Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
The Return of a 47-Year-Old Headline
I was thumbing through an old magazine over the weekend. It was 47 years old to be exact, and I came across a surprisingly prescient piece entitled wittily, "The Arab, the Jew, and the Pickle." What particularly caught my eye was that the piece was written by me in what is now called The American Spectator. Imagine that. In it, I argued that Israel had no other choice but to resist its enemies. They were all around little Israel and they were hostile to the utmost. Any sign of weakness would put the state of Israel in mortal danger.
Everything You Need to Know About College Microaggressions
When students protesting "microaggressions" took over an administrative building at Occidental College in California, they issued 14 demands. The school agreed to all except the first, which required the firing of its president. Similar protests took place concurrently at other colleges nationwide. Occidental's five-day takeover was organized by Oxy United for Black Liberation, led by members of Oxy's Black Student Alliance (BSA) and Coalition at Oxy for Diversity and Equity (CODE).
Medicare Waste, Fraud, Abuse and Deja Vu
An office manager in Louisiana who billed Medicare for services that weren't needed or even provided was recently sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay $14.1 million in restitution. Twelve other defendants are awaiting sentencing for their roles in the $50 million scheme to defraud Medicare. The next day, a Detroit-area physician was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to pay $2 million in restitution for his role in a $4.2 million Medicare fraud scheme.
How NOAA Lies With Global Warming Statistics
A subscriber to Cornwall Alliance's e-newsletter recently wrote asking us if we have replies to the various graphs at "Climate Change: Global Temperature," on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate.gov web page. Oh my goodness; the misrepresentations of facts in those graphs are awful!
The Low Depths of Higher Education
Give thanks this day for some indirect blessings of liberty, including the behavior-beyond-satire of what are generously called institutions of higher education. People who are imprecisely called educators have taught, by their negative examples, what intelligence is not. Melissa Click is the University of Missouri academic who shouted "I need some muscle over here" to prevent a photojournalist from informing the public about a public demonstration intended to influence the public.
Grateful for What They Hate
The Paris attacks have occasioned a wide-ranging debate about what they mean and how to respond, involving Islam and its role, military strategy and, oddly enough, how Muslims in New Jersey reacted to Sept. 11 (thanks, Donald Trump). It's all very interesting and, for the most part, quite important. At bottom, though, the import of the Paris attacks is not complicated: ISIS terrorists are enemies of our civilization.
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
College Campus Protests: This Is the Generation That Will Destroy America
What in the name of John Blutarsky is happening on our university campuses? A new survey from the Pew Research Center reveals that a shocking number of Millennials support curbing free speech. According to their findings, 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 believe the government should be able to ban any speech that is offensive to minority groups.
The Jacksonian Appeal of Donald Trump
After the Paris attack, conventional wisdom held that Republican voters would finally turn away from political outsiders and reward candidates representing sobriety and experience. No one stopped to consider that, actually, voters might be drawn to the guy who memorably said of ISIS that he would "bomb the [expletive] out of them."
Turkey-Russia Turmoil
The deadly consequences of America "leading from behind" in the fight against ISIS.
If a Kindergartener Gets It, Why Do We Need Funding for 'Settled Science'?
A couple of months, ago Weatherbell.com CEO Michael Barak gave me an idea for an article when he posed this question: "If this is such a done deal with global warming, why do we need to keep researching it?" I can think of many reasons why, including the pure curiosity of men to find a cause, but after that one has to ask the question: If it's such a done deal, except to crackpots out there like me who believe CO2 has a very tiny effect, why are we wasting so much time and money on all this?
Dumb Responses to the Paris Attacks
The recent attacks in Paris have inspired various half-baked proposals to prevent terrorism in the United States. Here are four of the dumbest.
Too Late for Carson to Catch Up on Homework
A little over a year ago, when Ben Carson was gearing up to run for president, I questioned in this space whether he was ready for what lay ahead. We now have our answer: No. Carson had a great number of things going for him: his amazing life story, charm, professional accomplishments, eloquence and courage. I had only one major concern: "While he speaks eloquently and passionately about the importance of doing homework in his own life and for children everywhere, it's not obvious he's taken those lessons to heart when it comes to politics."
Finding Riders for This Omnibus
When the House and Senate fly back from Thanksgiving, they'll get to work carving up something else: the federal budget. Although some of the heavy lifting is out of the way with last month's two-year budget deal, GOP leaders have a big job to do before having themselves a merry little Christmas.
Presidents and Thanksgiving
Responding to a request from Congress, President George Washington issued our nation's first Thanksgiving proclamation in 1789. Only in the midst of the crucible of civil war, however, did presidential proclamations of Thanksgiving become customary. Every year since 1863 our chief executives have urged Americans to recognize God's bounty and blessings on the fourth Thursday in November.
Thank Liberals for Today's Chaotic and Dangerous World
We're in a world today increasingly defined by chaos. At home it's on our college campuses. Abroad it's spreading across the Middle East and spilling over into Europe. Who do we have to thank for it all? Liberals and moral relativists in power in our country and Europe. Liberals have led the way to destroy all sense of moral clarity in our nation, all objective sense of right and wrong and all sense of authority.
Free Speech
Recent events at the University of Missouri, Yale University and some other colleges demonstrate an ongoing ignorance and/or contempt for the principles of free speech. So let's examine some of those principles by asking: What is the true test of one's commitment to free speech? Contrary to the widespread belief of tyrants among college students, professors and administrators, the true test of one's commitment to free speech does not come when one permits people to be free to express those ideas that he finds acceptable. The true test of one's commitment to free speech comes when he permits others to say those things that he finds deeply offensive. In a word, free speech is absolute, or nearly so.
Self-Defenseless
What might have happened if a few of the 1,500 concert attendees in Paris' Bataclan theater had guns? The terrorists had time to kill, reload and kill again. The police unit didn't come for more than a half hour. If a few people in the theater were armed, might they have killed the killers? We'll never know.
Dealing With Evil Empires
Why did the Marxist atheists who controlled the Soviet Union tear down the Berlin Wall? Did the Western leaders who forced Soviet communism to collapse shrink from proclaiming the truth of the Bible or the fact that free societies are based on a rule of law rooted in the natural law that God engraves on every heart? In 1983, when President Reagan told the National Association of Evangelicals that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire," he described the conflict with communism as a religious one.