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New Trier High School, one of the country's top public schools, is forcing students to attend seminars on racial identity on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. "The goals for this day are to help New Trier students develop a deeper understanding of their own racial identities and the identities of others, and to better understand how we can all work to counter the impact of systemic racism in our lives," reads a statement on the school district's website. Attendance is mandatory, though other public institutions in New Trier Township will be closed in observance of the holiday.

But some have still wondered if Trump can be considered a “natural born citizen” as the Constitution requires since his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, was born in Stornoway, Scotland, thus giving her British citizenship at her birth in 1912. Donald’s father, real-estate mogul Frederick Christ Trump, was an American by birth in New York City in 1905. Columnist Ben Smith at Politico jokingly wrote, “Trump’s mother, it should be noted, was born in Scotland, which is not part of the United States. His plane is registered in the Bahamas, also a foreign country. This fact pattern – along with...

Ryan Duffin was a freshman at the University of Virginia when he met a student named Jackie. Both teenagers were new to campus in September 2012, and the pair quickly became friends through a shared appreciation of alternative rock bands such as Coheed and Cambria and Silversun Pickups. Early on, Duffin sensed that Jackie was interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with him. Duffin valued her friendship but politely rebuffed Jackie’s advances for more. Just days after he met her, Duffin said, he was goaded into a text message conversation with a U-Va. junior named “Haven Monahan,” whom Jackie said...

The establishment hasn't been in a position to impose a candidate on the party on a long time. But if it coalesces around a standard-bearer, it gives him the tools -- chiefly money and endorsements -- to persuade enough of the Republican electorate to nominate him. *snip* This time the establishment, at least a large complement of its donors, picked Bush, who turned out not to have the strength to scare competitors out of the race or to maintain a dominant position in the race. Now the establishment is at sea, dazed and confused by the rise of Trump and...

Republican presidential candidate and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will skip President Obama's final State of the Union Address Tuesday night.While the other two Republican candidates currently in Congress, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio plan to attend Obama's address in the House chamber, Cruz' campaign staff told The Hill that Cruz will instead be on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, where he currently sits in fourth place in an average of New Hampshire Republican polling.Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is also scheduled to be in attendance for Obama's speech tonight.Although Cruz will not attend...

His divisive attacks hurt his cause As his sputtering presidential campaign remains on political life support, the typically polite and demure Jeb Bush is desperately lashing out at GOP frontrunner Donald Trump and others in the Republican field. During the campaign Bush has called Trump a “buffoon,” “clown,” “jerk,” “bully,” a “chaos candidate” with “crazy” ideas about foreign policy, and not “a serious candidate.” Establishment Republicans like Bush are savaging Trump with a ferocity they rarely deploy against Democrats. These increasingly vicious attacks are coming from the Bush family scion because this is his last chance in the 2016 primary...

CNN's Wolf Blitzer sat down with presidential candidate Donald Trump to discuss a wide range of topics from North Korea to Ted Cruz's citizenship.

I find it distracting to see those squiggles in a post. Usually, the ’ mark is the result of an apostrophe being inserted in the text. When you cut and paste from some articles, a different code (e.g., often Unicode) is used rather than ASCII code for the apostrophe. The †mark suffers the same fate, and is often associated with the "slight lean" that quote marks have in word processing documents. The fix is easy: when you preview your post, highlight the squiggle and replace it with the appropriate character as used in a Free Republic post. The squiggles...

Carly Fiorina says Donald Trump has no chance in the general election against Democrat Hillary Clinton. “Look, Donald Trump is controversial [and] Donald Trump is entertaining,” Fiorina said of her rival for the GOP’s presidential, in an interview with "Glamour" published Tuesday. “[But] Donald Trump is not a leader and I do not think Donald Trump will be our nominee. If he were, Hillary Clinton would wipe the floor with him.”

Like, oh, say . . . this one? It’s hard to get to the left of Barack Obama on immigration, but one thing I guess you’d have to say for Hillary Clinton is that she’s quite agile when it comes to policy positions. What difference, at this point, does it make if she once favored a trade deal? Now she opposes it. Or voted to authorize a war? She’s now against it. Or thinks rape victims should be believed, since, uh, yeah, about that . . . Hillary’s position on anything depends on the day, on the poll numbers and...

