Free Republic

After Ted Cruz won every delegate up for grabs at the Colorado Republican convention, Donald Trump began complaining that the process at such conventions is unfair. His claim is that party insiders should not be making these choices, but rather that the power should be vested with the voters. As a consequence, Cruz is “stealing" delegates from Trump, and in so doing defying the will of the voters. Trump's accusations are specious and disingenuous. The process that has been playing out is perfectly legitimate. Trump's real problem is that he is being outhustled by the Cruz campaign. The Republican nomination...

Why are the Trumpists so angry at Cruz? In fact, doesn’t it seem like they are always angry at something or someone? It’s true. It’s either “lyin’ Ted,” the Washington insiders, the press, which is bit surprising considering how much free air time he is given, or whatever. It almost appears Svengali Trump has figured out that he must continually invent new villains to keep his followers amped up. This reminds me a bit of the leaders of the hard left, who must keep some form of “The Man” in perpetuity, holding down the oppressed democrat faithful, who are then...

When conservatives think about what they most hate about the left, several factors come to mind: their racist appeals, their whining social justice warrior nonsense, their distinct willingness to attack conservative women, their consistent stream of lies, their perversion of buzzwords.

It's one thing to be upset with the so-called Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Barack Obama and his destructive policies, but it's another for a GOP presidential candidate to exploit that anger illegitimately against a fellow anti-establishment candidate. Many of us have been critical of the GOP leadership for opposing conservatives in GOP primaries, not backing conservatives in office trying to do the right thing, always advising that Republicans dilute their message to attract independent voters and not sufficiently recognizing the threat President Obama represents to this nation and opposing his agenda. From the beginning, grass-roots conservatives,...

Donald Trump is waxing wroth these days about Ted Cruz's rounding up of Colorado delegates and has called the whole GOP delegate selection process "rigged and crooked." He says this to audiences who probably know less about the state-by-state rules than he does. It is the blind leading the blind, telling the assembled mob to grab their torches and pitchforks and storm the establishment castle.

Call it a high-tech lynching. In the wake of Donald Trump’s being shut out in Colorado — final delegate count: Ted Cruz, 34; Trump, 0 — his fans have formed virtual mobs, and on Sunday a particularly passionate Twitter user tweeted out the home address and phone number of Steve House, chairman of the Colorado GOP. House’s personal information has been retweeted more than 1,100 times. He says he’s received some 3,000 phone calls, most of them uncomplimentary: Meanwhile, the same Trump partisan also tweeted information for the state’s national committeewoman, Lily Nuñez, and committeeman, George Leing. Of course, the...

As Donald Trump attempts to distract from his campaign's myriad failures in Colorado by cynically stirring the "rigged corrupt game" pot, one of the public faces of this phony outrage is a gentleman who earned himself prime Drudge real estate when he dramatically burned his voter registration card on camera -- claiming that he was wrongfully turned away from the state party convention because he's a Trump fan. It's a disenfranchisement conspiracy cooked up by the elites, he argued, torching his Republican documentation in protest.  The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway was skeptical of the man's version of events and dug into the back story....

So, here’s what’s going on: Trump wants delegates from the state of Washington, so the campaign sent out an email soliciting possible delegates on Friday, April 8 to let everyone know that the deadline to submit their Declaration of Candidacy for Delegate form was Wednesday, April 6. Oh, no. It gets worse, though. There is no deadline anyway. Well, there sort of is, but it isn’t April 6 across the board; Washington has a number of conventions that all take place on different days and have different deadlines.. The gaffe would have reflected poorly on the campaign if they’d send...

On March 1, the Colorado Republican party prepared for 60,000 voters to arrive at nearly 3,000 precinct-caucus sites across the state. Those voters would select men and women to attend the party’s county assemblies and congressional district conventions, in the first step of a multi-part process that determined 34 of Colorado’s 37 delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. To hear Donald Trump and his fans tell it, those tens of thousands of Republicans never arrived, never made their choices, and never had the chance to play a role in selecting the party’s delegates. Matt Drudge, the populist Right’s...

Donald Trump is right: The system is rigged. It’s rigged in favor of front-runners. That’s why Trump, who is leading the Republican nominating contest, has a larger percentage of delegates (46 percent) than of votes (37 percent). Unsurprisingly, Trump never mentions when the rules have helped him. He much prefers to whine and peddle conspiracy theories when they don’t. Trump’s latest tantrum is over Colorado, where Ted Cruz just swept all 34 of the state’s available delegates. Trump is calling the results “totally unfair” and on Twitter he asked: “How is it possible that the people of the great State...

