ActRight

Most presidential campaigns spend their time and money appealing to people who vote regularly in elections. Not Donald Trump. According to a Trump campaign memo obtained by FiveThirtyEight, the cam…

El Trumpo suddenly discovered a new set of principles today and it’s being reported that he will indeed endorse Paul Ryan and cave to the head of the GOP establishment!! Sources tell @CNN Don…

The Great Cratering is upon us. According to the RealClearPolitics average, Donald Trump is losing to Clinton by almost seven points, the battleground polls look terrible, his net favorability rating is minus 26 (a 16-point gap with Clinton), and the betting markets give him an almost 80 percent chance of losing the presidency. Only the most deluded Trump loyalist — the kind of person who measures support by counting Trump signs in his neighborhood or comparing rally attendance numbers — would think things are going well for their man. But who’s to blame for his fall? Is it those elitest GOPe jerks at Never Trump? Hardly. A few points: 1. We Never Trumpers must be the most powerful “losers” in history. I can remember just days ago when we were completely irrelevant, the Trump Train had driven straight over our cuck bodies, and it was cruising straight to the Oval Office. Now that Trump is slumping Never Trump is suddenly so powerful that “assholes” like the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens (to quote Trump acolyte Sean Hannity) should be “held accountable” if Hillary wins.  2. The real story is much less dramatic. Never Trump’s actual electoral influence — to the extent it had any — peaked during the primaries. In a base election, Never Trump writers, thinkers, and pundits reached a much higher percentage of the electorate. Our great failure wasn’t so much in persuading people not to vote for Trump — he won with the lowest percentage of the vote of any GOP nominee in the primary era (even when he was unopposed for the last few contests) – but in creating a movement that could unite behind a single candidate. For lack of true leadership, the movement was lost. 3. Never Trump still has some electoral influence, but it’s at the margins. The electorate is spiking from the 31 million who voted in the GOP primary to the almost 130 million who are expected to vote in the general election. While our collective reach isn’t small (in the millions), it often overlaps, is hardly monolithic, and simply can’t reach a significant fraction of the total vote. In other words, engineering a large-scale, national polling swing is well beyond Never Trump’s political capacity. 4. Even if Never Trump has a considerable megaphone, it’s dwarfed by Trump’s media-amplified reach. In other words, we can’t reach nearly as many people with a message about Trump as Trump can reach with a message about himself. He’s the central actor in this drama, and his performance is the one that matters most, by far.  5. Thus, the real goal of Never Trump isn’t so much to beat Trump in the general election (Trump is proving quite good at beating himself) but to preserve the intellectual and moral foundation of the conservative movement. If Trump and his acolytes are the arsonists — torching the ideas and values that will best secure our inalienable rights and our national prosperity — then Never Trump seeks to be the firefighters. And it’s not just vital that we preserve the viability of conservative ideals, but that we also preserve the credibility of conservative thinkers. Ideas need ambassadors, and Trump’s loyalists are shredding their long-term credibility with every passing day. Trump is to blame for his troubles. He is losing to Hillary Clinton. He would rather humiliate his opponents than unify the party. He is the Democrat demagogue who secured the nomination. He is the person who mocks conservative values and scorns conservative ideas. That’s all on him, not on Never Trump.  

ESPN

“I had not previously realized that "short circuited" was synonymous with "got caught lying through my teeth, again" @HillaryClinton”

Two networks. Two vice presidential candidates. Same questions. Today co-host Savannah Guthrie on Friday interviewed Mike Pence and urged the Republican to trash Donald Trump. On CBS This Morning, Norah O’Donnell talked to Tim Kaine and urged the Democrat to trash... Donald Trump. She did not demand that Kaine bash Hillary Clinton. Instead she asked if Trump was “sane” and “competent.”

One of the Americans recently released by Iran says their departing flight was delayed for hours while their captors waited for another plane to arrive. The Obama administration delivered $400 million in foreign cash by plane the same day Iran released the prisoners. “They said, ‘We...

On Tenth Amendent grounds, a President Gary Johnson probably would not interfere with states’ efforts to restrict abortion.

The BBC's James Cook analyses Donald Trump's claim that Iran's military filmed $400m in cash being taken by plane to Tehran by the US authorities.

We will continue to lose ground to the Left until we demand consistency from our leaders.

One of the American hostages who was released the day the United States sent $400 million to Iran said his plane to freedom was not allowed to take off until “another plane” arrived in Tehran, acco…

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has determined in a preliminary ruling that wearing clothing featuring the Gadsden Flag constitutes legally actionable racial harassment in the workplace. In short, wearing the Gadsden flag while at work can earn you the title of "racist",

Donald Trump is expected to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan R-Wis., Friday, two highly placed Republican officials tell Fox News -- just days after the Republican presidential nominee declined to back Ryan when asked in an interview.

