Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Winters, Not Summers, Increase Mortality and Stress the Economy
Global warming alarmists continue to over-emphasize the danger of heat and ignore cold in their papers and in stories for the media. The danger associated with this misdirection is that cold weather kills many more people that hot weather. This conclusion is clearly supported by many studies of populations in a wide range of climates. Examples are provided below from a study of thirteen countries, as well as national studies from the United Kingdom, the USA, Canada and Australia. Furthermore, this conclusion is not new, but has been known for many decades.
All Gave Some, Some Gave All — Memorial Day Salute
On November 11, 2011, Congress voted to award a Congressional Gold Medal for the 20,000 black Marines of Montford Point, the first blacks to serve as Marines. I write about Staff Sgt. Elder — and my struggle to understand him — in my latest book, "Dear Father, Dear Son." On August 13, 2013, Col. Jason Bohm, commander, "Fighting 5th," United States Marine Corps, Camp Pendleton, made the following remarks: "We are honored that you joined us today to recognize the service of one of our own, Staff Sgt. Randolph Elder. ... "In the days leading up to World War II, the United States was a segregated society, in which the African-American Community faced bigotry, racial prejudice and discrimination. It was not until June 25, 1941, just five months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor thrust us into the Second World War, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order, No. 8802, that first opened the door for African-Americans to serve in all branches of the armed services.
Using Tax Dollars to Lobby for More Tax Dollars
Here's a half-serious question: How much do taxpayers have to pay off Boeing to make the Export-Import Bank finally and irrevocably go away? If the feds wrote a check to Boeing for $100 million, would they then let the Ex-Im Bank fade away after the current portfolio winds down? I ask this because the aerospace giant is the largest beneficiary of the Ex-Im Bank. The bank provides subsidized loans and insurance contracts to foreign companies that buy American exports. Ex-Im Bank doles out billions of dollars of loans and insurance subsidies every year and has become the poster child for corporate cronyism in Washington. Think of the bank as food stamps for America's Fortune 500 companies. Ever since the early Reagan years, conservatives have been trying to eliminate the subsidies, but the bank has multiple lives.
Ramos Can Stay, but Matt Lauer Has to Go
I finally found a Mexican willing to do a job no American will do! I have an explosive book on the No. 1 issue in the country coming out next week, I've already written 10 New York Times best-sellers — I'd be on a postage stamp if I were a liberal — but can't get an interview on ABC, NBC or CBS. Only Mexican-born Jorge Ramos would interview me on his Fusion network. Yay, Jorge! After a spellbinding interview, Ramos ended by asking this excellent question — which I had suggested myself for all authors, most of whom write very boring books, harming the marketability of my own books: "Is there anything in your book that isn't already generally known?" My soon-to-be-released book, "Adios, America! The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole," is jam-packed with facts you didn't already know. Don't even think of using it as a coaster, like those other books.
A Modest Proposal for Education Reform
Before he passed away recently, John M. Templeton, the distinguished physician and philanthropist, questioned: "Should we tolerate a public educational system with its entrenched self-interest which virtually every inner-city parent knows is destroying any hope or possibility of their children achieving meaningful opportunity in a 21st-century economy?" A growing number of parents say no. Now critics of the public school system are coming forward with alternatives to it, and many of them are parents, often parents of disadvantaged students, usually parents that fear for the fate of their children in schools in the inner city. Stephen Moore, an economist at The Heritage Foundation, writes in The Wall Street Journal about the grim scene at a Washington, D.C., public school where a father, concerned about his son's attendance there, walked in past "two police cars ... (an) everyday routine. ... There was violence. Fighting. Disrespect and drugs." The father complained to the principal about what he saw, and she "shook her finger" at him and admonished, "Don't tell me how to run my school."
Knocking on War's Door
For a time, reset, concessions and appeasement work to delay wars. But finally, nations wake up, grasp their blunders, rearm and face down enemies. That gets dangerous. The shocked aggressors cannot quite believe that their targets are suddenly serious and willing to punch back. Usually, the bullies foolishly press aggression, and war breaks out. It was insane of Nazi Germany and its Axis partners to even imagine that they could defeat the Allied trio of Imperial Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. But why not try? Hitler figured that for a decade America had been unarmed and isolationist. Britain repeatedly had appeased the Third Reich. The Soviets initially collaborated with Hitler.
