ActRight

My meandering thoughts, and finger ratings. Love it - thumbs up. Hate it, middle finger. This is not a politically correct blo. Snowflakes be warned.

White House Petition Launched To Put Trump On Mount Rush An official White House petition has been started to put ...

Abdullah bin Zayed says President Trump's order affecting citizens of Muslim-majority countries is not Islamophobic.

On Monday, The Conservative Review published an article that once again highlights the hypocrisy of the Democratic party.  They are ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump threatened in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart to send U.S. troops to stop "bad hombres down there" unless the Mexican military d

“Radical left wing extremists are now in control of many Senate Democrats. And they have been ordered to block everything or else. https://t.co/NqSNA9W1sv”

Democrats in Washington are winning headlines and pleasing their noisy base with an all-out push to oppose, obstruct and resist Team Trump. But what’s the long-term strategy? What plays to lefties …

It didn’t matter that Judge Neil Gorsuch was a highly respected jurist or that his stature as a leading conservative intellectual legal thinker made him a natural successor to the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The growing number of Democrats who are determined to not so much oppose the Trump presidency as “resist” it wasted no time blasting Gorsuch as “anti-woman” and a tool of the corporate class. In doing so, the party base made it clear to Senate Democrats that nothing less than a battle to the death to stop his nomination would be considered acceptable. But in case there was any doubt about the duty of Democrats to oppose Gorsuch in spite of his impressive qualifications, it was removed by the graphic and accompanying article that the Times placed at the top of its home page almost as soon as President Trump announced the nomination. Based on “President-elect Trump and His Possible Justices,” a study by Washington University in St. Louis, the Times chart analyzes Gorsuch’s legal history as being to the right of every justice on the current court with the exception of Justice Clarence Thomas. Indeed, it asserted that he was more conservative in his opinions than Justice Scalia. The Times quoted the study’s authors as predicting that Trump’s nominee, if confirmed, would seek to “limit gay rights, uphold restrictions on abortion and invalidate affirmative action programs.” Those are fighting words for the Left and enough to ensure that even red-state Democrats up for reelection in 2018 should fear the reaction from their party’s grassroots if they were inclined to oppose a filibuster, let alone vote to confirm Gorsuch. But Times readers with long memories should recall a similar chart published last March after President Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland for the same seat. Obama and his reliable cheering section in the mainstream media touted Garland as a centrist pick rather than a doctrinaire liberal. That talking point served as an effective stick with which to beat the Republicans who refused to consider his nomination because of the unprecedented nature of the president’s demand that a Senate controlled by the opposition party should allow a president to alter the ideological balance of the court during an election year. But the claim that Garland was a centrist was debunked almost immediately by the same liberal flagship of the mainstream media that has labeled Gorsuch as being to the right of Scalia. The chart published by the Times on March 16, 2016, demonstrated that Garland was to the left of two of the court’s current liberals — Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan — and a virtual match for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, leaving only Sonia Sotomayor slightly to the left of him. As the Times helpfully pointed out, Garland’s presence on the high court would have helped “shift the court to be more liberal.” This painfully obvious observation was studiously ignored by the paper’s editorial column over the following months as it continued to argue that Obama’s nominee was a neutral choice that Republicans should confirm. That Garland was no moderate but, in fact, a doctrinaire liberal was not something the same newspaper chose to recall today as it sought to lead the charge against Gorsuch as an extremist. But there’s more to this than just the usual liberal hypocrisy we’ve come to expect from the Times. For one, the Left–Right analysis in the Washington University study is irrelevant to many of the cases that the Supreme Court adjudicates. Like the man whose seat he hopes to fill, Gorsuch is an originalist. This means that Gorsuch, much like Scalia, would be far more protective of the rights of defendants than Garland would have been. Those who seek to protect the Constitution as it was conceived and written are primarily concerned about protecting individual rights. Progressive statists such as Garland tend to be more interested in increasing the power of the government to infringe upon those rights in order to promote the political agenda of the Left. Gorsuch, much like Scalia, would be far more protective of the rights of defendants than Garland would have been. Liberals have been quick to demonize Gorsuch for his rulings in favor of the Hobby Lobby Corporation and the Little Sisters of the Poor as they successfully fended off the Obamacare contraception mandate. But their belief in statism has led them to distort the significance of those cases. One needn’t be opposed to contraception, let alone the rights of women, to understand that imposing the contraception mandate (which also covered abortifacients) on people of faith violated their right to religious freedom. But to liberals, even the First Amendment’s protection of free exercise of religion can and must be sacrificed to achieve their goals. Those cases are a reminder that what is at stake in the battle to get the Supreme Court back to nine is more than a partisan vendetta. Claims that Gorsuch’s seat was “stolen” from Obama or Garland are as absurd as they are telling. Obama had no inherent right to demand that a Republican Senate majority acquiesce in his desire to flip the court from a conservative majority to a liberal one. As the Times’ charts point out, the difference between Garland and Gorsuch is such that this is not merely a petty party grievance but a genuine conflict; how it’s resolved may well determine the future of religious liberty and other pressing issues of our day. — Jonathan S. Tobin is a veteran journalist and contributor to National Review Online.

Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet.

Dump trucks and heavy machinery rolled into the protest camp near the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline on Monday, and crews began filling large dumpsters with garbage that has accumulated, much of it now buried under snow.

Following the Women's March will be a so-called March for Science, where people will be marching in Washington, D.C. at some point in the future to stick up for science. Is this really a March for Science, or is it just leftism hiding behind the brand of science? Here are seven things you need to know about the March for Science. 1. A date for the march has not been officially set. 

Imam Husham Al-Hussainy, leader of the Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center in Dearborn, says Mike Hager's mom did not pass away this weekend after being barred from traveling to the United States. The Imam confirms that Hager's mother died before the ban was put in place.

If you ask vast numbers of both conservative and liberal Americans what word comes to mind when they hear Donald Trump’s name, the response is immediate: “Authoritarian.” In fact, if there is one theme that has remained constant in mainstream coverage of Trump ever since he surged to the top of Republican primary polls in 2015, it’s that he has authoritarian tendencies. He seeks power, and he cares not for process. Just look at recent headlines from some of the nation’s most respected media outlets: “Donald Trump’s Authoritarian Politics of Memory” (The Atlantic) “Donald Trump: Strong Leader or Dangerous Authoritarian?” (NPR) “Beyond Lying: Donald Trump’s Authoritarian Reality” (The New York Times) To be sure, this concern isn’t confined to the mainstream press. I myself have been deeply concerned with Trump’s authoritarian impulses — including his expressed disrespect for the First Amendment, due process, and private property.  But if Trump is an authoritarian, he just dealt a huge blow to his own agenda: As a Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch will almost certainly be a firewall against federal overreach and a consistent defender not just of the Bill of Rights but of the republican, federalist structure of government the founders established. The Constitution of the United States is arguably the most effective and powerful single document at restraining tyranny and preserving liberty that has ever been written. Textualists and originalists at their best — and Gorsuch is among the best — respect the language of the document and the intent of its drafters. They apply Constitutional rights equally to all Americans, regardless of ideological affiliation or outcome. And in so doing, they protect our most critical bulwarks against authoritarianism: free speech for all, due process for all, and equal protection for all. But Gorsuch’s respect for the Constitution extends even further, into an obscure and vital doctrine that may well correct one of Justice Scalia’s greatest mistakes. If you say the word “Chevron” to most Americans, they think “gas station.” Say that word to a tiny class of basement-dwelling constitutional-law geeks, however, and they think “Supreme Court case that mandated deference to administrative agencies’ legal interpretations.” The case, Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, was decided in 1984, two years before Antonin Scalia took his seat on the Supreme Court bench. Its core holding is that when the court confronts an executive agency’s “construction of the statute which it administers,” then it will defer to the agency so long as Congress hasn’t “directly spoken” to the issue and the agency has engaged in a “permissible construction” of the statute. These benign-sounding words have led to an enormous amount of presidential and executive mischief and supercharged the stunning growth of the regulatory state. As a practical matter, the Chevron decision facilitated the transformation of executive-branch agencies into entities that combine all three functions of government (lawmaking, interpretation, execution) and place them under presidential control. Fears about Trump’s authoritarianism thus resonate in no small part due to Chevron, because the power of the executive branch (acting through its agencies) has grown to a point where the president has unconstitutionally disproportionate influence over American life. While Scalia didn’t participate in the Chevron decision, he applied it consistently and on occasion defended it with vigor. Here he is speaking to Duke Law students shortly after ascending