Free Republic

...“Donald Trump beat Sen. Ted Cruz earlier this month in Louisiana’s Republican presidential primary by 3.6 percentage points, but the Texan may wind up with as many as 10 more delegates from the state than the businessman,” WSJ reported. In Louisiana, Cruz and Trump each won 18 delegates. However, Cruz may now be able to gain 10 more delegates because there are five unbound delegates who can vote for whichever candidate they want. Additionally, five delegates are now up for grabs after Sen. Marco Rubio left the race. Louisiana also released the names for delegates on the Rules Committee, Credentials...

Last week an anti-Trump political action committee not tied to any candidate issued a Facebook ad it said was targeted at Mormon voters in Utah. The ad used one of Melania Trump’s many professional nude modeling pictures, over which was written “Meet Melania Trump. Your next First Lady. Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.” Trump was a model in her career prior to marrying businessman Donald Trump. She is his third wife thus far. This independent group is called “Make America Awesome” and is led by consultant Liz Mair. Ted Cruz was on track to win Utah by...

Now how could this be? How could Sean Hannity have gotten it so wrong? >>>Earlier I said a pro-Cruz PAC pushed the Melania ad. Incorrect, the group has no affiliation with Cruz & as I said, Cruz condemned it<<< Twitter source

When "polar vortex," "below zero" and "rapid weather change" have become integrated into the vocabulary of every Chicagoan, it's snow wonder why: In 2015, the Chicago region saw its first population decline in more than two decades, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released Thursday. The Windy City's drop-off also was higher than any metropolitan area in the U.S. People are giving Chicago and Illinois the cold shoulder and migrating to states such as Florida, Arizona and Nevada, where they can enjoy warmer and much less moody climates. Can you blame them? Imagine lying poolside in the sunshine and not...

A pair of new polls are showing good news for presidential hopeful Ted Cruz. In a new Fox News poll of 388 likely GOP primary voters, frontrunner Donald Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz are now in a statistical dead heat nationally. The poll shows Trump and Cruz polling at 41%-38% respectively, a slight edge for the real estate mogul, but within the poll's +/- 5 point margin of error. Governor John Kasich is running in third place with 17%. A second poll, this one from Emerson College, is spelling good news for Ted Cruz in the April 5th, winner-take-all...

If you like John Kasich, it's time to celebrate! The Ohio governor finally won a primary – his home state’s. Of course, he flopped in last week's other contests, ending the evening with almost two dozen fewer delegates than Sen. Marco Rubio, who exited the GOP race. Kasich’s campaign has bordered on the bizarre. He has survived for two reasons: First, he has refused to get out, no matter how badly he has done. And second, he has been so irrelevant that nobody attacked him, leaving him generally unscathed in a race where there is plenty of blood on the...

Jeb Bush early Wednesday endorsed Ted Cruz’s Republican presidential bid, calling the Texas senator a “consistent, principled conservative.” Bush, who ended his own campaign last month, said Cruz has “has demonstrated the ability to appeal to voters and win primary contests.” “Washington is broken, and the only way Republicans can hope to win back the White House and put our nation on a better path is to support a nominee who can articulate how conservative policies will help people rise up and reach their full potential," the former Florida governor said. Bush called on Republicans to “overcome the divisiveness and...

This past June, American academia went into an uproar over Gov. Scott Walker’s new budget in Wisconsin,....Specifically,any professor in the system—tenured or not—could be dismissed or laid off by the 18-member Board of Regents using maddeningly vague criteria:“when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance,curtailment,modification or redirection.”This,when combined with the faculty’s diminished role in governing the university—and thus determining such things as which programs should continue, be curtailed, or get modified—basically meant that these regents—16 of whom were appointed by Walker—could fire anyone,at any time, for any reason.[SNIP]Professors do not want...

The mainstream media — that is, the liberal media — share all the views and characteristics of the Left. Among these is the Left’s view of truth. There are honest individuals with left-wing views and dishonest individuals on the right. But truth is not a leftist value. Everything the Left believes in is more important than truth — social justice, economic equality, reducing carbon emissions, expanding the power of the state, battling sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism, and above all of these, destroying its conservative opposition. The media’s coverage of President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme...

Washington, D.C. — It was billed as an attempt to win new supporters from the ranks of congressional Republicans. But after Donald Trump convened a handful of lawmakers and a number of party luminaries for lunch on Monday, the sole attendee not already backing Trump’s candidacy emerged as uncommitted as he’d gone in. Held in D.C.’s high-powered Jones Day law firm, the confab was supposed to be a congressional outreach effort, but only one attendee — Senator Tom Cotton — was neutral on Trump’s candidacy. The others — including Senator Jeff Sessions and Representatives Chris Collins, Scott DesJarlais, Renee Ellmers,...

