Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
SCOTUS Rolls Against Alabama Tide on Marriage
It may be the Supreme Court of the United States, but it isn't a united one. At least two justices are disgusted by the Court's activism on marriage -- and they aren't afraid to show it. Hours before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to same-sex "marriage" in Alabama, Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia took aim at their colleagues in a blistering criticism of the majority's decision. Instead of defending the will of the people, Thomas blasted the Court for "(looking) the other way as yet another federal district judge casts aside state laws." This is "another example of this court's increasingly cavalier attitude toward the states," Thomas fumed. "This acquiescence may well be seen as a signal of the Court's intended resolution of that question. This is not the proper way for the court to carry out its role," he said, echoing the concerns of so many Americans, "and it is indecorous for this court to pretend that it is." All the Court has done, Thomas laments, is create more chaos and confusion. "I would have shown the people of Alabama the respect they deserve and preserved the status quo while the Court resolves this important question."
Brian Williams: Puffed Up Anchor, Puffed Up Tales
By now everyone knows about his transgressions. If even only some of the reports are true, Brian Williams is a serial embellisher, a self-aggrandizing fabulist. No doubt everyone knows somebody like this, and if you don't it's probably because you're that guy. But Williams' case is special. This isn't some sad Willy Loman at the end of the bar who needs to invent impressive stories about himself. If anything, he needed to not tell such stories, given that he reportedly makes more than $10 million a year to be a trusted name in news. Yet he couldn't stop himself.
Fairness and Justice
Oxfam reports that the richest 1 percent of people in the world own 48 percent of the world's wealth. Many claim that we should be alarmed by income inequality because it hampers upward mobility. Others argue that because income is distributed so unevenly, justice and fairness require income redistribution. Let's look at fairness and justice. What constitutes fairness and justice has been debated for centuries. Widespread agreement has proved to be elusive at best. However, I think that an important part of an intelligent discussion about fairness and justice is the recognition that knowing results of a process cannot establish whether there is fairness or justice. Take a simple example. Suppose Tom, Dick and Harry play a weekly game of poker. The game's result is that Tom wins 75 percent of the time. Dick and Harry, respectively, win 15 percent and 10 percent of the time. Knowing the results of the game permits us to say absolutely nothing about whether there has been poker fairness or justice. Tom's disproportionate winnings may be a result of his being an astute player or a clever cheater.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Throwing the Book at Overspending
Chapter and verse on federal programs that deserve the ax
President Compares Islam to Christianity
In his National Prayer Breakfast speech last week, President Barack Obama said: "And lest we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. ... So this is not unique to one group or one religion." It is important to analyze these words -- because the president of the United States spoke them in a major forum, and because what he said is said by all those who defend Islam against any criticism.
Nuts to You!
It's been kind of fun, I tell you: a Florida Democratic congressman, one Alcee Hastings, calls Texas a "crazy state." Texans -- e.g., Rick Perry -- joyfully, jubilantly acknowledged the craziness that has made our state (yes, I am one of the assorted bedlamites) foremost in the country for economic growth. How come Texas leads in job creation and in general economic wellbeing -- the oil price free-fall notwithstanding? Because we're all nuts down here? It's a nice kind of nuttiness, if so. Not that Texas -- very much a part of our fallen, post-Edenic world -- is without its modern challenges, including deficiencies in the public schools and the persistence of poverty amid plenty: the same challenges, come to think of it, facing Congressman Hastings' Florida. To say nothing -- in variant degree -- of progressive paradises such as California, New York, Illinois and Massachusetts, where enlightened opinion would shut down quickly enough any crazy, Texas-like adventures in the spread of freedom.
Southern Comfort on Marriage
Politicians in other states may roll over and play dead as the federal courts trample their laws, but not Alabama! There's an organized resistance developing in the Deep South, and it might just be the turning point on marriage that many Americans have been waiting for. Late [Sunday] night, Alabama's Chief Justice Roy Moore began rallying state probate judges under his jurisdiction with a 27-page order drawing a line at the courthouse door over same-sex "marriage." "Effective immediately," Moore said in a warning shot across the state, "no probate judge of the state of Alabama nor any agent or employee of any Alabama probate judge shall issue or recognize a marriage license that is inconsistent with the Alabama Constitution."
