ActRight

Summary: Donald Trump's promises on healthcare and smaller government appear to be fading behind news of increased military spending, infrastructure spending and compromises on health care and tax ref

How thirsty does Variety look begging readers to join it in doing high V cheerleading moves for Chelsea Clinton? Thirstier than an ultra-marathoner lost in Death Valley in mid-July. Hyping the ente…

North Carolina about to become first state to move against undocumented immigrants.

A sketchy version of history and yet another Islamic State strategy.

Both party establishments hate Ted Cruz

Liberals, stop being so defensive. That’s the message of Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet in a new post at Balkinization, titled “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism.” The problem, according to Tushnet, is that liberals have been too defensive when it comes to advancing their agenda in the courts.

Presumptive GOP nominee also calls on Republican leaders to "stop talking" about him so much, and Muslims to "report" suspicions

What is the campaign strategy for the two political parties? Clues can be had from the responses to a question I asked about a dozen dignitaries of each party at their conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia. What’s your best guess, I asked, emphasizing guess, of your nominee’s percentage of the popular vote in November 2016? I understood the responses, being on the record, were not entirely frank. Only two Republicans guessed Donald Trump would lose; only one Democrat said he was uncertain about the result. It would be churlish to hurl the responses of those who turned out to be less than prescient back at them in scorn. One thing the responses had in common is that they reflected pre-convention polling, which showed Hillary Clinton 3 to 5 points ahead. Democrats did not seem to be taking into account post-Republican Convention polling that showed the race essentially even. But otherwise they differed. Only two Republicans guessed that Trump would get more than 50 percent of the vote. Several made a point of saying that minor party candidates — Libertarian Gary Johnson, Green Jill Stein — would get a significant number of votes. Most Democrats did not take this prospect very seriously. Only two guessed that Clinton’s percentage would be under 49 percent. Most thought it would be 52 percent or higher — more than Barack Obama’s 51 percent in 2012. Acting national chairman Donna Brazile guessed that Clinton would win 303 electoral votes, which she would if she carried every Obama 2012 state except Florida. It may be natural for Republicans to consider more permutations and combinations than Democrats. Republicans have just been through a primary cycle in which conventional wisdom has been disrupted over and over. Democrats’ result was the one they expected all along. As is the result they seem to expect in November. They’ve internalized the analyses that claim that demographic change — increasing percentages of nonwhites, Millennials, single women in the electorate — have propelled them to something like permanent majority status. They understand that Donald Trump is running stronger than previous Republican nominees among non-college-educated white men, and their speakers made ritual obeisance to the meme that Democrats are better for the little guy. But the more prevalent appeal, delivered especially by Michael Bloomberg, is to whites with higher education who are already repelled by Trump. This amounts to augmenting their initial strategy of re-assembling the 2012 Obama 51 percent majority with what FiveThirtyEight proprietor Nate Silver calls a “1964 strategy,” arguing that the Republican nominee is unacceptable. The numbers look like they might add up — or not. But there are some imponderables. One is that the incumbent party is at a disadvantage when two-thirds of voters believe things are moving in the wrong direction. The Clinton convention was forced to claim that things are better than you think and even to take on the trappings of optimistic nationalism and, at some risk of boos from Bernie bros, add flags and generals in its third and fourth days. That risks being at odds with the middle of the electorate and its own left wing at the same time. The second is that the candidate promises economic growth with policies that have over the last seven years produced only sluggish growth — more sluggish than economists thought, it turns out, from GDP statistics released July 29. The 16 references to “growth” in the Bernie Sanders–influenced party platform refer mostly to policies helping one or more of the party’s favored splinter groups. There’s also a claim that higher taxes will stimulate growth and a promise of more infrastructure spending. But as Barack Obama grinningly observed, there are no shovel-ready projects. And if you want someone who will sweep aside environmental barriers and regulatory delays, you might well prefer Donald Trump. The third imponderable is something pollsters can’t reliably gauge: turnout. Even with Obama’s endorsement, Clinton is unlikely to equal the black turnout and Democratic percentages of 2008 and 2012. Hispanics have shown less enthusiasm for repudiating Trump than Democrats expected. Young voters, who dislike Trump but voted heavily for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, may be hard to rally. Polling shows many under-35s who choose Clinton in a two-way race prefer Libertarian Gary Johnson or the Green party’s Jill Stein when given the option. That could swell the minor-party vote above the 1.0 to 1.8 percent they received in the last three elections. So which party has a winning strategy? Not clear. — Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2016 The Washington Examiner. Distributed by Creators.com.

Florida GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis — the Republican nominee for governor backed by President Trump — warned voters Wednesday not to “monkey this up” by electing Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, his Afri…

The Left slams the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart.

“White people at the 5C’s: we’re all racist. we’re all microaggressive. We are all not only complicit in, but actively perpetuating white supremacy.”

Supporters of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein withdrew a last-ditch lawsuit in Pennsylvania state court aimed at forcing a statewide recount citing the cost of the proceedings.

