Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Special Rules for Democrats
Remember poverty? It was once a chief preoccupation of the Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson made war on it. An entire ecosystem of federal, state and local programs has been created over the course of the past half-century to combat it, costing taxpayers more than $1 trillion annually. Yet the Democratic Party seems to have forgotten the poor. The proposal to increase the minimum wage by a few dollars is trifling compared with the vaunting ambitions of the War on Poverty. Sargent Shriver, Johnson's poverty czar, predicted that welfare state programs would eliminate poverty by 1976. Throughout the post-Great Society era, Democrats proclaimed that the persistence of poverty was a moral stain on the nation.
Obama's Foreign Policy Nonexistent
You know things are bad when you can't wait for the return of a TV character to demonstrate what resolve and leadership really look like. Yes, after a four-year hiatus, the show "24," featuring Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland), returns May 5 to the Fox network. Bauer displays many of the traits once found in, or at least expected of, American presidents and top military leaders. He doesn't waffle or wiggle; neither does he negotiate. He wins. If you think I am about to draw a contrast between Bauer and the current president of the United States you are right. The headlines are depressing: "Obama Suffers Setbacks in Japan and the Mideast" (New York Times); "Pentagon: (Defense Secretary Chuck) Hagel's Russian Counterpart won't return his calls" (Fox News); and these two from the May issue of Commentary Magazine: "China Rises As America Weakens"; "He's Made It Worse: Obama's Middle East."
Supreme Court Justice Talks Candidly About Rewriting Constitution
Justice John Paul Stevens doesn't believe anyone has the right to own a gun, and admits that you would need to rewrite the Constitution to make his preference a legal reality. And that's exactly what he thinks should happen. Throughout his 35-year tenure on the Supreme Court, Justice Stevens was a lion of the Legal Left. He was an unapologetic advocate of the "Living Constitution" -- that judges should continually reinterpret the words of the Constitution in accordance with what they, and other elite members of society, decide is the evolving enlightenment of modern society.
Justice Sotomayor: Saying It's So, Makes It So
The nice thing about modern America is that, if you don't like a certain form of reality, you can always make up your own version. It helps to have a few federal judges in your corner -- such as the ones currently busy with re-imagining marriage as an institution open, on an equality basis, to same-sex as well as different-sex pairings. Then there's Justice Sonia Sotomayor, declaring that a call for no racial discrimination is tantamount to a call for racial discrimination of a very racial, and detestable, sort.
What Have You Said in Private?
A private recording of racist remarks by the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, Donald Sterling, in a telephone conversation was released last week. Among other comments, Sterling said to his former mistress, a black Mexican woman known as V. Stiviano: "It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you're associating with black people. Do you have to? ... You can sleep with [black people]. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is not to promote it on that ... and not to bring them to my games. I'm just saying, in your lousy f---ing Instagrams, you don't have to have yourself with, walking with black people. ... Don't put him [Magic] on an Instagram for the world to have to see so they have to call me. And don't bring him to my games."
Politics Versus Education
Of all the cynical frauds of the Obama administration, few are so despicable as sacrificing the education of poor and minority children to the interests of the teachers' unions. Attorney General Eric Holder's attempt to suppress the spread of charter schools in Louisiana was just one of the signs of that cynicism. His nationwide threats of legal action against schools that discipline more black students than he thinks they should are at least as damaging. Charter schools are hated by teachers' unions and by much of the educational establishment in general. They seem to be especially hated when they succeed in educating minority children whom the educational establishment says cannot be educated.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Unhealthy Trends in Nation Beg for Conservative Leadership
A new, sweeping demographic snapshot of the United States, "The Next America," has been produced by the Pew Research Center. The data and graphs present a stunning picture of how dramatically the United States has changed and how dramatically it will continue to change. The big themes that one walks away with is that America is getting older, less white, less religious, less traditional, and less patriotic. These trends suggest big questions regarding the future of the country and what the implications are regarding our politics and public policy.
Amid Holocaust Remembrance, Antisemitism Adapts and Thrives
It wasn't a failure of Holocaust remembrance that explains why Frazier Glenn Miller opened fire outside two Jewish community facilities in Overland Park, Kan., murdering three people on the day before Passover. Miller, a 73-year-old former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon, knows all about the Holocaust -- enough, at any rate, to extol Adolf Hitler as "the greatest man who ever walked the earth" and to shout "Heil Hitler!" after his arrest. Like his hero, Miller is obsessed with Jews. Asked once in an interview whom he hated more, blacks or Jews, he didn't hesitate: "Jews!" he said. "A thousand times more!"
The Supreme Court's 'Half a Loaf' Decision
As the old expression goes, "half a loaf is better than none." And whether Americans realize it or not, that's all they got with the Supreme Court's latest ruling on affirmative action. The 6-2 decision, upholding the ban on racial preferences with regard to admission to the University of Michigan law school, was as narrow as it could possibly be. "This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. Sorry, Justice Kennedy, not good enough. Don't get me wrong. Any move in the direction of a society where merit trumps quota-mongering is OK by me. But who's kidding whom? Either the Constitution of the United States means something, or it doesn't.
ObamaCare: Here Today, Oregon Tomorrow
If it's possible to do a worse job on health care than the federal government, Oregon has. The Beaver State made ObamaCare history last week, becoming the first state to quit its own exchange and move to the federal system. After sinking $130 million into Cover Oregon, the state's enrollment program, the system's bugs were so irreparable that Oregon officials ultimately threw up its arms and surrendered. The charade of efficiency is finally over for the state, which didn't manage to enroll a single person in ObamaCare through its website -- and instead spent millions of dollars to sign up 69,000 people on archaic paper applications. As if that embarrassment weren't enough, local reporters broke a story back in February that the project's managers "may have designed fake web pages on the exchange site "to convince the federal government the project was further along than it actually was," according to KATU.com.
