ActRight

Molina Healthcare had done OK selling basic plans on the individual market. Until now.

President Trump complained at a White House press conference Thursday that he “inherited a mess” from President Obama, but nevertheless pledged to fulfill his campaign promises. “I’m here again to …

President Donald Trump answered a CNN reporter who asked why they're have been called fake news. President Donald Trump explains brilliantly exactly why CNN ...

WIDESPREAD suburban rioting spilled into central Paris last night as hundreds went on the rampage over the alleged rape of a young black man by French police.

Mick Mulvaney once proposed a 0.6 percent cut in defense spending. Off with his head.

Sorry Vox, truth hurts.

A shadowy Iranian general responsible for the deaths of nearly 500 Americans traveled to Moscow Wednesday to meet with high-ranking Russian officials -- a trip that violated multiple United Nations resolutions forbidding him from leaving his country, multiple western intelligence officials with direct knowledge of the visit told Fox News.

President Donald Trump discussed golfing with Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and criticized Barack Obama for preferring golfing with friends rather than w...

Democratic former governor is echoing his Republican successor’s call for a nonpartisan process to draw legislative districts.

Officials arrested Osama Nazzal for painting a swastika and “f*ck arabs” on an Arab family’s garage door. The Toledo Blade ...

A Christian street preacher was locked up and charged with a hate crime for quoting from the Book of Genesis.

President Trump will name Alexander Acosta, the dean of the Florida International University law school, as his new nominee to be secretary of Labor, an administration official said Thursday.

It's time for Petraeus to exit the public stage.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. At Reason, Peter Suderman confirms that the IRS will continue its Obama-era policy of accepting tax returns that lack vital information about their filers’ compliance with Obamacare. As a result, Suderman concludes, it will remain easy for “individuals to go without coverage while avoiding the penalty.” Thus will the baton be passed sideways, from one haughty emperor to another. Prima facie, the IRS has a strong case for its declaration. Contrary to initial reports, the move does not constitute a reversal of the agency’s policy but a continuation of the approach that it took during the Obama years. Per Suderman, the IRS was due this year to begin rejecting incomplete returns, but “reversed course on February 3.” As such, the status quo will obtain. What was good enough for Obama will be good enough for Trump, and the ACA will remain on the honor system. In addition, there is a material difference between weakening a reporting requirement and obviating the mandate completely. As Suderman confirms, “taxpayers are still required to pay the mandate penalty, if applicable,” and — crucially — any liability incurred behind the scenes will continue to accrue. Regardless of what he might write on his return, a taxpayer who is audited and found to have lacked health insurance will be punished according to the terms of the law. Nullification this is not. Indeed, when compared with the extraordinary latitude Obama claimed during his implementation of the ACA, one might argue that this barely registers on the scale. Time and time again, the previous administration ignored the clear text of the law in an attempt to limit its ill effects. As was argued repeatedly in these pages, that was not a legitimate use of executive power, but an extra-constitutional outrage that should have yielded far more opprobrium than it did. That we are only now hearing cries of “overreach” is irritating in the extreme. Nevertheless, “Obama did it too” does not constitute a defense of Trump, and that the move fails to destroy the mandate in toto does not render it tolerable. As it did during Obama’s tenure, the IRS is announcing its intention to ignore the lawbreaking that it has been charged with rooting out. This is not quotidian “discretion,” which is inevitably “case by case,” but an attempt to subvert a statute. The penalty’s merits to one side, this should vex any conservative who is concerned by the executive’s increasing tendency toward the non-enforcement of law. Would this policy fly in any other area? The Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibits felons, drug users, and the mentally ill from purchasing firearms. As a result, ATF form 4473 includes a series of questions designed to determine whether an applicant is disqualified from buying. If, at the scene of a purchase, an aspirant answers “yes” to any of those questions, the seller is required to halt the transaction. Were the ATF to decide that, henceforth, a buyer could submit his form without filling in those parts, it could offer all sorts of justifications in favor of its decision. It could contend, for example, that it was only altering the information-collecting process, not obviating the underlying law; that any felon, drug user, or mental patient caught with a gun was still liable to be punished; and that, given the number of guns being sold, it was simply not feasible for gun dealers to keep up with the paperwork. And, in a narrow sense, it would have a point. But so would those who argued that the move amounted to a blanket desire to decrease enforcement of the law. I consider a government that rewrites statutes on the fly to be a far bigger threat than a government that contrives ugly and unpopular programs. Which, of course, is exactly what it would be — just as was the IRS’s approach under Obama, and just as it will be under Trump. It is a serious transgression. As in my hypothetical, if a statute is causing problems for the agency charged with enforcing it, the correct course of action is for Congress to change the statute. I happen to agree with the critics of Obamacare who argue that using the IRS to police health-insurance compliance is insane. What I cannot agree with, however, is that this accords the executive a license to shirk its constitutional law-enforcement responsibilities. As it happens, one might argue that the IRS’s approach is worse under Trump than it was under Obama, both because the law is now old enough to be out of its “transition” period and because it looks as if the agency’s reversal was the product of an executive order. On January 20th of this year, Trump signed a missive instructing his cabinet departments to “take all actions consistent with law to minimize the unwarranted economic and regulatory burdens of [Obamacare], and prepare to afford the states more flexibility and control to create a more free and open health care market.” Can one doubt that the February 3rd decision was a reaction to this? Had the decision-makers at the IRS come back from a work retreat and concluded with a sigh that the mandate was unenforceable, the blame could be put squarely at the feet of Congress. But they didn’t. They read Trump’s words and canceled their plans for change. This not a policy objection. I loathe the mandate and the statute to which it belongs — an intrusive, abusive, and hubristic nightmare that elevates the federal government way above its station and destroys the proper relationship between the citizen and the state. If it is repealed, I shall rejoice as if it were the Fourth of July. But the rule of law is yet more important still, and I consider a government that rewrites statutes on the fly to be a far bigger threat than a government that contrives ugly and unpopular programs. It is caprice, not stupidity, which serves as the most potent enemy of freedom, and for years now the IRS has been capricious in the extreme. Until such time as Congress amends its mistake, the hideous statute it passed will remain on the books and in force. For now, it must be respected — or we will soon enough have no law at all. — Charles C. W. Cooke is the editor of National Review Online.

