Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
65 Percent of Children in Households on Federal Aid Programs
The Census Bureau reported in a study released this week that 65 percent of American children lived in households taking aid from one or more federal program as of the fall of 2011. "Almost two-thirds (65 percent) of children," said the Census Bureau, "lived in households that participated in at least one or more of the following government aid programs: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Medicaid, and the National School Lunch Program."
Welcome to TotCare: Obama's Preschool Takeover
The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round, just like the endless cycles of big, bad government programs to federalize preschool and daycare. On Wednesday, the White House Summit on Early Education will unveil nearly $1 billion in new "investments" to "expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America" from "birth and continuing to age 5." It's a retread of President Obama's 2013 State of the Union school-spending plan, which was a repackaging of his 2011 Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge program.
Catching Cops on Camera Can Be Crucial
Notwithstanding the Eric Garner Case, Video Evidence Is a Powerful Weapon Against Police Brutality
Using Allegations of Rape in a Grab for Power
Nine males were accused of being part of a heinous rape. The alleged injustice fomented a mob mentality. An enraged community wanted to skip any talk of a serious investigation, never mind a trial, and go straight to the punishment. I'm not talking about the now-discredited allegations against fraternity members at the University of Virginia, but of the legendary case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American teenagers falsely accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. Despite testimony from one of the women that she had made up the whole thing, the Scottsboro Boys were convicted in trial after trial. All served time either in jail or prison.
Rolling Stone Crumbles
No parent wants to consider the travesty that when he sends his 18-year-old daughter to college, she could be vulnerable to sexual assault. But in the increasingly punitive atmosphere surrounding sexual-assault allegations, he should also fear sending his 18-year-old son to campus, where he may be falsely accused of rape. The national media are deeply feminist. Their default position is the presumption that "the victim" is the female accuser. Some pundits have even argued in national newspapers that the accuser should be "automatically believed."
To the Left, Lying About Rape Is Just Dandy
This week, Rolling Stone printed an editor's note retracting one of the most highly praised pieces of investigative journalism in its history. That piece, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, alleged that several members of the University of Virginia fraternity Phi Kappa Psi, had raped a 19-year-old student named Jackie, including with foreign objects, as she lay on a floor covered with broken glass. The article resulted in the university suspending the fraternity's activities, and national outrage over the so-called "rape culture" on campus. That rape culture supposedly leads to one in five women being sexually assaulted on campus -- a faulty statistic from a poll that didn't even ask women if they were raped or sexually assaulted, and instead defined sex while inebriated at any level as rape. With regard to reported rape, the federal government reports a rate of just 1.3 per 1,000 Americans. That is, of course, far too high. But it is not a rape culture by any plausible definition.
I Love a Mystery
Sometimes people are surprised to learn that my favorite books are mysteries, many of which are written by Brits. I particularly enjoy those that are leavened with humor, but those are extremely rare. The reason I like the genre is because mysteries tend to be logical and they invariably end well with justice being meted out to the guilty -- unlike real life. I also prefer mystery novels because, unlike most non-fiction, which is either ghost-written if it has a politician's name on the cover or is the work of an historian or an academic, mysteries are written by actual writers with an eye to style, not by those whose long suit is research.
Climate Catastrophe
People argue about whether the "consensus" of scientists is that we face disaster because of global warming. Instead of debating whether man's greenhouse gasses will raise temperatures, we should argue about how we gauge disasters. If you take most environmentalists and climate scientists at their word, the Earth heated up about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century, not much more than it heated up the century before that. Warming may increase, but no one can be certain of that. Let's agree for the sake of argument that this recent warming was partly caused by humanity. Let's also agree that there are some negative effects, including more frequent coastal flooding or longer droughts.
Christmas Books
This year, Christmas shopping may be an especially welcome respite from the ugly events going on across the country, as mobs take to the streets because grand juries that examined evidence reached different conclusions from those reached by mobs who made up their minds without examining that evidence. Perhaps more than in other years, shopping malls can become shopping mauls. One of the ways to make Christmas shopping less stressful is to give books as presents -- after ordering them on the Internet. There is a good crop of new books to choose from this year, as well as some old favorites that can make good gifts.
What's Rule of Law?
President Barack Obama said just before the recent Ferguson, Missouri, riots, "First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law." Most Americans have little or no inkling of what "rule of law" means. Many think it means obedience to whatever laws legislatures enact. That's a vision that has led to human tragedy down through the ages. Historically, it sanctioned the divine right of kings, whereby a monarch was subject to no earthly authority, deriving his right to rule directly from the will of God. More recently, it's a vision that included the Nuremberg laws, which led to the genocide of European Jews, and the brutal laws of the regimes of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, which led to tens of millions of murders.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Optimism and Decency: Progressive Kryptonite
It's been a tough couple of weeks for the campus rape narrative. Two prominent tales of forcible rape disseminated by actress Lena Dunham and Rolling Stone Magazine appear to be falling apart faster than a Yugo. And no one is sadder than an American left that has invested a considerable amount of effort to convince the public our so-called institutions of higher learning are hotbeds of sexual assault. As is so often the case with the progressive agenda, the "lie repeated often enough it becomes the truth" is the essential element in promoting that assertion. In this case it is the assertion that a whopping one-in-five women are sexually assaulted on college campuses. That statistic comes courtesy of a Campus Assault Study conducted from 2005 through 2007 for the Justice Department's National Institute of Justice.
