Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, May 12, 2016
Texas Can’t Afford to Miss Out on School Choice
Last week I had the good fortune to be in Texas discussing conservative policy solutions with hundreds of dedicated men and women in San Antonio, Austin, and Houston. One of the big topics of conversation was freedom in education: How can we offer young Americans the best education possible, while ensuring that each family can freely choose and afford the schooling that fits its needs?
Trump: Unexpected and Unconventional but Suited for Our Times
One of the most extraordinary things about Donald Trump’s primary victory in the Republican Party is that he received more votes from people identifying as Christian than his closest competitor Ted Cruz — the son of an evangelical pastor and one who profusely displayed his Christian identity in speech and temperament. In contrast, by standards that many believe to be the essence of Christian character as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, Donald Trump has been anything but meek, merciful, or peacemaking in his political rise. Some have likened him to a one-man wrecking ball. So what’s going on?
Amtrak Helps Government Ride Off the Rails
In 1906, Leonor Loree, an accomplished railroad executive, examined the dilapidated Kansas City Southern Railroad that he had been hired to rehabilitate. Dismayed, he permanently enriched American slang by exclaiming: “This is a helluva way to run a railroad!” Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s second-most important court, recently said, with judicial decorousness, essentially the same thing about Amtrak.
School Play Depicts Rape, Filthy Language and Public Urination
Carnegie Vanguard High School’s one act play had a little something for everyone: depictions of male-on-male rape, male-on-female rape, filthy language, on-stage urination, and an actress who simulated wiping her private parts at center stage. Oh yes, there was also a scene where a male cast member turned his back to the audience and dropped his pants, as fellow cast members deliver dialogue about the size of his appendage.
Trump Can Win
For the umpteenth time, Donald Trump is no conservative. He is an economic populist. When asked to name the top three functions of government, he said national security, health care and education. Two of the three named “duties” one does not find in Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. This puts him exactly where the country is politically — center-left. Americans talk the talk as to their alleged concern for ever-increasing debt. But when asked, “Which programs to cut?” the same complainers look as blank as Homer Simpson when asked to help Bart with his algebra.
Elites Can Afford to Support Looser Immigration Policies
Support for, or opposition to, mass immigration is apparently a class issue, not an ethnic or racial issue. Elites more often support lenient immigration policies; the general public typically opposes them. At the top of the list are Mexico’s elites. Illegal immigration results in an estimated $25 billion sent back in remittances to Mexico each year. The Mexican government worries more about remittances, the country’s No. 1 source of foreign exchange, than it does about its low-paid citizens who are in the U.S., scrimping to send money back home. Remittances also excuse the Mexican government from restructuring the economy or budgeting for anti-poverty programs.
Cronies, Place Your Bets on the Wire Act
Some members of Congress want the Department of Justice to know that they are unhappy. The source of their consternation is the correct DOJ’s finding in 2011 that the 1961 federal Wire Act — long believed to prohibit all forms of interstate gambling — is in fact “limited only to sports betting.” To show their displeasure, language was recently inserted into a Senate appropriations bill, which made the obvious point that the Wire Act didn’t change in 2011, and that it is up to state courts to interpret criminal laws.
North Carolina Fights Back
Standing on principle, not to mention common sense, is so rare these days that when someone does it they make headlines. That’s because you can quickly be labeled a “bigot” if you oppose a lot of the sludge dumped on us by the secular left, and few can withstand the onslaught. North Carolina’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, is unafraid.
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Trump, Hillary, Pickup Trucks & Your Vote
As I’ve spoken for some time now concerning my complete rejection of Donald Trump and my support for #NeverTrump, the most common response I get from Trumpsters and Republican party faithful is this same old worn out comment: “But if you don’t vote for Trump, you’re voting for Hillary.” If I’ve heard that comment once I’ve heard it a thousand times. And no doubt you have too. But is that true? When one rejects one option does that automatically mean they are embracing another, even if they reject that one as well? Let’s see if that argument holds water.
