Free Republic

The Republican presidential primary field is shaping up to have about a dozen contenders in 2016, and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas may become one of them. But if Cruz decides to mount a campaign, his biggest strength -- strong support among conservative, tea party voters – may also be his biggest liability. While he hasn’t yet officially announced a run for president, Cruz has said he is strongly considering it. In October, he made a visit to the Wichita, Kansas, headquarters of the oil billionaire Koch brothers to make the case that Republicans need a grassroots conservative as...

Alfredo Padilla grew up in Texas as a migrant farmworker who followed the harvest with his parents to pick sugar beets in Minnesota each summer. He has not forgotten the aches of labor or how much the weather — too little rain, or too much — affected the family livelihood. Now an insurance lawyer in Carrizo Springs, Tex., he said he was concerned about global warming. “It’s obviously happening, the flooding, the record droughts,” said Mr. Padilla, who agrees with the science that human activities are the leading cause of climate change. “And all this affects poor people harder. The...

According to New Mexico 2013 state population estimates, 46.4% of New Mexicans were Hispanic, and 41.3 % were White, so why do Hispanic women account for the majority of abortions in the state? Hispanics in New Mexico In New Mexico, reporting of legal induced abortion became law in 1977, and 1978 was the first full year of reporting. The number of abortions reported in New Mexico in 2013 was 3,408. This is an 8.7% increase from the 2012 number. In 2013, 67.6% of abortions in New Mexico were to women who were less than nine weeks pregnant and 86.0% of...

GOP presidential hopefuls are cozying up to anti-immigrant extremists and right-wing billionaires. When I was growing up, my older Mexican-American relatives had an expression: “Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.” It was my family’s way of making me careful about choosing my friends. Even then, I could see they were right. The smart kids mostly hung out with other smart kids. The athletes stuck with other athletes. The troublemakers befriended other troublemakers. That saying comes to mind when I think about the Iowa Freedom Summit, a big gathering in Des Moines that basically...

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas has earned a singular honor once reserved for movie villains, according to a Friday story on Breitbart TV. Bill Maher laid into the possible Republican presidential candidates on his HBO political rant show. He had little good to say about any of them, but he reserved a special sort of ire, on the level of what he has used for Sarah Palin, for Cruz. Putting it simply, the bad boy of pay for view cable is deathly afraid of the junior senator from Texas. Maher minced no words about how terrified he is about Cruz. “Maher...

The right-wing firebrand Texas senator, who has been on both sides of the immigration debate, is a lot more complex than he might seem.How “Hispanic” is Ted Cruz? If the brilliant but polarizing senator from Texas—who happens to be Cuban-American—does indeed run for president in 2016, does he have a shot at winning Hispanic votes? At a time when the GOP is hemorrhaging support from Hispanics, would nominating Cruz provide a solution—or, given his extreme rightwing politics, make the problem worse? I have to be honest: I hate these types of questions. It’s fair to ask whether a certain candidate...

Utah Sen. Mike Lee defended himself Tuesday against allegations that his point of order vote, which he earned in partnership with Sens. Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions, contributed to President Barack Obama being able to confirm more of his nominees through the outgoing Democratic Senate majority. “Look, I’ve got tremendous respect for Charles Krauthammer, but he does not have a crystal ball,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee said on the Laura Ingraham radio show.

Earlier this week, National Review’s Eliana Johnson reported on how Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) plans to approach the 2016 presidential campaign: “His strategists aren’t planning to make a big play for so-called independent voters in the general election if Cruz wins the Republican nomination,” writes Johnson. “According to several of the senator’s top advisers, Cruz sees a path to victory that relies instead on increasing conservative turnout; attracting votes from groups — including Jews, Hispanics, and Millennials — that have tended to favor Democrats; and, in the words of one Cruz strategist, ‘not getting killed with independents.’” The plan has...

New population projections released by the U.S. Census Bureau show that whites will become a “minority” by 2044, replaced by a “majority” of minority groups, mostly blacks and Hispanics.The new projections, analyzed in a Brookings Institution report, show the huge rise of Hispanics, projected to make up 25.1 percent of the U.S. population in 2044, double African-Americans.According to the analysis, the white will make up 49.7 percent of the country in 2044, minorities the rest. What’s more, by 2060, whites will account for just 44 percent of the country.Brookings attributed the shift to a “majority minority nation” this way:— The...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has a plan for running for president in 2016, according to National Review: don't focus on winning over Independents, instead hedge on getting "Jews, Hispanics, and Millenials." That's according to a new report in National Review on Monday which said that the Texas senator, if he does decide to run for president as he's rumored to be planning on, has a strategy for victory that does not center around winning independents. As an unnamed adviser put it to National Review, "winning independents has meant not winning." The Cruz circle cited John Kerry in 2004 and Mitt...

