ActRight

President Obama's lame duck administration poured on thousands more new regulations in 2016 at a rate of 18 for every new law passed, according to a Friday analysis of his team's expansion of federal authority. While Congress passed just 211 laws, Obama's team issued an accompanying 3,852 new federal regulations, some costing billions of dollars. The 2016 total was the highest annual number of regulations under Obama. Former President Bush issued more in the wake of 9/11. The proof that it was an overwhelming year for rules and regulations is in the Federal Register, which ended the year Friday by printing a record-setting 97,110 pages, according to the analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The annual Unconstitutional Index from Clyde Wayne Crews, CEI's vice president for policy, said that it was much higher under Obama than under former President George W. Bush.

One Texas Congressman is listening to Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s clarion call to defund the United Nations following last Friday’s kangaroo court in which the world once again rallied against the Jews. Spoke w/ Israeli PM @netanyahu tonight to wish him Happy Chanukah & assure him of strong support in Congress. No US $ for UN until reversed.

“Should the US return to its 1848 borders?”

This should not be happening in the U.S., or anywhere.

So desperate.

Defenders of due process and fairness on campus have a ?valuable opportunity? to reform ?the embarrassingly minimal standards of campus courts? imposed by the Obama administration, according to a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Robert Shibley, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, lays out a blueprint for the incoming Trump administration to restore ?

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Moscow will not expel American diplomats in response to US sanctions against Russia, according to Russian state media.

Academics at the University of Oregon have determined that glaciers and the science that studies them are deeply sexist. "Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecolog

Robert Shibley writes that the Education Department should raise standards for campus courts—protecting victims and the accused.

Donald Trump’s pledges to deport undocumented immigrants and build a U.S.-Mexico border wall helped fuel Republicans’ surprising election victories, but they now face growing challenges from fellow party members.

Intent on establishing progressive utopias, universities and federal bureaucrats are together systematically violating the constitutional rights of students and professors. The stories are legion, the legal standards are unconscionable, and it’s past time for other branches of American government to step in and set things right. Consider what just happened at the University of Oregon. Acting in response to student and faculty outrage after a white law professor dressed up as a black man at an off-campus costume party (she was attempting to protest racism), the university suspended the offending professor and then issued a lengthy report holding that wearing the costume constituted “discriminatory harassment.” Why? Because the incident was race-based and caused arguments and controversy on campus. Here’s a key statement in the report: “Based on both the reaction and lack of reaction from other faculty and professors, students have also felt a sense of anxiety and mistrust towards professors and faculty beyond just Shurtz, with some students considering and seeking out transfers to other schools.” Allow me to interpret. Offended students weren’t just angry at the professor, they were also angry that not all students and professors were sufficiently outraged at the offending professor’s actions. In other words, at Oregon if you speak on an issue of race, gender, religion, or sexuality, you are responsible not only for any anger your speech may cause but also for other students’ and professors’ reactions to that anger. But of course identity politics don’t merely impact free-speech rights. They also lead to systematic anti-male sex discrimination and violations of the most basic due-process rights of students accused of sexual assault. Then consider this legal complaint, directed at Indiana University. It is simply astounding. The university expelled a male student for sexual misconduct even though the female student allegedly admitted that she invited the male student into her bedroom, asked him to retrieve a sex toy, and asked him to have sex with her. She told the Bloomington police department, “I was, like, telling him, like, to have sex with me.” The resulting university proceedings were allegedly a due-process horror show, featuring university hearing officers trained by an official “who admits that he starts each case believing the [defendant] is guilty.” The lawsuit points to news reports where this same official admitted to trying to “break” another defendant. And speaking of due-process horror shows, this case from James Madison University shows how universities engineer the results they want. After an initial finding that the male defendant was “not responsible” on the charge of sexual misconduct, the female student appealed. The appeals panel reversed the finding and sanctioned the male student. The male student sued, and a federal judge ruled in his favor, finding that “no reasonable jury” could find that he was given a “fair process.” The reasons were legion: In short, Doe [the male student] was given no opportunity to respond to some of the evidence . . . , was hampered by the rules prohibiting contact with witnesses or limited by time constraints in responding to others . . . , and was not permitted to appear before the appeal board. . . . Additionally, because the appeal board made no finding of responsibility by Doe and provided no reasons for its “Increased Sanction” decision, the appeal board decision and its review . . . were unfair to Doe. I bring up these cases not because they’re unusual but because they’re becoming all too typical on campuses overrun by identity politics and governed by a federal educational bureaucracy that is lawlessly expanding Title IX and other federal statutes well beyond their intended scope. For disturbing chapter and verse on this sad and unconstitutional spectacle, I’d urge you to read Robert Shibley’s excellent Twisting Title IX. The new regime mandates that universities conduct their own quasi–court proceedings to adjudicate criminal matters best left to real courts, sanctions and encourages “due process” that often denies legal assistance to defendants, and effectively shifts the burden of proof (through bizarre “affirmative consent” standards) to the accused. In a Title IX investigation, the accused is often prevented from adequately reviewing the charges against him and prevented from adequately questioning witnesses. University officials conduct themselves in a manner that would embarrass even corrupt or amateurish judges and prosecutors. As for free speech, on campus the heckler’s veto is alive and well — with a student’s or professor’s First Amendment rights mainly dependent on the size of the outcry against him or her. Raise enough of a ruckus, and the Constitution fails. Administrators fear their own on-campus ideologues and the progressive education bureaucracy far more than they fear the federal courts. A generation of litigation has inflicted loss upon loss on public universities, yet the campus climate is still rife with censorship and due-process violations. It turns out that administrators fear their own on-campus ideologues and the progressive education bureaucracy far more than they fear the federal courts. Indeed, the financial penalty for angering a bureaucrat — loss of federal funding — is far greater than any damage award imposed by any court. Judges are proving to be a poor check on campus power. So it’s time to turn the tables. It’s time to readjust the incentives. Congress needs to intervene in two concrete ways. First, it needs to withhold federal funds from any public university that repeatedly violates the constitutional rights of its students or faculty. If a court of final jurisdiction finds that a public university violated the constitutional rights of a student or faculty member more than once in any five-year span, it should lose all federal funding for at least a year. Moreover, there should be a substantial, fixed financial penalty for each constitutional violation, no matter how infrequent. #related#Second, universities need to get out of the sexual-assault-adjudication business. Universities are educational institutions, not criminal courts, and they are poorly equipped to decide criminal cases or even civil liability. It is easy enough to separate students who are embroiled in pending criminal or civil proceedings, and universities should discipline or expel only students who are found guilty or liable by courts of final jurisdiction. It’s simply too much to ask the Trump Department of Education to “fix” Title IX or to protect constitutional rights on campus. Any rulemakings or memoranda generated by a new administration can be just as easily undone by the next. It’s time to use sensible congressional majorities to pass sensible laws. Universities have proven they can’t govern themselves. Perhaps Congress can fill the breach. — David French is a staff writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