Obama's State of the Union, Empty Chairs, Violence, Abortion It’s not an empty chair that should be the focus of President Barack Obama’s last State of the Union address tonight, but an empty cradle. In consideration of Obama’s intensely pro-abortion presidency; in searing memory of the closing words of his 2013 Planned Parenthood address: “Thank you, Planned Parenthood, God bless you”, the symbolic chair he is having placed center stage to represent those who lost their lives to gun violence, is as phony as the artificial tears he supposedly ‘wept’ at last Monday’s gun control press conference.

A long line of gun fanciers waiting to buy tickets snaked across the Cow Palace parking lot early Saturday morning despite a cold drizzle, as the Crossroads of the West gun show kicked off a two-day run at the famed exhibition hall. Judging by the size of the morning crowd, show owner Bob Templeton predicted total weekend attendance of about 7,000 -- double the usual 3,500 at the show he's been holding at the Cow Palace for three decades. "There are a lot of first-time buyers," said Templeton, a Utah resident. "They're here for two reasons -- the safety of...

Sources told the publication Davis would be a guest of the Family Research Council for President Obama’s speech. ... Meanwhile, a plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage, Jim Obergefell will be a guest of the president.

New numbers from the Census Bureau on how many people move from state to state underscore another aspect of the right-to-work debate that does not often take center stage: Americans continue to move to right-to-work states. The Mackinac Center has long viewed changes in the number of people in a state as perhaps the single best tool for measuring the quality of life there. After all, there are reasons people pack up and move, and those reasons reflect an individual’s self-interest. Economic opportunities are a clear reason to move, as are amenities such as access to coastal waters or more...

Johnny Manziel is in danger of losing his biggest sponsor -- Nike -- with sources telling TMZ Sports the company is "on the fence" about dropping the QB from its roster this off-season. In fact, one highly placed Nike source tells us ... "We are worried about him and hope things will turn around in the right direction ... but we are on the fence if [our relationship] will continue."

MASON CITY, IOWA -- Thanks to Donald Trump, the Ted Cruz birther issue emerged this week on the edges of the presidential campaign. Cruz, born in Canada to an American citizen mother and a Cuban father, is an American citizen by birth, according to U.S. law. But Trump suggested there might be a question of whether Cruz meets the constitutional requirement that the president be a "natural born citizen," and that the issue could be tied up in litigation, thus creating a problem for Republicans if Cruz were to be the party's nominee. At a town hall in Mason City...

Elin Krantz was a 27-year-old Swedish model that promoted diversity and multiculturalism. She was young, she was beautiful and now she is dead at the hands of an African "refugee" immigrant. Krantz was a member of "We Like Diversity" on Facebook and had referred to herself as "multicultural." the 23-year-old man that raped and murdered Krantz was an immigrant from Africa to the united States via a marriage to an Ethiopian woman and then immigrated from Virginia to Sweden. He whined that he's being mistreated in the USA because he's black and was granted refugee status in multiculturalism embracing Sweden.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declared Florida's death penalty law unconstitutional. Florida requires the trial judge, not the jury to make the critical findings necessary to impose the death penalty.

It's interesting that some of the same people who go ballistic at the suggestion that corporations are people are quite willing to ascribe human attributes to inhuman things. "I'm out to prove that rocks are alive and humans are not," Simon Porzak, a writing instructor at Columbia said at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Austin last week. Porzak had a slew of lines that kept the crowd at the MLA in stiches: ~ "Can I baptize a dog?" (he and his source left the question open) ~ "Crossing boundary lines with a pigskin" ~ "We never judge other...

As Erick noted recently, the GOP Establishment and their talking heads are eager to frame Ted Cruz as too conservative to win in November.“We’ll take anyone!” the Establishment is saying, “Even Trump over Cruz.”As I wrote the other day, these are the same political pygmies who have put the Republican Party in the state that it is in today. Rudderless, easily rolled by the Obama Administration and more interested in money and power, not principle, this chattering class is terrified of Ted Cruz and what he means to their futures.Eager to undermine Cruz, they have moved from whispering to shouting,...