Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Saturday, June 6, 2015
The Essential King Dollar/Low-Energy Nexus
The strong May jobs report — including a 280,000 jump in nonfarm payrolls — reminds me of the big debate over the harmful effects of a strong dollar and falling oil prices. But where's the harm? King Dollar, along with the supply benefits of the fracking revolution, may actually be propping up a subpar economy facing headwinds from heavy business taxes and overregulation. The entire cost structure of American business benefits from lower-cost imports and the cheaper purchase price of anything when the dollar is king and energy costs sink. American firms become more competitive. And consumers benefit from rising real incomes in response to the energy price collapse. And it's not only energy. King Dollar strengthens consumer purchasing power across the board.
Friday, June 5, 2015
Obama's Foreign Policy Delusions
President Obama's stunning declaration that the global image of the United States has greatly improved under his administration is another example of his ideology and narcissism's blinding him to his many policy failures. During a White House event with the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative, he managed to turn the subject to himself, saying, "People don't remember — when I came into office, the United States in world opinion ranked below China and just barely above Russia. And today, once again, the United States is the most respected country on earth." As evidence, the White House cited a Gallup poll, but it failed to mention a BBC poll showing that the United States is in the middle of the pack. Significantly, the BBC poll ranked the U.S. behind most of the countries with a positive image — such as Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, the European Union and Brazil — and ahead of mostly just those that always enjoy a negative reputation, such as China, Russia, North Korea, Pakistan and Iran.
Left Plays Fast and Loose With Issue of Gender Identity
At a moment when many on the left are desperately trying to conjure up enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton's bid to become the first woman president, others on the left want to turn the word "woman" into a term of exclusion and oppression. This is just one of the more amusing ironies on display as what passes for liberalism today eats itself. No doubt you've heard: Bruce Jenner has become Caitlyn Jenner. I can't muster much outrage about this. If someone born a man wants to live as a woman, or vice versa, they are free to do so as far as I'm concerned. What does bother me is the way everyone is expected to celebrate Jenner's decision and courage. Why can't I just not care? Or, maybe I just don't want to be part of a massive public relations effort tied to the rollout of yet another reality show?
Who Can Play a Mixed-Race Role?
Let's set aside whether Cameron Crowe's new movie, "Aloha," is a good or bad movie. Whatever the flick's merits or demerits, it has inadvertently helped expose the arbitrary, capricious and ridiculous demands of militant identity politics. After getting hammered by ethnic mau-mauers, director Crowe issued an apology this week for casting actress Emma Stone as the character "Allison Ng" in his Hawaii-centered rom-com. Stone is the alabaster-skinned, green-eyed, red-haired beauty who played Spider-Man's sweetheart, Gwen Stacy. "Ng" is a fictional Air Force fighter pilot of Chinese, Hawaiian and Swedish descent.
Outflanking Democrats on College Costs
Many political debates in the upcoming presidential race will play out this way: The Democrat will offer "X for all," and the Republican will respond, "Do you have any idea how much that's going to cost?" That's the way nearly all political debates are engaged — usually to the disadvantage of Republicans (and the public fisc). That's why I wished, while attending a panel on higher education reform sponsored jointly by the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The Bradley Foundation, that every Republican candidate in America had been listening. The Democrats have a tried-and-true formula (which is actually false, but work with me): They promise to spend more on education to make it more accessible. President Obama has proposed to make community college "free."
Only Democrats Are to Blame for ObamaCare Chaos
If the Supreme Court were to decide not to allow retroactive legislating and uphold Obamacare as written, terrible things would happen to America. We might, for instance, find out what health insurance in fabricated, state-run "marketplaces" actually costs. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the 37 states that have declined to set up exchanges would see an average spike of 287 percent should the King v. Burwell decision not go the Obama administration's way. It would be 650 percent in Mississippi — an amount that only proves that exchanges have not made insurance markets more competitive or more affordable as promised. Actually, the cost of insurance in federally run exchanges is already 287 percent higher. The difference is picked up by taxpayers.
Bowing to the Big Lie of Bruce Jenner
The story of Bruce Jenner declaring against human reality that he's a woman was already a tired old story, exhausted last month in a one-hour prime-time ABC "news" special. But that's not how the grand pooh-bahs of our news and entertainment media see it. They can't get enough. Deconstruction is a tonic. And so the Kardashian-Jenner Inc. rollout continues, a perfect combination of shameless TV hucksterism and a leftist revolt against the old-fashioned notion of natural humanity. How yesterday. We know — everyone knows — Vanity Fair rolled out a new cover of Bruce Jenner gaudily underdressed as a woman with the headline "Call Me Caitlyn." Not a cover story, mind you, just a cover image. The media went bananas. ABC, CBS and NBC offered more than 48 minutes of coverage in two days, as if Jenner was now the Queen of America.
