Free Republic

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Ohio lost 112,500 jobs in 2015 resulting from the United States' trade deficit with countries that are part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. That places Ohio sixth, in terms of the percentage of jobs lost to trade with TPP countries, among the 50 states and the District of Columbia ranked in the report released Thursday by the liberal Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The lost jobs represent nearly 2.2 percent of employment in Ohio, according to the analysis. The total number of lost jobs includes those directly and indirectly impacted...

I was thinking about the republican primary and asking myself, "if conservatism is the answer and Ted Cruz is an exemplar of conservatism, why is he not doing much better at the ballot box so far?" Or, why is Donald Trump doing so much better? In my opinion, Trump is doing better because he is proposing solutions to our country's problems that are derived from common sense thinking. For example, there are thousands of illegal aliens crossing the border with Mexico on a monthly basis. Trump's solution? Build a wall. This is not a new idea so Trump adds that...

Creating the Department of Education in 1979 was certainly one of the worst blunders the nation made in that whole blunder-filled decade. Having neither a constitutional warrant nor any rationale except to reward the teachers’ unions for backing Jimmy Carter, the Department barely made it through Congress. (Even the New York Times thought it a bad idea, as Richard Vedder notes in this Pope Center article in which he explores the damage this agency has done.) Since then, we have wasted billions on the Department but educational results are worse than ever. And now it’s evident that the bureaucrats have...

Ted Cruz: A President Should Not "Embarrass" Us MARCH 5, 2016, 1:41 PM|Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a GOP presidential candidate, tells "Face the Nation" that presidents should provide good role models for American children.

Every election, I hear the same thing. "We need to vote _____ because this is THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER. Vote ____ to save America." Some people say we barely survived an Obama presidency. I assert that we DID NOT SURVIVE IT. America looks NOTHING like it did 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. We embrace pure evil (abortion), we embrace pure madness (transgenderism and gay superiority), we embrace pure racism (black lives matter but white ones don’t), we embrace pure tyranny (attacks on every BoR Amendment). So people who tell me we need to vote ________ to save America...

Paul Ryan's team has been in contact with Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s campaign to discuss the party’s agenda going into the November elections, the House Speaker's office says. Ryan (R-Wis.) is expected to communicate with the rest of the presidential field as well, as the GOP prepares to unveil an official policy platform this spring. “We have heard from the campaign, but the two have not yet spoken. We expect the speaker to be in touch with all the remaining candidates soon to discuss our efforts to build a bold conservative policy agenda for 2017,” Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck...

Hillary Clinton set out 10 months ago to inspire and energize the Democratic Party, hoping to bring together the rising American electorate of black, brown, young and female voters into a durable presidential coalition. But buried beneath Mrs. Clinton’s wide-ranging and commanding victories on Tuesday night were troubling signs of a party that has not yet rallied to her call. Democratic turnout has fallen drastically since 2008, the last time the party had a contested primary, with roughly three million fewer Democrats voting in the 15 states that held caucuses or primaries through Tuesday, according to unofficial election results tallied...

Marco Rubio brushed off Ted Cruz's call for candidates who have yet to win a state to "prayerfully consider" dropping out of the race, telling NBC News he understands "Ted's spin on this," but he's not going anywhere.

Running scared from a debate hosted by Megyn Kelly in Iowa, Donald Trump instead hosted an Iowa event to, according to his campaign, "raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors, who have been treated so horribly by our all talk, no action politicians." The $6 million raised went, curiously, straight to Donald Trump's campaign website -- an odd way to fundraise. That money, equally curiously, has yet to find its way to veterans' groups. When Donald Trump demanded a $5 million ransom from CNN to appear in their December debate, he also used veterans as a foil. Trump claimed...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I didn't think it was possible, but the GOP establishment is panicked even further. They're now just out of their gourd. And you know what? They're getting a bunch of leftists to join them in their supposed fear of what will happen to the GOP if Donald Trump gets the nomination. We have audio sound bites of this coming up Now, one thing about this I've never understood, but I think now it's coming into focus, I have never understood, like at that now famous dinner that I had with Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham in New...

