Free Republic

Conservatives in America are sick and tired of letting the elitist political establishment in both parties, as well as the leftstream media, select Republican presidential nominees (RINOs who lost like: Ford, Dole, McCain, Romney), leaving the country with the false choice of two liberal candidates. One organization and one man are doing something to turn around this treacherous strategy that results in loss after loss, and has given us the worst president in history, Barack Obama. Election after presidential election, we are informed by the Karl Rove-types on who the “most electable” candidate is, and conservative icon Brent Bozell and...

Tell me who I’m leaving out: Bush, Walker, Rubio, Paul, Cruz, Christie, Huckabee, Perry, Jindal, Santorum, Graham, Carson, Fiorina, Trump, maybe John Kasich, maybe even Rick Snyder. There’s also a chance Peter King and/or John Bolton will run, just to make life extra miserable for Rand. That would be … 18 candidates onstage in a forum that’s never accommodated more than 10. Huh. You could, of course, limit the debates to the 10 most popular and/or credible candidates in the field. Just tell me how you go about reliably discerning who those people are circa early August, five months before...

Ted Cruz is breaking from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) about whether or not he would have ordered the U.S. military into its eight-year war in Iraq. “Knowing what we know now, of course we wouldn’t go into Iraq,” the Texas Republican told The Hill on Tuesday. “At the time, the intelligence reports indicated that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction that posed a significant national threat to this country. That’s the reason there was such widespread bipartisan support for going into Iraq,” he added. “We now know in hindsight, those intelligence reports were false.” “Without that predicate,...

Likely GOP presidential contender Jeb Bush says he will try to convince grassroots groups of parents who oppose the Common Core standards to flip-flop and embrace the education initiative. When Megyn Kelly of Fox News Channel’s The Kelly File observed how unpopular the Common Core initiative is with grassroots conservatives in particular, Bush responded: “Common Core means a lot of things to different people, so they could be right, based on what’s in front of them…but the simple fact is we need higher standards; they need to be state-driven. The federal government should play no role in this – either...

Lotta buzz about this in the political Twittersphere this afternoon. I can’t figure out why. The likely Republican presidential candidate will instead attend a competing event, the RedState Gathering in Atlanta, the day of the Iowa event, GOP sources in Iowa told The Des Moines Register Tuesday. A spokesman for Bush confirmed the report…

The headlines I’ve seen this morning about this exchange claim that Bush said he wouldn’t rescind Obama’s executive action “right away,” which is sort of true. What Jeb said is that he’d rescind the amnesty as part of a deal with Congress on immigration. That won’t happen on day one of his presidency, so yeah, technically O’s order would remain intact for at least a few months while President Bush works out the details of the new bill with the House and Senate. But focusing on the timing misses the point of what Jeb’s implying: If Republicans in Congress refuse...

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush believes he can convince conservative primary voters that illegal immigrants should be “punished”–by being granted a path to amnesty. In an interview from Liberty University that aired Monday on Fox News, host Megyn Kelly told him, “you know that there’s a core wing of the party for whom this will be a deal breaker.” Bush replied, “I don’t know that.” “I’ve been traveling over the last three months. I get a sense that a lot of people can be persuaded, to be honest with you,” he said. Polls, though, have shown conservatives in early primary...

MIAMI – Union leader Dolores Huerta prefers a woman in the White House in 2016, saying that “there’s a lot at stake for Latinos” if one of the current Republican hopefuls wins the election, even if he has “a Latino name or speaks Spanish.” The tireless 85-year-old activist said in an interview with Efe that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) “took two steps back” when he could have used his “influence to pass immigration reform” in 2013. “Some of those candidates who are Latinos in reality don’t represent the values of the Latino community, who for the most part are working...

The former governor of Florida, John (or as he prefers to be called, Juan) Ellis Bush, doesn't appear to have a lot of support among Republicans, as opposed to Republicans in Name Only (RINOs), who absolutely adore him. But Juan isn't sweating it. He's rolling in dough, and more importantly, he's rolling in opponents. Have you ever heard of a "straw" candidate? When you have a weak front-runner that can't reach 50 percent, often a third, or a fourth, or even a fifth candidate suddenly jumps into the race. If he has a name similar to that of the strongest...

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush rejects the popular notion that his support for a path to legal status for some undocumented immigrants is a surefire way to doom his shot at being the GOP presidential nominee. In an extensive interview with Fox News host Megyn Kelly that is scheduled to air Monday night, Bush – who has strongly suggested he is moving toward announcing a run for the White House, but has yet to do so – said he believes that undocumented immigrants brought to the country as minors should be able to legalize their status.

