ActRight

When Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign on June 16, 2015, the savants in the news media weren’t just skeptical — they were openly disdainful of the man who will be sworn in as America’s 45th President at noon tomorrow. Reporters sniffed that Trump’s campaign was a “carnival show” which threatened to turn the GOP primary race into “a joke.” CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin called Trump a “fool,” NBC’s Chuck Todd blasted him as “a political streaker,” and pundit after pundit insisted the real estate mogul had no chance of winning.

CNN's Jake Tapper was in bitch mode today and attempted to diminish Jackie Evancho's talent ahead of her highly anticipated performance at President Donald T...

Cassie Jaye makes a documentary that changes her life

Dukes, an Austin Democrat, faces two misdemeanor counts of abuse of official capacity and 13 felony counts of tampering with public records, a source says.

Not bad for a bunch of alleged bigots.

That New York Times hit piece on Perry was unsubstantiated garbage

Senator Al Franken, a former comedian who is a joke as a senator, asked Tom Price how he could own tobacco stock. When Price explained...

As we enter the Era of Trump, many Americans find themselves feeling tentative about the future of the country. Trump’s incoming approval ratings are historically low, but Americans are optimistic about 2017. The economy seems to be on firm footing, but economists suspect a recession will occur sometime in the next four years.

CNN shockingly aired a segment that highlights a "quirk" in the constitution that would allow Barack Obama to appoint a successor to the presidency if Donald...

President Donald Trump replaces President Faily McWorsethancarter Friday, but were not going to be able to Netflix and chill in the fight for freedom.

Subtitles available via Captions (CC) button. https://timetable.iit.artsci.utoronto.ca/fallwinter you cant gain wisdom and knowledge supposing to know all......

Donald Trump has been, and remains, a businessman. Winning the presidency will not change that. And so, with that in mind, it should come as no surprise to his supporters and detractors alike that Team Trump is working feverishly on soon slashing the bloated and deficit-belching federal budget, cutting taxes, and giving more of the …

