ActRight

That one?s from Canada, and this is from an old mate in the US: ?What does the Australian press have to say about this?? These were their entire messages. What ?it? an…

The vote on Tuesday was believed to be the first in Senate history in which the vice president was called in to break a tie on a cabinet nomination.

We cannot be responsible hosts when our immigration and entrance system is in shambles.

Study suggests Kiwi men are sexually abused much more than official figures show.

?People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.? ? Max Noel, FBI (ret.) Recently, I had my head torn off by a b…

The leaders of the Democratic party, especially Senator Chuck Schumer, need to think a little more deeply about the precedent they are setting with their near-unanimous and purely partisan opposition to virtually all of President Donald Trump’s remaining Cabinet choices. The great strategic problem with the Democrats is that when they win, they think they’ll never lose again, and when they lose, they think they’ll never win again. When Barack Obama was in the White House, Democrats couldn’t get enough of his “pen and phone” strategy to run roughshod over the separation of powers; apparently, it never occurred to them that a Republican president might make use of these same tools. Now shut out of the White House and holding minority positions in both houses of Congress, Democrats are taking a scorched-earth approach to the president’s nominations; apparently, it hasn’t occurred to them that it is likely that a future Democratic president will face a Senate in which Republicans are a majority rather than a frustrated minority, and that it is entirely possible that a Republican opposition could do to most — or even all — of that future Democrat’s Cabinet picks what they did to Merrick Garland. Borking may be the Democrats’ invention, but the Republicans are better at it. On the merits, the Democrats do not have much of a case against Betsy DeVos, Tom Price, or Steven Mnuchin. The Democrats are making a dishonest argument, most intensely against DeVos, that being “qualified” for an office means agreeing with the Democrats on substantive policy questions. DeVos has spent most of her adult life working on education-reform projects, and the fact that these projects are based on policy positions at odds with those of most Democrats is not a question of qualification — it is a question of whether the president is entitled to nominate to the agencies officials who reflect his views. He is. Indeed, congressional Democrats — and Americans at large — should be breathing a sigh of relief over President Trump’s Cabinet choices and his nomination of Neil Gorsuch, a first-rate legal mind and jurist, to the Supreme Court. President Trump’s views and his approach to governance are, to put it gently, eccentric at times. It is not at all difficult to imagine his having made less impressive choices — or grossly inappropriate ones. (It is difficult to think of a plausible reason for Steve Bannon to be on the National Security Council.) Whatever one thinks of Betsy DeVos, Tom Price, or Steven Mnuchin or their ideas about public policy, there is not one of them who is not better qualified for the position to which he has been nominated than Barack Obama was for the presidency or Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose career mainly has consisted of being wife to a very successful politician, was to serve as secretary of state. And the Trump administration will benefit from the services of other excellent choices, such as Rick Perry and Jeff Sessions. A generation ago, Democrats thought they could destroy Robert Bork in an act of petty political score-settling against President Ronald Reagan and never pay a price for it. They have, and the country has, as an increasingly politicized federal bench has undermined both the prestige and the perceived legitimacy of the judiciary. If you are wondering why Americans haven’t exactly gasped at Trump’s ugly denunciation of a “so-called judge,” that is part of the explanation: We may believe that judges should be above politics, but who believes that they actually are? A generation ago, Democrats thought they could destroy Robert Bork in an act of petty political score-settling against President Ronald Reagan and never pay a price for it. The Democrats are stung by the treatment of Garland, and understandably so. But if they want to make Supreme Court nominations the hill to die on, they ought to appreciate the fact that no Republicans died on that hill in 2016. Trying the same thing while in the minority, however, is a different game entirely. De-escalating Supreme Court picks is probably too much to wish for. But if Democrats want to create the same dynamic for every Cabinet appointment, from secretary of education to secretary of health and human services, they ought to consider what that will mean for the country and for the effectiveness of American government. And if they lack the prudence and patriotism to give that serious thought, they might consider what it means for the Democratic party, too: At the moment, Republicans control the presidency, the Senate, the House, the great majority of state legislative chambers, and more than twice as many governorships as Democrats. Senator Schumer believes that taking a more hard-line stance against Republicans, especially on economic issues, will bring him and his party back to power. But given a choice between the hard-line position of Senator Bernie Sanders and the more accommodating position of Mrs. Clinton, Democratic primary voters turned their noses up at the Vermont socialist. If Senator Schumer thinks the key to a Democratic comeback in Florida or Michigan is out-Sandersing Sanders, he probably is making a miscalculation. That he apparently intends to attempt this nifty trick while Democrat-aligned rioters are firebombing buildings at Berkeley and rioting in Washington suggests that he is bent on the kind of bold Democratic thinking that turned Richard Nixon from a 32-state winner in 1968 to a 49-state winner in 1972. No one was more dismayed to see the Republicans nominate Donald Trump than I, and no one was more surprised to see Trump win the election. But win the election he did, and as president of these United States he is entitled to name a Cabinet that comports with his views and his goals. If Senate Democrats want to transform that into yet another bare-knuckled partisan brawl, then they ought to at least consider the possibility that it is a fight they are going to lose in 2017 — and the next time the president has a “D” next to his name. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.

