Free Republic

In the last few days we’ve entered into a new phase in the campaign: Paul Manafort, the designated grownup in the Trump palace, has embarked on persuading Donald Trump to stop his degrading Twitter rants, and on persuading the RNC to learn to love its new, likely, master. “That’s what’s important for you to understand,” Manafort told the RNC. “That he gets it, and that the part he’s playing is evolving.” Seen in this light, it is not clear that Trump’s decision to disappoint the pro-life movement by abandoning the strong party-platform language that pro-life advocates have worked for years...

Longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly has asked her daughter and five others to resign from the board of Eagle Forum after tension spread through the group over Schlafly’s endorsement of Donald Trump.Schlafly asked board members Eunie Smith, Carolyn McLarty, Anne Cori, Rosina Kovar, Shirley Curry, and Cathie Adams to step down in an April 10 letter. Cori is Schafly’s daughter. All but Curry have endorsed Ted Cruz in the Republican presidential primary.In March, Schlafly endorsed Trump. She said, “we’ve been following the losers for so long — now we’ve got a guy who’s going to lead us to victory.”One of the members that Schlafly is...

The Cruz campaign has gone on record supporting women getting abortions. The campaign says there should be no punishment for those women if abortion is illegal. Deadline Hollywood reports: Ted Cruz campaign chairman Chad Sweet...this afternoon told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Cruz believes in punishment for doctors who perform abortions, not the women who get them. Pro-life supporters are scratching their heads. If they succeed in getting a pro-life amendment, Ted Cruz appears to be saying that the amendment should contain some kind of non-culpability clause, so that Congress can write any law resulting from a Life Amendment in a...

Over the past 28 years there has been a sea change in the media. Not only has the monopoly of the so-called mainstream media been shattered but the phenomenal rise of conservative media has been truly stunning. It began in 1988 with the national syndication of Rush Limbaugh and his distinctive brand of conservative political commentary espoused in an entertaining and captivating way, which opened the flood gates for other conservatives, together with Rush, to dominate the talk radio airwaves. In the 1990’s the internet, through hundreds of websites, gave voice to journalists to report stories either ignored or downplayed...

GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz tells The Brody File that the reason Donald Trump is performing well in the GOP race for president is because his voters are uninformed and not engaged in the process. “Donald does well with voters who have relatively low information, who are not that engaged and who are angry and they see him as an angry voice. Where we are beating him is when voters’ get more engaged and they get more informed.” Hunch: I’m thinking Trump and his “Silent Majority” may push back on this just a bit don’t you think? Lots to unpack...

That's the provocative thesis advanced by David Bernstein in a new piece for Politico Magazine: If Trump wins the GOP nomination, he will be testing the limits of a strategy that has long haunted the Republican Party. Since the civil rights era, the Republicans have relied heavily upon white male voters in order to overcome a disadvantage among minorities and some subsets of women. Mathematically, that was an easier strategy a half-century ago, when white men dominated the electorate. But as the GOP failed to broaden its coalition and the demographics of America have shifted dramatically, an ever-greater percentage of...

That sound you hear is the noise made by the Republican Party establishment crashing and burning. The only remaining question for them is how far they will go to blow up what remains.The GOP, as it has been known for decades, is no more. The cadres of white, upper-crust, East Coast establishmentarians has been elbowed aside by the upstarts Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. And nothing they can do from here on out will change that.They have no viable candidate. They have no agenda to speak of. Their rationale for being has been smashed. All they have left is to...

Minneapolis — Jesse Ventura told The Daily Beast he will run for president if Bernie Sanders does not win the Democratic nomination. Ventura was elected the governor of Minnesota as an independent in 1998 after serving as a Navy SEAL and professional wrestler. Ventura said his campaign was so successful at showing an outsider could be elected that Trump and Sanders are “ripping him off.” He bets he can do it again if Sanders loses and the election is Hillary Clinton vs. Trump. “They’re setting the groundwork for me because if Bernie loses, by the time we get to June,...

