Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
America's Question: Cut or Crash?
On the last day of July, with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives serving as co-pilot, President Barack Obama flew the United States past a dubious fiscal landmark on our way toward what increasingly looks like a crash landing. That day, the federal debt hit $17,687,136,723,410.59 -- an increase of roughly $7 trillion since Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009. That $17,687,136,723,410.59 in debt works out to approximately $171,575 for each of the 103,087,000 full-time year-round workers the Census Bureau says were in the United States as of 2012.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
'Freedom X' Takes on CAIR
A lawsuit has been filed in Tennessee by Freedom X, a nonprofit law firm that specializes in First Amendment issues. *ACT! for America Knoxville vs. Knox County Schools* alleges that Knox County School officials and Superintendent Jim McIntyre canceled an April after-hours presentation at Farragut High School that was to center around Sharia Law and its increasing acceptance in the United States due to complaints from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). "Public officials, and that includes public school officials, violate the free speech clause of the First Amendment whenever they censor speech merely because it offends someone," said William J. Becker, Jr., Freedom X's president and general counsel. "Unfortunately, we are seeing this trend grow as Muslim activists play the victim card."
Bride Brawl Lifts the Veil on Left's Agenda
At W.W. Bridal Boutique, it isn't unusual to see two women shopping for wedding dresses. What *is* unusual is two women shopping for wedding dresses for the same ceremony. That's the predicament Victoria Miller found herself in as the owner of the Pennsylvania shop. When a lesbian couple contacted the store for an appointment, Victoria explained that she couldn't help the women find gowns for a ceremony that violates her Christian faith. Right now, an employee explained, the Bloomsburg store doesn't service same-sex weddings. Instead of showing the tolerance their movement claims to practice, the women turned to social media to bully the shop -- trashing its online reviews and sparking a city-wide firestorm. Miller, whose orthodox beliefs are in the bulls-eye, isn't backing down. "We feel we have to answer to God for what we do," she told reporters, "and providing those two girls dresses for a sanctified marriage would break God's law."
Three Hundred Years Later, Americans Owe a Debt to King George I
Three hundred years ago, on Aug. 1, 1714, by the Julian calendar (Aug. 12 by the Gregorian calendar we use now), Queen Anne died. She was just 49 years old, but was weakened by obesity, gout and the effects of 17 pregnancies, from which only one child lived beyond infancy -- William, Duke of Gloucester, who died of smallpox at age 11 in 1700. That posed a constitutional crisis in an era when monarchs actively led governments and religion was inextricably intertwined with government. Who would succeed the Protestant Anne as king of England, Scotland and Ireland?
Attacking Achievement
New York's mayor, Bill de Blasio, like so many others who call themselves "progressive," is gung-ho to solve social problems. In fact, he is currently on a crusade to solve an educational problem that doesn't exist, even though there are plenty of other educational problems that definitely do exist. The non-existent problem is the use of tests to determine who gets admitted to the city's three most outstanding public high schools -- Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. These admissions tests have been used for generations, and the students in these schools have had spectacular achievements for generations.
So Now We're in Iraq Again ... What?
Is anybody overjoyed, rapturous, bowled over with delight at seeing the United States again involved in Iraq? No? We can move on then. The United States *is* involved in Iraq. Concerning which involvement we have two choices: 1) Mess it up, getting lots more people killed than have been killed already; or 2) help the locals to engineer something like a standoff between Iraqis able to pass for reasonable people and those who, on present evidence, might have earned censure from Genghis Khan for excessive devotion to human slaughter. It may be a while before President Obama figures out what he has gotten himself into -- first on account of prematurely pulling all American troops out of Iraq, second by sending back the Air Force to protect the Iraqi minority known as the Yazidis, along with such Americans as can still be found among our endangered friends, the Kurds.
