Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, June 5, 2014
The Obama Treasury Stealing From Fannie & Freddie Shareholders
As voices across the ideological spectrum have come to recognize the need for serious reform of our housing finance system with a greater role for private capital, the nation's top housing regulator made an unfortunate revelation. A revelation which points to the difficult path for serious housing reform. Mel Watt, newly installed Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) director and top regulator of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, says that reforming the unfair housing finance system and protecting property rights is not part of his job description. "My responsibility in the conservatorship is not to the shareholders, really. So I don't lay awake at night worrying about what's fair to the shareholders," Mr. Watt said in a recent interview on C-SPAN's "Newsmakers."
The Bergdahl Deal – Five Terrorists for a 'Deserter'?
The Washington Times reports that the Pentagon pretty much knew the whereabouts of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in recent years. So why didn't they rescue him? Quoting a former intelligence official, the Times said: "Military commanders were loath to risk their people to save this guy. They were loath to pick him up and, because of that hesitancy, we wind up trading five Taliban guys for him. The mentality was, 'We're not going to lose more of our own guys on this.'" The Times also quoted an anonymous "high-level congressional aide": "Joint Special Operations Command always had the rescue mission on the table and it was entirely under their ownership, but the big question centered on whether Bergdahl was somebody you risk lives for when you still have time and space to maneuver diplomatically. ... The prisoner swap was being built up as the only option that was available. But there's been knowledge of the general vicinity of where Bergdahl was, down to how many guys were guarding him."
The Troubling Plight of the Modern University
Employment rates for college graduates are dismal. Aggregate student debt is staggering. But university administrative salaries are soaring. The campus climate of tolerance has utterly disappeared. Only the hard sciences and graduate schools have salvaged American universities' international reputations. For over two centuries, our superb system of American public and private higher education kept pace with radically changing times and so ensured our prosperity and reinforced democratic pluralism. But a funny thing has happened on the way to the 21st century. Colleges that were once our most enlightened and tolerant institutions became America's dinosaurs.
I am an Innocent Man
My mission is to supply value added forecasts to anyone that wants them. As such, when it comes to energy, I could care less where the energy comes from. I need to make an accurate forecast that benefits the client, else the client has no need for me and I get fired. So whether energy comes from wind, solar, natural gas, nuclear reactors, fossil fuels, eating cheetos, snapping your fingers -- *it does not matter to me.* You still have to know if it's two degrees warmer or two degrees colder than normal. If you worked for an energy company, hedge fund, retail company, city, or almost any thing you can imagine, and you hedged your planning toward our *very cold and snowy* winter forecast put out before the fact, then you had an advantage over the competition. That is what I do.
Grassley Protects Constitutional Turf
If Democrats don't know basic history, should they really be trying to rewrite it? That's a question some people wondered this week after Senator Chuck Schumer's (D-N.Y.) primetime gaffe. The Harvard-educated agitator, one of 42 liberals trying to scrap the First Amendment, argued for his party's amendment by suggesting that the author of it would have approved. "I think if Thomas Jefferson were looking down, the author of the Bill of Rights, on what's being proposed here, he'd agree with it." Except that Thomas Jefferson didn't write the First Amendment -- James Madison did. We all make mistakes -- but Sen. Schumer's is far bigger than forgetting a founding framer. It's supporting a measure that would peel back 223 years of untouched law. Liberals have been backing Sen. Tom Udall's (D-N.M.) amendment under the guise of election accountability -- instead of what it really is: a naked power grab designed to silence the opposition.
Victims of Progressivism
Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ("micro-aggressions," often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia's progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism's achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia's turn to be broken to government's saddle.