Measles, Vaccines and Autism
The current controversy over whether parents should be forced to have their children vaccinated for measles is one of the painful signs of our times. Measles was virtually wiped out in the United States, years ago. Why the resurgence of this disease now? The short answer is that false claims, based on other false claims, led many parents to stop getting their children vaccinated against measles. The key false claim was that the vaccine for measles caused an increase in autism. This claim was made in 1998 by a doctor writing in a distinguished British medical journal, so it is understandable that many parents took it seriously, and did not want to run the risk of having their child become autistic.
63rd Annual National Prayer Breakfast ... Let Us Prey
There was a time when the 63-year-old National Prayer Breakfast was a rather mundane affair. It rarely made news. Speakers -- evangelist Billy Graham spoke at most of the early ones -- talked about Jesus and salvation. Presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, would follow with unremarkable comments mostly ignored or relegated to the religion page by the secular press. In recent years the breakfast's higher purpose has sometimes been tainted by politics from a lower kingdom, not by the choice of the Senate and House members who alternate organizing the event, but by some speakers who have used it to promote personal agendas. Mother Teresa spoke against abortion at the 1994 breakfast and announced that any pregnant woman who didn't want her child could send the child to her. That made headlines and I wrote approvingly of her remarks, noting they fit into a moral-spiritual framework.
Stealing From God
Frank Turek's new book is a brilliant and unique contribution to Christian apologetics. "Stealing From God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case" is thoughtful and provocative yet a very quick read. I have read many books on Christian apologetics but nothing quite like this book. Not only is much of the content different from that of other books on the subject but so is the approach. By definition, Christian apologetics deals with defending the faith and, in the process, marshaling evidence in support of Christianity's truth claims. "Stealing From God" does that, of course, but it does something else, too. It transitions from defense to offense and turns the tables on the atheist community, exposing the brittle foundation on which many of its beliefs (or non-beliefs) are based.
Wackos Here & Abroad
As many of you know, I have long trumpeted my support of Scott Walker in the 2016 presidential race. I regard it as a surplus of riches that we Republicans will get to decide between the governor of Wisconsin and several other first-rate candidates, whereas the Democrats seem to be stuck, like prehistoric animals finding themselves knee-deep in the tar pits, with two left-wing dinosaurs named Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. One thing for certain is that there is much that needs to be done in America to make things right and, thanks to Barack Hussein Obama, perhaps even more that needs to be undone.
Putting the Boo in Boolah-Boolah
A long-cherished belief held by Americans for decades is on the verge of being upended. A quartet of stories is the latest indication that a college "education" has become the most-overrated commodity on the planet, save for the elitist institutions whose primary mission is to keep our ruling class populated with like-minded Masters of the Universe. For the rest? A stupendous waste of time and (taxpayer-backed) money. We begin at the epicenter of institutional quackery, more familiarly known as the University of California. The UC Student Association Board, representing all 233,000 students enrolled at the10 campuses that comprise the UC system, passed the "Resolution Toward Socially Responsible Investment at the University of California" by a lopsided vote of 11-1-3. Much like the popular and anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) resolutions ginned up by the likes of Muslim Student Associations (MSA) determined to turn many colleges into anti-Semitic wastelands, this resolution demands a similar divestment.
The Democratic Majority That Emerged -- And Disappeared
John Judis, co-author of the book "The Emerging Democratic Majority," now says in an article in National Journal that that majority has disappeared. His title: "The Emerging Republican Advantage." The original book, published in the Republican year of 2002, forecast accurately the groups that would make up the Democratic majority coalition that emerged in the 2006 and 2008 elections: blacks, Hispanics, gentry liberals, single women, young voters. But as Judis writes now, that coalition has come apart. That's partly because of diminished support from millennials and Hispanics, but mostly because of additional white working-class defections and erosion among suburbanites unhappy with higher government spending and taxes.
