Free Republic

With the pivotal Indiana presidential primary only two days away, and the decisive California contest still six weeks off, many Republican officials are already privately writing off 2016. Amid the wreckage of the turbulent 2016 nominating season, they still have a challenge in front of them: handicapping which of the two flawed finalists will cause the least long-term harm to their Grand Old Party. The conventional wisdom has been that Donald Trump is the bigger menace than Ted Cruz. Certainly, several swing-state Republican senators up for re-election in November worry about The Donald at the top of the GOP ticket...

What has happened to him? I used to listen to him religiously everyday on my way home from work. However, over the last 3 weeks or so, I rarely tune him in as I'm tired of his continuous Trump bashing. So today, I figured if I tuned him in, he'd finally admit that Cruz was done after the Trump rout last night. But what does he do on his opening monologue today? Yep, he continues his bashing and whining about Trump meeting up with Bobby Knight today. After 4-5 minutes of his crap, I finally tuned him out and listened...

As many of you might know, today marks the official commemoration of Earth Day, a holiday conceived by the unfortunately named U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970 and celebrated by self-styled environmentally conscious individuals every year on this day since. You might be wondering why I would choose to address this subject on a website whose purpose is ostensibly far removed from the subject of environmentalism. The answer to that question is very simple. Although usually framed either as an economic or a cultural argument, one of the most compelling reasons to reduce the excessive immigration into this country that’s...

A new Mexican movie promoted by Univision host Jorge Ramos portrays a drunk vigilante motivated by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rant killing at least four illegal immigrants at the border. The trailer for the movie, Desierto, now in Mexican theaters, blasts out Trump's initial criticism of illegal immigrants as a man armed with a rifle guns down targets crossing under barbed wire.

Sometimes it is amazing what comes out of the mouthpiece of a campaign. Ted Cruz's challenged campaign manager is proclaiming that Trump should drop out if he cannot get over 50% in New York. In that case, Cruz should drop out because he only got 43.8% in Texas. The opposition vote in Texas was 27% for Trump, but then 18, 4, and 4, for Rubio, Kasich, and Carson respectively. IOW, a non-Trump vote of only 26%. Kasich is running second in New York, and Cruz had 18% at last count, well below the non-Trump vote in Texas of 26%. In...

Analysis: How Everyone Wins If Donald Trump Loses...Including Trump By WILL RAHN CBS NEWS April 6, 2016 Nearly everyone in the Republican Party could benefit from Donald Trump losing, including Trump himself. The question is just about how he loses, and when. It's obvious at this point that Trump is rapidly deflating. Even putting aside his loss in Wisconsin Tuesday night, every indication we have is that he would be decimated in a general election. According to a Washington Post poll from last week, he's losing to Hillary Clinton by double digits. Demographics that went heavily for Mitt Romney, such...

A former Mexican president and previous critic of Donald Trump heaped new criticisms against the Republican presidential candidate late Wednesday. Vicente Fox Quesada tweeted out a string of attacks against the GOP front-runner, bashing Trump's immigration stances and calling him a "looser." "Trump is a looser, in business and in campaigning. He will never make it. He only is increasing hate ,violence. How can people stand him?" Quesada wrote. The former Mexican leader bashed Trump's plans to build a wall on the southern border, claiming the U.S. would not "survive enclosed in 4 walls."

The Odds Rise of a Democratic Victory William A. Galston While all eyes have been turned toward the dramatic nominating contests in both political parties, the fundamentals that will shape the general-election contest have been shifting toward the Democrats. Candidates seeking to succeed a two-term incumbent of their own party face an uphill battle. All other things being equal, political scientists find, such candidates can expect to fall short of the incumbents’ re-election vote share by at least 4 percentage points. Applied to the 2012 results, this metric would yield a 47% share for this year’s Democratic nominee. On the...

Germans appear to be losing faith in the idea of a borderless Europe, as the results of a poll published on Tuesday showed that two-thirds would prefer the government to end the Schengen free-movement zone. The survey by French pollsters IFOP found that while 60 percent of Italians were against Schengen — an agreement which allows people to travel within the EU without showing a passport — across the Rhine the number of French people wanting borders closed was as high as 72 percent. It shows that the terror attacks in Brussels and Paris “stoked the feeling that things have...

