Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Bud Selig's Winning Legacy
The business of baseball and the nation's business used to be conducted in Washington with similar skill. The Washington Senators were run by Clark Griffith, who said: "Fans like home runs, and we have assembled a pitching staff to please our fans." Today, however, Washington's team is a model of best practices. The government? Less so. The nation had what historians have called a "critical period," and so has the national pastime. The nation's was in the 1780s, after the Revolution but before the Constitutional Convention, when the 13 states were linked, barely, by the Articles of Confederation, which George Washington called "a rope of sand." The federal government was too weak to collect adequate revenues or to assure the free flow of interstate commerce, and disparities between bigger states -- Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York -- and the rest produced a weak sense of common national endeavor.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Feds Get Moore Justice on Marriage
Federal judges may have the last word on marriage -- but they won't have the final one. That's becoming abundantly clear in Alabama, the latest state to feel the sting of a runaway court invalidating the will of the people on marriage. In a letter to Governor Robert Bentley (R-Ala.), Chief Justice Roy Moore made that quite clear -- explaining that this isn't an issue that the federal courts will resolve. Rather, he said, it "raises serious, legitimate concerns about the propriety of federal court jurisdiction over the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Amendment." Unelected judges and a handful of lawyers have been pushing state marriage amendments over like sleeping cows. Meanwhile, stunned Americans have struggled to make sense of a legal system that puts its own political agenda ahead of the expressed will of the people. Like most conservatives, FRC has watched in horror as the courts have robbed tens of millions of Americans of their voice on an issue of critical importance -- not just to our nation's stability, but to its very survival.
'No One Has Right to Decide Who Can Live and Who Can Die'
When should it be legal for a doctor -- or anyone else -- to deliberately take an innocent human life? Politicians in both parties need to listen to the answer Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles gave to this question Saturday as he offered a requiem Mass for aborted babies. "Only God, who is the Lord of our beginning and the Lord of our ending, can make the determination of the beginning and end of life," he said. "The right to life, as we know, is the foundation of every other right and liberty and the true foundation of justice and peace in society," he said. "If the child in the womb has no right to be born, if the sick and the old have no right to be taken care of, then there is no solid foundation to defend anyone's human rights."
Abortion Protesters Don't Count?
Hundreds of thousands of protesters descend on Washington every January to "March for Life," protesting the horror of more than a million abortions in America every year. Every year the "news" outlets report next to nothing, even when their reporters are there documenting the event as their cameras film it. This year, the turnout was among the strongest ever, with estimates as high as half a million people. The visual of wave after wave marching to the Capitol to demand action, with banners, flyers and flags; with an ocean of those supposedly disinterested millennial cheering and praying; with babies everywhere. It was a breathtaking sight. Except virtually no one watching the networks ever saw it. CBS gave the story a paltry 15 seconds. NBC "News" blacked it out entirely. So too did ABC "News."
Choose to Refuse: Say 'No' to PARCC/SBAC Testing
This is National School Choice Week, but I want to talk about parents' school *testing* choice. Moms and dads, you have the inherent right and responsibility to protect your children. You can choose to refuse the top-down Common Core racket of costly standardized tests of dubious academic value, reliability and validity. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I'm reminding you of your right to choose because the spring season of testing tyranny is about to hit the fan. Do you object to the time being taken away from your kids' classroom learning? Are you alarmed by the intrusive data-sharing and data-mining enabled by assessment-driven special interests? Are you opposed to the usurpation of local control by corporate testing giants and federal lobbyists?
Hasty Drug Warriors Are a Menace
Prompted by a Raid That Gravely Injured a Toddler, Georgia Considers Limits on No-Knock Search Warrants
Obama, Ignoring Realities, Sticks to His Comfort Zone
A week after his State of the Union address, political observers are still trying to figure out what President Obama's game is. That's because rhetorically and substantively, he seems to be in another world. In his State of the Union address, Obama refused to even take note of the GOP's historic midterm gains and the fact the House and Senate are now both under Republican control. On foreign policy, Obama talked as if everything was going swimmingly abroad, prompting even the Washington Post's Dana Milbank to marvel at Obama's "disconnect" from what is happening in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Russia.
