ActRight

The state Supreme Court has a Republican majority and is expected to affirm the law's constitutionality.

Source: Legislative Update: 5/24/2016 In last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, Congress cut benefits to veterans by increasing co-pays for prescriptions. According to the Congressional Bu…

Ghana: Muslim cleric says gays cause earthquakes, says severely punishing them is

Michael Cutler Moment: Memorial Day and Celebrating the First Amendment UK: Muslim NHS doctor leaves family to join the Islamic State

A 70-year-old Christian woman has been stripped naked, beaten and paraded through the streets by a mob of around 300 Muslim men in a village in southern Egypt.

Scofflaws of New York, rejoice — the City Council has cleared the way for you to litter, loiter and pee in the street to your heart’s content. New legislation dubbed the “Criminal Justice Reform Ac…

Sergeant Alicia White and Officer WIlliam Porter sue Mosby for defamation, invasion of privacy

She repeatedly ignored warnings not to use private email while secretary of state.

Donald Trump reached the number of delegates needed to clinch the Republican nomination for president Thursday, completing an unlikely rise that has upended the political landscape and set the stage for a bitter fall campaign. Trump was put over the top in the Associated Press delegate...

Republicans Wednesday jumped on the report by the State Department watchdog accusing Hillary Clinton of flouting federal records rules and cybersecurity guidelines with her use of personal email while secretary of state, saying it showed she was in clear violation of the Federal Records Act and endangered national security.

Another defeat for Wisconsin labor unions.

On Kimmel, Trump agreed to debate Bernie prior to the June 7 California primary for charity, claimed to be raising $1 billion for the GOP, and waffled on the trans bathroom debate.

Will GOP leadership do anything to stand up to Obama?

