Free Republic

Either it was a most unusual party or else it was a most unusual testimony time. I'm referring to a Tuesday evening event at a banquet hall in Hollis, New Hampshire. What made the event most unusual is that the event was both a party and a testimony time. I'm speaking of the post-election event where many of us gathered to celebrate the strong showing of Ted Cruz in the New Hampshire primary. Several hundred campaign workers gathered among hundreds of boxes of pizza and dozens of TV cameras to celebrate Cruz's strong third-place finish. Why celebrate third? Because New...

You've gotta hand it to Ted Cruz. He might be a ruthlessly self-aggrandizing right-wing bomb-thrower who antagonizes everyone around him, but he also clearly has a rare mixture of good fortune and consummate skill at marshaling his insatiable ambition to the festering cultural alienation that pervades the grassroots of the conservative movement. Over the past week, Cruz's good luck and talent for exploiting culture war grievances have given him the perfect issue to use and abuse as the fight for the Republican nomination heads into the South. I'm talking about the question of whether women should be required to register...

Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the eligibility of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) to run for president. The suit, filed in federal court in Alabama, alleges that Cruz is not a "natural born citizen" of the United States, and should therefore be disqualified from seeking the office of president. Cruz was born in Canada in 1970 to an American mother. The plaintiffs, Sebastian Green, Shannon Duncan, Kathryn Spears, Kyle Spears and Jerry Parker, are all residents of Cullman County and supporters of Cruz's opponent, Donald Trump, according to AL.com....

Donald Trump on Friday issued a warning to Ted Cruz, alleging that he has standing to sue the Texas senator over questions of his birth and constitutional eligibility to serve in the White House. If @tedcruz does not clean up his act, stop cheating, & doing negative ads, I have standing to sue him for not being a natural born citizen, Trump tweeted. The broadside was an escalation in the accusations that the real estate mogul has been lobbing Cruzs way this week. Trump called Cruz a liar in a series of tweets beginning Thursday that stem from allegations that...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's Republican presidential campaign has pulled its latest ad after learning one the actresses featured in it has a resume packed with not-safe-for-work titles. The ad, titled "Conservatives Anonymous," shows a support group for voters felt betrayed by Marco Rubio, the Florida senator and Republican presidential contender who helped craft a comprehensive immigration reform bill that included a path to citizenship - anathema to Cruz and other hard-line conservatives. "Who else here has struggled with being lied to?" the group leader asks. "Well, I voted for a guy who was tea party hero on the campaign trail,...

I have been studying health care policy for 20 years now. I am also a multi-state licensed health insurance broker who continues to operate in an increasingly less competitive and more bureaucratically controlled system on both the federal and state level. During the last 20 years I have seen a lot of changes in the U.S. health care system. Some of them good (HIPAA) and some bad (Reagan’s EMTALA) the PPACA a.k.a. “Obamacare” etc. During the last two decades I have read everything I could get my hands on pertaining to health care policy. I also spent the longest two...

As much of the political world shifts its attention towards the South Carolina primary, MSNBCs Steve Kornacki checked in this morning with Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), the states former governor. Sanford noted he’d heard from a lot of locals that supporting Donald Trump would help send a message to Washington. The Trump candidacy, the congressman added, has tapped into Republicans frustrations. Sanford’s troubles were understandable. There were plenty of Republicans who effectively, if not literally, ruled out Trump as a possibility in 2015, when they still assumed the New York developer’s support would collapse. But many of those same GOP...

Thursday's latest endorsement for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was a two-for-one deal for the Republican presidential candidate's campaign. In South Carolina, where Republican voters will make their choice for their party's presidential nomination a week from Saturday, there are two major voting blocs. Christian conservatives make up one, while active-duty military and veterans make up the other. U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (ret.) bridges both groups. He retired after 36 years in the military, and is also an ordained with a passion for spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ. And, as of Thursday afternoon, he was firmly with the...

Trump won in dominant fashion and Cruz met expectations as Rubio fell completely apart. This is scary stuff. I've been writing about the Donald Trump phenomenon several times a week for seven months now. As his candidacy evolved from a bizarre spectacle to a serious campaign, it's become clear that this is a pivotal moment in American politics. It's not just that we have a shocking demagogue or a profane performer topping the polls in the Republican presidential race. It's the alarming notion that a crude authoritarian white nationalist is appealing to a very large section of the American people....

With conservatives across the country facing a critical decision whether to back Donald Trump, top radio talker Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday that true conservatives have no choice but to vote for Ted Cruz. Limbaugh told his radio audience, "If conservatism is your bag, if conservatism is the dominating factor in how you vote, there is no other choice for you in this campaign than Ted Cruz...." Limbaugh gave his powerful imprimatur to Cruz by adding, "This [Ted Cruz] is the closest in our lifetimes we have ever been to Ronald Reagan." Cruz has finished first in Iowa caucuses, but performed,...

