Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, May 16, 2014
Woody Allen & Other Pinheads
Even before he wound up sexually involved with the adopted daughter of his lover, Mia Farrow, when he was 56 and Soon-Yi was 19, I had little use for Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg). Except for "Hannah and Her Sisters" and "Broadway Danny Rose," I had never liked his movies. Obviously Hollywood viewed him otherwise, having nominated him for 24 Academy Awards, four times giving him an Oscar. But as much as I dislike his movies, I find his politics even more revolting. It was Allen who said that Congress and the Supreme Court should step aside so that Barack Obama could do what he wants. Clearly, it was right in line with Obama's own thinking, as he has commenced to run roughshod over the Constitution.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Storms of My Father
James Hansen has a fantasy book out called "Storms of my Grandchildren." I say fantasy because it seems that if you are climate scientist, or pretend to be (Dr. Hansen is actually a trained astronomer and a darn good one from what I have heard), you are allowed to make forecasts that no one now will be around to verify, and the ones you do make short term are allowed to bust and then be claimed as correct anyway. I think a lot of people in my business, who pre-date the rise of the climate science hero, are wondering if we chose the wrong profession. However, I have a real story. It ties in with the major worry we have about what on paper in the large term is a less than spectacular hurricane season. And now I see forecasts coming out that look and sound much like what WeatherBell Analytics has had out for quite some time now.
A New Level of Illegal Immigration Chaos
Those convicted of murder, assault and kidnapping are free to roam the streets of America.
Hollywood's Beverly Hills Hotel Boycott: Sharia or Islam?
The Beverly Hills Hotel, owned by the sultan of Brunei, is a ghost town. The sultan recently imposed Sharia on the citizens of this small country in Southeast Asia with a population of less than 500,000. The law includes the punishment of death for any who engages in the "crime" of homosexuality or adultery. Jay Leno, one of the celebrities attending a rally in front of the hotel, said: "It's people being stoned to death. Hello!" Meanwhile, Bill Maher, another member of the almost-all-Hollywood left, discussed the kidnapping of mostly Christian Nigerian schoolgirls by a radical Muslim group. But, Maher added, "There's no mention here of connecting this to the religion, which is always what I am seeking to do because I think that's the elephant in the room." Maher, unlike the Hollywood lefties protesting the hotel, insists Islam itself, not merely Sharia, is the issue.
Another Noble Quest With No Solution
The arrival last week of the enormous -- 829 pages! -- and laborious U.S. National Climate Assessment, a report put together by 300 American worrywarts, reminds me of a little noted fact. The American left has no practical solution for many of the problems that agitate it, and that its neurotics hope will agitate us. Put another way, the left is given to setting the American people off on noble quests for which there is no solution. A case in point is global warming or climate change. The global warmists -- mostly drawn from the left -- may or may not be right about global warming. As they say in their recent Climate Assessment, "Climate change, once considered an issue for the distant future, has moved firmly into the present." Well, maybe so, but there is still little we can do to alleviate global warming. America is, mostly for economic reasons, meeting the goals of the Kyoto Protocol without actually having signed the treaty.
Free Speech Not So Free When Discussing Gay Rights
Once, Social Security was the "third rail" of politics. Touch it and face political death. Now it is homosexuality. Criticize anything gay people do and you risk ostracism, fines, suspension or loss of your livelihood. Michael Sam, the first openly gay player to be drafted by a National Football League team -- the St. Louis Rams picked him 249th in the last round -- is being treated by the media and those in the gay rights movement as the equivalent of an early American pioneer. Miami Dolphins safety Don Jones, apparently, didn't get the memo. Jones tweeted "OMG" and "horrible" after he saw Sam and his boyfriend kiss each other live on ESPN. His tweet was quickly taken down, but the political correctness police swooped in anyway. Jones has been fined and suspended. He's also being forced to attend "educational training" to get his "mind right," to borrow a phrase from the film "Cool Hand Luke." This sounds like the old communist "re-education" camps.
Idaho Ruling Hardly Small Potatoes
If anyone can handle a political hot potato, it's Idaho. Still, that didn't make Tuesday's decision on marriage any easier for its deeply conservative voters, who unwillingly joined the parade of states overruled by the judicial elite. Reporters barely had time to exhale after Friday's Arkansas decision, when U.S. District Magistrate Judge Candy Dale sent them packing for the northwest to write the same story in a different state. For the 12th time since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last summer, a local judge felt empowered to bulldoze the will of an entire state, declaring a "fundamental right to marry" that even the justices didn't acknowledge. In Boise, the ruling stings a bit more than others, since unlike the courts' other victims, Idaho had overwhelmingly voted for an amendment that wouldn't recognize any form of counterfeit marriage -- including domestic partnerships and civil unions. Making matters worse, Dale inflicted this damage as a magistrate, well exceeding her authority and outraging 63% of voters who never believed it was her decision to begin with.