Remember when Barack Obama promised the world in 2008, only to leave some enthusiasts bereft after he failed to close Guantanamo, much less slow the rise of the oceans? If we elect a President Donald Trump, you ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to disillusionment. Imagine the fury among his supporters when their outsized hero is exposed as a huckster who cashes the check as soon as the car is off the lot. The brash billionaire has sold I-can-fix-it-just-you-watch pledges to millions of voters enraged about a steady stream of hollow political promises. To them, Trump towers as the...

Emboldened by her South Carolina landslide, Hillary Clinton is shifting her focus to Republican front-runner Donald Trump as her party seeks consensus on the best ways to challenge the billionaire’s unpredictable nature in a general election. Among the likely options: Questioning Trump's qualifications and temperament to be president, scrutinizing his business practices and bankruptcy filings, and re-airing his inflammatory statements about women and minorities who will be central to the Democrats' efforts in November.

Now that Donald Trump has won three primaries by convincing margins, there are at least some cracks in the wall of opposition to his candidacy within some segments of the Republican Party establishment. As Trump racks up delegates and makes it more difficult for the four remaining challengers to catch him in the race for delegates, some major GOP donors are questioning the purpose and efficacy of efforts to derail Trump’s candidacy. Bob Grand, managing partner of Barnes & Thornburg in Indianapolis, was a financial supporter and bundler for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. He hasn’t yet decided if he’s...

My old friends Mitch Daniels and Grover Norquist are at each other's throats these days over Mitch's decision to raise taxes on his fellow Hoosiers within days of being sworn in as governor. Grover is, of course, the nation's chief advocate of "the pledge," which commits those who take it to forswear support of any tax increase. Its existence and Grover's aggressiveness in encouraging politicians to take it have had a salutary influence on campaigns, elections and the performance of those who have signed it once they take office. To sign Grover's pledge and then break it is very difficult...

The conservative-libertarian marriage is on the rocks. So says the Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, who sees a “conservative crack-up” afoot. Ryan Sager agrees. Jonah Goldberg of National Review says there will be no crack-up, but doesn’t deny there is marital strife. The relationship between conservatives and libertarians has always been troubled, he argues. Too often, though, the idea of a conservative-libertarian divorce reads like an ultimatum from libertarians, who occasionally express so much frustration at conservative apostasy they threaten to walk away. If we’re going to follow the marriage analogy to its grisly end, this dynamic is akin to a mouthy,...

"If we were not so used to it, we would find it odd for the government to collect money from young workers and give it to the old (mostly workers' parents)." -- Robert Barro The headline that Business Week put on Robert Barro's column quoted above was "Why Private Accounts are Bad Public Policy." And the headline that the Washington Post put on a story that referred to Barro and others was Conservatives Splitting on Social Security. Is that the real story? I would describe Social Security as a program with a dubious economic rationale and very large costs. As...

HERE WE GO again. Suddenly, conservatives, libertarians and other souls of a rightish bent are pondering whether a “conservative crack-up” is nigh. In their book, “The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America,” John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge offered some insight into what could stop the conservatives from prospering: if they became “too Southern, too greedy and too contradictory.” Libertarian law professor and influential blogger Glenn Reynolds says the conservatives are “aiming for two out of three” of these opportunities to yank defeat from the jaws of success. Elsewhere, the New York Post’s Ryan Sager, another libertarian, laments that the Republican...

Here we go again. Suddenly, conservatives, libertarians and other souls of a rightish bent are pondering whether a "conservative crack-up" is nigh. In their book, "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America," John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge offered some insight into what could stop the conservatives from prospering: if they became "too Southern, too greedy and too contradictory." Libertarian law professor and influential blogger Glenn Reynolds says the conservatives are "aiming for two out of three" of these opportunities to yank defeat from the jaws of success. (Reynolds, a Southerner, isn't too worried about the third.) Elsewhere, the New York...