Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Student Senator Faces Impeachment for Conservative Beliefs
There's a witch hunt underway for conservatives at the University of Southern California — and Jacob Ellenhorn appears to be Public Enemy No. 1. Ellenhorn is a student senator at USC and president of the College Republicans. He is also an outspoken conservative. And that's a big problem among his fellow student lawmakers at USC. Ellenhorn is facing possible impeachment — accused of all sorts of tawdry behavior, like publicly expressing his conservative opinions and (brace yourself) inviting high-profile conservative speakers to campus.
Candidates Banking on the Export-Import Bank?
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is one of a kind. He is the only self-proclaimed socialist in Congress, and he is also the only Democratic candidate in the presidential race to oppose crony programs such as the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Hillary Clinton, a big supporter of the bank, and Sanders clashed quite vigorously on the issue during the recent presidential debate in Flint, Michigan.
Can Our Colleges Be Saved?
The public is steadily losing confidence in undergraduate education, given that we hear constantly about how poorly educated are today's graduates and how few well-paying jobs await them. The cost of college is a national scandal. Collective student loan debt in America is about $1.2 trillion. Campus political correctness is now daily news. How could higher education be held accountable and thereby be reformed? Just as expensive new roofs are not supposed to leak, $100,000 educations should not leave students unprepared for the real world upon graduation. Rain and snow calibrate the effectiveness of a roofer's work, but how does society know whether students' expensive investments in their professors and courses have led to any quantifiable knowledge?
White Poverty and Me
In his continuing effort to pit races and classes against each other, Democratic presidential candidate and socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) has said that if you are white, "you don't know what it's like to be poor." He should drive some of the roads I've driven in West Virginia, among other places. Some of the homes of the white poor look like throwbacks from an earlier time. Sanders attempted to "clarify" his comment (a political synonym for walking it back when it didn't play well) during a town hall meeting Monday night in Detroit. Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked him about his remark and Sanders replied, "I know about white poverty. There is no candidate in this race who has talked more about poverty than I have."
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Random Thoughts
Random thoughts on the passing scene: The presidential election prospects for the Democrats are so bad this year that only the Republicans can save them — as Republicans have saved them before. Will a Supreme Court without a single Protestant justice rule that an "under-representation" of any group is evidence of discrimination? Here is a trick question: What percentage of American households have incomes in the top 10 percent? Answer: 51 percent of American households are in the top 10 percent in income at some point in the course of a lifetime — usually in their older years. Those who want us to envy and resent the top 10 percent are urging half of us to envy and resent ourselves.
Hillary Takes Her Show on the Roe
The Democrats' platform on abortion is sure easy to sum up: not safe, not rare — and always legal! If you tuned in to the Fox News [Monday] night for the Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton debate (and based on the ratings, you probably didn't), there couldn't have been a starker contrast with the GOP candidates, who are competing to make life a bigger priority in their campaigns. And based on the political landscape, it's no wonder. Apparently, the last seven years of President Obama's extreme policies have resulted in fundamental change — of people's minds!
ISIS and Christian Genocide
It's part a lack of resources overseas and part simple disinterest at home, but the American news media seemingly are out of the business of covering international news. For example, one of the most neglected international stories is the attempt by ISIS to exterminate and persecute Christians. Instead, our media obsess over the faintest hint of domestic "Islamophobia." A few weeks ago, The New York Times filed a national story from Arizona with this incident: "Rania Kanawati, a Syrian immigrant, was walking to her car after Friday Prayer last month at the Islamic Center of Tucson when a beer can landed right behind her, then another one fell by her side." The headline was "University of Arizona Students Hurl Insults, and Litter, at Mosque in Tucson." No one was hurt.
Speaking of Polls...
A new ABC News/Washington Post poll is raising eyebrows for its results, which are critical of both front-runners. In the GOP contest, the poll found Trump leading with 34%, followed by Cruz 25%, Rubio 18% and Kasich 13%. In head-to-head match-ups, Cruz beats Trump 54% to 41%. Marco Rubio also beats Trump but by a closer 51%-to-45% margin. The difference is the intensity of support for Ted Cruz among conservatives and evangelicals. Cruz carries "very conservative" Republicans by 26 points and evangelical voters by 33 points. Rubio's margins are 15 and 13 points respectively.
Texas Abortion Law Meets Bill Clinton's Standards
The Supreme Court heard arguments last week in the Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt case, where the constitutionality of HB 2, the Texas omnibus abortion law that Gov. Rick Perry signed in 2013, is being challenged. At issue are the new regulations that the law placed on abortion providers in Texas. One: Facilities performing abortions must meet all standards of an "ambulatory surgical center." Two: Any physician performing an abortion must have "admitting privileges" at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic.
