Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Washington, DC, Comics: Dr. Ignoro vs. Bibi
White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough recently spoke to J Street, a left-wing organization that fancies itself the headquarters of the tough-love-for-Israel crowd. J Street's critics would phrase it a bit differently. In a charitable mood, they'd say J Street is all about loving Israel to death. Regardless, J Street is the perfect think tank for the Obama administration to get its message out. Which is why McDonough was there to deliver harsh criticism of Israel and to signal that the U.S., under President Obama at least, will not be as reliable an ally to Israel as it once was, particularly at the United Nations.
Ted Cruz Is Right About Taxes
The Internal Revenue Code's Headache-Inducing Complexity Is a Scandal
The NAACP's Fomenters of Fear
They just can't help themselves -- and their agenda-driven media enablers never, ever learn. This week, the NAACP made national front-page headlines with a local press release demanding that the feds investigate the hanging death of a local man in Port Gibson, Miss. Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP Mississippi State Conference, immediately invoked the specter of a "hate crime." In response, the Obama Justice Department flooded the zone with a whopping 30 federal agents. News outlets grabbed the bait. USA Today asked ominously: "Was it a lynching?" The discovery of ex-con Otis Byrd's body swinging from a tree by a bed sheet "brought back unpleasant memories of America's violent, racially charged past," the paper's video reporter asserted. Voice of America similarly intoned: "Mississippi hanging death raises lynching specter." The Los Angeles Times leaped into the fray with: "Why this story haunts the nation."
Weather Vain: Obama Uses Climate Hoax to Bully Govs
If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em! That's the President's new approach to climate change skeptics in conservative states. The Obama administration is apparently so desperate for support that it's willing to blackmail governors into adding global warming to their disaster planning -- or block their federal funds. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the conform-or-pay rules would go into effect next March. In the meantime, governors have a choice: they can bow down to the Left's faulty science or lose millions of dollars in FEMA relief planning. Under the new regulations, only states that tackle the effects of "changing environmental or climate conditions" in their long-term "hazard-mitigation plans" will qualify for funding. Specifically, governors must "identify tools and approaches that enable decision-making to reduce risks and increase resilience from a changing climate." It's a shocking amount of political arm-twisting, even for this administration.
What's Gone Wrong With Democracy?
The Economist magazine recently published "What's gone wrong with Democracy ... and what can be done to revive it?" The suggestion is that democracy is some kind of ideal for organizing human conduct. That's a popular misconception. The ideal way to organize human conduct is to create a system that maximizes personal liberty for all. Liberty and democracy are not synonymous and most often are opposites. In Federalist Paper No. 10, James Madison explained, "Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." Democracy and majority rule confer an aura of legitimacy and respectability on acts that would otherwise be deemed tyrannical.
Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015)
It is not often that the leader of a small city-state -- in this case, Singapore -- gets an international reputation. But no one deserved it more than Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore as an independent country in 1959, and its prime minister from 1959 to 1990. With his death, he leaves behind a legacy valuable not only to Singapore but to the world. Born in Singapore in 1923, when it was a British colony, Lee Kuan Yew studied at Cambridge University after World War II, and was much impressed by the orderly, law-abiding England of that day. It was a great contrast with the poverty-stricken and crime-ridden Singapore of that era. Today Singapore has a per capita Gross Domestic Product more than 50 percent higher than that of the United Kingdom and a crime rate a small fraction of that in England. A 2010 study showed more patents and patent applications from the small city-state of Singapore than from Russia. Few places in the world can match Singapore for cleanliness and orderliness.
Gentrify!
No matter what you do, modern liberals will tell you you're wrong. For decades, liberals complained that American society is segregated because rich, white people don't want to live in ethnically mixed neighborhoods. Sometimes, liberals had a point. From the 1930s to 1960s, as rich white people moved into New York City, urban planner Robert Moses got city bureaucrats to condemn and destroy busy black neighborhoods. The city called the neighborhoods "blighted" and moved many of the poor into rent-subsidized apartment complexes called "projects." Many quickly became slums.
