Free Republic

As Donald Trump hurtles toward the Republican convention, he is on a collision course with the anti-abortion movement — a crucial conservative constituency that contends Republicans must own that issue to win a general election. Leaders of the movement are suspicious, if not outright opposed, to the three-time married billionaire who only recently came to oppose abortion and whose gaffes suggest he does not understand the issue. The latest flap exploded Thursday after Trump vowed he would "absolutely" change the Republican platform opposing abortion "for the three exceptions" — rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother. The...

Mississippi and North Carolina ought to rethink their laws affecting the rights of its LGBT citizens, President Barack Obama said Friday, while inviting all Britons to visit the states nonetheless. Before ending a news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, Obama fielded a question about the United Kingdom issuing travel advice to its citizens on Friday about the new laws in Mississippi and North Carolina that affect the rights of British LGBT travelers. Attempting to assuage concerns and not offend the citizens of those states, Obama told the British people that they should come visit North Carolina and Mississippi,...

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...

CHRISTMAS in New York was lovely this year — especially for those who prefer to spend the day working on their tans. It was the city’s warmest ever, with temperatures peaking at 66 degrees. Record-breaking temperatures are occurring with alarming frequency in the United States, but Americans are reacting with a collective shrug. In a poll taken in January, after the country’s warmest December on record, the Pew Research Center found that climate change ranked close to last on a list of the public’s policy priorities. Why? In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, we provide one...

With the city facing the threat of a teachers strike, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis focused attention on Gov. Bruce Rauner on Wednesday in an incendiary speech that likened the Republican governor's actions to terrorism. "Rauner is the new ISIS recruit," Lewis said during an address at a packed City Club of Chicago luncheon, using a term that refers to the Islamic State terrorist group. "Yes, I said it, and I'll say it again," Lewis continued. "Bruce Rauner is a liar. And, you know, I've been reading in the news lately all about these ISIS recruits popping up all...

If it concerns sex in any way, you can be sure that our culture will fixate on it and manage to defy common sense with hyperventilating indignation. Same-sex marriage roiled the waters for decades, but now that the Supreme Court has big-footed that question, culture warriors are prowling for new realms of transgression to embrace. So, coming to a bathroom near you — transgenderism. I’m just back from a weekend at Harvard University where unisex bathrooms are the norm. On behalf of womankind, I say: To the Bathroom Barricades! Bathroom injustice has been a feature of the world for a...

Wisconsin’s recent primary election gave Democrats another opportunity to take political shots at Governor Scott Walker’s 2011 signature collective-bargaining reform law, Act 10. Curbing the power of the public-sector unions had damaged the state, according to Senator Bernie Sanders. Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton declared that weakening collective bargaining was “making it more difficult for families.” This “analysis” of Walker’s reforms might play well at a political rally, but it ignores the evidence on the ground from the last five years. It all began on February 11, 2011, when Governor Walker declared that the state was broke. Years of...

... His history with the gay community is a long one. He donated to charities focused on the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and early ’90s. In 2000, when he briefly considered running for president, he gave an interview to The Advocate, a gay magazine, in which he supported amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to “include a ban of discrimination based on sexual orientation.” “It would be simple. It would be straightforward,” Mr. Trump said in the interview, adding, “It’s only fair.” Sixteen years later, gay rights advocates are still trying to persuade Congress to pass a similar...

Kentucky’s Republican governor on Tuesday ordered an investigation into what he described as wrongdoing under his Democratic predecessor, charging that state employees were coerced into contributing to political campaigns and that a contract was improperly steered to a politically connected company. Gov. Matt Bevin’s allegation of “greed and oftentimes corruption” escalates the feud between the new governor, who took office in December, and the Beshear family: former Gov. Steven L. Beshear and his son Andy, the state attorney general. On April 11, Andy Beshear sued Mr. Bevin, saying the governor acted illegally in cutting higher education spending without approval by...

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts signed a bill on Tuesday that eliminates civil forfeiture, which allows law enforcement to seize and keep property without filing charges or securing criminal convictions. The bill, LB 1106, passed the unicameral legislature last week by a vote of 38 to 8. Civil forfeiture has ensnared a wide swath of victims in Nebraska. A Peruvian pastor once had $14,000 seized during a traffic stop. Only after the local chapter of the ACLU intervened was he able to recover his cash. Last year, a federal appellate court upheld forfeiting more than $63,000 in savings from a decorated...

Just over a year ago, Wisconsin became the 25th state to adopt a “right to work” law, as states are allowed to do under Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Many people misunderstand what the phrase “right to work” (RTW) means. A RTW law does not guarantee anyone a job. Nor does it damage or prohibit unions, as Big Labor advocates often suggest. All that a RTW law does is to deny the validity of collective bargaining contract clauses that require the company to fire a worker because he or she refuses to pay the union dues. But...

