Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, June 26, 2015
Marilyn Mosby Guilty of What She Seeks to Condemn
I ask you quite sincerely, What is the moral difference between racially motivated abuses of power by rogue municipal police officers and those by prosecuting attorneys? People should be concerned by Baltimore City State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby's behavior, but it is especially alarming when you consider that she is engaging in the same type of behavior that she is using her state power to criminalize. We can now see why Mosby played hide the ball with the autopsy report on Freddie Gray's death, and it certainly wasn't to protect anyone's privacy — except, perhaps, her own, because it is objectively damning to her politically driven prosecution.
Liberals Are Playing a Racial Shell Game
Let me get this straight. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is something of a dashboard saint to American liberals, principally for her retrograde leftism on economics. It was alleged a few years ago that she spent much of her professional career lying about her fictitious Native American roots. Warren listed herself as a minority in a professional directory and identified herself as a Native American. There was no evidence to support her claim, other than her own family lore and her personal conviction that she feels part Indian. And yet, when Republicans criticized her for it, they were denounced as racist by many defenders. Touré, a professional expert on all things racial, wrote in Time magazine, "Warren has every right to define herself" as part Native American. "The only way we could truly gauge Warren's Indian-ness would be to see how much being an American Indian means to her," he explained.
Whitewashing the Democratic Party's History
Here's what the former president of the United States had to say when he eulogized his mentor, an Arkansas senator: "We come to celebrate and give thanks for the remarkable life of J. William Fulbright, a life that changed our country and our world forever and for the better. ... In the work he did, the words he spoke and the life he lived, Bill Fulbright stood against the 20th century's most destructive forces and fought to advance its brightest hopes." So spoke President William J. Clinton in 1995 of a man who was among the 99 Democrats in Congress to sign the "Southern Manifesto" in 1956. (Two Republicans also signed it.) The Southern Manifesto declared the signatories' opposition to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education and their commitment to segregation forever. Fulbright was also among those who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That filibuster continued for 83 days.
On Lowering the Flag
After a massacre like the one at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, our immediate reaction is to do something. Something, for politicians, means legislation. And for Democratic politicians, this means gun control. It's the all-purpose, go-to, knee-jerk solution. Within hours of the massacre, President Obama was lamenting the absence of progress on gun control. A particular Democratic (and media) lament was Congress' failure to pass anything after Sandy Hook. But the unfortunate fact is that the post-Sandy Hook legislation would have had zero effect on the events in Charleston. Its main provisions had to do with assault weapons; Dylann Roof was using a semiautomatic pistol.
Facing a Changing World Balance, Obama Makes Odd Choices
Is the world back to where it was around the year 1800? One could come to that conclusion after reading British historian John Darwin's recent book "After Tamerlane," which assesses the rises and falls of empires after the death in 1405 of the famously bloodthirsty Muslim Mongol monarch. From his Central Asian base, Tamerlane conquered Persia and lands from Egypt to India, destroying captured cities and piling up enormous piles of skulls. His fame has endured, from Christopher Marlowe's Elizabethan play to the first name of the slain Boston Marathon bomber. Darwin's perspective is worldwide, with as much emphasis on East Asia, South Asia, the Islamic world and Russia as on Western Europe and its American offshoots. He argues that from the 1400s to about 1800, China, India and the Islamic world were about as economically and technologically advanced and culturally sophisticated as that little set of peninsulas at the western edge of the Eurasian land mass called Europe.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
America's Coming Transfer of Wealth
Does it seem as if some lawmakers have the attention span of a toddler? Several years ago, concerns about the debt and overspending were all the rage. These worries have dissipated almost entirely as deficit levels have gone down from their sky-high summit in 2009. And just like that, lawmakers have gone back to overlooking our long-term fiscal situation and the unsustainable path the nation is on. Case in point: the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office. According to the CBO's annual Long-Term Budget Outlook, if current laws were to remain unchanged, government spending as a share of gross domestic product would reach 22.2 percent in fiscal 2025, up from 20.5 percent today. By then, even under a very rosy GDP growth scenario, the debt would amount to 78 percent of the economy. To put this number in perspective, the debt-to-GDP ratio was 35 percent in 2007. In 2040, the debt could reach a whopping 103 percent of GDP. Spending on interest alone would consume 4.3 percent of GDP, a dramatic increase above the current 1.3 percent. Putting that in dollar terms, interest on the debt would jump from $235 billion to over $2.2 trillion. That's a lot of money.
