ActRight

The leading GOP presidential candidate declared his passion for violence on Thursday during a morbid, 95-minute, stream-of-consciousness rant in Fort Dodge, Iowa, a speech that was truly bananas, even by Trump’s standards. What separated this invective from so many others, though, was Trump’s near-psychotic advocacy for war, torture and killing. At one point, he even invited an audience member — any audience member — to stab him in the stomach with a knife. At Tuesday’s debate, Trump doubled down on his absurdly cruel proposal to deport all of the nearly 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally. Mexican immigrants were deported by ship in conditions comparable to that of “an eighteenth century slave ship,” according to a congressional investigation. Hundreds of thousands of people were dumped across the border in extreme heat that killed some of them. Trump made his indifference to suffering and death even more clear on Thursday, when he ticked off the punishments meted out to immigrants in other countries. “If you cross the United States border illegally, you get a job, you get a drivers license, you get food stamps, you get a place to live, you get health care, housing, child benefits and in many cases education,” he continued. Captured by the Taliban, he was beaten, confined to a cage and locked in chains. Released last year in a prisoner swap, Bergdahl was charged with endangering troops and desertion. To demonstrate his incredulity, Trump proceeded to flop his own belt up and down onstage in a spurt of folly that in a sane world would become the Donald’s very own Dean Scream doom story.

"We are in serious times. This is not entertainment."

In a letter to the chairwoman, Sanders noted that of the 45 names he submitted to Democratic National Convention committees, Wasserman Schultz appointed only three.

Within 24 hours of becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump had reversed his positions on tax increases, paying down the debt, raising the minimum wage, and self-financing his campaign. It was a busy day. In a Wednesday interview with CNBC, Trump said that the tax plan he released in September, which he had pledged would “provide major tax relief for middle-income and for most other Americans,” was only a starting point, and there could be middle-class tax increases in the future after all. #ad#“You know, when you put out a tax plan, you are going to start negotiating,” he said. “You don’t say, ‘Okay, this is our tax plan, lots of luck, folks.’ There will be negotiation back and forth. And I can see that going up, to be honest with you. . . . During a negotiation, I could see that going up. I don’t want middle to go up at all, but I could see that going up. And I think that will probably happen. “ In an April interview with the Washington Post, Trump boldly promised to eliminate the country’s $19 trillion debt in a period of eight years without raising taxes. A campaign spokesman later suggested a Trump administration would sell off about $16 trillion in government assets to pay down the debt. (The General Accounting Office calculated the federal government’s reported assets at about $3.2 trillion as of September 30, 2015.) RELATED: This Election is Not an A/B Test But by Wednesday’s CNBC interview, Trump had replaced all talk of selling off assets and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse with an even more unrealistic idea for handling the national debt: simply demanding that creditors accept much less than they’re owed. As CNBC gently put it, “such remarks by a major presidential candidate have no modern precedent.” For all of the flaws of the American government, it’s pretty good at paying what it owes on time; it has only failed to do so once since the Great Depression, and that was an accident. If the U.S. announced it would not repay a portion of the debt, banks and other institutions that currently lend the American government money at very low interest rates might raise those rates or stop lending entirely. Rates would then spike elsewhere in the economy, markets would crash, your 401(k) or IRA would get slaughtered, and more economic problems would follow. Perhaps even worse, global confidence in the country, the government, and the U.S. dollar would be severely shaken; the United States would join the ranks of Greece, Mexico, and Argentina in modern sovereign-debt defaults. RELATED: The Donald Surprised in the Primaries, Can He Repeat the Trick in November? Trump later added in the interview that he wasn’t proposing a default, merely a renegotiation of what’s owed. But because the U.S. government is already contractually obligated to pay in full, the only leverage he would have over lenders would be the threat of default. And an American president or treasury secretary saying to lenders, “We’re on the verge of default, please let us pay you less than you’re due” would almost inevitably set off an economic panic. #share#The day after Trump won the nomination, his all-but-certain opponent, Hillary Clinton, hit him for his opposition to raising the minimum wage. In a November primary debate, he argued that, “We have to leave [the wage] the way it is,” and in an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe days later, he added that, “We have to become competitive with the world. Our taxes are too high, our wages are too high, everything is too high,” implying that he might even want to lower the federal hourly minimum wage. RELATED: The GOP’s Ideological Earthquake and the Aftermath But almost immediately after Clinton hit him on the issue, Trump joined CNN’s Wolf Blitzer to declare that he had changed his mind, and was now considering a minimum-wage hike. “I’m actually looking at that, because I’m very different from most Republicans,” he said. “I mean, you have to have something you can live on. What I’m really looking to do is get people great jobs so they make much more money than that.” Blitzer pressed Trump on whether his comments meant he was open to raising the minimum wage, and Trump said that was the case. Until very recently Trump argued that any candidate taking donations was effectively beholden to his donors. Finally, on Thursday, Trump’s campaign confirmed earlier reports that Steven Mnuchin will serve as its national finance chairman, declaring Mnuchin “brings unprecedented experience and expertise to a fundraising operation that will benefit the Republican Party and ultimately defeat Hillary Clinton.” Throughout the primary, Trump proudly claimed he was financing his own campaign, though that was never quite true. As of April 21, 2016, Trump had given $36 million to his campaign in a mix of loans and donations and raised about $12 million from donors. It’s not shocking that Trump concluded outside money would help his general-election campaign; both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama spent more than $1 billion in 2012. But up until very recently, Trump argued that any candidate taking donations was effectively beholden to his donors, and that he was thus the only uncorrupted man in the field. He cut an entire ad to make his point. #related#If Trump really has a $10 billion net worth as he claims, then it would be easy for him to stick to his guns, self-funding the campaign all the way through November. Instead, he’s apparently concluded that donations only corrupt candidates in a primary. Or maybe he’s just unwilling or unable to pay his way to the finish line now that he’s the nominee. It is, of course, unsurprising that Trump would change his tune on a dime, adopting whichever stances he deems politically convenient at a given moment. He did the same thing before he had the nomination sewn up, and he’s sure to do it again over the next six months. What remains to be seen is whether his supreme mutability will catch up to him eventually — whether voters will notice his complete lack of principle and punish him for it. Stay tuned. — Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent for National Review.