Overcoming Pop Culture
Fighting the modern culture on a daily basis is tough. Today's families are busier than ever and it's so easy when you are tired or just plain worn out to throw in the towel and set your values aside. I know. I've been guilty of doing it myself sometimes. As a mother of three now grown children, I've had plenty of battles and challenges along the way. And I'm the first to admit that I've failed far too many times to uphold the standards I've said I believe in. As parents, too many of us are so fearful of losing that we never try; others give in or give up along the way. Many parents don't seem to realize that in today's world, you must fight to protect your child's innocence, their childhood, their character -- and their best futures. But it's a battle that's well-worth fighting.
Dear Pope Francis: Shut Up!
I don't think that most people would disagree with the statement that race relations in America were better before Barack Obama took office. Between him and the race card hustler Eric Holder, the divide hasn't been this large in decades. In similar fashion, I believe that Pope Francis has set back Catholic/Jewish relations. Although his recent trip to the Holy Land was trumpeted as ecumenical in nature, in reality it was about as unifying as the blade of a guillotine. When Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu observed that Jesus spoke Hebrew, school marm Francis piped up: "Aramaic." To which Netanyahu, the perhaps too polite host, said, "Jesus spoke Aramaic, but he knew Hebrew."
It's Time to Say Thank You to Those That Saved the World
Here in this little French village of Sainte Mere Eglise they remember D-Day. Sainte Mere Eglise, as students of history and World War II movies know, became the first town to be liberated from Hitler's armies when hundreds of American paratroopers fell from the sky early on the morning of June 6, 1944. The people of Sainte Mere Eglise have never forgotten the men of the 101st Airborne and 82nd Airborne divisions who were killed or wounded during an operation designed to prevent the Germans from using a road to counterattack the amphibious landings at Utah and Omaha beaches.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
How Cops Become Baby Burners
The Horrifying Collateral Damage Inflicted by the War on Drugs
Will Obama Save Meraim Ibrahim and Her Babies?
As of this writing, Meriam Ibrahim sits shackled in the cell in the Omdurman Federal Women's Prison in Sudan that she shares with her two babies, Martin and Maya. This is the family of an American citizen -- being persecuted for their Christian faith by a foreign government. How did they end up in a Sudanese prison? Meriam's husband is Daniel Wani, a naturalized U.S. citizen, who, according to the Manchester Union Leader, moved from Sudan to New Hampshire in 1998. He was naturalized in 2005. In December 2011, according to the Daily Mail, he and Meriam were married in a Christian church in Sudan.
Hillary Versus the Truth on Benghazi
The liberal media consistently dismiss or condemn hearings into Obama scandals as unnecessary and rabidly partisan, and reach those conclusions before said hearings even begin. That might explain why the public doesn't always line up with that opinion. A new ABC-Washington Post poll shows 51 percent of those polled support the new House investigation into the scandalous lack of security for our personnel at the Benghazi, Libya, consulate. ABC and the Post found 58 percent think Team Obama engaged in a cover-up, and only 32 percent denied reality and claimed they "honestly disclosed" what they knew. Perhaps it is because we are approaching the second anniversary of that attack, and this administration simply refuses to account for its actions that night.
Barack Obama, Judge of Life or Death
On Sept. 30, 2011, two American Predator drones based out of a Saudi Arabian CIA facility swept into Yemen and fired Hellfire missiles at a car containing terrorist and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. He was killed. So, too, was terrorist buddy Samir Khan, an American born in Saudi Arabia. President Barack Obama promptly announced the kill: "The death of Awlaki is a major blow to al-Qaida's most active operational affiliate. He took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans ... and he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda." Nowhere did Obama mention that either man was an American citizen. Last Saturday, Obama announced that the United States had traded five Taliban terrorist leaders in exchange for American Sgt. (sic) Bowe Bergdahl. As the days passed, it became clear that Bergdahl was no American hero: he was, in fact, a deserter. He left a note at his base in Afghanistan on June 30, 2009, stating that he hated the military; he emailed his father stating that he hated America. Reports a year later from the U.K. Daily Mail stated that Bergdahl was teaching the Taliban bomb-making and had converted to Islam.