Owning Ideas
For most of history, people suffered in miserable poverty. Then, in a few hundred years, some new ideas made life hugely better for billions of us -- things like running water, the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the Internet. We want people to keep coming up with new and better ideas. But there's a problem: Why would you bother to spend years inventing something if other people can just steal your idea? Who will devote years and millions of dollars to making a big movie? Or a dozen years and billions of dollars to bringing a new drug to market? Almost no one.
Will Republicans Go the Way of the Whigs?
In 1856, the Whig Party ran former president Millard Fillmore for president of the United States. Fillmore had last run in 1852; he'd been denied the nomination as the party fell apart over the issue of slavery. In an attempt to bring the party back together that year, the party nominated General Winfield Scott, who promptly imploded in the general election against Democrat Franklin Pierce. "We are slain!" shouted Representative Lewis D. Campbell of Ohio. "The party is dead, dead, dead!" Free Soiler Charles Sumner wrote, "Now is the time for a new organization. Out of this chaos the party of freedom must arise." Most of the Whig leaders thought this talk overwrought. They insisted that the party would live on. Senator William Seward of New York said, "No new party will arise, nor will any old one fall." Seward thought that if the party elided the slavery issue, it could hold together. But by the same token, without the slavery issue, there was truly no difference between the two parties. As future president Rutherford B. Hayes wrote, "The real grounds of difference upon important political questions no longer correspond with party lines. The progressive Whig is nearer in sentiment to the radical Democrat than the radical Democrat is to the 'fogy' of his own party; vice versa." The party had become a party of convenience rather than principle.
Defense Against Demagogues
When gasoline sold at record prices, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said, "I think it's time to say to these people, 'Stop ripping off the American people.'" When the average price of regular gas was close to $4 a gallon, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called for Congress to look into breaking up giant oil companies. The claim was that "Wall Street greed (was) fueling high gas prices." Today in some places, gasoline is selling for less than $2 a gallon, less than half of its peak price in 2008. The idiotic explanation that attributed high oil prices to greed might now be adjusted to argue that big oil executives have been morally rejuvenated. They are no longer greedy and no longer want to rip off the American people. My guess is that everyone in the oil business would like to charge higher prices. Plus, there's no legal prohibition against big and powerful Exxon Mobil's selling its regular gas today for $4 a gallon. Exxon stations don't do so because the market wouldn't bear that price.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Regaining Lost Economic Freedom
Showing a slight improvement, the U.S. still has a long way to go
With Liberty and Justice for All
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Barry Morris Goldwater, may God rest his freedom-loving soul, spoke the celebrated words in accepting the Republican nomination for president in 1964. But the author of the phrase was a brilliant political scientist named Harry V. Jaffa, whose death a couple of weeks ago, at 96, put the obituarists instantly in mind of a rhetorical flight from which Goldwater supposedly never recovered. The two -- Barry and Harry -- knew with some exactitude what they were doing. As William J. Middendorf, a ring leader of the Draft Goldwater movement, would later note: Goldwater was taking on "the major theme of the (GOP) opposition debate: that he and his supporters were 'extremists' and the Rockefellers and Scrantons of the party were the voices of 'moderation.'"
Fact-checking the Fact Checkers
John Adams famously quipped that, "Facts are stubborn things." If only the media's so-called "fact checkers" wouldn't be so stubbornly biased, the facts might just get a fair hearing. After the House passed the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 7) last week, The Washington Post fact checked Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), giving her 3 undeserved "Pinocchios," for saying: "The president's health-care law authorized massive subsidies to assist millions of Americans to purchase private health plans that will cover abortion on demand… hard-earned taxpayer dollars are now being used to pay for elective abortions." FRC wrote last year about the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report which revealed that taxpayer-funded subsidies helped pay for 1,036 ObamaCare plans which cover abortion on demand. Even The Washington Post conceded much of Rep. Foxx's claim when they wrote, "abortion charges would range from 0.2 percent to 0.65 percent of an enrollee's monthly bill." The issue isn't how much, but whether taxpayer subsidized plans cover elective abortion at all.
GOP Abortion Bill: Right Ends, Wrong Means
As thousands descended on Washington last week for the annual "March for Life," the Republican House of Representatives was busy watering down an antiabortion bill that restricted abortions after 20 weeks, except in cases of rape or incest, with exemptions allowed only after a police report had been filed. This after a small group of moderate Republican female lawmakers challenged the bill and lobbied for a less restrictive measure. Politics wins. Life loses. It seems these moderate Republicans, fearing the bill could revive the Democrats' phony "War on Women" mantra, erred on the side of expedience so as not to, as the Washington Post writes, "...expose Republicans in swing districts to a barrage of attack ads in 2016 from women's rights groups and Democrats."
