ActRight

Philip Davies challenges the sexist pro-feminist agenda bill that only protects women from domestic violence and ignores men and boys!

As their ratings continue to decline, MTV continues its left-wing politics by releasing a short video entitled "2017 Resolutions for White Guys."

Canada welcomes Syrian refugees like no other country. But for one 10-year-old’s parents, is she leaving too much behind?

The interview from there for Nasheed got torpedoed when Tucker held him accountable for his own words even in a book that he wrote about lying about his sex book

Sheila Gunn Reid says, after Notley told Albertans to walk or take the bus to prepare for the carbon tax, she checked to see if they were leading by example....

The tangled politics of the “war on Christmas.”

The New Republic wrote an expose on Media Matters for America Monday that included a shocking-- simply shocking-- revelation: the David Brock-run organization

The Pacific Research Institute’s Clark S. Judge writes that the risk that regulators pose to business is up 79% from 2010—a burden that falls heavy on industry.

America owes President Barack Obama an enormous debt of gratitude for showing how truly dangerous the federal government can be when our Constitution’s checks and balances start failing. With the active collusion of congressional Democrats, President Obama’s presidency has been one long series of body blows to the separation of powers that has protected our democracy since the founding. The results have been stark. Never has a president trampled so much on the prerogatives of Congress. Obama’s executive orders, suspending parts of our immigration laws and even his own prized Obamacare, have been sheer usurpations, going far beyond even the breathtaking delegations of legislative authority granted by the brief Democratic supermajority in Congress in 2009–10. Sad to say, Obama’s trampling on the prerogatives of state governments has been even more unprecedented, and potentially far more damaging. His agencies’ “Dear Colleague” letters, addressing such sensitive issues as local school districts’ bathroom policies and the standards by which institutions of higher education review claims of sexual assault, have wrested away the core functions of state leaders, local boards, and even administrators. The separation of state and federal authority is one of the most essential principles of our Constitution. It explains the Constitution’s structural allocation of powers as much as the division between legislative, executive, and judicial functions. If we lose the separate and independent existence of state governments, we will lose our Constitution. Hence the potentially historic importance of the initiative just announced by Governor Scott Walker, under the heading “Wisconsin, Not Washington.” This morning Governor Walker sent a letter to President-elect Trump, asking for Trump’s help in restoring the federal structure of the Constitution. Governor Walker’s letter opens (after congratulating Trump) with a paragraph framing the issue in a way similar to how the Founders might have done it: The question is not what functions the federal government should give back to the states, but what functions should the federal government have in the first place. The federal government was originally created to be a small, central government of limited powers, with everything else left to the states. Through years of federal overreach, this model has been turned on its head, and now is the time to right the ship. Power flows from the people to the government, not the other way around. With an eye toward “aggressively expand[ing] opportunities for those seeking family supporting jobs,” the letter calls on the incoming Trump administration to provide various block grants and waivers to state governments. Among other suggestions, the letter calls for an executive order “directing all federal agencies to consult and coordinate federal activities with their state counterparts and to truly delegate oversight of functions and activities without mandates or strings.” It suggests that federal agencies should be required to make permitting decisions in a timely manner, just as most state agencies are required to do. The letter specifically calls for flexibility in the administration of nutritional-assistance programs, Medicaid, and the management of the state’s gray-wolf population. It highlights the need for revisions to the Clean Air Act’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards. And it calls for giving Wisconsin more ability to manage federal timberland for the benefit of the resources, wildlife, and economy of Wisconsin, not the federal government. The Supreme Court has many times insisted that states must remain “free and independent within their proper sphere of authority.” But the Court has given the federal government almost free rein to put coercive conditions on the funds it sends the states, and to require federal-agency “permission” for states to implement federal law. These twin levers of “coercive federalism” have resulted in a situation where federal and state governments are more integrated with each other than many independent federal agencies are with the rest of the executive branch. Today the president has more control over how states run their Medicaid programs than he has over the Federal Communications Commission. There’s definitely something wrong with that. Democrats who fear the exercise of unbridled power by a Republican president have as much reason to want state governments kept free from federal control as Republicans do for not wanting a repeat of Obama’s constitutional abuses. We can disagree about policy issues, but we should agree on the basic meaning of our Constitution. It is urgent to return the states’ reserved powers and responsibilities to them, as the Tenth Amendment requires. It is urgent to return the states’ reserved powers and responsibilities to them, as the Tenth Amendment requires. But as we do so, it’s equally important to resist the temptation of letting states take over federal functions. One of the most invidious forms of federal control is “cooperative federalism,” whereby states assume responsibility for implementing federal programs. Instead, the federal government should be forced to implement all federal regulations itself. Constituents who fear the EPA may prefer State Implementation Plans to Federal Implementation Plans under the Clean Air Act, but either way, it’s a shakedown. If federal bureaucrats want to regulate everything, let’s make them do it all by themselves. If they want us to do it at the state level, then they should let us do it all by ourselves. #related#Governor Walker’s letter closes by noting that the suggested recalibration between the federal and state governments “should only be the beginning of our efforts to return authority closer to the people.” He is absolutely right that this conversion will not happen overnight, but it is a challenge that must be tackled immediately. The separation of powers between the federal government and state governments is as important as the separation of powers between the branches of the federal government. Restoring those checks and balances is a task for all the states, and all generations of Americans. The task before us is monumental, but with any luck, Governor Walker’s letter to the incoming president can serve as a rallying call. — Mario Loyola is the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s Center for Competitive Federalism. Jake Curtis serves as an associate counsel at the Center.