The time has arrived for …

Recognizing the past is brutal and complex.

“Seriously FUCK Twitter. Censors and bans conservatives for nothing, yet lets "Kill Mike Flynn" trend in the top 10 with only 11,600 tweets.”

A large number of non-citizen Hispanics, as many as 2 million, were illegally registered to vote in the U.S., according to a nationwide poll.

There were two major pieces to Donald Trump’s economic platform throughout the 2016 campaign: (1) An “America First” protectionism featuring threats of tariffs and stern warnings to American companies who would move jobs offshore; and (2) Tax reform that covered the standard supply-side gospel (corporate and marginal-income tax cuts, deregulation, etc.). Traditional Reaganite conservatives like me spent most of the campaign praying that if Trump won he would prioritize the supply-side plank of his platform at the expense of the protectionist plank. When Trump shockingly won the election, many pundits turned to his selection of cabinet appointments and economic advisers to get a feel for what a Trumpian economic agenda would look like. But from the very beginning of Trump’s campaign, using those around him to gauge his economic priorities has proven futile, because Team Trump has no philosophical harmony on matters of economic ideology. It should be noted that this is not in and of itself a bad thing. When good and effective economic policies are adopted by those in power, the impact on the economy is the same regardless of their ideological biases. With that said, our understanding of how the Trump administration aims to handle the economy would be greatly enhanced if the president’s team were bound by a consistent economic philosophy, and thus far it is not. Much effort has been devoted to analyzing the different world views and personalities of Trump World’s key players. But it is their economic ideologies that should grab our attention. It would appear that on economic policy, the new administration is being slowly divided into three camps: (1) The protectionist die-hards who most advocate the trade platform President Trump campaigned on. In this camp we find Commerce nominee Wilbur Ross, National Trade Council chairman-designate Peter Navarro, and Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s nominee for U.S. Trade Representative. (2) What we might objectively call the “technocrats” — those heavy on business experience but light on ideology. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, both Goldman Sachs alumni, fit this bill. 3) The traditional supply-siders, who have been under-represented in Trump’s appointments but maintain a presence through their original influence on the campaign’s platform, not to mention their compatibility with Vice President Mike Pence. These include Stephen Moore, Larry Kudlow, and Mark Calabria, whom Pence just appointed as his chief economist. It remains to be seen which of these three camps Trump will choose from if and when he does fill the vacant chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. But the meat of Trump’s tax plan remains rooted in supply-side orthodoxies and heavily endorsed by the Moore/Kudlow/Forbes camp of supply-side evangelists, which should give those of us whose sympathies lie in that camp hope. Where will things go from here, then? There is no doubt that Trump favors some version of tax reform, and I expect he will accomplish the lion’s share of what he has proposed in this vein, including a reduction in the corporate tax rate, a harmonization of how so-called pass-through entities and C corporations are taxed, a repatriation of American companies’ foreign profits, and a full and immediate expensing for business investment. There will no doubt be various details to fine tune, but these major substantive points seem to be agreeable to all camps within Team Trump. Beyond them, though, there is significant uncertainty about the administration’s economic agenda. The “border adjustment tax” is the huge question going into the tax-reform debate, with its protectionist tentacles appealing to the Ross and Navarro camp, its promised deficit reduction giving cover to many on Capitol Hill, and its revenue from Mexico satisfying Trump’s need to save face on his promise that our neighbors to the south would pay