The Separation of Campaign and State
A simple apology would suffice. Instead, campaign finance reformers, horrified by the predictable results of their handiwork, aspire to yet more regulatory wrinkles to limit political speech. These, too, would have consequences unintended and undesired by reformers, "requiring" a new round of reforms. But the Constitution, properly construed, requires a wall of separation between campaign and state. Reformers detest the emergence of super PACs that fund advocacy supportive of, but not "coordinated" with, particular candidates. These vast reservoirs of money are, however, inevitable, reasonable and, on balance, wholesome responses to the reformers' attempts to combat what they call "too much money" in politics. Reformers have limited the amounts that can be contributed to parties and to candidates' campaigns, thereby limiting the quantity of political advocacy — aka speech.
No Memorial Day for Inner-City Dead
"Black lives matter!" was the chant heard at recent demonstrations in cities and towns from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore, Maryland. Yes, they do matter, but apparently not so much to some other blacks. Only when a white police officer shoots or engages in other behavior that results in the death of a black man do black lives seem to matter. While Memorial Day weekend featured the traditional parades, barbecues and moments of silence at baseball games for those who gave their lives in wartime to preserve our freedoms, in some of America's biggest cities virtual shooting galleries produced the sort of carnage more likely to be found in the Middle East from Islamic State terrorists. In Baltimore, which was wracked by violence just one month ago after Freddie Gray, an African-American man, died while in police custody, 32 people were shot. Nine of them died. That brings to 35 the number killed in Baltimore just in May and the month isn't over.
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Liberals Respect Me
During the early years of the Reagan administration, a Washington news conference was held for me for my first book, "The State Against Blacks." Before making summary statements about the book, I offered the reporters assembled that they could treat me like a white person. They could ask me hard, pressing questions. They could demand proof of the arguments that I was making. People such as former NAACP President Kweisi Mfume and former Chairman Julian Bond and the Rev. Al Sharpton can make ludicrous statements. An intimidated news media just swallow the nonsense. They are probably afraid to challenge, lest they suffer guilt feelings of racism or be seen as racists for demanding that a black person back up his comments with facts.
A Future Freely Chosen
*The Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists consists of members of the European Parliament who oppose the centralized power of the European Union; they favor "the exercise of power at the lowest practicable level — by the individual where possible, by local or national authorities in preference to supranational bodies." On May 22, Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint received the group's inaugural Edmund Burke Award. The following is a transcript of his remarks.* Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great honor to receive this award tonight, and twice an honor to be its first recipient. Though we have representatives of many nations here today, I would like to begin by thanking our English hosts, and congratulating them on their recent conservative election victories …
What Will Drive Illinois to Ask Washington for a Bailout
Earlier this month the Illinois Supreme Court overturned a state law that would help fix the state's notorious pension crisis. What a tragedy for the state's taxpayers. The justices basically ruled that the pension arrangements are iron-clad, although these pensions are on a course to bankrupt the state and imperil public services that Illinois families depend on. The unions come first. This could have negative consequences for more than half the states that are trying to defuse government employee pension time bombs. By way of background: Illinois has one of the deepest public employee pension holes in the nation. The long-term deficit is estimated at above $110 billion and the red ink rises every year. Even in California — where several cities have declared bankruptcy — the pension sink hole isn't as deep on a per capita basis. The watchdog group Open the Books reports that there are more than 5,000 teacher and other education officials who receive an annual pension of more than $100,000 a year. Worse yet, half of all government employees retire with benefits before age 60. That's more than twice what a typical private worker gets for having worked 12 months, not nine months, a year.
Bernie Sanders' Foul Socialist Odor
Socialist genius Bernie Sanders has figured out what's really ailing America. Our store shelves have too many different brands of deodorant and sneakers. Just look at all those horrible, fully stocked aisles at Target and Walgreens and Wal-Mart and Payless and DSW and Dick's Sporting Goods. It's a national nightmare! If only consumers had fewer choices in the free market, fewer entrepreneurs offering a wide variety of products and fewer workers manufacturing goods people wanted, Sanders believes, we could end childhood hunger. Nobody parodies the far left better than far-leftists themselves.