Confronting ISIS -- 'It Takes an Army to Defeat an Army'
When liberal Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and the conservative former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich agree on something, attention should be paid. Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said last Friday that the U.S. must confront the jihadists who call themselves the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL). "It takes an army to defeat an army," she said, adding, "I believe that we either confront ISIL now or we will be forced to deal with an even stronger enemy in the future." In an article first published on CNN.com, Gingrich noted there is now "an arc of terror from Boko Haram in Nigeria through Hamas in Gaza to ISIS in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, there is a clear wave of vicious religious warfare being waged against civilization by fanatics who openly promise and engage in genocidal killing." Gingrich added that since Americans were seized as hostages in Iran in 1979, "the United States has been at war with radical Islamists. They knew it. We hid from it."
Fact-Challenged and Extreme? Do You Really Want to Go There, Mr. President?
President Obama claims that the extremism and reality-challenged nature of his political opponents explain his limitless policy failures, which, of course, he also refuses to acknowledge. This is truly rich but nothing new. Obama told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, "What you've seen with our politics ... is increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme, maximalist positions." He continued: "Sooner or later, that catches up with you. You end up not being able to move forward on things we need to move forward on. ... We need to rebuild our infrastructure. You go to the Singapore airport and then you come back to one of our airports and you say, 'Huh?' We're not acting like a superpower."
Civilization Versus Barbarism
Recently, Pope Francis declared that "the persecution of Christians today is even greater than in the first centuries of the church, and there are more Christian martyrs today than in that era." The slaughter of as many as 500,000 Christians in South Sudan since 2011 may not have received the attention it deserved. However, now the religious cleansing of Christians in Iraq resulting from Islamic jihadists' conquest of lands Christians had called home since the first centuries A.D. cannot be ignored. In a region where Christians and Muslims had previously lived in relative peace side by side for centuries, the past 10 years have witnessed some 1.1 million Christians being killed or driven from their homes. Since June, the fall of northern Iraq to the control of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has created more than a half-million refugees -- both Christian and non-Christian.
Scofflaws, Ne'er Do-Wells & Liberals
I don't think it's coincidental that the Palestinians and Obama both use children as props. Because they both know that most normal human beings have a soft spot for kids, they don't hesitate to use them as propaganda tools. In the case of Arabs and Muslims, they place them in harm's way so that they can then carry their mangled little bodies through the streets in a perverted attempt to make their side appear to command the moral high ground.
Monday, August 11, 2014
Seeking Lower Taxes, Companies Flee the U.S.
The last several months have seen a wave of American companies merging with foreign companies, a process known as "inverting." In effect, inversion is the corporate equivalent of a renunciation of American citizenship. By some estimates, about $250 billion of these deals have been consummated since the start of the year, and another $100 billion could be finalized soon. As inversions have exploded onto the policy scene, Washington is scrambling to find ways to counteract a trend that could deprive the federal treasury of tens of billions of tax dollars, which Washington believes belong to the government. In President Obama's own words, "My attitude is I don't care if it's legal, it's wrong."
Hillary Clinton 'Shoulda Stood in Bed!'
Hillary Clinton's famous "listening tour" of Upstate New York in 2000 eased her way into the U.S. Senate. She was the first liberal politician in years to discover there *was* an Upstate New York. Who knew? She then spent eight years in the Senate, the "world's greatest deliberative body," during which time she distinguished herself only by voting *for* the Iraq war. She spent much of the middle years of the decade trying to explain away her vote. Hillary Clinton ran for president in '08 against the dovish Sen. Barack Obama. He is credited with the best putdown in the history of Democratic presidential debates. Without looking up from his notes during their New Hampshire encounter, the Senator from Cool said: "You're likeable enough, Hillary."
Don't Mistake Tea Party Birth Pains for Death Throes
With, most recently, incumbent Republican Senators Pat Roberts in Kansas and Lamar Alexander in Tennessee winning their respective primaries, Tea Party challengers failed in all attempts in this primary cycle to defeat Senate incumbents. Now we're starting to hear eulogies about the Tea Party movement. But let's not confuse birth pains with death throes.
