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It’s quickly becoming the winter of her discontent for U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren. No matter which direction she looks, she faces political headaches.From the right, a fresh barrage of stories broke this week about the mysterious $1.3 million line of credit on her Cambridge home, a development first reported by the Boston Herald in 2015. For two years in a row, Warren failed to list it on the financial disclosure form all senators complete each year.
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March for Life 2017

Submitted 8 years ago by ActRight Community

Live and complete coverage of the most important pro-life event of the year: the annual March For Life in Washington, DC.
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President Donald Trump said his hour-long phone call with Mexico's president, Enrique Peña Nieto, today was a "very friendly call." "I will say that we had a very good call," Trump said in a news conference at the White House. "I've been very strong on Mexico. I have great respect for Mexico. I...
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A youth ministry group visiting D.C. for Friday’s March for Life rally says its members were attacked by a group of teens Wednesday night near the metro.
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“Mr. President, I think you said, you confirmed that you’re 100% behind NATO,” she added, turning to face Trump as she spoke.
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Media Matters for America, the George Soros-funded progressive activist organization, has secretly been strategizing a major campaign to “stop” Breitbart News.
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After a fast-paced first week of putting “America First” by targeting pseudo-“free trade” regimes and rogue regulatory agencies, Trump is reportedly preparing to take on the United Nations. By Alex Newman
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Liberals seeking to move to Canada because they are unhappy with the election results are finding that Canada won't take them because its immigration policies exclude those who won't contribute to the
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A secret recording of a closed GOP meeting reveals a party facing sharp internal concerns about its quick push to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
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The U.S. economy slowed in the fourth quarter and annual growth failed to reach 3% for the 11th straight year, reflecting the huge hurdles the new Trump administration faces in trying to speed up a 7 ½-year-old expansion.
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44th Annual March for Life LIVESTREAM On FOX News Now. ALL TIMES EST: 11:45 a.m. Musical Opening with Transform DJs 12:00 p.m. Rally Program 1:00 p.m. March ...
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Revenge of the Nation-State

Submitted 8 years ago by ActRight Community

The first week of the Trump administration has been a vindication of the American nation-state. Anyone who thought it was a “borderless world,” a category that includes some significant portion of the country’s corporate and intellectual elite, has been disabused of the notion within about the first five days of the Trump years. The theme running throughout President Donald Trump’s inaugural address was the legitimacy of the nation-state as a community, a source of unity, and the best means of advancing the interests of its citizens. The address was widely panned, but early polling indicates the public didn’t share the revulsion of the commentariat. The speech’s broadly nationalistic sentiments were bound to strike people as common sense. “At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.” Who else would it serve? “From this moment on, it’s going to be America first.” Why would anything else come first? Trump’s speech was less poetic, but in one sense more grounded, than George W. Bush’s call for universal liberty in 2005 or Barack Obama’s vision of international cooperation leading to a new era of peace in 2009. Trump spoke of “the right of all nations to put their own interests first.” If Bush was a vindicator of universal freedom, and Obama, in his more soaring moments, a citizen of the world, Trump is a dogged citizen of the United States, concerned overwhelmingly with vindicating its interests. His executive order authorizing the building of the wall is an emphatic affirmation of one of the constituent parts of a nation, namely borders. In general, immigration is an important focus for Trump’s nationalism because it involves the question of whether the American people have the sovereign authority to decide who gets to live here or not; of whether the interests of American or foreign workers should be paramount; of whether we assimilate the immigrants we already have into a common culture before welcoming even more. The Trump phenomenon is pushback against what the late political scientist Samuel Huntington called in his 2004 book Who Are We? the “deconstructionist” agenda, a decades-long project of the country’s “de-nationalized” political and intellectual elites. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, Huntington argues, “they began to promote measures consciously designed to weaken America’s cultural and creedal identity and to strengthen racial, ethnic, cultural, and other subnational identities. These efforts by a nation’s leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.” If Trump is a welcome rebuke to this attitude, caveats are necessary: A proper American nationalism should express not just an affinity for this country’s people, as Trump did in his inaugural address, but for its creed, its institutions, and its history. These are absent from Trump’s rhetoric and presumably his worldview, impoverishing both. Trump’s nationalism has the potential to appeal across racial and ethnic lines, so long as he demonstrates that it isn’t just cover for his loyalty to his preferred subnational group. If Bush was overly expansive in his international vision, Trump could be overly pinched. Bush’s anti-AIDS program in Africa was unvarnished humanitarianism — and will redound to his credit, and the credit of this nation, for a long time. Finally, Trump’s trade agenda also is an expression of his nationalism. Trade deals should have to pass the national-interest test. But protectionism is, historically, a special-interest bonanza that delivers benefits to specific industries only at a disproportionate cost to the rest of the economy. All that said, the nation-state is back, despite all the forecasts of its demise. It is no more in eclipse than religion, which we also were told would fade away as humanity embraced a more secular, cosmopolitan future. The lesson is that it’s a mistake to predict the inevitable decline of things that give meaning to people’s lives and involve fundamental human attachments. The nation is one of them, something that Trump, if he gets nothing else, instinctively understands. — Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: [email protected]. © 2017 King Features Syndicate 
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WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. economy lost momentum in the final three months of 2016, closing out a year in which growth turned in the weakest performance in five years.
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The State of State

