Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, October 17, 2014
CBS Drives Away 'Anti-Gay' Catholics
While the cultural commissars keep throwing praise and awards at raunchy shows on trendy Internet streaming channels, CBS has a series of highly-rated traditional police or military shows that get no attention or respect. "NCIS" keeps spinning off shows -- this year in New Orleans -- and "Blue Bloods" is a consistent Top 20 performer despite airing on Friday night. You won't see its star Tom Selleck at Emmy awards time. "Blue Bloods" deals with an Irish-Catholic family of cops, headed by New York police commissioner Frank Reagan, played by Selleck. Some Catholics became fans of the show as a rare portrayal of a church-attending Catholic family dealing with today's thorny issues.
Hispanics Seem to Be Souring on Obama Democrats
It's looking like a tough offyear election for Democrats, with their Senate majority at serious risk and their chances of gaining House seats down toward zero. Every party has a bad offyear sometimes; Republicans did in 2006. Sooner or later they recover. But in the crosstabs of polls and in party strategists' moves I see evidence that one group Democrats have been counting on is moving away from them: Hispanics. Hispanics voted 71 percent for Barack Obama in 2012, 20 points above his national average of 51 percent. According to Gallup, Hispanics' latest Obama job approval has sunk to 44 percent, just 3 points above the national average.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
The Challenge: Media Consumption
In today's health-conscious culture, the saying "you are what you eat" is generally regarded as gospel truth. We know it's important to eat well because it's obvious that our lives are deeply affected by the quality of our diets. How much more important is it to watch what we put into our minds and pay attention to how it affects us? If you want a healthy family, it is essential to step back from time to time to evaluate whether the media messages we and our family members are consuming are supporting -- or harming -- the hopes and dreams we have for our family unit as a whole, and for each individual.
Government Malpractice
Add Ebola to our long and growing list of federal screw-ups. On Wednesday morning we learned a second nurse was infected by the virus in a Dallas hospital while taking care of the Ebola patient from Africa who died October 8. When the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Tom Frieden, went on TV, he admitted his government agency wasn't aggressive enough in managing and containing the spread of Ebola. "We could've sent a more robust hospital infection control team and been more hands-on with the hospital from day one about exactly how this should be managed."
We'll Tell You How Dangerous Ebola Is After the Election
There had never been a case of Ebola in the U.S. until a few months ago. Since then, thousands of people have died of the disease in Africa, and millions upon millions of dollars have been spent treating Ebola patients in the U.S. who acquired it there, one of whom has died. But the Obama administration refuses to impose a travel ban. This summer, the U.S. government imposed a travel ban on Israel simply to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu into accepting a ceasefire agreement. But we can't put a travel restriction on countries where a contagious disease is raging.
An Obamacare Mess You Likely Missed: Biosimilars
Buried inside of the 20,000 pages of the Obamacare monstrosity are a few paragraphs which could create a multi-billion dollar industry in the American healthcare sector. Known as "biosimilars," the law allowed for the production of complex drugs which are medically equivalent versions of biologics (drugs derived from living organisms), and can treat deadly diseases ranging from Alzheimer's, AIDS, and rheumatoid arthritis. Not only can biosimilars save lives, the competition they create for a heavily regulated and patented marketplace can help patients by lowering the price of their prescriptions by up to 40%. The average annual cost of biologic drugs is roughly $35,000, so any savings can often make the difference between life and death. That is why the creation of approval process for biosimilars may be the only part of Obamacare that enjoys bipartisan support.
If Minimum Wage Is So Great, Why Cite Bogus Study?
The head of a Los Angeles-based nonprofit "sustainable economy" association calls for a higher minimum wage. No surprise there. But he cites a major pro-minimum wage study that responsible academics long ago abandoned. Daniel Flaming of the Economic Roundtable, in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, said: "The conclusion that wage fairness is not a zero-sum game was established by a landmark study comparing neighboring counties in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, after New Jersey increased the minimum wage but Pennsylvania did not. It found that after the wage hike, employment in the fast-food industry increased more in New Jersey counties than in neighboring Pennsylvania counties."
We're Living in Depressing Times
Some people I know refuse to watch the news or read the papers these days, and who can blame them? The headlines are depressing and no one seems to be in charge. The stock market rises and falls, playing "now you see it, now you don't" with your 401k, the Ebola virus is on the move, infecting more and more people, while the United States pretends there isn't anything at all to worry about. ISIS, which is something to worry about, marches steadily forward, despite U.S. and "coalition" airstrikes, and Turkey, which has thousands of troops on its border with Iraq and Syria, refuses to help the Kurds repel these Islamic fanatics from further conquests.
Stop This Voter Card Madness!
Let us put the forthcoming election into perspective. At least let us put it into perspective as the left-wing sees it. If, way back in the 1960s, you had wanted to gain an insight into how the left was going to break society down into a series of left-wing interest groups in the decades ahead, those groups always to be harvested as voting blocs for the increasingly left-wing Democrats, you would have done well to read Kenneth Minogue's 1963 classic "The Liberal Mind." There Minogue adumbrated the "suffering situation," the left's fanciful assortment of constituencies from the very poor in the 1960s right up to today's poor clods who stumble into the polling booth without a voter ID card or as we say a photo ID card. This poor clod may not have a pair of shoes on his or her feet or even a handbag, but what is crucial the left tells us is that he or she cannot lay hands on a voter ID. So we, blessed with our voter ID cards, are expected to have compassion for him or her, and let the wretch vote anyway -- possibly two or three times, possibly in polling booths throughout the city, possibly throughout the state.
