Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Monday, May 18, 2015
Emptying My Brain Pan
In the old days, I recall my mother would occasionally have to empty the little pan under the ice box into which water would collect. With so many items winding up in my in-box, every so often I have to do a little emptying myself. To begin with, I thought Charles Krauthammers's comment regarding the peddling of influence by the Clintons was well worth sharing: "If there isn't a shred of evidence that they accepted bribes in exchange for favors, it's because they shredded the evidence." The more I see of Bill and Hillary doing everything imaginable in pursuit of a few extra dollars, the more I find myself thinking of them as the Kardashians on steroids. As for Hillary's presidential aspirations, I think that the only people who would like to see her elected more than Bill and Chelsea are America's editorial cartoonists. With her snarky smile and her multitude of pantsuits, she is easily drawn, although some of us would prefer to see her drawn-and-quartered.
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Santorum: The Return of the GOP's Runner-Up
A near miss can be a sharp spur, so Rick Santorum wants to say something to those who profess condescending puzzlement about his persistence in pursuing the Republican presidential nomination: You probably have no idea how close I came to defeating Mitt Romney in 2012. Since 1968, he notes, the Republican presidential nominees emerging from contested primaries have been either former or sitting vice presidents (Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush), an incumbent president (Gerald Ford), a son of a president (George W. Bush), or men who previously were runners-up for the nomination (Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney). Santorum intends to join this last group, starting in Iowa next February.
Ex-Im Bank Is Crony Capitalism Run Amok
There are two types of businesses: successful ones that don't need financial assistance from the government, and unsuccessful ones that don't deserve it. Those lucky enough to have foreign deals backed by the Export-Import Bank fall almost entirely in the first group. They don't need the help, but they'll take all the favors they can get. Only 2% of American exports get this kind of subsidy from the government, and over time, those special taxpayer-funded favors can mean hundreds of millions in additional profit to those lucky few corporations.
Is the Democrat Party Becoming Anti-Labor?
Studies show there are three things you can do that will almost guarantee you will never live in poverty: (1) finish high school, (2) get a full time job and (3) get married, but wait until you are 21 and don't have children until you are married. Do these three things and it's very unlikely you will be poor. If you are, you won't be poor for very long. So how does public policy affect these choices? Inner city schools dominated by powerful teacher unions are not meeting the needs of poor minority students. The welfare state (185 federal/state means test programs) is designed from top to bottom to encourage single motherhood and penalize marriage. And virtually every public policy you can think of is making it more expensive to hire workers. It is this last set of policies that I find most perplexing. In times past, the Democratic Party was the party of full employment. It wasn't that long ago that The New York Times endorsed a zero minimum wage. Prominent Democrats once endorsed the idea of enterprise zones — places where there would be fewer regulations and lower taxes, so that job producing businesses would flourish. And although it originated in a Republican administration, Democrats have traditionally supported the Earned Income Tax Credit — under which low-income workers get a bigger tax "refund," the more they work and the more they earn.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Will Anyone Ever Defend Banks?
One of the interesting nuggets coming out of the conservative sweep in the British elections was the failure of bank-bashing by the Labour Party. Labour leader Miliband, who has since resigned, was anti-bank, anti-rich and anti-business. It failed. And while conservative leader David Cameron didn't necessarily defend banks, he didn't attack them either. Now, the case for Tory economic management wasn't bad. The London Stock Exchange has been hot as a pistol. And the British economy is growing about 2.5 to 3 percent. Not great, not awful. It was enough for a handsome Tory victory. And it may be a message to British pundits that tax-the-rich, redistributionist, bank-bashing talk is old hat. Been there. Won't work. But the question is, how will bank-bashing do in the U.S. election next year? It's already coming from both sides of the aisle.
Repeal That Law School
When the University of Massachusetts agreed in 2010 to acquire the Southern New England School of Law, there were skeptics aplenty. The decision to take over the small private institution and transform it into a state-run facility, rechristened the UMass School of Law, was disparaged by critics who said the merger was unnecessary, unrealistic, and unwise. Two University of Massachusetts trustees, Richard Lawton and Kenneth MacAfee, warned at the time that the law school proposal "stinks of political motives," and claimed it would "prove to be an embarrassment to our UMass brand." The Pioneer Institute analyzed the plan — which was premised on the assertion that a weak private law school could be made bigger, better, and more competitive without costing taxpayers a dime — and rated it "virtually impossible."
Christian Lives Don't Matter?
