ActRight

In a must see interview with ?Fox News Sunday,? Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) hinted, by way of asking a series of rhetorical questions to host Christopher Wallace, that the FISA abuse memo will expose Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee?s true role in obtaining the Steele dossier.  Credit: Chuck Ross Partial transcript provided by Chuck Ross ?

Trump didn’t break the old order, the Left did.

New York Times Kicks off NRA Convention Coverage with Massive Lie -

One reason for the emergence of outsider Donald Trump is the old outrage that elites seldom experience the consequences of their own ideologically driven agendas. Hypocrisy, when coupled with sanctimoniousness, grates people like few other human transgressions: Barack Obama opposing charter schools for the inner city as he puts his own children in Washington’s toniest prep schools, or Bay Area greens suing to stop contracted irrigation water from Sierra reservoirs, even as they count on the Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy project to deliver crystal-clear mountain water to their San Francisco taps. The American progressive elite relies on its influence, education, money, and cultural privilege to exempt itself from the bad schools, unassimilated immigrant communities, dangerous neighborhoods, crime waves, and general impoverishment that are so often the logical consequences of its own policies — consequences for others, that is. Abstract idealism on behalf of the distant is a powerful psychological narcotic that allows caring progressives to dull the guilt they feel about their own privilege and riches. Nowhere is this paradox truer than in California, a dysfunctional natural paradise in which a group of coastal and governing magnificoes virtue-signal from the world’s most exclusive and beautiful enclaves. The state is currently experiencing another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty. All that is energized by a strapped middle class that is still fleeing the overregulated and overtaxed state, while the arriving poor take their places in hopes of generous entitlements, jobs servicing the elite, and government employment.   Pebble Beach or La Jolla is as far from Madera or Mendota as Mars is from Earth. The elite coastal strip appreciates California’s bifurcated two-class reality, at least in the way that the lords of the Middle Ages treasured their era’s fossilized divisions. Manoralism ensured that peasants remained obedient, dependent, and useful serfs; meanwhile, the masters praised their supposedly enlightened feudal system even as they sought exemptions for their sins from the medieval Church. And without a middle class, the masters had no fear that uncouth others would want their own scaled-down versions of castles and moats. Go to a U-Haul trailer franchise in the state. The rental-trailer-return rates of going into California are a fraction of those going out. Surely never in civilization’s history have so many been so willing to leave a natural paradise. Yet collate that fact with the skyrocketing cost of high-demand housing along a 400-mile coastal corridor. The apparent paradox is no paradox: Frustrated Californians of the interior of the state without money and who cannot afford to move to the coastal communities of Santa Monica or Santa Barbara (the entire middle class of the non-coast) are leaving for low-tax refuges out of state — in “if I cannot afford the coast, then on to Idaho” fashion. The state’s economy and housing are moribund in places like Stockton and Tulare, the stagnation being the logical result of the policies of the governing class that would never live there. Meanwhile, the coastal creed is that Facebook, Apple, Hollywood, and Stanford will virtually feed us, 3-D print our gas, or discover apps to provide wood and stone for our homes. Crime rates are going up again in California, sometimes dramatically so. In Los Angeles, various sorts of robberies, assaults, and homicide rose between 5 and 10 percent over 2015; since 2014, violent crime has skyrocketed by 38 percent. This May, California’s association of police chiefs complained that since the passage of Proposition 47 — which reclassified supposedly “nonserious” crimes as misdemeanors and kept hundreds of thousands of convicted criminals out of jail — crime rates in population centers of more than 100,000 have increased more than 15 percent. California governor Jerry Brown has let out more parolees — including over 2,000 serving life sentences — than any recent governor. How does that translate to the streets far distant from Brentwood or Atherton? Let me narrate a recent two-week period in navigating the outlands of Fresno County. A few days ago my neighbor down the road asked whether I had put any outgoing mail in our town’s drive-by blue federal mailbox, adjacent to the downtown Post Office. I had. And he had, too —to have it delivered a few hours later to his home in scraps, with the checks missing, by a good Samaritan. She had collected the torn envelopes with his return address scattered along the street. I’m still waiting to see whether my own bills got collected before the thieves struck the box. Most of us in rural California go into town to mail our letters, because our rural boxes have been vandalized by gangs so frequently that it is suicidal to mail anything from home. Most of us in rural California go into town to mail our letters, because our rural boxes have been vandalized by gangs so frequently that it is suicidal to mail anything from home. (Many of us now have armored, bullet-proof locked boxes for incoming mail). On the same day last week, when I was driving outside our farm, I saw a commercial van stopped on the side of the road on the family property, with the logo of a furniture- and carpet-cleaner company emblazoned on the side. The driver was methodically pumping out the day’s effluvia into the orchard. When I approached him, he assured me in broken English that there was “no problem — all organic.” When I insisted he stop the pumping, given that the waste water smelled of solvents, he politely replied, “Okay, already, I’m almost done.” When it looked as if things might further deteriorate, the nice-enough polluter agreed to stop. In the interior of green California, it is considered rude or worse to ask otherwise pleasant people not to pump out their solvent water on the side of the road. Down the road, I saw the morning’s new trash littered on the roadway — open bags of diapers and junk mail. Apparently California’s new postmodern law barring incorrect plastic grocery bags (and indeed barring free paper grocery bags) has not yet cleaned up our premodern roadsides. Remember: California knows it dare not enforce laws against trash-throwing in rural California; that’s too politically incorrect and would be impossible to enforce anyway. Instead, it charges shoppers for their bags. In California, the neglect of the felony requires the rigid prosecution of the misdemeanor. I was in my truck — and suddenly I felt blessed that I was lucky enough to have it. Last summer it was stolen from a restaurant parking lot in Fresno when my son borrowed it to go to dinner. The truck was found four days later, still operable but with the ignition console torn apart and the interior ruined, amid the stench of trash, marijuana butts, beer bottles, waste, and paper plates still full of stale rice.   