ActRight

Substance and style -- it's easy to get them confused or mistake one for the other. And they're never entirely unconnected, though exactly how much so is a matter of debate. That's especially true...

Just Strtwhtmale trying to help the kids. These parents are out of control and need to be stopped. follow me on twitter www.twitter.com/strtwhtmale chipmunks...

SUPPORT JOURNALISM. DONATE AT PATREON.COM/TIMCAST We met with a Muslim, Mohammed, in Ramels Vag a neighborhood in Malmo. Ramels Vag is considered one of the ...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents say that under the new Trump administration, they've been empowered to carry out their jobs, instead of being punished for insubordination and told not to ar

To avoid creating sympathy for France's far-right presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, we need to hear the substantive reasons to oppose her. Here are six reasons to reject Marine Le Pen other than 'because of racism.'

Once again, the anti-Trump mob have attacked peaceful Trump supporters. When will the left step up and disavow this violent behavior? Will they?

Ben Stein: Media 'Looking for a Scandal' Every Day with Trump to Do to Him What They Did to Nixon

Trumpism has divided the conservative blogosphere and laid waste to formerly reputable outlets.

The New York Times’s (NYT) executive editor framed the Gray Lady as an objective and non-partisan news outlet during an appearance on CNN’s Reliable Sources.  

Liberals on social media went ballistic after the Quran, the sacred text of Islam, was quoted during an award acceptance speech at Sunday night's Oscars. The “woke” moment was celebrated by so-called white “progressives” who failed to see the irony in praising a 7th century Islamic religious text.

The big news this week seems to be that the Mexican government is not happy with President Trump’s border control plans. That headline comes on the heels of the news that the sun is hot. Imagine that!

Switch on the subtitles by clicking on "CC" on the lower right screen corner. From http://livsstil.tv2.dk/2015-05-06-ibi-pippi-efter-koensskifte-derfor-vil-j...

A week after she protested against the “Islamization” of Canada outside of Masjid Toronto Mosque, Sandra Solomon, an ex-Muslim who became a human rights act

LIKE | COMMENT | SUBSCRIBE Ben Stein Destroys CNN & Defends Trump On-Air - "The MSM Is An Unelected Aristocracy" donald, trump, 2016, 2017, election, race, d...

Sunday’s State of the Union on CNN saw former Pennsylvania senator and Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum describe himself as aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) on the issue of international trade.  

‘Feminists’ are again calling for the government to do more to tackle ‘Maternity Discrimination’ after The Commons Women and Equalities Committee claimed 54,000 woman have been forced out of their …