So far as liberals, including Barack Obama, are concerned, dead people only count if they happen to be black criminals killed by white cops, not if, as in the majority of cases, they're black people being killed by other black people. Similarly, so far as that crowd is concerned, innocent lives only matter when we're talking about Muslims, not Jews or Christians. Frankly, that's not too surprising when it comes to Europeans. It's been a great many years since most of them even thought of themselves as Christians. Thanks to socialist policies, which have seen Greece's economy go belly-up, most Europeans are now devout secularists whose only religion is Liberalism, and whose tenets consist of the 35-hour work week, four week paid vacations and "free" health care. Having granted all that, it is still mind-boggling how it is that the West has turned a blind eye to Islamic carnage that includes the burnings of churches and people, beheadings, crucifixions and, most recently, the drowning of 12 Christians by a shipload of Muslims, who just happened to be escaping the joys of Islam.
Stop Economic Cronyism, Wind Down the Ex-Im Bank
Speaker John Boehner recently made headlines by joining the growing chorus among conservatives on Capitol Hill calling for a "wind down" of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im) – signaling he might be open to a plan by U.S. House Republicans to bring the New Deal-era program of economic cronyism to an end. The statement came before the April 30 joint Financial Services-Oversight hearing, in which Ex-Im Bank Chairman Fred Hochberg was questioned about the bank's politically motivated international handouts and the 31 ongoing fraud investigations. Boehner joins a large number of conservative lawmakers calling for the bank's end. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Majority Whip Steve Scalise and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan have all expressed their desire to "break the bank," as have six Republican presidential candidates: Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and Governors Bobby Jindal, Mike Pence, Scott Walker and former Governor Jeb Bush.
Friday, May 15, 2015
Obama's 'Snap Back' Sanctions Fantasy
Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin blows a giant hole in President Obama’s assertions.
Pope Francis
Pope Francis' decision to give formal recognition to a Palestinian state is puzzling at best. Some conservative Catholics — most prominently scholar and papal biographer George Weigel — have given a wide berth to the pope's views on income inequality, climate change and how best to integrate gay and divorced Catholics into the Church's ministry, even as the left has gleefully embraced the pontiff's rhetoric. Francis' latest foray into controversy is harder to explain. Unlike Francis' positions on the poor, which Weigel avers are rooted in the pope's pastoral history and mission, the decision on Palestinian statehood is purely political — and, as such, is open to criticism. Jonathan Tobin, writing online in Commentary magazine, notes: "For all his good will, the pope is mistaken to think that giving the Palestinians such recognition will advance the peace process." Tobin reminds us that the Palestinians were offered an independent state in 2000, 2001 (in an offer that included almost all of the West Bank, Gaza and part of Jerusalem) and 2008, and they refused to negotiate in 2013 and 2014 under an Obama administration-led framework that included a two-state solution.
Left in Agony on Pain Ban
Not everyone was celebrating [Wednesday's] historical pro-life victory in the House of Representatives. Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards and President Obama wasted no time blasting the House's decision to end the intense pain babies feel from abortion after the five-month mark. Cecile Richards aired her disgust that Americans would rise up and want to stop the shedding of innocent blood. "A 20 wk ban would hurt women," Richards tweeted. As experts in hurting women, Planned Parenthood should know better. The organization — and in fact, the entire movement — is indifferent to the agony their industry causes to the unborn *and* women. It's that aggressive insensitivity that continues to repel Americans from their cause. "Put simply," Richards argued, this bill "lacks compassion & it lacks respect."
Feminism and Frozen 'Huevos'
Sofia Vergara is the Spanish-accented sexpot on the ABC sitcom "Modern Family." She's also now the center of an unwanted controversy over a "modern family." She's fighting with an ex-fiance over two frozen embryos. Back in 2013, Vergara granted a TV interview to Dr. Oz to discuss her baby-making plans: "I've been very concerned about fertility and I wanted to take advantage of science, so I froze my huevos." She and her fiance Nick Loeb had no success with a surrogate mother on two embryos, and they made two more before the relationship soured. The current controversy began when Loeb recently wrote an op-ed for The New York Times publicly asking for his test-tube children, with no expectation of joint custody or child support payments: "When we create embryos for the purpose of life, should we not define them as life, rather than as property?"
When Will Hillary Answer for Her Iraq Vote?
You can't be more straightforward: "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?" Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked presumptive GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush about the Iraq War. Without hesitation, Bush replied: "I would have." Bush went on to qualify his answer, adding that "so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody. And so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got." Well, even if we give Bush the benefit of the doubt and concede that he was probably answering the question "Knowing what we knew then, would you have authorized the war?" rather than the one Kelly posed, it was still remarkably tone-deaf.
Third-Class Temperament
Like cult members awaking to find their leader swigging gin and squirreling money into a Swiss bank account, liberals are rubbing their eyes in disbelief at President Obama's behavior. The figure they worshiped so fervently and for so long is now revealed to be a "sexist" — at least according to National Organization for Women President Terry O'Neill. Her view is seconded by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio. They are upset about the president's derisive treatment of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who committed a sin the president does not take kindly — she disagreed with him. For differing about the merits of the TPP trade deal, she got what everyone should already recognize as the Obama treatment: Her views were caricatured, and her motives were questioned. "The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else." Brown thought the president's use of Warren's first name betokened sexism.