Death Penalty Opponents, Have I Got a Deal for You!
As described in last week's column, The New York Times and other sanctimonious news outlets censored details about the crime that put Clayton Lockett on death row, the better to generate revulsion at his deserved execution. You might say they buried the facts alive. For example, the Times neglected to mention anything about the raping that preceded the murdering, which seems odd for a newspaper so consumed with the "War on Women." (At least Lockett never refused to pay for a woman's birth control pills!) The Times also dropped the part about Lockett's dangerous behavior while incarcerated, such as ordering hits on the witnesses against him, his threats to kill prison guards, and the bounty of homemade weapons seized from him in prison -- saw blades, sharpened wires, shivs and shanks. (Old Times motto: "All the News That's Fit to Print." New Times motto: "Nobody Likes a Rat.")
Winning Back Freedom
Under the extremely liberal and near socialist reign of President Obama, it is easy to blame America's drifting away from its founding principles on Democrats. But the truth of the matter is that both parties are at fault and have lost their way -- especially the Republican Party. You can see the evidence of the loss of American values and freedom everywhere. We have become a "nanny state" marked by big government and outrageously high taxes. And both parties are contributing to the problem. Expansive government growth and control of the market place occurred under the leadership of Republicans before the Obama era at a rate so fast it boggles the mind. And although Obama and team have America now moving at lightning speed toward financial ruin, the current Republican establishment has America headed to the same destination, albeit at a slower rate. But the truth is, if you are headed to ruin, you are headed to ruin. What does it matter if you are on a rocket headed to hell or a train if you end up in the same place?
Modern World Is Still Premodern in Many Ways
Nigeria's homegrown, al-Qaeda-linked militant group, Boko Haram, brags openly that it recently kidnapped about 300 young Nigerian girls. It boasts that it will sell them into sexual slavery. Those terrorists have a long and unapologetic history of murdering kids who dare to enroll in school, and Christians in general. For years, Western aid groups have pleaded with the State Department to at least put Boko Haram on the official list of terrorist groups. But former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's team was reluctant to come down so harshly, in apparent worry that some might interpret such condemnation as potentially offensive to Islamic sensitivities. Instead, Western elites now flood Facebook and Twitter with angry postings about Boko Haram -- either in vain hopes that public outrage might deter the terrorists, or simply to feel better by loudly condemning the perpetrators.
In Illinois, Stark Choices
Democracy can be cruel because elections deprive the demos of the delight of alibis and the comfort of complaining. Illinois voters have used many elections to make theirs the worst-governed state, with about $100 billion in unfunded public pension promises, and $6.7 billion in unpaid bills. The state is a stark illustration of prolonged one-party rule conducted by politicians subservient to government employees unions. A new Gallup poll shows that Illinois has the highest percentage -- 50 percent -- of residents who want to leave their state. If Illinois voters re-elect Gov. Pat Quinn, 65, they will reject Bruce Rauner, 58, who vows to change the state's fundamental affliction -- its political culture.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Mike Rogers Rains Fire on Conservative Radio
Those who attack the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin -- as too conservative, too vitriolic or simply unhinged -- have that right, even if, as is so often the case, they rely on others rather than listen to the shows themselves. That's what liberals do. There are pretenders to the throne of conservative talk radio who claim to be so much less "poisonous" and stupid than Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, et al. -- and travel the same character-assassination route. Congressman Mike Rogers told The New York Times he's retiring in January to join Cumulus Radio for a national show, because "I think there is room for a more productive, you-might-actually-learn-something kind of talk radio in the marketplace." Rogers, call your office.
Prying Provokes Privacy Protection
A year before most of us knew that the National Security Agency was routinely collecting our phone records, Ron Wyden warned that the Obama administration would regret keeping us in the dark. "When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the PATRIOT Act," the Oregon Democrat said on the Senate floor in May 2011, "they will be stunned and they will be angry." As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden knew about the NSA's phone record dragnet, but most of his colleagues did not. The outrage he predicted therefore was not limited to the general public; legislators were also stunned and angry, as reflected in the privacy protection bill that two House committees unanimously approved last week. By exceeding the powers that Congress thought it had granted, the Obama administration seems to have assured passage of the most significant surveillance reforms since the PATRIOT Act was approved in 2001.