In 1960, when John Kennedy was elected president, America’s population was 180 million and it had approximately 1.8 million federal bureaucrats (not counting uniformed military personnel and postal workers). Fifty-seven years later, with seven new Cabinet agencies, and myriad new sub-Cabinet agencies (e.g., the Environmental Protection Agency), and a slew of matters on the federal policy agenda that were virtually absent in 1960 (health-care insurance, primary- and secondary-school quality, crime, drug abuse, campaign finance, gun control, occupational safety, etc.), and with a population of 324 million, there are only about 2 million federal bureaucrats.      So, since 1960, federal spending, adjusted for inflation, has quintupled and federal undertakings have multiplied like dandelions, but the federal civilian workforce has expanded only negligibly, to approximately what it was when Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952. Does this mean that “big government” is not really big? And that by doing much more with not many more employees it has accomplished prodigies of per-worker productivity? John J. DiIulio Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania and the Brookings Institution, says: Hardly. In his 2014 book “Bring Back the Bureaucrats,” he argued that because the public is, at least philosophically, against “big government,” government has prudently become stealthy about how it becomes ever bigger. In a new Brookings paper, he demonstrates that government expands by indirection, using three kinds of “administrative proxies” — state and local government, for-profit businesses, and nonprofit organizations. Since 1960, the number of state- and local-government employees has tripled to more than 18 million, a growth driven by federal money: Between the early 1960s and early 2010s, the inflation-adjusted value of federal grants for the states increased more than tenfold. For example, the EPA has fewer than 20,000 employees, but 90 percent of EPA programs are completely administered by thousands of state-government employees, largely funded by Washington. A quarter of the federal budget is administered by the fewer than 5,000 employees of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — and by the states, at least half of whose administrative costs are paid by CMS. Various federal crime and homeland security bills help fund local police departments. “By conservative estimates,” Dilulio writes, “there are about 3 million state- and local-government workers” — about 50 percent more than the number of federal workers — “funded via federal grants and contracts.” Then there are for-profit contractors, used, Dilulio says, “by every federal department, bureau and agency.” For almost a decade, the Defense Department’s full-time equivalent of 700,000 to 800,000 civilian workers were supplemented by the full-time equivalent of 620,000 to 770,000 for-profit contract employees. “During the first Gulf War in 1991,” Dilulio says, “American soldiers outnumbered private contractors in the region by about 60-to-1; but, by 2006, there were nearly as many private contractors as soldiers in Iraq — about 100,000 contract employees, not counting subcontractor employees, versus 140,000 troops.” Today, the government spends more (about $350 billion) on defense contractors than on all official federal bureaucrats ($250 billion). Finally, “employment in the tax-exempt or independent sector more than doubled between 1977 and 2012 to more than 11 million.” Approximately a third of the revenues to nonprofits (e.g., Planned Parenthood) flow in one way or another from government. “If,” Dilulio calculates, “only one-fifth of the 11 million nonprofit sector employees owe their jobs to federal or intergovernmental grant, contract or fee funding, that’s 2.2 million workers” — slightly more than the official federal workforce. Today’s government is indeed big (3.5 times bigger than five and a half decades ago), but dispersed to disguise its size. To which add the estimated 7.5 million for-profit contractors. Plus the conservative estimate of 3 million federally funded employees of state and local governments. To this total of more than 12 million, add the approximately 2 million actual federal employees. This 14 million is about 10 million more than the estimated 4 million federal employees and contractors during the Eisenhower administration. So, today’s government is indeed big (3.5 times bigger than five and a half decades ago), but dispersed to disguise its size. This government is, Dilulio says, “both debt-financed and proxy-administered.” It spends more just on Medicare benefits than on the official federal civilian workforce, and this is just a fraction of the de facto federal workforce. Many Americans are rhetorically conservative but behaviorally liberal. So, they are given government that is not limited but overleveraged — debt-financed, meaning partially paid for by future generations — and administered by proxies. The government/for-profit contractor/non-profit complex consumes 40 percent of GDP. Just don’t upset anyone by calling it “big government.” — George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. © 2017 Washington Post Writers Group

Even more intrusive, however, are the more than 400 federal agencies created by Congress that issue thousands of regulations controlling every aspect of our lives, from our air and water to our farms

