Free Republic

Republican elites are begrudgingly embracing Ted Cruz—and hanging Marco Rubio out to dry. Panicked at Donald Trump's dominance and dismayed by Rubio's continued inability to do anything about it, some top Republican power brokers are turning to Cruz, putting aside their policy and personal misgivings to back the candidate they now openly label as their best hope to stop Trump's GOP takeover. "He seems to be the only guy who's got some momentum, and is probably the best situated if there is anybody out there to beat Trump," said Austin Barbour, a prominent Mississippi-based GOP operative. "That's why there are...

Anti-Donald Trump forces are expanding their offensive against the Republican front-runner, releasing a TV advertisement in Florida just days before the state's primary that spotlights a former Trump University salesman who says he was "ashamed" to work for the online school. In the 60-second ad, the employee, named Cliff, describes receiving "nonstop calls with complaints" from customers unhappy with Trump University services. He also talks about the school's low ratings from the Better Business Bureau. "I think I walked away from the job because I couldn't sleep at night," Cliff says. "With Donald Trump, you always have to read the...

Stephanopoulos: "You know, we’ve talked about this several times over the last several years. I first asked you about this in 2011 and you said you would release your tax returns then—you were thinking of running for President—when President Obama releases his birth certificate. He did... Then you said you would release your tax returns when Secretary Clinton releases her emails. She has turned over all the emails in her possession." Trump: "She didn’t turn over all. There’s plenty missing. I read yesterday where there are a lot of emails missing. I know she’s a good friend of yours, and...

Less than a year ago, ABC's George Stephanopoulos admitted that he had made $75,000 of undisclosed contributions to the charitable foundation/campaign operation of his former employers, Bill and Hillary Clinton. He then personally pledged he wouldn't moderate a Republican primary debate this year. But ABC News later issued a statement of support for Stephanopoulos, insisting it wouldn't take punitive action against him. It's bad enough that ABC never even considered removing this self-evident Clinton loyalist from his "objective" political coverage position. They even allow him to conduct softball interviews with Hillary Clinton, and won't even insist on reminding viewers of...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEi8MFTOZ3c Trump Claims Clinton Bias, Blasts Stephanopoulos on Taxes ‘It’s None Of Your Business!’

Charlie Rose and three of Barack Obama’s former speechwriters had a good laugh Monday night while joking about the president’s infamous, oft-repeated false promise that under Obamacare, “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” Obama said dozens of times in the run-up to the Affordable Care Act’s signing and enactment that no Americans who liked the insurance plan they had would lose it under the Affordable Care Act. In reality, millions of policies were canceled because of the law’s regulations, and Obama was forced to apologize to the American people. The infamous remark...

Charlie Rose and a trio of former Obama speechwriters laughed it up this week as they discussed the president's infamous promise that that under the Affordable Care Act, "if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkqn6wsrUfs

The journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates said on Monday that he and his family would not move into a $2.1 million Brooklyn brownstone they recently bought because media coverage of the purchase had made them worried for their safety. Mr. Coates and his wife used a limited-liability corporation to shield their identities during the transaction — a legal maneuver frequently used by celebrities seeking privacy — but word of the sale leaked to The New York Post, which published an article about the purchase with pictures of the house last week. Real estate and other news organizations soon followed suit....

Donald Trump will come to Washington on Thursday for a series of meetings with Republican congressional leaders. The goal, all involved say, is to hasten the process of unifying a fractured party. The reality is that, nice words to the contrary, Trump and those party leaders are likely never to fully achieve that result.

When Jon Stewart left The Daily Show last year he left a major void in the late night television landscape. Not only was Stewart considered one of the most sharp political satirists on television, but he also hates Donald Trump. The two have a long-standing rivalry.... “Look I don’t even know if Donald Trump is eligible to be President — that’s not a birther thing,” Stewart said. “I’m not a constitutional scholar so I can’t necessarily say, but are you eligible to run if you are a man-baby or a baby man?”

