ActRight

In an interview for PBS Newshour, Hillary Clinton defended her role in the Libyan intervention saying it “didn’t cost a single American life.”

It’s lights out for democracy. No surprise for those who have been paying attention. But if this is your first time through it, this election has been totally rigged. From the start, it was clear t…

Gallup: Support for Planned Parenthood Drops

The online news site makes its move after suffering a $140 million judgment in the Hulk Hogan lawsuit.

A population of illiterate, non-thinking morons can’t possibly obtain good paying jobs. This country spends $12,000 per public school student per year on education and this is the outcome? Th…

Trump has been complaining about bias regarding the judge in the Trump U lawsuits

U.S. Border Patrol agents took a previously deported criminal illegal alien into custody in New York after a local police officer stopped the man for a traffic violation. Agents determined the man had a violent criminal record and had re-entered the U.S. illegally after being deported.

While researching for a wrap-up on the June 7 Presidential Primaries, we discovered evidence that Google may be manipulating autocomplete recommendations in ...

A few more thoughts on the view from 1957. Relative to the size of the U.S. economy (which is to say, as a share of GDP) we have cut military spending to barely a third of what it was in 1957, from 9.8 percent of GDP then to 3.3 percent of GDP now. Even though we were spending three times as much on national defense in 1957—and even though we had lower taxes (17.2 percent of GDP then vs. 17.7 percent of GDP today) we ran a budget surplus. It’s usually described as a “modest” surplus, but at 3.4 percent of GDP, the budget surplus of 1957 was proportionally larger than military spending is in 2015. So, where’d the money go? Feel free to consult the historical data yourself, but the short answer is: welfare spending. The broadest budget categories are national defense, human resources, physical resources, net interest, other functions, and undistributed offsetting receipts. National defense, net interest, other functions, and undistributed receipts are pretty self-explanatory; human resources includes welfare and health-care programs, entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security, and education spending. Physical resources means things like energy development, transportation, natural resources maintenance, environmental conservation, and community- and regional-development programs, the “infrastructure” we’re always going on about. Interest on the debt today is almost exactly the same as it was in 1957; it is exactly the same as what it was in 1953: 1.3 percent of GDP. In 1957, we spent 1 percent of GDP on physical resources; today, we spend a bit less, 0.8 percent of GDP. Other functions constituted 1.6 percent of GDP in 1957, today down to 1.1 percent of GDP. Undistributed receipts is nearly unchanged, up 0.1 percent of GDP. That leaves us with the welfare category, the only area of federal spending that has grown significantly relative to the size of the U.S. economy. In 1957, it was 3.9 percent of GDP—not insignificant, to be sure; that’s a slightly larger figure than our present-day military spending. But welfare entitlement spending in 2015 is 15.2 percent of GDP. Which is to say, broadly defined welfare spending alone is equal to 86 percent of all the federal taxes that are going to be collected this year. Most of that is Social Security, health-care spending, traditional welfare, and federal education spending, which has grown substantially despite the fact that most education spending happens at the state and local level. Recap: In GDP terms, we spend about a third on the military today compared to what we spent in the late 1950s. We spend almost exactly the same on interest on the debt. We spend 20 percent less on energy, transportation, the environment, and natural resources. And we spend almost four times as much on welfare. Again, that is in GDP terms, and our economy is a heck of a lot bigger than it was in 1957. As a share of all federal spending, welfare has gone from 23 percent of spending to 73 percent of federal spending. In constant-dollar terms, we spend 17.5 times as much. In nominal-dollar terms, we spend 150 times as much. We could probably stand to trim the Pentagon budget a bit and reform defense procurement. But the real problem is the welfare state. The numbers don’t lie.    

Donald Trump slammed President Obama and Hillary Clinton Friday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington DC on ...

Donald Trump speaks at Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington, DC JUNE 10th 2016! Don't forget to share Trumplicans! ―――――――――――――――――――――――――――――― ★ Wel...

Hilary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren just executed some killer tweets. Are we better than this?