After the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the debate on race relations in the U.S. has been reignited. What do the #BlackLivesMatter activists really mea...

When the Internet’s legions of Hillary hecklers steal away to chat rooms and Facebook pages to vent grievances about Clinton, express revulsion toward Clinton and launch attacks on Clinton, they now may find themselves in a surprising place – confronted by a multimillion dollar super PAC working...

On Thursday, animal rights protesters descended on a Hillary Clinton campaign rally. Hillary, reacting with all the spontaneity we’ve come to expect from an early-model RA-7 protocol droid, scrolled through her data logs and came up with this snappy comeback: “We’ll keep talking, and apparently these people are here to protest Trump – because Trump and his kids have killed a lot of animals.”

Allah Akbar. Sharia supporting attorney Khizr Khan is still making the media rounds. Khizr Khan who waved a US Constitution ...

Every move you make. Every click you take. Every game you play. Every place you stay. They’ll be watching you.

Paul Nehlen has drawn praise from Donald Trump, who refused to endorse Ryan.

Donald Trump, the man who defied every political rule and prevailed to win his party’s nomination, last week took on perhaps the most sacred political rule of all: Never attack a Gold Star family. Not just because it alienates a vital constituency but because it reveals a shocking absence of elementary decency and of natural empathy for the most profound of human sorrows — parental grief. Why did Trump do it? It wasn’t a mistake. It was a revelation. It’s that he can’t help himself. His governing rule in life is to strike back when attacked, disrespected, or even slighted. To understand Trump, you have to grasp the General Theory: He judges every action, every pronouncement, every person by a single criterion — whether or not it/he is “nice” to Trump.  Vladimir Putin called him brilliant (in fact, he didn’t, but that’s another matter) and a bromance is born. A “Mexican” judge rules against Trump, which makes him a bad person governed by prejudiced racial instincts.  House Speaker Paul Ryan criticizes Trump’s attack on the Gold Star mother — so Trump mocks Ryan and praises his primary opponent. On what grounds? That the opponent is an experienced legislator? Is a tested leader?  Not at all. He’s “a big fan of what I’m saying, big fan,” attests Trump. You’re a fan of his, he’s a fan of yours. And vice versa. Treat him “unfairly” and you will pay. House speaker, Gold Star mother, it matters not. Of course we all try to protect our own dignity and command respect. But Trump’s hypersensitivity and unedited, untempered Pavlovian responses are, shall we say, unusual in both ferocity and predictability. This is beyond narcissism. I used to think Trump was an eleven-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully. I was off by about ten years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value — indeed exists — only insofar as it sustains and inflates him. Most politicians seek approval. But Trump lives for the adoration. He doesn’t even try to hide it, boasting incessantly about his crowds, his standing ovations, his TV ratings, his poll numbers, his primary victories. The latter are most prized because they offer empirical evidence of how loved and admired he is. Trump’s greatest success — normalizing the abnormal — is beginning to dissipate. Prized also because, in our politics, success is self-validating. A candidacy that started out as a joke, as a self-aggrandizing exercise in xenophobia, struck a chord in a certain constituency and took off. The joke was on those who believed that he was not a serious man and therefore would not be taken seriously. They — myself emphatically included — were wrong. Winning — in ratings, polls, and primaries — validated him. Which brought further validation in the form of endorsements from respected and popular Republicans. Chris Christie was first to cross the Rubicon. Ben Carson then offered his blessings, such as they are. Newt Gingrich came aboard to provide intellectual ballast. Although tepid, the endorsements by Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were further milestones in the normalization of Trump.  But this may all now be jeopardized by the Gold Star gaffe. (Remember: A gaffe in Washington is when a politician inadvertently reveals the truth, especially about himself.) It has put a severe strain on the patched-over relationship between the candidate and both Republican leadership and Republican regulars.  Trump’s greatest success — normalizing the abnormal — is beginning to dissipate. When a Pulitzer Prize–winning liberal columnist (Eugene Robinson) and a major conservative foreign-policy thinker and former speechwriter for George Shultz under Ronald Reagan (Robert Kagan) simultaneously question Trump’s psychological stability, indeed sanity, there’s something going on (as Trump would say). #related#The dynamic of this election is obvious. As in 1980, the status quo candidate for a failed administration is running against an outsider. The stay-the-course candidate plays his/her only available card — charging that the outsider is dangerously out of the mainstream and temperamentally unfit to command the nation.  In 1980, Reagan had to do just one thing: pass the threshold test for acceptability. He won that election because he did, especially in the debate with Jimmy Carter in which Reagan showed himself to be genial, self-assured, and, above all, nonthreatening. You may not like all his policies, but you could safely entrust the nation to him. Trump badly needs to pass that threshold. If character is destiny, he won’t. — Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2016 The Washington Post Writers Group

One of my all-time favorite lines is from Henry Thoreau: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” It came to mind this

On July 3, 2016, Shawn Lucas and filmmaker Ricardo Villaba served the DNC Services Corp. and Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz ...