What’s going on in the Republican Senate primary in Colorado? “Who knows,” jokes Colorado pollster Floyd Ciruli. #ad#Colorado is one of just two opportunities this year for Republicans to pick up a Senate seat in a cycle where they are largely on defense. But a crowded primary field of virtually unknown candidates hoping to challenge Democratic senator Michael Bennet has left Republicans taking a “wait and see” posture toward the race. What might have been a top priority in another year has become a question mark for Republicans looking at the race: Will a candidate emerge that is strong enough to justify investment? And will Colorado even be competitive at all?  It was less than two years ago that Republicans were riding high in Colorado, when Cory Gardner, then a congressman, bested incumbent Democratic senator Mark Udall. It was a coup for Republicans: Political analysts had not initially regarded the seat as in play, but then, in March 2014, with a single stroke, Republicans persuaded Gardner to enter the race and his Republican opposition to exit. They went on to win the seat as part of the 2014 sweep that gave them control of the Senate for the first time in eight years It was less than two years ago that Republicans were riding high in Colorado. … Things could not look more different this year. Things could not look more different this year. Attempts to recruit first-tier — or even second-tier — candidates failed time and time again. Representative Mike Coffman, the first choice, resisted entreaties to run. That wouldn’t have been a problem, except so did Representative Scott Tipton, state treasurer Walker Stapleton, Aurora district attorney George Brauchler, and several other candidates Republicans hoped would try their hand at the seat. The result: a field of candidates that, with just six weeks remaining until the June 28 primary, has scant name recognition and is drawing little attention. “It’s like the primary that never was,” says one Colorado Republican. Big-name Republicans and outside groups have thus far declined to play powerbroker to boost any one candidate. Without a Gardner-like figure to rally around, “the Republican party doesn’t have a real sort of sense of direction at the moment,” says Ciruli. Gardner, for his part, says he’ll wait to get involved until after the primary. With little time left, name recognition is paramount. “The first person who becomes a household name among Republican-primary voters is going to be win the primary,” says Patrick Davis, a former National Republican Senatorial Committee political director who runs the super PAC that is backing GOP businessman Robert Blaha in the Senate race. That means spending money. There’s not a lot of time left for the candidates to turn themselves into known quantities. In Colorado, many people vote early by mail, and ballots will be mailed out on June 6. By the time primary day rolls around on June 28, much of the electorate will have already voted. That makes the next two weeks potentially crucial for candidates looking to break out. The fastest way to raise name recognition? Spend money on advertising. “When you get in late, and all you’re doing is trying to drive around the state and persuade voters one voter at a time — you need about a twelve-year primary to make that successful,” says Walt Klein, a consultant for Jack Graham, a businessman and former Colorado State University athletic director who was one of the last candidates to enter the race. Klein was the campaign manager for Ken Buck, who narrowly lost to Bennet in 2010.  Money is not something any of the campaigns have a lot of. All five candidates finished March with less than $1 million. Money is not something any of the campaigns have a lot of. All five candidates finished March with less than $1 million in their campaign accounts – some of them with much less. But Graham and Blaha have each put $1 million of their own money into their campaigns, and for now, that has Republicans looking favorably on their chances. Right now, they are the only two candidates on the air. Blaha went up for a period early this year and is now back on air. On Wednesday, Graham debuted his first TV ad, a positive biographical spot. His campaign plans to maintain a heavy ad presence through the primary, something they see as essential in such a late-developing race. Graham has drawn favorable attention among operatives for the mechanics of his campaign. He hired