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...

A United Nations agency agreed Tuesday to close its investigation into Iran’s past nuclear activities, moving Tehran another step closer to large-scale sanctions relief following its deal with world powers this summer. Diplomats said the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors unanimously approved a resolution drafted by the U.S. and five other countries that will close the investigation in the coming weeks. That five-month probe concluded that Iran had a nuclear-weapons-related program until 2003 and then continued some of those activities as late as 2009. However, the agency said Iran’s activities weren’t advanced and that there was no evidence...

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.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The poor Drive-Bys are so confused. I mean, they're really riding a roller coaster of emotions, the seesaw of emotions -- up, down, up, down, where are we going, when's it gonna stop, is it good, is it bad. They just can't quite figure it out. Greetings, my friends. Great to have you here, as we head on down the tracks. Rush Limbaugh from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Three hours broadcast excellence hosted by me. Telephone number, if you want to join us, is 800-282-2882. Look at what is happening in Los Angeles. Either...

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...

Some days I think Barack Obama is trying to get Donald Trump elected. My theory on Trump's rise focuses on the surge Trump's polling at the same time President Obama has visibly failed to keep Americans safe from ISIS. Fourteen dead in San Bernardino, the Los Angeles schools closed after a credible bomb threat to multiple schools, and the President looking dazed and lost in rhetoric repeated so often he knows it by heart. Trump now has two respected polls, Monmouth and ABC/WashPost that show him essentially cracking 40% support. This breakthrough has the political professionals leaping to all kinds...

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...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The latest on the closure of Los Angeles Unified School District schools due to a threat (all times local): 9:40 a.m. New York City officials say they and many cities across the country received the same threat that closed the Los Angeles school system. Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters Tuesday that the threat came in the form of a "generic" email and that New York officials quickly concluded that it wasn't credible. Los Angeles Unified School District officials say they closed all of the system's more than 900 schools and 187 public charter schools as...

— Terrorism has emerged as the top concern among Republican primary voters, and Donald Trump is seen as the candidate best equipped to combat it. This is the main reason Trump has popped in the polls since his call last week for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration into the United States. A fresh Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that 38 percent of Republicans name terrorism as the single most important issue, compared with 29 percent who name the economy and just 6 percent who highlight immigration. “Asked to choose which candidate among the top five they would trust most...

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.

A secret U.S. policy that prohibits immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas was reportedly kept in place over fears of a civil liberties backlash and “bad public relations.” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end the policy, even though several other officials in the organization pressed for such a policy change, ABC News reported Monday. John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and currently a national security consultant for ABC News, said he pushed for a change in 2014 that would allow...

Now this… A stash of explosives was discovered in Mark Twain National Forest in Mid-Missouri in October....... --snip-- Since the suspicious activity first leaked last week, the investigation has progressively revealed worse details, working retroactively to bring to light every alarming thing that happened before two men were stopped in a Lebanon Walmart. Now, it seems to have reach a head, after an incident in October provides some potential answers as to what is being plotted from the center of our country, and what targets are at imminent risk. A man who was hunting in the Mark Twain National Forest,...

It just keeps getting worse. At first we were told that she had been vetted by two agencies. Apparently Obama Administration officials were hoping to cover up the magnitude of this failure. In any case, Tashfeen Malik stands as a witness to the impossibility of vetting for jihadis.“U.S. missed ‘red flags’ with San Bernardino shooter,” CBS News, December 14, 2015:As investigators focus on what or who motivated San Bernardino shooters Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, to open fire at the Inland Regional Center, a report about Malik’s comments on social media before she moved to the U.S....

UPDATE: It gets worse. ABC News is reporting that Homeland Security officials have been bound by a secret US policy not to scrutinize visa applicants' social media footprint because the Obama administration feared bad press over "civil liberties." This represents an stunning, intentional dereliction of duty -- all for PR: 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. visas, a former senior department official...

President Barack Obama says his administration will continue releasing terrorists from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, so long as those released are less dangerous than the jihadists currently fighting against the U.S. and its interests. The bizarre argument comes in a new interview with Olivier Knox of Yahoo! News and is one of several comments in their discussion that reinforces the president's stubborn nonchalance on issues related to jihad. Obama also shrugs off concerns about recidivism of former Guantanamo detainees, suggesting that only a "handful" of former detainees have returned to the fight and claiming that only "low-level"...

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....

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...