ActRight

Speaking at a townhall in Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was detailing the differences between himself and his challenger, Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke, when he began, “On the Second Amendment—” prompting a gun rights supporter to interrupt, “Come and take it!”

A new nationwide poll reveals that the overwhelming majority of voters in the United States (68 percent) view illegal immigration as a “major problem” in America and believe that not enough is being done by the federal government to remedy the situation.

As things stand now, Donald Trump has no path to 270 electoral votes.

The number of job openings in the U.S. climbed to a record 6.9 million in July in a clear sign that a booming economy is entering the second half of the year with a big dollop of momentum.

Smokers and obese people will be denied surgery on the NHS by cash-strapped hospitals trying to save money, senior health officials have warned. Vale of York Care Commissioning Group has announced it will make people wait up to a year for non-essential surgery if they are overweight, until their body mass index (BMI) drops to 30. The group said the decision has been made as “the best way of achieving maximum value from the limited resources available”.

Eleven Maryland state lawmakers are asking county police to investigate sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, if alleged victims support investigating.

Confident Donald Trump Campaign Sprints Into Final Week In Blue States As Hillary Clinton’s Momentum Collapses

World leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, are congratulating Donald Trump on his historic win.

While it's true that President-elect Donald Trump has enabled some infighting within the Republican Party, conservatives can always agree on one thing when it comes to The Donald: The complete meltdown of a reaction Trump elicits from leftists is hilarious, and perfectly illustrates the intolerance of the frail left.

The shooting at a congressional baseball practice in June and the methods of the gunman behind it are described in the starkest detail yet in a report released Friday by Virginia officials.

'It appears the governing of the United States has changed from a reality TV show into a fantasy TV show,' said one writerAfter President Donald Trump tweeted

As Cuban dissidents flood the streets of Miami with tears of joy, recalling their painful experiences as victims of the Castro regime, world leaders, buckling under the weight of their own moral cowardice, continue to heap praise on a savage dictator who censored, abused, tortured, imprisoned, and killed his people mercilessly for six decades. From President Obama’s diplomatic appeasement to Prime Minister Trudeau’s fawning eulogy, Fidel Castro’s tyranny has been swept under the rug in service of crude historical revisionism.  

If you are unaware, China is developing a system in which all people will have a ?social credit score? that is based upon compliance with laws and social codes of conduct.  The more loy…

Syndicated Analytics latest report titled “Ethanol Manufacturing Plant Project Report: Industry Trends, Manufacturing Process, Plant Setup, Machinery, Raw Materials, Investment Opportunities, Cost and Revenue 2023-2028” covers the details involved in establishing a ethanol...

How do you define 'grievance?'

On Tuesday, The New York Times published a piece designed to teach you how to most productively argue with your conservative or liberal uncle at the Thanksgiving table.

UW-Madison class aims to tackle 'white supremacy.'

The Trump transition team is floating the possibility of an early executive action to impose tariffs on foreign imports, according to multiple sources.

A more expansive version of the law would have been even less popular than the one we have now.

The Latest on President-elect Donald Trump (all times EST):

OPINION | Same press, same bias, eight years later.

According to multiple media outlets, the Trump administration announced earlier today that they would consider a solution to making Mexico pay for the famous Trump Wall: a 20 percent tax on imports from Mexico. This comes on the heels of Trump slamming the North American Free Trade Agreement for creating a “$60 billion trade deficit” and threatening Mexico that if they didn’t sign a check, they might as well cancel their meeting with him.

