supposed to be an elder statesman of the party. He issued the other day in The New York Times a statement about Ted Cruz that reflected the heights of Dole's political wisdom, refined by decades of experience and commitment to his party's cause: "Nobody likes him." It's as if Dole thinks Cruz is rushing a fraternity....

Growing up, Bernie Sanders followed the path of many young American Jews. He went to Hebrew school, was bar mitzvahed and traveled to Israel to work on a kibbutz. But as an adult, Sanders drifted away from Jewish customs. And as his bid for the White House gains momentum, he has the chance to make history. Not just as the first Jewish president — but as one of the few modern presidents to present himself as not religious. "I am not actively involved with organized religion," Sanders said in a recent interview. Sanders said he believes in God, though not...

MOSCOW (AP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday criticized Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, accusing him of placing a "time bomb" under the state, and sharply denouncing brutal repressions by the Bolshevik government. The harsh criticism of Lenin, who is still revered by communists and many others in Russia, is unusual for Putin, who in the past carefully weighed his comments about the nation's history to avoid alienating some voters. At the same time, he signaled that the government has no intention of taking Lenin's body out of his Red Square tomb, warning against "any steps that would divide the...

In their editorial, National Review editors put it this way: There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones. Paraphrasing a line of scripture from 1 Timothy, Erickson writes this: We should not put a new conservative in charge of conservatism or the country, so that he does not become puffed up...

Worse is the prospect that one of them might somehow win. Very few presidents are so terrible that they genuinely endanger their own nation, but Trump and Cruz would go there and beyond. Trump is a solipsistic branding genius whose "policies" have no contact with Planet Earth and who would be incapable of organizing a coalition, domestic or foreign. Cruz would be as universally off-putting as he has been in all his workplaces. He's always been good at tearing things down but incompetent when it comes to putting things together. So maybe it's time for Establishment Republicans to actually do...

Trump, blessed with more raw political cunning than any 2016 contender (including Clinton) hasn't yet won a single contest, but he's got good reason to pretend it's already down to just the Democrat and him. That strategy allows him to talk past his Republican opponents, legitimizes him as his party's frontrunner, gives him pushback against the argument he'd get creamed in a general election, and lets him dry-erase the fact that he flirted with not-so-conservative politics and the Clinton Clan. For Clinton, Trump is theoretically a useful character – a cartoonish embodiment of Republicans' unfitness to govern. In reality he's...

Benzi Gopstein, leader of the extremist anti-assimilationist group Lehava, has called for the prevention of Christmas celebrations in Israel and the expulsion of Christians whom he compared to "vampires." "Christmas has no place in the Holy Land," he wrote, adding "Let us remove the vampires before they once again drink our blood." The Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism and the Coalition Against Racism have asked the deputy prosecutor for special functions, as well as the police unit in charge of cybercrime, to investigate. The movements wrote: "The article calls for the prevention of celebration of Christmas, the most...

Obama did not grow up in a religious household and became a practicing Christian as an adult. He has written more extensively about his spiritual awakening than almost any other modern president, addressing it in two books before he was elected to the White House and in more than a dozen speeches since. His faith had been central to his identity as a new kind of Democrat who would bring civility to the country's political debates by appealing to Republicans through the shared language of their Judeo-Christian values. With just one year left in his second term, Obama now holds...

THE presidential candidate who has most harmed American politics this year is Donald Trump, a bully who has prospered by inciting rage. Yet from the narrower perspective of the Republican Party, the most dangerous candidate of the 2016 pack may just be Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is rising in the polls by telling conservative activists a seductive but misleading story about how their party wins elections. Since launching his presidential run, the 44-year-old Texan has built his campaign around a simple pitch: assuring the most conservative third of the Republican electorate, from born-again Christian voters to hardline members...

Hillary Clinton tells a story of how she tried to join the Marines in 1975 but was rejected because she was too old. The problem? The story may not be totally true. As The Post's Fact Checker illustrates in a column dedicated to Clinton's Marine claim Thursday, there's little reason to believe that she -- already a very prominent person -- would suddenly attempt to join the military. The Fact Checker doesn't say Clinton is lying -- and notes that several of her friends have, in the past, vaguely corroborated Clinton's recounting of her interest in the Marines. But it...

There are plenty of reasons to be cautious of national polls that show Trump and Carson leading. They may fail to screen out casual voters, for instance, and leaders at this point in past years have eventually tanked. But perhaps the biggest reason to ditch stock in these polls is that they’re simulating a national vote that will never take place. In reality, the GOP nominating contest will be decided by an intricate, state-by-state slog for the 2,472 delegates at stake between February and June. And thanks to the Republican National Committee’s allocation rules, the votes of “Blue Zone” Republicans...

For those villagers eagerly snapping pictures on the side of a road in the Czech Republic in late September, the appearance of the line of U.S. “Stryker” armored fighting vehicles must have seemed more like a parade than a large-scale military operation. “We are demonstrating operational freedom of maneuver across Eastern Europe,” Col. John V. Meyer III told a reporter. But not everyone is convinced. “This Stryker parade won’t fool anyone in Moscow,” says retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor. “The Russians don’t do many things well, but they have been subverting, destabilizing, invading and conquering their neighbors since Peter the...

John Sununu, a former New Hampshire governor and longtime GOP hand, is one of the few who is willing to admit just how clueless he is about, among other things, the rise of Donald Trump and Ben Carson. Here's what Sununu told the New York Times's Jonathan Martin: I have no feeling for the electorate anymore. It is not responding the way it used to. Their priorities are so different that if I tried to analyze it I’d be making it up. Sununu is far from alone in GOP ranks. Think about how most establishment Republicans saw this race playing...

Jeb Bush, the man who once pledged famously/infamously that he would run for president "joyfully," had this to say on the campaign trail in South Carolina: "If this election is about how we’re going to fight to get nothing done, then I don’t want anything, I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation. I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable,...