Sometimes party loyalty asks too much. —John F. Kennedy, 1960 I have always voted for the Republican presidential candidate. From Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan (twice) and George H. W. Bush (twice) and Bob Dole, from George W. Bush (twice) to John McCain and Mitt Romney—I've checked the box next to those eight names on all 11 occasions I've had the chance. About half the time, I've voted for someone else in the primary. But even in those cases I never hesitated before supporting the Republican nominee in the general election. I regret none of those votes. I believe in retrospect, as I believed at the time, that in every case these men would have pursued policies better for the country than their opponents would have, and I believe now, as I did then, that in almost every case the Republican nominee was also superior to his opponent in terms of character and temperament and judgment.

No really, guess.

Why others in GOP leadership should follow Ryan’s lead.

Isn't democracy wonderful? The death of free speech: The West veils itself http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/7915/the-death-of-free-speech-the-west-veils-its...

"It’s incumbent on Paul Ryan to help bring unity to the party," Katrina Pierson says.

The more I speak to supporters of Donald Trump, the more convinced I become that a significant portion of the man’s apologists are blissfully unaware of what is actually at stake in 2016. Time and time again, I’m told blithely that it doesn’t really matter if Trump loses in 2016, because a loss could not possibly be worse than the status quo. Trump, I am informed, is a “Hail Mary.” And if the Senate and the House go down, too? Well that’s just the price of trying to shake things up. This, I’m afraid, is flat-out wrong. Disastrously wrong. Apocalyptically wrong. The Republican party is an imperfect vehicle and it has, of course, made mistakes. But the idea that it hasn’t effectively and consistently opposed President Obama’s agenda is little more than a dangerous and ignorant fiction. Had the GOP not been standing in the way — both from 2008, when it was in the minority everywhere, and from 2010, when it regained the House — the United States would look dramatically different than it does today. Without the GOP manning the barricades, Obamacare could well have been single payer, and, at the very least, the law would have included a “public option.” Without the GOP manning the barricades, we’d have seen a carbon tax or cap-and-trade — or both. Without the GOP manning the barricades, we’d have got union card check, and possibly an amendment to Taft-Hartley that removed from the states their power to pass “right to work” exemptions. Without the GOP standing in the way, we’d now have an “assault weapons” ban, magazine limits, background checks on all private sales, and a de facto national gun registry. And without the GOP standing in the way in the House, we’d have got the very amnesty that the Trump people so fear (it’s fine to oppose Marco Rubio for his support for the “Gang of 8″ bill, but it’s not fine to pretend that it didn’t matter that the Republicans ran the House when the reform bill left the Senate; it did). A similar truth obtains at the state level. Had the GOP not taken over the vast majority of the country’s local offices since 2010, we’d have seen significantly less progress on right to work, the protection of life, school choice, and the right to keep and bear arms; we’d have seen a whole host of new sanctuary cities; we’d have had considerably fewer attorneys general rising up against Obama’s executive overreach; and, perhaps most importantly, we’d have seen Obamacare entrenched almost everywhere as state after state chose to expand Medicaid. If the general election polls prove to be as accurate as were those that marked the primaries, Donald Trump is likely to lose in a blowout in November, and possibly to take the House and the Senate and a whole host of states with him. Or, put another way, a Trump nomination is likely to return the GOP to where it was back in 2008. And then? Well, then you can count on all of the above items being passed permanently into