Trash TV Shouldn't Be News
Maybe I'm just getting old, but the media coverage of Bruce Jenner's transformation into Caitlyn and the Duggar family saga strike me as evidence that our society has become unhinged. I'd never heard of the Duggars or their TLC show, "19 Kids and Counting," until two weeks ago when the story broke that the eldest child, now an adult, had resigned his job for the lobbying arm of the conservative Family Research Council over allegations that he had fondled his sisters as a young teenager. As for Jenner, I didn't know he was married to a Kardashian — a name I know primarily from the O.J. Simpson trial, for which the original patriarch served as defense counsel — much less that he was having an identity crisis.
Rand Paul's ISIS Delusions
Why Democrats, not GOP hawks, are to blame for the rise of the Islamic State.
Gov't: It's Our Potty and We'll Pry if We Want To
Is it a lavatory or a laboratory for social change? Depends on who you ask. Under the Obama administration, what happens in the bathroom is an issue for the boardroom, thanks to the Department of Labor. In an announcement this week, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is warning the country that it's "taking on" the issue of transgender politics — and expects the business community to as well. Big Brother has already been a big nuisance, piling on regulation after regulation under ObamaCare, the EPA, IRS, and now OSHA. Its latest intrusion is a memo demanding that the W.C. become P.C. by allowing workers in offices across America to use the restroom of their choosing. "Restricting employees to using only restrooms that are not consistent with their gender identity, or segregating them from other workers by requiring them to use gender-neutral or other specific restrooms, singles those employees out and may make them fear for their physical safety."
Are We In for Another High-Crime Era After the Response to Ferguson and Baltimore?
Are we seeing a reversal of the 20-year decline in violent crime in America? A new nationwide crime wave? Heather Mac Donald fears we are, and as a premier advocate and analyst of the policing strategy pioneered by Rudy Giuliani in New York City and copied and adapted throughout the country, she is to be taken seriously. And the statistics she presented in an article in last weekend's Wall Street Journal are truly alarming. Gun violence is up 60 percent in Baltimore so far this year compared to 2014. Homicides are up 180 percent in Milwaukee, 25 percent in St. Louis, 32 percent in Atlanta and 13 percent in New York in the same period. Why is this happening? Mac Donald writes, "The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months."
Why Doctors Quit, Chapter 2
I rarely do follow-up columns. I'm averaging one every 10 years. And while my last such exercise resulted in a written apology from the White House (for accusing me of making up facts over its removal of Churchill's bust), today's is not a complaint. It's merely a recognition that the huge response elicited by last week's column, "Why Doctors Quit," warrants both rebuttal and clarification. Physicians who responded tended to agree with my claim that doctors are being driven out of the profession by the intrusions, interferences, regulations, mandates, constraints and sundry other degradations of their vocation that are the result of the bureaucratization of medicine. Chief among them is the imposition of electronic health records (EHR). I've also heard from people who notice how much attention their doctor must devote to filling out EHR boxes on a computer screen rather than to engaging with them during an office visit. To the point where a heretofore unheard of profession has been invented — the "scribe" who just enters the data so the doctor can actually do doctoring.
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Crossing the Global Border
Northern and central Italy are not on the southern Mediterranean. But somehow thousands of refugees from Africa, Asia and the Middle East are everywhere here — as is true of much of the European Union. Some sleep on park benches. Many peddle knock-off electronic goods and counterfeit watches. Angry Italians shoo away refugee beggars from tour groups. The Greek islands near the coast of Turkey are likewise flooded this summer with dispossessed refugees from countries such as Afghanistan to and Syria. Apparently a bankrupt Greek government lacks the resources to patrol its vast coastline. Some beleaguered Greeks assume that thousands of boat people and homeless refugees will eventually leave their makeshift camps and head northward to the wealthier homelands of Greece's Northern European creditors.
Lawfare Is Killing the Death Penalty
Last week, the Nebraska legislature voted to do away with the death penalty. I think that was a mistake. But that's a conversation for another day. Instead, I want to talk about a lesson we might take from the decision. Charles Murray (my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute) has written a book, "By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission." The first third of the book is the best diagnosis of America's governmental sickness ever written for the non-specialist. I say "diagnosis," but Murray might call it an autopsy. "The founders' Constitution has been discarded and cannot be restored," Murray writes. The framers never imagined — and would have never consented to — the massive welfare state we have today.