One of the painful realities of our time is that most public schools in most low-income, inner-city neighborhoods produce educational outcomes that are far below the outcomes in other neighborhoods and especially in more affluent neighborhoods. Attempts to assign blame are too numerous to name, much…

Group's support of 'American Exceptionalism' also cited as reason for denial.

Parody of 84 Lumber's Super Bowl commercial "The Journey Begins" which is nothing more than Liberal propaganda to promote open borders and to denounce Presid...

Swamping Congress with phone calls and engaging at town halls works

Hillary’s ba-ack! Like Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes, the former Secretary of State won’t just go away. She pops up every so often, smiling ghoulishly into camera, murmuring, “Miss Me?”

The UCF “Knights for Socialism” group will teach left-wing students how to “BASH THE FASH” with a “Leftist Fight Club” open to everyone but Republicans.

California State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De Léon said that “half his family” was in the country illegally and using false documents.

An attempt at looking at the some of the reasons I can identify behind the Trump victory and the British vote for Brexit. What fuelled this? Where are its ro...

No more excuses.

The White House released a list of 78 terror attacks around the world on Monday, saying most of them did not get sufficient attention from the media.

California Democrat State Senate Leader: ‘Half My Family’ Here Illegally California Democrat, Kevin de León, recently admitted that half of his ...

The endgame of hijab culture in Islam is totalitarian. For all their talk of ‘renegades,’ Playboy and The Huffington Post are hawking the banal conformity of this age: Anything but Western Christendom.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to revive U.S. coal production and bring back thousands of jobs. But it’s basic economics and international concern about climate change that have crushed the American coal industry, not environmental regulations.

Ronald Reagan, an actor-turned-politician and the 40th president of the United States, would have turned 106 on Monday. A look at his life and legacy in photos.

A UC-Berkeley mob pepper-sprayed a woman, injured six people, started fires, and destroyed buildings all to prevent a speaker from speaking.

Ronald Reagan was born Feb 6, 1911. A graduate of Eureka College, Illinois, 1932, he worked as a life guard and then announced for radio stations in Iowa. He became a sports announcer for Chicago Cubs baseball games and traveled with the team. While with the Cubs in California, Ronald Reagan auditioned with Warner Brothers, […]