The most recent propaganda angle with Team Trumpster has been that 'a vote for Cruz is a vote for an open convention in Cleveland... where the 'Establishment' is going to ram-through Paul Ryan on the 2nd ballot.  'So you gotta vote for Trump- don't you see?' Except that Paul Ryan is running out of ways to say 'I'm not running'.  Yes, the strategy in gaining his current position as Speaker of the House was 'Aw shucks, I'm not interested'... waiting until the demands for him grew louder and wider... then -reluctantly, of course- accepting the will of the people and a...

Homeland Security officials Wednesday named an illegal immigrant whom police accuse of killing a young woman in a drunken-driving accident to their list of 10 most wanted fugitives, hoping to capture a man who’s become a black eye for immigration agents. Agents failed to respond in February to pick up Eswin Mejia, 19, after he was charged with vehicular homicide by Omaha, Nebraska, authorities. . . . ICE Director Sarah Saldana appeared to stumble in testimony to Congress about the incident, saying that agents would have responded if the victim of the crash, 21-year-old Sarah Root, had already died, rather...

The University of California System is frequently lauded as one of the best public-education systems in the world. But a scathing new state audit of the system tells a story of manipulation of admissions standards for financial gain, as the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The audit claims that the university knowingly admitted out-of-state-applicants with lower qualifications in an effort to boost income from increased tuition. "This report concludes that over the past several years, the university has undermined its commitment to resident students," the audit reads. "The university made substantial efforts to enroll nonresident students who pay significantly more tuition...

Those of us who’ve pledged that we will never, ever vote for Donald Trump always get the same response: “You’d put Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office instead?” Clinton’s name is spoken like an epithet, as if it’s unthinkable that any conservative would take any single action that could facilitate her election. I will not, under any circumstances, vote for Clinton, but I also do not believe that Trump would make a better president. Not because Clinton isn’t as bad as you think, but because Trump is worse than you imagine.

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...

The news report goes back in time documenting US history of international trade agreements starting from the time of Reagan administration who proposed a North American Common Market to current history. Fast Forward to November of 2004 when the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America is formed. Their focus is no longer trade and prosperity but security. Three private groups headed by the Council of Foreign Relations(CFR) and their respected organizations in Canada and Mexico. They claim in their own words North America is vulnerable on several fronts: the region faces criminal and terrorist security threats, increased...

A federal judge fined a major Lexington County farm operation $1 million on Thursday for unlawfully using between 300 and 350 illegal immigrants as workers, according to filings Thursday in U.S. District Court in Columbia. . . .Although Anderson seemed inclined, if he could, to hold Rawl’s corporate officers individually responsible, he said the $1 million fine had been worked out by prosecutors and HW Group attorneys and that his role as judge was to approve it in its entirety or reject it. . . . Johnson, one of the Rawl family members and the registered agent for HW Group,...

Sentencing a Dominican EBT fraudster, the judge said, "Had the defendant been a citizen of the United States, he would, in all likelihood, be receiving a substantial sentence." . . . Attorney General Maura Healey's office signed off on this miscarriage of justice. The reason: So that Julio would not be deported back to the Third World hellhole from which he came. His lawyer said, "We want to keep him in the U.S." Why? So he can conspire to steal more money from Americans? The judge said she accepted the wet-kiss deal "reluctantly … reluctantly."

A federal appeals court has ruled that the U.S. cannot deport an illegal immigrant who is a "habitual drunkard." In a 2-to-1 decision by the western 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the judges decided the condition has been wrongly equated with poor moral character and instead is a medical disease. . . . The ruling rendered Mexican citizen Salomon Ledezma-Cosino, considered a "habitual drunkard," not eligible for removal from the U.S. Medical records indicate he drank an estimated one liter of tequila a day for a decade.

Milwaukee social justice advocates don't want Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke handling policing at political events for Donald Trump. Clarke, earlier this month, told a Fox News host that demonstrators with immigrant rights and Black Lives Matter movements deserve to be "hit first and hit hard." Now the social justice groups Voces de la Frontera and the Coalition for Justice are circulating a petition calling for a law enforcement official other than Clarke to oversee public safety at Trump events in the Milwaukee area.

The physical damage was easy to see. The attackers' bombs shattered an airport terminal and a subway station. But when one of the European Union's top leaders expressed his sympathies to the men, women and children hurt and killed in Brussels on Tuesday morning, he hinted that the three attackers purportedly acting on behalf of the extremist group Islamic State had caused even greater damage. "These attacks have hit Brussels today, Paris yesterday," said European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. "But it is Europe as a whole that has been targeted." When the European Union was created in 1993, one of...