Standard Practice
The human tempests presently sweeping the country -- rape allegations at the University of Virginia and in the U.S. military, racial protests and rioting over police conduct, growing and growling bitterness during the sweetest of seasons -- have as much to do with moral decay as with circumstances. A moral system presupposes some general level of personal restraint in word and deed; some level of decorum and consideration for others. Yeah. Well. That's not where we are right now. Nor have we been there in a lot of years. We live in the "But I Wanna" Era: I want what I want when I want it.
Conservatives Need to Re-establish Control of Party and Nation
I am concerned that certain Republicans just can't take yes for an answer. To borrow an old adage, they can't handle prosperity -- with prosperity being defined as the voters rejecting Obama's agenda (and thereby embracing theirs). This is partly because of the fact that many grass-roots conservatives mistakenly believe that their only obstacle to moving a conservative agenda forward in Washington is the so-called Republican establishment -- GOP centrist politicians and their institutional supporters. But I believe it's more than that.
A Reply to Rush Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh is a savvy guy who thinks Republican leaders are wrong to shun the idea of another government shutdown. Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," he argued that the only important poll is the one held on Election Day. "(The GOP) won a landslide election 10 months after that so-called shutdown. ... The essence of a poll is an election, and I've got two of them. And we would have won in 2012 if four million Republicans hadn't stayed home." The belief that Romney would have won in 2012 if millions of Republicans hadn't sat out the election is widely shared on the right, but it's probably not true. Sean Trende, one of the country's most careful election analysts, examined turnout data for RealClearPolitics.
Is Law Optional?
The fiasco of "Rolling Stone" magazine's apology for an unsubstantiated claim of gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house -- and the instant rush to judgment of the university administration in shutting down all fraternities, when those charges were made -- should warn us about the dangers of having serious legal issues dealt with by institutions with no qualifications for that role. Rape is a crime. It belongs in a criminal justice courtroom. And those found guilty belong behind bars for a long time.
Rep. Paul Ryan's Hope for a Congress That Works
Like two predatory animals circling each other, Republicans and Democrats are trying to sort out the meaning of last month's election and plan strategies for the remaining days of the current Congress and the new one in which Republicans will hold majorities in both houses. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), soon to be chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, spoke with me about the election and his party's strategy going forward.
December 7, 2014: Hillary's Day of Infamy
President Franklin D. Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of Congress on this day in 1941. Looking stern and resolute, the President wore a black armband, as if to memorialize the thousands of U.S. sailors, Marines, Army and Coast Guard personnel who had been killed and wounded the day before in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
...ANDA Happy New Year?
If you thought your Christmas list was long, you should see Congress's. Clocking in at about 1,000 pages, the House's monster spending package -- $1.014 trillion worth -- will be "one of the last trains leaving the station" from the 113th Congress. Appropriators planned to release the bill text late tonight, which will help write the final chapter of this two-year experiment in partisan gridlock. As usual, both sides are taking the debate right down to the wire -- part of a regularly scheduled drama that seems to re-air every couple of months before the government's funding runs out. But before members can switch off the lights and head home, there's plenty of horse-trading and arm-twisting left to do in the sprint to a possible Friday recess. Even Mrs. "We-have-to-pass-the-bill-to-find-out-what's-in-it" is threatening to actually read this proposal, a shock to anyone who remembers her infamous ObamaCare quote. "Let's look at the whole package," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said without a hint of irony. But, as one Hill expert pointed out, "You have to not just be a speed-reader, but really be a Superman to get through all of it."
You Don't Have to Love Your Parents: The Case for the Ten Commandments
We don't have to love our parents. We have to honor them. Last week PragerUniversity.com released 11 five-minute video courses: each of the Ten Commandments and an introduction. We received over one million views this first week. The reason we made these videos is that we believe that everything needed to make a good world is contained in the Ten Commandments.
Don't Look for Much Emphasis on Abortion in the 2016 Campaign
Americans are divided politically along cultural, not economic, lines. Partisan preference is highly correlated with views on non-economic issues and only loosely related to economic status. This is the norm rather than the exception in American political history. Party preference has run along regional, racial and ethnic lines more than the divisions along economic lines that became dominant in the New Deal era and began petering out in the late 1960s.