Free Republic

President-elect Donald Trump fired back at Meryl Streep Monday morning after the actress denounced his campaign rhetoric during a speech at the Golden Globe Awards Sunday night. Streep ripped Trump for his obvious mockery of a journalist's physical disability in late 2015, and Trump responded by once again denying that he meant to make fun of the reporter's condition. [SNIP] As I've written before, Trump's defense simply isn't believable. Kovaleski, who covered Trump long before the real estate mogul entered politics, has said that "Donald and I were on a first-name basis for years." Trump was undoubtedly aware of Kovaleski's...

The notion that the media could control a presidential campaign was always bogus. News organizations enjoy the ratings and readership delivered by Donald Trump — just ask CBS boss Les Moonves — but they haven’t made him the Republican presidential front-runner. Voters who ignore or even embrace his venomous brand of politics and the many negative stories about him have done that. If it were up to the press, John Kasich would be the GOP nominee. But whatever control the media did have feels lost after a week that began with a distasteful, super PAC-sponsored ad campaign featuring a mostly...

As Donald Trump added to his delegate total on Saturday with primary and caucus victories in Louisiana and Kentucky, CNN commentator Sally Kohn offered a grim forecast of a Trump presidency — and suggested the media will be culpable. "There is a fine line between covering a candidate and amplifying a candidate," Kohn, a progressive activist, said during the cable channel's coverage of Saturday voting. "And I’m sorry, but, yes, Donald Trump may be the Republican front-runner, I still think we’re giving him way too much attention in proportion to the other candidates who also had victories to celebrate tonight....

There was no avoiding it, and Fox News Channel didn't really try: Megyn Kelly was the star of the show at Thursday's Republican presidential debate in Des Moines. Kelly, of course, is a big reason that GOP front-runner Donald Trump refused to participate. Ever since their run-in at the first primary debate in August, Trump has maintained that Kelly is a "lightweight" who doesn't ask fair questions. (Never mind that he previously said she's a great moderator.) Unreasonable as Trump's critique might be, all eyes were on Kelly and her questions in Des Moines.

It’s one thing to publish an editorial denouncing Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump; any news outlet can do that, and plenty have. It’s another to get almost two dozen leading conservative thinkers to write essays arguing against the Manhattan billionaire’s nomination and agree to print them under a single banner: “Against Trump.”

In their editorial, National Review editors put it this way: There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones. Paraphrasing a line of scripture from 1 Timothy, Erickson writes this: We should not put a new conservative in charge of conservatism or the country, so that he does not become puffed up...

see link Conan, semi-retired ... tells me that as far as he knows the term is meant to connote genitalia. And he doesn’t think his usage makes Trump’s okay.

By now, there’s a reasonable chance you’ve seen Fox Business anchor Neil Cavuto’s interview with Million Student March organizer Keely Mullen. It was all over the Internet in recent days -- and particularly the right-leaning portion of said Internet, which delighted in a liberal college student struggling to explain how giving everyone free college would be paid for. The exchange was, in a word, uncomfortable. Cavuto began by giving Mullen the floor to lay out the demands of her group, which orchestrated student walkouts at 110 college campuses last Thursday. They were: free tuition at public universities, the cancellation of...