I have disagreed with Senator Ron Wyden on practically every political question there is, but he always has struck me as a decent and honest man, and so it is with a heavy heart that I write these words: Senator Wyden must resign his seat in light of disturbing new information about his past that has come to light. The shocking revelation: Senator Wyden has been, for more than a decade, a willing accomplice to a plot to undermine the American political order and to overthrow the Constitution by infiltrating agents of radicalism into the highest reaches of the federal judiciary. The nefariousness of this undertaking cannot be overstated. The monsters advanced to positions of power with Senator Wyden’s assistance include dangerous extremists whose ideology “represents a breathtaking retreat from the notion that Americans have fundamental Constitutional rights.” His agents take “a very dangerous view to our liberty” that “harkens back to the days when politicians restricted a people’s rights on a whim.” Wyden’s anti-constitutional conspiracy “is couched in the sort of jurisprudence that justified the horrific oppression of one group after another in our first two centuries.” Horrific. I refer, of course, to his longtime support of Neil Gorsuch. Judge Gorsuch, who has been nominated by President Donald Trump to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, may be unknown to Americans who do not follow the affairs of the judiciary with any great interest, but this monster — Wyden’s own characterization of him is what is quoted above — is hardly unknown in the halls of power. In fact, this atavistic beast, who would strip us not only of our constitutional rights but of our human dignity if given half a chance, was up for a confirmation vote as recently as 2006, when he was named to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most powerful and prestigious of the federal benches. But a curious thing happened in 2006. In spite of Judge Gorsuch’s obvious extremism, the danger he presents to the lives and liberties of every American, and his manifest unfitness to hold any federal judicial seat, he was confirmed. He was confirmed unanimously. Senator Wyden could not stir himself to vote against this human horror, whose defects are so obvious and so well-documented. Neither could Gorsuch’s classmate from Harvard Law, Senator Obama. Senator Dick Durbin knuckled under to the unanimous decision, as did Senator Debbie Stabenow, Senator Chuck Schumer, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (remember her?), Senator Barbara Boxer, Senator Harry Reid, Senator Patty Murray, Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator John Kerry, even the late Senator Ted Kennedy. And, of course, there was Senator Wyden, who now has turned against his former confederate. Not one Democrat could stir himself to cast a vote against this menace to all we hold dear. There are only a few possibilities that could explain this. The first is that Senator Wyden is so negligent in his duties, so incompetent, so mentally unfit for office that it simply escaped his notice that he was helping to advance the judicial career of a Constitution-killer such as Gorsuch. But that seems to me unlikely — Senator Wyden is many things, but he is not an utterly blind, deaf, and illiterate fool. The second possibility is that Senator Wyden is simply a coward and an opportunist who is interested in Gorsuch now only because the election of Donald Trump has riled up his constituents and donors, and Supreme Court votes make headlines that appellate-court confirmations do not. But it would be a disservice to the intellectual depth of Senator Wyden to believe such a thing. No, that is unthinkable. If Gorsuch is what Senator Wyden says he is today, then that is what he was in 2006. But if we reject the possibility that he is simply a fool or a self-seeking political miscreant, then Senator Wyden must be a villain, one who knowingly and with malice aforethought helped maneuver Gorsuch onto the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he marinated in his own malevolence and awaited his eventual elevation to the Supreme Court. And so, Senator Wyden must resign. In fact, if Senator Wyden remains in office — or Senator Schumer, or Senator Murray, or any of the others who went along with Gorsuch’s unanimous confirmation — then it will be impossible to take seriously the Democrats’ current objections to the nominee, i.e., that he is a uniquely unqualified candidate with a borderline sociopathic style of jurisprudence that would make serfs of us all. Not since Cicero confronted Catiline has a senate seen such a heinous plot or required more dedicated action. If Gorsuch is what Senator Wyden says he is today, then that is what he was in 2006, when every Democrat in the Senate signed off on his nomination. But such are “The Difficulties of a Statesman,” and we all know how that philippic ends: “Resign. Resign. Resign.” — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent. 

