Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
The FBI Wants the Key to Your Data
Is Government-Resistant Encryption an Intolerable Threat to Public Safety?
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
The Pope and the Hammer and Sickle
Last week the Marxist quasi-dictator of Bolivia, Evo Morales, presented Pope Francis with a gift: a carved wooden hammer and sickle cross on which the figure of Christ is crucified. The Vatican announced that the pope had not been informed in advance about the gift. And some commentators said photos of the pope and Morales show that the pope was actually offended. That was a false — probably wishful — interpretation. The pope himself later announced that he was keeping the hammer and sickle crucifix and taking it home, saying, "I understand this work. For me it wasn't an offense." And as reported by The Guardian, "Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said he personally wasn't offended by Morales' gift."
Goldstein-ing the American Right
Two paragraphs from a recent article entitled "The New Totalitarians Are Here" by U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols should be required reading for those on the right who believe accommodating the American Left's sensibilities has an endpoint. Nichols refers to the recent attack on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas by has-been actor George Takei. Takei called Thomas a "clown in blackface" because Thomas cast a dissenting vote against the Courts' decision to "discover" yet another previously unknown part of the Constitution, legalizing gay marriage — and trampling states' rights in the process. Nichols also takes on Quartz.com journalist Meredith Bennett-Smith, who insisted that a Washington Post column by Cathy Young, challenging the bogus feminist definition of campus rape, was written by a "horrendous rape apologist" who should never be printed in that paper again.
Preachers of Habit
Redefining marriage in the courts may not have been difficult, but persuading Americans to accept it is another story entirely. Their supporters may be cheering the Supreme Court now, but those five black-robed lawyers may also be responsible for something else: America's spiritual revival. In church after church, the story is the same — pastors preaching powerful sermons on God's design for marriage and urging their congregations to accept no substitutes. If what's happening in the pews of America is any indication, the Supreme Court didn't weaken people's resolve — it strengthened it. And if liberals truly believe that evangelicals are the "only cultural holdouts" on marriage, they're about to find out how wrong they are. Across denominations, ethnicities, and political parties, there's a growing outrage over the Court's presumption — and the President's betrayal.
Hillary's Tired, Demagogic Economic Proposals
Hillary Clinton is a walking, talking cliche who spouts decades-old sound bites that were bad enough when her husband first delivered them but are painfully anachronistic today. Same old material, same old demagoguery. You would think a self-styled "progressive" would be less regressive and reactionary, but this woman apparently believes that the Clinton magic of the '90s can be dusted off and resurrected without the slightest rhetorical modification. The problem with that is that Clintonomics only works on the heels of Reaganomics and liberals have been squeezing every last ounce of Reaganomics out of our system. In her first major economic policy speech at The New School in New York, Hillary made clear that she wants to revive the shamefully populist Clinton-Gore trope of "trickle-down economics." This hackneyed slogan is grounded in the lie that Republicans believe that only by stacking the deck in favor of the wealthiest people will the rest of America be able to do better, and then only by catching their breadcrumbs as they trickle down into the general economy.
Is the Civil War Over?
In the wake of the recent murders in a South Carolina church, the killer's hope of igniting a race war produced the opposite effect. Blacks and whites in South Carolina came together to condemn his act and the race hate behind it. Some saw in the decision to remove the Confederate flag from in front of the state house a symbolic repudiation of the old South's racial past — and the end of the Civil War. But, unfortunately, wars do not end until both sides decide that it is over. The black parishioners who expressed forgiveness toward the killer did more than most of us could do, and the whites who responded with solidarity did their part. Note how quickly this was done, by ordinary people of good will — black and white — without the "help" of racial activists like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson.
Disruptive Politics: Trump as a Third Party Candidate
"My sole focus is to run as a Republican," Donald Trump told my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York last week, "because of the fact that I believe that this is the best way we can defeat the Democrats." He went on, "Having a two-party race gives us a much better chance of beating Hillary and bringing our country back than having a third-party candidate." But when York asked if he would definitively rule out running as a third-party candidate, Trump said, "It's not something I'm thinking about right now." And as John Fund pointed out in National Review, it is something Trump has thought about in the past. He made a feint at getting Ross Perot's Reform Party nomination back in 1999. And while Trump recently called Clinton "the worst secretary of state in the history of our nation," somehow overlooking James Buchanan's feckless stint in the Polk administration, he also contributed to her Senate campaigns and has called her "a terrific woman."
