Free Republic

I’m not concerned about Sen. Ted Cruz running for the presidency. His extremist views doom his chances and predestine his failure, but will provide some needed amusement and head-scratching peculiarities necessary to punctuate the merciless bore of an endless presidential campaign. Surrounded by a massive infestation of indoctrinated followers, he preceded his announcement with a paint-drying, self-aggrandizing preamble trying to the patience of all but his most ardent acolytes. Even its earnest pomp and magnificent solemnity were threatening glazed eyes to crust over and anesthetized enthusiasm to reach for that relieve only found in liberating slumber. Oh, I could tell,...

LET’S SEE, why does this sound familiar? A charismatic constitutional scholar, with an inspiring life story, still in his first Senate term, promising a dramatic change of direction . . . . But wait: it’s 2015, and the candidate, officially as of Monday, is Sen. Ted Cruz. Here’s one way to tell Mr. Cruz (R-Tex.) from the winning constitutional scholar of 2008: Sen. Barack Obama promised to unite the country. Mr. Cruz — not so much. In fact, the most notable characteristic of Mr. Cruz’s brief time in elected politics has been his aversion to values that are essential to democracy’s functioning: practicality, modesty...

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Sunday brushed off the idea that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) would intrude on his turf among conservative Christian voters. "My base is really beyond just evangelicals," Huckabee said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "I think the untold secret is a lot of the support that I have, and that I anticipate I will have, is from the working-class, blue-collar people who grew up a lot like I did – not blue-blood, but blue-collar," Huckabee said. He acknowledged that evangelical voters played a major role in his 2008 presidential campaign. Cruz, the first major Republican...

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said the United States should not be attempting to tell Israel how to negotiate peace with the Palestinians, and he wouldn’t do so if elected president. “Israel is a sovereign nation, and I trust the leaders of Israel to determine whether they want to adopt a one-state solution or a two-state solution,” Cruz said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The Obama administration has “demonstrated an arrogance that America’s going to dictate the terms of security in Israel. It’s not our place to do it,” Cruz said. …

Voters are more concerned with finding a candidate to restore their personal economic outlook than they are with how conservative the Republican Party is, expected GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee told Face the Nation on Sunday. Huckabee told host Bob Schieffer he knows there will be a “big brouhaha” over which Republican candidate will be most conservative, but added, “there really isn’t an outright liberal in the whole bunch.” There may be degrees of conservatism from policy to policy, he said, but, “compared to the current administration, all of us are conservative.” Huckabee said voters don’t care about the horizontal...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be the perfect feminist hero. In theory, she fits the role on multiple levels: She’s an escapee from an abusive patriarchy. She’s an African immigrant who made her own way in a Western country, the Netherlands. She’s a fierce advocate for women’s rights. She’s a target for deadly violence by angry men who want to shut her up. She left her religion and became a scourge of its repressive practices. Except for the blemish on her record: Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a dissident from the wrong religion. Raised a Muslim in Somalia, subjected to genital mutilation...

And unless there are any changes, this is the order. Iowa, New Hampshire,Colorado,Minnesota,New York,Utah.Then from Feb.6 thru Feb.23,we have Nevada,South Carolina,North Carolina and Michigan on the 23rd. Obviously the odds of Bush even winding up in the top three are about the same as the odds of Joe Biden taking the Democrat Nomination in 2016. The far left media will probably keep Bush in the top three with their "Left Leaning Polls". Should be interesting to watch their reactions when Jeb wont even make the top four in Iowa.

Glenn Beck wants listeners to pray for him. Mark Levin says Fox News is out to get him. Hugh Hewitt calls him an “intellectual leader.” Rush Limbaugh thinks his campaign launch was “masterful.” Laura Ingraham hails him as “Reaganesque.” Erick Erickson considers him a “good friend.” Ted Cruz may be trailing in the polls and strapped for cash, but the first declared candidate of the 2016 race is winning in at least one key contest — the conservative talk-show primary. Tens of millions of listeners — and potential GOP primary voters — tune in each week to the biggest right-wing...