Dick Wadhams, a respected former chairman of the state party, to be his campaign manager, and he was the first candidate to file the signatures necessary to get on the ballot. He was ultimately the only candidate to do so without any challenges. Blaha, Jon Keyser, and Ryan Frazier were all initially kicked off the ballot by the secretary of state for failing to procure the sufficient number of signatures in each congressional district — a story that has drawn perhaps the most attention of any aspect of the race. Graham has bought more airtime, but Blaha’s ads are flashier. His first ad featured an exploding toilet and a doctor who was shoving his hand into a patient’s rear end. The second spot calls Blaha the cure for “the Washington Blahs.” Colorado Republicans say a third candidate, Darryl Glenn, might be able to make a more serious play than expected after an endorsement from the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF). The group has run paid media for favored candidates in past primaries, which could help boost Glenn’s campaign. For now, the SCF says it is focused on bundling money for Glenn. That, on its own, will be useful, since he finished March with a paltry $11,000 in his campaign account. Glenn won a place on the ballot by giving a rousing speech at the GOP convention, but concerns remain about his ability to raise money and his lack of a statewide infrastructure. Glenn’s communications director, Jillian Likness, says they’re aware that they need high name identification, and the campaign plans to run its first radio ads beginning Memorial Day, with television ads to follow. A fourth candidate, Jon Keyser, is expected to go on air, but his campaign team declined to give any details as to when. Keyser entered the race as the favored candidate of D.C. Republicans. A major in the Air Force Reserves who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has perhaps the most compelling personal backstory of any candidate in the field. Keyser’s campaign argues that makes him the strongest candidate against Bennet, whom Republicans see as especially vulnerable on national-security issues. They point to Bennet’s votes in favor of the Iran deal and his vote to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. That last vote could have particular resonance: Obama is considering Colorado as one of the places that could house Guantanamo Bay detainees, if the White House succeeds in transferring the prisoners to the United States. “In Colorado, you end up with a pretty engaged voter pool by the time you get to primary day,” says Brad Todd, a consultant for Keyser’s campaign, saying he believes voters would pick Keyser because he is the most viable in a general election. But Keyser has stumbled on the expectations set for him. Before he entered the race, a campaign ally bragged to the Colorado Statesman that he had received $3 million in soft money commitments at a Republican Jewish Coalition Forum. But on his most recent campaign-finance report, which shows records through the end of March, he reported raising just $400,000, one-quarter of which he personally loaned to his campaign. And he has fumbled repeatedly over the past few weeks in addressing issues about signatures on his ballot petition. A fifth candidate, Ryan Frazier, won his appeal to be on the primary ballot Wednesday, after initially being kicked off for not having gotten the required number of signatures. Frazier’s campaign did not respond to request for comment.  Republicans see Bennet as vulnerable, but he has built up a hefty campaign war chest to combat that. He ended March with $7.6 million in his campaign account, and as the chairman of the committee charged with electing Senate Democrats last cycle, he is plugged in to the donor community. And the question is whether the eventual Republican nominee — whoever it may be — can convince donors that he is a wise investment. National Republicans say Keyser would be the most likely to draw money from both donors and outside groups, if he were to win the nomination. But in a year where Republicans will have to spend to protect vulnerable incumbent senators across the country, the eventual nominee in Colorado could struggle to compete for resources.   And Republicans have few predictions of who that could be. As one Colorado Republican out it, “that’s like pulling names out of a hat.” — Alexis Levinson is the senior political reporter for National Review.  