Last week, President Donald Trump again expressed concern that the violence in Chicago was “totally out of control.” “We’re going to have to do something about Chicago,” the president said. While it’s unclear what Trump has in mind, it is undoubtedly true that the Chicago police department is a mess, with the city suffering ever increasing murder rates. Some analysts, such as Heather Mac Donald in the Wall Street Journal, focus on the damage created by President Obama trying to run local police departments via the U.S. Justice Department, but the problems facing Chicago go well beyond that and certainly aren’t new. The quality of Chicago’s policing has been deteriorating for decades. Back in 1991, 67 percent of murderers were arrested. When Mayor Richard M. Daley finally left office 20 years later, in 2011, the arrest rate was down to 30 percent. This troubling drop only continued after Rahm Emanuel became mayor, hitting a new low of 20 percent in 2016. Unfortunately, the true figure is even worse, because Chicago has been intentionally misclassifying murders as non-murders. Nationally, in 2015, 61.5 percent of murders resulted in an arrest — almost two out of every three. And unlike Chicago’s arrest rate, the national rate has been fairly constant over the decades. Chicago’s problems are a result of putting politics ahead of sensible policing for decades. For example, after becoming mayor, Emanuel did three unfortunate things to the Chicago police force: 1) Emanuel closed down detective bureaus in Chicago’s highest-crime districts, relocating them to often distant locations. 2) The mayor disbanded many gang task forces. 3) In cooperation with the ACLU, Emanuel instituted new, voluminous forms that have to be filled out by police each time they stop someone to investigate a crime. All this time wasted filling out forms is time that can’t be spent policing neighborhoods. These policies have made it much more difficult to catch criminals, and when you don’t catch criminals, the result is more crime. The detective-bureau relocations have been disastrous. Detectives who had worked for years in high-crime neighborhoods suddenly found themselves working other areas of the city, their hard-earned, neighborhood-specific knowledge of likely culprits and informants now rendered irrelevant. As one detective told Chicago magazine, “All the expertise you once had is useless when you’re working on the other side of town. You might as well put me in a new city.” Moving detectives from crime hotspots also means longer travel times. These delays were not only a waste of time — they made detectives less effective at doing their jobs of tracking down witnesses and keeping track of evidence. The result was more unsolved crimes. If budget cuts necessitated closures, then detective bureaus in low-crime areas ought to have been considered first. But that would have met with tougher political resistance, because of the affluent and politically well-connected people who live there. So much for the Democrats’ claims that they care about poor minorities. Chicago’s police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, blames gangs for the violence. Regarding all the murders over Christmas, Johnson was blunt about the source of the violence: “These were deliberate and planned shootings by one gang against another. . . . This was followed by several acts of retaliation.” But Emanuel’s decision early in his administration to gut gang task forces, a move that undid the hard work that had allowed the police to infiltrate many gangs, is not something that can easily be undone. The arrest rates are low for gang murders because witnesses are loath to get on a gang’s bad side. But in Chicago the situation is especially bad because witnesses have very little hope that gang members will ever be put away. In Chicago the situation is especially bad because witnesses have very little hope that gang members will ever be put away. The agreement with the ACLU was a politically motivated result of Laquan McDonald’s videotaped shooting by police. Emanuel caused a stronger backlash by delaying the release of the video until after his reelection. As arrest rates have fallen and murder rates have risen, Daley and Emanuel have kept pushing responsibility on others. After all, they claim, it isn’t their fault that state legislatures and the U.S. Congress haven’t passed sufficiently strict gun-control laws. Back in 2010, Daley claimed that the increased crime rate was “all about guns, and that’s why the crusade is on.” Emanuel has made similar claims. The problem of unsolved crimes seems to have gone unnoticed. Democrats have learned nothing from Chicago’s failed experiment in banning guns, which began in late 1982. After the ban, the city’s murder rates stopped falling and started soaring — not only in absolute terms, but also relative to adjacent counties and other large cities. Democrats need to learn that gun control primarily disarms law-abiding citizens. Police matter in crime prevention — and so do policing policies. Chicago’s problems run much deeper than something that has occurred over the last couple years. The city’s politicians need to stop trying to buck their responsibility for their failed policies. — John R. Lott Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author of The War on Guns.

The President’s travel ban was overhasty and incompetent. The Ninth Circuit’s response wasn’t impressive either.