Monday, February 9, 2015
America on the Wrong Path on Race and Poverty
I've got a new book out which is not really so new. It's new because it has just been released as an eBook. But it is not so new because it is a collection of some of my columns from past 10 years with Scripps Howard News Service. And those columns reflect what I have been saying over the last 20 years -- about race, about politics, about religion, about America's problems and my sense of the answers to these problems. It's called "Blind Conceit -- Policy, Politics, and Racial Polarization: Moving Forward to Save America." It's a book about love and faith. Love of God, love of America, love of freedom, and faith that the answers to the many problems that trouble us so deeply today have answers in our traditional sources -- our Bible, our Constitution - and that as more Americans turn to those sources we can get back on the path to the freedom and justice we seek.
One Million Child Victims of Muslim Rape Gangs in the U.K.?
A national disaster sweeps Britain.
There Is a Simple Formula for Unleashing Economic Prosperity
The age old question in economics is this: how does a nation or state create economic growth and rising living standards for its citizens? Once upon a time superstitious economists believed that growth was a function of the constellation of the stars. That kind of belief in astrology as a predictor of growth was no more misguided than many of the fad economic theories that are peddled today by charlatan economists who preach more government interventionism. The Europeans and several South American nations are growing their government sectors in order to create jobs and higher incomes -- when these policies are often what has created the weak growth and stagnant incomes in the first place. Too many political leaders -- including some in the U.S. -- have learned all the wrong lessons from the Great Recession and its aftermath.
Prayer Breakfast Jam-Packed With Distortions
Plenty of people left the National Prayer Breakfast [Thursday] with a bad taste in their mouths -- and not from the food. In what must be an encore of his apology tour, President Obama chose [Thursday's] breakfast to join in the condemnation -- not of Islamist violence, but *Christians'*. While the rest of the free world is united in its outrage over ISIS's evil, this President seems all too eager to malign the faith he himself professes. Most Americans are tired of the apologist-in-chief, who takes every opportunity to lecture us about the atrocities of ancient Christians and how their tradition is as evil as Islam's. Are there things that have been done in the past under the mask of religion? Absolutely. But, as I told Fox News's Megyn Kelly [Thursday] night, almost all Christians universally, denounced that type of behavior -- whether it was the Crusades of a thousand years ago or slavery in this country 150 years ago.
'I See Parchment Burning, but the Letters Are Soaring Free'
Book burning is as old as books, and as current as this week's news. The Associated Press reported on Monday that Islamic State fanatics have ravaged the Central Library of Mosul, the largest repository of learning in that ancient city. Militants smashed the library's locks and overran its collections, removing thousands of volumes on philosophy, science, and law, along with books of poetry and children's stories. Only Islamic texts were left behind. "These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah," one of the ISIS jihadists announced as the library's holdings were emptied into sacks and loaded onto pickup trucks. "So they will be burned."
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Education Is the Business of the States
In 1981, Tennessee's 41-year-old governor proposed to President Ronald Reagan a swap: Washington would fully fund Medicaid and the states would have complete responsibility for primary and secondary education. Reagan, a former governor, was receptive. But Democrats, who controlled the House and were beginning to be controlled by teachers unions (the largest, the National Education Association, had bartered its first presidential endorsement, of Jimmy Carter, for creation of the Department of Education) balked. In 1992, the former Tennessee governor was President George H.W. Bush's secretary of education. He urged Bush to veto proposed legislation to expand federal involvement in K-through-12 education. He said it would create "at least the beginnings of a national school board that could make day-to-day school decisions on curriculum, discipline, teacher training, textbooks and classroom materials." The veto threat derailed the legislation.
The Connection Between High Taxes and Stagnant Wages
President Obama has wisely abandoned his lead-filled trial balloon of taxing college savings plans. Congressional offices were deluged over the last week with indignant calls from voters on this middle-class bait-and-switch scheme and finally Democrats caved. Good riddance. But the worst Obama ideas on taxes are directed at investors, entrepreneurs and risk-takers. These Obama investment tax hikes wouldn't just harm wealthy investors, but American workers. Obama proposes raising capital gains taxes and dividend taxes to 28 percent. He also wants to impose a new capital gains tax on inherited wealth -- on top of the existing death tax of 40 percent.