ActRight

States can and should help end Obamacare whether Congress does their job, or not.

Darul Hadis Latifiah, an all boys school in east London, was branded inadequate across all areas, as the school watchdog concluded pupils were 'not prepared for life in modern Britain'.

The role of teachers is to counter populism, and push students towards “progressive rebellion”, according to a piece in this week’s TES.

By Ken Meyer | MediaiteAfter famously depicting Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and many others, Meryl Streep can officially add Donald Trump to her acting repertoire.More of Meryl

Last night, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association gathered to give awards to people in Hollywood in front of other people from Hollywood — and it was the perfect example of the kind of self-serving ego-stroking trash that is going to keep these wannabe political activists from ever having any influence over anyone outside of their bubble. First of all, there’s the fact that La La Land – a movie about Hollywood — won more Golden Globes than any other movie in the history of the Golden Globes. Sure, it was probably a good movie (I wouldn’t know, I watch only the news, true-crime TV, and ’90s Adam Sandler movies) but the fact that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was apparently more enchanted with a movie about themselves than any other film ever is a story almost too perfect to write. And then there was Meryl Streep’s speech — and I’m not just talking about her Donald Trump comments, either. Yes, those comments certainly played a role in pissing people off, and I will get to them later, but focusing on those alone would ignore just how terribly self-indulgent and ignorant so much of the rest of it was. Streep actually had the nerve and naiveté to begin her speech by whining about how Hollywood is one of “the most vilified segments in American society right now” — all while wearing a gown that probably costs more than all of the clothing in an average American’s closet combined. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to be rich and miserable; what I am saying is if I am ever worth tens of millions of dollars and I still use my time in a public speech to complain about how victimized I am, please do me a favor and punch me in the face. People may be mean to you on the Internet, and that may be a bummer, but I can assure you that no one waking up at 5 a.m. to shovel coal from a mine or facing a day full of soul-crushing number-crunching interrupted only by a 20-minute break to eat a turkey sandwich on bread that may not even be organic wants to hear it. Streep said that people should be grateful for the Hollywood elite because without them they’d “have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts” — because apparently she’s too trapped in her bubble to realize that those are both things that many people very much enjoy. Throughout the speech, Streep kept insisting that the actors gathered at the Golden Globes represented nothing more than a collection of various regular people from various regular places — “I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey,” she bragged — but the fact is, just because you start out as a “regular person” doesn’t mean that you’ll stay that way forever. Regardless of who these “Hollywood elites” were before they became rich and famous, the truth is that they have since become people who were too isolated to consider that Donald Trump had any chance of winning the election, and who are still too isolated understand that they’re going to have to accept the fact that he did. Yes, the job of an actor may be, as Streep noted, “to enter the lives of people who are different,” but that doesn’t change the fact that when it’s time to give out awards, the film that they connect to the most is still the one about the glitzy lives they’re living now. It doesn’t change the fact that, instead of trying to connect with Trump voters to try and understand why they did what they did, they’d rather just write them off as garbage people and continue to make comments slamming them any chance they get. Sure, some people may be calling Streep’s comments on Donald Trump “brave” — but those are the exact same people who already agreed with her anyway. Hollywood does not need to win over those people. They’ve been won, and continuing to mock the other side over things that happened more than a year ago is only going to ensure that their side will continue to lose. #related#I was no supporter of Donald Trump during the election. In fact, like Streep, I consider many of his comments and actions to be disgusting, including the one that she referenced last night. But the truth is, that incident with the reporter happened in 2015 . . . and he won anyway. Bringing it up isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about Trump, because the people who voted for him voted for him despite having known about it — and there were enough of those people to win him the White House. Her speech is not going to help her cause; it only encouraged the Trump voters who did not listen to Hollywood during the election to continue to not listen to Hollywood. If people like Streep are really concerned about the direction of our country, and if they really do want to change it, then they need to make earnest attempts to connect with the people they disagree with instead of going on self-serving, elitist rants in a country that’s full of people who do like things like MMA. — Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.

Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Ben Sasse want President-elect Trump to fire the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and are not waiting until Trump takes the oath of office to tell him so. The two conservatives sent a letter to Vice President-elect Mike Pence asking the incoming administration to fire Richard Cordray, the independent agency's director, citing a recent federal court ruling to make the case that Trump would have the power to do so. It's time to fire King Richard, Sasse said. Underneath the CFPB's Orwellian acronym is an attack on the American idea that the people who write are laws are accountable to the American people. Unlike President Obama's appointees at the Securities and Exchange Commmission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Cordray has not said that he will step down before his term ends in 2018.

Yep. Vince Vaughn and Mel Gibson, who worked together on the war film Hacksaw Ridge, didn't look thrilled with what Streep was saying.

The Wall Street Journal columnist ought to lighten up. || Russ Smith

All election season we heard about the threat of Trump supporters breaking out of their cage and terrorizing society... but it looks like reality is quite th...

Meryl Streep didn't just take a dig at President-elect Donald Trump in her speech at last night's Golden Globe Awards.

Iran is set to receive a massive shipment of natural uranium from Russia -- enough, potentially, for several bombs, diplomats said Monday, highlighting a move that could give the Islamic Republic major leverage if the U.S. tries dismantling the controversial nuclear deal.

One Silicon Valley executive had a few choice words to describe Americans living in the heart of the nation, and they were not flattering. Melinda Byerley, MBA and founder of Timeshare CMO, a Silic

"The most vilified segments in American society right now...Hollywood, foreigners and the press..."

WOW! How Much More Damage Will Obama Inflict On the World Before he Leaves Office? Apparently Barack Obama wasn’t satisfied ...

Kellyanne Conway, President-elect Donald Trump’s ?

