Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, May 8, 2014
What Do the Putins of the World Want?
Vladimir Putin's Russia is a disaster of a declining population, corruption, authoritarianism, a warped economy and a high rate of alcoholism. Why, then, would Putin want to ruin additional territory in Crimea and Ukraine the way that he has wrecked most of Russia? Doesn't Russia have enough land for its diminishing population? Are there not enough minerals, timber, gas and oil for Putin's kleptocrats? In the modern age, especially since Karl Marx, we rationalize the causes of wars as understandable fights over real things, like access to ports, oil fields, good farmland and the like. Yet in the last 2,500 years of Western history, nations have just as often invaded and attacked each other for intangibles. The historian Thucydides wrote that the classical Athenians had won and kept their empire mostly out of "fear, honor and self-interest."
Policing Thought Crime
In 1920, a bond salesman walked into Joseph Yenowsky's Waterbury, Conn., clothing store. Yenowsky was a tough sell. During their lengthy conversation, Yenowsky told the salesman he thought Vladimir Lenin, the Russian Bolshevik leader, was "the brainiest man" in the world. The bond salesmen turned Yenowsky in to the police for sedition. Yenowsky got six months in jail under a Connecticut statute. This was hardly an isolated incident during the so-called "Red Scare" of the World War I era. In Syracuse, three activists were arrested for circulating fliers protesting the conditions of America's political prisoners. The subversive flier quoted the First Amendment. They got 18 months in prison. In Washington, D.C., a man refused to stand for the The Star-Spangled Banner. A furious sailor shot the "disloyal" man three times in the back. When the man fell, the Washington Post reported, "the crowd burst into cheering and handclapping." An Indiana jury deliberated for two minutes before it acquitted a man of murdering an immigrant who'd said "To hell with the United States."
Supreme Court Rules 5-4 on Public Prayer
Ever since the Supreme Court ruled organized prayer and Bible study in public schools unconstitutional in the early 1960s, conservative Christians have been trying to re-enter the secular arena. Take Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). The case, The New York Times wrote last year, "...challenged a 1968 Pennsylvania law that reimbursed religious schools for some expenses, including teachers' salaries and textbooks, so long as they related to instruction on secular subjects also taught in the public schools. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger ... said the law violated the First Amendment's prohibition of government establishment of religion. The ruling set out what came to be known as the Lemon test, which requires courts to consider whether the challenged government practice has a secular purpose, whether its primary effect is to advance or inhibit religion, and whether it fosters excessive government entanglement with religion."
Thin Skins and Prayer
After the marshal on Monday spoke the traditional "God save the United States and this honorable court," the Supreme Court ruled that the upstate New York town of Greece does not violate the First Amendment's prohibition of "establishment of religion" by opening its board of supervisors' meetings with a prayer. This ruling would not scandalize James Madison and other members of the First Congress, which drafted and sent to the states for ratification the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights. The Congress did this *after* hiring a chaplain. Three decades have passed since the court last ruled on the matter of prayers during government meetings. In 1983, the court held: "The opening of sessions of legislative and other deliberative public bodies with prayer is deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country. From colonial times through the founding of the Republic and ever since, the practice of legislative prayer has coexisted with the principles of disestablishment and religious freedom."
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Dying in the Hands of Veterans Affairs
Veterans advocates call for heads to roll after medical malfeasance cover-up.
Mother's Day After Abortion
Mother's Day is a wonderful celebration -- a time when mothers are honored for their constant love and daily sacrifice, and when life itself is recognized and treasured as the gift that it is. But for many women who have had abortions, Mother's Day is one of the biggest triggers of painful memories, regrets, and remorse over what "might have been." My heart breaks for these women. Even though they accepted and believed the messages our society esteems so highly -- messages about a woman's right to choose and the importance of "family planning" -- these women have learned, through bitter experience, the truth that abortion is tragic for women.
