#11601
Favorable polls and President Trump's declining approval ratings are giving Democrats confidence they can retake the House after eight years in the minority.
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#11602
Remember when the Solicitor General of the United States suggested that the federal government might be obliged to take away theologically conservative religious institutions' tax exemption? Evangelical voters did.
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#11603
South Korean President Moon Jae-in ordered discussions to be held with the United States on deploying additional THAAD anti-missile defense units following North Korea's test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile, his office said on Saturday.
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#11604
Amazon is “the fuel for antisocial behavior,” according to Gabelli Multimedia Trust portfolio manager Larry Haverty.
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#11605
Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Geraldo Rivera were pelted with eggs as they left an inaugural ball in Washington, ...
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#11606
Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet.
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#11607
The question, posed in a letter from a House committee chairman, was part of an inquiry into how the Obama administration handled its officials’ use of personal email.
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#11608
President Obama and Hillary Clinton likely made the decision to falsely tie an inflammatory anti-Islam Internet video to the fatal Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack that left four Americans dead in Benghazi, Libya, the chief of the conservative government watchdog group Judicial Watch (JW) told Breitbart News.
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#11609
A survey last week from Public Policy Polling found that 40 percent of Republican voters in North Carolina believe the practice of Islam should be made illegal.
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#11611
It's been a tough decade for the political left. Eight years ago, a Time magazine cover portrayed Barack Obama as Franklin Roosevelt, complete with a cigarette and holder and a cover line proclaiming, "The New New Deal." A Newsweek cover announced, "We Are All Socialists Now."
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#11612
Facebook sends misinformation about conservatives to dissuade members but denies responsibility, palming dishonesty off as technical glitches
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#11613
Glenn Beck, his television network and a conservative think tank have been dismissed from a defamation lawsuit filed by the father of Ahmed...
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#11614

