ActRight

On Monday night President Donald Trump met with Congressional leaders in the White House. Trump told the political leaders that ...

An incredibly snobbish professor who wrote a few books and wears a bow tie tried convincing Tucker Carlson America is full of racist but facts prevail. Twitt...

Some Yazidi girls were "sold" for a few packs of cigarettes. "Some of those women and girls have had to watch 7-, 8-, and 9-year-old children bleed to death before their eyes, after being raped by ISIS militia multiple times a day. ISIS militias have

Guest post by Joe Hoft As we pointed out throughout the months leading up to the election, crowd size matters.  ...

The curbs echo what happened in Canada six years ago

Yahoo News Special Report

It was hard to find a mandate in the results from last June's Fargo City Commission election. The winners, Tony Grindberg and John Strand, won their seats with just 16 and 15 percent of the vote, respectively.If two members of the commission together received at most 31 percent of the vote, how can it...

“I will be making my Supreme Court pick on Thursday of next week.Thank you!”

Truthful & Conservative Political Commentary, LIVE from the swamp! Home of the Columbia Bugle CuckScore™. Our hearts are in the trim!

On Saturday, Trump press secretary Sean Spicer created a media firestorm by fibbing about sizes of inauguration crowds. After calling a press conference to claim that Trump’s inauguration had the largest audience in history, both “in person and around the globe,” Spicer tore into the media for their supposed falsehoods; Spicer specifically referenced D.C. Metro figures, fencing and magnetometer placement, and floor coverings that highlighted empty spaces on the National Mall. None of his claims were true. NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Trump top adviser Kellyanne Conway about Spicer’s routine. “I’m curious,” he said, “why President Trump chose yesterday to send out his press secretary to essentially litigate a provable falsehood when it comes to a small and petty thing like inaugural crowd size. I guess my question to you is, Why do that?” Conway futzed about for an answer, variously misdirecting to the press’s willingness to ignore President Obama’s widespread lies, Trump’s executive actions, and a New York Times reporter’s quickly retracted tweet about a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. being removed from the Oval Office. Todd’s question is the right one: What would drive President Trump to spend mental energy on a question as silly and meaningless as inaugural crowd size? There are dozens of excellent reasons his crowd size didn’t match Obama’s; the best reason is that the inauguration takes place in a Democratic stronghold, Washington, D.C. (Trump won 4.1 percent of the vote there.) Nonetheless, Trump chose to glom on to media coverage of crowd size. Why bother? But Todd’s question wasn’t that of the media at large. Their question quickly turned from one of presidential focus and temperament to a far more self-centered one: Why would Trump send out his press secretary to lie to them? Why would Trump want to establish such an adversarial relationship with the press? Why would Spicer attack the media? That personal umbrage from the media drove the coverage throughout the weekend. On CNN with Brian Stelter, former Hillary Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon called Spicer’s comments “an affront to anybody who is on our side of the wall and works in this business.” CBS’s Major Garrett complained, “I’ve never seen anything like this, where it was so intense, so harsh and passionate right off the beginning.” This is why Trump wins every time he attacks the media: because the media are so consumed with themselves, they don’t seem to care about the public interest. When Spicer returned to the podium on Monday, he gave the first question to the New York Post rather than the Associated Press. This sent the collective media into spasms of apoplexy — how dare Spicer violate protocol this way? Why did he give questions to the Christian Broadcasting Network before CNN? Then, finally, when the more Trump-unfriendly press did get a shot at Spicer, they made the entire crowd-size debacle into a firefight over media relations. “Before I get to a policy question, just a question about the nature of your job,” said Jon Karl of ABC News. “Is it your intention to always tell the truth from that podium, and will you pledge never to knowingly say something that is not factual?” This is the way Team Trump wants to portray the media: as completely obsessed with their own mistreatment at Trump’s hands rather than with mistreatment of the truth and, by extension, of the American people. By dividing the media from the American people, Team Trump conquers. If Obama fibbed, the media glossed over those fibs — they weren’t upset on behalf of Americans, because they weren’t upset in general. The media have been complicit in their own demise for years. For nearly a decade, they swallowed lie after lie from the Obama administration. Why? Didn’t they have an obligation to ask Jay Carney the same question Karl asked Spicer, particularly after Carney was trotted out day after day to claim that Americans could keep their doctors under Obamacare? Why didn’t the media take personal umbrage when Barack Obama fibbed about Benghazi or about the IRS? Why did they seem wildly untroubled when Obama national-security adviser Ben Rhodes peddled absolute fiction about the Iran nuclear deal — and then bragged about it? Because they agreed with Obama. So they weren’t affronted. After all, Obama wasn’t really lying to them — he was merely lying to the American people! And was that so bad? The American people didn’t know enough to understand the complexities of Obamacare or the foreign-policy rationale behind the Iran deal or the details of the Benghazi attack. If Obama fibbed, the media glossed over those fibs — they weren’t upset on behalf of Americans, because they weren’t upset in general. Now, in the age of Trump, nothing has changed with respect to the veracity and credibility of the president’s press secretary. The media are angry that they’re being treated as the enemy rather than as the representatives of truth. But they handed over that title years ago. How can they restore their credibility? By treating personal slights as immaterial, and lies as slights to Americans, rather than vice versa. Who cares who gets to ask the first question at a press conference? Is it really important to a truck driver from Michigan whether Jim Acosta at CNN is upset because Trump called him “fake news” wrongly? Or is it more important that Trump lied to the American people when he said he would turn over his IRS records? In the end, Trump can fib about crowd size, and few people will care. They see the issue as just another food fight between Trump and his media antagonists. If the media want to police honesty in the Trump administration, they’ll have to assess themselves honestly first: Are they interested in a story because it affects them, or because it affects the American people? — Ben Shapiro is the editor in chief of the Daily Wire.