Free Republic

Deutsche Bank Trust Co. Americas ratcheted up its battle with Donald Trump, claiming the hard-charging developer personally owes it $40 million after defaulting on a $640 million construction loan for Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. On Friday, Deutsche, the main lender on Trump's development alongside the Chicago River, filed suit against Trump in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan.It is the second suit filed within a month over the high-profile project under way at 401 N. Wabash Ave., which at 92 stories has already become a dominant figure on Chicago's skyline.-snip-Steven Molo, an attorney representing Deutsche, declined...

Ted Cruz's debating skills are overrated. There. I said it. Over. Rated. ... There are three main reasons Trump came out on top against Cruz. Poll positions First: ad hominem (I'm a winner and you're a loser) combined with ad populum (I'm ahead in the race, so I must be the best). Trump initially mentioned how Cruz was losing by "going down in the polls" and that Trump was indeed winning as he boasted "In Iowa now...Ted, in the last three polls, I'm beating you. So you shouldn't misrepresent how well you're doing with the polls." Cruz had no response,...

Under assault from Donald Trump, Ted Cruz offered something of a thinly veiled contrast Friday.... Cruz, in the middle of an intense 28-county bus tour, has been arguing that he is out working the GOP field on the ground as they rely on "slick Hollywood TV ads." Asked by reporters if he had much faith in the ground game of a Trump, Cruz mocked his opulence. "I feel confident that I'm never going to have a plane with my name on it," he said at a church. "How do you run a grassroots campaign? It's very time intensive. It's labor...

...So what is Mr. Cruz's "one big problem"? It turns out to be that he's for honest money, ideally a dollar defined in terms of gold. That is, he's got the same problem that dogged those notorious losers like, to name but a few, Geo. Washington, John Adams, Thos. Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, Wm. McKinley, Thos. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan.This is a bizarre argument that puts the Huffington Post - the dispatch is by its senior political economy reporter, Zach Carter - in the company of, say, Richard Nixon. It was Nixon...

Donald Trump, a candidate even Republicans once considered a side show, increases his lead yet again in the nomination race, according to the latest Fox News national poll. The poll also finds Ted Cruz ticking up, Marco Rubio slipping, and Ben Carson dropping. Trump hits a high of 39 percent among Republican primary voters, up from 28 percent a month ago. The increase comes mainly from men, white evangelical Christians, and voters without a college degree -- and at the expense of Carson. ... The favorites among white evangelical Christians are Trump (39 percent), Cruz (26 percent) and Carson (12...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) defended his role in the 2013 immigration battles Thursday, telling reporters at a rally here that the Republican "establishment" was misleading people about why he introduced an amendment to penalize workers in the United States illegally. "Let me use a Las Vegas analogy, from poker," said Cruz. "It's called 'calling their bluff.' Listen, the Democrats and the establishment Republicans who supported the Gang of Eight, they claimed they cared about the people who were here illegally. And so I introduced an amendment that made anyone here illegally permanently ineligible for citizenship. That amendment called their bluff,...

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: If you define amnesty as he does, as citizenship. Yes, he fought that. If you define it as allowing people who came here illegally not to suffer the consequences of illegal entry, which by law should be deportation, he did not oppose that. It is very clear that he supported that. And as you showed last night in that big showdown, many, many pieces of evidence like his interview with Byron York and others, and what he told the Texas Tribune, he, at the time, said he was in favor of a compromise that would take the 11...