Make Bureaucracy Great Again

Submitted 7 years ago by ActRight Community

Because they are so rare — and I mean unicorn rare — positive bureaucratic experiences stand out in my mind. In 2001, I went into a driver’s-license office in Montgomery County, Pa., and was greeted by a middle-aged man wearing about 40 pieces of Masonic swag (I later learned he was a Catholic!) who asked me what brought me in. I said I needed to trade in a Texas driver’s license for a Pennsylvania license. He gave me a form to fill out, asked me a couple of questions, took my money, and that was that. Perhaps it was a Masonic plot. But if the Illuminati can get me through the DMV in less than 15 minutes, then bring on the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, and the reptilian shape-shifters, too. I’ve got places to be. I had a similarly pleasant surprise in Europe last summer. I am that guy who shows up at the airport a minimum of two hours before boarding time, because the only thing I hate more than waiting is being late. The French were threatening to go on strike, as they do weekly, and my hopes for the efficiency of the Italian public sector were not very high. But compared with entering or leaving the United States via JFK, it was a snap. It did not quite make sense — I was asked for my passport about two more times than seemed necessary — but it didn’t take a minute. I had similar experiences in the Netherlands, where one expects such efficiency, and in Spain, where one does not. Maybe there is something of the old royalist or Napoleonic attitude that survives in Europe, which approaches the matter of bureaucracy with a certain dignity. Whereas their American counterparts alternate between acting like they’re hustling $6 appletinis at TGI Friday’s (“Hello, my name is Caitlyn, and I’ll be taking care of you today. Are we ready for our rectal probe?”) and acting like they’re going to shoot you in the face (Hello, TSA!) the front-line agents of European bureaucracy are aloof and maybe just a little bit contemptuous, but efficient. There is a sense of pride in position, something that we just don’t have in the United States, where being an assistant vice principal is socially one step down from being a rodeo clown. (And, no, I didn’t tell Ma I was a newspaper editor; she thought I was a piano-player in a whorehouse.) There are weird ideological fault lines in American public life: People such as Barack Obama, whose own children would never be expected to forsake Sidwell Friends and darken the doorway of a public school, care much more deeply about the “public” part of “public education” than they do about the “education” part, hence their hysterical reaction to the nomination of school-reformer Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. No one seriously doubts that many students, especially poor children from poor families in poor neighborhoods, would be better served if their parents had some real choice about where they were educated — including the choice to attend the private schools that Democratic elected officials so often choose for their own children — but there is some reason to believe that school-choice programs would erode what they call the “public” nature of education, by which they mean the monopolistic nature of our schools. A variation on that (familiar to any libertarian) is the fact that our progressive friends get so worked up about purported abuses in privately run prisons; the same kinds of abuses (and worse) exist in the publicly run institutions — consider the many horrors of Rikers Island, where not long ago a homeless veteran was roasted to death by unionized government employees — but private prisons present the Left with a special horror, because progressives recognize the need to lock people in cages from time to time (for, say, the crime of holding nonconformist views on global warming) but object deeply to the profit motive. From kindergarten to solitary confinement: Fine, so long as you don’t interact with the private sector at some point during the course of that life sentence. Though conservatives are sometimes tempted to simply reverse that attitude, their high regard for some parts of the public sector (military, police, etc.) generally keeps them from going absurdly far down that road. But conservative respect for the gun-toting and uniform-wearing parts of the public sector has its drawbacks, too: Are we so sure that the unhappy people of Ferguson, Mo. or Baltimore or Los Angeles are entirely wrong about the character and efficacy of their police agencies? Are we quite sure that the Pentagon’s procurement agents are all as pious as St. Francis? Our progressive friends who demand a Scandinavian scope of government have very little to say about achieving a Scandinavian standard of government. If we are to have a political exchange that amounts to something more than an imaginary exchange between two polar positions held by almost no one in the 21st century United States (Bismarckian étatism vs. Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, or Thomas Hobbes vs. Ayn Rand) then we have to pay some attention not only to the size and the scope of the state’s agencies but also to whether they are any good at what we ask them to do. Moralistic egalitarian arguments for a uniform system of public education will never be persuasive to people who know about Atlanta, or to people who are familiar with the stark differences in school quality that can be seen by walking a mile, or to people who know about the “rubber rooms” of New York. Our progressive friends who demand a Scandinavian scope of government have very little to say about achieving a Scandinavian standard of government, or even a Canadian one, as though competence could simply be assumed in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. They talk about the postwar years as though the only thing that has changed since the Eisenhower administration is the top marginal income-tax rate. Americans do not much trust their government, for good reason. And this has immediate, important real-world consequences. For example: It can be difficult to distinguish between hysteria about Islam and well-founded concern about Muslim immigration into the United States, but who seriously thinks that our public institutions are up to the job of properly investigating tens of thousands (or more) refugees, asylum-seekers, and ordinary immigrants every year? If Donald Trump’s temporary order seems to you unreasonable, ask yourself what the next-best option is and how much confidence we should have in it. The U.S. government has been flubbing the problem of radicals crossing our borders since Lee Harvey Oswald was simmering in Minsk. How many terrorists and school shooters were already on the authorities’ radar, and had been for years, before they committed spectacular atrocities? A half-dozen examples come to mind. That is not confidence-inspiring, and Americans do not lack faith in their public institutions because they listen to too much talk radio or read the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. They lack confidence in their public institutions because they go to the driver’s-license office from time to time, because they see disability fraud and Medicaid fraud all around them, because they know crooked cops and incompetent teachers, because their memories may be short but are not so short that they have forgotten the Clintons exist. Generally speaking, I walk into a government office a Bill Buckley conservative and walk out ready to join a militia in Idaho. My temperament, fortunately for the republic, is not everyone’s. But we should not underestimate how effective competence is as an antidote to political radicalism and angry populism of either the left-wing or right-wing variety. No one ever will be elected president for asking why it takes two hours for an American to get back into his own country through JFK but six minutes to pass through Barajas in Madrid, or why a law-abiding regular guy has to provide a birth certificate, Social Security card, and additional photo ID to go about his ordinary business as a citizen while we cannot enforce the law against illegal aliens. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.
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#11615
Municipal leaders nationwide vowed to defy any crackdown on sanctuary cities after a warning from Attorney General Jeff Sessions that they could lose federal money for refusing to cooperate with immigration authorities
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#11616
The Environmental Protection Agency enacted the rule in question in 2015, responding to research showing HFCs, as the chemical is known, con...
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#11617
Details are emerging about the Marines who were killed yesterday in Chattanooga, Tenn.
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#11618
Lazy pack journalism running on the thin fuel of formula coverage materially damages Americans. The idea that is America requires a better media.
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#11619
The judge in ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s fraud trial revealed Friday he has received threats over the case and now travels with U.S. Marshals, as he turned back a media request to release juror information.
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#11620

Donald J. Trump on Twitter

Submitted 6 years ago by ActRight Community

“Best economic numbers in decades. If the Democrats take control, kiss your newfound wealth goodbye!”
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#11621
Michigan-based Betsy DeVos has been a longtime critic of the entrenched and resistant-to-change American public school system. For decades she has pushed for school choice, vouchers, charter schools, and less federal control over state and local schools. And Donald Trump just made her his choice to be the nation’s next Education Secretary.   Some initial …
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#11622
Steven Crowder RETURNS to have real conversations with real people on hot button issues. For this edition, Steven revisits the triggering issue of "hate spee...
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#11623
As the Daily Wire reported Tuesday, the Hollywood trade Variety released its latest issue, a special Inaugural edition that features five left-wingers opposed to Donald Trump, the man who will be sworn in as our 45th president Friday.
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#11624
The leaders took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post.
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#11625
“The Hammer,” a secret government surveillance system, was allegedly used to spy on Trump, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and millions of other Americans during the Obama administration. By Marry Fanning and Alan Jones On June 5, whistleblower and former CIA/NSA contractor Dennis Montgomery filed a federal lawsuit [Dennis Montgomery, et. al, vs. James …
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