Statement to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee by William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University, made on February 25, 2009.  Excerpts: Sometimes…

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, news organizations — caught with their finger distinctly off the pulse of America — are promising to do better. But however well-intentioned, they’re still o…

CNN Calls Michigan Middle School 'Build the Wall' Chant 'Racism'

The biggest problem with liberal solutions to problems is that they're almost always overthought. In most cases, it isn't that they don't care about the issues they try to solve. They simply abandon logic and accountability in their quests to be more helpful. This reality is presented in the most dangerous way with SB 1322 which decriminalizes child prostitution in an attempt to save more children from sex traffickers.

Muslims are the fastest-growing religious group in the world. Here are some questions and answers about their public opinions and demographics.

Secretary of State John Kerry, in his lengthy harangue about Israel, lamented that too often … anyone who disagrees with Israel policy is cast as anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic. We live in an age in which it is considered unacceptable for anybody from a majority group to lecture members of a minority group about what does and does not qualify as bigotry. Straight white cisgendered males who question claims of sexism, racism, homophobia, or transphobia, are routinely scolded, commanded to check their privilege and to stop mansplaining. So it's notable that Kerry, a non-Jewish former Senator and presidential candidate in a powerful cabinet post, used his perch to casually downplay claims of prejudice against a religious minority that makes up less than one-fifth of one-percent of the world's population yet has been persecuted for thousands of years, slaughtered by the millions, and whose adherents are regularly targeted around the world, including in the United States. In fact, in the face of news stories about the rise of Islamophobia, American Jews are still the victims of a majority of religious hate crimes in the U.S., despite making up less than 2 percent of the population. (Even after adjusting for population, Jews are still more targeted than Muslims.)

Kellyanne Conway may have managed to get Donald Trump to Washington, but she is finding it harder to do the same for her children. Conway, who will serve a counselor to Trump in the White House,

An Obama supporter explains how after you get to a certain age, such as whatever age you turn in 2016, you naturally become concerned with executive overreac...

Beginning on Jan. 1, prostitution by minors will be legal in California. Yes, you read that right. SB 1322 bars law enforcement from arresting sex workers who are under the age of 18 for soliciting or engaging in prostitution, or loitering with the intent to do so. So teenage girls (and boys) in California will soon be free to have sex in exchange for money without fear of arrest or prosecution. This terribly destructive legislation was written and passed by the progressive Democrats who control California's state government with a two-thirds supermajority. To their credit, they are sincere in their belief that decriminalizing underage prostitution is good public policy that will help victims of sex trafficking. Unfortunately, the reality is that the legalization of underage prostitution suffers from the fatal defect endemic to progressive-left policymaking: it ignores experience, common sense and most of all human nature — especially its darker side.

Eugenics is the closest historical parallel to the climatist pseudo-science.  Richard Lindzen explored similarities between both in a book chapter Science and Politics: Global Warming and Eugenics …

This clip is taken from the Joe Rogan Experience podcast #889 with Brian Redban (https://youtu.be/lA0atLQJ5Aw), also available for download via iTunes & Stit...

He’s the mayor of New York City ... right?

The new FBI/DHS report on Russian hacking contains nothing new.

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