Schweizer: Hillary Lost Because 'Corruption Has Consequences'

Veterans Affairs will mandate VA regulatory changes affecting VA care in all states, creating a states rights problem, to allow advanced practice registered nurses (APRN) to treat veterans without …

Liberal author CJ Werleman issued a tweet advocating a military coup against President-elect Donald Trump.

Los Angeles city and county leaders on Monday unveiled a $10-million fund to provide legal assistance for residents facing deportation, the region’s boldest move yet as it prepares for an expected crackdown on illegal immigration by Donald Trump.

Hey, white guys: we came up for some New Year's Resolutions for you, some of which include Black Lives Matter, Beyoncé, Kanye West, and more! Update: This vi...

In their desperate attempts to paint the incoming Trump administration as anti-Semitic, The Huffington Post has found a story they think will really stick: National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn met with Heinz-Christian Strache, the head of the Austrian Freedom Party, a few weeks ago. Strache is an ally of Vladimir Putin’s; the Freedom Party is a far-right European nationalist party. Their headline: “MIKE AND REICH: FLYNN MET LEADER OF EX-NAZI PARTY.”

It’s been a rough couple days for The Washington Post. Word emerged that hackers invaded its internal system—for a few days, no less—all of its staffers had to change their passwords as the company tried to figure out how much data had been compromised. Meanwhile, a petition campaign was launched related to news that Amazon, under the Post’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, recently secured a $600 million contract from the CIA. That’s at least twice what Bezos paid for the Post this year. Bezos recently disclosed that the company’s Web-services business is building a “private cloud” for the CIA to use for its data needs. Critics charge that, at a minimum, the Post needs to disclose its CIA link whenever it reports on the agency. Over 15,000 have signed the petition this week hosted by RootsAction. Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50! In a statement released by the Institute for Public Accuracy, media writer/author Robert McChesney observes: When the main shareholder in one of the very largest corporations in the world benefits from a massive contract with the CIA on the one hand, and that same billionaire owns the Washington Post on the other hand, there are serious problems. The Post is unquestionably the political paper of record in the United States, and how it covers governance sets the agenda for the balance of the news media. Citizens need to know about this conflict of interest in the columns of the Post itself. If some official enemy of the United States had a comparable situation—say the owner of the dominant newspaper in Caracas was getting $600 million in secretive contracts from the Maduro government—the Post itself would lead the howling chorus impaling that newspaper and that government for making a mockery of a free press. It is time for the Post to take a dose of its own medicine.” See article by Norman Solomon for a fuller accounting. He notes: Bezos personally and publicly touts Amazon Web Services, and it’s evident that Amazon will be seeking more CIA contracts. Last month, Amazon issued a statement saying, “We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA.” Read next: Greg Mitchell’s post on CNN deleting a tweet claiming that Edward Snowden offered to spy on the US.

