Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Voting 'No' on Obama's Immigration Policies
Everyone finds a lesson in the Republican midterm tsunami. One message was that so-called comprehensive immigration reform and broad amnesty have little national public support. Polls have long shown that, but so do last week's election results. Candidates in swing states who promised amnesties got no edge from such opportunistic posturing. Candidates who pandered to identity groups and played the ethnic card lost in most cases.
The President of No!
In the gloom of the day after last week's election I think even his allies in the media expected something more from the Prophet Barack Obama. After all, he had just suffered through a wave election and he was left soaking wet. He did not merely lose this wave election. He was swamped. Republicans were victorious practically everywhere. At times they won by double digits: Senator Mitch McConnell won by 15 points, Arkansas' Senator-elect Tom Cotton by 17 points. And forget not the governorships: Ohio's John Kasich by 31 points, South Carolina's Nikki Haley by 15 points. The sorely pressed governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, won his third race for governorship in four years by five points against unions, big money Democrats nationwide, and Hollywood! As I said last week, it was the second wave in the last three elections and an election more epochal than the president's in 2008 and his rerun of 2008 in 2012.
Rethinking U.S. Foreign Policy
Barack Obama's coming request for Congress to "right-size and update" the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against terrorism will be constitutionally fastidious and will catalyze a debate that will illuminate Republican fissures. They, however, are signs of a healthy development -- the reappearance of foreign policy heterodoxy in Republican ranks. Many events (U.S. military misadventures since 2001, the Syrian civil war, the rise of the Islamic State, the spinning centrifuges of Iran's nuclear weapons program) and one senator (Rand Paul) have reopened a Republican debate that essentially closed when Dwight Eisenhower won the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. One reason he sought it was to block Ohio's Sen. Robert Taft.
Who Are You Calling Stupid?
"Stupid is as stupid does" -- Forrest Gump Unless you regularly follow conservative media, you may not have heard what one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) thinks about you. Jonathan Gruber is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist who helped craft Obamacare. In a rare moment of unvarnished candor, Gruber told an audience last year at the University of Pennsylvania the law passed because of the "stupidity of the American voter."
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Gas Is Cheaper. Where Are the Grandstanding Politicians?
Oil prices are plunging. Gasoline is now cheaper than milk. Why doesn't Washington *do* something already? Since peaking in June, the price of oil has tumbled by 25 percent. Texas light sweet crude futures have fallen to around $77.40 a barrel, a three-year low, while Brent oil, the global benchmark, sank on Monday to its lowest price in four years. With cheaper oil has come cheaper gasoline. The national average price for a gallon of regular is now just $2.926. Drivers haven't seen pump prices this low since December 2010. Nor have they seen such a sustained decline -- the price has dropped for 46 days in a row -- since 2008. According to AAA, "the national average could fall another 5-15 cents in the coming weeks, which could make for the cheapest Thanksgiving gas in half a decade."
Florist Case Stems From State's Intolerance
We were told that same-sex "marriage" was about building homes -- not destroying others'. Unfortunately, that's just another lie from a liberal movement bent on shattering Americans' freedom, their livelihoods, and now, their property. Like dozens of conservative businesses, the owner of Washington State's Arlene's Flowers is finding out exactly how low the Left is willing to sink to demand conformity on marriage. Barronelle Stutzman, who drew the Left's ire when she [politely declined](http://nydailynews.com/news/national/flower-shop-sued-shunning-gay-wedding-article-1.1321259) to make arrangements for a same-sex "wedding," has been bogged down in a legal fight for almost two years just for exercising her First Amendment rights in the marketplace. Now, that fight may cost Barronelle more than customers. According to Alliance Defending Freedom, it could cost Stutzman her home too. In a sick twist to an already outrageous case, long-time customer Robert Ingersoll and his partner are not only suing Arlene's Flowers -- but Barronelle personally.
District of Cannabis
How Will Congress Respond to Marijuana Legalization in the Nation's Capital?
Big Truthy Is Watching (Some of) You
This week, President Obama launched a prominent social media campaign on behalf of "net neutrality" and urged the FCC to "keep the Internet free and open." The man has gall. This is the same speech-squelcher in chief whose administration snooped on reporters; vengefully audited tea party pro-life activists and conservative election watchdogs and slow-walked the probe into the IRS witch hunt against them; entertained a government scheme to monitor story selection in TV newsrooms; and forked over $1 million to a researcher building a Twitter-snooping database.
Will Boehner Give Obama Everything in Lame Duck?
Can you decipher the unique language used by Republican leaders? Here is a quick test. At his first post-election press conference, House Speaker John Boehner said: "My job is to listen to the American people. The American people have made it clear, they're not for Obamacare. Ask all those Democrats who lost their elections Tuesday night." He also said: "So, the House, I'm sure, at some point next year, we'll move to repeal Obamacare because it should be repealed and it should be replaced with common sense reforms that respect the doctor/patient relationship."
Obama Always Puts U.S. on the Wrong Side
Americans of most political persuasions tend to view the United Nations as corrupt and morally inverted. An organization supposedly dedicated to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights regularly overlooks abuses by the world's worst actors (Cuba, North Korea, China, just to name three) while expending vast quantities of outrage at the efforts of one tiny democracy, Israel, to defend itself. When the United States stands with Israel against the UN lynch mob, it restores ballast to the moral universe. What should be up is up, and what should be down is down. I kept a photograph of Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN in the 1970s, on my wall for many years. Scowling with disgust at the corruption of the idea of human rights in the UN, he held his hand high to veto the infamous "Zionism is Racism" resolution. Steady American diplomacy under later presidents got the foul thing revoked in 1991.
