Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Obama's Economic Propaganda Has a Limited Shelf Life
Democrats have continued to stoke their phony "war on women" issue and racial politics this election cycle because it's all they've got. President Obama's domestic policy and foreign policy are in shambles, and they know it. In the most recent two national elections (2010, 2012), Democrats used the race and gender cards, to be sure, but they talked up the economy and health care more than they're doing now. They completely distorted those issues, but today they must have discovered that their propaganda just won't prevail against the brutal realities people are experiencing.
Choices We Don't Want Women to Make
Mary McCarthy once famously skewered fellow writer Lillian Hellman as "tremendously overrated, a bad writer, a dishonest writer... Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" It created quite a stir at the time (1980) and led, as nearly every breeze ruffling so much as a feather in America often does, to a lawsuit. I think of McCarthy because President Obama's record for wrongheadedness is about as reliable as Hellman's was for dishonesty. (Hellman was a Stalinist, so calling her a liar was redundant.) Speaking to a Rhode Island College group last week, the president uttered a gaffe that opened a window to his stale, doctrinaire thinking.
Democrats Playing the Race 'Deck' in Midterm Elections
Forget the race "card." In this election, Democrats have been playing the entire race "deck." The Wall Street Journal has listed some of the more outrageous ads and flyers designed to frighten African-Americans into believing that all opposition to President Obama's policies and to the Democratic Party is a sign that lynch mobs may soon return. The milder stuff includes a letter to black voters from the Democratic National Committee appealing for racial solidarity. Imagine the response if Republicans asked for racial solidarity from white people.
John Lennon, Che Guevara & Me
When the Beatles were at the height of their popularity, John Lennon said that they were more famous than Jesus. It infuriated a great many Christians, but I just thought it was simply the latest in a series of inane and egomaniacal statements he delighted in making. He was, after all, a liberal zealot, and I have noted through the years that the richer these people are, the more strident they are in their opposition to capitalism and the more separated they are from reality. In much the same way the more power that politicians have over the people who elect them, the more they pretend to be populists. Which is why anytime I hear a wealthy politician of either party brag about his humble beginnings, the less likely I am to ever vote for the schmuck.
Voter Fraud and Voter I.D.
One of the biggest voter frauds may be the idea promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder and others that there is no voter fraud, that laws requiring voters to have a photo identification are just attempts to suppress black voting. Reporter John Fund has written three books on voter fraud and a recent survey by Old Dominion University indicates that there are more than a million registered voters who are not citizens, and who therefore are not legally entitled to vote. The most devastating account of voter fraud may be in the book "Injustice" by J. Christian Adams. He was a Justice Department attorney, who detailed with inside knowledge the voter frauds known to the Justice Department, and ignored by Attorney General Holder and Company.
Obama Will Leave the Democrats in Shambles
Before the election results are in, and keeping in mind that there may be some unpleasant surprises for one party or the other -- or both -- it's possible to assess how the Democratic Party has fared under the leadership of President Obama. To summarize the verdict: not so well. By one metric it has done very badly indeed. When Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, there were 257 Democrats in the House of Representatives. Going into this election there are 201 (including two vacant Democratic seats). Psephologists universally agree Democrats will suffer a net loss of House seats, for reasons explained in an earlier column in this space. That will leave them with a number probably somewhere in the 190s.
Dead and Paralyzed American Children DEMAND Answers
On Oct. 7 the Patriot Post published my column, "Enterovirus D68: A Call to Arms." It was a plea aimed investigative journalists and dedicated epidemiologists, asking them to determine whether what is now known as the EVD-68 enterovirus could be directly attributed to the massive influx of illegal alien children orchestrated by the Obama administration last summer. My call has been partially answered. "The deadly EV-D68 enterovirus epidemic, which struck thousands of kids this fall, was likely propelled through America by President Barack Obama's decision to allow tens of thousands of Central Americans across the Texas border, according to a growing body of genetic and statistical evidence," reports the Daily Caller.
Monday, November 3, 2014
Well-Financed Democrat Lies Won't Confuse Blacks This Time
Some call the fear and hate ad campaigns being orchestrated by Democratic Party supporters to boost black turnout in next Tuesday's congressional elections desperation. I call it pathetic. The way for a Party to get support is to deliver success. When there is no record of success, lies, distortion, and fear become the operative tools, in hope that uninformed voters will buy the garbage.
How Democrats Plan to Create Jobs
Conventional wisdom says that Democrats wanted to campaign this year on jobs and the economy. They were supposedly thrown off message by ISIS and the Ebola scare. But if voters re-focus on jobs and the economy, do the Democrats have a credible plan to offer them? I tried to find out. To begin with, the Democrats have a terrible record to defend.
Upsetting the Apple Cart
Apple's old logo was colored by the rainbow -- and it looks like their top management still is. Three years after taking the company over for an ailing Steve Jobs, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed what many people suspected: he identifies as a homosexual. Cook, the head of the tech world's colossus, said he made the announcement because his predecessor had urged him to "be himself" as the company's chief executive. "While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven't publicly acknowledged it either, until now," writes Cook. "So let me be clear: I'm proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me." Of course, the news was greeted with a huge round of media applause, as words of support and encouragement continue to pour in from the corporate world.
