Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
A Lick of Guts and an Ounce of Smarts
I was fortunate to have wrestled under Bill Koll for three years at Penn State. I say fortunate not because of the beating I took on the mats with my 1-4 career record -- we weren't as good as we are now under Cael Sanderson, but we always were a top 10 dual meet team and dominated the east, in spite of fierce opposition from the likes of Lehigh and Navy -- but because wrestling under Coach Koll and assistant Andy Matter re-enforced the values I learned from my parents. The child of strict Italian parents, my first year or two at Penn State was like a kid being released into a candy shop whose never had a sweet before. I almost flunked out of school, but once I went out for wrestling, my grades shot up as the discipline returned. I quickly understood that if you want something you have to work for it. It also showed me why athletics can be a huge aid in education if done *right*. A big lesson for me: If you want something and someone is smarter or stronger than you, you have to outwork them to even have a chance.
The IRS Scandal Blows Wide Open
Unearthed emails reveal Lois Lerner conspired with DOJ to criminally prosecute "political" groups.
Consider Easter
Darkness fell across the land and the man they thought would be their savior cried out in a loud voice, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Soon after, he breathed his last. The people standing at the foot of the cross beat their breasts and stumbled away. From a distance, his mother and friends watched in silent despair. His disciples were broken in spirit -- no doubt confused, hurting and angry. They had followed this man for years, left their work and their families for him. They thought he would change everything. But in the course of one day, all of their hopes were dashed.
Back Any Candidate You Want as Long as It's One of These Three
As those of you who follow my hate mail know, I am opposed to running untested candidates against perfectly good incumbent Republican senators this election cycle. It will be a long time before Republicans have as good a year as this to win a Senate majority. Unfortunately, we have idiots doing the idiot thing, pretending to be "tea partiers," while challenging sitting Republican senators over fairly minor ideological differences. Anyone opposing an incumbent Republican for any reason other than amnesty is a fraud or an idiot. Right now, immigration and Obamacare are the only things that matter. Since every Republican voted against Obamacare, that leaves only immigration.
Snitchgate – Sharpton Is Still Lying
If the Rev. Al Sharpton, the bigoted, anti-Semitic, non-tax paying race-hustling poverty pimp, had any credibility left, it just vanished. The beneficiary of a lifetime of passes from our race-conscious mainscream media, Sharpton ran into an outlet not afraid of him -- The Smoking Gun. They obtained material that exposed Sharpton as an FBI "informant." Sharpton, of course, denies that this constitutes "snitching." No, he says he "volunteered" to "cooperate" with the FBI -- and for the most honorable of motives. Why would the government-hating "civil rights" leader cooperate with the feds? Sharpton told Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," that he did so to root out "mob influence" in the record business. To this, the suppliant Joe Scarborough actually praised Sharpton, calling him "a great example."
Krauthammer Against The Tyrants
Last week a national treasure spoke. That would be Charles Krauthammer, syndicated columnist, television commentator and all around public sage. He also is a chess player. Krauthammer noted that two months ago a petition bearing the signatures of some 110,000 tyrants was sent to the Washington Post -- from where did it come, I would like to know -- demanding that the Post discontinue publishing articles that deny global warming or -- who knows -- take even a skeptical view of global warming. Yet Krauthammer assures us that precisely a day later his column containing the exact heresy ran in the Post. So, apparently, the Washington Post, unlike the Los Angeles Times, will remain unintimidated by the global warmist tyrants, at least for now.
Chicken Little 'Science'
The cult centered on "global warming" alarmism is getting hot under the collar. People seem to have stopped paying attention and polls show "climate change" barely registers on a list of voters' concerns. This can only mean, as losing politicians like to say, that their message isn't getting through. What to do? Why shout louder, of course. A recent story in The New York Times sought to help alarmists raise the decibel level: "The countries of the world have dragged their feet so long on global warming that the situation is now critical, experts appointed by the United Nations reported Sunday, and only an intensive worldwide push over the next 15 years can stave off potentially disastrous climatic changes later in the century."
Understanding Our Divisions
In a 2006 interview, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said the Constitution is "basically about" one word -- "democracy" -- that appears in neither that document nor the Declaration of Independence. Democracy is America's way of allocating political power. The Constitution, however, was adopted to confine that power in order to "secure the blessings of" that which simultaneously justifies and limits democratic government -- natural liberty. The fundamental division in American politics is between those who take their bearings from the individual's right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom, and those whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.
Who Are the Real Saboteurs of Immigration Reform?
