Free Republic

Philadelphia (CBS) – Chris Stigall criticized presidential candidates Ben Carson and Donald Trump for blaming Ted Cruz after rumors were spread by his supporters in the moments before the Iowa Caucus that Carson was dropping out and returning home to Florida.Stigall, on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, said this entire controversy is Carson’s fault for running such a poor campaign and making mistakes that can be exploited by his opponents.“These people are in perpetual, constant dog fights. On the mic, off the mic, on the camera, off the camera, on Twitter, they’re never off, they’re never off, they never go away....

Votes are stubborn little things. Votes have none of the sparkle and shine of campaign rhetoric. Votes don't soar; they sink in. Votes are precious to, and deeply felt by, the men and women who cast them, but the candidates stop catering to votes as soon as they're cast. Iowa is yesterday's news. When we look back where the tall corn grows, in the rear-view media mirror, we see Cinderella among the cinders. The postmortems on polling will embarrass some of the pollsters for a day or two, but they'll fall into the memory hole quickly. There's always next year....

The U.S. economy added 151,000 jobs in January, a slowdown from recent months but still a sign of a solid job market. Employers raised pay, more people felt confident enough to look for work and the unemployment rate dipped to 4.9 percent, its lowest level since 2008. Friday's report from the Labor Department showed that the job market remains a vital support for an economy that is struggling in areas such as manufacturing and is facing weakness overseas. It provides a key piece of evidence for the Federal Reserve, which is weighing whether to raise interest rates again after lifting...

After a four-year battle, undocumented immigrant activist, Cesar Vargas, was finally sworn in to practice law Wednesday at the Appellate Division, Second Department, courthouse in Brooklyn, "it was an amazing moment, It felt like the day was never going to come," Vargas said."I must admit, there were moments where I felt defeated; there were moments where I thought I was not going to be a lawyer." Vargas is the first undocumented immigrant to hold a law license in New York, he passed the bar exam in 2011 but was denied the right to practice because of his illegal immigration status."I...

he establishment media and Iowa Caucus losers Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio have been savaging Ted Cruz and his campaign team for the tactics that helped Senator Cruz win the Hawkeye State's first-in-the-nation election contest. But we think that Republicans, and especially conservatives, should celebrate the fact that they have a candidate and a campaign team in the race that are smart, technologically savvy, in the moment, right on the issues and ruthless enough to use every issue and advantage they can identify to win. First, let's knockdown the ludicrous charge by Donald Trump (repeated to our disappointment...

I don't know how the primaries will turn out in New Hampshire next week. But I was glad to see Republican voters in Iowa prick some of the air out of the Trump balloon Monday night and lift Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio to the top of the GOP heap. All Iowans didn't get caught up in the Trump celebrity or go goofy for the Trump plane. A lot of them looked at the Donald's political substance -- and realized he didn't have any. Not in politics, anyway. Going forward, however, conservatives still have the same problem they've had for...

Your Brain Has More Memory Than the Internet by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Whoever said the human brain is the most highly organized collection of matter in the universe was more correct than they could have known. New research modeled tiny structures within nerve cells and discovered a clever tactic brains use to increase computing power while maximizing energy efficiency. Its design could form the basis of a whole new and improved class of computer.

ABC News announced the lineup for Saturday's GOP presidential debate in Manchester late Thursday evening. Seven candidates will take the stage just three days before the New Hampshire primary. For Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina will not be one of them despite beating rivals John Kasich and Chris Christie in the Iowa caucus. She's also beating Dr. Ben Carson in New Hampshire polling.  .@ABC reveals Republican candidates participating in Saturday's #GOPDebate https://t.co/phaAPdGLAh pic.twitter.com/VHuGgmlBd4— ABCNews PR (@ABCNewsPR) February 5, 2016 Fiorina is responding with accusations the "game is rigged." "I've been telling you the game is rigged. And here's even more...

Political pundits and Republican leaders like to say that nobody could have foreseen the extraordinary rise of Donald J. Trump’s presidential candidacy. But there were early signs that the electorate was ready for an insurgency like the one Mr. Trump has inspired this election. And some of the most powerful of those indicators came from New Hampshire. In 2014, Scott Brown, a Republican and former Massachusetts senator who was running for a Senate seat in New Hampshire, aired an ad that seemed a curious fit for the state: As ominous music played in the background, and scenes of southern border...