Ethnic Aristocracies Have No Place in Modern America
Once upon a time, the liberal position was to reject the old discriminatory branding of people by the color of their skins rather than by the content of their characters. Not now. Political and career advantage is found in trumpeting -- or occasionally making up -- genealogies. Take the inexact category of Latino or Hispanic -- an often constructed identity that increasingly no one quite knows how to define. Almost anyone can be a Latino or Hispanic, from a fourth-generation American with one-quarter Mexican ancestry, to a first-generation Cuban, to a youth who recently arrived illegally from Central America, to someone whose great-grandparents emigrated from the Portuguese Azores.
Tackled by the Language Police
Wretched excess by government can be beneficial if it startles people into wholesome disgust and deepened distrust, and prompts judicial rebukes that enlarge freedom. So let's hope the Federal Communications Commission embraces the formal petition inciting it to deny licenses to broadcasters who use the word "Redskins" when reporting on the Washington Redskins. Using the FCC to break another private institution to the state's saddle for the satisfaction of a clamorous faction illustrates how the government's many tentacles give it many means of intimidating people who offend it. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, empowered to ban trademarks that "may" disparage persons, has already limited trademark protection of the Redskins' name.
Pastors Vow to Fight Mayor's Sermon Grab
Houston is home to one of NASA's most sophisticated space centers -- but even it would have trouble finding signs of intelligence in the local Mayor's office. The city's highest official is blowing past the First Amendment at warp speed -- and lighting a political powder keg in the process. After four years of forcing her extreme agenda on the city, Mayor Annise Parker may have finally picked a fight she's bound to regret. Five months after bullying her way into a Houston-wide "bathroom bill," Parker is furious that the city's voters won't roll over and accept it. Instead, America's fourth-largest city fought back, gathering three times the number of signatures needed to put the issue on the ballot. Furious with local pastors for leading the push-back, Parker decided to get her revenge by ordering a Soviet-style crackdown on area churches.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
A Bowla Ebola Idiocy
On Monday, The Daily Mail reported that NBC's chief medical correspondent, Nancy Snyderman, had a hankering for a bowl of soup from Peasant Grill in Hopewell Boro, New Jersey. So she hopped in her car with one of her crewmembers and headed over to the Grill. When she got to the restaurant, she had her crewmember run inside, grab the soup, and run back out. There was only one problem: Both Snyderman and her crewmember were under mandatory quarantine for 21 days. That quarantine was a result of their journey to Liberia to cover the Ebola outbreak, a journey during which cameraman Ashoka Mukpo contracted the disease. The authorities made the quarantine mandatory after *another* of the crewmembers violated a voluntary quarantine last week.
Federal Debt Now $200,000 Per Full-Time Private-Sector Worker
Which will be greater: the burden of student debt on Americans who went off this fall to their first year of college, or the amount of federal debt per full-time private-sector worker when these students earn their degrees and start looking for jobs? There is no doubt: It will be the amount of federal debt per full-time private-sector worker. As of last Friday, the total debt of the federal government was $17,858,480,029,490.28, according to the U.S. Treasury. That equaled $200,258.81 for each of the 89,177,000 full-time private-sector workers that, according to the Census Bureau, were in the United States in 2013.
Time for Conservative Cultural Surrender?
On Oct. 12, the Sunday edition of The Washington Post reported their "Election Lab" estimate that the Republicans will win six more seats in the House and eight more Senate seats, and projected it was 95 percent certain that Democrats will lose the Senate. But on NBC's "Meet the Press" that morning, newly installed host Chuck Todd stubbornly persisted in the usual Republicans-in-deep-trouble narrative. Based on the judicial failure to take up gay marriage cases, Todd previewed the program by asking, "Is it time for conservatives to surrender in the culture wars?" Later, Todd underlined his point: "Whether it's on abortion, whether it's on same-sex marriage, whether it's on marijuana legalization, the culture wars have shifted to the left. Many Republicans are trying to acknowledge that general public shift. And yet, it's going to cause some heartburn."
The Centers for Everything but Disease Control
So now the federal health bureaucrats in charge of controlling diseases and pandemics want more money to do their jobs. Hmph. Maybe if they hadn't been so busy squandering their massive government subsidies on everything *but* their core mission, we taxpayers might actually feel a twinge of sympathy. At $7 billion, the Centers for Disease Control 2014 budget is nearly 200 percent bigger now than it was in 2000. Those evil, stingy Republicans actually approved CDC funding increases in January larger than what President Obama requested. What are we getting for this ever-increasing amount of money? Answer: A power-hungry busybody brigade of politicized blame-mongers.
Voter Fraud, Abortion Safety and Other Phony Emergencies
Two Texas Laws Illustrate a Politically Poisonous Legislative Habit
Crumbling Constitution
Does the Constitution still matter? When it was written, Ben Franklin said the Founders gave us a republic, "if you can keep it." Few people thought the republic would last another 227 years, but it has. The Constitution's limits on government power helped create the most free and prosperous country on earth. But now, some Americans, right and left, give up on the Constitution whenever it gets in the way of policies they like. Some on the right defend anti-obscenity laws or want more mingling of church and state, while those on the left want endless economic regulation.
Ebola Is Much Less Scary Than Hollywood's 'Contagion.' Or Is It?
While disposing of a body in a mass grave, one man in a hazmat suit turns to another and asks, "When did we run out of body bags?" "Two days ago." Fortunately, the scene is only from the movie "Contagion," though it's probably close enough to what is going on in parts of West Africa right now. The 2011 hit about a runaway virus that kills millions has probably come to mind to more than a few people of late as we watch governments struggle to contain Ebola and reassure the public.