A Mass. Exodus on ObamaCare
Functionality may be in short supply with ObamaCare -- but irony sure isn't. Monday, in an announcement that seemed to sum up the last year of this debacle, Massachusetts scrapped the health care system that started it all. What once served as the model for the President's law is now a symbol of its dysfunction, as the Bay State becomes the third state to junk its site and start over. The 2006 system, which served as the basis for ObamaCare, hit its biggest wall when officials tried to merge the program with HealthCare.gov. One hundred eighty one million federal dollars later, the technical mess was so great that the state had to shift 160,000 people to temporary Medicaid coverage -- an expensive back-up plan that costs upward of $10 million a month.
Government Will Control You Before It Controls Climate
Ultimately, it will not matter if people in government cynically promote the theory that human activity is destroying the global climate as a means of taking control of your life, or if they take control of your life because they sincerely believe human activity is destroying the global climate. Either way, government will control of your life. The National Climate Assessment the Obama administration released this week describes in Sisyphean terms the task government faces in limiting carbon dioxide emissions, which the assessment says make up 84 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions it holds guilty of artificially warming our planet.
The Left's Phantom Wars
On Monday, as Vladimir Putin waged an actual war in Ukraine, Bashar Assad waged an actual war in Syria, and a Nigerian terror group waged an actual war on underage girls, President Barack Obama announced his own war on "climate disruption." White House adviser John Podesta explained on Monday afternoon that Obama would be acting alone to push new regulations under the Clean Air Act to combat climate change. That announcement came in the wake of an 840-page report from the federal government suggesting that the globe is on the verge of a meltdown: "Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present."
Hollywood's Sexual Predator Problem Explodes
Hollywood is sick, sick, sick. Behind its curtain of holier-than-thou progressivism, the entertainment world's top A-list stars have engaged in the most depraved sexual abuse against vulnerable children and teens, according to a growing number of victims. After years of cover-up, the institutional scandal is exploding. Finally. The latest alleged atrocities involve "X-Men" director Bryan Singer and at least three other power players in the business: veteran television executive Garth Ancier, former Disney executive David Neuman and producer Gary Goddard. Last month, former child actor and model Michael Egan filed civil suits against the men, alleging that they passed around underage boys "like pieces of meat at sex parties" in the late 1990s. Egan's X-rated lawsuit exposes a cabal of alleged predators who plied young boys and teens with hard drugs and alcohol before sexually assaulting them.
A Lethal Injection of Reality
Sixteen minutes into last week's botched lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, the warden closed the blinds on the windows to the execution chamber and turned off the sound so that witnesses could not see Clayton Lockett writhe or hear him moan. The procedure, designed to resemble a medical treatment -- albeit one with an involuntary patient and a very low probability of recovery -- had begun to look uncomfortably like the cold-blooded killing of a helpless person. Since Lockett himself was guilty of such a killing, having been convicted of shooting a 19-year-old woman during a burglary and watching as his accomplices buried her alive, many Americans -- most, judging from public opinion polls -- would say justice was done. But the eagerness of death penalty advocates to address the shortcomings revealed by Lockett's drawn-out demise suggests that majority support for capital punishment depends on sanitizing the practice to conceal its true nature.
Whistling Past the Bad Polls
In March 2006, CBS News announced that President George W. Bush had stumbled into a "record low" approval rating of 34 percent. All the other networks jumped on the poll. CNN was reporting the number every hour on the hour. The survey confirmed their suspicions. The wheels on the Bush presidency had come off. Last week, ABC and the Washington Post found President Barack Obama is "facing the worst poll numbers of his presidency," with an approval rating of 41 percent, and 52 percent disapproving. It's another administration on political life support. ABC offered its own survey a mere 18 seconds of attention from "Good Morning America" on April 29, and nothing on its own news that night. The others said nothing.
Clayton Lockett: A Just Execution, Regardless
Last week the state of Oklahoma "botched" an execution. Botched is the accepted term in the media coverage, despite the fact Clayton Lockett was executed. He just died badly, suffering for 43 minutes until he eventually had a heart attack. Oklahoma's governor has called for an investigation. President Obama asked Attorney General Eric Holder (who is seeking the death penalty in the Boston Marathon bombing case) to review the death penalty.
Offensive Speech
Last week, when the NBA banned racist team owner Donald Sterling, some said: "What about free speech? Can't a guy say what he thinks anymore?" The answer: yes, you can. But the free market may punish you. In America today, the market punishes racists aggressively. This punishment is not "censorship." Censorship is something only governments can do. Writers complain that editors censor what they write. But that's not censorship; that's editing.