  Back when they were fighting each other for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sparred about Ronald Reagan. In January of that year, Obama said, “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” The Hillary Clinton campaign criticized the comment, and Obama felt it necessary to clarify that he hated Reagan’s ideas. The remark signaled Obama’s ambition. He wanted to be the liberal Reagan, or rather the liberal anti-Reagan: the person who pulled American politics back to the left a generation after Reagan pulled it to the right. Bill Clinton had not done that. Instead he had governed in Reagan’s shadow. Obama thought that the time was ripe to emerge from that shadow. Many of his supporters wanted the same thing. For them, “Yes we can” — one of his 2008 campaign slogans — meant “Yes, we can overcome Reaganite conservatism and Clintonite triangulation.” As late as last April, the commentator Fareed Zakaria was able to write that Obama had pulled it off. “Obama aspired to be a transformational president, like Reagan. At this point, it’s fair to say that he has succeeded.” This judgment was not crazy, but it turns out to have been premature. Less than a year later, it appears that the Obama project has failed. He did manage to pull his own party to the left. In this respect he was like Reagan. Many pre-Reagan Republicans were less ideologically conservative, and much more inclined to cooperate with Democrats in expanding the welfare state, than Reagan. He defeated such Republicans in the 1980 primaries, and his alliance with them thereafter was often uneasy. Reagan showed his party that there was a different path to winning elections from running on a lite version of the Great Society. Demographic trends — suburbanization, de-unionization, movement south and west — gave Republicans confidence in this new path. At the end of Reagan’s presidency, one of the Republicans he had beaten in 1980 ran on a basically Reaganite platform to succeed him. Later Republicans were still more conservative. Reagan drew his party far enough to the right that the compromises with liberalism that he made during his career became unthinkable in the aftermath of his career. He created a Republican party that wouldn’t put up with the kind of tax increases that he had signed. A year into Obama’s presidency, liberal writer Peter Beinart looked back on the Bill Clinton era as a time when Democrats had lived in fear of America’s latent conservatism. They had to avoid sudden moves that would awake the sleeping bear. That fear had vanished under Obama: “From top to bottom, Democrats have decided to bet the party’s future on the belief that Americans prefer bold liberals to cautious ones.” On criminal justice, on entitlements, on immigration, on abortion, on religious liberty, Democrats staked out positions and adopted rhetoric that were much less moderate than they had previously been. The new Democratic consensus included Hillary Clinton, who ran in 2016 as the heir to Obama rather than to her own husband. Clinton, indeed, ran a more thoroughgoingly progressive campaign in 2016 than Obama had in 2008. She eschewed the outreach to white Evangelical Christians in which he had engaged. She didn’t talk about finding common ground on abortion, as Obama had and as she herself had in previous political moments. For most of his presidency, Obama had stressed that there were limits to how much he could liberalize policy toward illegal immigrants using his executive authority. Finally he decided he could go far to relax the laws, and in 2016 Clinton said she was prepared to go farther. Just as the Republicans of an earlier era concluded that they could ride a rising conservatism to power, so Democrats in the Obama years embraced a new political strategy. They thought that changing demographics had displaced the old political order. Christian conservatism was in decline. The white working class was a shrinking share of the population. The bear was finally dead. For Reagan to succeed in pulling the country to the right, he not only had to convince his party that it was safe and smart to come along with him. The party’s confidence in the new approach also had to be borne out, and be seen to be borne out. And this in turn had to shock the opposition party into assimilating elements of that approach. In these last two respects, Obama has so far been unsuccessful. Reagan left office only slightly more popular than Obama is now. But Reagan also left his party holding more seats than it held when he was elected. The reverse is true of Obama, at every level of government. The public was also much happier with the state of the country when Reagan left office than it is now — although that measure of public opinion may say as much about growing polarization over the last few decades as about Obama’s performance. The most important difference in their political records is that Reagan was followed in office by an ally while Obama will not be. George H. W. Bush ran for Reagan’s third term in 1988 and won a decisive victory. In this way he showed that Reaganism’s electoral success was not dependent on the surpassing political talent of Reagan himself. If she had won, perhaps Hillary Clinton would have shown that the political trend lines Obama had identified could carry even someone who lacked a trace of his charisma to victory. But she did not win. The Democratic strategy of the Obama years has left the party locked out of power in the White House, the Senate, and the House at their end. A heavily urban and progressive coalition delivered presidential majorities twice, but its geography put the party at a structural disadvantage in Senate, House, and gubernatorial races. And the Democrats may have pushed their strategy too far even at the presidential level. If Clinton had replicated Obama’s 2012 performance among white Catholics or white Evangelicals or white working-class voters, she would have won the election. But her campaign was not geared to the sensibilities of any of these overlapping groups. At no point in Obama’s presidency did his political success make Republicans consider assimilating some of his views into their philosophy, as Bill Clinton had done with Reaganism. Republicans are even less likely to make such an adjustment now. The Democrats’ political defeats also imperil their policy achievements under Obama. It is not clear how much of Obamacare will survive. But it is clear enough already that Obama is no Reagan. —​ Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor of National Review. This article appears in the January 23, 2017, issue of National Review. * National Review magazine content is typically available only to paid subscribers. Due to the immediacy of this article, it has been made available to you for free. To enjoy the full complement of exceptional National Review magazine content, sign up for a subscription today. A special discounted rate is available for you here.