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry surprised many observers by devoting so much of their waning time in office to excoriating Israel. But it turns out they had more mischief planned: a last-minute Palestinian bailout. Only three hours before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Obama administration notified Congress that it would send $221 million to the Palestinian Authority (PA). The funding had previously been blocked by two separate congressional holds, which are usually respected by the executive branch. The Obama administration informed Congress that the money would fund humanitarian projects as well as political and security reforms to help prepare for a future Palestinian state. However, only the willfully blind can deny that this money will also finance terrorism and ultimately prolong the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Since 2004, Palestinian law has explicitly mandated large monthly payments to the families of terrorists who attack Israel, as well as salaries and jobs for the terrorists on their release from Israeli jails. The PA structures the payments so as to make its incentive structure crystal clear: The more Israelis you wound or kill, the more money your family will receive. Some families of terrorists can even receive up to $3,100 per month — so long as their relative has killed many Israelis and either died during the attack or was sentenced to over 30 years in Israeli jail. By comparison, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports that the average Palestinian salary is just over $276 per month. These payments add up. In 2014, Israel estimated that the PA paid $75 million per year to families of terrorists. However, the number may have risen sharply this past year, to $137.8 million, financing the “knife intifada” that terrorized Israelis. By transferring $221 million in its final hours, the Obama administration has ensured that the PA will be able to carry on business as usual without reducing its terror subsidies. Palestinian leaders have tried to hide their support for terrorism by transferring the subsidies in 2014 from the PA, which receives international aid, to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which does not. This even managed to fool State Department official Anne Patterson, who said of the subsidies at the time, “I think they plan to phase it out.” However, Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party run both the PA and the PLO, and the subsidies have continued. How can we be so easily fooled into funding terrorism? “Willful blindness helps,” writes David Feith in the Wall Street Journal. America continues to prop up Abbas’s government, even though he denies the Holocaust, incites terrorism, and his term in office technically ran out in January 2009. The Obama administration was willfully blind for a reason. As Daniel Pipes writes in a recent issue of Commentary, the international community and even many Israeli politicians have expected the Israeli–Palestinian conflict “to be concluded through goodwill, conciliation, mediation, flexibility, restraint, generosity, and compromise, topped off with signatures on official documents.” Accordingly, the theory goes, Israel must make painful concessions while Palestinian incitement and support for terrorism can be overlooked, all in the hope that the Palestinians will be won over and “reciprocate by accepting the Jewish state.” Appeasement and denial of facts on the ground only resuscitate Palestinian war aims and extend the conflict. It is this approach, which has failed since 1993, that the Obama administration applied with its focus on settlements at the U.N. But it is pure foolishness to expect a sudden burst of reciprocity from the Palestinians. “Wars usually end,” writes Pipes, “when failure causes one side to despair, when that side has abandoned its war aims and accepted defeat, and when that defeat has exhausted the will to fight.” Yet the international community and the Obama administration sought to prevent a Palestinian defeat as they chased a mediated solution. For example, by declaring at the U.N. Security Council that the Israeli presence in East Jerusalem — including at the Western Wall and the Temple Mount — has “no legal validity,” the message to the Palestinians is clear: “Do not give up your struggle or moderate your war aims. Jerusalem is yours, so keep fighting for it.” The insistence on zero natural growth in Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem beyond the Green Line encourages the Palestinians not to concede areas that will obviously become part of Israel in any peace deal, and to maintain their maximalist war aims, even though Israel is never going to surrender Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people. Every international bailout, including the $221 million from Obama, only encourages the Palestinians to keep fighting for unattainable objectives. The foreign-policy establishment will always fret that recognizing Israeli control of Jerusalem will anger the Palestinians, but appeasement and denial of facts on the ground only resuscitate Palestinian war aims and extend the conflict. This is one important reason why the Trump administration must not renege on its campaign pledge to move America’s embassy to Jerusalem. President Trump will do Palestinians no favors by encouraging them to carry on a losing struggle for unachievable aims, such as retaking Jerusalem. Instead, Trump should reverse the failed policies of the past and make clear that Israeli control of Jerusalem is an immutable fact. — Elliot Kaufman is the managing editor of the Stanford Review.