Coming End to Racial Preferences
Last week's U.S. Supreme Court 6-2 ruling in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action et al. upheld Michigan's constitutional amendment that bans racial preferences in admission to its public universities. Justice Sonia Sotomayor lashed out at her colleagues in a bitter dissent, calling them "out of touch with reality." She went on to make the incredible argument that the amendment, which explicitly forbids racial discrimination, itself amounts to racial discrimination. Her argument was that permissible "race-sensitive admissions policies," the new name for racial preferences, both serve the compelling interest of obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body and inure people to the benefit of racial minorities. By the way, no one has come up with hard evidence of the supposed "educational benefits" that come from a racially mixed student body, and there's mounting evidence of harm done to minorities through academic mismatching.
Moral Bankruptcy
If you want to get some idea of the moral bankruptcy of our educational system, read an article in the May 4th issue of the New York Times Magazine titled, "The Tale of Two Schools." The article is not about moral bankruptcy. But it is itself an example of the moral bankruptcy behind the many failures of American education today. Someone had the bright idea of pairing public high school kids from a low-income neighborhood in the Bronx with kids from a private high school that charges $43,000 a year.
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
New Democracy Alliance Donors Revealed
The highly secretive Democracy Alliance (DA), which takes great pains to keep its work disbursing millions of dollars to left-wing causes beyond public scrutiny, has made a foolish mistake. According to the Washington Free Beacon, a document left on the floor following the DA's latest meeting at Ritz Carlton hotel in downtown Chicago reveals the names of a number of wealthy individuals committed to moving U.S. policies to the left. Wealthy might be an understatement. The document has a list of new DA "partners" who must each contribute $30,000 in dues per year, plus an additional $200,000 in spending to groups supported by the DA. It also reveals the identities of DA "advisors," foundation participants and other individuals who are getting a "sneak peek" at the DA's activities. These partners include top labor, financial and business leaders as well as heirs to billion dollar fortunes, all of whom are recognized as large Democratic campaign contributors.
Pray, Why Not?
The U.S. Supreme Court's latest public prayer decision reminds us what an increasingly terrible time our liberals have with God. To wit, they don't really want him around: well, certainly no more than necessary, and when he does show up, the less said about it, the better. Except that considerable numbers of Americans appear very much to want him around. How to make these obsessives take their obsessions discreetly out of sight? Such is the liberals' perplexity. In Greece, New York, a suburb of Rochester, the town board has, since 1999, invited local religious leaders to open meetings with prayer. The preponderance of these leaders has been Christian (there have been no calls in Greece, apparently, for the blessings of Zeus). Two disconcerted locals sued; they wished the town to demote the Christian/Jewish God to a more generic status. A federal district court said Greece was doing just fine; an appeals court asserted the reverse; this week the Supreme Court agreed with Greece, finding, 5 to 4, in favor of what Justice Anthony Kennedy called "a practice that was accepted by the Framers and has withstood the scrutiny of time and political change."
The Oklahoma Heart vs. the Abolitionist Heart
Last week, Oklahoma authorities botched the execution of a murderer named Clayton Lockett. The execution by lethal injection took more than 40 minutes. According to witnesses, he twitched and gasped and said, "oh, man" after officials had thought he was unconscious. Opponents of the death penalty outdid one another in expressing their outrage. It was the left's hysteria-of-the-week. In contrast, many Oklahomans were not nearly as upset.
Gary Becker (1930-2014)
Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker was internationally renowned within the economics profession, but was not nearly as well known among the general public as he deserved to be. More important, his path-breaking ideas, including his analysis of the economics of racial discrimination, deserved to be much more a part of the many discussions of that subject. More than half a century after Professor Becker's landmark work on the economics of discrimination, most controversies on that subject, both in the media and in politics, go on in utter ignorance of his penetrating insights. So do laws and policies that make discrimination worse. As someone who has written about racial discrimination within the framework of analysis that Becker created, I am especially indebted to him, and wish only that more people were aware of that framework, which could spare us much rhetoric and offer some useful understanding instead.