I have been struggling to decide who to vote for president. This field that was hyped as the "most talented in a generation" has turned out to be a field full of mediocrities. Standing atop the field until last night was a vulgar carnival barker and reality TV star. Instead of a debate on ideas, we have mindless sloganeering and empty words. Donald Trump absolutely cannot be the Republican nominee. Trump is not a conservative, he has not fought with conservatives, and he has actively aided and funded the enemies of conservatives. It's more than that though. To nominate Trump...

The 100 biggest donors of 2016 cycle have spent $195 million trying to influence the presidential election more than the $155 million spent by the 2 million smallest donors combined, according to a POLITICO analysis of campaign finance data. The analysis found that the leading beneficiaries of checks from the top 100 donors were Jeb Bushs floundering campaign for the GOP nomination (a supportive super PAC received $49 million from donors on the list), Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton (super PACs dedicated to her raised $38 million from top 100 donors) and Ted Cruzs insurgent GOP campaign ($37 million). In fact,...

One of the under-reported stories leading up to Ted Cruz' win in the Iowa Republican Caucus was his ability to attract libertarian-leaning members of the GOP base. With Rand Paul in the race, it seemed unlikely he would be able to convince New Hampshire's decidedly more libertarian "liberty wing" to follow suit. Paul dropped out of the race last week, and this week seven of the Kentucky senator's biggest Granite State supporters announced they are backing Cruz now. State Rep. J.R. Hoell was among the first to switch. The mechanical engineer now in his third term serving New Hampshire House...

Hillary Clinton has made every effort to make Flint her own. The water crisis afflicting this predominantly black Michigan city - ignored by Washington politicians for years - has become another battlefield in a progressive war between Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Race, class and the environment matter again in an issues-based, neck-and-neck race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Looking past Tuesday's primary in New Hampshire, where Sanders is tipped to win, and toward the March primary states where she will be counting on African American support, Clinton made a symbolic campaign stop here on Sunday. "I feel blessed to be...

The states of Iowa and North Carolina have at least two things in common. First, they are the nation's top producers of hogs. Second, they are often overrun with politicians desperate to attract attention and votes. But I repeat myself. Now that we know the results of the Iowa caucuses, the 2016 political landscape is much clearer. Those seeking office or running campaigns in North Carolina would be well advised to look to Iowa, another purple state, for lessons about the press, the polls and the parties. For starters, reporters and commentators are only as insightful as their sources. Many...

Young women in New Hampshire were offended by the way Hillary Clinton uses her gender to garner support, an MSNBC survey revealed Friday. When MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall asked young female voters about Hillary Clinton's claim on Wednesday that she is not an establishment candidate because she is a woman, they responded negatively. One of the respondents said that she did not like how Clinton assumed that her feminism was identical to the feminism of all women. "I also am a woman. I also face discrimination as being a woman. Her feminism does not represent my feminism, and I think...

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump on Sunday said he and Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders "very much agree" on trade. "Well it's very interesting that you say that, because the one thing we very much agree on is trade," Trump said on CNN's "State of the Union." "We both agree that we're getting ripped off by China, by Japan, by Mexico, by everybody we do business with." Asked how he would differentiate himself with the Vermont senator to New Hampshire independents who may be torn, the billionaire businessman said he will actually be able to do something to correct trade...

Gio Vanecchia is so enamored of Bernie Sanders that he made a five-hour drive with his wife and infant son from South Jersey on Saturday morning to catch a glimpse of the progressive firebrand. But what if Sanders loses the Democratic nomination? Asked whether he will be there to vote for the Democrat in November should Sanders falter, the 34-year-old union mechanic reacts as if the question is insane. There is not a chance, he insists, that he would ever support Hillary Clinton. "She's establishment," Vanecchia said. "Most of the guys I work with think she's a criminal." Usually, that...

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- ANOTHER Ted Cruz rally, another Ted Cruz rant about the media's failure to give him his due. I endured one in the tiny town of Weare, N.H., on Thursday afternoon and had two thoughts. The first was that I'd seldom heard a voice as ripe with self-regard -- as juicy with it -- as his. He's pomposity's plum tomato. The second thought was that he's right. We've sold him short. We continue to underestimate him. He's even craftier than we appreciated. He's more devious than we realized. And he has a better chance to win the Republican...

Cruz should have held his campaign staff accountable for spreading bad information just like Hillary should have held State Department staff accountable for not stopping jihadi savages from murdering Americans. Asked by Todd Starnes if he was satisfied with the way Sen. Cruz has handled himself as Christian over the incident in Iowa, Carson said, Well, let me put it this way, it is not the way that I would have handled it. I would make sure that it did not happen again, Carson continued. And I would take corrective action. Not to take corrective action is tacitly saying it...