Hey, it was just a harmless prank! No real harm done. Ha! Ha! That is the tone of The Atlantic magazine article explaining away the vandalism performed by the Clinton White House as it transitioned over to the incoming George W. Bush administration. The article is about how tough it is to transition from one White House administration to the next but the real purpose as we shall see is to slam Donald Trump for mishandling a transition that has yet to happen because he hasn't even been nominated yet. First author Russell Berman attempts to explain away a major...

Republicans have a major electoral-map problem in November. Major. Donald Trump’s victory last week in Indiana’s primary not only effectively sealed the GOP nomination for the real estate billionaire but also brought into sharp relief how difficult it will be for any Republican to get to 270 electoral votes and beat Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president this fall. Start here: Eighteen states plus the District of Columbia have voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election between 1992 and 2012. Add them up, and you get 242 electoral votes.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called for a more liberal version of Fox News to help fix the problems he sees in corporate media. “I think we have got to think about way that the Democratic party for a start starts funding the equivalent of Fox television,” he said in an interview that aired Friday on MSNBC's “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Sanders blasted the media for shallow reporting, including coverage of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump. “I think the American people are going to have to say to NBC and ABC and CBS and CNN, you know what, forget the...

Racism is to blame for Puerto Rico’s dire fiscal situation, Mayor de Blasio charged Saturday. “The backs of the United States government turned on them, while a health-care crisis grows, a humanitarian crisis grows, the Zika crisis grows,” he said in a speech at the National Action Network in Harlem.

Never one to hold back, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader and bane of the Koch brothers and Mitt Romney, made clear on Thursday that he intended to spend much of the rest of the year savaging Donald J. Trump. In a conference call with reporters from his home in Las Vegas, Mr. Reid lit into Mr. Trump, calling him anti-woman, anti-Hispanic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-President Obama and anti-working people, to name a few. “It is a sad day for Republicans when they decide to bow to Trump,” said Mr. Reid, who is not running for re-election, potentially freeing...

We made it a point to tune into Joy Reid's debut this morning in the MSNBC slot formerly occupied by Melissa Harris-Perry. For anyone who imagined Reid might be more fair-and-balanced than MH-P: fuggedaboutit. After an all-liberal opening panel blamed Bernie Sanders for failing to adequately address the concerns of African-Americans, the remainder of the show was one, long, hate-Trump fest. Mac Stipanovich, a Florida lobbyist who in the past worked on one of Jeb's gubernatorial campaigns, was the token representative of the GOP. As the headline indicates, he was Joy Reid's kind of Republican. Stipanovich called Trump a "fascist"...

In an oddly ironic twist, today Donald Trump announced that he has picked as chairman of his newly launched fundraising operation none other than a former employee of the bank he has repeatedly criticized in the past, and which he used as a foil to criticize Ted Cruz: Goldman Sachs. Trump announced that heading up his own personal fundraising operation as national finance chairman will be Steven Mnuchin, a long-time business associate, chairman and CEO of the hedge fund Dune Capital. More importantly, however, he spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs where he was most recently a Partner, having built...

Sen. Ted Cruz dropped out of the presidential race on Tuesday, making it almost certain that Donald Trump will win the GOP nomination and face Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders in November. For those who've been in denial that this day could ever come, we figured a refresher course on the real estate developer's musings about climate and energy might be in order. On the basic science: "I am not a great believer in man-made climate change," Trump told the Washington Post editorial board in March. "If you look, they had global cooling in the 1920s and now they have...

Filmmaker Rob Reiner made headlines today by arguing that the rise of Donald Trump stems from racism in America and that the media has given him a pass. Reiner accused the media of going easy on Trump, saying that the billionaire businessman is only taken seriously as a political candidate because he is a celebrity. "The words that have been flung out from his mouth are insane!" Reiner said on MSNBC. "If he was not a celebrity - if Donald Trump was not a celebrity … you'd see a guy in a park, a lunatic in a park on a...