If establishment pundits can’t deny a Republican’s intelligence, then they have to claim his intelligence is a problem. The other day, NPR’s Robert Siegel assembled his usual suspects from the New York Times, Washington Post and Brookings Institution to provide a “balanced” review of the week in politics, including the latest from Ted Cruz. These two short sentences provide a perfect example of the uphill climb Cruz and any Republican has ahead: DAVID BROOKS of the NY Times: “My problem with Cruz is that he’s very, very smart – he’s going to Wall Street these days and impressing people with...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)If Fox News tries to sell Ted Cruz as the conservative Barack Obama, are they damning him or helping him? There are so many laugh-out-loud moments in this clip it's hard to know where to begin. Dorothy Rabinowitz hails Cruz as a magnificent orator, hard-liner on foreign policy, and one who can inspire the conservative base to action. But overall, this is an on-air attempt to damn Cruz with faint praise, just as they did in an editorial earlier this week. It's clear both from the WSJ editorial and Peggy Noonan's pile-on the next day that Cruz is hardly their...

Link only: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/jeb-bush-ted-cruz-poll/2015/03/29/id/635137/#ixzz3VncIuLew

The Texas Republican's devotion to principle – or an unyielding insistence on getting his way – could propel him to the front ranks of Republican contenders for president or render him unelectable.Ted Cruz looked out over a sprawling audience of Iowa farmers and agri-business leaders, people who rely on federal subsidies of ethanol, and the man who would be president stuck it to them. “I know you’d like me to say I’m for the renewable fuel standard” – that’s the subsidy of their product – “that’d be the easy thing to do,” he said. “But I’m going to tell you...

Scott Walker and Jeb Bush were bound to collide sooner or later. It turned out to be sooner. As the son of a Baptist minister, and the son of the 41st president of the United States, these two were destined to be the odd couple of the 2016 election. Walker is running against the establishment and the Washington elites. Bush embodies both. Walker will need at least $100 million to compete in the GOP primary, and more if he makes it to the general. Most of the Republican donors who write those kinds of checks are on Bush’s speed dial....

Chuck Schumer is set to get a big promotion -- and that's welcome news to Wall Street. The veteran Democratic senator from New York is widely expected to take Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's job when he retires at the end of 2016. Reid, who announced he would not be running for reelection Friday morning, quickly endorsed his New York colleague for the role. Schumer's ascension to the top Democratic position in the Senate -- and even possibly to Senate majority leader if his party regains control of the chamber -- is a boon for the finance and business communities,...

Opponents of the Second Amendment and haters of self-defense are facing a relentless barrage of pro-Second Amendment and pro-self-defense legislation in state legislatures across the country. It is as if the GOP took a page out of the Democrats’ book–improved, then applied it–so that just as the Democrats flooded legislatures with gun control measures in early 2013, Republicans are now flooding legislatures with bills broadening the exercise of Second Amendment rights and protecting the use of firearms for self-defense.

As President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry close in on a nuclear deal with Iran, it's worth remembering that the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation received money from "a front for the government of Iran" called the Alavi Foundation. The front gave the Clintons $30,000 between April 2005 and March 2006, according to tax forms. This occurred years after law enforcement officials tied the group to Iranian radicals. “The center is funded by the New York-based Alavi Foundation, which law enforcement officials say is closely tied to the mullahs who dominate Iran,” the Washington Post reported...

Thanks to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, it's becoming even clearer that immigration is the banana peel of 2016 Republican presidential politics. Just ask Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. He stepped up as a Senate leader on immigration only to slip and fall in a tea party ruckus over the issue. In a moment of candor, Rubio remembered the months of trying to get back up as "a real trial for me." Now it's oops for Walker. In 2013, Walker said it "makes sense" to offer a way to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally. Early this month, however, he said...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.azcentral.com/story/azdc/2015/03/29/ted-cruz-no-barry-goldwater-john-mccain-jeff-flake-say/70579530/

Ted Cruz is the candidate most likely to take our country from where it's arrived under the leadership of President Obama to where it should be - in the hands of "We the People." His authenticity and consistency are just two of the advantages he has over the rest of the field-in-waiting. He says what he means, he means what he says, and Washington knows it. Expectedly, the knives are out against Sen. Cruz, and they're coming from both sides of the aisle. There's no doubt in my mind however, many of those knives will be dulled once the presidential...

John Zogby, founder of the Zogby Poll and the Zogby companies, is an internationally renowned pollster, author and political pundit. He spoke to the Trib regarding U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas becoming the first Republican candidate to officially announce a 2016 presidential bid. Q: Does Cruz benefit at all by being the first GOP candidate to be formally out of the gate? A: I don't think so, but it doesn't hurt him, either. He got the news cycle on a slow news day, so he took advantage of that and he got the announcement in his hometown newspaper first,...