Free Republic

The morning after the vice-presidential debate, Cathy Frasca woke at 5 a.m. and hand-wrote a four-page letter to Donald Trump that said: “It is obvious that you could easily lose this election.” The 89-year-old grandmother urged Trump to release his taxes, ignore the controversies that Hillary Clinton tries to start, stop tweeting at 3 a.m. and remember that “Bill Clinton is not running for election, so please avoid using precious time to discuss his sex life.” Instead, Frasca wrote, Trump should tell voters about how he will improve the country. “You know what to do but time is running out,”...

In a recent episode of “Modern Family,” two children, a boy and a girl, play a round of broom hockey in a living room. In those 12 seconds, the first openly transgender child appeared as a transgender character in a mainstream sitcom. The performance of Jackson Millarker, 8, is part of a new era in television, signified by a small but growing number of transgender characters. It is inspiring talent agents, writers, producers and parents to gingerly explore a frontier within a frontier as they bring young actors into the fold. Jackson’s character, Tom, is not the only one to...

Any news outlet wishing to provide solid and comprehensive coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign cannot avoid mentioning Sean Hannity's promotion of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. "Hannity," which airs in the prime-time lineup of Fox News, is influential among conservatives and enjoys a substantial cable news audience, and its more interesting moments have a long tail on the Internet. In violation of any journalistic principle, Hannity has done a video promotion for Trump, hosted him for softball interviews too numerous to recount and even provided advice to the campaign. BuzzFeed, the New York Times, The Washington Post and the...

Early last month, New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet told a crowd at Harvard University that he would happily face time in jail to publish Donald Trump's long-withheld tax forms. Theoretically, Baquet just might have his chance. But almost certainly, only theoretically. The Times' big-ticket story revealing Trump's nearly billion-dollar losses two decades ago relies on three documents from state tax forms sent anonymously to the newspaper less than two weeks after Baquet's remarks, which were reported a few days later. The article goes into depth to capture how Trump could parlay those losses into great gains by using...

My colleagues make fun of my old-fashioned devotion to my mailbox. It’s about 30 feet from my desk — among all the other third-floor employees’ mailboxes — and I check it constantly, always hoping a tipster will have sent me some revealing letter or secret document. In Metro, we get a lot of junk mail, and are regularly flooded with correspondence from prisoners in New York’s penitentiaries. But Friday, Sept. 23, was different. I walked to my mailbox and spotted a manila envelope, postmarked New York, NY, with a return address of The Trump Organization. My heart skipped a beat....

Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show. The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan....

I admire Hillary Clinton. This is new for me. I have come to admire her only over the past year. Before Monday’s debate, she had already sealed the deal. But everything I have come to see was on display that evening: intelligence, fortitude, self-control, discipline, strength and grace.

A company controlled by Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, secretly conducted business in communist Cuba during Fidel Castro’s presidency despite strict American trade bans that made such undertakings illegal, according to interviews with former Trump executives, internal company records and court filings.

Call it “mansplaining,” “bropropriating,” or “Kanye at the VMAs,” women are familiar with being interrupted by men when they speak. So when Donald Trump repeatedly interrupted Hillary Clinton at Monday night’s debate — 51 times, according to Vox — it hit home for much of the audience. Women have been interrupted by men in professional settings for decades. Whether it’s Kanye West cutting off Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards or an executive halted midsentence by her peer in a corporate meeting, studies have found that men are more likely to block women from talking entirely, to correct...

At last night’s presidential debate Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton made all kinds of attacks on each other. But on one notable issue, they were in complete agreement: they both think people on the federal government’s “no fly list” should be categorically denied their right buy guns under the Second Amendment. Both candidates have repeatedly said so for months. Trump’s stance on this issue should be deeply troubling to those who care about gun rights – and also to people concerned about constitutional rights generally, even if they don’t care much about this one.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Constant interruption. A condescending tone. Eye-rolling. For many women, the presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was a case study in deja vu. For more than 90 minutes on a national stage, they said Tuesday, Trump subjected the first female presidential candidate from a major party to indignities they experience from men daily, in the workplace and beyond.

They think Frank Luntz's group of 18 out of 20 thinking Clinton won is more accurate lol

It started with a mystifying missed opportunity on race. It ended with a piercing attack on gender. Hillary Clinton's performance in the first presidential debate on Monday veered from uncertain and tentative to firm and, ultimately, scorching. No amount of practice, it seemed, could fully prepare her - or perhaps anyone - for Donald J. Trump's hurricane of factual distortion, taunting interruptions and blustery generalities. Mrs. Clinton seemed to slowly but steadily learn how to confront and subdue Mr. Trump on the fly, as tens of millions of Americans watched. [Snip] Mrs. Clinton eventually found her footing in the second...