Free Republic

If there was any doubt that Ted Cruz is the hot commodity of late in the Republican presidential race, it should be dispelled by the results of the latest national poll. Ryan Lovelace of the Washington Examiner reports, “A new national survey shows that while Donald Trump maintains a huge lead among GOP primary voters, Sen. Ted Cruz is continuing to surge. Marco Rubio“According to the latest New York Times/CBS poll, Trump wins 35 percent of the vote, and has a 19-point lead over Cruz. But Cruz jumped into second place with 16 percent, which is roughly four times the...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This reminds me what else I did last night. I finally sat down with my new iPad Pro, and I ran the app Apple Music, and I started searching Christmas music. Mannheim Steamroller, they've got all kinds of Christmas playlists that they put together, Christmas cocktail, which is jazz, country Christmas. I was just reveling. Now, it has to be stuff that I've heard before for me to be able to enjoy, but Christmas music fits the bill. There isn't that much new since I lost my hearing, so I spent some time doing that, just finding...

Long before the day I was graciously afforded the opportunity to write on this blog I have been contemptuous of Barack Obama. Time has only heightened that contempt. Two stories that parallel each other demonstrate just how badly Barack Obama will compromise the US for the sake of his hubris. The jihadista of San Bernardino, Malik Tashfeen, passed three DHS background checks when immigrating to the United States. The Obama administration looks the other way when it comes to social media postings- on the part of immigrants. Tashfeen openly supported violent jihad but in the Obama regime that's not a...

On Tuesday, the Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District announced that all schools would be shut down today due to an unspecified terror threat. According to ABC News, that threat also carries “unknown credibility.” Bus drivers say they have been returned to their bus depots. LAUSD is the nation’s second-largest school district, with 640,000 students and 900 schools; children range from kindergarten to 12th grade.

The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll reveals that following the San Bernardino terrorist attack, 70 percent of Americans now believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction and only 43 percent approve of Barack Obama’s job performance as president. About 71 percent of Americans say that the “shootings and random acts of violence that took place this year in Charleston, S.C., Oregon , Colorado, and the terrorist shootings in San Bernardino, California — are now are now a permanent part of American life.” Domestic terrorism and national security have more than doubled this year and now are the...

About three weeks ago, a video came out on Youtube and Facebook entitled Woman Raised Muslim Drops Truth About Islam. While the link at the end of this article has been viewed many times, it is worth viewing again because of a very sad truth: Americans are dumber than ever when it comes to Islam. From the Pew Resesarch Center: Muslims are the fastest-growing religious group in the world. The growth and regional migration of Muslims, combined with the ongoing impact of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and other extremist groups that commit acts of violence in...

President Obama made a pitch Tuesday for Americans to remember their immigrant roots, describing the U.S. as the traditional home for refugees fleeing the world's worst troubles. He compared today's climate of fear over immigration and terrorism to what he called some of the darkest days of the country's immigrant history, such as when black Africans were brought in the slave trade, when Irish and Chinese faced discrimination and when Japanese were pushed into internment camps during World War II. "In the Syrian refugee of today we should see the Jewish refugee of World War II," the president said as...

In a secret project tied to the overall U.S. campaign against the Islamic State, intelligence officials have spent months mapping out known physical locations of media safe houses where the extremist group’s operatives are compiling, editing and curating raw video and print materials into finished digital propaganda products for dissemination across the Internet. Most of the locations are embedded in heavily residential areas in Syria, Iraq and Libya and are not being targeted by U.S. airstrikes because of Obama administration concerns about civilian casualties, according to sources who spoke to The Washington Times only on the condition of anonymity.

Today on Good Morning America, John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and now a national security consultant for ABC News, dropped a bombshell: over the objections of security-minded DHS personnel, the Obama administration secretly barred DHS from looking at postings on social media by visa applicants like Tashfeen Malik: Fearing a civil liberties backlash and “bad public relations” for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end a secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S....

Immigrant rights activists have vowed to sign up 1 million immigrants — mostly Mexicans — for citizenship and then quickly register them to vote in time to punish Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans at the polls in November for their harsh rhetoric. The advocates say the new voters could make a difference in the presidential race, where most of the Republican field has tacked to the right in word and policy, and in key Senate races in Illinois and Florida, where Republicans will be reaching to hang on to critical seats.

