Free Republic

Rank your recommended "List of 21" nominees for any future Trump SCOTUS nominations! (Obviously we are recommending "in the abstract," i.e., without knowing what the current political weather will be when a vacancy arises. If another "Access: Hollywood" recording comes out, Trump will be hard-pressed to pick a woman, etc.) My considerations, in order of importance, are: 1. Clearly constitutionalist. If we blow it on this point, the rest doesn't matter. Never forget that Brennan, Warren, Blackmun and Souter were all REPUBLICAN nominees. 2. Sufficiently non-controversial, so that we don't lose squish GOP Senators like Collins and Murkowski. (This will...

[sub-head: Jeff Roe, Ted Cruz’s campaign manager, tells 'Off Message' that Trump’s allergy to analytics could be fatal.] Math beats mouth. Donald Trump plans to defeat Hillary Clinton through blustery force of will and word — but the architect of Ted Cruz’s efficient, numbers-focused campaign thinks Trump is making a huge mistake by burning the modern electoral playbook. Jeff Roe, a burly and self-deprecating 43-year-old former baseball umpire and onetime howitzer-crew hand, estimates that the presumptive Republican nominee is costing himself from 2.5 to 5.5 percentage points nationally by refusing to invest more time, energy and cash in data, analytics...

Previously there were possible real-world scenarios which justified the continuing anti-Trump position: 1. A dark horse white knight makes an 11th hour entry and runs third party. This is now virtually impossible, and soon will be entirely impossible. By the way, the application to get on the ballot in Texas has already passed -- so, um, good luck with this one. 2. Trump would prove so toxic in the polls that it would cause the party to do whatever was necessary to install a new candidate, even at the expense of blowing up the party to do it. I thought...

Who, with the benefit of hindsight, were your preferences for the GOP nomination, in order? And if you feel like adding it, whom did you #1 prefer in 2008 and 2012?

You could see it scattered across multiple headlines by Sunday night. Trump LOSES weekend delegate fight in five states! To read these ledes and the twitter feeds of the #NeverTrump crowd you’d have thought there were nearly a half dozen elections you somehow slept through and Trump had been trounced in all of them. The reality, of course, is that there weren’t any public elections and the only time Trump was actually beaten anywhere in recent memory was in Wisconsin. But what Trump was losing at was the race to collect delegates who are loyal to him and will...

Circle this date on your calendar: April 22. I’ll be in Chicago that day attending what may be a very significant milestone in American politics and domestic policy. It’s going to be a wake and a wake-up call, part memorial and part protest.If you are a so-called American “STEM worker” in science, technology, engineering or math, if you have college-age children studying in the STEM fields, or if you have younger children who aspire to work in STEM industries and you are concerned for their future, you should do everything you can to join us.April 22 is the last day...

Miami — “I loved watching Michael Jordan play basketball, because he could do things with the basketball that were not teachable,” Whit Ayres, a highly regarded Republican pollster, said in between sips of coffee in a downtown D.C. hotel conference room. “Marco Rubio is the Michael Jordan of American politics.” It was March 31, 2015, just 13 days before Rubio, long considered the GOP’s brightest star, would launch his campaign at the Freedom Tower here in his hometown. Ayres, Rubio’s polling guru, had written a book with detailed, data-driven prescriptions for Republicans to take back the White House in 2016....

Although I'm (stupidly) still not a gun owner, I would like to join a pro-2A lobby to preserve my right to BECOME one. But which one to join? The largest is the NRA, but they endorse sh**s like Harry Reid. Suggestions?

My wife and I are considering "making the leap" by dumping our land line phone. We'd effectively still have a hard-wired connection, to a point, namely our U-verse internet connection -- although that largely becomes wireless INSIDE the house. We are sufficiently confident in the connection that it would work in a medical or other emergency. Also, we have gotten so many spam land-line calls in recent years, despite being on the DNC list, that our landline is largely useless anyway. Thoughts?

Texas’s Ted Cruz has come a long way in his quest to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison in the United States Senate. He has spent the better part of the last year slowly closing the polling gap with his principal rival, the better-known lieutenant governor David Dewhurst, to the point that a runoff between the two now seems the likeliest of outcomes in the May 29 primary. But finishing a strong second isn’t an outcome worthy of an articulate, principled conservative such as Cruz. He can and should win a runoff with Dewhurst, become the Republican nominee, and be elected the...