Submitted 8 years ago by ActRight Community

Josh Rogin, a foreign-policy and national-security correspondent for the Washington Post, briefly set the political Internet abuzz when he fretted, Chicken Little–style, that the senior leadership of the State Department had resigned en masse. Rex Tillerson’s confirmation as secretary of state had, he suggested, caused an exodus of diligent, talented, indispensable civil servants. Professional #Resistance members dutifully took up Rogin’s hue and cry, gnashing teeth and rending garments because the bureaucratic eschaton had become immanent. Conservative commentators pointed out that the departing civil servants had not exactly distinguished themselves for competency or impartiality during their long careers. Matt Lee, the Associated Press’s diligent and pathologically underappreciated diplomatic writer, sighed that the whole thing was a non-story. The AP, after all, had written up the whole thing a full day before Rogin decided to immolate his hair. The truth is a bit more complicated than first meets the eye. In general, Lee is right: This is not a real story. Whether they were forced out, as reported, or not, is immaterial. Wholesale turnover at the top of the State Department is perfectly normal, and actually began in November, immediately after it became clear that Hillary Clinton would not be the next president. The new administration has not filled the personnel gaps at Foggy Bottom with celerity. Indeed, in addition to the just-departed leadership, the following 15 offices appear to have their leadership posts occupied by placeholders in an “acting” capacity: Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Office of the Legal Adviser Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs Bureau of Counterterrorism Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs Bureau of Political Military Affairs Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs Bureau of International Organization Affairs Bureau of International Information Programs Bureau of Public Affairs Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance Bureau of Legislative Affairs Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor That’s a lot of empty chairs, and they need to get filled sooner rather than later. However, a slow transition does not mean that indispensable leaders are drifting away. This is a normal function of the transition from one administration to the next. When the sheriff rides off into the sunset, the deputies keep the peace. The people who decamped en masse had helped turn the State Department into an ideological hothouse. Nonetheless, the departing personnel are not, in one important way, just run-of-the-mill civil servants. Under Hillary Clinton, and then John Kerry, the State Department became an intractably politicized department from top to bottom. The people who decamped en masse yesterday were instrumental in helping that process happen. Indeed, their collective decision to resign bespeaks their earlier role in helping turn the State Department into an ideological hothouse rather than a diplomatic engine in pursuit of American interests. Patrick Kennedy, the most conspicuous member of the pack, has made himself an institution at State, and more to the bad. For the last decade, Kennedy has been under secretary for management, or “M” in the parlance of the diplomatic corps. His office oversees the vital functions of the department, including administration of the department, diplomatic security, personnel, budgeting, staffing, information resources, management policy, and a host of other matters. Thus it is Patrick Kennedy who was ultimately responsible for the signal failures of the State Department over the last eight years. The Russian hacking of State’s e-mail servers, which left them so woefully compromised that they had to be shut down for days, was Kennedy’s responsibility. The Benghazi attacks, coming despite repeated warnings about the deteriorating security situation in Libya, was Kennedy’s responsibility. Knowing about and preventing Hillary Clinton’s use of an imprudent and likely illegal homebrew e-mail server was Kennedy’s responsibility. Yet Kennedy survived in his post, despite these failings, in large part because he has been willing to sacrifice the integrity of the bureaucratic process to protect successive secretaries of state. Numerous former employees of the Clinton Global Initiative and the broader Clinton Foundation have taken posts in the department, especially in those parts that deal with international business approval. More egregious still, after a member of the White House advance team – the son of a prominent Clinton donor – got caught up in the Cartagena Secret Service prostitution scandal, the State Department hired him on as a contract policy advisor to the Office on Global Women’s Issues. And no one did more to obstruct Congress’s investigations into Benghazi, and by extension Clinton’s e-mail server, than Kennedy. Kennedy discouraged and slow-rolled bureaus responsible for compliance and security under his control. He actively engaged with the investigation, and not in pursuit of the truth. Indeed, as Tim Mak of The Daily Beast has reported, Kennedy may have “contacted the FBI, offering to allow the FBI to place more agents in Iraq in exchange for changing the classification of an e-mail from Clinton’s private e-mail account.” Thus, while the departure of Patrick Kennedy and his acolytes is a normal part of the peaceful transition of power, Kennedy himself is not, or at least should not be considered, a normal civil servant. He has become a partisan operator in sheep’s clothing, and he is not alone. Conservatives ought to worry about the tardiness of the transition at State, not because it is leading to the departure of the incumbent leadership, but because a more thoroughgoing excavation of the State Department is in order. – Luke Thompson is a partner at the Applecart political consultancy. 
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Despite racial disagreement on the way police interact with their communities, no demographic is 'anti-cop'—and a majority agrees on needed reforms.
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The Yin and Yang of Trump

