ActRight

Democrats find their first bit of optimism in years, eyeing significant gains.

Donald Trump is not a details guy. From his checkered experience in business, he draws this lesson: “One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper.” Question: Who thinks that Donald Trump actually has read the paper? Asked at a town-hall meeting (which isn’t actually a town-hall meeting, but we insist on calling these dog-and-pony shows that and pretending that they are) to list the top three priorities of the federal government, Trump responded: “Security, security, and security.” That the candidate was stalling for time while his political mind, honed to the fine edge of an old butter knife, ran through the possibilities was to be expected. We are used to his filibustering by now. He was right to identify security as the overriding concern of the U.S. government. #ad#The federal enterprise was created to handle those tasks that are by their nature interstate or national: War, relations with foreign powers, international and interstate trade, immigration, and relations between the states are the reasons it exists. A superior power is required to solve problems that cannot be adjudicated by a single state, such as cooking up an excuse for why Texas must be forced to honor your Massachusetts-issued same-sex-marriage license while Massachusetts has no reciprocal obligation to honor your Texas-issued concealed-carry permit, despite the pesky fact of gun rights actually being right there in the Constitution and all. All right, maybe not the best example. The federal government is necessary because it alone can create and execute a program under which “aid” to foreign governments is laundered back into the pockets of campaign contributors through military-procurement rules. Okay, not a great example, either. But the federal government does something useful, of that we are assured. It’s not like all those thousands of federal factota hived up in Washington do nothing but sit around and masturbate to Internet porn all day. Trump does not oppose big government. He believes that we simply haven’t been doing it right. But the Trumpkin view of all Trumpkin enterprises is expansive, demanding superlatives. And so Trump expanded. Other top federal duties, he declared, included “health care, education . . . and then you can go on from there.” Go on to where? “Housing, providing great neighborhoods.” Anderson Cooper, tasked with the necessary duty of reminding Trump that this contradicts everything he said until five minutes ago, asked: “Aren’t you against the federal government’s involvement in education? Don’t you want it to devolve to states?” Sure, Trump said, but — see if you can make anything of this — we must consider the “concept of the country.” (If that sounds like a cheesy theme hotel, well . . . ) And: “The concept of the country is the concept that we have to have education within the country.” Indeed. Likewise, he rejects the notion of a federally run health-care system, advocating instead a “private” system that is . . . federally run, or, in Trump’s phrasing, led by the federal government, in case you for some reason believe that “led by” and “run by” mean different things when the federal government is involved — which is to say, if you are a credulous rube. One would think that a real-estate man from New York City would have some appreciation of what kind of “great neighborhoods” are created by federal policy, but one suspects that Trump is mainly unfamiliar with those parts of New York between Central Park North and Yankee Stadium. #share#Trump, who until recently supported a Canadian-style government-monopoly health-care system, says that the answer is in competition. He’s partly right about that, but the idea that there is going to be robust competition — strong enough to drive down prices and increase quality — under a system led by the federal government is, forgive me for noticing, exactly the thinking that produced the so-called Affordable Care Act, the Obamacare regime that Trump professes to disdain. Yes, professes: His political donations helped sustain the Democratic politicians who created it. Maybe you believe he is in earnest. Maybe you are a credulous rube. You can believe that a guy whose preferred health-care policy was somewhat to the left of the French model suddenly became a born-again Friedmanite in his seventh decade walking this good green Earth, in much the same way that you can believe that a man who had no moral reservations about the commercial vivisection of human children for the purpose of accommodating sexual convenience suddenly embraced Mother Teresa’s view of abortion at approximately the same politically convenient moment. #related#Trump does not oppose big government. He believes that we simply haven’t been doing it right. Trumpism, like the “true Communism” beloved of Berkeley sophomores, has never been tried. Or so he thinks. Of course it has: in Italy, in Germany, in Spain, in Venezuela — and here, under Woodrow Wilson’s “war socialism” and the New Deal, which was little more than Wilsonian war socialism filtered through Franklin Roosevelt’s sense of noblesse oblige. Trump, who has no noblesse to oblige him, is constrained by no philosophy, no principle, and no real knowledge of our constitutional order. To admit that there is something that the federal government under Trump cannot do well is to admit that there is something Trump cannot do well, and Trump cannot endure the thought. Federally run health care? Sure, but it’ll be great this time around. A big ugly federal footprint in education? If you cannot trust Donald Trump and his third-grade reading skills to set education policy, who can you trust? And, of course, expect the classiest housing projects you’ve ever seen, because the government is going to build great neighborhoods. The concept of the country is well-ordered liberty with the necessary evil of a federal government and a presidency that are severely limited in their scope and ambition by provisions written into the Constitution itself. The federal government has enumerated powers, and satisfying Donald Trump’s bloated and cancerous sense of the importance of his own ridiculous person is not one of them. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.

