Free Republic

Trending on Twitter right now is the retweet by Donald Trump. I'm using an image because I can't imagine this won't be memory-holed at some point: ********** Chuck Todd asked Trump about it on Meet the Press: ********** TRANSCRIPT TODD: You know right now on Twitter, there is a trending retweet of yours. You tweeted someone from "ilduce2016″ (okay, I wet myself, are you happy?), it was a Mussolini quote, but you didn't know it was Mussolini when you retweeted it, it said, "It is better to live one day as a lion than one hundred years as a sheep."*...

Let's just get this out of the way first. Donald J. Trump is now highly favored to win the nomination and that's true even if the field winnows. The Donald's appeal is attitudinal, not ideological, which allows him to compete in majority rural, suburban and urban congressional districts, as opposed to the historical conservative vs. moderate dynamic that has traditionally been decided in the suburbs. Because proportional delegates are awarded to candidates in a Republican primary based on the results of voting totals and thresholds in congressional districts, Trump is well-positioned to win the nomination. In fact, as I explained...

Not Even The Fee For The Gaming License When the smoke all clears, we will be reviewing the vote counts from the Nevada Caucus as if it was a legitimate election. But the buzz on Twitter from people on the ground suggests that it is anything but. For some background, Nevada politics is amazingly crooked, to the point that one might criticize The Godfather movies for having an unduly naive picture of the state's political culture. Former GOP Governor Jim Gibbons lost in a primary in 2010 under a cloud of ethical and sexual improprieties. Democratic former Senate Majority Leader...

Update (AP): All hell is breaking loose on Twitter at 9:20 ET as reports are trickling in from caucus sites about the GOP running out of ballots, people receiving -- and casting -- multiple ballots, poll workers wearing Trump gear, yelling, swearing, and on and on. The best thing you can do to stay on top of it is to scroll down in this post and scroll through our collective Twitter feed, which is being updated minute by minute with news. It's total chaos in Nevada. I'll leave you with this for now:

So Donald Trump while trying to get the GOP nomination will take the beautiful witness stand at in the very near future in his own fraud trial. Gotta love it. Let's say he actually gets the nomination and the other Democrat, Hillary Clinton, gets hers. We'd have one candidate running while on trial for fraud and another under FBI investigation. What a country. Here are some details: In court filings last Friday, lawyers for both sides in a long-running civil lawsuit over the now defunct Trump University named Trump on their witness lists. That makes it all but certain that...

Rubes: Come to Think of It, Now That My Presidential Hopes are On the Line, I Will Reluctantly and Insincerely Crabwalk Back My Position to Pretend I'm Closer to Cruz's Position on Amnesty Than Jorge Ramos' And you can tell a man really really believes in what he's saying when he announces a shift in a long-held position on the eve of a vote that could determine if he gets the nice big office and promotion he wants. I mean, that's gold standard, right? You can tell Rubes really stands behind his sudden vow to cancel DACA immediately -- after...

Washington (CNN)Marco Rubio suggested Thursday that he would end parts of President Barack Obama's deferred action program for undocumented immigrants on his first day in office, an apparent break from previous statements and inviting attacks from more hardline rivals. Rubio has long maintained that he would eventually end the White House program that shields some undocumented immigrants who entered before their 16th birthday from deportation, but he has been less clear about when that would happen. Rubio told CNN's Jake Tapper on "The Lead" on Thursday that he would revoke the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order immediately, a departure...

While serving as a city commissioner in West Miami, Marco Rubio voted in favor of a city resolution urging the federal government to give Honduran illegal immigrants permanent resident status and free them from risk of deportation, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller. The 1998 city resolution, #98-16, is titled "Resolution of the City of West Miami urging the federal government and Immigration and Naturalization Service to accord same status to Hondurans as has been afforded to Nicaraguans."

Raul Labrador, Idaho representative and a leader of the House Freedom Caucus, is endorsing Ted Cruz for president, sources close to the campaign confirm. Labrador had previously thrown his weight behind Kentucky senator Rand Paul, serving as his Western States Chairman. Candidates began vying for Labrador's endorsement as soon as Paul left the race following a less-than-stellar showing in the Iowa caucuses.

Noting with sorrow Justice Scalia’s death, Sowell begs his readers to sober up: The vacancy created on the Supreme Court makes painfully clear the huge stakes involved when we choose a President of the United States, just one of whose many powers is the power to nominate justices of the Supreme Court. After enumerating these, and indirectly reminding readers that the next president is apt to be a wartime president, he makes his views about Trump perfectly clear: Against this background, the frivolous rhetoric and childish antics in the televised political “debates” are painful to watch. If ever there was...