Donald Trump played up his plans to tax companies that move jobs out of the United States as he tried to appeal to blue collar workers in a New York rally Sunday. Speaking for about an hour Sunday in Rochester, N.Y., Trump recited statistics about the area's loss of manufacturing jobs and economic hardship in recent years. He reiterated his desire to tax goods sold by companies once based in the United States that moved away to find cheaper labor. The plan has been widely panned by economic experts. But the Rochester crowd ate it up. "I'm the only one...

Despite what you may have heard or read, Donald Trump has never filed for bankruptcy. His companies have, four times, but Donald Trump never has.  The purpose of corporations is for investors to put a limited amount of capital at risk in exchange for the opportunity to earn money in any one of a myriad of legal ways. Investor use the corporate structure to ensure that if their bets go south, the most they can lose is the capital they invested in the first place. Corporate bankruptcy laws can give a company an opportunity to restructure its business in a...

If you’ve spent any time on social media, particularly in the politicalsphere, chances are you’ve encountered an internet troll or two. This election cycle has been er, um… interesting. I never thought I’d long for the days the so-called Paulbots would troll my feeds lecturing me about liberty and the Constitution and Dr. Paul. At least most of those accounts were real. Alas… Not so in 2016. The Trumpbots, or accounts that seem to exist solely to attack those with unfavorable views of The Donald, are a special breed of vicious. I’ve learned it’s best to ignore, block, and move...

JACQUELINE ALEMANY CBS NEWS April 8, 2016 "Kosher" Trump Vodka Lands In Hot Water Well, apparently neither does the kosher liquor company that Donald Trump rented his name to. Trump Vodka, the product of yet another licensing deal under Trump's name, was founded in 2006 and distributed by a company called Drinks Americas, the Jerusalem Post reports. Despite the Trumpian catchphrase "Success Distilled," distribution of the drink came to an end in 2011. But when an independent importer saw an opportunity for the drink to enjoy a fruitful afterlife in Israel, Trump agreed to a new deal allowing H. Pixel...

More than two months after Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump claimed to have raised $6 million for veterans' charities at a fundraiser held on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, most of the organizations targeted to receive the money have gotten less than half of that amount.

If you think President Richard Nixon was paranoid to the point of having an enemies list, consider the Donald J. Trump statement following his crushing defeat by Sen. Ted Cruz in the Wisconsin primary. Trump did not make the statement personally, lest he provide enough ad hominem sound bites to last a generation. Rather he and his myth of invincibility hid from the camera he usually loves. The statement blaming his loss on everybody and everything but himself, and with the first word after his name being a lie, reads...

It's right there in the Washington Post... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-hopes-message-appeals-to-democrats-independents-too/2016/04/02/e55057ba-f945-11e5-958d-d038dac6e718_story.html "The party's presidential front-runner told supporters Saturday that he's out to bring independents and Democrats behind his cause even though 'right now I'm catering to the Republicans.'" Which means, of course, that it's all been an act and, once nominated, he'll be "catering" to the Democrats. Face it, Trumpsters, if Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney had said this, you'd know exactly what it meant. If Cruz or Kasich said this, you'd be wagging your fingers and hammering their supporters over it. But, there it is, plain as Kansas, Trump is "catering to...

The term “gaslighting” comes to us from a play called “Gas Light,” written in 1938 by British playwright Patrick Hamilton. The play focuses on an abusive husband in the 1880s who convinces his wife that she is going crazy. One of his methods is lowering the gaslights and telling her it hasn’t gotten any darker. It’s all in her imagination. Donald Trump has been playing this game on the American people, or at least a meaningful portion of it, for five months now. Telling us that Trump University was a success. Telling us that he only worked with the mafia...

NBC anchor Chuck Todd isn’t buying the National Enquirer hit piece on Ted Cruz. On the March 27 edition of Meet the Press, Todd commented that “there’s more evidence that ties Trump to planting the story, than there is to the story itself tying anything to Cruz.” Todd also accused Trump of taking a page out of the “LBJ playbook.” Discussing the story with NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell, Todd retorted that “Trump is almost trying to borrow a page from the LBJ playbook, when he put out a statement on the National Enquirer – let me put...

Let me begin with this. If the National Enquirer wrote a story about me cheating on my wife with five women, I had better be extremely definitive in my response; because if I’m not, my wife –smelling the guilt – would kick my ass. OK, let me also tell you that I wouldn’t be angry; in fact, I’d be ecstatic. It’s fun to count money from guaranteed punitive and compensatory damages in a multimillion dollar lawsuit. But that’s me. I can’t speak for Senator Ted Cruz except to say that so far his reaction seems —well, not exactly definitive. He...