During this same recent 14-day period, my wife stopped at her office condo in Fresno to print out a document. She left the garage door open to the driveway for ten minutes. Ten minutes is a lifetime in the calculus of California thievery. Her relatively new hybrid bicycle was immediately stolen by a fleet-footed thief. I noted to her that recent parolees often walk around the streets until they can afford to buy or manage to steal a car — and therefore for a time like bikes like hers. That same week, her bank notified her that her credit card was canceled — after numerous charges at fast-food franchises showed up in Texas. Cardinal rule in California: Be careful in paying for anything with a credit card, because the number is often stolen and sold off.  Cardinal rule in California: Be careful in paying for anything with a credit card, because the number is often stolen and sold off. I thought things had been getting better until these awful two weeks. One-third of a mile down my rural street, in the last 24 months, at least the swat team crashed a drug/prostitution/fencing operation hidden in a persimmon orchard. The house across the street from that operation was later surrounded by law enforcement to root out gang members. Forest fires started by undocumented-alien pot growers were down in the nearby Sierra. I hadn’t lost copper wire from a pump in two years. I once also thought the proof of American civilization was predicated on three assumptions: One could confidently mail a letter in a federal postal box on the street; one in extremis could find safe, excellent care in an emergency room; and one could visit a local DMV office to easily clear up a state error.  None are any longer true. I’ll never put another letter in a U.S. postal box, unless I’m in places like Carmel or Atherton that are in the Other California. Two years ago, I was delivered by ambulance to a local emergency room after a severe bike accident; on fully waking up, I saw a uniformed police officer standing next to my bed to protect fellow ER patients from the patient in the next cubicle — a felon who had punched his fist through a car window in a failed burglary attempt and who was now being visited by his gang-member relatives. Not long ago, the DMV did not send me the necessary license sticker. Online reservations were booked up. So I made the mistake of visiting the local regional office without an appointment, where I first got my license 47 years ago — the office then was a model of efficiency and professionalism. A half-century later, a line hundreds of feet long snaked out the door. The office is designated as a DMV center for licensing illegal aliens. The entire office, in the linguistic and operational sense, is recalibrated to assist those who are here illegally and to make it difficult if not impossible for citizens to use it as we did in the past. After 20 minutes, when the line had hardly moved, I left. What makes the law-abiding leave California is not just the sanctimoniousness, the high taxes, or the criminality. It is always the insult added to injury. We suffer not only from the highest basket of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation, but also from nearly the worst schools and infrastructure. We have the costliest entitlements and the most entitled. We have the largest number of billionaires and the largest number of impoverished, both in real numbers and as a percentage of the state population. California crime likewise reflects the California paradox of two states: a coastal elite and everyone else. California is the most contentious, overregulated, and postmodern state in the Union, and also the most feral and 19th-century. On my rural street are two residences not far apart. In one, shacks dot the lot. There are dozens of port-a-potties, wrecked cars, and unlicensed and unvaccinated dogs — all untouched by the huge tentacles of the state’s regulatory octopus. Nearby, another owner is being regulated to death, as he tries to rebuild a small burned house: His well, after 30 years, is suddenly discovered by the state to be in violation, under a new regulation governing the allowed distance between his well and his leach line; so he drills another costly well. Then his neighbor’s agricultural well is suddenly discovered by the state regulators to be too close as well, so he breaks up sections of his expensive new leach line. After a new septic system was built by a licensed contractor and a new well was drilled by a licensed well-driller, he has after a year — $40,000 poorer — still not been permitted to even start to rebuild his 900-square-foot house. From her nest in Rancho Mirage, a desert oasis created by costly water transfers, outgoing senator Barbara Boxer rails about water transfers. In the former case, the owner of port-a-potties and shacks clearly cannot pay and belongs to an exempt class of the Other. The latter owner is a rare law-abiding Californian, and so he has a regulatory target on his back — because he is someone of the vanishing middle class who can and will do and pay as ordered. He is an endangered species whose revenue-raising torment is necessary to exempt others from the same ordeal. In feral California, we suffer not just from too many and too few applications of the law, but from the unequal enforcement of it. When the state has one-fourth of its population born in another country, dozens of sanctuary cities exempt from federal law, and millions residing here illegally, it makes politicized cost-benefit choices. Feral California out here is a live-and-let-live place, a libertarian’s dream (or nightmare). The staggering costs for its illegality are made up by the shrinking few who nod as they always have and follow the law in all its now-scary manifestations. #related#The rich on the coast tune out. From her nest in Rancho Mirage, a desert oasis created by costly water transfers, outgoing senator Barbara Boxer rails about water transfers. When Jerry Brown leaves his governorship, he will not live in Bakersfield but probably in hip Grass Valley. High crime, the flight of small businesses, and water shortages cannot bound the fences of Nancy Pelosi’s Palladian villa or the security barriers and walls of Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley billionaires — who press for more regulation, and for more compassion for the oppressed, but always from a distance and always from the medieval assumption that their money and privilege exempt them from the consequences of their idealism. There is no such thing as an open border for a neighbor of Mr. Zuckerberg or of Ms. Pelosi. A final window into the California pathology: Most of the most strident Californians who decry Trump’s various proposed walls insist on them for their own residences. — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