Feminists demand that men learn not to rape so that suggestive attire can be worn safely. Hispanics in California demanded that high school students not be permitted to wear patriotic attire so that Hispanics wouldn't feel offended and perhaps become violent. The school complied. A Federal District Court and a majority of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the Hispanics.According to this Rutherford Institute press release, it has asked the Supreme Court to reject a lower court ruling that declared it unsafe for California public school students to wear American flag t-shirts to school. In asking the Supreme Court to hear the case of...

The Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) released a poll from On Message on Monday which gives a good indication of how Gov. Rick Scott was able to defeat former Gov. Charlie Crist in last month’s Florida general election. The poll of Floridians who voted in November shows Scott did better than expected with Hispanic voters while also taking a majority of male voters and seniors. Scott won the election 48 percent to 47 percent and did well with Hispanics, running almost dead even with Crist. The poll shows 49 percent of Hispanic voters backed the Democrat while 47 percent supported...

(CNSNews.com) – In New York City, 77.56% of the abortions in 2011 were performed on Black and Hispanic babies, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The Abortion Surveillance report published by the CDC, for which the latest abortion numbers are for 2011, show there were 76,251 abortions in New York City that year. For that total, 9,550 abortions were of white babies, which is 12.5% of the total; 35,188 babies were black (46.1% of total); 23,959 were Hispanic (31.4%); and another 7,554 “other” abortions, 9.9%, which includes Asians and Native Americans, as...

Black anger that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson was not charged for killing Michael Brown stems partly from the fact that blacks in America often face much worse treatment from cops than whites do. Only rarely do whites get an unpleasant taste of what minorities have to swallow. A few years ago, when my middle child was in college, he had a summer job in New Mexico. Returning home to Illinois, he drove into Oklahoma, where he was pulled over by a highway patrolman. He said my son was going 57 mph in a 55 zone, asked him to get...

All but drowned out by Republicans’ clamorous opposition to President Obama’s executive action on immigration are some leaders who worry that their party could alienate the fastest-growing group of voters, for 2016 and beyond, if its hottest heads become its face. They cite the Republican Party’s official analysis of what went wrong in 2012, the presidential-election year in which nominee Mitt Romney urged Latinos here illegally to “self-deport.” “If Hispanics think that we do not want them here,” the report said, “they will close their ears to our policies.” “Both the president and the Republican Party confront risks here,” said...

An NBC News poll discovered that President Obama’s planned executive amnesty order is not overwhelmingly popular among Hispanics, while nearly half of all Americans oppose it.  In fact, the margin of opposition among all Americans is greater than the marhin of support among Hispanics. The casual assumption that Spanish-speakers automatically want to open the floodgates for illegal immigrants overlooks the vast diversity among people grouped together in a census category that assumes people from Barcelona are the same as people from Tegucigalpa.  It also fails to recognize that people who came here legally, or whose ancestors did, may resent...

Gov.-elect Greg Abbott achieved a big enough victory margin to treat outnumbered, defeated Democrats like the North treated the South during Reconstruction — and to gloat shamelessly. But he appears to be choosing a much more dignified, statesmanlike path. That path took him to the Rio Grande Valley — a region that didn't vote for him — for his first post-election trip. Abbott met with Valley leaders Tuesday to talk about economic development and to announce his first gubernatorial appointment — Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos, who will be Texas secretary of state. Political philosophy-wise, Cascos isn't a diversity hire....

LAS CRUCES, N.M.—Rep. Steve Pearce is the rarest of Republican Party officeholders, a very conservative Anglo who keeps winning elections from a predominantly Latino electorate. As the national GOP seeks to improve its dismal standing with Hispanic voters, the 65-year-old former oil man has some advice. "You just have to show up, all the time, everywhere," he said, during a recent barnstorm tour of his district, which sprawls across the southern half of this border state. "Most Republicans don't bother. I do. I bother." Republicans must spend time in Latino neighborhoods with the respectful attentiveness of a small-town mayor. "We...

The majority of people on this site don't live in Texas and don't follow our politics closely, so this is for them: Dan Patrick has been a conservative talk show host for at least 20 years in Houston. He recently branched out and has a number of radio stations in other major Texas cities too. He was happy to be like Rush, an outsider, trying to hold Republicans accountable. But then he got a TASTE of just how corrupt the Republican Party in Texas was (and is, although not nearly as bad after this election). Back maybe 15 or so...

A conventional wisdom bubbled up among media people like myself about the tenor of Republican Dan Patrick’s message on immigration. We concluded that his hard-edged border security focus in his campaign for lieutenant governor was going to stampede Hispanic voters into the waiting arms of Democratic statewides. Wrong. Or at least partially wrong.