Dear Gov. Bush: There are many ways to express your love of country. One is to serve as president. In your case, that path seems closed. Since April, you spent the better part of $15 million in Iowa, yet you came sixth, winning just 2.8 percent of the vote and one delegate. At this rate, you'd need to spend $18,540,000,000 to win the nomination -- which is more than even Right to Rise can manage. There is no shame in losing, of course, and it's always possible that New Hampshire will shock the world by giving you a victory, but...

This has not been a good week for Hillary Clinton. She prevailed over Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses by less than four tenths of one percent of all votes cast, after having led him in polls in Iowa at one time by 40 percentage points. In her statement to supporters, standing in front of her gaunt and listless looking husband, she was not able to mouth the word "victory" or any of its standard variants. She could barely hide her contempt for the Iowa Democrats who disserted her. Sanders isn't even a Democrat. According to official...

Families in Germany are switching their children’s schools fearing that large amounts of migrants will ruin their child’s chance at a good education. According to a detailed report in Sueddeutsche, more and more German families are switching their child’s schooling because of the presence of more and more migrant children who often disrupt class and bully native Germans.

Imagine Hillary Clinton's relief, come Wednesday morning, when she no longer has to grovel before New Hampshire's famously prickly primary electorate. It means no credibility leapfrogging as in 2008 when, following a third-place humiliation in Iowa, she told a New Hampshire debate audience: "I'm running on 35 years of change." Or, on Thursday night in Durham, New Hampshire, with Clinton repeatedly invoking the Bin Laden raid - be it her hard work on behalf of President Obama -- or her hard work, post-Obama, on the speech circuit. About Thursday night's Democratic debate - the only time Hillary Clinton and Vermont...

"Daesh is in fact nothing more than a mixture of killers, of kidnappers, of criminals, of thugs, of adventurers, of smugglers and thieves," Kerry said. "And they are also above all apostates, people who have hijacked a great religion and lie about its real meaning and lie about its purpose and deceive people in order to fight for their purposes." The use of the word "apostates" - a term to describe someone who renounces or abandons their religion - has raised eyebrows among observers. The description has been commonly used by extremist groups: The Islamic State has justified its attacks...

Labor Department adds 'transgender status, gender identity' to workplace discrimination listThe Department of Labor is seeking to remove the terms "he" and "she" from a regulation prohibiting discrimination in the workforce in an effort to "avoid the gender binary." The agency is also adding "sex stereotyping, transgender status, and gender identity" to the list of types of employment discrimination banned under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. If adopted, the regulation would cost job training centers millions of dollars to change their equal employment opportunity posters to include "gender identity."

There is a misplaced fear -- shared, I'm sad to say, by many on the right -- that Christian conservatives are zealots, theocrats and all-around bogeymen. Ever since the advent of the moral majority during the Reagan years, establishment Republicans have been leery and sometimes contemptuous of them. They resent having to deal with this block of "crazies," who always muck up the right-wing coalition with their annoying Jesus talk and their injection of social issues into the mix. If they'd just quit talking about abortion and same-sex marriage we could take this country by storm. Instead we hand the...

A Midway businessman is facing charges under Utah's commercial terrorism statute after investigators say he took scores of free tourism brochures out of stands owned by a competitor and replaced them with his own brochures. Scott Jay Eckersley is charged in 4th District Court with four counts of commercial obstruction, a second-degree felony. Wasatch County prosecutor Mckay King said the charges are appropriate, based on the allegations against Eckersley. Over the past year, Eckersley went to the Zermatt Resort & Spa in Midway four times and "totally cleaned out" a competitor's display of free tourism brochures, according to Wasatch County...

"The Republican Obama." That's the new hot attack on Sen. Marco Rubio. Ted Cruz leveled the epithet at Rubio just days before the Iowa caucuses, which is a little ironic since Cruz has been called the same thing in the past. But the leader of the opposition to Rubio, at least when it comes to this line, is actually someone not in the race: Joe Scarborough, the normally affable host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Contrary to all evidence, Scarborough has denied he has an unhealthy obsession with his fellow Floridian. But given Scarborough's near-relentless denigration of Rubio, objective viewers might...

Markeece Young is a nationally recognized political blogger and activist. As a former Democrat he now dedicates his time to reaching minority and millennials voters to the right...

On February 4, Chicago Police Department officers discovered five adults and one child stabbed to death in a home in Chicago's Gage Park. Police found the bodies around 1:05 PM Thursday. According to the Chicago Tribune, the CPD sent officers to investigate after someone called police to say a "co-worker had not shown up for work Wednesday or Thursday." When officers arrived to check on the missing co-worker, they looked through a window and saw "what they believed to be a body" inside the house. Upon entering the house, they found five adults and "a child 11 or 12 years...