Free Republic

Jeb Bush, seizing on a federal judge’s ruling Tuesday, took to Facebook to attack President Barack Obama over his executive action on immigration. “Last year, the president overstepped his executive authority and, in turn, hurt the effort toward a commonsense immigration solution,” the former Florida governor wrote. “That’s not leadership. The millions of families affected across the country deserve better.” Story Continued Below . . “Now, more than ever, we need President Obama to work with Congress to secure the border and fix our broken immigration system,” Bush added. Bush, an outspoken advocate of comprehensive immigration reform and the co-author...

Scott Walker climbs the rankings after a great start to the year, while Paul and Christie stumbled down the list.Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and a surging Scott Walker top Hotline's new GOP Presidential Power Rankings – in part because they're that good, and in part because the competition has been so bad. If you're going to make mistakes in the presidential race, it's better to make them early. But Rand Paul and Chris Christie have stumbled so often they've slipped from the top-tier slots they occupied in the first round of the Power Rankings we released last month. Walker is...

I need to mention a fact that many freepers will find painful and upsetting. In the 20th Century, Country Club Republicans had greater influence in selecting Republican nominees for President, than grassroots Republicans. There are only 2 notable exceptions when the establishment candidate did not win - 1964 and 1980. In 1964, the Republican establishment was deeply divided. Three Republican candidates from extremely wealthy, Old Money, WASP families were on the ballot. They were Governor Nelson Rockefeller from New York, Governor William Scranton from Pennsylvania, and former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. from Massachusetts. Lodge did not formally enter the...

Friends don't let friends vote RINO... I don't give a damn how much moolah Jeb Bush is currently shaking out of people with more money than sense... it's impossible to picture this charmless Gee-Oh-Pee establishment tool in the White House: not only does the Republican base despise him, but no Bush is going to beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.  I actually consider her a more flawed candidate than most do, but you can't run a clown who's practically family with the Clintons and expect him to take the requisite fight to Shrillary by discussing her serial scandals/failure.  And the Clinton...

Earlier this year, Mitt Romney had a Galadriel moment. He appeared to be briefly seized by a vision of himself as an all-powerful, world-striding President Romney, before turning away from temptation and settling for the plain old Mitt Romney he has always been. It was political theater at its most bizarre, a flack-driven frenzy that doubled as a flashback to the self-delusion that blinded the Romney 2012 campaign in its final days. With Romney now out of the way, Jeb Bush has consolidated the support of the GOP's moneyed class with surprising alacrity. As Politico noted last week, the contest...

It’s far too early to guess intelligently about who will be elected president next year or whom the Republicans will nominate, but this doesn’t seem to be stopping many pundits. Fox News has its Special Report panels lay odds on the Republican field once a week. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza handicaps the Republican field once a week. And the Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes has just produced an assessment of that field so exhaustive that it includes Donald Trump. Memories of eight years ago prevent me from joining in the fun. At this time in 2007, and for a considerable...

The 2016 Republican presidential field is shaping up into a legendary free-for-all, with polls showing the race wide open and more candidates expressing interest by the day. Will it be Jeb Bush who consolidates establishment support? Can Rand Paul or Ted Cruz break through with a powerful grassroots coalition? Could Scott Walker thread the needle between both sides? What about Marco Rubio? And then there’s the Democratic side. Will it be Hillary Clinton who prevails? Or will – actually, you know what, it will probably just be Hillary Clinton. While the former secretary of state hasn’t even said whether she’ll...

A leading Republican consultant has ranked the top 10 presidential candidates for 2016 while claiming that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has about the same odds of winning the party’s nomination as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, The Washington Post reported. The unnamed strategist divided the GOP race for 2016 into "four lanes" — establishment, tea party, social conservative and libertarian, according to the newspaper. Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker are the leading candidates in establishment, the largest lane, while former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is battling it out with retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum...

The debut edition of our leader board of the Republicans most likely to win the presidential nomination, based on what we know now, shows the field may not be as big as most people think. 1) JEB BUSH (age 62, to Hillary’s 67): He’s got money, momentum, Florida, big ideas. His surprise, early signal that he’s running is THE PLAY OF THE CAMPAIGN so far — pushing OUT Mitt and perhaps Christie by freezing or stealing their money and talent. Jeb will be first Republican to $100 million by a mile. Now, watch for the use of overwhelming force to...

On Tuesday, the Observer broke the story of a high-dollar fundraiser hosted by Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis where donors could meet Jeb Bush and contribute to Right to Rise, the PAC set up to enable a third Bush presidency. Later that day, Politico revealed that the requested dollar amount would be a staggering $100,000. The event went off as planned last night and according to one attendee was even better attended than expected. “More than forty contributors showed up, and it wasn’t just KKR people,” said the attendee, who insisted on anonymity because of the perceptions about paying such a...