ROME — The threat of terrorism must be confronted sensibly and not by restrictions based on religion, which ultimately threaten religious freedom and incite more violence, said Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the US bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty. “As citizens and as believers, Christians and Catholics in the United States cannot possibly countenance” denying people entry into the country due solely to religious affiliation, he told Catholic News Service. Lori was in Rome for a Dec. 10-12 international conference on Christian persecution in the world, held at the Pontifical Urbanian University. While the continuing...

COACHELLA, California — Holy prayers at a mosque here on Friday were canceled with families gawking behind fire lines after discovering the front of their holy house had become one big fireball. Late Friday night, authorities announced that they believe the fire was deliberately set, and the local branch of the FBI is investigating as a possible hate crime. In addition, a person of interest has been detained, but not identified. Members of the congregation are blaming GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump for setting the ugly tone that charred their house of worship. The mosque began to burn at around...

CNN editor Arsalan Iftikhar, formerly of CAIR, blames Donald Trump for anti-Muslim acts.

THE F-1 VISA Under current law, the F-1 student visa operates under the assumption that foreign students have no intention of abandoning their home countries. It is intended to operate similar to a foreign exchange program, where the students return home after their studies are concluded. Current statute reads that an F-1 visa holder is “an alien having a residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning…” The I-Squared bill turns that on its head by removing the presumption that F-1 visa applicants return to their home country—rendering admissible a larger pool of foreign applicants, who...

The fear in both the GOP and Democratic party is visible at the surface when it comes to Trump, and it's not that he's any of what they've accused him of. No, it's really much simpler than that, and both Republican and Democrat parties, along with the mainstream media, are utterly terrified that you, the average American, is going to figure out what underlies all of these institutions in America. No, it's not that they're evil. It's worse, for evil frequently is recognized and fought back yet for decades America has not awakened to what has been going on in...

If Donald Trump secures the Republican presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton is sure to be the next U.S. president, according to Jeb Bush. Appearing on WBZ-TV Sunday morning, the former Florida governor slammed his Republican presidential opponent as "not motivated to win the presidency" and continued to proclaim that Trump is in cahoots with Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner. Bush also contended that Trump is neither a "serious person" nor a "serious candidate." "The simple fact is, his winning the primary, the Republican nomination would guarantee that Hillary Clinton will be elected president," Bush said. -snip- According to Real Clear Politics' aggregated...

According to Pergram, House Republicans are gearing up to attach a proposal to the omnibus that has been decried by Sessions and others as empowering Obama to bring in an unlimited number of refugees. Pergram writes that the omnibus may include: “some combination language which tightens up the visa waiver program and bolsters a review of Syrian and Iraqi refugees coming to the U.S.” The language “bolster a review of Syrian and Iraqi refugees,” appears to be a direct reference to the Ryan-McCaul proposal which passed the House on November 19 and was rebuked as a “show vote” that accomplished...

According to a recent CNN/ORC poll, many white evangelical Christians in the early primary states support Donald Trump. That’s surprising. Trump’s call Monday to bar all Muslims from entering the U.S. is perhaps the biggest act of religious bigotry in modern presidential politics. Such a proposal is a total affront to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s stunning that Trump would ask the American people to punish Muslim refugee families for the sins of ISIS. It’s even more stunning that such positions have traction with the American electorate. As we come upon Christmas, the business mogul turned presidential candidate has...

Islam is a religion, and like any other faith, it is internally diverse. Islamism, by contrast, is the desire to impose a single version of Islam on an entire society. Islamism is not Islam, but it is an offshoot of Islam. It is Muslim theocracy. In much the same way, jihad is a traditional Muslim idea connoting struggle—sometimes a personal spiritual struggle, sometimes a struggle against an external enemy. Jihadism, however, is something else entirely: It is the doctrine of using force to spread Islamism. President Barack Obama and many liberal-minded commentators have been hesitant to call this Islamist ideology...

Fox’s Eric Bolling tonight––guest-hosting The O’Reilly Factor––said that the Republicans criticizing Donald Trump are basically on the same side as Hillary Clinton and the liberal media.As far as Bolling’s concerned, Trump’s all-Muslim ban isn’t really that bad of an idea, partly because it’s not hurting him in the polls.He asked, “Is this a mistake for the other GOP contenders to line up on the same side as Hillary Clinton and the media?… You’re forcing the American public, the GOP to choose. A lot of them don’t like liberals or the media.”Simon Rosenberg still said it was a bad idea because...