Free Republic

Hey Hillary! You really need to do a better job of faking sincerity. That is the advice of Dave Johnson at the Huffington Post. Johnson is worried that in the general election Donald Trump, if he is the nominee, would be a lot more credible in his opposition to trade deals than Hillary Clinton who is merely faking it. What she needs to do to is put on a credible game face to get away with faking her opposition to trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership in order to fool enough people to win the general election. So far Trump is much...

GUTHRIE: Do you believe in raising taxes on the wealthy? TRUMP: I do. I do – including myself. I do. That was...this morning, in an interview that featured some other controversial statements.  In fairness to Trump, he's been using the "raise taxes on rich people like me" line for months, embracing Obama-style class warfare tax gimmicks like the 'Buffet Rule.'  But raising taxes on anyone, an outcome Trump just re-endorsed, is not what his formal policy agenda proposes.  Just the opposite.  As we've seen on issues such immigration, abortion and foreign policy, Trump routinely makes clear that he isn't familiar with his own positions.  His stances aren't...

Trump acknowledged that he “had a feeling that question was going to come up” and proceeded toe the liberal line of political correctness: “Well, look, North Carolina did something that was very strong and they're paying a big price and there's a lot of problems....People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate. There has been so little trouble.” ... Fellow co-host Savannah Guthrie turned to the subject of abortion: “The Republican platform, every four years, has a provision that states that the right of the unborn child shall not be infringed. And it makes no exceptions for...

Donald Trump said Thursday he would change the Republican Party platform's position on abortion to include exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. Trump made the remarks during a town hall on the "Today" show on NBC on Thursday morning when host Savannah Guthrie asked him about abortion exceptions. "The Republican platform every four years has a provision that states that the right of the unborn child should not be infringed," Guthrie said. "And it makes no exceptions for rape, for incest, for the life of the mother. Would you want to change the Republican platform to...

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2016-04-21/trump-wave-builds-in-a-steel-town-forsaken-by-the-world-economy

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...