Free Republic

You see, contrary to the impression that many people have been left with over the past couple of days, Colorado’s traditional caucus-night poll had never been a binding, primary-like election. That’s not how it worked. It was a simple straw-poll — nothing more, nothing less. It wasn’t the process used to distribute delegates to the candidates. The nomination procedure in this state has been driven by the election of representatives for over a hundred years (except for from 1992 to 2002). It starts with grassroots caucus attendees from local precincts voting on congressional-district delegates (their neighbors) to represent them, and...

Donald Trump played up his plans to tax companies that move jobs out of the United States as he tried to appeal to blue collar workers in a New York rally Sunday. Speaking for about an hour Sunday in Rochester, N.Y., Trump recited statistics about the area's loss of manufacturing jobs and economic hardship in recent years. He reiterated his desire to tax goods sold by companies once based in the United States that moved away to find cheaper labor. The plan has been widely panned by economic experts. But the Rochester crowd ate it up. "I'm the only one...

Despite what you may have heard or read, Donald Trump has never filed for bankruptcy. His companies have, four times, but Donald Trump never has.  The purpose of corporations is for investors to put a limited amount of capital at risk in exchange for the opportunity to earn money in any one of a myriad of legal ways. Investor use the corporate structure to ensure that if their bets go south, the most they can lose is the capital they invested in the first place. Corporate bankruptcy laws can give a company an opportunity to restructure its business in a...

A brief news item appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal under the headline, "Jeb Bush Available For Paid Speeches." This struck me as dubious news. The guy — who I suggested in a recent column should team up with Dr. Ben Carson and go on tour as the Ambien Twins — is being hyped as a paid speaker? But not just any paid speaker. As the article pointed out, Bush (and this really had me scratching my head) "reported last year earning nearly $10 million in speaking fees since 2007, receiving as much as $40,000 a speech in...

Florida may prove crucial to Donald Trump’s presidential hopes if the Republican nomination race goes to a contested convention. Under the state’s GOP rules, all of the 99 delegates Trump received when he won Florida’s March 15 primary must vote for him through the first three nominating ballots at a contested convention. That makes Florida unique. Thirty-one states and territories require Republican delegates to support the winner of a given primary or caucus only for the first ballot, according to the Republican National Committee. Seven require delegates to back the primary or caucus winner for the first two ballots. The...

If you’ve spent any time on social media, particularly in the politicalsphere, chances are you’ve encountered an internet troll or two. This election cycle has been er, um… interesting. I never thought I’d long for the days the so-called Paulbots would troll my feeds lecturing me about liberty and the Constitution and Dr. Paul. At least most of those accounts were real. Alas… Not so in 2016. The Trumpbots, or accounts that seem to exist solely to attack those with unfavorable views of The Donald, are a special breed of vicious. I’ve learned it’s best to ignore, block, and move...

More than two months after Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump claimed to have raised $6 million for veterans' charities at a fundraiser held on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, most of the organizations targeted to receive the money have gotten less than half of that amount.

If you think President Richard Nixon was paranoid to the point of having an enemies list, consider the Donald J. Trump statement following his crushing defeat by Sen. Ted Cruz in the Wisconsin primary. Trump did not make the statement personally, lest he provide enough ad hominem sound bites to last a generation. Rather he and his myth of invincibility hid from the camera he usually loves. The statement blaming his loss on everybody and everything but himself, and with the first word after his name being a lie, reads...

It's right there in the Washington Post... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-hopes-message-appeals-to-democrats-independents-too/2016/04/02/e55057ba-f945-11e5-958d-d038dac6e718_story.html "The party's presidential front-runner told supporters Saturday that he's out to bring independents and Democrats behind his cause even though 'right now I'm catering to the Republicans.'" Which means, of course, that it's all been an act and, once nominated, he'll be "catering" to the Democrats. Face it, Trumpsters, if Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney had said this, you'd know exactly what it meant. If Cruz or Kasich said this, you'd be wagging your fingers and hammering their supporters over it. But, there it is, plain as Kansas, Trump is "catering to...

Donald Trump is a boor. He's a vulgarian, a liar, an ignoramus. He has only the most cursory grasp of policy, a stentorian voice and a great big set of self-assurance. He's winning the Republican nomination. Why? It is partly because of the Clintons. While the media point and laugh at the Trump reality show carnival, they forget that the Clintons originally took us all to the circus. This week, we found out that Hillary Clinton's email scandal now occupies the attention of 147 FBI agents, and that she will be questioned by the FBI. We found out that her...

