Right Opinion

A Graham Candidacy's Fun Factor

In 1994, Lindsey Graham, then a 39-year-old South Carolina legislator, ran for Congress in a district that he said had not elected a Republican since Union guns made it do so during Reconstruction. He promised that in Washington he would be "one less vote for an agenda that makes you want to throw up." He was elected to the Senate in 2002 and soon almost certainly will join the Republican presidential scramble, enlivening it with his quick intelligence, policy fluency, mordant wit and provocative agenda. He has the normal senatorial tendency to see a president in the mirror, and an ebullient enjoyment of campaigning's rhetorical calisthenics. Another reason for him to run resembles one of Dwight Eisenhower's reasons. Graham detects a revival of the Republicans' isolationist temptation that has waned since Eisenhower defeated Ohio's Sen. Robert Taft for the 1952 nomination.

Death or Life for Tsarnaev?

The penalty phase of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's trial is underway, and federal prosecutors have been getting some well-publicized advice about the penalty they should seek for the Boston Marathon terrorist. In a statement featured on the Boston Globe's front page last week, the parents of 8-year-old Martin Richard — the youngest victim murdered by the Tsarnaev brothers — said they would be in favor of the Justice Department "taking the death penalty off the table" in exchange for a life sentence and the waiver of any right of appeal. On Monday, the Globe spotlighted a similar call by Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downes, newlyweds who both lost legs in the 2013 bombing.

Christie's Social Security Reform Hurts America, Particularly Minorities

Some are touting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's proposal to take an ax to Social Security as an act of bold political leadership. Sorry, I see the opposite. America needs leadership to replace old dysfunctional baggage with new programs and ideas fitting for a free 21st-century country. We don't need those who think leadership is retrofitting the country into our old baggage. It's the latter that Christie proposes. His "solution" to the impending bankruptcy of Social Security is to phase out benefits for retirees earning $80,000 to $200,000 and above and increase the retirement age from 67 to 69, and 62 to 64 for early retirement.

Snarking Hillary Is Not the Way to the White House

A number of GOP candidates are engaging in Hillary-bashing over allegations that she used her office as secretary of state to help her husband's business dealings, prop up speech-making fees and grease the path for foreign governments to donate massive amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation. But here's a warning to my friends on the presidential campaign trail: Bashing Hillary is only going to make the Republican Party look mean-spirited and snarky. It's no road to the White House. I would suggest laying off Hillary and instead showing us what you got in the way of economic-growth policies that will foster 4 to 5 percent growth and maybe another 12 million jobs. The GOP needs a positive growth message, along with a strong national-security message, because the party needs a positive rebranding and a positive vision. But Hillary-bashing will drown that out.

Rand Paul: Too Little, Too Late

Politicians have even found a way to make presidential races boring. As you may have noticed, nobody ever just says, "I'm running." First they have to announce they're forming an exploratory committee, meaning they're not only calling everyone they've ever laid eyes on, hoping they'll cough up a few bucks, but haranguing the rest of us suckers. Next they announce that they'll make an announcement in a month. Then the day before the month is up, they announce their decision is coming tomorrow. Finally, the big day arrives, the politician shows up at a venue where nobody is likely to throw a ripe tomato in his direction and admits that after checking with his wife, kids, God and, most importantly, the guy in charge of collecting campaign funds, he has decided to do us all a favor by running for, if not the best job in the world, at least the job with the very best perks.

Clinton Greed

The Clintons have always had an uneasy relationship with money. Bill never had any. And although Hillary had a comfortable upbringing, she didn't take the path to riches that her Yale Law degree might have provided, choosing instead to do public interest law right out of law school and marry a man with great political ambition. But, clearly, both Bill and Hillary wanted the good life — and the money it takes to provide it. Nothing wrong with that, but the means by which they've enriched themselves have been unsavory at best. And all this makes suspicious the recent revelations that Bill and Hillary have become fabulously rich through the former president's speeches paid by individuals, corporate interests and governments who stood to benefit from their relationship with a former president married to a U.S. senator who then became secretary of state.

Fix the Secret Service, Dammit

We learned this week that the Secret Service dawdled for an entire year before fixing a broken security system at the home of former President George H. W. Bush. The Secret Service itself is looking pretty broken these days. A few weeks ago, two drunken agents returning from a party drove right through an active bomb investigation outside the White House. They didn't notice that their colleagues were examining a suspicious package. In 2012, a number of agents were found to have engaged prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia, during a presidential trip. At least one of the prostitutes had links to a major drug cartel, according to investigators.