Democrats Get a Taste of Obama's Arrogance
These are not good times for the Republic (and if you laughed or scratched your head at me calling America a republic, I rest my case). But they are amusing times, at least for those of us capable of extracting some measure of mirth and schadenfreude from the president's predicament. With the sand running out on the Obama presidency, it's finally dawning on the president's friends and fans that he can be a real jerk. Consider the Washington Post's Dana Milbank. For the last six years, he's spent much of his time rolling his eyes and sneering at Republicans. His subspecialty is heaping ridicule on conservative complaints about, well, everything and anything. If it bothers conservatives, it must be irrational, partisan, churchy, fake, hypocritical — or all of the above. Meanwhile, poor Barack Obama, while not always without fault in Milbank's eyes, is the grown-up, the good guy trying to do good things amidst a mob of malcontents and ideologues.
ObamaCare Exchanges on Life Support
At a recent White House science fair celebrating inventors, a Girl Scout who helped design a Lego-powered page-turning device asked President Obama what he had ever thought up or prototyped. Stumbling for an answer, he replied: "I came up with things like, you know, health care." Ah, yes. "Health care." Remember when the president's signature Obamacare health insurance exchanges were going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, the remote control, jogger strollers, Siri, the Keurig coffee maker, driverless cars and Legos all rolled into one? The miraculous, efficient, cost-saving, innovative 21st-century government-run "marketplaces" were supposed to put the "affordable" in Obama's Affordable Care Act. Know-it-all bureaucrats were going to show private companies how to set up better websites (gigglesnort), implement better marketing and outreach (guffaw), provide superior customer service (belly laugh), and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse (LOLOLOL).
At Georgetown, Obama Masquerading Again as Bipartisan
I watched President Obama's remarks on poverty at Georgetown University, and several things stood out to me, apart from his umpteenth swipe at Fox News. Obama sometimes makes statements that sound reasonable and moderate, but he either doesn't believe the things he's saying or has an ideological blind spot about what they really mean. But his practice of saying such things, I think, is one reason that during the 2008 presidential campaign, some were fooled into believing he was bipartisan and a uniter.
British Pollsters Failed in the Increasingly Difficult Struggle to Get It Right
"The world may have a polling problem." That's the headline on a blogpost by Nate Silver, the wunderkind founder of FiveThirthyEight. It was posted on 9:54 ET the night of May 7, as the counting in the British election was continuing in the small hours of May 8 UK Time. That was an hour after the result in the constituency of Nuneaton made it clear that all the pre-election polls were wrong. Nuneaton, in the Midlands just east of Birmingham, was No. 28 on a list of 42 marginal two-party contests. Projections based on pre-election polls were that Labour would win 35 of these 42 seats. Instead, Conservatives won 34 of them. Nationally, the pre-election polls predicted that Conservatives would win about 280 seats, barely ahead of Labour and far short of a 326-seat majority. The exit poll pegged them at 316. They ended up winning 331.
Save Obama (on Trade)
That free trade is advantageous to both sides is the rarest of political propositions — provable, indeed mathematically. David Ricardo did so in 1817. The Law of Comparative Advantage has held up nicely for 198 years. Nor is this abstract theory. We've lived it. The free-trade regime created after World War II precipitated the most astonishing advance of global welfare and prosperity the world has ever seen. And that regime was created, overseen, guaranteed and presided over by the United States. That era might be coming to a close, however, as Democratic congressional opposition to free trade continues to grow. On Tuesday, every Democrat in the Senate (but one) voted to block trade promotion — aka fast-track — authority for President Obama, which would have given him the power to conclude the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal being hammered out with 11 other countries, including such key allies as Japan, Australia and Singapore.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
On Poverty, President Shows Poor Judgment
These days, it wouldn't be a presidential appearance without some gratuitous Christian-bashing. And at [Tuesday's] roundtable on poverty, President Obama didn't disappoint. During the panel discussion at Georgetown University, President Obama took the common goal of helping the poor and used it to drive an even deeper wedge between his administration and people of faith. In between swipes at Fox News, the President scolded the church for being too preoccupied with the culture war to help the needy. "I think it would be powerful for our faith-based organizations to speak out on this in a more forceful fashion. This may sound self-interested because there have been — these are areas where I agree with the evangelical community and faith-based groups, and then there are issues where we have had disagreements around reproductive issues, or same-sex marriage, or what have you. And so maybe it appears advantageous for me to want to focus on these issues of poverty, and not as much on these other issues."