law. Truth be told, the vast majority of the criticisms of the GOP’s performance since 2010 revolve around a willful misunderstanding of how the American constitutional system actually works, often coupled with a preference for saying — absent any real evidence — that Republicans just haven’t “fought hard enough.” Like it or not, the Constitution gives President Obama a veto, and that veto can be used both to kill legislation (as it was when Congress repealed Obamacare and defunded Planned Parenthood last year), and to force a shutdown in such cases as the president dislikes the budget. Simply saying that Congress enjoys the “power of the purse” does not change this. Yes, the House can refuse to include the president’s priorities in its spending bills. But, by virtue of the powers he is granted by the same document, the president can then refuse to sign off on those spending bills. At the moment, at least, Republicans are simply not popular enough to win the fights that result. To acknowledge this is not to “cave,” it is to accept political reality. Which is to say that, absent super-majorities in both houses (super-majorities that the Republican party has enjoyed at no time since 2010), the scope for reversing rather than blocking Obama’s gains has always been slim. There is only one way in which the Republican party is going to usher in the sort of sweeping change that its voters would like to see, and that is to add the White House to its collection of public offices. Sadly, the party’s voters seem to have chosen another course. Worse still, they seem to have decided to risk their backstops as well, thereby rendering it likely that a loss at the presidential level will be transmuted into a loss everywhere else. I suspect that those responsible for this approach will only come to understand how utterly foolish is the idea that the GOP doesn’t matter when, having weakened it to an ignominious rump, they are forced to sit and watch in horror as the dam finally breaks.

Mitt Romney: Won't Support Trump or Clinton, 'Hoping That We Find Someone Who I Have Confidence In' as Nominee

Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Donald Trump's most outspoken Republican critics, says he will not vote for either Trump or Hillary Clinton for president this year.

Report: Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts to Endorse Donald Trump

(((Subscribe))) now for more! http://bit.ly/1QHJwaK A black man waving guns around says he's going to kill Donald Trump, his daughter, and his wife, and is a...

Written by John Ackimenko Donald Trump appeared on NBC last week, and replied to a question regarding transgender bathroom usage.

An attempt to engineer diversity in student government at a public high school in San Francisco has drawn scrutiny from parents who claim faculty tried to replace an appointed student »

Today Paul Ryan told CNN he was not ready to support Donald Trump as the GOP nominee. Tonight Sean Hannity said he was not ready to support Paul Ryan as Spea...

It's time for a #TruthResurrection - Join Paul Nehlen to help defeat Paul Ryan this August 9th at http://ElectNehlen.com

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus says the chances of anyone but Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump becoming the GOP nominee is "highly unlikely," but "nothing

Imagine this: I was writing my column, blithely working away on tips for the Cruz campaign, when it all came crashing down. Not that tongue-in-cheek suggestions are likely to reroute electoral history, but those little things do matter. Consider that an elastomer “O-ring” caused the disintegration of the Challenger space shuttle. Or that one lunatic […]

Why conservatives should reject Trump.

Attempting to unify.

After the House speaker said he couldn’t endorse Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee fired back that he was “not ready to support Speaker Ryan’s agenda.”

Created false narrative and manipulated press and "experts" to fool the public

An East Point woman accused of threatening on Facebook to kill white police officers plans to offer a public apology Friday in an Atlanta church, authorities said.