Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on campaign 2016 (all times Eastern): 8:15 a.m. Donald Trump says he believes transgender people should be able to use whichever bathroom they choose. Speaking at a town hall event on NBC's "Today" Thursday, Trump said North Carolina's so-called "bathroom law," which directs transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificates, has caused unnecessary strife.

Republican Donald Trump says he'd be fine with Caitlyn Jenner using the bathroom of her choice at Trump Tower. (AP File Photo) (CNSNews.com) - Republican Donald Trump, appearing on Thursday's "Today" show, said transgenders should be allowed to "use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate." "So if Caitlyn Jenner were to walk into Trump Tower and want to use the bathroom, you would be fine with her using any bathroom she chooses?" host Matt Lauer asked Trump. "That is correct," Trump said. Asked for his view on the North Carolina bathroom controversy, Trump said the state has "paid a...

Half a billion. Minimum. That’s how much funding Donald Trump is likely to need if he becomes the GOP presidential nominee and runs against Hillary Clinton in the fall. The estimate comes from Anthony Scaramucci, founder of the hedge fund Skybridge Capital, who’s a prominent Republican donor. “If you do the math, he’ll need 15,000 $33,000 checks,” Scaramucci tells me in the video above. “That’s $495 million. He’s late to the party on that. If he’s going to be the nominee, he needs to start organizing that now.” Scaramucci is referring to the maximum amount individual donors can give each...

TRENTON — Hours after Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump won the New York primary, supporter and fellow businessman Carl Paladino said Wednesday that Trump is an "exterminator" appealing to voters who are frustrated with government and want "the raccoons out of the basement."

Even as he says those words, you know he hopes deep down they aren't true -- because if this election really does boil down to trustworthiness, his widely-distrusted serial liar of a boss is in some serious trouble: Mook: This Election Is All About Trust. NOTE 57% Of People Don't Think Clinton Is Trustworthy Note how Couric prefaces the question with a reference to a national poll showing Clinton underwater by 20 points on the honesty metric, a vulnerability that has consistently hurt her even among her own party's electorate.  Faced with that data, Mook deflects, blaming Republicans for "trying to dust up this email...

A candidate like Donald Trump should be impossible. A loud, unscripted, hard-edged reality show-style candidate with exceedingly flexible positions on many hot-button issues would be laughed out of contention for the Republican nomination in other years. A man whose serial gaffes and willingness to stick his thumb in the eye of the gatekeepers of good taste would be cooked before he stepped onto the debate stage. An utterly inexperienced politician, who describes our rights and privileges as particular to us as Americans rather than universal moral mandates, would be rejected by both parties at any other time in the modern...

... in the same polls, Ted Cruz is viewed as the candidate willing to tell you everything you want to hear so long as it benefits him. That’s the “authenticity” issue. Just as there is a long-term benefit in positive authenticity polling, there is a long-term detriment in negative authenticity polling. Opinions of “authenticity” are almost impossible to change once they embed. The word ‘almost’ is an understatement, because no politician in modern times has ever been able to reverse the authenticity component.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass) brushed off fears that a runaway national debt could pose a threat to America. "Look, a debt of whatever amount merely records resources that have already been acquired by the government," Markey argued. "The government has already gotten and spent that money for the benefit of America. Whether it ever pays this money back is basically irrelevant." "Let's imagine that, 'horror of horrors,' the government defaults on this debt," Markey continued. "Who's hurt? The people who lent the money to the government by buying bonds can obviously afford to lose this money. People who need their...

Donald Trump played up his plans to tax companies that move jobs out of the United States as he tried to appeal to blue collar workers in a New York rally Sunday. Speaking for about an hour Sunday in Rochester, N.Y., Trump recited statistics about the area's loss of manufacturing jobs and economic hardship in recent years. He reiterated his desire to tax goods sold by companies once based in the United States that moved away to find cheaper labor. The plan has been widely panned by economic experts. But the Rochester crowd ate it up. "I'm the only one...

The conservative Wall Street Journal has come out with an intensely critical editorial of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz for, the paper says, his "largely synthetic" aggression toward the GOP "establishment." . . . "This rage-against-the-machine bill of goods catapulted Mr. Cruz to prominence on talk radio, digital media and within a rump wing of the Republican Party," the paper said. "But the same fury also paved the way for [his rival Donald] Trump, who exploited it with a more blunt-spoken populism on immigration, trade and foreign policy ... The difference is that Mr. Cruz knows better, giving himself a...