When Did America Peak?
Is America on its way up? Or down? Within the USS Yorktown, which serves as a floating museum at Patriot Point in South Carolina, there is a replica of the Apollo 8 capsule that went to the moon and back at Christmastime 1968. The Yorktown was there — 47 years ago — to pick up the real Apollo 8 when it splashed down in the wide-open Pacific, carrying the first crew of human beings to ever circle the moon. That was an American ship, manned by American sailors, picking up American astronauts, in an American century.
Virginia's False 'Centrist' Advertising
The latest scorecard from the American Conservative Union is out, and the voters of Virginia might want to file a complaint about truth in advertising with the press corps. Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner have routinely been portrayed in news reports as "moderates" and "centrists." But after two years in the Senate, Tim Kaine has a perfect zero on the conservative scale. Mark Warner has a lifetime score of 10.33 percent conservative, but his last two annual scores have been a 4 and an 8. They could be mistaken for Barbara Mikulski. Far-left is middle of the road on the media spectrum. The Washington Post has been especially guilty of suggesting over the years that Kaine was as pious as conservative stalwart Ken Cuccinelli, a man they place on the "far right." In 2012, the Post profile of his GOP opponent George Allen suggested he was seen as a "colossally insensitive brute," but this is how the Post began a Kaine profile: "It's not unusual, on an election-year Sunday, to find a white candidate in a black church. But Tim Kaine, swaying this month to the gospel groove at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in a poor Richmond neighborhood, wasn't on the campaign trail. He was taking a break from it at his home parish."
The Unjust Law That Led to Freddie Gray's Death
If Cops and Prosecutors Can't Agree on Whether His Knife Was Legal, How Was He Supposed to Know?
Holy Warriors of the Left and Right
Mike Huckabee doesn't have a lot of prominent defenders, and I am not volunteering for the job. Huckabee has always struck me as a right-wing populist-progressive. A deeply religious — and by all accounts decent — man, Huckabee nonetheless has a view of the state that would have jibed almost perfectly with such forgotten titans of the Progressive Era as Richard Ely, Josephus Daniels and even William Jennings Bryan. Ely, a mentor to Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt and the founder of the "Wisconsin school" of progressivism, believed that "God works through the state in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution." It "is religious in its essence," and "a mighty force in furthering God's kingdom and establishing righteous relations."
Ann Coulter's War
This week, iconoclastic master Ann Coulter released her new book, "Adios, America!" The book has already been labeled racist by the mainstream left, which fears her argument, and will undoubtedly be marginalized by the mainstream right, which doesn't want to hear it. Coulter's thesis is simple: Since Senator Teddy Kennedy, D-Mass., rammed through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, America's immigration system has transformed from a device for enriching the nation for both native-born and immigrants into a scheme for importing anti-American voters. What made America America, Coulter argues, was a particular blend of Protestant religion and European civilization that led to the rise of the greatest nation in human history. What will unmake America, she continues, is a deliberate attempt to poison that blend with a flood of immigrants with wildly different values.
Don't Go!
It's graduation time! Have we learned much? No. College has become a scam. Some students benefit: those with full scholarships and/or rich parents so they don't go deep into debt, those who love learning for its own sake and land jobs in academia and those who get jobs that require a college credential. But that's not most students. Half today's recent grads work in jobs that don't require degrees. Eighty thousand of America's bartenders have bachelor's degrees.
How the World Has Changed Since World War I
Over the past year, I've been reading books inspired by the centenary of World War I, a war with horrific casualties painful to contemplate. What helps in comprehending the scale of the slaughter is a book by one of Bill Gates' favorite authors, the Canadian academic Vaclav Smil, "Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact." Smil leads the reader through the invention and development of electricity, oil production and distribution, the automobile, steelmaking, the telephone, the airplane and the production of synthetic ammonia — to his mind the most important because without it agriculture couldn't feed the world's 6 billion people.
Victory: Cop-Killer Mural Removed at Marquette University
But how many university officials were involved in its approval?