No Wonder Voters Like a Candidate Who Knows How to Castrate Hogs
One of the year's most effective campaign ads was first aired last March by Iowa Republican Joni Ernst, then a relatively unknown candidate for the US Senate. "I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm," says Ernst in the spot, which opens with her standing amid the stalls of a pig shed. "So when I get to Washington, I'll know how to cut pork." *That* got attention. The ad went viral on YouTube. Talk shows and cable news found it irresistible. Satirists like Stephen Colbert had a field day. (Colbert said he was pulling for Ernst "whole hog, or whatever's left of the hog when she's done.")
Sunday, November 2, 2014
A Return to the JFK-Reagan Economic Model
Election Day will produce a new Republican Congress, or so the latest polls tell us. If so, the huge losses for the Obama Democrats -- both in 2010 and this year -- will have come in large measure from the economic failures of a party that has moved radically left over the past 20 years. Hillary Clinton just argued that corporations and businesses don't create jobs, and that a higher minimum wage and other government actions do. It showcases just how far the Democrats have moved left since her husband, working with a Republican Congress, launched pro-growth supply-side policies like free trade, welfare reform, lower investment tax rates, limited spending and a strong dollar.
The Stakes on Tuesday
Mix a pitcher of martinis Tuesday evening to fortify yourself against the torrent of election returns painting a pointillist portrait of the nation's mind. Before you become too mellow to care, consider some indexes of our civic tendencies. Voting began, and "persuasion campaigning" receded, weeks ago. Mobilization measures became more important than ads. Saturation spending on ads makes for a steep decline in the utility of the last dollars spent on them. In the 2012 presidential race, $46 million was spent on 56,837 ads in Las Vegas; $30 million was spent on 39,259 in Columbus, Ohio. Ads become audible wallpaper, there but not really noticed.
Ice Buckets & Oracles
Let me confess that, aside from donating time or money, I rarely understand the odd things done on behalf of charities. For instance, even decades ago when I was an advertising copywriter, my fellow workers would often ask me to donate money based on how far they walked or ran on the weekend. I understood the part about donating, but I couldn't fathom why the distance they covered should have anything to do with the amount. These days, a great many people are allowing themselves to be doused with a large bucket of ice water as a way to help finance one cause or another. Although I admit to experiencing a certain *joie de vivre* each and every time I see some left-wing show biz celebrity being given an ice bath, I fail to see the connection to charity.
Obama Soaks the Rich, Drowns the Middle Class
The curse of the U.S. economy today is the downward trend in "take-home pay." This is the most crucial economic indicator for most Americans, but when President Obama said in a recent speech at Northwestern that nearly every economic measure shows improvement from five years ago, he conspicuously left this one out. Most workers' pay has not kept up with inflation for at least six years. Even as hiring picked up over the past year, wages and salaries have inched up by 2%, barely ahead of inflation. This probably explains why half of Americans say the recession never ended. They are experiencing what Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen last week described as "stagnant living standards for the majority."
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Reinflating the Housing Bubble
The headline in newspapers one recent weekend read like an April Fool's joke, but it wasn't April 1. The Obama administration announced it wants to provide a little more juice to the now-lackluster housing market by bending the home lending rules to make it easier for banks to make loans and marginal buyers to take on a mortgage. One of the big changes: The Federal Housing Finance Agency will lower down payment requirements from an already absurdly low 5 percent to a ridiculously low 3 percent on many loans that are eligible for federal mortgage insurance assistance.
From The Comedy Store
The White House sent a thousand more U.S. troops to West Africa to help the locals deal with Ebola epidemic. It's a scary mission. Back when Barack Obama campaigned for president on bringing the country free health care, he didn't mention that the country is Liberia.
Friday, October 31, 2014
Holder Pushing to Oust Ferguson Police Chief?
While the lynch mob promises death and destruction if an indictment isn’t delivered.
Hillary Clinton's Anti-Business Rhetoric Shows Her Radical Roots
Hillary Clinton is getting deservedly attacked for her imbecilic statement at a Democratic political gathering in Massachusetts on Friday about business and jobs. "Don't let anybody tell you that, ah, you know, it's corporations and businesses that create jobs," she preached, to loud applause. "You know that old theory, trickle-down economics. That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly." It may not be too surprising that Hillary can't connect the dots that it takes an employer to create an employee to create wages and salaries.
Houston: Still Haunted by the Passed
It may be Halloween, but even Mayor Annise Parker can't mask her real agenda. The Houston leader couldn't have been clearer [Wednesday] that while she may have withdrawn the churches' subpoenas, she has no intention of withdrawing from the battle over fundamental democracy. Remember, this whole saga began when the Mayor pushed a bad special rights ordinance, which morphed into a voting rights violation when she discarded over 30,000 signed citizen petitions. From there, it mushroomed into an attack on the First Amendment, and pastors started to challenge her totalitarian rule. "I didn't do this to satisfy them," an indignant Parker said. "I did it because it was not serving Houston."