By Henry Olsen February 3, Ethics & Public Policy Center, Defending American Ideals
Published in the Washington Post on Feb.5, 2017

Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His book “Ronald Reagan: New Deal Republican” is scheduled to be published in June.

Monday would have been Ronald Reagan’s 106th birthday. President Trump’s election has caused many observers to bemoan Reagan’s supposedly waning influence on today’s Republican Party. But these people start from the same flawed assumption, that Trump’s election means the United States and Republicans have rejected Reagan’s legacy.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Trump’s election does not represent the de-Reaganization of the Republican Party; it presents Republicans with their last, best hope to re-Reaganize it. This flawed common wisdom flows from a flawed understanding of Reagan’s philosophy that accepts the myth that Reagan was an anti-government ideologue. But to paraphrase Reagan himself, it’s not that the common wisdom is wrong, it’s that so much of what it knows just isn’t so.

Reagan’s conservatism was not a more attractive version of Barry Goldwater’s anti-statist ideology. From the moment Reagan started speaking out as a conservative in the late 1950s, he endorsed an active role for government. He believed that government should care for those who could not care for themselves, build public housing for the poor and expand public universities. Where Goldwater attacked Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon for supporting Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Reagan enthusiastically backed both men in their presidential campaigns.  READ IT HERE

Judge Neil Gorsuch of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals makes a point while delivering prepared remarks before a group of attorneys last Friday at a luncheon in a legal firm in lower downtown Denver.

by Carrie Johnson, National Review Online, January 31, 2017

President Trump has selected federal appeals court Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill a Supreme Court seat that has sat vacant for nearly a year, setting up a blockbuster confirmation hearing that could put the new White House's domestic political agenda on trial in the U.S. Senate.

The selection fulfills an early campaign promise by Trump to nominate a solidly conservative judge with a record of strictly interpreting the U.S. Constitution. Gorsuch, 49, sailed through an earlier confirmation process for a spot on the federal appeals court in Denver. Only weeks after his nomination in 2006, the Senate confirmed him by voice vote. The American Bar Association rated him as "unanimously well qualified" at the time.

Gorsuch has a sterling legal pedigree. He clerked for two Supreme Court justices, Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. He also served as a clerk on the second most important appeals court in the country, in Washington D.C., for conservative Judge David Sentelle.

Like Justice Antonin Scalia, whom he is in line to replace, Gorsuch has cultivated a reputation as a memorable and clear author of legal opinions. He also considers himself to be an originalist. Lawyers who practice before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, where Gorsuch currently works, said he is a popular and approachable judge.

READ the REST here

by CHARLIE SPIERING  30 Jan 2017 Breitbart News

President Donald Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates, after she refused to defend his executive order to restrict immigration and refugees from six high-risk countries in the Middle East. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer issued a statement saying that Yates, an Obama administration appointee, had “betrayed the Department of Justice” by refusing to enforce Trump’s order.

“Ms. Yates is an Obama Administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration,” the statement read.

Trump replaced Yates with Dana Boente, the current U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, until Sen. Jeff Sessions is confirmed by the Senate.

“It is time to get serious about protecting our country,” Spicer’s statement continued. “Calling for tougher vetting for individuals traveling from seven dangerous places is not extreme. It is reasonable and necessary to protect our country.”  Breitbart News

by Syndicated columnist, Cal Thomas, Jan 27

President Trump’s critics are finding it difficult to stay focused following a flurry of actions taken by the new American CEO.

In just the first two working days of the new administration, the president has signed an executive order withdrawing from the negotiating process of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), aligning him with socialist independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who broke with former President Obama over the agreement. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama oppose withdrawal.

Strange bedfellows, indeed.  Trump has also reinstated the Mexico City Policy, which, writes CBS News, “required nongovernmental organizations to agree as a condition of receiving any federal funding that they ‘would neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.'”

by Neil Munro, Breitbart News, 25 Jan 2017

The nation’s new pro-American immigration policies will help Mexicans as well as Americans, President Donald Trump told the nation today.

“It is going to be very, very good for Mexico,” he told a cheering audience at the headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security. “Our relationship with Mexico is going to get better and better,” he said Jan. 25, shortly after he signed orders ending a series of pro-migration policies established by President Barack Obama.

Trump’s emphasis on the benefits to both Americans and Mexicans flips the standard script pushed by progressives who argue that Trump’s pro-American policies are motivated by hostility towards foreigners, including Mexicans and Central Americans.

At the DHS, standing beside Gen. John Kelly, the new DHS chief, Trump declared:

The unprecedented surge of illegal migrants from Central America is harming both Mexico and the United States, and I believe these steps … starting right now, will improve the safety in both countries … A nation without a border is not a nation.

The policy of firm borders will be used to increase “economic opportunity on both sides” of the border, Trump said, after describing the northward flow of drugs and criminals.

“I want to emphasize that we will be working in a partnership with our friends in Mexico to improve safety and economic opportunity on both sides of the border,” he said, adding “I have deep admiration or the people of Mexico.”

READ it Here

by David Savage, LA Times, Jan. 24, 2017

Neil Gorsuch, 49, was among 21 potential high court candidates circulated by Trump’s team during the campaign. Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, a highly regarded conservative jurist best known for upholding religious liberty rights in the legal battles over Obamacare, has emerged as a leading contender for President Trump’s first Supreme Court nomination.