Freedom for Iran's Hostages Should Trump Any Nuclear Deal
In his remarks to the White House Correspondents' Dinner in April, President Obama pledged that his administration would work tirelessly for the freedom of Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who has been held hostage by Iran since last summer on spurious espionage charges. "Jason has been in prison for nothing more than writing about the hopes and fears of the Iranian people," Obama said. "We will not rest until we bring him home to his family, safe and sound." Yet just four days later, the president warned Congress that he would veto any bill making approval of a nuclear deal with Iran contingent on the release of Americans in Iranian captivity. Obama may want the mullahs to set their US hostages free. But he wants that nuclear deal more.
Educators School Congress on Rights
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes... the end of religious liberty? That's what plenty of faith-based groups are worried about, now that the Supreme Court is weeks away from potentially writing the epilogue to the First Amendment rights of millions of religious Americans. In the quote heard 'round the world from the Supreme Court arguments on same-sex "marriage," the President's top lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, confirmed everyone's worst fears — that the government would use a liberal ruling as a weapon to use against Christians. Asked if religious schools could lose their tax-exempt status for holding a natural view of marriage, Verrilli was surprisingly candid. "[I]t's certainly going to be an issue. I don't deny that, Justice Alito. It is going to be an issue." If the Court invents a constitutional reason to redefine marriage, one bad decision could trigger dozens more. Charitable statuses, tax benefits, government contracts, accreditation, professional licenses, grants, social service programs, and more could fall like dominos if the justices err.
The Future of Identity Politics
Are American voters still suckers for identity politics? Have they not learned that character matters more to leadership than some random physical trait like race, color or creed? Did Franklin Delano Roosevelt's race help him win World War II? Did Ronald Reagan's creed help him win the Cold War? What was his creed? Americans fell for identity politics in 2008, when they elected Barack Obama at least in part because he could lay claim to being African-American. Even I was rather glad when he won. Now maybe all the claptrap about America being a racist country might subside. Let the Germans and French catch up with America. Of course, my enthusiasm for Obama evanesced a bit when the economy continued to fizzle and our foreign policy began to make it downright dangerous to carry an American passport in some parts of the world. Now, with the economy slipping back toward recession and a ragtag army committing atrocities in the Middle East that have not been practiced by armies since the Dark Ages, and all while our president polishes up his golf game, I am looking to elect a leader to the White House in 2016, not a community activist or even a gifted mesmerist.
The Wright Stuff
I was not surprised to see historian David McCullough's latest book rocket to the top position on The New York Times Best Sellers list. Not only is "The Wright Brothers" beautifully written in McCullough's familiar narrative style, it reminds Americans of what we once honored and promoted: vision, initiative, talent, genius, entrepreneurship, faith, even clean living. Orville and Wilbur Wright took many personal and financial risks. They paid for their experiments with a "flying machine" out of the small profits from their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Incredibly, after the first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903, which lasted just 12 seconds, and subsequent longer flights in the next two years -- many of which were photographed — skeptical newspapers and especially the U.S. government would not believe that humans could fly. Previous attempts had failed, some spectacularly. The assertion that "If God had meant Man to fly, He would have given him wings" was deeply embedded.
Immigration Advocates Frightened by 99-Pound Blonde
Third World immigration advocates Frank Sharry, Ali Noorani and Marc Andreessen aren't shy about rushing to the press with pabulum quotes about how wonderful immigration is, but they don't want to debate me, even to lie about all those benefits. They don't want you to think about immigration at all. Although you will miss the lush analytical context of the full case made in my smash new book, Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, here are some more startling facts from my book that the anti-American crowd doesn't want you to know: — If an illegal alien drops a baby on American soil, the entire family can access welfare programs that were supposed to be for U.S. citizens — in addition to the government assistance illegal aliens can collect right away, such as food stamps and housing subsidies, free medical care and free schooling.
Bernie Sanders' Socialist Charade
Does any stricture of journalistic propriety or social etiquette require us to participate in Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' charade? Is it obligatory to take seriously his pose of being an "independent" and a "socialist"? It gives excitable Democratic activists a frisson of naughtiness to pretend that he is both. Actually, he is neither. "Independent"? He caucuses with Senate Democrats and attends their policy lunches, his committee assignments count against the Democrats' quotas, he reliably votes with Democrats and he is seeking the Democrats' presidential nomination. He is a Democrat. If he is a "socialist," who isn't? In olden days, socialism meant something robust — government ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Then, voters and reality being resistant to such socialism, the idea was diluted to mean just government ownership of an economy's "commanding heights," principally heavy industries, coal mines, railroads, etc.