The term “gaslighting” comes to us from a play called “Gas Light,” written in 1938 by British playwright Patrick Hamilton. The play focuses on an abusive husband in the 1880s who convinces his wife that she is going crazy. One of his methods is lowering the gaslights and telling her it hasn’t gotten any darker. It’s all in her imagination. Donald Trump has been playing this game on the American people, or at least a meaningful portion of it, for five months now. Telling us that Trump University was a success. Telling us that he only worked with the mafia...

Not sufficiently humiliated by his collapse as the early Republican presidential front runner, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has endorsed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in an attempt to deny the nomination to Donald Trump. In doing so, Mr. Bush has further diminished his onetime stature as the darling of the dying Grand Old Party establishment once represented by his father, President George H.W. Bush, and his brother, President George W. Bush. Previously, Jeb Bush had preserved some stature among the old-timers by conspicuously offering himself as the initial Trump giant-killer. In his frontal assault on Mr. Trump as a fraudulent...

NBC anchor Chuck Todd isn’t buying the National Enquirer hit piece on Ted Cruz. On the March 27 edition of Meet the Press, Todd commented that “there’s more evidence that ties Trump to planting the story, than there is to the story itself tying anything to Cruz.” Todd also accused Trump of taking a page out of the “LBJ playbook.” Discussing the story with NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell, Todd retorted that “Trump is almost trying to borrow a page from the LBJ playbook, when he put out a statement on the National Enquirer – let me put...

The overload factor may be high, but the answer to my title-question is all of the above and more. 1) "More" includes Jeb Bush's endorsement of Ted Cruz this week, making official the merger between Bush, Inc. and the Cruz campaign, which began when the core of the Jeb Bush campaign finance committee, including the tainted Neil Bush (also globalist Boyden Gray) moved over to Team Cruz. Cruz supporters, from Rush Limbaugh (undeclared) to Kellyanne Conway, explain this as proof of how "True Conservative" Cruz has co-opted GOPe. I don't think so. If that were so, why, as the Texas...

"I thought it was going to be Jeb Bush and myself, two successful governors laying out their vision for America and bumping their records up for each other," Perry said on Fox News. . . . Perry argued Sunday that Cruz would win at a brokered Republican convention. "You can expect a contested contest at the convention. At that particular point in time, I think there will be a lot of people comfortable that Ted Cruz, the consistent constitutionalist, the consistent conservative, is the best person for us to put forward to beat Hillary Clinton," Perry said.

Donald Trump has denied any connection to the National Enquirer story released yesterday claiming Ted Cruz has had 5 mistresses: I have no idea whether or not the cover story about Ted Cruz in this week’s issue of the National Enquirer is true or not, but I had absolutely nothing to do with it, did not know about it, and have not, as yet, read it. Likewise, I have nothing to do with the National Enquirer and unlike Lyin’ Ted Cruz I do not surround myself with political hacks and henchman and then pretend total innocence. Ted Cruz’s problem...

CHIP REID CBS NEWS March 25, 2016 Trump Feeling Female Voter Backlash (snip) A CBS News/New York Times poll in October found that 57 percent of registered women voters had an unfavorable view of Trump. Now, it's up to 63 percent.

Michael Savage said today on his radio show that the National Enquirer story smearing Ted Cruz is completely false, and he knows this based on a source he says he would trust with his life. Savage points out that Cruz is rightly offended over this utter garbage. But even more so, Savage says that he abhors these attempts of assassination by innuendo, as it has been done to him, and while he doesn’t blame Trump for the story, he threatens to withdraw his support of Trump if he doesn’t completely disavow the story and the man who owns the National...

The latest issue of the National Enquirer contains a story alleging that Ted Cruz has had extramarital affairs with five women. The story features pixelated photos of women the Enquirer claims were involved in affairs with the Texas senator and presidential candidate. There’s been speculation that one woman in a blurred photograph is Donald Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson. Pierson offered these comments on the story:

An aide to Donald Trump on Friday fulfilled the businessman's threat to "spill the beans" on Republican presidential rival Ted Cruz's wife, Heidi. Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson rattled off a list of attacks three days after Trump first made the threat. "Spilling the beans is quite simple when it comes to Heidi Cruz," Pierson said in an interview with MSNBC's Steve Kornacki. "She is a Bush operative; she worked for the architect of NAFTA, which has killed millions of jobs in this country; she was a member on the Council on Foreign Relations who — in Sen. Cruz's own words,...