Free Republic

Bill Kristol, son of Irving, names Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) 79% , Mitt Romney, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) 79% , and others on his hypothetical shortlist of third-party candidates that he could run if Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee. The “Weekly Standard” editor and self-styled neoconservative power broker is back to talking about a third party, declaring that a Trump victory in Indiana would force him to re-focus on his so-called “Latter-Day Republicans” independent ticket. A third party could help to split the vote on the Right and elect Hillary Clinton president, which would allow Kristol to stave off...

GOP VOTERS NOW THINK OF TED CRUZ AS ESTABLISHMENT - HuffPollster: “Here’s the latest proof of how strange this primary cycle has become: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who’s long tried to leverage his colleagues’ loathing into a version of outsider cred, is overwhelmingly viewed by his party as an establishment candidate. In a new HuffPost/YouGov survey, 62 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters say that Cruz is more of an establishment candidate, while just 29 percent describe him as an outsider. That’s a marked shift since December, when just 36 percent considered him part of the establishment….While that might help...

The chair of the Michigan Republican Party has pledged to vote for Donald Trump at the Party's National Convention. She also happens to be the niece of one of the GOP's most prominent Trump critics -- Mitt Romney. Ronna Romney McDaniel said she hasn't spoken with the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican nominee about her decision.

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...

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...

After Donald Trump began racking up big victories deep into the Republican primary election, there was a widespread call for his remaining challengers to clear the field and let one person consolidate the anti-Trump vote. Those calls intensified briefly when the field was whittled down to its current three, with more than a little anger Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who hadn’t won anywhere but his home state. Those calls have been muted recently though, as the GOP seemed to accept that Kasich was in it for the duration, regardless of his mathematical elimination from the race for the 1,237 delegates...

(FOX19) - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is back on track after winning the Maine caucuses. What the headlines haven't told you is that what happened in Maine is the messiest caucus Republicans have had so far, and it may not be over yet. Maine, is not a major state during national primaries. Only 24 delegates come out of Maine to the national convention. But what happened there over the weekend does more than raise eyebrows. It is enough to make you question, was the caucus fixed? Saturday night, February 11, the head of the Maine GOP, Charlie Webster, announced...

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...

Even before the devastating effects of a thorough beating in New York’s Republican primary crash down on Ted Cruz, his fortunes are waning in California. Not only is he now trailing by 7 points (39/32) after moving up to a statistical tie with Donald Trump, then fading; but the level of enthusiasm among Cruz supporters is falling rapidly. A Field Poll conducted in California during January found that enthusiasm levels among Trump’s supporters was at 55%. That level has improved to 58% today. While that might not sound impressive when compared to the number among Cruz supporters which is currently...

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...

In 2012 the GOPe gave us the architect of Obamacare Mitt Romney a crash dummy we had to hold our nose to vote for. An estimated 3.5 million potential conservative voters stayed home and another 17% of those who did show up actually voted for Obama. Shortly after the 2012 disaster an analysis of the voting patterns in four states was conducted. The resultant data are facts the GOPe would just as soon we didn’t remember. It found that with a total number of just 333,908 switches in votes in New Hampshire, Florida, Ohio and Virginia, Romney would have gained...

The worst 10 days of Donald Trump’s campaign got him whooped by Ted Cruz in Wisconsin. Nevertheless, Trump’s chances of winning the Republican nomination on the first ballot are good. Trump continues to lead Cruz in states/territories won and has a 226 delegate lead. The math is foreboding for Cruz. He has 517 delegates. There are just 769 delegates to be awarded. This means Cruz must win 720 of these 769 remaining delegates to reach the required 1237 and win a first round nomination. Trump has won 743 delegates so he must win 494 of the remaining 769. This gives...

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...