It was 2002 and officials in George W. Bush’s administration were weighing a tricky question: Should they use the American military to break up a suspected cell of al-Qaeda collaborators — not in Helmand Province, but in Lackawanna, N.Y.? The answer should have been a firm “no.” The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids the federal government from deploying troops on American soil (with an exemption for the National Guard). But advocates of boots near Buffalo had a fig leaf: a Justice Department memo from late 2001 that granted the president latitudinous authority against domestic terrorists. They also had a powerful advocate in Vice President Dick Cheney. #ad#President Bush ultimately overrode Cheney and sent in the FBI, but it wasn’t the last time his administration would hold a candle too close to posse comitatus law. Following Hurricane Katrina, Bush asked Congress to pass legislation allowing the military on American soil in the aftermath of a natural disaster or terrorist attack. The principle behind the Posse Comitatus Act is a sound one: The military is a wartime instrument free from many legal constraints, while law enforcement is charged with policing the homeland — mix the two and you have a recipe for domestic tyranny. To illustrate, let’s consider a hypothetical scenario: The public elects as president a mercurial man-child who possesses enormous self-regard, acts almost entirely on caprice, and has contempt for the rule of law. We’ll even complete the banana-republic imagery by giving him ridiculous hair. Aren’t we better off knowing our imaginary potentate can’t deploy the military to Lackawanna or Los Angeles? And shouldn’t we avoid setting such a precedent? Today, we’re forced to consider the possibility that Donald Trump might be sitting in the Oval Office next year. Many conservatives are horrified that this could happen, and have rightly denounced Trump as a red-alert threat to small-l liberalism. What they miss is that — by so often siding with Cheney and supporting the Bush administration’s executive enlargements — they’ve given a hypothetical President Trump ample precedent for abuse he might otherwise not have had. Think back to some of the controversies of the War on Terror. Should anyone trust Donald Trump with his personal metadata, collected in bulk by the NSA? Especially after Trump gave out Lindsey Graham’s personal cell-phone number? What about our e-mails and browsing history? Are we better off knowing that Trump could seize suspects and send them to Guantanamo Bay? How about the power to issue signing statements that circumvent the law? And what about Hillary Clinton? Can anyone sleep well knowing she could indefinitely detain American citizens? Justice Scalia certainly didn’t. The Bush administration’s apologists justified those policies by observing that we live in a post-9/11 world — a shifting of epochs on par with the end of the Cretaceous Era — where government needs to be nimble in its response to terrorism. The problem is that human nature in the post-9/11 world looks an awful lot like human nature in the pre-9/11 world, and American power is only as beneficent as the man wielding it. American power is only as beneficent as the man wielding it. Donald Trump may not be an American Caesar — after all, Julius Caesar went through the trouble of serving in the military, and Bellum Gallicum is far more literate than The Art of the Deal — but he’s certainly the sort of strongman our Founders feared would hijack the system they created. This is the same guy whose henchman, Roger Stone, suggested CNN’s broadcasting license be revoked because Stone didn’t like its coverage of Trump. It’s not reckless surmise to say a Trump administration would govern like authoritarians: They’ve openly promised to do so. America is a good country with a brilliant Constitution and an unprecedented standard of living, but it’s subject to Burke’s fears and Acton’s axioms just the same. We’re no more immune to spasms of unreason than were France and Germany. And if a leader riding the mob arrives in high office to find he can wage war without legislative approval and send in EPA SWAT teams, well, that just makes his job all the easier, doesn’t it? The best hope of mitigating a Trump win in November would be for the other branches of government to check and balance him. Thanks to the expansion of the powers of the executive, that will be far more difficult to do. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama deserve particular blame for our engorged executive, but the problem runs deeper than that, into the bedrock of our political culture. We’re all culprits here. We lambaste “do-nothing” Congresses for not regularly ramming through gargantuan overhauls of society. We prefer the singular and expeditious displays of power that come from our presidents, whom we revere. Our most over-exalted leader, so godly he can be conjured up by only the initials “JFK,” is remembered as sitting at the head of his own Camelot — fitting, in that this sort of monarch worship hearkens back to the Dark Ages. It’s always easier to vest one’s civic pride in a figurehead rather than a squawking gaggle of legislators, but the president is no mere figurehead. Unlike, say, the queen of England, he commands the awesome apparatus of government. Gene Healy has dubbed this the “cult of the presidency”; in Donald Trump, the cultists have found their L. Ron Hubbard. The entire Trump phenomenon is premised on the exercise of power by a single virile figure, cheered on by the masses. “I will fix,” Trump regularly pronounces on Twitter — no details required, and with an emphasis on the first-person pronoun. It should go without saying that this monocratic approach is incompatible with our delicately arranged form of government. Defending classical liberalism must mean more than firing off hash tags about Charlie Hebdo; it means defending all our rights, including the less convenient stuff about warrants and trials. It means remembering Madison’s warning that “power is of an encroaching nature,” and keeping the presidency off of Congress and the states. And it means the sort of constitutional housekeeping that frustrates those who only want to focus on the big issues. Too often, we’ve abdicated those duties in favor of an executive who we imagine can end inequality and evil. Donald Trump is a chilling reminder that we can’t afford to make that mistake any longer. — Matt Purple is the deputy editor of Rare Politics.