The Pope, the Globe and the Facts
The media and the secular left have a love-hate relationship with the Roman Catholic Church and its popes. When the pope takes positions with which they agree, they applaud him, but when he takes positions with which they disagree, they either ignore or criticize him. Such is the case with Pope Francis' encyclical on "climate change." The Washington Post gave it editorial praise, stating in a front-page headline that it "poses a dilemma for 2016 GOP hopefuls." Since Francis included abortion along with "climate change" in his argument that the environment and life at all stages has value and is in need of protection, one might ask why the secular left and media don't think that's a problem for Democratic presidential hopefuls?
The Meaning of Charleston
Almost immediately after a white killer gunned down nine black worshippers at a historic church in Charleston, South Carolina, out came the politics. On the Capitol grounds in Columbia flies the battlefield flag of Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, often erroneously called the "Confederate flag." Right after the shooting, calls came for the flag's removal. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, until now, had defended the compromise that moved the flag in 2000 from the Capitol dome, where it had flown since 1962, to a nearby Confederate soldier memorial on the statehouse grounds. The killer did not pull out a Confederate flag and use it to kill people. He used a .45. Also, he had flags of apartheid South Africa and separatist Rhodesia. Ban them, too?
Why Greece Won't Pay
For almost six years Greece has been on the cusp of financial disaster. Its Northern European and international creditors have extended loans, suspended interest payments and forgiven some debt. But European lenders have also stubbornly kept to the old-fashioned principle that debtors freely borrowed their money from lenders, and therefore most borrowed money must be paid back, regardless of the current financial status of the debtors. Greece counters that after all sorts of austerity budgets, it simply can no longer inflict the necessary pain on its relatively tiny population to squeeze out enough cash to pay its well-off creditors. In other words, borrowed money only sometimes must be paid back — depending on the relative wealth of the respective borrower and lender.
New Faces in the Race
The Republican Party, the political party of commerce (and of jobs!), has two aspiring candidates for the presidential nomination who are drawn from the business community. One evokes unwarranted snoozes; the other, rather astonishingly, evokes derision. I am speaking of Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard and Donald Trump, the billionaire developer. Those who offer their expert appraisals of these two candidates are retired politicians, political advisers and pundits. In other words, these appraisals are coming from those who have left the field of political combat for whatever reason, or who have never stood for election yet their assessments of candidates are taken very seriously by journalists, who also have never stood for election. Political commentary is unusual. It is as though the leading culinary critics in the country were all vegetarians, or at least fruitarians.
The Empty 'Marketplace of Ideas'
Americans take justifiable pride in their right to free speech. People may be muzzled by their government in places such as Cuba and North Korea, but not here. You can say what's on your mind without fear of prosecution. But can you do so without fear of persecution? More and more, it seems, the answer is no. Say the "wrong" thing, and the Outrage Police swarm you. Do we need a communist government to shut down debate when we're eager to do it ourselves? To be sure, political correctness isn't a new phenomenon. Aggrieved parties throughout history have struggled to suppress viewpoints they disagreed with. But we live in an age where, for example, refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding qualifies you for a figurative firing squad (figurative as of this writing, but at the rate things are going, watch out).
Let the Subsidies Die
In the five years since Obamacare became law, millions of Americans have seen their insurance premiums rise and their deductibles skyrocket. Millions more have been pushed out of their plans and onto Medicaid — a notoriously ineffective health program. And all the while, Washington has tried to paper over these problems with subsidies. Soon the Supreme Court will rule on the legality of the federal subsidies given to people who have purchased health coverage from Healthcare.gov, the federally-operated insurance exchange. In the case of King v. Burwell, the nine justices on the Supreme Court are given yet another opportunity to either apply the plain meaning of federal law, or to give the green light to the Obama administration's lawless and politically convenient handouts.
There's a Reason We Mostly Hear About White 'Micro-Aggressions'
The massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston by an evil psycho is a hideous thing. The case is especially sickening because the victims were chosen specifically because of their race. Thank God it's extremely rare for whites to target black people for attack. And yet the public is being told by The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC and Salon that the Charleston massacre is proof that we live in a country packed with marauding racist murderers. It's like saying we have an epidemic of men flying gyrocopters onto Capitol Hill. Yes, there's that one time, but I notice you keep citing the same case. In The Washington Post, for example, columnist Lonnae O'Neal blamed the Charleston attack on "white supremacy," claiming that "racial sickness is all around us." (I guess the one upside of the horror in South Carolina is that we can FINALLY have a national conversation about race.)