I have lost touch with my friend Mark, and, assuming he is alive, it will be some work to track him down, because he is periodically homeless or semi-homeless. My first impression was that his economic condition was mainly the result of his having been for many years a pretty good addict and a pretty poor motorcyclist, a combination that had predictable neurological consequences. I never knew Mark “before” — there is something in such men as Mark suggesting an irrevocably bifurcated life — but the better I got to know him, the more I came to believe that he probably had been much the same man, but functional, or at least functional enough. Like many people with mental problems, Mark tended to be repetitious. His rants were as well-rehearsed as any stand-up comedy routine. “My dear, sweet mother said I was a rebel, a troublemaker, and a hoodlum,” he would say. “But she was wrong. I ain’t no hoodlum!” Mark’s conception of himself as a rebel was central to his outlook on life, and it was reinforced by the amusing decision of the local social-services agency to put him into a subsidized apartment in a narrow strip of commercial and retail properties abutting two of the wealthiest communities in one of the wealthiest municipalities in the United States. He reveled in the fact that his mere presence on the street was sufficient to épater le bourgeois. Part of it was an act, but not all of it. If you saw him on the street and called his name, he’d spin around on you, fists balled up, half enraged and half afraid, ready to fight, until he recognized you, which could sometimes take a few seconds longer than it should have. But then he was all smiles and wry commentary on the passers-by and the police. He’d gesture at passing police cars (he lived about two blocks from the police station) and say, “They all know me,” which was true. We talked about motorcycles and his longing to ride again, and he’d explain to me all the reasons why that was never, ever going to happen. “They’d lock me up,” he’d say darkly, which also was true. He’d sometimes ask to borrow mine, and I’d explain to him all the reasons why that was never, ever going to happen. “You’re a maniac.” This was an approved line of argument. “That’s right!” he’d thunder. Maniac was fine, but he objected to lunatic. He didn’t like bum very much, either, but he was a realist. Mark was in his fifties at the time, and was still angry at his parents, his teachers, his family, society, and others he thought had failed him. He curated his resentments with the care of a sixth-century monastic archivist. I was in my thirties at the time and resolved to stop doing that. (I am still working on it.) The inability to move on from adolescent resentments is a strangely prominent condition among American men, as indeed is the inability to move on from adolescence in general. That is one of the unhappy consequences of the low-stakes character of American middle-class life, by which I mean the fact that the difference between being in the 50th percentile and being in the 55th percentile of whatever index of socioeconomic status you think most relevant is not that consequential in terms of one’s real standard of living. The price of being a little bit of a slacker is not very high in the United States, though the rewards for success can be staggering. Life is pretty comfortable, and you can take six years to finish your bachelor’s degree in art history while working at Starbucks, and it isn’t miserable. A 20-year-old man with adequate shelter, cheap food, computer games, weed, and a girlfriend is apt to be pretty content. Necessity used to be what forced us to grow up. That was the stick, and sex was the carrot, and between the two of them young men were forced/inspired to get off their asses, go to work, and start families of their own from time immemorial until the day before yesterday. A 20-year-old man with adequate shelter, cheap food, computer games, weed, and a girlfriend is apt to be pretty content. Some of them understand that there is more to life than that, but some do not. David Foster Wallace’s great terror in Infinite Jest was entertainment so engrossing that those consuming it simply stopped doing anything else. (Is it necessary to issue a spoiler alert for a 1,000-page novel that’s 20 years old? Well, spoiler alert: It’s Québécois separatists.) He revisited the idea later in “Datum Centurio,” which is one of the all-time great short stories, one that is written in the form of a dictionary entry from the future for the word “date.” Over the course of the definition (and the inevitable footnotes), we learn that pornography has become so immersive in the future that conventional sexual behavior has been restricted entirely to procreation. The final footnote reads: “Cf. Catholic dogma, perverse vindication of.” As our collective standard of living gets higher, the cost of individual failure gets lower. This is, we should appreciate, a good thing, especially for people like Mark, who sometimes fall right over the edge of adult life. (I can’t help but think of Wallace again here and his bitterly ironic treatment of a porn outlet called “Adult World.”) The old men who sit in chairs and rail about how peace and prosperity are making us soft and what we really need is a “good war” — as if there were such a thing — are wrong, as they always have been. But it is the case that the stakes of life are higher in India and China, where the difference of a few points on a test or a few degrees of scholastic prestige can have radical consequences on one’s life. The stakes are higher in a different way in Karachi or Lagos. Tyler Cowen considers some of this in his new book, The Complacent Class, in which he argues (in the words of Walter Russell Meade’s review) that “the apparent stability of American society . . . is an illusion: behind the placid façade, technological change and global competition have combined with domestic discontent to bring forth a new age of disruption.” That seems to me likely to be true, though I have no idea what “disruption” is going to look like, and I do not think anybody else really does, either. I suspect it is going to be very hard on the 40-year-old teenagers among us. But we should be thoughtful in our judgment of them. It isn’t that they have got over on us and gained some sort of unfair access to a life of ease. Mark’s life did not look easy to me, no matter how late he slept. Extended adolescence does not represent something that has been gained, but something that has been lost. That’s more obvious in some men than in others, but the principle is universal. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.

Philip Bilden is stepping aside

Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who pretended to be African-American in order to make inroads with the black activist community, may soon be on the streets.  Once the head of the NAACP branch in Spokane, Washington, the 39-year-old is now unemployed and on food stamps. She expects to be homeless soon, according to Fox News.

They're wealthy and they are among the biggest age groups to fill movie theaters, but many seniors have had it with Hollywood's political hate speech and they are threatening a boycott if the Oscars, as expected, turn into a Trump bashing affair Sunday. Taking aim at the star-studded event and host Jimmy Kimmel, a group that represents conservative seniors, which dubs itself the alternative to AARP, on Thursday issued the warning with 12 examples of the hate spewed by stars expected to walk the red carpet.

After little more than a month in office, President Trump’s sweeping tax-cutting reforms have had a huge impact on the economy, both here and abroad.

Tim Pool bravely traveled into Sweden to accurately report on what mass migration with little integration did to the once peaceful and safe country. Twitter:...