Bowe Ties Obama to Another Foreign Policy Blunder
Stuck in a cycle of scandals, President Obama was ready to do anything to change the conversation -- including, we now know, unleashing five of the world's most deadly terrorists on the rest of society. Four days into the administration's large-scale distraction, the White House is probably wishing it were still answering questions about the VA. So far, the "feel good" story of Sgt. (sic) Bowe Bergdahl's release from the Taliban doesn't feel good to anyone reading the steady drip of news about the five-year Taliban captive -- and the steep price Americans paid to return him.
Petty Annoyances
Most who read my columns think that I'm only annoyed by politicians, growing government and Americans who have little respect or love for liberty and our Constitution. There are other things that annoy me. One annoyance is people's seeming inability or unwillingness to differentiate between the number zero and the letter "o." I've had conversations with telephone operators who have told me that I can reach my party by dialing, for example, 31o-3o55. Sometimes I've asked, "If I follow your instructions, by dialing the letter 'o' instead of the number zero, will I reach my party?" They always answer no and that I must dial the zero. Then I ask, "Why did you tell me 'o' when you meant zero?" Our chitchat usually degrades after that. It's not only telephone operators. How many times have you heard a student or teacher say, "He has a 4 point o GPA"?
Advice for Presidential GOP Candidates: Do Your Homework
Good for Rick Perry. After a fairly disastrous first go at the White House, he's gearing up for a second try. Over the weekend, he told NBC News' Kasie Hunt: "I was not prepared properly." In 2012, he told CNN that the "idea you can just stroll in there and be in the mix and be successful, I think is a bit of a stretch. But, anyway, you live and learn." That's a bit of an understatement. The last time around, Perry parachuted into the Republican primary right after the Iowa straw poll, effectively landing on the winner: Rep. Michele Bachmann. She may have been the shortest-lived front-runner ever.
Popular Nonsense
"Young people are exploited!" "Income mobility is down!" "Poor people are locked into poverty!" Those are samples of popular nonsense peddled today. Leftist economist Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" has been No. 1 on best-seller lists for weeks (with 400 pages of statistics, I assume "Capital" is bought more often than it is read). Piketty argues that investments grow faster than wages and so the rich get richer far faster than everyone else. He says we should impose a wealth tax and 80 percent taxes on rich people's incomes.
Exclusive: The Story You Haven't Yet Heard About Bowe Bergdahl's Desertion
Five years ago, I publicly raised questions about Bowe Bergdahl's desertion from Blackfoot Company, 1-501 Infantry (Airborne), 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division. A few weeks after his so-called "capture" in late June 2009, three conflicting accounts surfaced: U.S. officials told the Associated Press Bergdahl had "walked off" the base with three Afghans; the Taliban claimed on its website that "a drunken American soldier had come out of his garrison" and into their arms; and Bergdahl claimed in his Taliban "hostage video" that he had "lagged behind a patrol" before being captured. I asked on my blog: Were the AP's sources mistaken? Or is the disturbing first account the right one? What about the "three Afghans" Pfc. Bergdahl reportedly "just walked off" with after his shift? Who are they? What's going on?
Obama: Incompetent or Intentional?
Even Democrats are beginning to yell ["incompetence!"](www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/democrats-privately-calling-obama-detached-flat-footed-incompetent_793544.html) And it's a nightly refrain on FOX News. Certainly we *are* seeing signs of incompetence in the deplorable VA scandal. And the rollout of ObamaCare was a world-class case of "glitch." Inquiring minds are still asking what became of a half billion dollar investment in Solyndra. That "green energy" company went belly up. The fact that many of its organizers were Obama contributors should not attract any congressional oversight, of course. Nothing to see here, folks, *just move on* (dot org). The other administration woes -- from Fast & Furious to Benghazi -- are even more troubling. A proper investigation may tell us whether or not vets died awaiting care at VA hospitals. But we already *know* that Americans died because of administration missteps in Mexico and Libya.