Free Republic

Conservative blogger Erick Erickson is hoping the momentum of the Donald Trump presidential campaign can lead to the overthrow of House Speaker John Boehner. Erickson recounted on his blog Wednesday that despite the effort by conservative House members like Reps. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and Steve King (R-Iowa), Boehner was reinstated as Speaker by a slim margin of victory in January. He credited Boehner’s victory to his ironclad agreement to conservatives that he would fight “tooth and nail” against President Obama’s executive amnesty on the Department of Homeland Security. Boehner broke that promise and funded DHS with barely...

RIO DE JANEIRO — The Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa calls Donald J. Trump a “racist imbecile.” In Mexico, people are gleefully bashing Trump piñatas after his caustic remarks about Latino immigrants in the United States. In Guatemala, a liquor company is putting up posters of Mr. Trump using a term that, when translated charitably, describes him as a jackass. Then there is Brazil, where Mr. Trump’s new 171-room stamp on the Rio de Janeiro skyline has generated so little uproar that his business partner feels perfectly comfortable trumpeting his contentious stance on immigration. “I’m a Latin and I...

And on the Democrat side, there’s surging support for a self-avowed socialist who is challenging Hillary Clinton, who thought she was the anointed candidate in 2008, only to be knocked off her pedestal by upstart Barack Obama. She considers herself anointed now, but finds her support fading quickly. So how about the gauntlet being thrown down by … Michelle Obama?

Second place in Iowa. Top three nationally. No, it’s not Jeb Bush or Scott Walker -- it’s Ben Carson. The neurosurgeon, who has never held elected office, is emerging from middle tier as a top contender after the first Republican debate. Carson, the only black candidate in the 2016 presidential field, is polling at 12 percent in a national Fox News poll out Sunday and 14 percent in a CNN Iowa poll out last week -- good enough for second place in the GOP field behind only Donald Trump. Carson is in third place in a national CNN poll out...

America’s next president could be eased into office not just by TV ads or speeches, but by Google’s secret decisions, and no one—except for me and perhaps a few other obscure researchers—would know how this was accomplished. Research I have been directing in recent years suggests that Google, Inc., has amassed far more power to control elections—indeed, to control a wide variety of opinions and beliefs—than any company in history has ever had. Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some demographic groups—with virtually no one...

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (D) has said that socialist policies characteristic of countries like Sweden should be implemented in the U.S. As a Swede, I would strongly advise against this. The worldwide socialist movement praises the Scandinavian countries for their high living standards and welfare. Easy to do for someone who has never lived in Sweden or read a book on Swedish history. First off: The success of Sweden predates the welfare state. In reality, the economy began to fall behind in the 1960s when the state rapidly expanded. Moreover, Sweden enjoyed the highest growth in the industrialized world between...

This year began with an election on whether Rep. John Boehner should continue as the Speaker of the House of Representatives. A number of brave House conservatives, led by Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Tom Massie, and Rep. Steve King (R-IA), waged a historic effort to deny Boehner the Speakership. What resulted was an earth-shattering groundswell of grassroots opposition to Boehner that shocked every Republican congressman. It was unsuccessful only because a handful of otherwise reliable House conservatives chose to support Boehner and give him another chance. And look at what their vote for Boehner has wrought in just two short...

Getting back to posting this weekly. There's an election a comin'!

Donald Trump continues to bewilder political experts. He unabashedly wades into politically dangerous territory and yet continues to be rewarded by favorable poll results. He has clearly tapped into a reserve of public resentment for inside-the-Beltway politics. How far this resentment will carry him is anyone’s guess, but the Republican establishment is worried. His latest proposal to end birthright citizenship has set off alarm bells in the Republican party. The leadership worries that Trump will derail the party’s plans to appeal to the Latino vote. Establishment Republicans believe that the future of the party depends on being able to capture...

“If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that, right? Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with US citizenship and guarantee a full access to all public and social services this society provides, and that’s a lot of services. Is it any wonder that two-thirds of the babies born at taxpayer expense in county-run hospitals in Los Angeles are born to illegal alien mothers?” No,...