for his border wall. The supply-side camp rightly loathes the border adjustment tax, believing it at best to be an untested and unproven gamble on currency markets and at worst to be a tariff under a different name borne by consumers. Cohn, Mnuchin, and the other pragmatists in the middle camp have not yet chimed in on the proposal, but they will likely prove to be the voices President Trump listen to when deciding how to proceed. Perhaps the team Trump has assembled and will continue to assemble is designed as a composite of his own non-ideological and less-than-consistent economic thinking. He has frequently criticized the neo-Keynesian chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, for her accommodation of the stock market through low interest rates, but he has also said “I like low interest rates — I’m a low rate kind of guy.” A truly Hayekian understanding of price discovery has never struck me as a big part of Trump’s economic education. He consistently campaigned on an economic nationalism that he has apparently espoused since at least the mid 1980s. He campaigned on a platform of lower taxes too, but rarely with the same passion he showed for protectionism. The danger in piecemeal economic policy is that one agenda item may be at direct odds with another. How economic policy emerges from this unlikely mix of characters remains to be seen. The most likely scenario is that each camp focuses on the priorities most near and dear to it, foreclosing the possibility of a congruent, harmonized economic agenda in favor of piecemeal policymaking. The protectionism of Navarro and Ross may win the day with regards to foreign commerce and labor, even as the tax reformers (who are most likely to cross all camps) get what they want via supply-side cuts. Mnuchin and Cohn seem highly likely to accomplish much of their agenda of financial deregulation as well, with support from the business leaders on Trump’s economic advisory council. The danger in piecemeal economic policy is that one agenda item may be at direct odds with another. Agreeing to a border adjustment tax in exchange for a lower corporate-tax rate still threatens to make our tax policies less business-friendly. Allowing the camp of Keynesian infrastructure spenders to get their way if it means securing supply-side tax cuts on income and investment risks blowing out deficits, pushing interest rates higher, and giving the Left an excuse to deny the efficacy of lower tax rates. Promoting the freedom of a more efficient and deregulated market while at the same time implementing significant penalties and punishments on companies for cutting the best deals they can on labor and parts is incoherent and directly contradicts the basic market principles conservatives have cherished since 1776. A pragmatist such as Cohn, who is by all counts an unquestionably effective operator and organizational head, may very well provide the Left an easy target should Trumpian economic policy provide inequitable blessings to the classes of people Trump has campaigned on benefiting. Without a foundational ideology, how will Trump’s team design and implement much needed reforms of Dodd-Frank? If everybody’s favorite part of economics becomes the ingredient list for a comprehensive policy prescription, who pays the piper when low interest rates, stimulus spending, tax cuts, and deregulation all combine together in the absence of a larger vision? President Trump has thus far not served up any economic heresy that should truly worry free marketers who have studied at the feet of Hayek, Friedman, and Laffer. Indeed, even his anti-free-trade musings are, at least for now, mostly limited to tweets, threats, and self-serving meetings with American CEOs. There is plenty of reason to be optimistic and hopeful that the eventual meal we get will contain fiscally prudent, market-respecting, pro-growth ingredients to satisfy any Reaganite supply-sider. But there’d be even more reason for optimism if the people cooking the meal shared the same tastes. — David L. Bahnsen is a trustee of the National Review Institute and the founder and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group, a wealth-management firm in Newport Beach, Calif.

'Dr. Ben Carson deserves an up or down vote by the full Senate...'