Submitted 8 years ago by ActRight Community

It’s hard to judge a presidency on its first few days, but so far President Donald Trump looks, sounds, acts, and behaves an awful lot like candidate Donald Trump. For conservatives, this state of affairs has its upsides. In the coming week, Trump is expected to name his first nominee to the Supreme Court, and the two jurists rumored to be finalists — Denver-based U.S. Court of Appeals judge Neil Gorsuch and U.S. District Court judge Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania — should have those on the right doing cartwheels. Many conservatives wary of Trump as a candidate justified their support for him on the grounds that he would pick better Supreme Court justices than Hillary Clinton. If things shake out as the rumors suggest, the president will soon vindicate that argument. Pro-lifers were given reason to cheer when Trump restored the Mexico City policy by executive order, ensuring that family-planning funds can once again go only to groups that agree not to perform abortions or lobby foreign nations to overturn their pro-life laws. Small-government conservatives can get behind the new administration’s federal hiring freeze — a short-term step that will have only a marginal effect on the size and cost of government, but will send a critical signal to the bureaucracy that business as usual is over. After showing pro forma support at best for cutting the size of government on the campaign trial, Trump is rumored to be preparing a budget proposal that will take an axe to programs conservatives have derided as corporate welfare. On immigration, Trump has directed federal agencies to use existing funds to start construction on a wall along the border with Mexico, and has formally called for the hiring of an additional 5,000 Border Patrol agents and 10,000 immigration officers. (Congress will have to appropriate the funds to pay the new hires and complete construction of the wall.) He has also ordered a halt to federal funding that goes to hundreds of “sanctuary cities,” which have pledged not to cooperate with federal law-enforcement efforts to deport illegal immigrants. Trump’s initial executive order on the Affordable Care Act is broad and vaguely worded, but if confirmed as health and human services secretary, Tom Price could issue a blanket hardship exemption to anyone who does not own health insurance, effectively repealing Obamacare’s individual mandate. Speaker Ryan is pledging that a tax-reform bill will be done by August. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, among others, thinks corporate-tax reform could spur a private-hiring spree. “I think you will see people begin to open up the purse book and begin to invest at a higher level,” he said. Even if the expansion plans recently announced by GM, Walmart, Amazon, and other large companies are aimed at currying favor with the new president, constant news of new job creation can only fuel more economic optimism. Time will tell whether a genuine economic boom is on the horizon, but the Dow Jones Industrial Average just passed 20,000; it’s up 1,667 points since Trump’s election in November. All of the above policy decisions are good news for conservatives. But Trump’s personal downsides should not be ignored. After a perfectly fine inauguration, he was apparently driven into a rage after watching press reports declare that the attendance for his inauguration was significantly lower than the one for President Obama’s in 2009. Over the objections of his aides and advisers — who urged him to focus on policy and the broader goals of his presidency — the new president issued a decree: He wanted a fiery public response, and he wanted it to come from his press secretary. Why? Does a president get fewer vetoes if the crowd at his inauguration doesn’t reach a certain level? Crowd size has absolutely no practical impact on anything related to the presidency, other than the president’s ego. Which of course, was enough in this case. The 2016 presidential race between Clinton and Trump is now followed by a different kind of race: one between Trump’s decisions and his behavior. After