Ted Cruz beats Hillary Clinton nationally in recent polls, though narrowly, and in state-by-state matchups performs better than the current front-runner for the Republican nomination. Predictably, Cruz wallops Clinton in Utah, a reliably Republican state. But — this is news — both Clinton and Sanders win there when they’re matched against Trump, according to a Deseret News/KSL poll conducted March 8–15. The best evidence we have here in March, as candidates fight for the nomination, is that Trump at the top of the ticket would remove Utah from the “solid Republican” column and put it and its six electoral votes...

On Friday night, Northern Iowa’s Paul Jesperson made a shot that nobody ever makes to send his team to the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Two days after the Panthers sunk that miracle buzzer-beater from half-court, Northern Iowa got sunk by the greatest-slash-most-horrifying comeback in the history of March Madness —and probably in the history of college basketball. The only consolation for the Panthers: The game was on truTV, so a total of eight people probably saw it happen. With 44.3 seconds to go in the second half, Northern Iowa’s Jeremy Morgan made two free throws to give the...

On April 14, 1852, Lloyd and Lodisa Frizzell and their four sons, with “five yoke of cattle one pony & sidesaddle” in tow, departed their home, on the Little Wabash River in southeastern Illinois, for California. Seventy-two days into their voyage, Lodisa would write in her journal (later titled Across the Plains to California in 1852): That this journey is tiresome, no one will doubt, that it is perilous, the deaths of many testify, and the heart has a thousand missgivings, & the mind is tortured with anxiety, & often as I passed the fresh made graves, I have glanced...

[SNIP]The argument against Cruz is that he’s obnoxious.His colleagues don’t like him,and exit polls show he doesn’t do nearly as well among moderate and somewhat conservative voters as he does among hardcore conservatives....That’s why,when my colleague Jamelle Bouie was betting on Cruz,I put my money on Rubio...I stand refuted.Cruz hasn’t overcome the Trump wave,but he has proved that in an angry party,his organization,discipline,and message can beat a broadly appealing rival.Republicans who vote for Trump in 2016,only to see him abandoned by elements of their party and defeated in the general election,would be at least as angry in 2020.The notion that...

Donald Trump and his fellow liberals Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are lambasting free trade as the scourge of the American working man. How odd it is that an economic activity so beneficial to almost every American, indeed to the vast majority of the human race, suffers such attacks with only half-hearted defenses raised by politicians who should know better and economists who do know better. I stipulate: in trade, as in any economic endeavor, there are losers in the short run. Capitalism is, after all, fundamentally a system of creative destruction. But if there is any area of agreement...

Herewith, an under-asked question for our friends on the progressive left: “Has Donald Trump’s remarkable rise done anything to change your mind as to the ideal strength of the State?” I make this inquiry because, for a long while now, I have been of the view that the only thing that is likely to join conservatives and progressives in condemnation of government excess is the prospect that that excess will benefit the Right. Along with their peculiar belief that History takes “sides” and that improvement is inexorable and foreordained, most progressives hold as an article of faith that, because it...

It's not impossible that Donald Trump finishes in third place in Ohio. The latest Ohio polls show a barn-burner between John Kasich and Trump, but they also show a distinctive Ted Cruz surge in the past 10 days. Snapshot Six pollsters have surveyed Ohio Republicans in March. RealClearPolitics averages the last four, and derives an average that shows Kasich up 35.3 percent, two points ahead of Trump. Ted Cruz's average over those four polls is 20 percent. Rubio is in single digits in all four polls and will finish fourth in Ohio. One of four polls (PPP) shows Trump leading....

National Review, one of the country’s leading conservative magazines, will endorse Ted Cruz on Friday in a blow to Marco Rubio after its top editors and publisher decided that the Texas senator is the only candidate left who can defeat Donald Trump, POLITICO has learned. “Ted’s the only one with a plausible path to stopping Trump,” National Review editor Rich Lowry told POLITICO, “either by getting a majority himself or denying Trump a majority and finishing close behind and getting it to convention.”

[snip]..Elian awoke to be spotted by two fishermen. He was brought safely to American shores, vindicating the sacrifice his mother made. She literally gave her life for him. He was free at last.Or so he hoped.Elian was taken in by relatives honoring his mother’s wishes. The story immediately made international headlines, and then Fidel descended, holding a staged press conference in Havana with Elian’s (divorced) father. Obviously not free to speak his mind, Elian’s dad demanded the child’s return.What would the Clinton administration do? What would President Bill Clinton, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Attorney General Janet Reno, do?As...

Republican lawmakers are warily eyeing the possibility of a brokered convention that could force party leaders to choose between Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and celebrity businessman Donald Trump for their presidential nominee. It is, they say, a very difficult choice. From their perspective, it’s picking between the devil they know and the devil they don’t know. Many GOP senators have declined to state their preferences publicly while the race remains competitive. Privately, they are flummoxed at the possibility of likely having to choose between two candidates they view as highly problematic. Lawmakers who spoke to The Hill on background say...