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Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) has run a brilliant campaign, and if it were not for Donald Trump, he'd probably be on the verge of wrapping up the Republican nomination by now. The Texas firebrand knew long before others that the party's primary schedule and delegate allocation rules played to his advantage, not to an establishment candidate like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. From his arrival in the Senate, Cruz has bent the political space-time continuum around himself by demonstrating GOP leaders' inability to govern effectively or deliver on their promises to conservatives.

A reflective Jeb Bush said he had no regrets Thursday about his failed presidential bid, saying in his first interview since leaving the race that Donald Trump could still lose the nomination fight. "There's a possibility that he won't get 50% on the first ballot," Bush told CNN's Jamie Gangel, giving his first television interview exclusively to CNN after dropping out of the presidential race in February. "And if he doesn't do that, there are a whole lot of people who don't believe he's the proper guy."

Thursday on CNN’s “Wolf,” while discussing Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s statement that “We have to be unpredictable” to our enemies during his foreign policy speech yesterday, former governor of Florida Jeb Bush said, “The idea that a president should be unpredictable is not really the way history has been written.”

CNBC: Cruz will make major announcement at 4PM

“Well, I think it would be a bad idea to put little girls in a bathroom with grown men,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told CNN on Thursday. But the senator also made it clear that the issue is not one of major national importance, as far as he is concerned: “All I can say is that the only bathroom I can control is in my office, and you can use the bathroom in my office without bringing your birth certificate.” …

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on campaign 2016 (all times Eastern): 8:15 a.m. Donald Trump says he believes transgender people should be able to use whichever bathroom they choose. Speaking at a town hall event on NBC's "Today" Thursday, Trump said North Carolina's so-called "bathroom law," which directs transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificates, has caused unnecessary strife.

If you think the Trump campaign is full of amateurs, you are correct. Donald Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino, eager to prove that his boss was an expert on tax reform, posted a link to an appearance Trump made in 1991 before the House Budget Committee: There’s one problem: in his testimony, not only did Trump bash Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986, calling it a catastrophe and saying income taxes should be raised to increase investment in real estate, but Trump actually compared the United States to the Soviet Union. Why, you’d almost think Trump is a...

He won’t be alone. There is preliminary talk of Cruz assembling a high-profile team of GOP surrogates and bringing them to Indiana, according to sources familiar with the Cruz campaign’s internal deliberations. The goal would be to project unprecedented party unity against Trump with a roster of supporters that, in addition to familiar faces such as Walker and Carly Fiorina, could include Jeb Bush or even Mitt Romney. Is that what last night’s surprisingly upbeat Cruz speech was about? Sounding more like a traditional general-election candidate in order to encourage establishment Republicans to unite with him now? In any case,...

On April 13, ABC’s World News Tonight correspondent Tom Llamas devoted most of that night’s report to chilling death threats against the Colorado state Republican party chairman, angered at how Donald Trump failed to win any delegates at the weekend party convention. Besides that one report, and two minor mentions (one on ABC’s Good Morning America and on Thursday’s CBS Evening News), that’s all the broadcast news attention given to reports of actual death threats in this increasingly nasty presidential race: 110 seconds in total, not a moment of which was on NBC. But since the Colorado convention through Thursday...

"Reince Priebus' former loyalists say they have reluctantly concluded that forces at the RNC will stop at virtually nothing to keep the door open to the nomination of Ohio Gov. John Kasich at the July convention – or, as some skeptics fear, some “white knight” who moderates claim will have broader voter appeal this fall than either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, the two top-delegate winners, have shown in most polls so far."

Cavuto on a minute ago, Jeb is meeting with his family including GHWB, cutting staff across the board. Down to last 10 million and donations lagging.

(CNSNews.com) - The Open Society Institute, a private foundation controlled by liberal billionaire and political activist George Soros, received more than $30 million from U.S. government agencies between 1998 and 2003. Last year, Soros donated at least $20 million of his own money to such liberal groups as Moveon.org, in a failed attempt to block the re-election of President George W. Bush. Tax records the Open Society Institute (OSI) is required to file with the Internal Revenue Service list "FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES" as "Contributors" of amounts between $4.6 million and $8.9 million over a six year period: * 1998 -...

On March 1, the Colorado Republican party prepared for 60,000 voters to arrive at nearly 3,000 precinct-caucus sites across the state. Those voters would select men and women to attend the party’s county assemblies and congressional district conventions, in the first step of a multi-part process that determined 34 of Colorado’s 37 delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. To hear Donald Trump and his fans tell it, those tens of thousands of Republicans never arrived, never made their choices, and never had the chance to play a role in selecting the party’s delegates. Matt Drudge, the populist Right’s...

Donald Trump has repeatedly labeled his political opponents liars. He dubbed Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) Lyin' Ted when it became clear that Cruz was a serious rival for his nomination; he called Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) an "even bigger liar" than Cruz. He dubbed Dr. Ben Carson a "pathological liar" and said former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's lies were almost as bad as Cruz's. Trump has termed virtually every mildly adversarial media member a liar, too. But there's only one truly massive liar in this race: Donald Trump. When Politico attempted to measure how many lies Trump told over the...

Donald Trump is right: The system is rigged. It’s rigged in favor of front-runners. That’s why Trump, who is leading the Republican nominating contest, has a larger percentage of delegates (46 percent) than of votes (37 percent). Unsurprisingly, Trump never mentions when the rules have helped him. He much prefers to whine and peddle conspiracy theories when they don’t. Trump’s latest tantrum is over Colorado, where Ted Cruz just swept all 34 of the state’s available delegates. Trump is calling the results “totally unfair” and on Twitter he asked: “How is it possible that the people of the great State...

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...