Sharyl Attkisson Vs. Cynical Liberals
Sharyl Attkisson worked for CBS News for more than 20 years, and now she has turned her spotlight on her network in a new book called "Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington." It's a sad chronicle of how the press corps has largely walked away from investigative journalism about their beloved president. Obama's approval rating may be dangerously low in the general public, but not in the newsrooms. Attkisson pressed to get out of her contract with CBS after they smothered her reporting on Obama scandals, from Fast and Furious to Benghazi. Months would go by with her journalism only surfacing on the CBS News website.
Bureaucracy Clouds Justice on Veterans Day
The red tape nightmare of firing those responsible for putting our nation’s heroes on death lists.
Axes of Evil
In New York City, yet another black convert to the Religion of Peace named Zale Thompson went after a few cops with an axe, which mirrors the way Mohammad, himself, went about converting infidels. It also suggests that Mr. Thompson might have misunderstood those two cheerleaders for Islam, George Bush and Barack Obama, and thought he was converting to the Religion of Pieces. No doubt Obama will label the event workplace violence rather than Islamic terrorism because it was, one, violent and, two, the cops were working. It should remind us that while Obama may not be a Muslim, as some people insist, he certainly has a soft spot in his heart and his head for those who are.
Educational Fraud
It would be unreasonable to expect a student with the reading, writing and computing abilities of an eighth-grader to do well in college. If such a student were admitted, his retention would require that the college create dumbed-downed or phantom courses. The University of North Carolina made this accommodation; many athletes were enrolled in phantom courses in the department of African and African-American studies. The discovery and resulting scandal are simply the tip of the iceberg and a symptom of a much larger problem. A UNC learning specialist hired to help athletes found that during the years 2004 to 2012, 60 percent of 183 members of the football and basketball teams read between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. Eight to 10 percent read below a third-grade level. These were black high-school graduates, and their high-school diplomas were clearly fraudulent. How cruel is it for UNC to admit students who have little chance of academically competing on the same basis as its other students? Black students so ill-equipped run the risk of ridicule and reinforcing white stereotypes of black mental incompetence. If these students are to retain their athletic eligibility or minimum GPA requirements, universities must engage in academic fraud.
America's Education Crisis
An educational crisis has struck Minneapolis' public schools: Black students have a tenfold higher chance of suspension or expulsion than white students. And superintendent Bernadeia Johnson wants to "disrupt that in any way that I can." Her solution: refusing to suspend black and Hispanic students. "The only way I can think [to solve the disparity] is to take those suspensions back to the individuals and try and probe and ask questions," Johnson explained. Johnson will work with the Department of Education, which originally brought the disparity to light. Now, Johnson will have to review every potential suspension of a non-white, non-Asian student. "Changing the trajectory for our students of color is a moral and ethical imperative, and our actions must be drastically different to achieve our goal of closing the achievement gap by 2020," Johnson stated.
Democracy Delusions
When the Berlin Wall came down 25 years ago this week, people in the Soviet Bloc gained something even more valuable than a right to vote: a free market. Democracy is definitely better than taking orders from Communist dictators. But real freedom means doing what you choose as an individual, not waiting for the rest of society to vote on whether you can. In politics, winners get to tell the losers what to do.
Democrats' Loss Is Not a Win for Hillary Clinton
In the old Soviet Union, Kremlinologists would read the state party newspaper Pravda not so much for the news it contained, but to glean what the commissars wanted readers to believe the commissars were thinking. The closest we have to that in America is the New York Times. Obviously, it's not a state organ and there are many fine journalists there, but it does play a similar role for the Democratic Party, often reporting less on what Democrats actually think and more on what Democrats want readers to believe is the current state of Democratic thinking. Two days after the midterm Democratic Gotterdammerung, Team Clinton let it be known that it thinks the election was good news for it. "Midterms, for Clinton Team, Aren't All Gloom," proclaimed the understated headline in the Times.
October Jobs Numbers: If Things Are So Good, Why Do We Feel So Bad?
First, the good news. The economy is unmistakably regaining some of its mojo. We picked up another 214,000 jobs in October according to the Labor Department, and with revisions from previous months the number was closer to 250,000. Now THAT'S more like it. The stock market is on a raging bull ride too. We keep adding wealth - at least on paper. That's good for retirement funds, 401k plans and individual investors. On the jobs front, hiring was seen in nearly every occupation from construction to nursing, to business services and retail all the way down to burger flippers. But too many of the new jobs are low paying and that is a continued frustration for workers.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
The Tax-Cut Referendums
For months on end, Democrats crowed that voters were going to toss Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and his tax-cutting agenda out of office. He was pounded in the media for the evident sin of following the Laffer-Moore model of income-tax rate reductions to stimulate growth and prosperity. This reform was denounced as a failure and "trickle-down economics." Voters don't want tax cuts, the Kansas City Star, New York Times and others hollered, hopefully. Except it didn't turn out that way. Not at all.