On Wednesday, on the eve of Rick Perry’s confirmation hearing to head the Department of Energy, the New York Times published: “‘Learning Curve’ as Rick Perry Pursues a Job He Initially Misunderstood.” The headline is intended to summarize the alarming lead paragraphs: When President-elect Donald J. Trump offered Rick Perry the job of energy secretary five weeks ago, Mr. Perry gladly accepted, believing he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry that he had long championed in his home state. In the days after, Mr. Perry, the former Texas governor, discovered that he would be no such thing — that in fact, if confirmed by the Senate, he would become the steward of a vast national security complex he knew almost nothing about, caring for the most fearsome weapons on the planet, the United States’ nuclear arsenal. That would be extraordinary news — if it were true. But the article that follows, written by reporters David Sanger and Coral Davenport, provides precisely no evidence to support the claim. The closest the authors come is this, later in the piece: “If you asked him on that first day he said yes, he would have said, ‘I want to be an advocate for energy,’” said Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist who advised Mr. Perry’s 2016 presidential campaign and worked on the Trump transition’s Energy Department team in its early days. “If you asked him now, he’d say, ‘I’m serious about the challenges facing the nuclear complex.’ It’s been a learning curve.” Obviously, the quote does not suggest what the Times claims. But it gets worse: McKenna himself says the story distorts his quote. The headline and lead paragraphs “don’t really reflect what I said,” McKenna told the Daily Caller. “He added that ‘of course’ Perry understood the role of the Department of Energy when he was offered the job.” Second, McKenna left the Trump transition team in mid November. Perry was nominated to head the Department of Energy on December 14, almost a full month later. But such niggling details are, of course, beside the point. The Times story accomplished what was intended: to establish a narrative. The story was immediately shared on social media by a herd of approving journalists: among others, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, NBC reporter Benjy Sarlin, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, New Republic editor Brian Beutler, and Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen — who added: “Yup Rick Perry is as dumb as we thought he was.” The Times’ “scoop” was reprinted by Business Insider, GQ, Slate, and The Hill (“Rick Perry accepted Energy secretary job without knowing what it was”). “Rick Perry” trended on Twitter, and by Thursday morning the Perry piece led the Times’ website’s Politics section. To anyone with even a passing familiarity with the subject matter, the Times’ claim should have been an occasion for skepticism. To anyone with even a passing familiarity with the subject matter, the Times’ claim should have been an occasion for skepticism. Perry spent 14 years as the governor of Texas, and the state’s Panhandle region is home to the Pantex Plant, the United States’ “primary facility for the final assembly, dismantlement, and maintenance of nuclear weapons” (in the words of Pantex’s website). It’s overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration, an Energy Department agency. The plant was established in 1942. Rick Perry is supposed to have been completely oblivious to all of this? But not even this much reasoning was required. A Google search would have been sufficient to turn up Perry’s statement on his nomination. Note the italicized clause: It is a tremendous honor to be selected to serve as Secretary of Energy by President-elect Trump. . . . I look forward to engaging in a conversation about the development, stewardship and regulation of our energy resources, safeguarding our nuclear arsenal, and promoting an American energy policy that creates jobs and puts America first. Well. How about that. None of this is to say that Perry does not face a “learning curve.” The Department of Energy’s portfolio is large. “There’s a lot of elements to the department that people don’t necessarily know about until you get there,” Spencer Abraham, the former Michigan senator who served as Energy secretary during George W. Bush’s first term, told the Times in December. “You find yourself surprised by what it really entails.” Perry himself recently said that he “regrets” recommending the elimination of the department in 2012, having been briefed more thoroughly on the department’s various functions since then. But the Times did not pen a story about the legitimate challenges Perry is likely to face. It penned a hit job. The Times assumed that Rick Perry is a dumb Texan hick, then wrote a piece to bolster that impression — and journalists eager to see their impressions validated leaped to share it, blithely ignoring the glaring lack of evidence for the central claim. This is how a narrative spreads. As noted, on Thursday morning the Perry piece led the Times’ website’s politics section. Next to it was a piece entitled, “From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece.” Oh, the irony. — Ian Tuttle is the Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow at the National Review Institute.

“CNN requested press passes. Here is our response.”

President Obama oversaw the deepest legislative malaise in modern political history, according to the Washington Times Legislative Index, which captures his struggles to find ways to work with a Congress that ranged from lukewarm to openly hostile toward him.

Trump’s manipulation is instinctive.

The world's most celebrated artists come together to honor Hillary Clinton on January 20th, 2017. Glen Roven set two of Clinton's speeches to music, and sing...

There's a lot more to this story than meets the eye, and plenty of reasons to doubt these allegations.

Most of the $278 billion in approved sales have gone to Saudi Arabia and other Mideast allies.

President-elect Donald Trump's pick for a top national security position stepped down amid allegations that she had plagiarised significant portions of her book and other writings.  Conservative writer Monica Crowley was tapped to be the senior director of statregic communications at the National Security Council, but a scathing report from CNN's KFILE found that she had allegedly plagiarised passages in her 2012 book What the (Bleep) Just Happened. 

Butthurt Theater Presents: Donald Trump Supporters reading and commenting on actual posts by liberal Hillary Clinton supporters after Trump won the 2016 pres...

Does this send a chill up your spine? Does it remind you of the past? What do you think of the is video? hmmm?

President Trump Gets The Last Laugh When Donald Trump first announced his candidacy for President of the United States on ...