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The abrupt Obama administration pre-election pullout from Iraq in 2011, along with the administration’s failed reset with Russia and the Iran deal, created a three-headed hydra in the Middle East. What makes the Middle East monster deadly is the interplay between the Iranian terrorist regime and its surrogates Hezbollah and the Assad regime; Russian president Vladimir Putin’s deployment of bombers into Syria and Iraq after a 40-year Russian hiatus in the region; and the medieval beheaders of the Islamic State. Add into the brew anti-Americanism, genocide, millions of refugees, global terrorism, and nuclear weapons. ISIS is simultaneously at war against the Assad regime, Iran and Iranian surrogates such Hezbollah, and Russian expeditionary forces. ISIS also seeks to energize terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe. Stranger still, ISIS almost surely is receiving stealth support from Sunni nations in the Middle East, some of them ostensibly American allies. This matrix gets even crazier. The authors of reset policy during the Obama administration are now furious at President Trump for even talking about what they tried for years: reaching out to Putin. Yet in the Middle East, Russia is doing us a favor by attacking ISIS, even as it does no favors in saving the genocidal Assad regime that has murdered tens of thousands of innocents — along with lots of ISIS terrorists as well. Iran is the sworn enemy of the United States, yet its foreign proxies attack our shared enemy, ISIS. The very troops who once blew up Americans in Iraq with shaped charges are for now de facto allies on the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields. Given that there is now no political support for surging thousands more U.S. troops into Iraq to reverse the disastrous Obama-administration pullout, there are three strategic choices in dealing with the Middle East hydra, all of them bad: One, hold our nose, and for now ally with Russia and Iran to destroy ISIS first. Then deal with the other rivalries later on. (The model is the American-Soviet alliance against Hitler that quickly morphed after 1945 into the Cold War.) Two, work with the least awful of the three, which is probably Russia. (The model might be Henry Kissinger’s outreach to Mao’s China that left Moscow and Beijing at odds and confused over the role of the United States.) Three, simply keep out of the mess and let them all diminish one another, despite the collateral damage to the innocent. (The model is the savage Iran–​Iraq war of 1980–​88 that weakened U.S. enemies Saddam Hussein and the Iranian theocracy, though it resulted in some 800,000 deaths.) In the short term, option three is ostensibly the least costly — at least to the U.S. But 2 million Syrian and Iraqi refugees have swarmed Europe, coinciding with an uptick in radical Islamic terrorism. Syria is becoming the new Balkans or Rwanda – and nonintervention would mean allowing the wasteland to spread, as hundreds of thousands more civilians die or flee westward. Which of the other two options is the least objectionable? After 2014, we quietly pursued option one by fighting in parallel fashion with Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Assad government against ISIS, the more dreadful enemy. Apparently, the Obama rationale was that when ISIS was destroyed, the U.S. could then come to terms with an energized and empowered Iran rather than with Russia. The jury is out on that strategy. The second option so far seems to be President Trump’s preference: a new détente with Putin in the hope that he will back off even a bit from his support of Iran and Hezbollah as we jointly fight ISIS. The flipping-Russia approach may seem unlikely: It assumes nuclear Russia is far less of a threat than soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. Would Putin really be willing to write off a half-century of Russian support for Syria? Would the mercurial Putin work with moderate Sunni regimes, Israel, and the U.S. to provide regional stability? Or can Putin see that the U.S. has mutual interests with Russia in opposing all Islamic extremism – both ISIS and Putin’s Iranian clients? Would the mercurial Putin work with moderate Sunni regimes, Israel, and the U.S. to provide regional stability? Can Trump persuade Putin that having Iran as yet another nuclear power near the borders of the old Soviet Union (in addition to Pakistan, India, North Korea, China, and NATO forces) is not in Russia’s interest? Would overlooking Putin’s autocracy be any worse than the Obama administration’s negotiations with a murderous Iran, the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism? What would be Putin’s steep price to abandon Assad, to ensure that Iran stays non-nuclear, and to finish the destruction of ISIS? Overlooking Russian autocracy? Keeping mum should Putin threaten autonomous nations on his border? These are bad choices. Trump, a political outsider, did not create the monster. Rather, he inherited from past U.S. leaders the three-headed hydra of the Middle East. — Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing [email protected]. © 2016 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The leaks that led to Michael Flynn’s resignation are just the beginning. Obama and his loyalists in and outside government are working to undermine Trump.

The Wall Street Journal's report that intelligence agencies are deliberately withholding information from the Trump administration is coming apart, too.

During WWII, blacks believed (and Martin Luther King, Jr. later proved) that dignity is both a shield and a sword. Dignity's disappearance hurts America.