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Gentry Liberals Have Increasing Clout in Chicago's Shrinking Electorate
Rahm Emanuel heads into a runoff April 7 in his bid for a second term as mayor of Chicago. He's the favorite going in, having won 46 percent in the Feb. 24 first round against longtime local officeholder Chuy Garcia's 34 percent and topping 50 percent in recent polls. Emanuel, President Obama's first White House chief of staff and architect of the Democrats' 2006 takeover of the House, is politically astute, energetic and profane. Given all that, it's surprising that his support is down from the 55 percent he won in the first round in February 2011. And it's interesting that his strongest support comes from gentry liberals: high-income, high-education whites. In February, he won absolute majorities in only eight of Chicago's 50 wards, six on the Lakefront running north from the Loop almost to the city limits and two just inland.
Ending Ivory Tower Welfare
"The GOP needs to hold tobacco company-style hearings, hauling in the presidents of various universities and asking them to justify their multimillion-dollar salaries. We want professors explaining, under penalty of perjury, exactly how much they make per hour for their rigorous schedules of two classes a week, summers off, and full-year 'sabbaticals' every few terms. Also, we'd like to know how driving the getaway car for a cop-killer constitutes a qualification to teach college."—columnist Ann Coulter This, my fellow Americans, is an idea whose time has come for the simplest of reasons: it is the American taxpayer who is ultimately responsible for any and all defaults on student loans. And the amount of outstanding debt is staggering, currently amounting to $1.6 trillion and projected to reach the $2 trillion mark by 2022. The average debt load carried by each student is now approaching $30,000, and a staggering one-in-five American households are currently on the hook. Those pursuing advanced degrees can ring up a tab of over $100,000.
America's Left-Wing Jews Ashamed of Israel's Jews
American Jews on the left were beside themselves last week. Israel's Jews did something that utterly infuriated these American Jews: Israel's Jews overwhelmingly voted for a man of the right (or for other right-of-center parties). And not just any right-winger, but the only leader in the Western world to publicly differ from their hero, President Barack Obama. To understand their fury, one must first understand that no one is more certain of their moral superiority than the left. This is true the world over, and among Jews it is particularly so. For the leaders of the American Jewish religious left (Reform, Reconstructionist, and now Conservative Judaism) Jews who are politically or socially conservative are a disgrace to Judaism, which, for left-wing Jews, is essentially the same as leftism. Both religious and secular Jews on the left regard Jewish conservatives as moral traitors to the Jewish people.
A Simple Question
It is amazing how a simple question can cause a complex lie to collapse like a house of cards. The simple question was asked by Bill O'Reilly of the Fox News Channel, and it was addressed to two Democrats. He asked what has Hillary Clinton ever accomplished. The two Democrats immediately sidestepped the question and started reciting their talking points in favor of Hillary. But O'Reilly kept coming back to the fact that nothing they were talking about was an accomplishment. For someone who has spent her entire adult life in politics, including being a Senator and then a Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has nothing to show for all those years -- no significant legislation of hers that she got passed in the Senate, and only an unbroken series of international setbacks for the United States during her time as Secretary of State.
Ted Cruz, the Antiobama
Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential announcement was immensely gratifying in numerous ways, including the venue he chose for it. He made his announcement at Liberty University, which is a conspicuously Christian institution located in Virginia, the veritable birthplace of the United States of America. In the world of political commentary today, we usually see analysis focusing on whether a politician or candidate hit the right themes and whether those -- and he -- will resonate with the voting public. The emphasis is usually on the game rather than the substance.
News Cruz on the Scene of GOP Bid
You didn't have to be in Lynchburg, Virginia to hear the starting gun of the 2016 presidential race. The first out of the gate was Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who distanced himself from the competition by announcing his campaign *for* liberty *at* Liberty. Anxious to get a lead on the crowded GOP field, Senator Cruz picked the largest Christian university in America to announce his candidacy. Senator Cruz's presence on campus [Monday] morning followed a long line of presidential candidates who have fanned the flames of conservatism on Liberty's campus. Still, [Tuesday's] speech was significant in that it not only signaled the start of the effort to win the support of evangelical voters (which made up almost 50% of the primary vote in the 2012 presidential cycle), but it once again flies in the face of the pundits who are eager to eulogize social conservatives or the "Religious Right."