The American middle classes, the Chinese, and Vladimir Putin have never been convinced that Ivy League degrees, vast Washington experience, and cultural sophistication necessarily translate into national wisdom. Trump instead relies more on instinct and operates from cunning — and we will soon see whether we should redefine “wisdom.” But for now, for example, we have never heard a presidential candidate say such a thing as “We love our miners” — not “we like” miners, but “we love” them. And not just any miners, but “our” miners, as if, like “our vets,” the working people of our moribund economic regions were unique and exceptional people, neither clingers nor irredeemables. In Trump’s gut formulation, miners certainly did not deserve “to be put out of business” by Hillary Clinton, as if they were little more than the necessary casualties of the war against global warming. For Trump, miners were not the human equivalent of the 4,200 bald eagles that the Obama administration recently assured the wind turbine industry can be shredded for the greater good of alternate energy and green profiteering. In other words, Trump instinctively saw the miners of West Virginia — and by extension the working-class populations of states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio — as emblematic of the forgotten man, in a way few of his Republican rivals, much less Hilary Clinton, grasped.    No other candidate talked as constantly about jobs, “fair” trade, illegal immigration, and political correctness — dead issues to most other pollsters and politicos. Rivals, Democratic and Republican alike, had bought into the electoral matrix of Barack Obama: slicing the electorate into identity-politics groups and arousing them to register and vote in record numbers against “them” — a fossilized, supposedly crude, illiberal, and soon-to-be-displaced white working class. For Democrats that meant transferring intact Obama’s record numbers of minority voters to a 68-year-old multimillionaire white woman; for Republicans, it meant pandering with a kinder, softer but still divisive identity-politics message. Trump instinctively saw a different demographic. And even among minority groups, he detected a rising distaste for being patronized, especially by white, nasal-droning, elite pajama-boy nerds whose loud progressivism did not disguise their grating condescension.   Trump Dismissed as a Joke Yet even after destroying the Clinton Dynasty, the Bush-family aristocracy, the Obama legacy, and 16 more-seasoned primary rivals, Trump was dismissed by observers as being mostly a joke, idiotic and reckless. Such a dismissal is a serious mistake, because what Trump lacks in traditionally defined sophistication and awareness, he more than makes up for in shrewd political cunning of a sort not seen since the regnum of Franklin Roosevelt. Take a few recent examples. Candidate Donald Trump was roundly hounded by the political and media establishment for suggesting that the election might be “rigged.” Trump was apparently reacting to old rumors of voting-machine irregularities. (In fact, in about a third of blue Detroit’s precincts, to take just one example, more votes this election were recorded than there were registered voters.)  Or perhaps Trump channeled reports that there was an epidemic of invalid or out-of-date voter registrations. (Controversially, the normally staid Pew Charitable Trust found that 2.4 million voter registrations were no longer accurate or were significantly inaccurate.)  Or maybe he fanned fears that illegal aliens were voting. (Another controversial study from two professors at Old Dominion suggested that over 6 percent of non-citizens may have voted in 2008; and the president on the eve of the election, in his usual wink-and-nod fashion, assured the illegal-alien community that there would be no federal interest in examining immigration status in connection with voting status.)  Or perhaps Trump was convinced that the media and the Democratic establishment worked hand in hand to warp elections and media coverage. (The WikiLeaks trove revealed that media operatives leaked primary debate questions and sent their stories to the Clinton campaign for fact-checking before publication, as two successive DNC chairpersons resigned in disgrace for purportedly sabotaging the primary-challenge efforts of Bernie Sanders.) For all this and more, Trump was roundly denounced by the status quo as a buffoon who cherry-picked scholarly work to offer puerile distortions. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both expressed outrage at Trump’s supposedly incendiary suggestions of voter irregularity, alleging that Trump was either delusional or insurrectionary or both.  But was he? Or did he sense that his candidacy was touching off an “any means necessary” effort of unethical progressives to warp the law and custom for purportedly noble ends? After the election, that supposition was more than confirmed.   The Joke’s on Them Trump’s enemies have now proved him a Nostradamus. Fourth-party candidate Jill Stein, joined by the remains of the Clinton campaign, asked for a recount of the 2016 election, but only in those states that provided Trump his electoral majority and only on the assumption that there was zero chance that Stein’s candidacy would be affected by any conceivable new vote figure. Though perhaps, Trump’s critics wished, the recount would resurrect the candidacy of Stein’s stalking horse Hillary Clinton.  Trump’s enemies have now proved him a Nostradamus. Then members of the Clinton campaign and powerful Democrats joined an effort to pressure electors of the Electoral College to defy their state-mandated duty to reflect the vote totals of their states and instead refrain from voting for Donald Trump. That was all but a neo-Confederate, insurrectionary act that sought to nullify the spirit of the Constitution and the legal statues of many states — part and parcel of new surreal progressive embrace of states’-rights nullification that we have not seen since the days of George Wallace. Trump then earned greater outrage when he questioned the CIA’s sudden announcement, via leaks, that the Russians had hacked Clinton-campaign communication. When Trump said that the newfound post-election “consensus” on Russian hacking was improper, unreliable, and suggestive of an overly politicized intelligence apparatus, he once again drew universal ire — proof positive that he lacked a “presidential” temperament.  