Libertarians and free-market advocates have a particular attachment to the concept of federalism. If states can differentiate themselves on the basis of taxes, spending, and regulation, or even social policies, that gives Americans more leeway in deciding the rules under which we live. If we’re dissatisfied with the policies of the state we live in, we can register our discontent by voting with our feet and moving to another jurisdiction. In theory, this competition for residents helps keep lawmakers in check, giving them an incentive to keep taxes and other intrusions modest. While this is great as a concept, that’s...

Ann Coulter has been a Romney supporter for a long time, and she's a brawler; it's no surprise that she would come away from the SC primary swinging. What's unexpected is who she's targeting. Instead of diligently investigating why Newt won, she has turned her acerbic tongue loose on the electorate instead. The very next morning after the primary, she suggested that republicans have become 'the mob' on Fox News, and has implied there and elsewhere that voters are stupid for backing Gingrich just because he can deliver an insult to the MBM. Along with a host of other sarcastic...

He should have delayed a month, or a month and a half. Was it the decision to schedule back surgery on July 1, putting Perry’s physical recovery on a collision course with a grueling schedule of fundraisers and campaign events? Was it the failure to prepare better for debates that soon turned disastrous? Was it simply a matter of getting in the race too late? Perry’s own string of verbal goofs, probably some of the worst in modern American political history, were so crippling that it is questionable whether any paid professionals could have pulled him out of the ditch....

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro has spoken out against US President Barack Obama, claiming that a "robot" would do a better job in the White House, AFP reported Monday. "Is it not obvious that the worst of all is the absence in the White House of a robot capable of governing the United States and preventing a war that would end the life of our species?" Castro wrote, according to AFP. {snip}

"I hope he stays in." said Rush Limbaugh today on his radio show, after acknowledging that there was some confusion about whether Rick Perry had decided to stay in the race for president or not.{Snip}

It is time for Republicans to get serious. After flirting with just about every candidate in a large presidential field, is is time to come home to the one candidate who has the demonstrated ability to run the largest organization in the United States, the Executive Branch of the federal government; who has never been touched by the slightest taint of scandal; whose success in the private sector makes him the outsider that Republicans say they are looking for; and who has by far the best chance of beating President Obama: Mitt Romney.{Snip}

Leftists ROUTINELY spout that their use of the tasteless term "Teabaggers" for tea party folks is excused because "they called themselves that first, before they found out the term's sexual implications," or the like. I need debunking of this, please! I once saw a conservative blog post that had done so. Specifically, that post "fisked" a lefty explanation. The explanation boiled down to ONE SIGN at ONE tea party rally, saying, "TEA BAG THE DEMS BEFORE THEY TEA BAG YOU." That's it. (And even THAT sign isn't truly calling the tea party "teabaggers." It's saying to strike pre-emptively, or something.)

The climate fascists are getting restless...Emerging battle-bruised from the disaster zone of Copenhagen, but ever-hopeful, a rider on horseback brought news of darkness and light: "The politicians have failed. Now it's up to us. We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. Until our laws do that, screw being climate lobbyists. Screw being climate activists. It's not working. We need an army of climate outlaws." The proper channels have failed. It's time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism....

Not only does Mitt Romney possess an air of real-world know-how, he also has mucho smarts. I've been a reluctant apologist for him for years now. [snip] Yet, notwithstanding his many attributes and my own nagging man-crush, it has become evident that Romney's is a hopeless quest for the presidency. It is possible to see — if one dares to dream — some authentic fiscal conservative emerging to take a shot at the presidency in 2012. While Romney has the required drive, intellect and temperament, he is wrong on the fundamental ideological question of this time: health care. In fact,...

On Monday's O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, NPR news analyst Juan Williams furthered the left's talking point about the tea party's supposed connection to militias, and even went so far to claim that the Gadsden or "Don't Tread on Me" flags used by the conservative grassroots movement is "the same imagery that was on Timothy McVeigh" . . . [snip]