Ted Cruz holds a wide lead over Donald Trump in Wisconsin less than a week from the state's primary, and Bernie Sanders has a narrow edge over Hillary Clinton, a new Marquette University Law School poll shows.

It was "scalding hot, OK?'

CNN ran a segment documenting how Trump changed his position on abortion three times within three hours. Donald Trump's 3 positions on abortion in 3 hours: CNN's @Phil_Mattingly reports C…

"Democratic" Socialism. What is it really? And does it even work. Read more at http://LouderWithCrowder.com including all sources athttp://louderwithcrowder....

How Breitbart.com, partly funded by a top Ted Cruz donor, became the Texas senator’s media lifeline.

Two low-profile Texas brothers have donated $15 million to support Sen. Ted Cruz, a record-setting contribution that amounts to the largest known donation so far in the 2016 presidential campaign.

On Wednesday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC, the usually-friendly talk-show host had Ted Cruz on as his guest and while the interview started out friendly, Kimmel soon made jabs at Cruz for being unlikeable and attacked Cruz’s claims about ObamaCare and radical Islam. When Cruz referred to ObamaCare as a "disaster," Kimmel countered that he hadn’t heard “one” negative story about ObamaCare.

A tight immigration policy and tougher requirements for those who come to Norway are important tools for avoiding radicalisation and parallel societies, Integration Minister Sylvi Listhaug said on Wednesday.

Our new polling paints a grisly picture for the Donald.

Says ?When there?s a majority of people in our state that thinks LGBT rights are an important issue, and thinks that they want representation to do that, it?ll happen? Says First Amendment Allows LGBT To Be Discriminated Due To ?Religious Liberty Nebraska Republican State Senator Bill Kintner had some choice words on talk radio to rationalize his ?

Cruz campaign officials have raised questions about the 622 signatures submitted by the Kasich campaign to get on the state's ballot

Donald Trump dropped another doozy Wednesday — saying women would have to suffer "punishments" for abortions if they were illegal.

Time To Get Serious About #Mattis2016?

Transparency.

Ted Cruz helps teen ask a girl to prom

In another chapter of the ongoing suppression of free speech and expression across university and college campuses via the expansion of leftism, a student of Harvard University joined Fox News Channel's Megyn Kelly to share several revealing anecdotes.

Marco Rubio is moving to lock down his delegates until the Republican convention so no one else can claim them just yet, in an unconventional move that represents the latest bid to stall Donald Trump’s front-running campaign – and perhaps give the Florida senator and ex-candidate a bigger role to play in July.

"I'm not confident which pedal I'd push" if I saw Trump, the Texas senator said.

The US has given $270K to Islamic Relief Worldwide, a group which was banned in Israel for funding Hamas & in the UAE for Muslim Brotherhood links.

Subsidies for ethanol create arbitrage opportunities to use it to make alcoholic beverages — so the government poisons it.

America will be great again through a strong military and economy.

“The issue is folks in the KU vicinity support a racist, sexist demagogue.”

Ted Cruz thinks that Donald Trump embodies New York values. Hillary Clinton isn't so sure. A new television ad from the Clinton campaign implicitly (and at one point explicitly) knocks the real estate mogul for failing to be a real New Yorker. (New York will, perhaps not coincidentally, vote in primary elections in mid-April). It's a strange tack for Clinton, who only became a New Yorker via IllinoisMassachusettsConnecticutArkansasWashington to take. (Moreover, when she did move to the Empire State, she settled in the suburbs. And these days she lives in D.C.) Say what you will about Trump, but the guy is a New Yorker: Except for a couple of years at Penn, he's lived his whole life there. Clinton's ad could also be viewed as a rebuke to her primary challenger, Bernie Sanders, who supposedly fares poorly in ethnically diverse areas. But that would be even more bizarre. Despite Sanders representing the state of Vermont, there's no mistaking that accent: He's a New Yorkuh to the core. (Indeed, so obviously New York is Sanders that another native New Yorker, a popular radio show host, has taken to calling him the deli man in reference to his Jewish Brooklyn roots.)