The rise of Donald Trump has many of his GOP rivals asking: How can we steal away the source of his apparent appeal to GOP primary voters? Today, we’re getting one answer to that question from Scott Walker, who seems to have decided that Trump’s surge is rooted partly in those voters’ frustration with the failure of GOP leaders to stop Obama. To appeal to those voters, Walker will take a page from Ted Cruz’s manual of demagoguery and distortions, arguing in a speech today that Washington Republicans let the country down by failing to live up to their promise...

Senator Rubio is on the firmest possible scientific ground when he says that science shows that the child in the womb, from the very point of successful fertilization, is indeed a human being.Senator Marco Rubio is right. The life of a human being begins at conception—not at implantation, “viability,” or birth. This is a scientific fact. It is not, as CNN journalist Chris Cuomo ignorantly insisted in a televised confrontation with Rubio, a claim of “faith” with no scientific basis. To our surprise, however, the distinguished bioethicist Arthur Caplan has intervened to try to rescue Mr. Cuomo in a fight...

Quoting journalist Lewis Lapham, Attorney John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute wrote: “The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country’s equestrian classes, aka the 20 [percent] of the population that holds 93 [percent] of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes. …” (“Don’t Be Fooled by the Political Game: The Illusion of Freedom in America,” Aug. 10, 2015)...

i truly love this guy, but sometimes it's enough to make ya wanna cry... Intellectual Froglegs 08/16.15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08iTxTg15BM

The Washington chattering class is perplexed and bedeviled by a political alien by the name of Donald Trump, who just doesn’t have the good manners to die, no matter how hard they try to kill him. No, like The Terminator, he keeps on coming, advancing through the fusillade of snide and snarky bullets, oblivious to the ad hominem walls of fire in his path, and immune to their favorite weapon: rhetorical condescension and ridicule. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, the more Trump is bashed the more people love him. Why? He’s brash, not polished. He’s vulgar, not erudite. He’s a...

On June 15, while Donald Trump was announcing his candidacy for President of the United States, I began to write. My article was published here on June 16, and I was way out front in how Donald Trump would resonate with the American people. Needless to say, I received tons of flak and ridicule. Also, the majority of pundits smirkingly dismissed it as an absurdity to think Trump would make a serious run. Well, my dear fellow Americans, it is now two months since he made his announcement and I must say—while I feel there are some terrific candidates—Trump towers...

First, an admission: I have seriously underestimated Donald Trump. After spending more than three years tracking the construct of the GOPe strategy to elect Jeb Bush, and having lost the most single important battle in May 2014 to stop it, I was deflated and disenfranchised. Few were willing to accept the road-map and sheer level of Machiavellian strategy deployed by the professional political class. Every single prediction (tripwire) which stems from understanding the construct was triggered in the exact sequence. We resigned ourselves to the outlook that Tom Donohue, Mitch McConnell and their team were going to pull it off....

Grassroots conservatives expressed disgust toward GOP establishment, consulting class operative Rick Wilson for his remark that Americans who support Donald Trump are “low information supporters.”Conservative radio callers swamped the phone lines of Breitbart News Saturday, hosted by Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon. They also expressed disdain for Willson’s snobbish arrogance and insults cast toward the conservative base throughout his CNN appearance on Friday with Breitbart’s Editor-in-Chief Alexander Marlow. During the CNN broadcast OutFront with host Kate Bolduan, Wilson admitted that he yearns for Jeb Bush to start “posting up” and to stop “trying to draft behind Donald Trump...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) expressed concern Sunday that the Republicans’ leading candidate for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination is going down the wrong road on immigration reform. Graham said that Donald Trump is embracing self-deportation that calls for all 11 million illegal immigrants to walk back to where they came from and “maybe we’ll let some of them come back.” “But I hope we don’t go down that road as a party,” Graham told CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “So the leading contender Mr. Trump is going backward on immigration and I think he will take us all with him if...

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