What’s a #NeverTrump donor to do in a very-Trump world? After pouring nearly $11 million into a months-long effort to halt the controversial billionaire’s march to the GOP nomination, the Club for Growth finds itself grappling with that question now. #ad#The Club waded into a presidential primary for the first time in its history this year this year in order to stop Trump, and the results were dispiriting. Last week, still trying to make sense of it all, the group disseminated a memo designed to boost its donors’ morale and provide them with a strategy for the rest of the 2016 cycle. The memo, sent to the organization’s board of directors from Club president and former Indiana congressman David MacIntosh, highlights the biggest challenge the group faces in the wake of Trump’s triumph: reframing the election “to give disillusioned Republicans a reason to go to the polls.” Since its founding in 1999, the Club has been one of the mightiest fundraising forces on the right, and the fact that it feels the need to motivate both donors and voters to participate in down-ballot elections is an early sign of the ordeal many Republican House and Senate candidates may face both raising money and turning out voters with Trump at the top of the ticket. The group has even planned a forthcoming public-relations campaign, “Save America — Save the Congress,” geared toward fundraising and turning out voters. Trump looms over all of this in a way that demonstrates just how weird the 2016 election has become. The Club is telling its donors that conservatives must ensure both the House and Senate stay in Republican hands in part to act as a bulwark against the potential Republican president, whom MacIntosh describes as “at worst, a liberal Democrat and, at best, ideologically confused.” Trump “says everything is up for negotiation, so it is critical that the Club for Growth PACs work to elect strong negotiators in Congress who would pull him toward conservative limited-government positions,” the memo states. Though MacIntosh says many of his board members plan to vote for the real-estate mogul, his goal is to ‘make it a socially acceptable thing to skip president and vote down-ballot.’ The Club is effectively aligning itself with the Republican party’s #NeverTrump faction. Though MacIntosh says many of his board members plan to vote for the real-estate mogul, his goal is to “make it a socially acceptable thing to skip president and vote down-ballot.” MacIntosh is well aware it’s an unorthodox stance. “It’s a little like the Club being given a choice between ‘Menu A’ and ‘Menu B’ and we say, ‘No, we’re going to choose menu C,’” he says. The Club’s position — that it’s okay not to vote for president, but showing up on election day to support conservative congressional candidates is paramount — will factor into the television ads the group puts out on behalf of the Senate candidates it’s supporting: endangered incumbents Pat Toomey and Ron Johnson, plus congressmen Ron DeSantis and John Fleming, running in crowded Republican primaries in Florida and Louisiana, respectively. As much as the Club is looking forward, it’s also looking back in an effort to understand its failure to prevent Trump from seizing the nomination. Ultimately, MacIntosh and others point the finger elsewhere. “The fundamental problem,” the memo states, “is that the really significant Republican money stayed on the sidelines. If others had intervened before South Carolina and the southern and northern Super Tuesday states, it might have been possible to keep Trump from winning, and would have given one of the pro-growth candidates an opportunity to stop Trump earlier. This didn’t happen.” It’s not too hard to figure out that the “really significant Republican money” MacIntosh references belongs to the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch and to casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, all of whom opted not to intervene in the GOP primary. The Kochs are likely to sit out the presidential race entirely, while Adelson has since endorsed Trump.  The Club and its top donors have made no secret of their disappointment that the Kochs, in particular, kept their wallets closed to anti-Trump forces, though board chairman Steve Stephens says he refuses to put the Kochs’ decision through the “retrospectoscope.” “I wish others had followed our lead in recognizing the Trump candidacy, that it was going to be as strong as it was, and had been willing to enter the fight earlier,” says Stephens says. “What I can say is that I think a more unified, concerted effort prior to South Carolina and the Super Tuesday primaries in the South would’ve made a difference. How much of a difference, I don’t know. . . . As far as the Club is concerned, I think we did yeoman’s work.”  MacIntosh himself remains optimistic about the Club’s efforts going forward. He is quick to point out that some of his group’s most significant victories have been built on the ashes of its most painful defeats, including Scott Garrett’s merciless but unsuccessful primary challenge against the centrist Republican Marge Roukema, whose seat he captured in 2002, and Toomey’s 2004 primary loss to then-senator Arlen Specter. “In the past when we didn’t succeed, we often came back and won the next time,” MacIntosh says. If Trump is successful in defeating Hillary Clinton, the Club for Growth will be back to do battle with him in 2020. And the record suggests he’ll have reason to be nervous. — Eliana Johnson is the Washington editor of National Review.

Some folks just can't focus on the big picture and what's at stake.

Conflict of interest disclosure reports filed by top federal officials were removed from public view by the Obama administration in recent months, a move that government transparency and accountabili

The lethal violation of the nation's most basic public health protocols.

Cheryl Mills' attorneys argued: "Judicial Watch should not be allowed to manipulate Ms. Mills’ testimony."

I expect Barack Obama to embarrass us yet again by apologizing (expressly or impliedly) for Americas dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Share on Facebook 1 1 SHARES . Donald Trump appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Wednesday night on ABC, and both made and sparked news. For one thing, he challenged Senator Bernie Sanders to a debate. Shortly afterward, Bernie accepted the challenge and Tweeted about it, saying “game on.” From CBS: Kimmel asked Trump if he’d be willing to debate Sanders, given that Hillary Clinton had turned | Read More »

Minnesota Muslim wanted to join ISIS to

"This is just another example of anti-gun propaganda being passed around as 'news' by 'journalists' who don’t believe in the Second Amendment, don’t like guns or the people who own them, and are in the pockets of politicians like ex-NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton."

The makers of a new Katie Couric documentary on gun violence deceptively edited an interview between Couric and a group of gun rights activists in an apparent attempt to embarrass the activists, an audio recording of the full interview shows.