Gorsuch, 49, was among 21 potential high court candidates circulated by Trump’s team during the campaign, but his stock has been rising lately as several admirers and supporters have been named to positions in the Trump administration. In Gorsuch, supporters see a jurist who has strong academic credentials, a gift for clear writing and a devotion to deciding cases based on the original meaning of the Constitution and the text of statutes, as did the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

Just as importantly, Gorsuch is seen as someone who might be more easily confirmed in the Senate. Unlike other appointees of President George W. Bush, Gorsuch won an easy Senate confirmation on a voice vote in 2006.

"He is very bright, well-respected and quite personable," said John Malcolm, a lawyer at the Heritage Foundation." And there's no question he would not be as contentious as some others." Until recently, the two top contenders for the first Supreme Court nomination by Trump were believed to be Judge William H. Pryor Jr. of Alabama, who serves on the U.S. 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta, and Judge Diane Sykes of Wisconsin, who serves on the U.S. 7th Circuit Court in Chicago. Trump mentioned them in a Republican debate after Scalia died.

Read more

Stephen Miller, senior policy advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, and Sean Spicer, incoming White House press secretary, at Trump Tower in New York. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

by Lisa Mascaro, LA Times, Jan 17, 2017

Too-cool-for-school upper-class students at Santa Monica High scoffed when administrators in 2002 reinstated a daily recitation of the pledge of allegiance. Most students in the liberal enclave slouched in their chairs and chatted over the morning ritual, which was widely viewed as a throwback to an American patriotism that seemed outdated in the multicultural mash-up of L.A.’s Westside.

Not Stephen Miller. Every day, the student body’s best-known and least-liked conservative activist stood at his desk, put his hand over his heart and declared his love of country.That solitary rebellion of conventionalism was an affront to the left-leaning sensitivities of many on the campus, making him a nerd to some, a provocateur to others.

Now Miller’s brand of brash conservatism, fostered during those years at Santa Monica High, is helping to shape the next presidency.  How the People’s Republic of Santa Monica, as the city is sometimes jokingly called, gave rise to the skinny-suited man now at Donald Trump’s side is as much a story about one teen’s intellectual tenacity as it is about the backlash to liberalism at the turn of the millennium.

The culturally sensitive environment at Samohi infuriated and ultimately shaped Miller, 31, now a senior advisor to Trump who is helping to draft this week’s inaugural address and will have a coveted West Wing office.

As he was finding his voice at Santa Monica High, Miller bemoaned the school’s Spanish-language announcements, the colorful festivals of minority cultures, and the decline, as he saw it, of a more traditional version of American education.Yet that robust progressive tradition nurtured Miller’s rise, teaching him how to fight for his beliefs, even if it meant he had to stand alone, in his tennis shorts and polo shirts, as he often did.

READ this great story HERE

Senator Rand Paul said that whoever did the intelligence leak of the fake Russian dossier should go to jail.  In this fine David Knight (InfoWars) interview with trial lawyer Lionel, they delve into the fact that this was a coup.  WATCH the you tube here.

Pray for president elect Trump!

Photo above: All 16 electors cast their vote for Donald J. Trump in Atlanta.

NYTimes Dec. 19, 2016  6:15 pm   

The Electoral College has affirmed Donald J. Trump as the nation’s 45th president, pushing him past the 270-vote threshold for election, with scant evidence of the anti-Trump revolt among electors that some of his critics had hoped would occur.

Republican electors in Texas vaulted Mr. Trump past the 270 mark, granting him all but two of their 38 ballots in a ceremony in the State Capitol in Austin.

In the House chamber, where the electors met, the vote was greeted with a standing ovation by citizens and Republican officials who had come to witness the event. Outside, perhaps 100 protesters waved placards and chanted “Save our democracy” in a vain effort to persuade electors to reject the Republican nominee.

Normally a political footnote, the electoral vote acquired an unexpected element of drama this winter after Mr. Trump’s upset of Hillary Clinton, who received 2.86 million more popular votes but won in states that totaled only 232 electoral votes. The states Mr. Trump won held 306 electoral votes. 

His electoral victory spawned a determined effort to block his path to the presidency by grass-roots advocates who saw him as unfit for the White House and by some who saw him as a threat to the political system.

Presidential electors — and particularly Republican electors, who are bound by tradition and often state law to support Mr. Trump — were inundated with phone calls, emails and even threats demanding that they vote for someone else. Leaders of groups that were lobbying the electors had privately believed they had a chance to persuade enough Republican electors to defect, denying him an Electoral College majority and throwing the election to the House of Representatives. But by late Monday, only a handful of electors had broken ranks.  READ the rest here       

 A FULL VOTE TRACKER is HERE

by Benny Johnson, Independent Journal Review,  ijr.com

Much has been made of people kneeling during patriotic moments at football games this year. However, the kneeling going on in the final moments of Army's historic victory over Navy Saturday night in Baltimore was a welcome sight, a least for the Black Knight hopeful.

West Point Chaplain Matthew Pawlikowski could be found on his knees, feet from the field, fiercely praying the Rosary for at least the last ten minutes of the game. In that time, Army took a commanding 21-17 lead — they stopped the ever-dangerous Midshipmen offense in their tracks and clung to the victory.

The spinning silver Rosary never left Pawlikowski's hands as he kissed it and kept his eyes shut tight, even as his team made crucial play after play and the audience roared.