From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first. – President Trump, inaugural address, January 20, 2017 President Trump is something of a paradox. He roots himself in nostalgia for yesteryear — “Make America great again!” — but is remarkably unconcerned with history. He ransacks the past for rhetorical baubles but declines to carry their historical baggage too. In 2015, a Washington Post reporter had to remind Trump that his use of the phrase “silent majority” had Nixonian “overtones.” “Oh, is that why people stopped using [the phrase]?” Trump replied. “Nobody thinks of Nixon. I don’t think of Nixon when I think of the silent majority.” He invokes the “forgotten man” as if he invented the term, never indicating that it was one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s central themes. His inaugural address made almost no reference to American history. His populist rejection of the status quo and the establishment suggests that he thinks the country is starting over at Year Zero. Indeed, he repeated a standard campaign line that at least some historians might quibble with: that he was elected by a “historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.” Which brings us to “America first,” a slogan the president seems to have first absorbed from a New York Times reporter trying to characterize the candidate’s positions. As with “silent majority,” Trump refuses to accept what that term means to many of the people who hear him use it. Granted, it’s more complicated than mainstream journalists would have you believe. The America First Committee was founded in the spring of 1940 by isolationist students at Yale University and quickly became a major national movement — though it was never the purely right-wing phenomenon many claim. Many Republicans and conservatives supported it (including a then-15-year-old William F. Buckley, who as an adult repudiated isolationism and barred isolationists from the pages of National Review). But other allies in the isolationist or “non-interventionist” cause included American Socialist party leader Norman Thomas, liberal journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, and such progressive icons Charles Beard, John Dewey, Joseph Kennedy, Bernard Baruch, and Progressive party hero Robert La Follette. Though it’s true the German-American Bund had opposed war, so did American pacifist organizations (until the Soviets told them to change their position). Isolationism is a bipartisan American tradition, and its defenders can claim George Washington’s farewell address as proof of its pedigree. The entire purpose of the America First Committee was to keep FDR from dragging the U.S. into another European war. Given the still fresh memory of the horror — both at home and abroad — of World War I, this always struck me as a defensible if, in hindsight, wrong position. That Trump could so easily adopt ‘America first’ without being hobbled by its negative connotation was a political coup. The isolationists had largely fought FDR to a political standstill until Pearl Harbor, which ended all debate. After the war, with the full knowledge of Nazi crimes and years of domestic patriotic fervor, the term “America first” took on a more sinister reputation in retrospect than it deserved (influenced by FDR’s political vendettas against the isolationists during the war). Some Jewish groups to this day unfairly consider it vague code for “America should have let the Holocaust run its course.” That Trump could so easily adopt “America first” without being hobbled by its negative connotation was a political coup. He insists that it’s just a catchphrase for prioritizing American interests. Even though the term is both catnip and dog whistle to some of his more unsavory fans, I think he’s sincere. Still, my problem with Trump’s version of “America first” isn’t his desire to do what is in America’s best interests — who could oppose that? It’s how he defines America’s best interest — and its best self. With his blind eye to the past, he’s stumbled into old-fashioned nationalism. Up until very recently, American exceptionalism — i.e., we are a creedal nation dedicated to certain principles reflected in our founding documents — largely defined the conservative understanding of patriotism. Trump, however, sees America more as an identity than an idea. He promised that America’s example “will shine for everyone to follow,” but he defined that example not in terms of our liberties or ideals, but in terms of unity. We will rebuild “our country with American hands and American labor” following “two simple rules: buy American and hire American.” We will shine through our success at building infrastructure, walling off our economy, and crushing our enemies. All in all, this is no “new vision” — though it is arguably new for an American president. — Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. © 2017 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