Cash for ObamaCare Shirkers
When Obamacare operatives aren't busy trashing the private health insurance market and squandering billions on useless technology, they're busy ... being idle. File the latest example of government health care profligacy under "Caution: Your tax dollars not at work." According to at least one Obamacare paper-pusher, employees at an application-processing center in Wentzville, Mo., are getting paid to sit around and do nothing. Investigative reporter Chris Nagus of the St. Louis television station KMOV News 4 spoke to the whistleblower. "They want to hire more people even though we still don't have work to keep the people that we have busy," the worker revealed. "There are some weeks that a data entry person would not process an application."
DC Schools: $29,349 Per Pupil, 83% Not Proficient in Reading
The public schools in Washington, D.C., spent $29,349 per pupil in the 2010-2011 school year, according to the latest data from National Center for Education Statistics, but in 2013 fully 83 percent of the eighth graders in these schools were not "proficient" in reading and 81 percent were not "proficient" in math. These are the government schools in our nation's capital city -- where for decades politicians of both parties have obstreperously pushed for more federal involvement in education and more federal spending on education. Government has manifestly failed the families who must send their children to these schools, and the children who must attend them.
Reid's Senate in a World of Pain
If you're wondering what Senate Democrats decided to give moms for Mother's Day, try dirty, unregulated abortion clinics. While conservatives fight to give women more protection, liberals are trying to send states back to the dark ages of health care. Their latest attempt, Sen. Richard Blumenthal's (D-Conn.) ridiculously named "Women's Health Protection Act," would sweep away virtually every state and local limit on abortion and clinic standards. For the extreme Left, Blumenthal's sweeping proposal is the answer to what they call a "cascading wave of restrictions" in the states. This great pro-life awakening, which launched a record-breaking number of common sense laws, is helping to break the abortion stronghold on communities across America. And that's exactly what the Left is afraid of. From abortion waiting periods to Planned Parenthood funding bans, the states are doing what voters wish Congress would: cracking down on an industry that destroys lives and exploits women. Like a lot of liberals, Sen. Blumenthal is so desperate to stop this flood of pro-life support that he's willing to trample states rights' to do it.
Why Jeb Bush's Turn May Not Come
What is happening to the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram is tragic. The sinking of the Titanic, the fall of Saigon, the British defeat at Gallipoli, the Dred Scott decision -- tragedies all. You can go on all day and all night listing terrible calamities and even lesser injustices, misfortunes and other evidence that life isn't fair. But you will probably collapse from exhaustion before you reach Jeb Bush's difficulty becoming the third President Bush. The New Yorker cartoons write themselves. Bush, in all his blue-blazered glory, sitting next to, well, just about anyone at a bar (or standing in front of the Pearly Gates, or lying on a psychiatrist's couch, or visiting the complaints department) lamenting that he never got his turn. Or maybe he'd wear a shirt saying, "My Dad and My Brother Lived at the White House and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt."
Mistakes & Other Misdemeanors
Over the course of writing 1,400 articles, I have made some mistakes. Liberals would insist that each of the 1,400 is jam-packed with them, but they'd only be taking issue with my opinions and my conclusions. I'm not claiming that even conservatives agree with me all the time or that all of my jokes are gems, but I can only recall two instances when I've made factual errors. The first time was when I griped that Mitt Romney garnered fewer votes than John McCain. I also fell hook, line and sinker, for the hoax about Obama's opening gas stations in several inner cities where poor people could fill up their gas tanks for free.
Marriage: It's Complicated
It's wedding season! More Americans get married in June than in other months. Why June? The timing seems pretty arbitrary if you look up its history. Some claim it's because June was named after Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage. Others say it's because in the 1500s, people took their annual bath in May, which meant they probably smelled best around this time of year. (Be thankful for modern times.) A third and more plausible explanation: If a bride got pregnant in June, she wouldn't be too big during summer to help with growing and harvesting food.
How the West Won the Great Hashtag War of 2014
This week, a picture emerged of Islamist terror group Boko Haram's leader Abubakar Shekau holding a machine gun in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. On that paper was scrawled: "#WeSurrender." Thus came to an end the Great Hashtag War of 2014. Led by the bravery of First Lady Michelle Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Democratic women of the United States Senate, the West tweeted Boko Haram into submission. When Obama released the H-bomb of twitter -- a sad duck-faced picture of herself in an empty room holding a sign reading #BringBackOurGirls -- total victory was achieved: 276 Nigerian girls who had been kidnapped and converted to Islam avoided sale into sex slavery, and the 150 Nigerians murdered by Boko Haram just last week suddenly sprang back to life.