There Should Be No Sanctuary From the Law
According to the Wall Street Journal, the last serious attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws appears to have been made in 1982 by a retired Justice Department official named Ronald Gainer. He failed, but the estimate then was "...50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law." Many more laws have been added since then. One thing is certain: If you violate federal law you are likely to be punished with a fine, imprisonment or both. These laws are supposed to apply to everyone, unless, it seems, you are an illegal alien living in San Francisco, or any of the other sanctuary cities around the country. By now, anyone not preoccupied with stories about shark attacks, the Confederate flag or singer Ariana Grande "maliciously licking" donuts she did not buy, has heard about 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle gunned down by an illegal alien while walking on a San Francisco pier with her father. Her accused killer is Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a felon from Mexico, who had been deported five times but always managed to sneak back in, choosing San Francisco, he reportedly said, because he knew it was a "sanctuary city" that would not deport him.
Monday, July 13, 2015
Supreme Court Logic: Knoll and Void
By redefining marriage, the Supreme Court's five justices did more than undermine democracy. They undermined their profession too. And for principled judges across America, that was just as offensive. The country's confidence in the courts was already in a freefall — slumping to its second lowest score (32%) since 1973, when SCOTUS made its other great mockery of justice in Roe v. Wade. Now as the highest court in the land chases the cultural winds, the rest of the bench is left to clean up the mess. In Louisiana, justices at the state supreme court reflected the deep division the June 26 decision caused when its effects made their way to the justices doorstep this week. Soon, what should have been a routine order certifying the ruling became anything but. In one of a thousand cases sure to trickle down, Louisiana's court was asked to recognize the gay adoption of two women "married" out of state. It did — but not without unloading on the Supreme Court for putting them in this position first.
We Need to Recreate Our American Melting Pot
During our last era of high immigration, remembered now as the "Ellis Island" age, our leaders would use the Fourth of July to stump for something once quaintly known as Americanization. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Louis Brandeis — they all did it, with stirring speeches about bringing new immigrants fully into the American dream. Presidential candidates, take note. One of the best ways to honor and safeguard our independence today is to start a debate on patriotic assimilation. For centuries, America welcomed succeeding surges of immigrants with an invitation to join a unique American culture that includes specific principles and virtues. Then, in the 1970s, our elites decided to reverse course, and started promoting sectarianism.
A Mess of Pottage
Although it doesn't appear in any English translation of Genesis, "a mess of pottage" has come to mean something precious, such as Esau's birthright, which he surrendered to his twin brother, Jacob, in exchange for something essentially worthless, "pottage" referring to a thin gruel. That is the bargain that the liberals have made, trading away the glorious endowment handed down by our Founders for the gruel of the welfare state, which demands nothing of the individual except that he continue to vote for more of the same. I fully understand that the Confederate battle flag raises hackles among a great many people. I also understand that for a lot of Southerners, people who tend to have a great love of their region and a respect for those who fought and died on its behalf, the flag represents a connection to their ancestors, most of whom did not own slaves or even necessarily favor slavery.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Licensed to Kill
First there was Pablo Escobar, the once notorious head of the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia. I have it on good authority from a high placed source that he was killed by a member of the US Special Forces. The US government doesn't admit to this, but it does acknowledge the role of US forces in locating Escobar and in destroying the Medellin cartel. Where did they get the authority to do that? The Constitution gives the Congress the authority to declare war, but Congress has never declared war on Colombia. Come to think of it, neither has any US president.
Three More Great Progressive Lies
Conservative leader Morton Blackwell keeps a picture of Leonardo's model of a bicycle on the wall of his Leadership Institute. It's his site gag — and a *sight* gag. Leonardo's bike is a reminder that the great conservative philosophical insight — *Ideas Have Consequences* — is true only if people act upon it. You can sketch a bicycle and perhaps even build a working model. But we know it took four hundred years for people to start riding bicycles. Progressives don't ever wait that long. They start acting upon their ideas immediately. The only trouble is: the ideas they believe in are not true.rogre Among the lies they believe, here are three of the most prominent: **Progressive Lie Number One:** We do not know when human life begins. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote this in his infamous Roe v. Wade ruling of 1973. That was a lie when he wrote it. We all knew that human life begins at conception. We had known this incontrovertible scientific truth since the 1850s. That was the reason the states were urged to bring their homicide codes into conformity with science's indisputable findings.
