Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, August 26, 2016
Have More Kids. It’s Good for the Planet.
The problem with environmentalists isn’t merely that they have destructive ideas about the economy, but that so many of them embrace repulsive ideas about human beings. Take a recent NPR piece that asks, “Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?” If you want to learn about how environmentalism has already affected people in society, read about the couple pondering “the ethics of procreation” and its impact on the climate before starting a family, or the group of women in a prosperous New Hampshire town swapping stories about how the “the climate crisis is a reproductive crisis.”
Is 2016 Redrawing the Political Map?
Is the political map, so familiar that even non-pundits offhandedly refer to red, blue and purple states, changing before our eyes? Yes, at least to a limited extent — and it’s probably about time. The political map has been pretty static for almost two decades, the longest since the 1880s. In the last four presidential elections 40 states and the District of Columbia, with 422 electoral votes, have voted for nominees of the same party each time. In only a few cases were the margins very close, as was the case with the five states with 41 electoral votes that voted for a second party just once (North Carolina, Indiana, Iowa, New Mexico, New Hampshire). That leaves only five states, with 75 electoral votes, supporting the winning candidates, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, in all of the last four elections. You will recognize them as the purplest of purple states: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada.
The Bribery Standard
Bernie Sanders never understood the epic quality of the Clinton scandals. In his first debate, he famously dismissed the email issue, it being beneath the dignity of a great revolutionary to deal in things so tawdry and straightforward. Sanders failed to understand that Clinton scandals are sprawling, multilayered, complex things. They defy time and space. They grow and burrow. The central problem with Hillary Clinton’s emails was not the classified material. It wasn’t the headline-making charge by the FBI director of her extreme carelessness in handling it. That’s a serious offense, to be sure, and could very well have been grounds for indictment. And it did damage her politically, exposing her sense of above-the-law entitlement and — in her dodges and prevarications, her parsing and evasions — demonstrating her arm’s-length relationship with the truth.
Hillary and Her Wheelbarrows
Do you know the old wheelbarrow joke? It’s truly funny only to grandpas and the grandkids they tell it to, so I won’t bother with the elaborate setup. For years a factory worker pushes a wheelbarrow full of straw past a security guard on his way out. Suspicious that the guy is stealing something, the guard looks in the straw but can’t find anything. Finally, when the worker is retiring, the guard asks, “I know you’ve been stealing something — can you tell me what it is? The guy smiles and says, “Wheelbarrows.” That joke keeps popping into my head whenever I hear Hillary Clinton’s defenders say there’s no evidence of a quid pro quo in the fresh batch of emails released this week. According to many Republican critics, the trove provides fresh evidence that the Clinton Foundation was, in Donald Trump’s words, a “pay-to-play” scheme, selling access to and favors from the secretary of state.
Officer Cleared in Military Bible Complaint
An Air Force major, who was accused of civil rights violations for having a Bible on his work desk, has been cleared of any wrongdoing, according to military officials at the 310th Space Wing in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Maj. Steve Lewis, a supervisor at the Reserve National Security Space Institute, agreed to voluntarily remove the Bible pending a military review. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation had filed a complaint against Maj. Lewis accusing him of “harboring and encouraging a truly abhorrent example of First Amendment civil rights violations.” But a public affairs spokesman told me late Tuesday that Maj. Lewis was well within his rights to have an open Bible on his office desk. “We have concluded that no abuse of liberties has occurred,” Lt. Col. David Fruck told me.
Thursday, August 25, 2016
Government: New 700,000-Word Regulation Is Good for You
The nine-second video of two federal bureaucrats the White House posted on its blog last week was notable for something it omitted. That something was very big — and putting it on display might not have fit with the apparent propaganda purpose of the video. The video itself starred EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who sat side-by-side at a table. The video starts with McCarthy and Foxx simultaneously scratching their signatures onto separate and apparently singular sheets of paper. Eight seconds into the nine-second clip, when McCarthy has finished signing her name, she looks up and declares: “Done.” Foxx, who signed even faster than McCarthy, spreads his arms in a gesture that appears to say: That’s it, folks. Then he echoes McCarthy: “Done.” So, what exactly had these two bureaucrats done?