Appearances are deceiving, and President Trump, although the launch of the 90-day travel ban was botched, cannot lose on the issue. His opponents, in the U.S. and the world, have absurdly overreacted; an arriving onlooker would imagine that the president had caused great loss of life in some frightful act of malice or negligence. He will almost certainly be upheld legally eventually, given the immigration legislation from 1952 and the constitutional powers of the president, which his six immediate predecessors have used. His abiding by the legal processes, if it does lead to judicial legitimization, will severely undercut his opponents. Even if he is ultimately unsuccessful, he has made the gesture, which the apparent majority of Americans support as a national-security measure. His opponents will bear the responsibility if there are any incidents that could arguably have been avoided if his measure had not been challenged. Senator Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) and others will regret their fatuous histrionics (“The statue of Liberty is weeping,” as Schumer himself pretended to do). The whole escapade reeks of the sleazy Left, which, in the Congress, the media, academia, and the entertainment world, is almost all that is left of the fierce opposition to Trump. Jay Inslee, the smug, verbose, banal governor of Washington state, who was filibustering interviewers last week, went judge-shopping to get this silly stay order on Trump’s 90-day partial-entry ban. He found the inane, posturing rogue judge James Robart — a George W. Bush appointee, which the local Democrats trumpet as proof of his impartiality — who could be relied upon to produce a provokingly hostile judgment. Robart decreed that his ruling covered the entire country — quite a reach for a federal district judge. The president should not have referred to Robart as a “so-called judge,” but the whole business is a frame-up. The Democrats must have had in the back of their minds the hope that Trump would impetuously ignore Robart’s order, as Andrew Jackson famously invited Chief Justice Marshall to try to enforce a decision of his Supreme Court. This would have enabled them to start already on the line they are bursting with impatience to raise — that this was grounds for impeachment. This too would be nonsense, but it would help them to ratchet up the righteous obstruction and start agitating for the complete immobilization of this unconstitutional billionaire megalomaniac who was assaulting constitutional propriety. Instead, Trump has been more compliant than necessary, and gone through the charade of appealing to the notoriously flaky and leftist Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, and will probably have to go on to the Supreme Court, which could entangle this issue with the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy on that court. Trump will get the political credit for trying to safeguard the country whether he is sustained or not, but can be almost a bystander between the raving Democrats and a serious Court when the issue arrives at one. The Democrats have flogged to death the fact that Robart was a George W. Bush appointee. Once in a life sinecure, judges often evolve unpredictably. Gerald Ford named John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court as a conservative, and he eventually became one of the most left-wing judges in the Court’s history, making William O. Douglas seem like “Hanging Judge” Jeffreys in comparison. Richard Nixon had a similar experience with Harry Blackmun, and John F. Kennedy named Byron White to the high court as a liberal and he proved quite conservative. Robart has metamorphosed into another northwestern liberal, seizing most opportunities to utter rabble-rousing left-wing battle cries. Trump’s enemies are reduced to screaming like banshees at everything the president does. The effort to represent the firing of former deputy attorney general Sally Yates for rank insubordination as a frightful injustice fizzled. The country yawned and these events are piling up as Trump charges through the opening days of his presidency. They have taken the bait again on the comment that the U.S. is not always innocent. Almost no story lasts more than a day or two, as Trump overwhelms the country with publicity that is given with animus by most of the media but that elevates him in stature even farther above his opponents than the natural preeminence presidents normally enjoy.Those who wish Trump well should be reassured that he has played this astutely, after an over-hasty launch. He calculatedly incited the idiocies of Schumer and many others and has virtuously been a pillar of legal process since. His losses of temper and lapses of civility are sometimes signs of his large ego, sometimes of business method exercised for the first time from the presidency, but they are also sometimes cunning tactics to exploit the weakness and stupidity of the Democratic leadership and their brain-dead claque in Hollywood and most of the media. The Democrats are becoming identified with the extreme left, like the 30 or so ninja-like vandals who trashed part of the Berkeley campus and prevented a conservative gay speaker from appearing (as he had been engaged to do by the campus Republican association), and like the obnoxious women