Donald Trump is now officially the Code Pink Republican. Or maybe he's the Daily Kos or Huffington Post Republican. How about the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Republican? I think that fits. Heck, we all saw it and we all heard it. Trump went full left loon on George W. Bush and 9/11, sounding like the most impassioned truther from the left. Did Maxine Waters do his debate prep? Trump snarked childishly that Bush did not keep us safe on 9/11. Apparently Mr. Trump is not intellectually very curious about history. If he were, he would know that 9/11 was dreamed up,...

The senator's super PACs have launched an unprecedented ground effort in South Carolina and seem intent on going where few super PACs have gone before--door knocking. We all know super PACs have permanently changed the face of American politics. But in South Carolina, right now, we're getting a preview of the unprecedented ways they can alter a campaign. South Carolina, as you may know, is kind of a big deal. It has a large population--4.8 million people--and a bad reputation because it's a place where candidates love to break out their dirtiest tricks. Or, in the case of Ted Cruz's...

Internal poll for Bush PAC shows much tighter SC race: Trump 26, Cruz 24, Jeb 12, Rubio 11--while public surveys give Trump a huge lead

mmediately after Saturday night's Republican debate, CBS News interviewed a nationally representative sample of debate watchers assembled by GfK's Knowledge Panel who identified themselves as Republicans or independents. Thirty-two percent of these debate watchers say Marco Rubio won the debate, beating out Donald Trump (24 percent) and John Kasich (19 percent), who are ranked second and third, respectively. Further down on the list are Ted Cruz (12 percent), Ben Carson (8 percent), and Jeb Bush (5 percent). The gloves come off in the CBS News Republican debate Republican debate: Donald Trump promises to cut use of profanity Marco Rubio is...

Few professional analysts seriously expected six months ago that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination. But after Tuesday night, it is a clear possibility. How much of a possibility? To get that answer right, it is important to understand some things about the Trump phenomenon. Perhaps most important, Trump's campaign is not a Tea Party phenomenon. While there's been a tendency to try to lump Trump in with various G.O.P. insurgencies of the last few years, that role is best filled by Sen. Ted Cruz, who really occupies the "Tea Party lane" of the G.O.P. primary more cleanly. Instead,...

January 20, 2017. President Trump takes his place behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office at 1:45 p.m. and opens a note from Barack Obama. "Good luck. Have a yuuuuuge day today, because the next four years are going to suck. --Barack" Propelled to office on a campaign of "making America great again" without ever explaining how he will do it, Trump rides high on a wave of gnosticism: The belief in secret knowledge. One of my favorite writers, Jonah Goldberg, posited that both Sanders and Trump's campaigns are based on a political version of a religious heresy (Gnosticism,...

Fox News anchor Bret Baier tweeted this quote from Donald Trump's recent interview with Greta Van Susteren, prodding me to snark that it'll be fascinating to watch Trump's cult of personality cheer on his inevitable mass amnesty proposal: In fairness, if you watch the clip, it's seems like he's mostly referring to his conduct on the campaign trail. His "rapid change" comment comes in the context of being challenged on whether dropping F-bombs and amplifying an audience member's mockery of Ted Cruz as a "pussy" is presidential behavior. Don't worry about that, Trump says. I'll clean up my act "as...

epublican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson smiles at the thought of the money he's raking in from the gullible and the attention he's getting from Donald Trump and Joe Scaroborough (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik -- caption by me.) If yesterday's assertion by Ben Carson that he was putting a lot of effort into campaigning in South Carolina (he's not, he is taking this weekend off and has only run 182 radio/television ads, all of them in Columbia, SC.) and that he has a plan for moving forward convinced you he was either delusional or dishonest, the balance has radically tipped to...

(CNN)Ted Cruz will launch his most forceful attack yet against Donald Trump in a TV ad that accuses Trump of buying political influence "in a pattern of sleaze stretching back decades." The 60-second spot, shared first with CNN, is part of a six-figure ad buy that will hit voters' TV screens across South Carolina starting as early as Thursday. It centers around Vera Coking, an elderly widow who faced the threat of losing her home in Atlantic City when the city tried to seize it through eminent domain — in order to allow Trump to build a casino parking lot....

Conservatives Anonymous