to the Supreme Court: “Broad delegation to the executive is the hallmark of the modern administrative state; agency rulemaking powers are the rule rather than, as they once were, the exception; and as the sheer number of modern departments and agencies suggests, we are awash in agency ‘expertise,’” he said. “In the long run, Chevron will endure and be given its full scope,” he added, because “it more accurately reflects the reality of government, and thus more adequately serves its needs.” Scalia reconsidered some of this enthusiasm later in his career, but his late-life skepticism is inconsequential compared to Gorsuch’s recent, full-throated, and direct attack on Chevron in a case called Gutierrez-Bizuela v. Lynch: There’s an elephant in the room with us today. We have studiously attempted to work our way around it and even left it unremarked. But the fact is Chevron . . . permit[s] executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’ design. Maybe the time has come to face the behemoth. He continues (and this really is worth quoting at length): Transferring the job of saying what the law is from the judiciary to the executive unsurprisingly invites the very sort of due process (fair notice) and equal protection concerns the framers knew would arise if the political branches intruded on judicial functions. Under Chevron the people aren’t just charged with awareness of and the duty to conform their conduct to the fairest reading of the law that a detached magistrate can muster. Instead, they are charged with an awareness of Chevron; required to guess whether the statute will be declared “ambiguous” (courts often disagree on what qualifies); and required to guess (again) whether an agency’s interpretation will be deemed “reasonable.” Who can even attempt all that, at least without an army of perfumed lawyers and lobbyists? And, of course, that’s not the end of it. Even if the people somehow manage to make it through this far unscathed, they must always remain alert tothe possibility that the agency will reverse its current view 180 degrees anytime based merely on the shift of political winds and still prevail. By the standards of restrained judicial writing, this is a primal scream for individual liberty and the separation of powers. If Donald Trump or any other president believes he is a constitutional superman, endowed with vast powers through his control of an immense bureaucracy, Gorsuch is living, breathing Kryptonite. There remain very good reasons to be concerned about Trump’s respect for liberties he so often scorned on the campaign trail. But the most consequential act of the first month of his presidency is a blow against authoritarianism of all ideological persuasions, and that should cheer anyone who hopes to see the American experiment endure. Neil Gorsuch is a champion of the Constitution, and now more than ever that means standing athwart tyranny, yelling Stop. — David French is a staff writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

Imam Husham Al-Hussainy, leader of the Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center in Dearborn, says Mike Hager's mom did not pass away this weekend after being barred from traveling to the United States. The Imam confirms that Hager's mother died before the ban was put in place.

A-list actor Matthew McConaughey sent a sobering message to celebrities and the cultural elites protesting Trump: get over it.

Michael Moore warned Democratic lawmakers: block President Trump's Supreme Court nominee or face a "true progressive" in the next election.

Tucker Carlson DESTROYS Congressman Eric Swalwell On Abortion & SCOTUS Nominee 1/31/17. On "Tucker Carlson Tonight" January 31, 2017 Host Tucker Carlson utte...

The confirmation places a lifelong oil company executive at the helm off what President Trump has promised will be an “America first” foreign policy.

Sens. Collins and Murkowski said they would oppose Betsy DeVos.

Democrats are bawling over the firing of the Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and calling it the Monday Night Massacre, referencing Richard Nixon by comparison...

Jock Journalists Rooting Against Tom Brady Because He Rooted for Donald Trump

The healthy party in this country is the Republican Party.

The outrage and hysteria over Trump should confirm what should have been obvious during the Obama years: progressives have turned politics into a religion.

Sub for more: http://nnn.is/the_new_media | Paris Swade for Liberty Writers reports, Buzzfeed contributor Natalie Shure told Ivanka Trump that her baby Theod...