ActRight

ICE officials are continuing to defend against media which continues to mischaracterize the round-up of criminal aliens.

Others have fallen in the rankings

Credit where credit is due: Trump has done more to preserve the full CIA Torture Report than Obama ever did. On his way out the door, the DOJ fought on his behalf in federal court, arguing against an order to deposit the full report with the court...

Is this how low the left will stoop to delegitimize Donald Trump? Apparently so. They're now roping kids into the equation and trying to brainwash them. In Staten Island, NJ a teacher is now under fire for putting a question about Donald Trump in a homework assignment for their students. But, bei

Monday is Presidents’ Day, a.k.a. Washington’s Birthday (federally), a.k.a. Washington and Lincoln Day (Colorado, Ohio, Utah), a.k.a. Washington and Jefferson’s Birthday (Alabama), a.k.a. Washington and Daisy Gatson Bates Day (seriously, Arkansas?), a.k.a. another excuse for the sort of underemployed worthless miscreants who get federal holidays off to enjoy another three-day weekend while contemplating the absolute historical and epoch-defining splendor of an august office held by the likes of Andrew Johnson, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson’s wife, William Jefferson Clinton’s humidor, and Donald J. Trump. Worst. Holiday. Ever. Oh, it started off with the best of intentions: a national commemoration of George Washington’s life on his birthday. George Washington was a natural aristocrat, a man of impeccable probity and great personal courage, whose dignity and humility after kicking King George in the pants set a new standard not for American political leaders but for political leaders per se. When Washington said he intended to return to his farm rather than establish himself as a lord in the new dominion he had wrested away from the British Empire, King George famously declared: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” He did just that, resigning as commander in chief and going home to Virginia. The new republic was not yet done with him, though, and he returned to serve as president before returning to the farm for good. Washington was, as David Boaz put it in his excellent essay of that title, “the man who would not be king.” He would not accept a title or an honorific, and established the excellent republican practice of referring to the chief executive simply as “Mr. President.” George Washington did not need the presidency — the presidency needed him. RELATED: General Washington’s Standard There have been some great men and some good men (and a few who were both) in the White House since then: Jefferson, Lincoln, Coolidge, Eisenhower, Reagan. Some of them took Washington’s example to heart: Lincoln was incapable of personal grandiosity, Coolidge eschewed pomp and ceremony, and Eisenhower insisted that he be laid out in the plain pine box of an ordinary soldier, wearing a field jacket with no medals or ribbons on it. Reagan had a touch too much Hollywood in him — perhaps he was only overcompensating for the gloom of the Johnson-Nixon-(Ford)-Carter years — and elevated the showmanship of the office to an unwelcome level. Among other things, he popularized the lamentable practice of having the president, who is a civilian rather than a uniformed military officer, returning salutes. (Ike, who knew better, did it, too.) But in many ways the ceremonial aspect of the modern presidency stems from the horribly abbreviated career of John Kennedy, whose political martyrdom invited a more Catholic approach to the public rites. The president is not the personification of our national ideals and values. The presidency today is a grotesquerie. It is a temporary kingship without the benefit of blood or honor or antiquity, which is to say a combination of the worst aspects of monarchy with the worst aspects of democracy, a kind of inverted Norway. (King Olav V, the “folkekonge,” was famous for using public transit.) It is steeped in imperial ceremony, from the risible and unworthy monkey show that is the State of the Union address to the motorcades and Air Force One to the elevation of the first lady (or, increasingly, “First Lady”) to the position of royal consort; our chief magistracy gives the impression of being about five minutes away from purple robes, if not togas. (There is in Philadelphia a wonderful statue of Ben Franklin in a toga, which one can sort of imagine so long as one also imagines him chugging beer with the wild boys in Tau Delta Chi.) And what kind of god-emperor does not have a national day set aside for worshiping him and his kind? This is nuts. The president of the United States is the chief officer of the federal bureaucracy, the head of one branch of a government that has three co-equal branches. Strictly speaking, it is not given to him even to make law, but only to see to the enforcement of the laws passed by Congress (and maybe to veto one here and there) and to appoint appropriate people, like the former CEO of Carl’s Jr., to high federal offices. In the legislative branch, the House of Representatives is the accelerator and the Senate is the brake; the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are pretty much all brake; the presidency is a kind of hybrid, sometimes pressing for needful reform and action, sometimes standing in Congress’s way when it is rash or overly ambitious. The architecture of our constitutional order is a complicated and delicate balance. RELATED: Washington’s Farewell Address Forsaw the Danger of Factions But the president is not the tribune of the plebs. He is not a sacred person or the holder of a sacred office. He is neither pontifex nor imperator. He is not the spiritual distillation of the republic or the personification of our national ideals and values. (Thank God Almighty.) He is not even primus inter pares like the chief justice of the Supreme Court or the Patriarch of Constantinople. He is the commander in chief in time of war (which, since we have abandoned the advice of Washington and Eisenhower, is all of the time, now) and the chief administrator of the federal bureaucracy. That is it. He is not a ruler. But men demand to be ruled, and they will find themselves a king even when there is none. (Consider all of the hilarious and self-abasing celebration of Donald Trump as an “alpha male” among his admirers, an exercise in chimpanzee sociology if ever there were one.) But they must convince themselves that they are being ruled by a special sort of man; in ancient times, that was the function of the hereditary character of monarchies. In our times, it is reinforced through civic religion, including the dopey annual exercise that is Presidents’ Day. Abolish it. Mondays are for working. – Kevin D. Williamson is NRO’s roving correspondent.