Ted Cruz and the perverse incentives created by the most energized members of the Republican base.

Cory Bernardi makes a bold play ahead of the SA election, unveiling 33 out of a possible 47 Lower House candidates who will contest the March 17 poll.

Name a more iconic quartet...

Visit the post for more.

"If you want a cause—want to get on a bandwagon—then get these guns outlawed, and do something about the Second Amendment."

Four state Registry of Motor Vehicle clerks along with two other people were arrested Wednesday after authorities say they were making false identifications through the registry and selling them to illegal aliens some of whom had been deported in the past.

The woman also swore at the Palm Beach County Sheriff's deputy during the Sept. 1 stop, which was caught on a dashcam.

New York’s proposed budget for 2015–16 reportedly contains provisions that should concern due process advocates—namely, the codification of an “affirmative consent” standard for college students engaged in sexual activity and a “Victim and Survivor Bill of Rights” that appears to preclude accused students from being presumed innocent until proven guilty. Brooklyn College professor KC Johnson details several problems with the “Bill of Rights” in a column for Minding the Campus posted yesterday. I reported on the State University of New York (SUNY) system’s adoption of the “affirmative consent” standard last October, and Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the adoption of a …

The agreement Iran’s national carrier reached with Boeing Co. to buy 80 aircraft valued at $16.6 billion is the first deal of its kind since 1979 -- and one that will force Congress and President-elect Donald Trump to balance their diplomatic priorities with U.S. job growth.

“It is also horribly insulting to the memory of the 6 million Jews who perished."

Huma Abedin broke her 2-year Twitter silence so she could lavish John McCain with praise, But it only proved the absence of any self-awareness.