US members of Congress have invited human rights activist Tommy Robinson to speak in Washington DC. Robinson is an outspoken critic of radical Islam and the Muslim grooming gangs in England. The liberal media in Great Britain attacks Robinson for speaking out against this modern day horror. In May, Robinson was arrested for contempt of …

Democratic politics is riven by a central conflict: the conflict between truth and desire. People generally want things; they want government to give them those things. Conservatives aren’t wrong when they say they can’t compete with Santa Claus — it’s far harder to draw voters to your side by telling them they won’t get something than by telling them that they’ll get real estate on the moon. But thankfully, there is another human tendency that helps counteract the desire to receive from the government: the natural outrage at being lied to. Human beings aren’t fond of being promised the moon and then delivered moldy cheese. This means that voters will support politicians who lie credibly, then turn radically on those politicians when those lies don’t work out. The result: a wildly variant politics in which nobody ever tells the truth — because telling the truth means avoiding the promises that get you elected. The Founders laid out a way of dealing with this conflict between wanting to be lied to and hating to be lied to: They attempted to minimize the benefit of lying for politicians. Limited government made lying less worthwhile. Who would believe that a politician would use the government to provide “free” things when the government itself was banned from providing free things? But with the rise of progressive government beginning in the early 20th century, the central conflict at the root of democracy took hold. For generations, conservatives struggled with the temptation to simply lie for political convenience and pay the cost later. Some, like Nixon, campaigned on big-government promises and paid for it with big-government failures. Others, like Reagan, campaigned on small-government truths and benefited from keeping their promises. Now, however, the struggle seems to be over. President Trump represents the notion, ascendant in Republican circles, that the only way to win elections is to fib to the American people. Power is its own justification, and there is no better way to demonstrate power than by promulgating a big lie. That fits with Trump’s view of the world, in which success is its own virtue. Trump spent most of his adulthood attempting to win friends and admirers in the upper-crust circles of Manhattan; he struggled with the fact that he was treated as a nouveau riche vulgarian. His solution: Embrace the vulgarity, brag about victories he never won, and turn the art of the sell into his persona. For Trump, the greatest sin isn’t lying or cheating: It’s losing. That’s why he spends an inordinate amount of verbiage calling his opponents “losers” or “failing,” as though victory and defeat amount to some sort of moral status. Americans can re-enshrine the Founders’ bargain by limiting government to minimize the impact of lying politicians. After eight years of President Obama, many Republicans were prepared to embrace Trump’s ethos. That became particularly apparent after Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat, which Republicans attributed not to his overly cerebral civility but to his fundamental decency. The theory became prevalent in conservative circles that Romney had lost not only because he wouldn’t fight hard enough but also because he wouldn’t fight dirty enough. Establishment conservatives conflated civility and decency; anti-establishment conservatives made the same mistake. Instead of stating that a less civil but similarly decent candidate could have won in 2012, anti-establishment conservatives concluded that it would take an uncivil, indecent person to defeat Democrats. And that, of course, was the ultimate purpose: defeating Democrats. Not truth, not a enacting a conservative agenda, but defeating Democrats: the lesser of two evils. Sure, Trump would make big-government promises, sound like a statist on health care and trade and economics. But he’d win, don’t you see? And his dishonesty would all be worthwhile, since he’d then pursue policies conservatives would like. Trump’s victory rewarded that theory. But the theory is untenable. It’s untenable because conservatives don’t seek the same policy results that leftists do. That means that Trump’s promises are bound to come up empty. And that means that Trump and the Republicans have placed themselves back on the horns of an ancient dilemma: They can lie to the people by promising them free things, but those things won’t materialize. That, after all, is exactly what happened to President Obama. Obama remained personally popular for his entire presidency. But his chief achievements are on the verge of destruction because he lied: He told people they could have everything, and then he delivered less than that. He told Americans that they could keep their doctors if they liked them; they couldn’t. He told Americans that they would not see rising premiums; they did. He said that he’d be fiscally responsible, but at the same time, he was blowing out the budget. His lies caught up with him. And if Republicans lie — as they have, in making guarantees about health care that mirror Democrats’ lies — they’ll pay the price, too. There are only two directions from here: up and down. Up: Americans realize that politicians who guarantee them free things are lying to them, and they react by re-enshrining the Founders’ bargain, limiting government to minimize the impact of lying politicians. Down: Americans distrust everyone in politics but simultaneously embrace the lies of their own side, justifying tissue-thin conspiracy theories that put the other side at a disadvantage, breaking down the social fabric and the political discourse until all faith in the system disappears completely. The choice is up to us. But whether we like it or not, truth will have its day. We can either acknowledge and celebrate the fact that power isn’t worth sacrificing truth, or we can lose both power and truth in the worshipful pursuit of power alone. — Ben Shapiro is the editor in chief of the Daily Wire.

Supreme leader denounces Rouhani's comments suggesting risk of war with the West has disappeared since he took office.

When a “solution” to a problem causes more damage than the problem, policymaking has gone awry. That’s where we often find ourselves with global warming today. Activist organizations like Worldwatc…

While everyone else was concentrating on Indiana and Iran last week, a much smaller piece of news broke that was of little interest to the wider world. It was so microscopic that I would have missed it entirely, if not for Sonny Bunch's indispensible blog, Everything's A Problem.

From Regan Pifer: I used to listen to a morning radio show on my way to work. On Fridays, they would highlight the “dummy” of the week. If I were still ?

Lee Drutman argues that consolidated power in the executive branch only serves to deepen our divide.

Kathy Griffin claims she paid "fame whore" Lisa Bloom $40,000 for two days of work that only made things worse, much worse.

Following Parkland Democrats and the 'Fake News' Media used pawns like David Hogg to push for gun control bills that would ultimately make students and Americans less safe.

Gen. Mark Milley, Army chief of staff, said the key is to educate the force, particularly commanders who will have to make decisions about soldiers in their units who request a gender change.

This man is completely out of control. Obama knocked Donald Trump ans his plan for a border wall today after ...

Violence Against Women Act should be called Violence Against Persons Act, because far more men than generally thought are victims.

Students at Appalachian State University are being told not to wear Halloween costumes that are “culturally appropriative” or offensive to the Black Lives Matter movement.