Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
44% Hike in Taxes Covers Obama-Era Debt
President Barack Obama has presided over a federal government that has already taxed more than $20 trillion away from the American people. But to cover the federal spending he has presided over without increasing the federal debt, he would have needed to increase federal tax revenues by about 44 percent. Since he was inaugurated in January 2009, Obama has completed 91 full months in office, running from February 2009 through August 2016. As this writer has reported at CNSNews.com, the monthly Treasury statements show that during those 91 months, the federal government collected approximately $20,197,437,000,000 in total revenues. But the Treasury’s “Debt to the Penny” database shows that during those same 91 months, the total federal debt increased by $8,878,290,996,028.69. $20,197,437,000,000 in total taxes was not nearly enough to cover the spending the federal government did in the first 91 months of the Obama era.
Lester Holt Learns His Lauer Lesson
Washington Post reporter Callum Borchers should win some kind of award for the worst pre-debate spin. He tried to defend NBC anchor and presidential debate host Lester Holt: “It turns out Holt is actually a registered Republican. Trump still might find things to complain about Monday night, but a case for partisan bias against him will be tough to make.” Right after the debate, despite all evidence, the Post’s Chris Cillizza doubled down, saying: “Want a testament to how well Holt did? I guarantee you no one is talking about him tomorrow. That’s a win.”
The Debate I Heard
Something’s wrong with me. I watched Monday’s presidential debate. But what I heard was different from what Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton seemed to say. When Clinton said, “I want us to invest in you,” what I heard was, “I will spend your money better than you will.” Also, I heard, “I will spend *lots* of your money!” When Trump said our economic problems are China’s fault, what I heard was, “Blaming China wins me votes.” When Clinton told Trump, “My father ... printed drapery fabrics,” what I heard was, “Donald, you are a spoiled rich kid.” When Trump replied, “My father gave me a very small loan,” I heard Trump saying, “Anything less than $200 million is a pittance.” (It’s actually not clear what Trump received from his dad. Trump claims it was $1 million; others say $200 million. Anyway, is a million dollars a “small” loan”?)
What We Learn From Black History
As the doors swung open last week to the nation’s new Museum of African American History and Culture, my organization, CURE, was hosting another separate, but related event. Fifty black pastors from around the nation convened in Washington, D.C., for CURE’s annual Pastor Policy Summit. CURE focuses on market and faith-based solutions to issues of race and poverty. What’s the connection between these two events? It is the connection between past and future. We should recall the famous observation by philosopher George Santayana about the study of history. “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Narrative-Building Has Become a Political Obsession
The most exhausting thing about our politics these days — other than the never-ending presidential election itself — is the obsession with “shaping the narrative.” By that I mean the effort to connect the dots between a selective number of facts and statistics to support one storyline about the state of the union. Narrative-building is essential for almost every complicated argument because it’s the only way to get our pattern-seeking brains to discount contradictory facts and data. Trial lawyers understand this implicitly. Get the jury to buy the story, and they’ll do the heavy lifting of arranging the facts in just the right way. President Obama understands this too. Just consider the way he talks about terrorism — often reassuring Americans that they’re more likely to die in a bathtub accident than in a terror attack. And he’s right.
Transgenderism Can Be Helpful
North Carolina’s legislative body passed the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, which mandates a statewide policy banning individuals from using public bathrooms that do not correspond to their biological sex, as opposed to their opinion of their sex. That means people must use bathrooms and other public facilities where occupants can be in various stages of undress according to whether their sex chromosomes are XX, in the case of females, or XY, in the case of males. The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community claims that the use of biology to determine sex is oppressive and limits alternatives. I agree. I all but argued this in a column earlier this year titled “You Are What You Say You Are.” Let’s look at some possible benefits of freeing oneself from the oppression of biological determinism.
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Debate Recap
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton met last night at Hofstra University for their first one-on-one debate of the 2016 presidential campaign. There were pluses and minuses throughout the exchange. Here’s my take: Donald Trump accomplished what he had to last night. He stood on the debate stage for 90 minutes with a career politician. Hillary Clinton is a lawyer. She has participated in dozens of debates as a Senate candidate and as a two-time presidential contender. She is one of the most prominent political figures of our age, and Donald Trump held his own. He showed that while his arena is the business world, he can handle the serious issues confronting our country.
Walmart Workers Refuse to Make Cop’s Retirement Cake
Three Walmart workers in McDonough, Georgia, refused to decorate a “thin blue line” cake for a police officer’s retirement party because they said it was racist. A number of my Georgia readers alerted me to the story and on Saturday night I spoke directly with the police officer’s daughter. She asked that I not divulge her name and I’ve agreed to honor her request. “I was so shocked,” she told me. “I didn’t know what to do or say or anything. I was trying not to lose my temper or make a scene.” For the record, Walmart has confessed that most of her allegations are true. I’ll have more on that a bit later in this column. The police officer’s daughter went to the Walmart on Willow Drive on Sept. 22 to order a flag for her father’s retirement party. He was leaving the force after 25 years on the job.
It’s Now or Never to Save the Internet
We have, unfortunately, come to expect our elected representatives to shirk hard decisions. So it came as little surprise when the Senate released the text of a continuing resolution late last week to fund the U.S. government that did not include key objectives sought by conservatives, such as stopping taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Although there are many problems with this budget deal, only one is irreversible and permanent: allowing the Obama administration to cede oversight of the internet to foreign bodies. It’s troubling that the Senate has failed to include language prohibiting this transfer of power. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the nonprofit organization responsible for maintaining databases for internet domain names, essentially the phone book for the internet.