Disastrous Iran Deal May Prove Fatal to Israel
In 1982, during one of many visits to Israel, I had the opportunity to speak with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who told me, "Israel needs friends." He added that in the end, his nation could not trust any nation with its fate and security. The protection of Israel, he said, was ultimately the responsibility of Israelis. Begin's comment was prophetic given the petulance of our current president, who behaves like an enemy of Israel when he attempts to impose a Palestinian state on Israel and negotiate a deal with Iran that can only lead to new threats against the Jewish state and further destabilize the chaotic Middle East. In his determination to strike a deal with Iran over its nuclear weapons program (which Iran has denied exists, so what is the U.S. negotiating?), President Obama has traded history, facts and reality for a potential deal with a regime that promotes terrorism around the world and is busy attaching Iraq to its vision of a greater Persian Empire.
The 'John Wayne Moment' We're In
Cinematically, as well as politically, we are sort of in a John Wayne moment: which is where Ted Cruz comes in. Things in this town of ours ain't a-going real good right now. Everything, in fact, seems to be falling apart, save in the eyes of folk who wish America would either drop into the sea or fall in line with President Obama's preachments and prescriptions. Wait! A sudden thunder of hooves in the distance! A shout! A shot! It's... It's ... Ted Cruz, declaring his candidacy for the U.S. presidency. I do not want to be understood as mocking a serious candidate at an undoubtedly serious moment in national affairs. The point is: Would he be volunteering to save us if the feeling weren't so widespread that we need saving, and fast?
No, Being a Climate Change Skeptic Isn't Like Fearing Vaccines
National Geographic's latest cover story generated lots of attention for comparing climate change skeptics to those who fear vaccinations, disbelieve NASA's moon landing, and oppose water fluoridation. The author bemoans the fact that only 40 percent of Americans (according to Pew Research Center) "accept that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming," asking how so many "reasonable people doubt science." Dubbing climate change one of the "precepts of science," the author opines that climate change skepticism is "dispiriting" for anyone considered a "rationalist." How could so many dismiss "settled science"? Actually, there's a healthy reason that the public has come to distrust government warnings and the scientific experts: they are often wrong.
Pet Peeves & Pet Heroes
Any list of my personal peeves would have to include New York City's Mayor Bill De Blasio. Those of us who used to take shots at the former mayor, referring to him as Nanny Bloomberg, didn't fully appreciate how much worse New York voters could do once they really put their minds to it. I honestly thought that after siding with the street mob against the NYPD, De Blasio ran the very real risk of facing a recall election, but I should have known better than to expect New Yorkers to show any sign of sanity. Now I have no doubt that the city's left-wing Jewish and Italian voters will applaud De Blasio's latest decision, which is to close the public schools for two Muslim holidays, Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr. No doubt the voters will also applaud themselves for having elected this ecumenical buffoon.
Monday, March 23, 2015
Boehner-Pelosi Medicare 'Reform' Adds to National Debt
Why are Republicans cutting a deal with Nancy Pelosi to throw an extra $400 billion onto the national debt and calling it entitlement reform? This latest misguided venture should concern all fiscal conservatives -- or anyone who likes the idea of keeping our government on a sustainable trajectory. Almost two decades ago, Congress decided to tie reimbursements for doctors taking Medicare patients to a "Sustainable Growth Rate" or SGR. This would pay doctors more if Medicare was in the black, less if it was in the red, and ideally balance things out year-by-year.
Are Liberal Policies Squeezing the Middle Class?
President Obama's concern about "middle class economics" is justified. But as I pointed out in a previous post, his prescriptions would do almost nothing to solve the problems. According to a private sector estimate, the benefit for families in the middle from all of the Obama proposals would be a paltry $12 a year. According to the Treasury Department, the benefit would be closer to $150. Either way, it's small potatoes. If you don't understand the problem – or won't acknowledge it even if you do understand it – you are unlikely to find a solution that works. Here is what is going on. All middle class families understand that for their children to do well in life they need to be in good schools. But the opportunity to attend a good public school these days is rationed through the housing market. And those opportunities are far removed from what life was like for the parents of today's parents.