Blowing Smoke on E-Cigs
Down through all the millennia that mankind has smoked tobacco, no one would have believed (or even imagined) that a battery-powered contraption with no tobacco would one day be considered a tobacco product. We’ve long had smokeless tobacco; now we have tobaccoless tobacco. This conceptual breakthrough is the work of federal bureaucrats who are bringing the regulatory hammer down on e-cigarettes in a misbegotten extension of the war on smoking.
Twitter’s Traitors
Social media giant Twitter’s got 99 problems, yet the politically correct company is far more worried about the “optics” of cooperating with federal agents trying to stop jihadist plotters online. Hashtag it: #TwistedTwitterPriorities.
Obama v. the Constitution
The Obama administration declared war [Monday] on normalcy and the rule of law when Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that she was countersuing the state of North Carolina over its commonsense bathroom law. Make no mistake about what is going on here: The Obama administration is unilaterally rewriting the law. It is attempting to force every state in the nation to comply with its radical demand that men and boys who “identify” as women and girls suddenly have a new “civil right” to use whatever bathroom they choose.
Team Obama Boasts of ‘Ventriloquizing’ the Press
President Obama’s political appointees are not only celebrated by the media as the best and brightest America has to offer; they are promoted as being so bright that they are allowed to boast about how they masterfully manipulate the press, like sculpting a can of smelly, journalistic Play-Doh. The New York Times Magazine wrote a long profile of Obama’s deputy national security advisor for strategic communications — his foreign-policy communications whiz — Ben Rhodes, lauded as “the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press.”
Anything You Can Sue, I Can Sue Better!
According to the Obama administration, the biggest threat facing America isn’t ISIS. It isn’t even a nuclear Iran. It’s the stick figures on the bathroom door. While the rest of the world watches wildfires torch through Canada, or millions of Christians flee the Middle East borders, President Obama and his out-of-touch ideologues aren’t worried about genocide. They’re too focused with gender-cide: the elimination of the sexes.
Next: Will Court Redefine Man and Woman?
What if a state department of motor vehicles or a public school insisted that only biological females could use the restroom set aside for females and that biological males had to use the restroom set aside for males? Would that be a rational policy? Would it be just? The U.S. Justice Department is now arguing in federal court that such a policy wrongfully discriminates against people whose “gender identity” does not “align” with their biological sex.
Slow Walking Our Embrace of Trump
Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican Party nominee for president. His imminent triumph has created shock and dismay within the GOP. A number of top Republicans are threatening not to support Trump. A few have proposed launching a third party bid. Trump has given conservatives good reason to doubt his candidacy. It’s hard to know what he really believes. Every day Donald is one tweet away from reversing himself. Moreover, he is an underdog in an election which Republicans once were the odds-on favorites to win.
Fiddling Away Black Futures
Most black politicians, ministers, civil rights advocates and professionals support Hillary Clinton’s quest for the presidency. Whoever becomes the next president, whether it’s a Democrat or Republican, will mean little or nothing in terms of solutions to major problems that confront many black people. We’ve already seen that even a black president means little or nothing. Politics and political power cannot significantly improve the lives of most black people and may even be impediments.
Perry, Other Republicans Selling Their Souls to Trump
“Let no one be mistaken: Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded,” former Texas Gov. Rick Perry declared 10 months ago. Trump’s candidacy, Perry added, represents “a toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued.”
Paul Ryan Should Not Support Trump
The push back against Donald Trump is about far more than Republican “elites” at war with Republican voters, which is what some claim. They say that Trump captured the strong anti-establishment sentiments of voters and that an entrenched Washington establishment won’t accept this new reality.
5 Lessons Trump’s Nomination Should Teach Republicans
Trump is surely a shock to everyone but political commentator Ann Coulter and a few other Trump stalwarts. Now it’s time to take away a few lessons.