Random Thoughts
Who says President Obama doesn't promote bipartisanship? His complicity in Iran's moving toward nuclear bombs has alarmed some top Senate Democrats enough to get them to join Republicans in opposition to the Obama administration's potentially suicidal foreign policy. Before the current measles outbreak, measles was once almost wiped out in the United States. But an article in a medical journal more than a decade ago had many parents afraid to have their children vaccinated, for fear that the vaccine causes autism. After scientific studies refuted that claim, the medical journal repudiated the article, and the doctor who wrote it had his license revoked.
Are Today's Millennials a New Victorian Generation?
Public policymakers and political pundits tend to focus on problems -- understandably, because if things are going right they aren't thought to need attention. Yet positive developments can teach us things as well, when, for reasons not necessarily clear, great masses of people start to behave more constructively. One such trend is the better behavior of the young Americans of today compared to those 25 years ago. Almost no one anticipated it, the exception being William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1991 book, "Generations," who named Americans born after 1981 the Millennial generation and predicted that "the tiny boys and girls now playing with Lego blocks" -- and those then still unborn -- would become "the nation's next great Civic generation."
The Upcoming Showdown at the EU Corral
For the last few years I've wondered what will be the trip wire that brings down the world's foremost experiment in transnational elitism, better known as the European Union. The shoveling of additional debt on top of previous debt, coupled with the pie-in-the-sky hope that it will somehow work itself out in the long run has just been dealt a severe blow. Led by Alexis Tsipras, Greek's radical-leftist Syriza party assumed control of the Greek Parliament after its own electoral success was coupled with a coalition deal with the Independent Greeks party. The parties have nothing in common other than a similar contempt for the austerity measures imposed on Greece as a condition for the billions of dollars in bailouts it has received from the EU. The coalition now controls 162 seats in Greece's 300 seat Parliament. In short, all hell's about to break loose. "Greek people have written history. The Greek people have sent a strong indisputable mandate for the country to leave behind it austerity," Tsipras told thousands of supporters. "The new government will negotiate with creditors a fair viable solution—a solution for Greece to end its vicious cycle."
Tidbits & Ironies
I am like a squirrel, but instead of storing nuts in a hollow tree trunk for future consumption, I store idle thoughts away in my in-box. Then one fine day, I decide it's time to empty the contents on an unsuspecting world. This is that day. To start with, a doctor friend of mine informed me that while taking a patient's history before performing an appendectomy, he discovered she was receiving Social Security disability and was on Medicare/Medicaid, but the only ID she had other than the benefit cards was a Mexican voter photo ID. When my friend, who speaks Spanish, asked her if photo IDs were required to vote in Mexico, she said they were because the Mexicans didn't want people who were in Mexico illegally to be able to vote. Apparently she thought that was only sensible, as do I, but unlike her, I'm aware of the irony.
If the President Couldn't Tell a Lie
In the famous 1997 movie comedy "Liar Liar," actor Jim Carrey plays a lawyer who, as a result of his young son's birthday wish being magically fulfilled, cannot tell a lie -- he can only tell the truth -- for 24 hours. Let's imagine that such a wish forced President Obama to do the same, not for 24 hours, but only during his State of the Union address. Here is what he said followed by what he would have said if he could only tell the truth.
Kudos to Congress and Netanyahu
Kudos to Congress for inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak at a joint session on the issue of imposing tough sanctions on Iran and to Netanyahu for accepting. President Obama has continually snubbed Israel and Netanyahu -- whom he refuses to meet with in March, allegedly because he doesn't want to interfere with the upcoming elections in Israel. Obama has been alarmingly lax in his dealings with Iran in its ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Some Obama defenders are chastising Congress for breaching protocol in inviting Netanyahu, saying, "There appear to be no rules anymore." This, from the same people who routinely pooh-pooh President Obama's habitual lawlessness. Even some conservatives are cautioning against Netanyahu's addressing Congress, saying that if it proceeds as planned, it will play into Obama's hands and undermine its goal of strengthening sanctions against Iran because it will shift the focus away from Obama's indefensible position and toward Netanyahu's "chutzpah."