Obama: Between Iraq and a Hard Place
It took Christian families fleeing into the mountains and innocent children being beheaded, but the Obama administration is finally engaging in Iraq. As men and women are driven into the night with only the clothes on their backs, the President, facing growing criticism for his inaction, authorized limited U.S. airstrikes. Their targets: a radical fringe of jihadists determined to exterminate the country's dwindling non-Muslim population. A reluctant President Obama, who has stood by as Christians were told to convert or be killed, announced the decision to bomb ISIS Thursday night. Even then, he couldn't bring himself to acknowledge the gravity of the crisis, calling it a "potential act of genocide." After months of religious persecution, the administration's hand was finally forced when thousands were trapped on Mount Sinjar without food and water. While we're grateful to see the White House take a stand against the religious genocide in Iraq, the question on everyone's minds is: is it too little too late? Short of sustained and aggressive action, there are few options but to write the epitaph for the oldest, continuous Christian community in the world.
How About a Year-Round Tax Holiday?
When it comes to tax relief, I am a committed Friedmanite: I embrace the teaching of the late great Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate in economics, who often declared that he was "in favor of any tax cut, under any circumstances, in any way, in any form whatsoever." Friedman's premise was that the best way to curb raging government spending was to curb the government's income, and that the best way to do that was to reduce taxes. So I suppose I should be glad that the Massachusetts Legislature has designated next Saturday and Sunday as the Commonwealth's annual sales-tax holiday. Two days of tax-free shopping, a chance to buy that new freezer or computer or necklace -- or simply to stock up on school supplies, toiletries, and batteries -- without having to pay the state's usual 6.25 percent levy on purchases: What's not to like? If experience is any guide, stores and malls will be thronged with shoppers, and $25 million that would otherwise have enriched the state Treasury will remain in the pockets of private citizens. It's all good, right?
An American Caliphate?
>"I say to America that the Islamic Caliphate has been established. Don't be cowards and attack us with drones. Instead send your soldiers, the ones we humiliated in Iraq. We will humiliate them everywhere, God willing, and we will raise the flag of Allah in the White House." --Abu Mosa, spokesman for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) So, how are those isolationist urges working out for you, my fellow Americans? You know what I'm talking about. The hand-wringing and/or the shrug of the shoulders accompanied by the "we can't be the world's policeman" bit. Far better to let the rest of the world burn if necessary, so we can solve the problems we have "right here at home."
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Are We Going Broke?
If you listened only to Barack Obama and his acolytes on TV talk shows you would think that the federal government's finances got a lot better last year. In fact, they got worse. Here is the latest White House spin: the official federal deficit is only 3% of GDP -- way below the 10% figure it reached only a few years ago. In terms of dollars and cents, the U.S. government's deficit is expected to be $514 billion this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That's the number you get when you look at cash flow. It means the government will spend $514 billion more than it takes in during the 2014 fiscal year.
Illegal Aliens Are What They Are
The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans when it comes to illegal immigration is that the Democrats stand to benefit from increasing the Hispanic vote. But both are equally guilty when it comes to not stemming the invasion. Otherwise, we would hear the Republican politicians demanding that a huge wall be erected along our southern border, instead of parroting Obama's call for comprehensive immigration reform (aka amnesty).
Nature's Creative Danger
Although the Ebola virus might remain mostly confined to West Africa, it has infected the Western imagination. This eruption of uncontrolled nature into what developed nations consider serene modernity is more disturbing to the emotional serenity of multitudes than it is threatening to their physical health. Perhaps the world periodically needs an equivalent of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, a chastening reminder that nature still has something to say about what human beings proudly, and prematurely, call "the conquest of nature." The earthquake disturbed Europe's Enlightenment serenity: Perhaps God has not really ordained a benevolently ordered universe. This should not have been news to Europe, which in the 14th century had lost more than half of its population to the Black Death plague, and had subsequently endured many lesser but nevertheless devastating epidemics.