Roberts v. Willett
Today's most interesting debate about governance concerns a 110-year-old Supreme Court decision. Two participants in this debate are the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court and a justice on the Supreme Court of Texas. The latter is trouncing the former. In his same-sex marriage dissent, John Roberts repeatedly denounced, with more animus than understanding, the U.S. Supreme Court's 1905 Lochner decision. In a recent opinion concerning occupational licensing in Texas, Justice Don Willett of the Texas Supreme Court demonstrates why America urgently needs many judicial decisions as wise as Lochner. An 1895 New York law limited the hours bakers could work daily and weekly. Ostensibly health and safety legislation, it actually was rent-seeking by large, unionized bakeries and their unions. They wanted to crush their small, family-owned, nonunionized competitors that depended on flexible work schedules. New York, defending the law, presented no evidence that baking wholesome bread is an especially unhealthful occupation or requires limiting workers' hours. So, the U.S. Supreme Court properly declared the law an unconstitutional "interference" with an unenumerated (by the Constitution) right of individuals to liberty of contract.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Unburdening My Mind
In a way, I envy those pundits who write once a week about a single issue and are satisfied with themselves. I write three or four times a week, cover multiple topics every time out, and I still feel I'm falling behind. For instance, I don't feel strongly one way or another about the Confederate flag. I understand why good people would have strong feelings on both sides of the controversy. On the other hand, I don't share the belief of most people that Abraham Lincoln was a great president or a great human being. As he made clear, he wasn't waging a war to eliminate slavery, but to preserve the Union. Would it have mattered if the Union hadn't survived? I don't think so. What would have been so terrible about there being two separate nations? When it served their mutual interests, as with trade or waging war against a common foe, they could have easily worked together, just as we do with Canada. The South would have soon enough eliminated slavery because, one, it would have become economically unsound and, two, their trading partners would have forced the issue.
Looking Back
After my 85th birthday last week, I looked back over my life and was surprised to discover in how many different ways I had been lucky, in addition to some other ways in which I was unlucky. Among the things I did not know at the time was that I was adopted as an infant into a family with four adults, in which I was the only child. All sorts of research since then has shown how the amount of attention and interactions with adults a child gets has a lot to do with the way the child develops. But of course I knew nothing about such things back then. It was decades later, when I now had a son of my own that I asked one of the surviving members of the family how old I was when I first started to walk She said, "Oh, Tommy, nobody knows when you could walk. Somebody was always carrying you."
Friday, July 10, 2015
An Open Question to Our Universities on AGW: What if You Are Wrong?
No climate program in the nation that I can find is teaching anything but the "party line" on global warming. Perhaps they are right, though if the forecasts made by computer modeling (as shown below) were graded like any college exam (if you said one thing was the answer and it turned out it was wrong), then I would expect the professor to grade it as being wrong. I assume college courses are still graded based on correct answers. In my world it comes down to this: The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) take the global temperatures with the most accurate information available and the finest gridding every 6 hours. The trends can easily be seen — the warming that was shown *by all* measuring tools through the late '90s and the recent downturn or even slight cooling over the past 10 years.
Estrangement From the Truth a Problem for Hillary
Hillary Clinton lies. This is a widely acknowledged fact among people who pay attention and aren't on her payroll. Nearly 20 years ago, New York Times columnist William Safire wrote: "Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our first lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar." Younger folks probably have little to no memory of the lies Safire had in mind, though some might have heard about Hillary Clinton's infamously implausible explanation for how she managed to make a 10,000 percent profit in cattle futures simply by reading The Wall Street Journal.
What (Little) You See of Hillary Clinton Is What You'll Get if She Wins
It says something about Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign that it was big news that she submitted herself to an interview with a cable news journalist. It also says something that the journalist selected for this honor, Brianna Keilar of CNN, was recently a guest at the wedding of the director of grassroots engagement for the Clinton campaign. Makes sense to hedge your risk. To her credit, Keilar did ask some reasonably tough questions and even some follow-ups, before concluding the interview with questions about earth-shaking issues such as who should be on the $10 bill and who is Saturday Night Live's best Hillary Clinton imitatrix. But, oddly for a former secretary of state, there was nothing on foreign policy, despite the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East, the nuclear negotiations with Iran, the failed reset with Russia and the Greek Euro crisis. Nothing on the Trans-Pacific trade deal, which Clinton advocated in the first Obama term and is waffling on now.
Lien on Me
Same-sex "marriage" isn't about building homes — it's about destroying them. Ask Aaron and Melissa Klein. The Christian bakers just learned that they stand to lose a lot more than their business for following their faith on marriage. According to the state, it could cost them their house too. In another sickening twist, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries is ordering the family to pay their $135,000 fine by next Monday or the state will put a lien on their home. Apparently, Commissioner Brad Avakian is so fiercely committed to his agenda that he's willing to put five kids on the street to prove it. Conform or go homeless. Sounds like tolerance to me! Like florist Barronelle Stutzman, whose home also hangs in the court's balance, the Kleins are finding out how low the Left is willing to sink to demand conformity on their redefinition of marriage.