Yet our intelligence agencies do have a history of politicization. The 2006 national intelligence assessment at the height of the Iraq insurgency and of George W. Bush’s unpopularity oddly claimed that Iran had stopped nuclear-weapons work as early as 2003 — a finding that, if plausible, would probably have rendered irrelevant all of Obama’s frantic efforts just three years later to conclude an Iran deal. And our intelligence agencies’ record at assessment is not exactly stellar, given that it missed the Pakistan and Indian nuclear-bomb programs, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and the status of Saddam’s WMD program. There is still no solid proof of deliberate Russian cyber interference intended to aid Donald Trump. Loretta Lynch is skeptical that Russia tried to help the Trump campaign. A Washington Post story alleging that the RNC was hacked was based on myth. WikiLeaks, for what it is worth, insists its source was not Russian. And we now learn that intelligence authorities are refusing to testify in closed session to the House Intelligence Committee about the evidence that prompted their odd post-election announcements — announcements that contradict their earlier pre-election suggestions that Russian hacking was not affecting the election. One possibility is that the likelihood of a Clinton victory spurred the administration and the likely president-elect to suggest that the election process remained sacrosanct and immune from all tampering — while the completely unforeseen loss to Trump abruptly motivated them to readjust such assessments. Trump has a habit of offering off-the-cuff unconventional observations — often unsubstantiated by verbal footnotes and in hyperbolic fashion. Then he is blasted for ignorance and recklessness by bipartisan grandees. Only later, and quietly, he is often taken seriously, but without commensurate public acknowledgement. A few more examples. Candidate Trump blasted the “free-loading” nature of NATO, wondered out loud why it was not fighting ISIS or at least Islamic terrorism, and lamented the inordinate American contribution and the paucity of commensurate allied involvement. Pundits called that out as heresy, at least for a few weeks — until scholars, analysts, and politicos offered measured support for Trump’s charges. Europeans, shocked by gambling in Casablanca, scrambled to assure that they were upping their defense contributions and drawing the NATO line at the Baltic States.  President-elect Trump generated even greater outrage in the aftermath of the election when he took a call from the Taiwanese president. Pundits exploded. Foreign policy hands were aghast. Did this faker understand the dimensions of his blunder? Was he courting nuclear war? Trump shrugged, as reality again intruded: Why sell billions of dollars in weaponry to Taiwan if you cannot talk to its president? Are arms shipments less provocative than receiving a single phone call? Why talk “reset” to the thuggish murderous Castro brothers but not to a democratically elected president? Why worry what China thinks, given that it has swallowed Tibet and now created artificial islands in the South China Sea, in defiance of all maritime custom, law, and tradition? Two weeks later after the call, analysts — true to the pattern — meekly agreed that such a phone call was hardly incendiary. Perhaps, they mused, it was overdue and had a certain logic. Perhaps it had, after all, sent a valuable message to China that the U.S. may now appear as unpredictable to China as China has appeared to the U.S. Perhaps the Taiwan call had, after all, sent a valuable message to China that the U.S. may now appear as unpredictable to China as China has appeared to the U.S. More recently, Trump asked in a tweet why we should take back a sea drone stolen by China from under the nose of a U.S. ship. Aside from questions of whether the drone is now compromised, damaged, or bugged, would anyone be happy that a thief appeared days later at the door, offering back the living room’s stolen loot, on the condition to just let bygones be bygones — at least until the next heist? On most issues, Trump sensed what was verbiage and what was doable — and what was the indefensible position of his opponents. Prune away Trump’s hyperbole, and we see that his use of the illegal immigration issue is another good example. Finishing the existing southern border wall is sane and sober. “Making Mexico pay for it” can quietly be accomplished, at least in part, by simply taxing the over $50 billion in remittances sent to Mexico and Latin America by those in the U.S. who cannot prove legal residence or citizenship. Ending sanctuary cities will win majority support: Who wants to make the neo-Confederate argument that local jurisdictions can override U.S. law — and, indeed, who would make that secessionist case on behalf of violent criminal aliens? Deporting illegal-alien law-breakers — or those who are fit and able but without any history of work — is likewise the sort of position that the Left cannot, for political reasons, easily oppose. As for the rest, after closing off the border, Trump will likely shrug and allow illegal aliens who are working, who have established a few years of residence, and who are non-criminal to pay a fine, learn English, and get a green card — perhaps relegating the entire quagmire of illegal immigration to a one-time American aberration that has diminishing demographic and political relevance.   Trump the Brawler Finally, Trump sensed that the proverbial base was itching for a bare-knuckles fighter. They wanted any kind of brawler who would not play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules of 2008 and 2012 that had doomed Romney and McCain, who, fairly or not, seemed to wish to lose nobly rather than win in black-and-blue fashion, and who were sometimes more embarrassed than proud of their base. Trump again foresaw that talking trash in crude tones would appeal to middle Americans as much as Obama’s snarky and ego-driven, but otherwise crude trash-talking delighted his coastal elites. So Trump said the same kinds of things to Hillary Clinton that she, in barely more measured tones, had often said to others but never expected anyone to say out loud to her. And the more the media cried foul, the more Trump knew that voters would cry “long overdue.” #related#We can expect that Trump’s impulsiveness and electronically fed braggadocio will often get him into trouble. No doubt his tweets will continue to offend. But lost amid the left-wing hatred of Trump and the conservative Never Trump condescension is that so far he has shattered American political precedents by displaying much more political cunning and prescience than have his political opponents and most observers. Key is his emperor-has-no-clothes instinct that what is normal and customary in Washington was long ago neither sane nor necessary. And so far, his candidacy has not only redefined American politics but also recalibrated the nature of insight itself — leaving the wise to privately wonder whether they were ever all that wise after all. — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