Veteran pollster Pat Caddell thinks the nation is at “the tipping point” of political “revolution” in the 2016 election because the Washington establishment doesn’t understand the legitimate concerns motivating ordinary Americans. Caddell believes the establishment “empire is trying to strike back” against the populist movement challenging their power, but the American people have “left the building.”

Texas Senator Ted Cruz secured the support not only of evangelical Christians but also of Jewish leaders ahead of Super Tuesday, the electoral event in various states across America that could make or break the fortunes of the five remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. Last week, Dr. Ben Chouake, national president of NORPAC, America's largest pro-Israel political action committee, endorsed Cruz for president, Charisma News reported. More Jewish leaders endorsed Cruz over the weekend, raising his number of influential Jewish political supporters to more than three dozen, according to the senator's campaign. "Since the day we announced our...

Pat Buchanan: Regardless of nominee, Donald Trump surge marks 'death rattle' of establishment ... We hear wails that the nomination of Trump would mean the end of the conservative movement. But how so? If Trump won and conducted a conservative government, it would validate the movement. If Trump won and turned left, it would inspire an insurgency like Ronald Reagan’s in 1976, when the Ford-Rockefeller-Kissinger administration moved too far toward detente. If Trump ran and lost, the conservative movement would have President Clinton to unite and rally the troops against. One recalls Barry Goldwater’s historic wipeout in 1964. But, in...

Former New York State gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino discusses why he likes the idea of Trump as the next president.

A New York judge will hear arguments on Tuesday in a lawsuit that challenges Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s ability to run for president given that he was born in Canada. State Supreme Court Justice David Weinstein will hear the claim of two men who contend that Cruz is not a citizen of the U.S. and is therefore ineligible to run for president, NBC has reported. Cruz was born in Alberta, Canada. Barry Korman and William Gallo will argue that despite Cruz’s mother being an American, the senator is not a citizen because such status cannot be passed from parent to...

Let us now do something sullying. Let us now praise Donald Trump. It is not a specific action or statement that earns him his gold star. But he has nonetheless given America something it needs. Oddly from a man so uninformed and inarticulate, that something is knowledge. He is teaching white people something important, for many of us have been locked in shameful ignorance of our countrymen. Much of America convinced itself that there were no racists left--that the silencing of overt bigotry by social and legal censure (think of Paula Deen, Donald Sterling, or Don Imus) meant the problem...

Say this for the dim bulbs of the GOP: They finally made a decision. It is now Marco Rubio or bust. With Rubio now designated the favorite son of the anti-Trump crowd, the theory will be tested Tuesday. If Trump runs the table or anything close, it's game over. Not just for Rubio, but also for the party's entire establishment. Trump is a total disrupter, and the GOP would never be the same.

Hundreds of people — from White House officials and titans of the mainstream media to senators, Supreme Court justices and many of her top colleagues at the State Department — could have known about Hillary Clinton’s secret email account, if only they’d cared to look closely enough. Listed on some of the more than 28,000 messages Mrs. Clinton released so far are several White House chiefs of staff and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, much of the rest of official Washington, and a number of people who had oversight of the State Department’s key operations...

Much will be written about the utter thrashing GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump took at the hands of the far-more prepared, knowledgeable, qualified and otherwise principled Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio during Thursday night's Republican presidential debate on CNN. I will, therefore, focus, instead, on another Republican candidate who's absolutely got to go: Ohio Gov. John Kasich.Many thanks to Hugh Hewitt for asking the question. In a campaign where the noise of myriad, and in many cases less critical, issues has drowned out the single greatest threat to God-fearing Americans' individual liberties - the secular left's tireless efforts to end our...

In a time where voters believe that all of official Washington is corrupt, the notion of having a president who doesn't owe anybody anything can seem enticing. Besides, many voters concluded long ago that it doesn't matter whether Republicans or Democrats win. In either case, the political insiders are the real winners and the nation is the loser. We've seen this storm coming. Three presidents in a row came into office with their party in control of Congress. Each time, unhappy voters expressed their disapproval in midterm elections by putting the other party in charge of congress. Never before in...