CNN's Chris Cuomo and Brooke Baldwin ADMIT on live television that they ARE biased! Chris Cuomo: "We couldn't help her anymore than we have. You know, she's ...

While campaigning in Florida on Tuesday, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine attacked congressional Republicans for failing to pass a funding bill that would have directed $1.1 billion toward research to treat and prevent the Zika virus. According to the Orlando Sentinel: Kaine . . . called for federal action on fighting the Zika virus, which officials on Monday said had reached South Florida via mosquitoes. Kaine said Congress should pass a $1.1 billion bill to combat Zika without what he called the “poison pill” of anti-abortion language added by House Republicans. “Congress should not be in recess when Zika is advancing,” he said. In reality, it was Senate Democrats who refused to pass the bill, and there’s no “poison pill” to be found anywhere inside it. Instead, the Democratic leadership is balking because the bill does not specifically earmark a portion of funding for Planned Parenthood. While most of the funding outlined in the bill would go to mosquito prevention and vaccine research, a small segment is dedicated to public-health efforts. According to Don Stewart, deputy chief of staff for Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Democrats chose to block the entire bill because none of this small portion was earmarked for Planned Parenthood. “The conference committee increased health-care block-grant funding and provided guidance on who could receive the funding,” Stewart tells National Review. “Planned Parenthood was not listed as a potential recipient, and Democrats want them to be explicitly listed as a recipient — even though the president’s initial request didn’t ask for any.” RELATED: Florida’s Zika Season: One More Menace In an Electorate That’s Already in a Sour Mood Senate Democratic leaders Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer held a press conference attempting to explain their decision shortly after leading an effort to kill the bill. Reid claimed that women would have nowhere to go to obtain birth control under the bill, but, in fact, nothing in the legislation would cut any federal funding currently going to Planned Parenthood. It simply does not add more funding in the context of treating Zika. Planned Parenthood’s executive director, Dawn Laguens, spoke alongside Reid and Schumer, implying that it is more important for Planned Parenthood to receive direct funding under the bill than it is to pass a bill quickly. The Democratic leadership is balking because the bill does not specifically earmark a portion of funding for Planned Parenthood. A letter from Planned Parenthood to the Senate offices prior to the most recent vote stated that “a vote against this bill will be seen as a vote for women’s health care.” But a vote against the bill is actually vote against women’s health care, particularly if the women in question have contracted the Zika virus. And, even from the perspective of Senate Democrats, there is no rational objection to the bill given that Planned Parenthood still would receive as much federal funding as it did before the Zika virus became an issue. But a compromise from Senate Democrats seems unlikely, given their latest statements. “We would love for them to end that filibuster and pass the bill, but it doesn’t sound like they’re prepared to do that,” Stewart tells National Review. #share#Meanwhile, Florida politicians have honed in with laser-like focus on the question of research funding — the state this week reported 14 local Zika cases, all in the Miami neighborhood of Wynwood. These are the first cases originating from mosquito bites that occurred in the U.S., as opposed to cases related to international travel. Marco Rubio held a press conference Wednesday morning in Doral, Fla., emphasizing the need for immediate congressional action to pass a bill funding research and prevention. RELATED: Regulators’ Infectious Zika Incompetence The Florida senator said he found it “inexcusable that Congress waited for months” to move on the issue and lamented that Zika has become “a political volleyball.” Rubio said that Senate Democrats’ objections to the bill are not enough to justify voting against it. “There is absolutely nothing in the . . . bill that the House is insisting on that has anything to do with Planned Parenthood,” he explained. “I think to be, quite frank, they are making it up because they want a political issue.” He also suggested that the White House has up to $300 million available to fund Zika research immediately, but that the administration might be withholding the money for political reasons. #related#Bill Nelson, the other U.S. senator from the state, has been pushing for the Senate to reconvene and pass an emergency spending bill. Complaining about the lack of response from McConnell, Nelson is said to have told a reporter, “Wait until a mosquito bites one of the people who is traveling to Kentucky and then he gets a transmitted case in Kentucky, then we’ll get action.” Florida representative Patrick Murphy, a Democrat challenging Rubio for a seat in the U.S. Senate, has been using language similar to that of Kaine and Reid, claiming on his campaign website that “Republican leaders are proposing limiting access to contraception” and “prioritizing partisan attacks on women’s health.” Senate Democrats likely will continue blaming Republicans’ opposition to “women’s health” for the political stalemate over Zika-research funding, but the real roadblock is Democrats’ absolute dedication to funding the abortion giant Planned Parenthood instead of actual women’s health care. — Alexandra DeSanctis is a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at the National Review Institute.

Fox NationJesse Watters:  It had nothing do with me paying the hitman. But this is Obama bribing Muslim terrorists to help his legacy, because if you look at these two