These Are Embarrassing Times
I believe it was Confucius who warned about the hazards of living in interesting times. I assume that was because they tended to be times of war, famine and pestilence, the sorts of things that tend to appeal to historians seeking grist for their mills. I am wondering if our current age, a time when just about everything from our pop culture to our political leaders, but definitely including our idols, our media and even those places laughingly referred to as centers of higher education, are better described as embarrassing than interesting, will be a lode worth mining for anyone but scamps like me.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
In a Tangle Over Euphemisms
Anodyne euphemisms often indicate an uneasy conscience or a political anxiety. Or both, as when the 1976 Democratic platform chose "compensatory opportunity" as a way of blurring the fact that the party favored racial discrimination in the form of preferences and quotas for certain government-favored minorities in such matters as government hiring, contracting and college admissions. Since then, "affirmative action" has become the ubiquitous semantic evasion. Last Tuesday, however, in her 58-page dissent that she summarized from the bench to emphasize her strenuous disapproval of the court's ruling in a case from Michigan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, entered the euphemism sweepstakes. She suggested adopting the phrase "race-sensitive admissions policies." Not that Michiganders are apt to be mollified by such semantic ether designed to tranquilize them regarding practices they correctly consider discordant with American values.
Why Is ObamaCare a Rube Goldberg Contraption?
Have you ever wondered why ObamaCare is burdened with so much complexity? Here's the answer: Barack Obama. Obama? Yes, the president himself. He campaigned on the promise that he would put partisanship aside and unite the country behind sensible answers to pressing problems. Then he didn't. How could that possibly have worked in health care? Easy. Obama could have adopted the approach taken by his 2008 opponent, John McCain. In fact we now know that Zeke Emanuel and others on the White House staff were urging him to do just that. Also, before he became the president's chief economic adviser, Jason Furman wrote a paper in which he endorsed a McCain-type approach to health reform. Since McCain's approach was more progressive than ObamaCare, it would have been easy to garner support on the left. And how many Republicans would have opposed the plan, after campaigning for McCain and defending his health plan during the election?
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Anti-Business Obama Strikes Again
When President Obama holds back approval of the Keystone pipeline, for the umpteenth time, it's bad enough that he's politically pandering to Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire and manic radical opponent of fossil fuels. If he gives in to Steyer by blocking the pipeline, Steyer gives $100 million to Democratic candidates this fall. Obama's transparent political cynicism is incredible. But it's more than that. It shows his disregard for jobs and economic growth for blue-collar union workers who used to be Democrats. It shows his utter disregard for our loyal Canadian ally up north. And it sends the wrong signal to Vladimir Putin, who probably believes the U.S. will not undermine Russia with energy independence and oil and gas exports while Obama is in office.
America Is the New Jew
For thousands of years, the Jew has served the world as its most popular scapegoat. If crops failed, a battle was lost or an economy tanked, tyrants would invariably blame it on the Jews. Adolf Hitler wasn't the first and he hasn't been the last. Throughout the Middle East, whatever troubles beset an Arab or Muslim nation, you can bet that the resident kingpins are blaming it on Israel. But in more recent years, the United States has become a target. When the economy bottomed out under Venezuela, Hugo Chavez blamed the U.S. When Iran has trouble building a nuclear bomb or Syria's al-Assad has a problem defeating the rebels, they blame us and the Israelis. When the world speaks out against Putin's attempts to restore the Soviet Empire and the Russian economy finds itself in the toilet, he blames America.
From The Comedy Store
Obama's tax return says his income fell a hundred fifty thousand dollars last year. He made three hundred grand less than the year before that. While other politicians just talk about economic decline under this administration, President Obama leads by example.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Getting Housing Finance Reform Right
A critical vote may await the Senate upon its return next week. The Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee is scheduled to vote on a massive proposal to overhaul the nation's mortgage finance market. Yet the draft language released by the authors -- Chairman Tim Johnson (D-SD) and Ranking Member Mike Crapo (R-ID) -- has raised concerns across the political spectrum. Organizations and individuals at polar ends of the political landscape, from Ralph Nader on the left to the Independent Community Bankers Association on the right, and from the right-leaning 60 Plus to the left-leaning NAACP, have all voiced objection to parts of this mammoth legislation. Others, such as HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and the National Association of Realtors have been more supportive of the bill. Who is right and what should Senators do?
A Not-So-Wise Latina Justice
Justice Sonia Sotomayor this week took the unusual step of reading her dissent in a case involving state-sponsored affirmative action in Michigan. In doing so, she showed herself not only petulant to be on the losing side in a 6-2 decision, but unable to divorce her legal reasoning from her own sense of racial grievance. It was an embarrassing but predictable performance. In 2009, I was one of a handful of witnesses who testified against Sotomayor's confirmation before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I did so with sadness, because there is much to admire in Sotomayor's personal history.
God Movies Make Money
The accountants in Hollywood don't have to believe in heaven to notice the box office numbers on recent movies with religious themes. "Heaven Is for Real" opened in the days before Easter and grossed more than $22 million, coming in second for the weekend, just $3 million behind the latest "Captain America" blockbuster (in its third week). The movie's per-screen average -- $8,895 -- was far above the rest of the top five. "Heaven Is for Real," like many movies, is based on a best-selling book. It's a real-life story about 4-year-old Colton Burpo and his visions of heaven after an emergency surgery in 2003. Within three weeks of its November 2010 release, the book debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times best-seller list. Eventually, it made its way to No. 1.
There's No Plan B for Obama's Foreign Policy
I think we all know what Barack Obama's foreign policy strategy coming into office was. Step 1: Be Barack Obama (and not George W. Bush). Step 2: ???? Step 3: World peace!