If Republican Jeb Bush's political contributions offer any signs, there's little doubt that the former Florida governor plans to seek the 2016 presidential nomination. More than half of the $122,800 Bush contributed Friday is going to candidates and state Republican Party organizations in the four states scheduled to begin the presidential voting next year. The candidates include Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. David Young of Iowa, Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Rep. Frank Guinta of New Hampshire, Sen. Tim Scott and Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, and Rep. Joe Heck of Nevada.

The Walker surge in Iowa, Hillary’s Obama problem and other news from Week One of our yearlong insiders’ survey from the ground in 2016’s first-in-the-nation races.Most Iowa insiders believe Scott Walker would win their state’s Republican caucuses if they were held this week. But they’re not this week, and virtually none of the most influential thought leaders in the Hawkeye State believe that the Wisconsin governor will sustain his recent bounce in polls. This is one of several intriguing findings in the debut survey of The POLITICO Caucus. More than 100 of the most plugged-in activists, operatives and elected officials...

This column is so easy to pick apart, it's amazing that the Washington Post actually published it. This is by far the strangest column I’ve read on Senator Ted Cruz’s potential — he hasn’t even announced yet — candidacy. It’s written by Jennifer Rubin, who basically argues that Cruz is unpopular because he’s too “extreme.” He behaves, she writes, like an “angry young man,” and is not “presidential” at all. The “evidence” she uses? He’s “only” polling at 5%, she says, at RealClearPolitics. OK, so let’s look at RCP’s poll of polls. And what do we see? Jeb Bush is...

ate in the evening of Sunday, January 18, an eleven-member delegation of tribal leaders from Iraq’s western Anbar Province arrived in Washington, D.C. Just as their plane was touching down, Islamic State units back in Iraq attacked the compound of one of the delegation’s senior leaders, Sheik Ahmed Abu Risha, killing nine Iraqi police officers and wounding 28 of the sheik’s guards. A nearby Iraqi military unit failed to respond to repeated calls for help. The brutal attack underscored the purpose of the Anbar delegation’s visit: The tribal leaders believed that they could defeat the Islamic State—but only if the...

Mitt Romney announced on Jan. 30 that he would not run for President in 2016, and immediately the commentariate ordained Jeb Bush the big winner. Bush was Romney’s heir, a thousand wagging tongues proclaimed. The donors would fall to him, and with them would go the Republican establishment, then the voters. The Republicans had a “frontrunner.” If there is a 2016 frontrunner for the GOP, he achieved that status six days before Romney’s announcement. On that day, Sat., Jan. 24, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker delivered a speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines, It vaulted him into the...

The Club for Growth was among the Beltway groups that battled against the “establishment” and egged on the government shutdown. To its credit however, its business membership stayed out of the immigration fight rather than join the ant-market right-wingers who want to restrict the U.S. labor market. And unlike outfits like the Senate Conservatives Fund (who tended to pick outlandish, losing candidates), the Club for Growth backed Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and now-freshman Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska). Under a new president, David McIntosh, the Club for Growth now has a choice whether to be an outlier group or...

Included in the Email dump, Jeb Bush included all the email and personal information sent to him about Terri Schindler Schiavo. The ".pst" files are not available anymore, but you can still look at the individual dates. The email addresses are not blocked out nor the names. Terri died on March 31, 2005. If you know what date you wrote your email, you can search for it. http://jebbushemails.com/email/search SEARCH FOR YOUR TERRI SCHINDLER SCHIAVO EMAILS ABOVE

Former governor and likely 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush hosted an Education Summit in Tallahassee, FL Tuesday, where he struggled desperately to avoid uttering the word “common” and “core”. (SNIP) Bush: As long as they’re state-driven, and they’re high, and they’re assessed faithfully, is what is the cor– the hallmark– [chokes] excuse me, hallmark of a reform agenda.

I don’t get it. Sometimes when I lack understanding about an issue or situation in the news, and after researching the issue, I say to myself; ‘okay, I get it.’ Other times, just like this instance, I really don’t understand. What is the problem with candidates who are without a doubt intending to make a run for the White House in 2016 committing to the fact? The obvious is Hillary Clinton. She has gathered a qualified campaign staff; several Super PAC’s have been created to finance her campaign; and she resigned as Secretary of State to allow herself to be...

The United States invaded the wrong country when it attacked Iraq. Saudi Arabia, not former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, financed the terrorists and aided and abetted the slaughter of thousands of innocent Americans on 9/11. We have always known that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. That was just a coincidence, proclaimed Washington. But the evidence old and new is stacking up that Saudi Arabia, at the top levels of government, provided aid for that assault. The 9/11 Commission reported that while all traffic over the United States was halted in the days following 9/11, six chartered flights with...