Sean Spicer’s unconvincing, cringe-inducing performance in his initial appearance as White House press secretary — with its “alternative facts” about the crowd-size spat — Trump delivered solipsistic, rambling, inappropriate remarks in front of the CIA Memorial Wall. He followed that by claiming, in a bipartisan meeting with congressmen and senators, that 3 to 5 million illegal voters cast ballots for Clinton, costing him the popular vote. When one of the Democrats at the meeting objected to this ludicrous accusation, Trump cited an anecdote supposedly from golfer Bernhard Langer — a German citizen — about standing on line at a polling place and seeing “voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote” but who were “nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots.” Thus, the president of the United States heard a secondhand tale of people who don’t look like they should be allowed to vote — how would you even tell a legal voter from an illegal one at a glance? — voting, and concludes that 3 to 5 million votes were cast illegally for his opponent. Perhaps most worrisome of all, a considerable number of people close to Trump say he needs to be managed, and that his actions and decisions are all too easily influenced by what he sees on television: One person who frequently talks to Trump said aides have to push back privately against his worst impulses in the White House, like the news conference idea, and have to control information that may infuriate him. He gets bored and likes to watch TV, this person said, so it is important to minimize that. The 2016 presidential race between Clinton and Trump is now followed by a different kind of race: one between Trump’s decisions and his behavior. His policies should make the country better, if not universally recognized as “great again.” But his temperament, lack of impulse control, and tendency to blurt out the first thought that pops into his mind will embarrass the country, generating needless controversies and an endless series of distractions from any good news. Trump’s presidency may hinge on which of these two aspects of his leadership defines him in the eyes of the public. — Jim Geraghty is National Review’s senior political correspondent.
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Politics: During the primaries and the presidential campaign, Donald Trump rarely described himself as a conservative. But his appointments and his initial actions as president have turned out to be as about as right wing as it gets. Trump over the years has earned a healthy amount of skepticism
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Studies show that newsrooms tilt liberal/Democratic. What's the deal with that?
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Donald Trump likes to brag that he has 'the best words.' Merriam-Webster disagrees.
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Nikki Haley, the new US ambassador to the United Nations, walked into UN headquarters for the first time Friday and promptly said, "For those who don't have our backs, we're taking names."
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A Confession of Liberal Intolerance

Submitted 8 years ago by ActRight Community

We’re big on diversity, but not when it comes to conservatives in academia. That’s wrong.
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Author and journalist Martin Sixsmith is set to release his new book Ayesha’s Gift, which tells the story of a British-Pakistani woman and her hunt to track down her father's killer.
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Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich

Submitted 8 years ago by ActRight Community

Some of the wealthiest people in America—in Silicon Valley, New York, and beyond—are getting ready for the crackup of civilization.
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What Trump's Wall Says to the World

Submitted 8 years ago by ActRight Community

President Trump's wall is a statement to the world: This is our country. We decide who comes here. And we will defend our borders.
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