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Despite the fact that there are no Christians, Jews, Hindus, or Buddhists in the Star Wars universe, Haroon Moghul appeared on the PBS NewsHour and lobbied for the inclusion of a Muslim Jedi in Episode VIII or IX. In a "NewsHour essay," Moghul explained, "With tensions between Muslims and our neighbors worse than I had ever known, I asked Abrams to add a positive Muslim character to one of these franchises." Maybe "a Jedi named Mohammed," he suggested. There are Jewish names in Star Wars, Moghul continued, as well as Christian ones. "We can accept a Ben Kenobi, though Ben's...

Life as a Trump spokesperson has got to be a degrading existence. Your job, essentially, is to defend every public utterance of a guy who changes positions every half hour, but refuses to ever admit that he has ever been wrong. As the Right Scoop notes, part of the job description of being a Trump spokesman is literally believing that Donald Trump has never been wrong, even when Donald Trump disagrees with previous things Donald Trump has said. Supporters of other candidates do not have to do this. Rubio's supporters don't have to say that Rubio was never involved in...

Conservative ideologues want to keep things essentially as they are, making only marginal and generally ineffective changes. Populists want to change things to be more consistent with what "we the people" want. Often, what we the people want is better than what our "leaders" want or try to provide. Under these definitions, Trump is a populist, not a conservative ideologue. That's good.According to Dictionary. com, these are attributes of "conservatives:" Disposed to preserve existing conditions, restore traditional ones, and to limit change. According to the same source, "populism" means: Any of various, often anti-establishment or anti-intellectual political movements or philosophies that...

<p>Donald J. Trump's reaction to the potential run of Michael R. Bloomberg in the presidential race was simple: Bring it on.</p> <p>"I would love to see Michael run -- I would love the competition," Mr. Trump said in a brief interview before a rally of several hundred people who lined up for hours to see him here.</p>

Tina Fey gave her fans what they were hoping for all week. Fey returned to Saturday Night Live to once again play former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on the heels of the political commentator's endorsement of Donald Trump. Fey appeared as Palin in the cold open alongside the GOP presidential candidate, played by fellow SNL veteran Darrell Hammond.

My reaction to the "Against Trump" issue of National Review: It's about damn time. It's not like contributors and editors of the conservative journal had been ambiguous on their feelings toward the billionaire and current GOP frontrunner. They've clearly had problems with him from the jump. But they'd done so individually. Now, they've spoken collectively in a way few conservative organizations would dare. To them, I quote John McClane form Die Hard in saying, "Welcome to the party, Pal." The appeal of a Donald Trump is obvious: 1) He has his own money, which means he's beholden to no one....

<p>The next Republican debate is coming up this Thursday and will be hosted by FOX News. Based on their back and forth the last time FOX News hosted, Donald Trump asked the network to take Megyn Kelly off the moderator desk.</p>

She was burned once before by being the second most liberal Democrat in a presidential race – when she ran against Barack Obama in 2008 – and she isn't going to let that happen again. Meanwhile, the national media allows her to get away with such a strategy by not asking what separates her from Sanders. Where are the newspaper columns suggesting that Bernie is dragging Hillary to the left? There aren't any. No one is forcing Clinton to take a more moderate stance because, if she has to pitch as far left as Sanders does to win the nomination,...

British Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday accused Donald Trump of making it more difficult to defeat Islamic State extremists. Speaking to the US website Mic.Com, the Tory Party leader said the billionaire was making the "fundamental mistake" of trying to blame all Muslims for the violent ideology of a minority while praising Islam as a religion of peace. Trump, currently leading national polls to be the Republican Party nominee ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1, sparked international censure in December after he demanded all Muslims be barred from entering the US following the Paris massacre. The property...

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...

Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. 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. Trump's political opinions have wobbled all over the lot. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV star has supported abortion, gun control, single-payer health care à la...

National Review, the conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley, will publish a special issue on Friday opposing Donald Trump's bid for the presidency, according to a source with knowledge of the issue's contents. The issue will feature a blistering editorial that labels Trump a threat to conservatism, as well as essays by 22 prominent conservative thinkers from various ideological factions, in opposition to Trump's candidacy, the source said. "Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot on behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as The Donald...

When President Obama secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to begin arming Syria's embattled rebels in 2013, the spy agency knew it would have a willing partner to help pay for the covert operation. It was the same partner the C.I.A. has relied on for decades for money and discretion in far-off conflicts: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Since then, the C.I.A. and its Saudi counterpart have maintained an unusual arrangement for the rebel-training mission, which the Americans have code-named Timber Sycamore. Under the deal, current and former administration officials said, the Saudis contribute both weapons and large sums of...

Thursday, January 21, 2016 Trolling is the New Politics Posted by Daniel Greenfield Your classic troll was an amoral sociopath or played one on the internet. His only cause was his own amusement. He advocated horrible and contradictory causes because it amused him to infuriate people. If he could get an entire group howling for his blood, he won. If an outraged media reported on his antics, he was a prince among trolls. Chaos and absurdity were his only agendas. But eventually the trolls who did it for the "Lulz" gave way to the "Moralfags" sincere trolls who were sincerely...

Marco Rubio once "arrested for drinking beer in public park" By Robert Tait, Los Angeles 3:23AM GMT 22 Jan 2016 Marco Rubio, the Republican presidential contender who has been touted as a possible choice of the party's "establishment", was once arrested in a Miami park notorious for gang violence, drug-dealing and prostitution, a newspaper profile has revealed. He was detained along with two friends while going through a wayward late teenage phase for drinking alcohol in his home city's Alice C Wainwright Park after it had been closed to the public for the night. Mr Rubio, a United States senator...

I was water-skiing with my children in a light drizzle off Hyannis, Mass., last month when a sudden, fierce storm plunged us into a melee of towering waves, raking rain, painful hail and midday darkness broken by blinding flashes of lightning. As I hurried to get my children out of the water and back to the dock, I shouted over the roaring wind, "This is some kind of tornado." The fog consolidated and a waterspout hundreds of feet high rose from the white ocean and darted across its surface, landing for a moment on a moored outboard to spin it...

George Soros, the world's richest hedge fund billionaire, has no shortage of opinions when it comes to both politics and the global economy. Famed for making a billion dollars by "breaking" the Bank of England in 1992, Soros is in a semi-retirement, but his prognostications still move markets. And he remains a top contributor on the U.S. political scene, where he supports liberal candidates and causes. On Thursday evening at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Soros used a 45-minute interview with Bloomberg TV's Francine Lacqua to create an explosion of headlines on both the political and economic front. "Donald...

U.S. Sen. Richard Burr on Thursday strongly denied a news report that said he had told people he would vote for Democrat Bernie Sanders over Republican Ted Cruz. Burr’s aides asked The Associated Press for a retraction. An AP spokesman said the news agency was sticking by its story. “I will support whoever the GOP nominee is,” Burr tweeted. “@AP is trying to create discord where there isn't discord by telling lies.”

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Donald Trump raped his wife! Mogul hates breast-pumping lawyer! Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Pardon me if I roll my eyes. Or just laugh out loud at the cynicism of the whole thing. The other day the Daily Beast ran a story — this story right here — that purported to tell a presumably gullible public that Donald Trump had raped his wife. Really. The headline was as follows: Ex-Wife: Donald Trump Made Me Feel ‘Violated’ During Sex: Ivana Trump once accused the real-estate tycoon of ‘rape,’ although she later clarified: not in...