shouting obscenities at the police at the Greenwich Village campus of New York University. Obstructing the confirmation of his Cabinet nominees is churlish and will not succeed. The facts are that Trump is almost certain to produce a superior health-care system than the shambles of Obamacare, and he has slowed down the process to avoid the chaos of repealing one system before the next is in place. He is almost certain to produce tax cuts for the middle and working classes. It is too early to say how his efforts to repatriate capital accumulations and jobs will go, but, because they are based on incentive economics, they are unlikely to be fruitless. And the president is picking his opponents astutely. He will eat some of Wall Street’s free fiscal lunch, but give with the other hand as he dismantles the moronic regulatory excess of Sarbanes-Oxley. A group of bankers was in to see him last week, including former ostentatious Democrat Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, who was rewarded for his fervent support of Obama with a $13 billion fine over his handling of the (government-created) mortgage bubble. Dimon is now a Trump supporter, although Trump publicly criticized him for caving to the Justice Department without a fight. The surest financial barometer of all of what very big, very smart money thinks is the revelation that that other great Democrat, Warren Buffett, has invested $12 billion in the U.S. economy since Election Day. After only two working weeks as president, Trump is already chipping away at blocs of Democratic support, in the limousine-liberal business community and with selected labor unions, including some he knew from his career working with the rough building-trade unions across the country. He has gone a long way to rallying the conservatives, including many intellectual conservatives, by nominating Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court in an elegant ceremony. As noted above, his confirmation (he was unanimously confirmed by the Senate to his current position as a federal appeals-court judge) might be necessary to get final approval of Trump’s travel ban, but the Democratic appointees on the Supreme Court are a great deal more substantial as jurists than the poltroon who gained his 15 minutes of world fame by starting this controversy. Donald Trump is well embarked on his revolution, and likely to be the most important president since Reagan. It need hardly be emphasized that the Obama policy of appeasement of Iran, and of consistent diplomatic defeat at the hands of puny Russia (which has displaced the U.S. in the Middle East with 50 warplanes and only a few battalions of troops), is receiving the ultimate reset. At this point, it appears likely that the Iranian theocracy, intoxicated with the smashing victory it won with the nuclear deal, will continue to provoke Trump with missile test-firings and promotion of the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza and Lebanon. This president will not hesitate to use overwhelming American domination of the skies to teach the ayatollahs a painful lesson, and everyone from Israel to Russia to Saudi Arabia will applaud him, as will his countrymen.  Two weeks are a very brief incumbency, but so far, Trump is building his base and assisting the Democrats into a cul de sac with the loonies of the far left, by presenting them with phantom targets — the appearance of vulnerability because of the calculated and flippant bombast with which he proposes intelligent and vote-winning policies and the installation of high-quality people in senior positions. It is difficult now to remember when he was routinely referred to as an exploiter and disparager of women, a racist, and a television egomaniac who could not run a two-car funeral. Also almost inaudible is the paranoid foolishness about “alt-right” extremism. It has been a grating performance at times, but a clever one, and it is impossible to feel any warmth for Schumer. It would be impossible for the Democrats to find a Senate leader more nauseating than Harry Reid, but Schumer is no Lyndon Johnson or Alben Barkley, or even Robert Byrd or George Mitchell. Donald Trump is well embarked on his revolution, and likely to be the most important president since Reagan. The intervening regimes (the OBushtons) all seem, as the last of those families, Hillary Clinton, used to say, “so yesterday.” In urgent times in American history, the presidential office seeks the man. It has now sought a septuagenarian billionaire with an uncommonly assertive manner and no direct political or armed-forces experience, one who appalls many, was scorned by almost all commentators, and continues to skate rings around his doubters and to lead in the right direction at an exhilarating velocity. For such a deliverance from the disasters of the last 20 years, America and the world can live with the loss of a few style points. — Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership.

With anti-Trumpers regularly taking to the streets, Senate Democrats apparently opted to get in on the “resistance” action with a rare all-night floor talkathon in protest of Betsy DeVos, the presi…

Elizabeth Poe, who owns a yarn store in Tennessee, isn't backing down despite getting harassed for her decision not to sell yarn to make 'pussyhats.'