Rates of gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease, are rising sharply in California, especially among gay and bisexual men, according to new state health data. The gonorrhea rate among California men aged 15 to 44 shot up 54 percent between 2011 and 2014, according to recently released data from the California Department of Public Health. Among women in the same age group, it rose 35 percent. An average of 34,000 gonorrhea cases among 15-to-44 year-olds was reported in California each year between 2012 and 2014, most of them among men. By contrast, the national gonorrhea rate, calculated slightly differently than California’s,...

Donald Trump says he wants to unite the Republican Party, but he keeps acting as if he’s mounting a hostile takeover. He’s now threatening to blow up the party’s July convention because he and his campaign were too lazy or inept to understand the 50 state nomination rules. That’s the story behind Mr. Trump’s complaints that the party’s nominating rules are “rigged” against him. “It’s a crooked system. It’s 100% corrupt,” the front-runner howled on Sunday following a Friday op-ed on these pages making the same claims. He added on Sunday that he hopes a contested GOP convention in July...

A longtime Republican consultant who has been harshly criticized by Donald J. Trump filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on Monday accusing him and his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, of making false statements that harmed her professionally and personally. The consultant, Cheri Jacobus, accused Mr. Trump and Mr. Lewandowski of libeling her by depicting her as a disappointed job-seeker who turned on Mr. Trump after he declined to hire her. When Ms. Jacobus criticized Mr. Trump on CNN in late January and early February, Mr. Trump branded her on Twitter as “a real dummy” who had “begged my people for a job.”...

In this paper, we use a hypothetical choice methodology to robustly estimate preferences for workplace attributes and quantify how much these preferences influence pre-labor market human capital investments. Undergraduate students are presented with sets of job offers that vary in their attributes (such as earnings and job hours flexibility) and asked to state their probabilistic choices. We show that this method robustly identifies preferences for various job attributes, free from omitted variable bias and free from considering the equilibrium matching of workers to jobs. While there is substantial heterogeneity in preferences, we find that women on average have a higher...

WASHINGTON — The other day, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, decided to lecture Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Senate Republicans, Mr. Grassley said, were not to blame for the partisan deadlock over President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. The real culprits? The chief justice and his colleagues. Mr. Grassley’s tongue-lashing, delivered on the Senate floor, was in response to an analysis in this column last month of the chief justice’s stance as Senate Republicans refuse to consider the nomination. Chief Justice Roberts has said, for instance, that partisan confirmation hearings feed a...

Donald Trump is complaining that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) is racking up “voterless” victories in states such as Colorado and Wyoming, where delegates are chosen by a “small handful of elites” who are “sidelining” Republican voters. This is dead wrong. In both Colorado and Wyoming, all registered Republican voters in the state had the chance to vote and participate in the delegate selection process. The Wyoming Republican Party website explains the process clearly: “Delegates to the state convention are elected by the county conventions. Delegates to the county convention are elected by precinct caucuses in their respective counties. Any person...

... Trump recently tweeted, “Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump!” This is hard to believe. More than 3 million people have seen the anti-Trump ad in which women repeat real quotes about women from Donald Trump, such as “bimbo” and “fat pig.” Trump described Megyn Kelly as having “blood coming out of her wherever” and mocked Carly Fiorina’s appearance by saying, “Look at that face.” He tweeted a picture of Melania Trump next to Heidi Cruz, as if potential first ladies are contestants in a Miss Universe pageant. And when asked whether women should be punished in...

Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was cleaning up one political mess in Florida when he walked himself into another, launching an error-filled attack on the state’s GOP chairman and revealing his camp’s internal goal for delegate accumulation. Appearing on Fox News Sunday in a segment titled “Can the Trump campaign move past distractions,” Lewandowski was asked about a prosecutor’s decision last week to not bring the Trump aide to court on a battery charge stemming from a run-in with a reporter in the state. But in response, Lewandowski pivoted to criticize the state’s Republican party and its process for...

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Sunday dismissed Donald Trump’s claims of a delegate-selection system “rigged” against him as “rhetoric and hyperbole.” “I’m not at odds” with Trump, Preibus said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “You’re not at odds, but it sure sounds like he is,” CNN host Dana Bash replied. “It depends on what you think,” Preibus said, repeating his claim that Trump’s criticisms were all rhetoric and hyperbole. “There’s nothing that the RNC can do to alter the rules between now and the convention [in mid-July]; it’s not the RNC’s place. So, I don’t sit here...