A last-ditch effort by never-Trumpers to derail the president-elect’s victory in the Electoral College fell flat Monday, leaving the anti-Trump movement licking its wounds and looking to 2017 on how it may be able to try and thwart Trump’s presidency and his agenda.

Breaking with all precedent, Trump will apparently retain his private squad of loyal ex-cops in the White House

From coal miners to school children to law enforcement, Americans are hopeful once again.

Members of the Black Panthers of Milwaukee, some armed with guns, marched through the Sherman Park neighborhood on Sunday to protest what they called the "genocide" of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement.

Not even Chief Justice Marshall would have agreed to this level of judicial overreach.

President Obama took the historic step to ban offshore oil drilling in the Arctic and off the Atlantic coastline, the White House announced Tuesday afternoon. The action represents a partnership between the United States and Canada to build a strong Arctic economy, preserve a healthy Arctic ecosystem and protect our fragile Arctic waters, including designating the bulk of our Arctic water and certain areas in the Atlantic Ocean as indefinitely off limits to future oil and gas leasing, the White House said. The actions, and Canada's parallel actions, reflect the scientific assessment that, even with the high safety standards that both our countries have put in place, the risks of an oil spill in this region are significant and our ability to clean up from a spill in the region's harsh conditions is limited, the White House said. By contrast, it would take decades to fully develop the production infrastructure necessary for any large-scale oil and gas leasing production in the region — at a time when we need to continue to move decisively away from fossil fuels, according to the statement.

President Obama on Tuesday ordered U.S.-owned waters in the Arctic Ocean and certain areas in the Atlantic Ocean placed indefinitely off-limits for future oil and gas leases, in a final fossil-fuel crackdown before he leaves office.

News that a veteran’s corpse was left in a shower room for nine hours linked to a cover-up as dinosaur VSOs call on Trump to keep Sec McDonald. Last week was a real humdinger for veterans waiting i…