Plans, Trans and Auto-Repeals
What kind of government says its health care can't afford to keep people alive — but *will* pay to change their gender? Yours! Welcome to the Obama administration, located at the intersection of illogical and outrageous. In two seemingly unrelated stories [Tuesday], the House helped to highlight just how radically out of touch the President's policy is with everyday Americans. For years, the Obama administration has argued that it's cheaper to "let sick people die" than treat them. And to prove it, they wrote a little something into the President's signature law authorizing 15 unaccountable bureaucrats to make decisions from Washington about whether you deserve care — and from whom. They called it the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), or "death panel," as most people know it. Of course, the administration never hid IPAB's real agenda. In fact, the head of Medicare at the time, Donald Berwick, was quite blunt about its role in rationing care.
Questions for Candidate Clinton
Hillary Clinton's reticence is drowning out her message, which is that she is the cure for the many ailments that afflict America during a second Democratic presidential term. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has called her "the most opaque person you'll ever meet in your life," but when opacity yields to the necessity of answering questions, here are a few: Your first leadership adventure was when your husband entrusted you with health care reform. Using a process as complex as it was secretive, you produced a proposal so implausible that a Democratic-controlled Congress would not even vote on it. Your legislation was one reason that in 1994 Democrats lost control of the House for the first time in 40 years. What did you learn from this futility and repudiation?
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Holy Hypocrisy and Hot Air
Unlike Pope Francis, I believe that air-conditioning and the capitalists responsible for the technology are blessings to the world. Perhaps the head of the Catholic Church, who condemned "the increasing use and power of air-conditioning" last week in a market-bashing encyclical, is unaware of the pioneering private company that has donated its time, energy and innovative heating, ventilating and air-conditioning equipment to the Vatican's most famous edifice for more than a decade. That's right. While the pontiff sanctimoniously attacks "those who are obsessed with maximizing profits," Carrier Corporation — a $13 billion for-profit company with 43,000 employees worldwide (now a unit of U.S.-based United Technologies Corp.) — ensures that the air in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel stays clean and cool.
The Pope's Beauty and Incoherence
There is a healthy discussion now underway within Catholic circles asking the improbable question: What is the message of Laudato Si, the pope's new encyclical on the environment? The political left feels not just vindicated but triumphant. Global warming is not just sound science; it is dogma. Conservative skeptics are therefore not just ignorant; they are immorally ignorant. Last week, Rush Limbaugh argued that "what this papal encyclical is saying is that every Catholic should vote for the Democrat Party. ... That's what it is. How else do you interpret it when the pope comes out and sounds like Al Gore on global warming and climate change?"
The Not-So-Long Goodbye to U.S. Manufacturing Jobs
Manufacturing employment in the United States peaked 36 years ago in June 1979. That month, the U.S. had a civilian labor force of 104,638,000 and 19,553,000 — or about 18.7 percent — were employed in manufacturing. Last month, the U.S. had a civilian labor force 157,469,000, but only 12,355,000 — or about 7.8 percent — were employed in manufacturing. Between those two dates, the number of Americans who held a job or actively sought one increased by 52,831,000. But manufacturing jobs declined by 7,198,000. In 1979, when manufacturing jobs peaked, households headed by Americans who had completed high school but not attended college enjoyed a median income of $54,503 in constant 2013 dollars.
The Race to Grace
Somewhere in Charleston, a deeply embittered 21-year-old is sitting in a dark cell replaying scenes from the courtroom over in his mind. For the killer who hoped to incite a nation with his bloody rampage, things didn't exactly work out as planned. The nine lives he sacrificed in God's house, offerings to a centuries-old race war, did more to quell the tension than spark it. In the end, violence was met by a force much stronger: forgiveness. Sitting across from the shooter at his bond hearing, no one would have blamed the families for lashing out in anger. Instead, one by one, racked by grief, they offered an unexpected gift — grace. "I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you," one daughter said through her tears. "We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive."
The Wonder of It All
I was thinking about the events in the wonderful world of climate over the past week, which as usual is more about what someone said rather than anything that happened. I am trying to make sense out of it. For example, why is the hockey stick-like linkage to life expectancy, population and per capita income not credited to increased CO2 brought on by the fossil fuel era? It is not by magic humans have it better off now than we did before fossil fuels came onto the scene. Yet somehow temperatures are, in spite of the record below, showing that, whatever effect CO2 has, it has to be rendered so small that one would be hard pressed to find any significant linkage.