Edward Snowden, the former CIA and NSA contractor responsible for the worst leak in the history of American intelligence, is seeking a presidential pardon. “These were necessary things, these were vital things” to disclose, Snowden told the Guardian in an interview published this week. He has behind him the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, and a letter encouraging President Obama to grant the pardon has been signed by a swath of celebrities ranging from George Soros and Noam Chomsky to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and actor Danny Glover. Snowden, a biopic directed by Oliver Stone, opens in theaters this weekend. But the hype and high-profile support do not change the facts. Edward Snowden should not be pardoned; he should be prosecuted. As leak cases go, this is one even Eric Holder’s Justice Department could handle. Snowden has confessed his crime, explained how and why he did it, and admitted that he knowingly endangered national security. The only issue, of course, is whether Snowden qualifies for “whistleblower” protections, and three-and-a-half years later it’s clear that his disclosures about government surveillance practices came at a disastrously high price. People on both sides of the political aisle were alarmed to discover the extent of America’s surveillance-gathering operations, the most controversial of which has been the NSA’s metadata program, and Snowden did reveal isolated instances of abuse and overreach, though no ongoing illegal practices. In an effort to assuage often-overwrought privacy concerns, Congress and the Obama administration have sought to curtail the NSA’s power to collect data in bulk; in May of last year, they (wrongheadedly, in our opinion) permitted Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which governed the metadata program, to expire, and replaced it with the misguided USA Freedom Act. Snowden and his defenders point to these and other policy revisions as an implicit admission that the policies were unconstitutional to start with. But the constitutional basis for the metadata program — the Supreme Court’s 1974 ruling in Smith v. Maryland — is quite clear. Meanwhile, the revelations about metadata collection, which have been the occasion for Snowden’s celebrity, constitute only a small portion of the information he exposed. According to former NSA director General Keith Alexander, the NSA has determined that Snowden had access to more than 1 million documents, and provided reporters with “probably over 100,000, and maybe even much more.” A declassified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report on the leak noted that Snowden absconded with 900,000 documents from the Department of Defense alone. And, as General Martin Dempsey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before Congress: “The vast majority of the documents that Mr. Snowden exfiltrated from our highest levels of security, the vast majority had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities. The vast majority of those were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques, and procedures.” The result has been a massive setback in American intelligence-gathering and defense. We know that specific counterterrorism operations and drug-interdiction efforts have been shut down because of Snowden’s leak. High-level officials, including former CIA deputy director Michael Morell, have stated that, post-Snowden, Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorists have modified the way they communicate. British intelligence has reported that, in the wake of the leaks, terrorists have ramped up their use of sophisticated encryption technologies. Even criminal gangs have changed their methods, making it harder for intelligence agencies to interfere in activities such as human trafficking. Russia, which recently indicated its intention to interfere in American elections, may be the biggest beneficiary of Snowden’s leak. Not only has Russian intelligence had access to the published documents, but they almost certainly have extracted additional information. In fact, a senior Russian security official confirmed as much in July: “Let’s be frank. Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security services do. If there’s a possibility to get information, they will get it.” Snowden may never have intended to become a collaborator with Russian intelligence, but his decision to eschew legal channels of oversight and flee punishment in the States by heading to Moscow — a plan arranged by the odious Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks — sounds less like the work of a whistleblower than like that of a defector, or a dupe. Snowden should face consequences for his actions, like any other lawbreaker. If Snowden is what he says he is — a whistleblower and a patriot — he will do what he should have done in 2013: surrender to the Justice Department and take his chances at trial, where he would have the opportunity to explain in full his actions and motives. Given the widespread sympathy he has garnered on both left and right, it’s hardly inconceivable that a trial would end with a hung jury and a favorable deal from the federal government. With a few shameful exceptions, it has long been the policy of the Justice Department not to negotiate with fugitives. The Obama administration should not make an exception for Snowden just because he has the support of Susan Sarandon. In 2015, Sir John Sawyers, the former head of British intelligence service MI6, said that “Snowden threw a massive rock in the pool, and the ripples haven’t stopped yet.” That will be true for years to come. Edward Snowden is responsible for a grave security breach that has endangered America’s security. He should face consequences for his actions, like any other lawbreaker.

"Morning Joe" co-host Joe Scarborough on Thursday said that he's tired of the GOP being the "stupid party." 

Police have raided an Antifa encampment in Olympia, Washington, following a train being sabotaged by anti-fracking activists — but the anarchists claiming credit for the act have vowed to continue until “every officer is down.” The train was reportedly shorted using jumper cables, causing the train to stop. Since November 17, dozens of anarchists have …

Three Islamic terrorists slaughtered innocent civilians and injured numerous others in London on Saturday, but it didn't have to be that way.

As covered earlier by RedState’s T.LaDuke, the shooter in the horrific attack at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue has been identified as 46-year-old Robert Bowers. On a roll with implications of last week’s attempted mail bombings, surely, if possible, the Left will attempt to connect the suspected murderer of least 11 to some sort of pro-Trump ideology. However, film director Robby Starbuck reportedly screencaptured Twitter | Read More »

Mexico is poised to recognize Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez as the winner of last month's election, according to a draft foreign ministry statement seen by Reuters, just days after the Organization of American States called for a fresh vote to dispel widespread allegations of fraud.

On Monday, University of Mississippi Police Department officers took down the state flag, yielding to those who argued that the standard’s Confederate battle flag in one corner made it unfit to display. The flag was furled and saved in the university's archives.

Hollywood celebrities suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) are coming to New York City to attend the "People's State of the Union" protest and scream at their sky king.

It’s not like Elizabeth Warren ever said or did something cynical about race to get ahead, right?

Former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's legacy provides many lessons to learn from, according to Black Lives Matter. After Castro's death Friday, Black Lives Matter released an article titled, "Lesso