ActRight

The mother of an injured Army veteran of the Iraq war is selling a rare letter from President Obama to cover her son's medical and personal expenses despite the president's handwritten promise to do everything we can over the next four years to support your family. Cherry McKimmey told Secrets, Something good might as well come out of that. It is doing no good lying in my drawer. It means absolutely nothing to me. She received the note from Obama in July 2009 after a non-stop effort to beg federal officials to help her son, David McKimmey. McKimmey was campaigning for the the Veterans Administration to do more to help him recover from injuries for which he received the Bronze Star with Valor for crawling back into a truck fire to save two soldiers who eventually died. He suffered burns to his face and hands is still likely to lose his leg.

Since 2011, only 2% of Syrian refugees have been Christians, even though they comprise 10% of Syria’s pre-civil war population and are ...

Forget being transgender like Caitlyn Jenner or transracial like Rachel Dolezal, there’s a new “trans” frontier: people who are transage.

Mr. Trump pointed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s actions toward Japanese, German and Italian aliens during World War II as precedent.

It makes a terrorist's deadly mission that much easier.

Normally it is highly unusual for the White House to comment on an ongoing presidential campaign that does not involve them. Mr. Obama appears unwilling to maintain that long-practiced rule. The Obama White House just indicated it believes Donald Trump is “disqualified” from being President of the United States.   White House Press Secretary made …

The Republican presidential candidate mocked anyone who would take issue with his plan.

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, has called for barring all Muslims from entering the United States.

Too many Muslim immigrants are angry rather than grateful toward their new country.

An analysis of the top candidates.

A Christmas tree erected on the campus of a West Bank university is decorated with pictures of Palestinian terrorists not traditional ornaments

Voters like Donald Trump not so much because they hate Mexicans and Muslims, but because they hate progressive bigotry.

"Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough cut to commercial break on Tuesday morning after real-estate...

The budget office expects the workforce to shrink because of coverage expansions.

Those fears have become more acute after Obama’s Sunday evening address.

What difference does it make which army imperils the lives of innocent Christians? 

Self-righteousness is liberating. The same people who are most exercised about guns in America, and want to ban and even confiscate entire categories of firearms, know little about them and evident...

Seven in 10 Republicans believe The Donald "tells it like it is."

People often assert that this or that gun control measure is 'common sense'. Cherry Picking https://mises.org/blog/mistake-only-comparing-us-murder-rates-dev...

Ted Cruz has overtaken Donald Trump in Iowa, according to a Monmouth University survey of Iowa Republicans released Monday.

The Hillary Clinton campaign is out with an ad highlighting her record as an advocate for LGBT rights.

UPDATE:

In this week's edition of the boss's Kristol Clear e-newsletter (sign up here!)-- readers are asked to rank their top three picks for the GOP's 2016 presidential nominee. The boss's impressions of Iowans seem to be borne out by the new Monmouth poll. The boss writes: Well, the results of this week's presidential straw ballot were interesting. For the first time in our seven straw polls, Ted Cruz took the lead, with 30% of the first place votes, closely followed by Marco Rubio with 26%, and Donald Trump with 17%. No one else was chosen first by more than 6% of you. Here's the tally: the first number is the percentage of the ballots on which the candidate was selected for first place; the second is the percentage of ballots in which the candidate was chosen for any of first, second or third. Ted Cruz 30% 66% Marco Rubio 26% 60% Donald Trump 17% 32% Ben Carson 6% 28% Chris Christie 5% 28% Carly Fiorina 4% 32% Mike Huckabee 3% 13% Jeb Bush 3% 13% Rand Paul 3% 10% John Kasich 2% 10% Rick Santorum -- % 2% What does it all mean? For what it's worth, these straw poll results are more or less in accord with the impressions I formed from a day and a half in Iowa at the end of last week. I spoke and mixed and mingled at a GOP event, and spent some time with friends and political types from the state. My sense was that Cruz and Rubio were strong, that Trump had solid support but much less room to grow, that Carson was fading, Bush had faded, and that Christie probably had the best chance of moving up from the second tier as a long shot. But my main takeaway from Iowa was this: It's a fluid and volatile race; few Republicans have definitively made up their minds; and a lot depends on what the various candidates say and do, and the cases they make for themselves and against their rivals, in the weeks to come. I can also report that national security, as you'd expect after San Bernardino, was very much on people's minds--and that voters seem to be paying attention to the Cruz-Rubio foreign policy and intelligence capabilities debates, and perhaps to claims such as Christie's to be better ready to handle national security issues By the way, perhaps the most startling thing I discovered from my brief sojourn in Iowa is that Iowans really are nice. On Sunday morning, after Iowa's traumatic defeat by Michigan State in the Big Ten championship Saturday night, a loss that cost Iowa its first chance for a national title in ages, all the Iowans I spoke to were gracious about MSU's victory, grateful for Iowa's exemplary season, and looking forward to the Rose Bowl against Stanford. I expected Iowans to be morose and sullen, as we East Coasters surely would have been after such a turn of events. They were instead pleasant and upbeat. Weird. One additional note about Iowa: The Machine Shed in Urbandale was memorable--though I was disappointed no one in our group had the nerve to order The Hungry Man's Breakfast TM (#11 on the second page of the menu). In any case, here's the menu. It's a great country. And nothing I saw in Iowa dissuaded me from the generally upbeat conclusion of my editorial in this week's issue--that Republicans are in better shape for November than lots of people worried about the current shape of the race think.

On Sunday, The Daily Beast's Christopher Dickey furiously tried to connect the Second Amendment to the protection of slavery before the Civil War. Dickey touted how Charles Dickens and "several British visitors to American shores...discerned... [that] people who owned slaves...wanted to carry guns to keep the blacks intimidated and docile." He also wildly claimed that "the Second Amendment...was essentially written to protect the interests of Southerners" to crush slave revolts.

Senate Democratic plan would create an "ISIS czar"