Ben Affleck Makes a Scandal for PBS

The North Korean email hack of Sony continues to haunt Hollywood. The leftist group WikiLeaks recently posted a searchable set of the documents and the London Daily Mail found a new scandal subject: Ben Affleck ... and PBS. Harvard black-studies professor Henry Louis Gates produces a show for New York PBS superstation WNET called "Finding Your Roots." Gates tells celebrities about their ancestors. A few years back, NBC had a show just like this called "Who Do You Think You Are?" It's now on cable, on TLC. Why PBS believes it's right to use taxpayer money to copycat commercial television is a mystery. Affleck was one of the celebrities (again: using taxpayer funds to study him?) and his family tree had a slave-holding ancestor. Affleck asked for that information to be scrubbed out of the broadcast. Gates asked Sony chairman Michael Lynton for advice. "Confidentially, for the first time, one of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors -- the fact that he owned slaves. Now, four or five of our guests this season descend from slave owners, including [liberal PBS legend] Ken Burns. We've never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. He's a megastar. What do we do?"

For Hillary Clinton, No War but the Class War

Near the end of a recent New York Times article detailing the imaginary populist roots of Hillary Clinton — the original Elizabeth Warren, her people would have you believe — the reader crashes into this implausible scene: "In a meeting with economists this year, Mrs. Clinton intensely studied a chart that showed income inequality in the United States. The graph charted how real wages, adjusted for inflation, had increased exponentially for the wealthiest Americans, making the bar so steep it hardly fit on the chart. "Mrs. Clinton pointed at the top category and said the economy required a 'toppling' of the wealthiest 1 percent, according to several people who were briefed on her policy discussions but could not discuss private conversations for attribution."

Clinton Restoration Could Be in Jeopardy

How should one think about the unfolding allegations rocking the Clinton Industrial Complex (which includes both her campaign and her foundation)? By now, you may have heard about Peter Schweizer's book, "Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich." The book isn't even out yet, and Clinton's team is already sheltering in place like Churchill's cabinet during the Blitz. That's in part because Schweizer, a conservative author and dogged investigative journalist, has teamed up with notorious right-wing rags The New York Times and The Washington Post to essentially re-report and expand on allegations made in the book.

The Depressing Appeal of Hillary's Phony Populism

There was a time when Hillary Clinton was a bona fide leftist radical, but those days have past, swallowed up by her lust for power and money. Don't get me wrong; she's still a true liberal who stands for everything I oppose, and her White House ambitions and her flawed character are a dangerous mixture. She'll say and do whatever she has to in order to win. But as I've said, I'm not that fearful that she'll even be nominated. What does have me concerned is the degree of extremism inhabiting the Democratic Party that makes it necessary and even acceptable for her to make radical statements to stay in contention. What does concern me is that such extremism is no longer considered as such by an ever-growing number of people. I'm troubled by the number of rank-and-file Democratic voters willing to overlook almost anything to advance an agenda they support. I'm alarmed by the lack of moral clarity among people who see nothing wrong with Hillary's trail of scandals or her arrogant refusal to address the most current batch.

GOP Shows It's Hyde Maintenance

Don't look now, but the do-nothing Senate is finally doing something under the GOP! A month after Democrats drove a popular anti-trafficking bill into a ditch, Republicans finally managed to pull the measure out of the partisan muck and pass it 99-0. For weeks, the Left had been warring against a piece of routine language in Sen. John Cornyn's (R-Texas) Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act that keeps taxpayers out of the abortion business. Despite being the law of the spending land for more than 40 years, the President's party pretended that the Hyde-like ban was not only new — but extreme. It was a ridiculous ploy, even for the Senate, which has long agreed with 70% of Americans that regardless of how taxpayers feel about abortion, they shouldn't have to pay for it. Instead, they used the media as a megaphone for their fake hysteria that this legislation was somehow more pro-life than past bills.

The Challenge: Hungry for Fellowship

The "center" of a home — the place that sees the most traffic — tends to be wherever food is found, which makes the kitchen, or more specifically, the table, the most important spot in every home. It's important for a simple reason: everyone needs to eat. But its significance reaches far beyond the filling of stomachs. The table has the potential to be the place where schedules line up, where work and entertainment get put aside in favor of the conversation that nourishes relationships. It's hard to overemphasize the importance of sharing meals together as a family — sitting down, away from distractions, as a group — as often as possible. There is just something about the simple, routine, and necessary act of eating that makes it the perfect medium for meaningful human interaction. And social science data backs up the importance of shared meal times: Studies show that children who have dinner with their families at least three times a week are twice as likely to report being happy; less likely to experiment with alcohol and drugs; and do better in school than their peers who don't have the benefit of family mealtime.