Jeb Bush said in an interview that he would not immediately move to repeal President Obama’s executive order on immigration — suggesting he would instead wait for a new law to be passed addressing the matter. In an interview with Megyn Kelly that is to be shown Monday night on Fox News, Mr. Bush said that rather than overturning the order, he believed in “passing meaningful reform of immigration and make it part of it.” The president’s executive order seeks to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. Most presidential candidates in the Republican field either oppose Mr. Obama’s order...

Why Republican candidates are scrambling to court Jeff Duncan, a one-time Clemson benchwarmer and arguably the most right-wing member of the House. Welcome to the Jeff Duncan primary. The what? Exactly. If you’ve never heard of Rep. Jeff Duncan, you’re not alone. The former banker and auctioneer isn’t well known outside his conservative South Carolina district. But Republicans running for president know Duncan as a man who is quietly emerging as an unlikely yet crucial figure in the process to pick the Republican nominee for 2016. In South Carolina this past weekend, more than a dozen Republicans from across the...

Jeb Bush defends his stance on immigration in an interview that airs tonight on Fox News, contending that "a lot of people can be persuaded" to support a rewriting of laws that would allow for legal status. "I think illegal immigration ought to be punished by coming out from the shadows, earning legal status over an extended period of time where you pay a fine, where you work, where you don’t receive government assistance, where you learn English, where you don’t -- you know, you’re where deported if you commit a crime as is the law," Bush said in an...

Jeb Bush says that he would have authorized the 2003 war in Iraq — just like his brother did. “I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody,” the former Florida governor told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly Saturday after delivering the commencement address at Liberty University in Virginia. “And so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”

In a preview of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly that will be aired Monday night, Bush said, we need to “fix the system so that legal immigration is easier than illegal immigration and show some respect for people.”

Cecily Strong introduced each of the GOP presidential "hopefuls" with a series of all-too-accurate puns.The Southern Republican Leadership Conference looks way more fun when it happens on “Saturday Night Live.”“SNL” mocked the event in its cold open this week, playing up the gathering of GOP presidential hopefuls as “the hottest event of the year,” complete with dance numbers and a very punny DJ (Cecily Strong). Strong introduced each of the “candidates” with zingers that ranged from a little painful (did Mike Huckabee really turn Arkansas “from a red state to a shred state”?) to, well, funny — and rather accurate....

Washington (CNN)Jeb Bush says he thinks he can sell the Republican base on his position on immigration -- and he's hitting opponents who have changed their positions on the issue. "I get a sense that a lot of people can be persuaded, to be honest with you," the former Florida governor told Fox News in a preview of his interview with host Megyn Kelly that aired Sunday. Bush has urged a respectful tone toward undocumented immigrants and has said it should be easier for those immigrants to gain legal status. RELATED: Hillary Clinton calls for 'path to full and equal...

The GOP presidential primary is on course to be flooded with super PAC money. But in 2016, candidates will need more than a little dough to win over voters.The GOP could have a dozen deep-pocketed presidential contenders, and they'll all learn next year that when it comes to actual votes, that extra money doesn't buy what it used to. Already, super PACs are arming second- and third-tier candidates with tens of millions of dollars while the supposed GOP front-runner, Jeb Bush, promises a record-setting haul. This combined fundraising guarantees that by the time Republicans have picked their nominee in summer...

Greenville, S.C. — Governor Scott Walker’s appearance at the South Carolina Freedom Summit wasn’t quite a series of standing ovations interrupted by his speech, but it was close. “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” an an attendee shouted over the applause as the Wisconsin governor walked on stage. Walker pointed at the man and repeated the word as he began his speech in praise of the military. It was a fitting opening for Walker, who rooted his policy statements in his middle-class background and alluded to his family throughout the speech — as if he planned to convince votes that he is the...

It's early in the process, but Spanish-language U.S. media is seeing former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, as one of their own. Bush is a fluent Spanish speaker and married to a Mexican, leading some Spanish-language media outlets to identify him as a "Latino" candidate, even though he's very much white. In late April, Telemundo ran an Associated Press article translated to Spanish and said Bush can "express himself in English and Spanish in declarations that [highlight] his deep ties with the Hispanic culture." Because Bush is an outspoken supporter of immigration reform...