The catastrophic scenario of a sudden breach at California's second-largest water reservoir, outlined between 2010 and 2012 in online archives of federal dam regulators, is a different and far graver situation than the concern that prompted sudden evacuation orders Sunday for 188,000 downstream residents. In an email Thursday, state water agency spokesman Ed Wilson said that despite the repeated back-and-forth correspondence between state and federal officials about reducing detection and response times in a sudden dam failure, the scenario was "hypothetical" and "not how dams typically fail in real life." Local officials, residents and a Florida-based evacuation expert said the federal-state discussion highlights the steps that the state Department of Water Resources and others still should take to improve warning and escape for people downstream. Absent "significant" advance warning, emergency responders instead would likely withdraw to safer ground and prepare for victims, said the same letter by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees safety of hydroelectric dams, in a summary of the state's conclusions. A May 2013 hazards-assessment report by Butte County estimates 8,735 people live in a so-called inundation zone in Oroville that would likely be under water in the event of a sudden rupture at the dam, which is five miles from the vulnerable area in Oroville. Since the 1990s, Oroville and other communities in Butte County have asked the state for the $300 million it would take to widen the full route of a key highway out of the county from two lanes to four, said Jon Clark, head of the Butte County Association of Governments.

Authorities in Virginia charged two illegal alien suspects with murder and ten suspects for gang participation and abduction.

"Sanctuary cities are racist" cried an African American woman at a town hall meeting at the City of Cudahy California where a vote was held to establish sanc...

CNN reporter Ana Navarro wrongly predicted Donald Trump would receive less than 20% of the hispanic vote. Donald Trump ended up with 29%, surpassing Mitt Rom...

Trey Gowdy told Fox News' Martha MacCallum Tuesday that Nancy Pelosi, Elijah Cummings and the rest of the House Democratic caucus took "an eight-year long vacation from doing oversight on the execut

Good fences

President Trump trashed the liberal media Thursday – and not just for fabricating “fake news.”In a 77 minute speech, Trump accused the media of publishing “fake news” 17 times – about once every four minutes. But, he also blamed the media’s fake news on their “hatred” of him on eight different occasions.

This email was disclosed the same day the anti-Trump universe was spinning over Michael Flynn’s resignation as President Trump’s national security advisor.

And what were Flynn's offenses?

A White House aide confirmed to DailyMail.com Friday morning that the idea 'has been discussed,' but wouldn't say whether a plan has been formalized or recommended to the president.

A Senate hearing to “modernise the Endangered Species Act” unfolded Wednesday just as supporters of the law had feared, with round after round of criticism from Republican lawmakers who said the federal effort to keep species from going extinct encroaches on states’ rights, is unfair to landowners and stymies efforts by mining companies to extract resources and create jobs.

CBS's Face the Nation host John Dickerson was critical of President Donald Trump's haranguing of the press during a Thursday press conference, but told

an interactive guide to alternative voting systems

For the first time since acquiring the collection in 2001, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives is hosting, free-of-charge, full-length Firing Line videos online through its digital collections website and YouTube channel. With a roster of guests including Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, Groucho Marx, Tom Wolfe, Jack Kerouac, Woodward and Bernstein, Barry Goldwater, Joan Baez, Hugh Hefner, and others, Firing Line serves as one of the most important and complete records of political and cultural movements in twentieth-century America.

Judge Jeanine Pirro weighed in this morning on President Donald Trump's epic news conference and responded to the recent leaks of intelligence on the Trump campaign's Russia contacts.

Student demands for censorship get a lot of coverage.

Flynn’s calls with the Russian ambassador broke no laws. So why did he lie about them?

President Donald Trump appeared alongside lawmakers and coal miners Thursday, officially undoing an Obama administration regulation that he called a "job-killer."

An elite Upper East Side private school’s annual ice-skating party at Trump Wollman Rink in Central Park had to be canceled after parents refused to send their kids in protest of the president, sources said.

"Not Jesus Christ. Jesus the immigrant."