Obama's Nixon Doctrine: Anointing Iran

In December, President Obama said that he wished to see Iran ultimately become a "very successful regional power." His wish — a nightmare for the Western-oriented Arab states — is becoming a reality. Consider: —Gulf of Aden: Iran sends a flotilla of warships and weapons-carrying freighters to reinforce the rebels in Yemen — a noncontiguous, non-Persian, nonthreatening (to Iran) Arabian state — asserting its new status as regional bully and arbiter. The Obama administration sends an aircraft carrier group, apparently to prevent this gross breach of the U.N. weapons embargo on Yemen. Instead, the administration announces that it has no intention of doing anything. Meanwhile, it exerts pressure on Saudi Arabia to halt its air war over Yemen and agree to negotiate a political settlement involving Iran. —Russia: After a five-year suspension, Russia announces the sale of advanced surface-to-air missiles to Iran, which will render its nuclear facilities nearly invulnerable to attack. Obama's reaction? Criticism, threats, sanctions? No. A pat on the back for Vladimir Putin: "I'm, frankly, surprised that [the embargo] held this long."

Rand Paul Is Right to Demand Reporters Ask Democrats About Late-Term Abortions

It was sort of inevitable that on his first day of campaigning as an announced candidate for president earlier this month, Rand Paul would be asked whether he supported a ban on abortions in cases of rape or incest. Reporters have been asking Republican candidates that question ever since 2012, when the Missouri Republican Senate candidate said he supported such a ban and added that pregnancies were unlikely in cases of "legitimate rape." But Paul's reply wasn't what the reporter expected. "Why don't we ask the (Democratic National Committee) is it OK to kill a seven-pound baby in the uterus? You go back and go ask (DNC Chair) Debbie Wasserman Schultz if she's OK with killing a seven-pound baby that's just not born yet.

When Bootleggers and Baptists Converge

Smoking, said King James I in 1604, is "loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs." Three years later he planted a colony in Jamestown. Its tobacco enhanced the royal treasury until Virginia produced a bumper crop of revolutionaries, including the tobacco farmer George Washington. King James might have been less censorious about "vaping," which almost certainly is less harmful than inhaling chemicals produced by the combustion of tobacco. Users of e-cigarettes inhale vapors from electronic sticks containing a liquid with nicotine, which is addictive and perhaps particularly unhealthy for adolescent brains. Between 2013 and 2014 the use of e-cigarettes by middle- and high-school students tripled, and now exceeds that cohort's use of traditional cigarettes.

Clinton vs. Clinton

Hillary Clinton apparently plans to base her presidential campaign on the noble goals of greater fairness and shared sacrifice. She has already lambasted vast differences in compensation. "The average CEO makes about 300 times what the average worker makes," Clinton warned. She is right — but can best appreciate that fact from her own career and family. Recently, Clinton has demanded up to $300,000 for brief 30-minute speeches. She apparently believes in the free-market theory that on the lecture circuit, speakers — like CEOs — should be paid as much as the market can bear.

The State of Our Planet Is Better Than Ever

Obama's Agents of Scandal

The latest sex scandal involving federal law enforcement officials has claimed its first high-level victim, with Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief Michele Leonhart stepping down after a Department of Justice Inspector General's (IG) report documented that DEA agents in Colombia had participated in "sex parties" with prostitutes — in some cases hired by the very drug cartels the agents were supposed to be fighting. This comes following a similar well-publicized scandal in Colombia (where prostitution is tolerated) involving Secret Service agents, but the IG report covered problems of sexual harassment and misconduct not only in the DEA, but also in the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Meanwhile, the Defense Department continues to struggle with problems of sexual assault and pornography in the military.

Was Sacrifice of Ramadi Dead in Vain?

"...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain..." —Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address While the U.S. military in recent years has had a difficult time winning wars, it has had an easier time surrendering to political correctness and social experimentation. Arguments against gays in the military were rejected, and now there is a push to allow women in front-line combat positions, though many believe most women do not have the upper body strength to carry heavy loads on their backs or perform in ways that achieve the mission and protect their comrades. Last week a new challenge emerged that could present an even greater threat to military effectiveness and unit cohesion. At a Pentagon news conference, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, said that the capital of Anbar province in Iraq, Ramadi, is not central to the U.S. and Iraqi aims of defeating the forces of the Islamic State.