It is useful to read David French’s piece today on why – as a matter of rules – delegates to the Republican Convention are not actually bound to vote for Donald Trump alongside Erick Erickson’s piece on the growing discontent in GOP circles with Trump (donors in panic, elected officials rescinding endorsements) and readiness to consider abandoning him, Noah Rothman’s review of Trump’s many and unique disadvantages as a national candidate, and Harry Enten’s poll analysis of how Trump thus far is not consolidating enough of the white vote to beat Hillary Clinton. These are not separate stories, but a single story: the party has every reason to believe it faces defeat up and down the ticket with Trump, and at least in theory, it could still make a choice to replace him with another nominee, if enough nominally Trump-supporting delegates decide by late July in Cleveland that this is in the best interests of the party and the nation. But what nominee, and at what cost? That’s the harder question. Any dump-Trump movement within the party must first surmount the same two problems that have thwarted the third-party-never-Trump effort, and that gave us Trump as the primary winner in the first place: the never-Trump effort suffered because nobody wanted to be the leader, and the primary field suffered because everyone did. Trump never did face a head-to-head race with a single opponent, and every effort to get first Chris Christie, then Jeb Bush, then Marco Rubio, then John Kasich to step aside or back a Trump opponent was too little, too late. Only if the many disparate factions can agree on a unified strategy – or if they can find a procedural way to dump Trump first and select a substitute second – is it even worth considering. Hence this, from Erick on the need to get Ted Cruz on board with the project: Nothing will happen at the convention without Ted Cruz’s blessing. Cruz may be placed in the very unique position of having to be the statesman and lead his delegates. Because of the remaining animosity between Cruz and establishment players, Cruz might very well be able to shape a ticket that benefits Cruz without putting him in the top slot. If that ticket then goes on to lose to Hillary, Cruz is the one who stopped Trump and put the party above his own desires when 2020 comes around. If the ticket wins, he becomes President of the Senate before becoming President of the United States. Or he just fully takes on leadership of the conservative movement. Cruz and [Scott] Walker are becoming key players as Trump continues to falter. The donor class feels comfortable with Walker and they think he could truly be persuaded to do it. The conservatives are comfortable with Cruz and recognize he has to be involved because of his delegate count and the personal loyalty of his delegates. This pitch to Cruz is more or less the same pitch that was made to Marco Rubio to join a unity ticket with Cruz after Kansas, to no avail. I’m sure Cruz will consider all the strategic angles carefully – Ted Cruz may not always have a good strategy, but he always has a strategy – but it’s hard to predict whether he would go along with such a radical step, when he’s already positioned right now to be the 2020 frontrunner while standing aloof from the Trump fiasco. Not mentioned here is John Kasich, who like Cruz and Rubio is still holding his delegates, and like Cruz is in no hurry to endorse Trump. Walker would be an intriguing possibility as a substitute, since he dropped out of the race early and therefore did not generate the same animosity from Trump’s supporters that Cruz, Rubio or Kasich did. He backed Cruz to the hilt in the Wisconsin primary, and unlike some other anti-Trump governors, he helped Cruz deliver a big win there, showing his continuing mastery of the Badger State. He looked great on paper before he launched his campaign, and his profile as a white, Midwestern, Harley-riding college dropout who’s never worked in DC would in theory appeal to the type of voter Trump has courted. His low-key personality, which got buried in a 17-candidate field, could be an enormous relief after a year of the Trump reality show. In 2006, Walker dropped out early from the primary for what turned out to be a failed campaign to win the Wisconsin Governorship for the GOP, and won party-loyalty chits he cashed in to sweep to the nomination in 2010; this would be a somewhat similar dynamic, but would involve a much more radical step he may blanch at taking. On the other hand, Walker’s unsteady micromanagement of his primary campaign showed him to be, at best, a guy who needed time to scale up the learning curve of national politics, and he’d be the first candidate since Hubert Humphrey (then a sitting Vice President) to get thrown into a national nomination without running a full primary campaign. And the bitterness of Trump’s supporters would be real and legitimate, and hard for even the most creative political magicians to soothe in a general election campaign of just over three months. Most likely, Walker would find himself needing to take some harder lines on immigration and trade than he would have liked (or than he did last summer) in order to mollify at least some of those voters. Then again, the opportunity to win may still be there. There remains a strong historic trend working against Hillary’s effort to hold the Obama coalition together for a third straight election, and her unfavorables would be the worst of any candidate in history if not for Trump.  As Jim Geraghty notes, the incumbent president’s favorability ratings remain low in the battleground states; people are eager for a change. And Sean Trende’s arguments for why Trump could win are mainly premised on Hillary’s weakness and the fact that elections are often driven by factors other than who the candidates are. Trump’s polling at this stage of the race is abysmal: RCP has him at 40.3% nationally and falling fast, 42.6% in Florida, 42.3% in Pennsylvania, 41.3% in Ohio, 38% in Virginia and Michigan, 34.8% in Wisconsin – even 45% in Georgia. Yet, Hillary’s support is not so hot either, and some national polls have Gary Johnson in double digits. Plainly, a lot of voters are deeply unhappy with their choices, and might give a fresh look to a guy who has been keeping a low national profile since exiting the race early last September. A party coup d’etat against a presumptive nominee – even one who won the lowest percentage of the popular vote in the history of popular GOP primaries – would be unprecedented, but everything about this election season has been unprecedented, and we’re not so far removed from watching the party maneuver Paul Ryan into the Speakership over the heads of a bunch of other people who’d actively pursued it. Many of Trump’s critics, like Ryan and Rubio, were unwilling to abandon him as the nominee on grounds of moral hygiene alone, but as the evidence of Trump’s political weakness mounts, it’s a nuclear option the party has a responsibility to examine seriously.

At some point, colleges and universities will have to fight back against the weaponization of Title IX.

MP3: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/3313/the-truth-about-trump-university-and-judge-gonzalo-curiel Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/stefan-molyneux/fdr-3313-...

Donald Trump promises to bring a business acumen to Washington, but his actual ventures reveal more — or, rather, less — than he intends.

The International Olympic Committee will now allow transgender men to compete as women without reassignment surgery. They ought to make ...

An Israeli police official told Fox News that Palestinians were celebrating the terrorist attack that left four dead in central Tel Aviv Wednesday night.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has been sued at least 60 times by individuals and businesses who accuse him of failing to pay for work done at his various properties, according to two published reports.

Unbind the delegates if Trump doesn’t have their confidence.

Jean-Guy Tremblay returns to get Americas to sign a petition for basic human rights. It is a very long list and a surprising amount of people sign. See Jean-...

Finally! Voters have another choice. The Libertarian Party recently nominated two socially tolerant but fiscally conservative former governors, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld.

Historically, horse racing was dominated by African-American riders – but a racist past (and present) managed to obscure the proud history of black jockeys. Every jockey wants to ride in the Derby,…

Ben talks Tel Aviv attack, the media wave for Hillary, and the vaunted mailbag!

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