President Barack Obama responded for the first time on ABC News' This Week to the criticism that the Democratic Party has seen historic electoral losses in his

Iranian lawmakers approved plans on Monday to expand military spending to five percent of the budget, including developing the country's long-range missile program which U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to halt.

State-run Chinese tabloid Global Times warned U.S. President-elect Donald Trump that China would "take revenge" if he reneged on the one-China policy, only hours after Taiwan's president made a controversial stopover in Houston.

At the Golden Globes Sunday night, and the Oscars next month, expect lots of gold-plated bitching about Donald Trump. Honorees will mourn the “dark times in America” in their $20,000 frocks. Or the…

The Fox News host joined in a chorus of conservative backlash on social media against Streep’s Golden Globes speech.

Paul says Trump is in "complete agreement" with his approach to repealing Obamacare.

What the government giveth, the government almost never taketh away, and that’s what Planned Parenthood has been counting on. Planned Parenthood is an industrial-scale baby abattoir responsible for more than 300,000 American deaths annually and a degradation of human dignity on the order of Josef Mengele, and the urgent issue of the day is whether it should be privately or publicly funded. Democrats are for the latter. Republicans are of the more modest opinion that if you want to slaughter your child in utero, you should have to pay for it yourself. That is what would happen if congressional Republicans succeed in defunding Planned Parenthood, which they currently plan to do as part of the process of dismantling President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Planned Parenthood is the recipient of more than $500 million annually in taxpayer dollars ($528.4 million in fiscal year 2013–14), or about 40 percent of its annual revenue. Under the Hyde amendment, the organization is technically prohibited from using this money to finance abortions. In reality, the amendment simply provides a $500-million cushion atop which Planned Parenthood can conduct its slaughterous business — and the technical separation of funds depends entirely on Planned Parenthood being scrupulous in its accounting, which it isn’t, to put it mildly. (It’s worth noting, too, that the most recent Democratic presidential nominee promised to end the Hyde amendment, which was an admirably honest middle finger to well over half the country.) Since the business of abortion is unseemly, Planned Parenthood justifies its reception of public munificence by insisting that the taxpayer subsidies are necessary to guarantee “women’s health” or to provide “reproductive health care,” the latter a vague constellation of services that range from pap smears and cervical-cancer screenings to dismembering babies. It goes conveniently unremarked that it was not conservatives who bundled those services together. No one forced Planned Parenthood to marry its cancer-screening and other services (which conservatives have been happy to fund through other institutions) to a morally dubious practice that the vast majority of Americans finds wretch-inducing. It goes equally unremarked that Planned Parenthood is the happy beneficiary of extraordinary private largesse. In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in November, for example, celebrities such as Katy Perry and Amy Schumer encouraged their social-media followers to donate to Planned Parenthood “in Mike Pence’s name.” John Oliver used his HBO show (which has an across-all-platforms audience somewhere in the single-digit millions) to do the same. In September 2015, children’s author Daniel Handler gave Planned Parenthood $1 million. Such things go unremarked because Planned Parenthood’s desire for public funding has nothing to do with money, of which there is plenty available, deep-pocketed liberals being easy to come by. Its real aim is to impose a radically refashioned vision of society on anyone who, for any reason, might prefer something different. Planned Parenthood, with its roots in early-20th-century eugenics, is the keystone institution in the progressive social movement that has set about to overthrow the notion that religious doctrine, cultural custom, or even biological fact might impose upon a person some duty they cannot shake off. The party of Science! conveniently ignores the biologically indisputable fact that abortion involves two bodies, not one. So it is that the party of Science! conveniently ignores the biologically indisputable fact that abortion involves two bodies, not one, professing instead that there is a magical moment at which a human being becomes a “person” with a constitutionally protected right to life. Prior to this, the dogma goes, that person was an indeterminate clump of cells with no moral status. Why it is that all enwombed clumps of cells unfailingly transform into human beings rather than hedgehogs, grapefruits, or iPods is apparently another of those abiding and unfathomable mysteries, like the origin of the cosmos or the material state of Jell-O. Abortion is, in other words, the respite of the selfish, the escape hatch by which to avoid a cumbersome responsibility. It is a technological “solution” to the “problem” of life. The government — and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, and anyone who is against waging “war” on women — needs to fund it not because it is unaffordable but because everyone needs to endorse the type of person who wants to be able to abort her child, the type of person who wants to be duty-bound to nothing and no one except herself. #related#Those who would welcome this reimagining seem to be oblivious to, or heedless of, the consequences, which are not restricted to mother and child. The violence of abortion severs the bonds between generations, denying the responsibilities we owe to those past and those to come, and it severs the bonds that join a community, denying the responsibilities we owe to those we live alongside. Abortion is the decision to cut oneself off from the world. Are the loneliness and pain that accompany it really so mysterious? Over the past year, particularly strident abortion advocates have begun encouraging women with the exhortation “Shout Your Abortion,” a PR campaign in which spiritually wounded mothers publicly boast about killing at least one of their children. This is abortion advocacy at its most vicious, attempting to turn self-destructive violence into liberating triumph. Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers do not have clients; they have victims. Defunding is the least of what they should face. — Ian Tuttle is the Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow at the National Review Institute.

The week after this election, senior editor of Think Progress Ned Resnikoff penned a screed online about his unfortunate experiences with his neighborhood plumber. Here’s the harrowing story, as quoted by roving journalist Michael Tracey: What in the ever-loving hell is this? These are the people running the Liberal Establishment. #Resist pic.twitter.com/UZUp8wHeiA

They are said to be the founding fathers of Western philosophy, whose ideas underpin civilised society.

HHS Secretary Burwell’s speech is part of last-ditch efforts by outgoing administration to preserve Obamacare.