Hillary Exposed
Hillary Clinton is taking it on the chin today. The Associated Press story we mentioned in yesterday’s report exposing her pay-to-play scheme continues to dominate the news. The front page of the New York Post has a great headline: “DOUGH NATION.” [See it here](http://nypost.com/cover/covers-for-august-24-2016/). The Washington Post editorial board blasted Hillary, writing: “After promising to avoid any conflict or appearance of conflict, Mrs. Clinton left ample room for perceptions that access to the Clinton Foundation could enable access to the government. Foundation staff appealed to Mrs. Clinton’s staff on behalf of donors, including foreign ones. . . Impressions such as these are corrosive to national institutions.”
Abolishing ‘Man’ at Princeton
“He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind” when they were created. (Genesis 5:2 NIV) Poor God. He, or maybe I should say, “It,” was so behind the times. If the deity had only gone to Princeton University and had its consciousness raised... Princeton, that once great school whose purpose at its founding in 1746 was to train ministers and whose motto remains Dei Sub Numine Viget (Under God’s Power She Flourishes), has, like other schools of “higher” learning, jumped into the deep end of the pool of political correctness. Just in time for the fall semester, Princeton has issued “Guidelines for Using Gender Inclusive Language.” The guidelines, approved by the university’s Office of Human Resources and Office of Communications and endorsed by the Orwellian-like Institutional Equity Planning Group as a preferred University practice, show you where this is headed.
Diversity: History’s Pathway to Chaos
Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history. The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls and myriad other African, Asian and European communities spoke Latin, cherished habeas corpus and saw being Roman as preferable to identifying with their own particular tribe. By the fifth century, diversity had won out but would soon prove a fatal liability. Rome disintegrated when it became unable to assimilate new influxes of northern European tribes. Newcomers had no intention of giving up their Gothic, Hunnish or Vandal identities.
Ranking Freedom, One State at a Time
Which states in our union are the most tolerant of marijuana and guns? Which interfere the least with your life? Which are likelier to hand out special goodies to politically connected companies? Those are some of the questions answered by economists Will Ruger and Jason Sorens in the 2016 edition of their study “Freedom in the 50 States.” Their ranking of the states in the U.S. in terms of freedom is based on three public policy dimensions affecting economic, social and personal freedoms. Sorens, a lecturer in the government department at Dartmouth College, and Ruger, vice president of research and policy at the Charles Koch Institute, scored more than 200 policies, including things such as gambling restriction, trans fat bans, the audio recording of police, occupational licensing restrictions, mandated family leave and the ability of couples to enter into private contracts.
Leo DiCaprio’s Dirty Dollars
Actor-playboy Leonardo DiCaprio walked away from a fender bender in the Hamptons this weekend without a scratch. But the outspoken liberal should not escape unscathed from his train wreck of high-dollar financial dealings with donors and businessmen in one of world’s most rotten regimes. Forget about the saving the environment, son. Clean up your entourage. Tinseltown’s self-proclaimed “King of the World” is entangled with accused kleptocrats in Malaysia. The activist celebrity ostentatiously condemned the “politics of greed” at the Oscars in February. Yet, he’s been partying it up with some of Kuala Lumpur’s most corruption-stained elites.
The Media Make History
This week I am going to do something unusual. I am going to enter into a conversation with another columnist. Doing so was not so unusual a few decades back. Bill Buckley and James Jackson Kilpatrick did it when provoked, and it was always interesting. But today columnists are godlike figures. They communicate solely with Mount Olympus, and the result is often a bit tedious. I propose to address the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin and congratulate him on noting that mainstream media, or MSM, have passed yet another milepost in their decline. In his column this weekend, Goodwin wrote: “Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it. The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand in hand with what was considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations.”
Trump Speaks, Media Translates
“Do you ever get tired of defending Donald Trump?” a critic asked. It isn’t that Donald Trump does not say things that are cringe-worthy. It’s that his opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, says and does things even more cringe-worthy. So forgive those who feel that Trump’s supposedly “outrageous” statements are nothing more than selective outrage, double standards, and the typical “Republicans are racist” meme. Democrats routinely say vulgar, bigoted, divisive, outrageous things while getting a toll-free pass. It wasn’t Donald Trump, but Donna Brazile, then Al Gore’s campaign manager, who said Republicans have a “white-boy attitude.” It wasn’t Donald Trump, but Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who said, after Hurricane Katrina, “George (W.) Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were poor and because they were black.”
