Free Republic

In the latest Quinnipiac University national survey of likely Republican voters, Trump jumps to 39 percent of the vote, up eight points from the beginning of the month. The Texas senator, meanwhile, saw his share of the vote drop four points to 18 percent. The big winner in the poll other than Trump is Florida Sen. Marco Rubio who held steady at 19 percent despite a setback in New Hampshire. With Cruz's slip, that was good enough to put Rubio in second place in this poll and for the first time the Real Clear Politics average of polls.

The incoming fire appears to have taken a toll in South Carolina, a state that had been seen as favorable territory for Cruz due to its conservative and evangelical bent. But new polls released this week show Cruz trailing by double digits, with Trump poised for a huge win in the state on Saturday. Wednesday's Monmouth University poll gives Trump 35 percent support, nearly doubling Cruz, who garnered just 19 percent. Trump's lead extends to the very evangelical community that Cruz had expected to win in large numbers.

President Barack Obama harshly criticized the entire slate of Republican presidential candidates during a press conference Tuesday afternoon. "I think foreign observers are troubled by some of the rhetoric that's been taking place in these Republican primaries and Republican debates," Obama said when asked what foreign leaders thought of Donald Trump.

Under a Trump presidency, Americans would lose their gun rights and religious liberty and see abortion rights dramatically expanded, Cruz said Monday morning on Fox News.

I want MY President to ...

Trump's rise in the Quinnipiac poll is boosted by first-time Iowa voters: 40 percent say they will support him, compared with 22 percent for Cruz.

WASHINGTON -- Iowa's secretary of state on Saturday blasted Ted Cruz's campaign over a controversial mailer that aims to drive voters to the polls for Monday's caucuses by claiming they have committed "violations." "Today I was shown a piece of literature from the Cruz for President campaign that misrepresents the role of my office, and worse, misrepresents Iowa election law," Paul Pate, a Republican, said in a statement Saturday.

Thursday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," host Joe Scarborough reacted to an interview hosted by Fox New Channel's Bill O'Reilly on the network's "The O'Reilly Factor" a night earlier with Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. Scarborough mocked O'Reilly, who begged Trump to reconsider his decision not to appear in the network's GOP presidential debate in Des Moines, IA scheduled for later tonight.

Tonight, a top official with the RNC called me to say that National Review was being disinvited [from the CNN debate]. The reason: Our "Against Trump" editorial and symposium. We expected this was coming. Small price to pay for speaking the truth about The Donald.

A local high school is honoring a man who was shot and killed by police inside Northlake Mall on Christmas Eve. Crossroads Charter High School on North Tryon Street dedicated its digital sign in memory of Daquan Westbrook.

After dozens of unsuccessful attempts to repeal all or part of President Barack Obama's signature health care law, Congressional Republicans on Wednesday finally succeeded in getting a repeal bill to the president's desk.

"Right now our goal is we're going to put a lot of our resources into Iowa, and that's what we're doing," Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. "Obviously, if we go to Iowa and lose — well frankly we probably won't keep going."

Farook, who also went by his middle name, Raheel, was a business taxes representative for the California State Board of Equalization, according to his LinkedIn profile. He is a 2003 graduate La Sierra High School, and most recently studied finance at California State University Fullerton until 2013. (As the Los Angeles Times notes, a Syed R. Farook was employed as an environmental health specialist by the San Bernardino County Health department, according to public recods. But that individual shows no apparent connection to the Redlands home raided by the police.)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announces that it has approved Fluad, the first seasonal influenza vaccine containing an adjuvant. Fluad, which is manufactured using an egg-based process, is formulated with the adjuvant MF59, an oil-in-water emulsion of squalene oil. The study showed that Fluad induced antibody levels that were comparable to the levels induced by Agriflu [i.e., no better.] Fluad was approved using the accelerated approval regulatory pathway, which allows the FDA to approve products for serious or life-threatening diseases based on evidence that the product has an effect on an outcome that is reasonably likely to predict clinical...

Muslim students at the University of Colorado are calling on school leaders to create a room inside the Engineering Center that they can use for their obligatory, five-times daily prayers while they're on campus.

Before an estimated crowd of 9,000, standing on a stage on an outdoor running track that was backdropped by the sun-soaked Flatirons, the longtime Independent senator from Vermont-turned-Democratic presidential hopeful delivered his wildly popular manifesto to an audience that loved every word of it.

The fact is, the mobile purchasing decision for most consumers is now more about buying into, and sticking with, an ecosystem than it is about a particular device -- no matter how well crafted. And Microsoft’s ecosystem can’t yet compete with what’s on offer from Apple, with its iTunes store, Beats 1 streaming radio, Apple TV and other cloud services. Phones that run Google Android, meanwhile, boast more than a million apps and seamless integration with a host of services like Docs, YouTube and Gmail. Microsoft’s problem is that most users in the U.S. already are on Android, which holds...

Christie has become such an also-ran that the Associated Press and the New York Times recently reassigned reporters dedicated to covering Christie ... “We’re all living in Trump world,” said Kean. “And Trump world is something none of these political gurus or any of these guys conceived of when they [started] running their campaigns.” ... Trump’s dominance of the news cycle is a major factor holding Christie down

A memo sent by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to her supporters this week urged them to remain calm, invoking, of all past examples, Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

"If necessary, we will issue parallel liquidity and California-style IOU's, in an electronic form. We should have done it a week ago," said Yanis Varoufakis, the finance minister. ... Syriza sources say the Greek ministry of finance is examining options to take direct control of the banking system ... They want a new team installed, one that is willing to draw on the central bank's secret reserves, and to take the provocative step in extremis of creating euros. "We have to restore stability to the system, with or without the help of the ECB. We have the capacity to print...