This legislation makes the Hyde Amendment permanent.

UVA spent half a million on a single law firm before the 'Jackie' case was discredited.

The announcement comes just one day after press secretary got pelted with questions from the press in his daily press briefing about the personally held beliefs

All 50 state secretaries of state are urging the Trump administration to rescind a last-minute Department of Homeland Security directive calling state election systems “critical infrastructure."

Days into Donald Trump's administration, heads are finally beginning to roll at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Two notoriously corrupt employees in Puerto Rico were fired this week, indicating t

Michigan State University accused Nathan of pushing Melanie, something even Melanie says he didn't do.

Bureaucrats Bring 500 Refugees Into Country One Day Before Trump's Expected Ban

So the scumbag liberals at Deadspin decided to ask their readers to try to get a picture of the CruzNado playing basketball, but when Cruz showed them up, they reacted like scumbag liberals always …

The real lesson of the March on Washington is that women are every bit as divided as the country is over Donald Trump’s presidency

“Dec 2016's avg global temp was 3rd highest on record. Global avg atmospheric CO2 concentration was ~405 ppm. https://t.co/Q7xdVFTBf5”

“If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible "carnage" going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!”

    Republican President Donald Trump has been active since he took office last Friday. Wasting no time on priorities and fulfilling campaign promises, he has followed through on slamming the brakes on Obamacare enforcement and stepping up against abortion. If there was any doubt as to what kind of President he would be, these doubts are quickly being erased. Another topic appears to be getting addressed now as well, which is immigration and terrorism. According to reports, President Trump is preparing to sign executive orders restricting immigration from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. This undoubtedly will cause shockwaves among the political environment, which is already heated in Washington D.C. Since his inauguration, President Trump has faced ongoing protests including a massive Women’s March. Immigration caused a lot of controversy for him during the election cycle and will likely reignite criticism again. The immigration restrictions make sense, however. President Trump has been a vocal critic of European countries allowing massive numbers of unfiltered refugees enter. Especially in the?

    CNN has made a name for itself promoting fake news and being an obvious promoter of the left. While the network and others in the mainstream media have long been labeled as liberal-leaning in their bias, the preference for Hillary Clinton was painfully obvious in last year’s presidential election cycle. Now the propaganda machine is targeting Nancy Sinatra, daughter of the late music legend Frank Sinatra. It was announced prior to the inauguration of Republican President Donald Trump that he would be using Frank Sinatra’s song “My Way.” It’s not unusual for politicians to use songs and have a musician object. While Frank Sinatra is no longer with us, his daughter is alive and active. On Twitter, Nancy Sinatra was asked about the song use. She replied to the question “just remember the first line of the song”, which is “And now, the end is near.” CNN picked up the tweet and ran with a story that she was unhappy about her father’s song being used. The problem?