Riot First, Ask Questions Later
The Charlotte rioters didn’t know whether the controversial police shooting of Keith Scott was justified or not, and didn’t care. They worked their mayhem — trashing businesses and injuring cops, with one protester killed in the disorder — before anything meaningful could be ascertained about the case except that the cops said Scott had a gun and his family said he didn’t. Charlotte is the latest episode in the evidence-free Black Lives Matter movement that periodically erupts in violence after officer-involved shootings. The movement is beholden to a narrative of systematic police racism to which every case is made to conform, regardless of the facts or logic.
Bernie Clinton
Someone might want to inform Hillary Clinton that greed and envy are two of the seven deadly sins. Her new revised tax plan? would raise the estate tax to as high as 65 percent — up from 40 percent, where it is today. She would also apply this hated death tax to as many as twice as many estates. It’s one of her dumbest ideas yet — and that is saying a lot. It won’t raise any revenue to speak of. It’s a bow-tied gift to estate-tax lawyers and accountants. Many studies have found that the cost to the economy of taxing a lifetime of savings more than outweighs any benefits. It actually could end up costing the Treasury money by reducing investment in family businesses, which are a major engine of growth for our economy.
It’s Time for Trump
Now that all of my inside-the-beltway, elitist, morally superior friends and colleagues have weighed in with their self-righteous denunciations of Donald Trump, it’s my turn. After initially opposing his candidacy for president, I have come around to another point of view. The election of Hillary Clinton will perpetuate and probably worsen everything many people hate about our bloated and dysfunctional government, collectively and derisively known as “Washington.” The election of Donald Trump will offer an opportunity — perhaps the last for decades — to “fire” or at least isolate the elites, returning the country to its constitutional boundaries.
Domestic Migration (Mostly) Explains a Generation of Partisan Changes
Let’s step back, as we approach the first presidential debate of the 2016 campaign, and look back to try to understand how voting patterns have changed over a generation, by comparing the 2012 presidential results with those of 1988 — keeping in mind possible shifts since 2012 suggested by 2016 polling. My thesis is that changes in states’ voting behavior can best be explained by surges of migration over the past generation — not just immigration, a subject of obvious interest this campaign season, but even more of internal migration within the United States. The overall picture is one of Republican decline, from the 53 percent George H.W. Bush won in 1988 to Mitt Romney’s 47 percent in 2012. But the decline was not uniform.
‘Favors’ to Blacks
A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression.
Monday, September 26, 2016
Heil Donald? Teacher Makes Kids Compare Hitler, Trump Speeches
Instead of parsing participles, a public high school English teacher has been using her classroom to wage an ugly propaganda campaign against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters. “Basically, the only people who seem to be safe from this guy are white Christian males,” the teacher said in a classroom discussion recorded by a student. “Am I missing anything? Oh, American — white, Christian, male Americans.” The unidentified teacher at North Carolina’s Cedar Ridge High School even made students watch speeches delivered by Hitler and had them compare them to speeches that Trump had delivered, outraged parents tell me.
Phyllis Schlafly, RIP
I realize it will sound odd coming from me, but I often find myself wishing that Republican politicians were more like their Democratic colleagues. That’s because those on the Left always know what they’re for and what they’re against. The tragedy, of course, is that they are always wrong, but they stick to their guns and eventually, when the stars are aligned, they get their way. One person who never shirked in her mission to define what being a Republican was supposed to be was Phyllis Schlafly, who recently passed away at the age of 92, after having spent more than half of her life fighting the good fight on behalf of conservatism. In a different America, the flags would all have been lowered to half-staff.
Sunday, September 25, 2016
Restoring America’s Economic Mobility
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” Today the story of American politics is the story of class struggles. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. We didn’t think we were divided into different classes. Neither did Marx. America was an exception to Marx’s theory of social progress. By that theory, societies were supposed to move from feudalism to capitalism to communism. But the America of the 1850s, the most capitalist society around, was not turning communist. Marx had an explanation for that. “True enough, the classes already exist,” he wrote of the United States, but they “are in constant flux and reflux, constantly changing their elements and yielding them up to one another.” In other words, when you have economic and social mobility, you don’t go communist.
Meet the Teen Who Stopped His Teacher From Defiling Old Glory
Alex Dunn is Captain America. The 16-year-old junior at Massey Hill Classical High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, is a red, white and blue patriot who loves America. And he especially loves the American flag. “I have a father in the military who taught me the way to respect the flag,” Alex told me. When he saw that his teacher was desecrating the flag during a classroom discussion on Monday, the teenager knew he had to do something. And what he did has patriots across the fruited plain cheering.
In the High Plains, a Republican Worth Voting For
Here on the High Plains, where the deer and the antelope once played, Denver’s suburbs roam toward the Rockies’ front range and the nature of today’s polyglot politics is written in the local congressman’s campaign schedule. One day last week, Republican Mike Coffman went from a Hispanic charter school in a strip mall, to another strip mall for lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant with leaders of the Ethiopian-American community, then to a meeting with the editor of the largest of two Korean-language newspapers serving more than 3,000 Korean-Americans in the metropolitan area.
Saturday, September 24, 2016
A Memo to Washington: Don’t Box in Our Freedom
C. J. Box is a New York Times best-selling author. Although he has published some stand-alone novels, he is best known for his Joe Pickett series. The 17th Joe Pickett novel is scheduled for release next spring. These novels feature a Wyoming game warden who encounters all the stresses and dilemmas associated with big game hunting in one of America’s most rural states. The dilemmas that Pickett encounters provide some insight into red-state America and the angst felt by frustrated conservative Americans.