Hillary's Federal Education Jackboot Squad
Brace yourselves, parents: Hillary Clinton's Fed Ed jackboot squad is from the government and is here to "help." Clinton wants a cadre of new government educrats to undo the decades-old damage of old government educrats in America's worst public schools. She pitched her creepy proposal at the Democratic presidential debate in Michigan on Sunday for an "education SWAT team" to swarm down and rescue students from failing districts in decrepit cities such as Detroit (run by whom? Oh, yeah. Democrats!).
Diner Offers 'Dictator Obama' Breakfast Special, Political Correctness Talking Points
The "American Diner" in Liverpool, NY, may be the most politically incorrect diner in the Empire State — and possibly the nation. The "American Diner" is a gun-toting, beef-eating, Constitution-loving establishment owned by Michael Tassone. Mr. Tassone is a no-nonsense God & Country fellow who takes pride in Old Glory and his signature "Animal Burger" — made from 24 ounces of "American Love." "We talk religions and politics and we encourage people to carry their guns," Mr. Tassone told me. "The Second Amendment protects all the rest of them."
Conservative Purists Are Capitulating
What a short, strange trip it's been for Donald Trump's conservative supporters. Ever since the Goldwaterite takeover of the GOP, the party has tried to convert voters to conservatism. This orientation has sometimes led it to follow a "better to be right and lose" axiom — hence Goldwater's disastrous defeat in 1964. Now we seem to have tipped in the other direction, thinking it's "better to be wrong and win." George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was seen as a nod in this direction, and a great many conservatives — myself included — were critical of his efforts to triangulate against traditional limited-government conservatism.
Three Reasons Conservatives Should Fear the Trump Phenomenon
Donald Trump's candidacy is scary. Trump isn't frightening because he's anything special personally. He's just a warmed-over mash-up of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, a spoiled brat billionaire eccentric with a history of position flipping and bullying foolishness. He has authoritarian tendencies on a personal level, and no awareness of the Constitution or its importance. In other words, he's Barack Obama if Obama weren't ideologically driven and suddenly experienced a precipitous drop in IQ.
Libertarian Lite
In this year's Republican presidential primaries, Sen. Rand Paul got little traction. In 2012, his father failed. That year, the Libertarian Party candidate, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, got just 1 percent of the vote. We libertarians must be doing something wrong. Maybe our anti-government message is too radical, says Jerry Taylor. Maybe we should soften our approach. "Libertarians need to be more realistic," Taylor told 500 young people at a taping of my TV show at last week's International Students for Liberty conference. In electoral politics, he said, finding libertarians is "like trying to find a daisy in Hiroshima" after the nuclear blast.
Warmongers Hate Trump
Last week, 117 "members of the Republican national security community" signed an open letter condemning Donald Trump. It made me think the bellicose billionaire, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is not quite as bad as I thought. "His vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle," the letter complains. "He swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence." Although there is some truth to that critique, an inconsistent skepticism of foreign intervention is better than none at all. That is why I have trouble agreeing with Eliot Cohen, the neoconservative foreign policy expert who organized the letter, when he says "Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin."
The Seen and Unseen
Claude Frederic Bastiat (1801-50) — a French classical liberal theorist, political economist and member of the French National Assembly — wrote an influential essay titled "That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen." Bastiat argued that when making laws or economic decisions, it is imperative that we examine not only what is seen but what is unseen. In other words, examine the whole picture. Americans who support tariffs on foreign goods could benefit immensely from Bastiat's admonition. A concrete example was the Bush administration's 8 to 30 percent tariffs in 2002 on several types of imported steel. They were levied in an effort to protect jobs in the ailing U.S. steel industry.
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Undying Devotion
The Untold Story of How Nancy Reagan Would Have Taken a Bullet for Her Husband
The Democrats' Archie Bunker
It was the "excuse me" that echoed around Democratic politics. In their intense Flint, Michigan, debate, Bernie Sanders pointedly said to Hillary Clinton in the heat of one exchange, "Excuse me, I'm talking." Sanders has an $18 trillion unicorns-dancing-on-rainbows spending program and a paranoiac's view of Wall Street, but nothing is quite as disqualifying for the feminist left as his alleged "condescension" in this moment and a couple of others (in two other instances, he asked if he could finish, please).
The Rubio Rally That Wasn't
The man was standing alone, leaning against the wall in the still half-empty conference room that the Marco Rubio campaign had rented for the senator's "big" Tampa rally. It was only 15 minutes before start time, and people were only trickling in. "Are you a Rubio supporter?" I asked the 60-something gentleman. "No. I'm just here to see the train wreck." While in line 30 minutes before the event waiting (with only a couple of hundred other people) for the door to open, I heard several say, not that they had come to support Rubio, but that they were now undecided about who to vote for. Anxious campaign staff kept looking for crowds that weren't there, and would never materialize.