"I believe that religious institutions ought to be protected and be able to be in a position of where they can live out their deeply held religious purposes," Kasich, who's running for the Republican presidential nomination, told host John Dickerson in an interview for Sunday's "Face the Nation." "But when you get beyond that it gets to be a tricky issue. And tricky is not the right word, but it can become a contentious issue." "In our state, we're not facing this, so everybody needs to take a deep breath, respect one another, and the minute we start trying to...

Some economists now see first-quarter growth as negligible, and it could easily turn out to be negative. Economists shaved already weak growth forecasts by a few more tenths Friday, after wholesale inventories fell 0.5 percent month over month in February, much more than the anticipated 0.1 percent decline. January was also revised down by 0.4 percent. The closely watched Atlanta Fed GDPNow model now shows first-quarter growth tracking at 0.1 percent, compared to a 0.4 percent estimate earlier in the week. JPMorgan economists now forecast the economy only expanded by 0.2 percent in the first quarter, from 0.7 percent. Barclays...

But, contrary to what you might think, it isn’t New York City they are going to. Resettlement contractors operating in the state are placing them in Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Utica along with a whole host of smaller cities throughout the state. On these pages over the years we’ve told you about problems and especially made note of the UN designated ‘Town that Loves Refugees‘ (Utica) having serious problems now with schools overloaded with educationally needy children, here. It does not take a genius to figure out that there is a huge cost associated with educating children who do...

he face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.” I was proud to be an American the day our president spoke those words. No, not our current president. That quote came from President George W. Bush exactly six days after the 9/11 attacks. At a time when many Americans were understandably concerned about radical Muslims doing further harm—with the visions of the Twin Towers collapsing and the Pentagon smoldering still fresh in their minds—President Bush chose that moment...

Leaving Trump’s incoherence aside, James Kalb, writing in Chronicles, was right to argue that “political correctness is a genuine threat to any tolerable way of life. . . . domination of public life by p.c. elites has thus made it impossible for ordinary people to assert their complaints publicly in an acceptable way, so their objections can be shrugged off as the outbursts of ignorant bigots who will, in any event, soon become demographically irrelevant.” Writing in the Daily Beast, Tom Nichols notes that part of Trump’s success is that his fans love his refusal to be politically correct: “Trump’s...

You can see the exact moment last week that Donald Trump made up his mind on whether women would face criminal punishment once he signed new restrictions into law. He is at a town hall with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, and, after Matthews badgers him for a while, he finally answers the question. “The answer is ... that,” Trump says, eyes looking to the side in thought, “there has to be some form of punishment.” He punctuates “has” with a hand gesture. Done. Final. But as it turns out — and as it has turned out repeatedly over the course of...

One of the many defeats American culture has suffered at the hands of the destructive influence of political correctness. It is always fine for a Black “comedian” to make crude jokes about White people, especially Southerners. But making fun of Blacks is simply never allowed. Not that we care to use the N word, but Whites are never permitted to use it even when they are condemning its use! So-called “ethnic jokes” may never, ever be uttered and the list goes on. Democrats can talk about how they want to appeal to Blacks and be praised in the media. But...

Normally, with an issue as complex as immigration, it’s hard to pinpoint any one thing that’s driving a notable shift in opinion. Unless there’s a sudden surge at the border, as there was in the summer of 2014 with children from Central America being sent north via Mexico, there’s no obvious reason for public opinion to change dramatically within a narrow six-month window, as it has here. In fact, if you’d asked me to guess whether support for the wall was up or down lately, I’d guess up for the simple reason that Americans are more worried about terrorism...

VIDEO

In a purely practical way, the present deportation debate is simply the essence of demagoguery. In 2006, when I first began researching deportations, George W. Bush was president and quietly building a deportation machine in the Department of Homeland Security. Outside of small activist circles, few Americans knew that deportations had been rising since 1996 due to legislation signed by President Bill Clinton. Nor could anyone then have imagined that the next president would be a Democrat, the son of a Kenyan immigrant, and would make Bush look like a piker when it came to record-high deportations. Nor, for that...