Parents Fuming Over Pledge of Allegiance ‘Waiver’
At first Micah Brienen thought his sister-in-law’s text message was a joke. “I was immediately shocked by it,” Mr. Brienen, of Bonita Springs, Florida, told me. “I thought it was a fake.” But the text message was not a fake — it was the real deal. It was a Pledge of Allegiance waiver from his niece’s public school in Tallahassee: “I understand my rights as a parent and I request that my child, noted above, be excused from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. This request includes standing and placing his/her right hand over his/her heart.”
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Have More Kids; Save the World
From time immemorial, humankind has regarded it as a blessing to be fruitful and multiply. Not Travis Rieder. A philosopher and bioethics instructor at Johns Hopkins University, Rieder was the focus of a recent NPR story, in which he argued that having children is immoral and should be discouraged with government penalties. It’s not that Rieder dislikes children — in fact, he has a 2-year-old daughter of whom he’s quite fond. But with “dangerous climate change” approaching a tipping point “very, very soon,” he says, bringing more children into the world is unethical. After all, every additional baby means additional carbon emissions, and more carbon emissions mean rising global temperatures. Without drastic change, the planet will soon be “largely uninhabitable for humans.” So the natural human urge to procreate, Rieder insists, must be suppressed.
Are You a Sheep or a Wolf?
“The world is full of sheep and wolves. To protect the sheep you need to learn to fight like a wolf.” This last week I had the opportunity to participate in a unique four day survival course that my wife and I hosted at our property, Liberty Ridge Ranch. The course was instructed by some of our military’s finest from the US Special Forces, Navy Seals, and Delta Force. My good friend Omar Hamada, MD, a veteran Major of the US Army Special Forces, developed the unique survival course along with several other elite US military professionals.
Liberal Judges Put Election Reforms in Wisconsin on Hold, Except for Voter ID
On Monday, a three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused without comment to stay a Wisconsin district court opinion in One Wisconsin Institute v. Thomsen that threw out changes the state legislature had made in early voting rules as well as other changes such as the residency requirement for new voters. However, the state’s voter ID law will remain in place for the November election because the district court judge, James D. Peterson, a President Barack Obama appointee, stayed his earlier ruling against the ID law on Aug. 11. Peterson didn’t have much choice on that issue: The same three-judge panel that refused to stay his overall ruling had issued a stay on the voter ID issue on Aug. 10 in a second district court case in Wisconsin, Frank v. Walker.
Target Stock Plummets as Bathroom Boycott Surges
There are two indisputable facts surrounding Target’s decision to allow men to use the same bathrooms and changing rooms as women and little girls. First, Target’s stock has taken pounding since April. Second quarter earnings fell to $680 million, according to Market Watch. And revenue fell 7.2 percent. Second, more than 1.4 million consumers have joined American Family Association’s nationwide boycott of the nation’s second-largest discount retailer. The debate is whether there is a correlation between those two facts. Target CEO Brian Cornwell told Fortune magazine in May that the transgender bathroom policy has nothing to do with their financial wellbeing.
The Colin Powell Defense
The influence that Colin Powell has over Hillary Clinton is something to behold. His word is her command. When he tells her to break the law and endanger the nation’s secrets, she doesn’t hesitate. She salutes smartly and does as she is told. Clinton has been desperate for the moral cover of Colin Powell for her email arrangement since the scandal first broke last year. Now we’ve learned that Clinton told the FBI that Powell advised her to use private email as secretary of state at a dinner in 2009. This escalates Clinton’s email defense from “Hey, Colin Powell did it, too,” all the way to “Colin Powell made me do it.”
Libertarian Town Hall
Vote for Donald Trump? No! Hillary Clinton? No! They are not trustworthy. They push bad ideas. Fortunately, we have another choice: Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and his running mate, William Weld. But most Americans don’t even know they exist. It would be good if the two ex-governors were allowed to join next month’s presidential debates, but the Commission on Presidential Debates will allow that only if Johnson reaches 15 percent in a select handful of polls. He’s at about 10 percent now. He tried to get the Commission to relax its rules, but they would not. You can still get a feel for what these candidates offer by watching my show Friday. I’ll do a Libertarian “town hall.” My studio audience will grill Johnson and Weld about ... well, whatever they want.