Solving the illegal immigration problem should not be hard. No one knows how many foreign nationals are residing illegally in the United States -- estimates range from 11 million to 20 million. But everyone understands that it is an untenable situation that must be addressed. The two extreme positions of the Left and Right probably have little public support -- on the one hand, blanket amnesties and open borders, and on the other, deportation of all foreign nationals who reside here without legal authorization. Polls show that most Americans want something in between.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Helping the Democrats Avoid the Victims
For a moment, imagine yourself back in 2006, at the height of liberal aggression about the "imperial hubris" of George W. Bush in the war on terror. The left's contempt for this man was rampant. Liberals savaged him for turning the world against this country. Keith Olbermann announced "the beginning of the end of America." Now imagine, in that milieu, if during the Bush administration, we'd witnessed a mass shooting by an Islamist at Fort Hood. Or a terrorist bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Or a deadly terrorist attack on a consulate in Libya. Would liberals have granted Bush a pass for any of these? Or would he and his policies have been blamed?
86M Full-Time Private-Sector Workers Sustain 148M Benefit Takers
Buried deep on the website of the U.S. Census Bureau is a number every American citizen, and especially those entrusted with public office, should know. It is 86,429,000. That is the number of Americans who in 2012 got up every morning and went to work -- in the private sector -- and did it week after week after week. These are the people who built America, and these are the people who can sustain it as a free country. The liberal media has not made them famous like the polar bear, but they are truly a threatened species.
Equality in Discipline
George Leef, director of research for the North Carolina-based John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, authored a Forbes op-ed article titled "Obama Administration Takes Groupthink To Absurd Lengths." The subtitle is "School Discipline Rates Must Be 'Proportionate.'" Let's examine some of the absurdity of the Obama administration's take on student discipline. Last January, the departments of Justice and Education published a "guidance" letter describing how schools can meet their obligations under federal law to administer student discipline without discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin. Its underlying threat is that if federal bureaucrats learn of racial disproportionality in the punishments meted out for misbehavior, they will descend upon a school's administrators. If schools cannot justify differentials in rates of punishment by race or ethnic group, they will face the loss of federal funds and be forced to undertake costly diversity training.
Do Republicans Want To Be the Party of Unprincipled Killjoys?
Mike Lee calls for "a new conservative reform agenda" based on "three basic principles," one of which is federalism. "The biggest reason the federal government makes too many mistakes is that it makes too many decisions," the Republican senator from Utah explained in a speech at the Heritage Foundation last year. "Most of these are decisions the federal government doesn't have to make -- and therefore shouldn't." So why on earth is Lee co-sponsoring a bill introduced last month that would ban online gambling throughout the country, instead of letting each state decide whether to allow Internet-assisted poker? The contradiction illustrates one reason the GOP seems destined for permanent minority status: Too many of its members are unprincipled killjoys who do not understand that federalism requires tolerance of diversity.
Holder's Race Card
Last week, the president's lap dog blew his dog whistle. In case you didn't know, in politics a "dog whistle" is coded language that has a superficial meaning for everybody, but also a special resonance for certain constituencies. Using dog whistles lets politicians deny they meant to say anything nasty, bigoted or controversial. Speaking to the National Action Network the day after a testy but racially irrelevant exchange with Republican members of a House panel, Attorney General Eric Holder said, "The last five years have been defined ... by lasting reforms even in the face of unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly and divisive adversity." He continued: "If you don't believe that, you look at the way -- forget about me, forget about me. You look at the way the attorney general of the United States was treated yesterday by a House committee. ... What attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What president has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?"
Nazis, American Style
It's no secret that the Left tends to be totalitarian in nature. Whether it was Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's Russia, Castro's Cuba or Mao's China, there's nothing that pleases a Progressive more than a dictator with his boot on the neck of those they regard as a lower form of animal life: namely, conservatives. We can now add Obama's America to the long and dismal list. Whether it's using the IRS to punish his political foes; the Justice Department to spy on members of the press; the State Department to provide cover for the Benghazi massacre; or his own executive power to circumvent Congress and the Constitution by altering the Affordable Care Act on a weekly basis, Obama has decided it's good to be the dictator.
Earth Daze
"The heavens reek, the waters below are foul ... we are in a crisis of survival." That's how Walter Cronkite and CBS hyped the first Earth Day, back in 1970. Somehow we've survived since then, and most of life got better, although I never hear that from the worrywarts. Of course, some things got better because of government: We passed environmental rules that got most of the filth out of the air and sewage out of lakes and rivers. Great -- but now we're told that we're in big trouble because greenhouse gases cause global warming. I mean, climate change. "Crop yields are down, deaths from heat are up," says the Los Angeles Times. The "Worst Is Yet to Come," warns The New York Times. This hype is not new. Alarmists always fool the gullible media. They once fooled me.
Why Conservatives Win Elections and Lose the War
On April 1, 2014, President Barack Obama triumphantly announced that 7.1 million Americans had selected a health insurance plan through Obamacare. In doing so, he nastily labeled his political opposition uncaring and unfeeling. "Why are folks working so hard for people not to have health insurance?" Obama asked. "Why are they so mad about the idea of people having health insurance?" That night, Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert sat behind his desk at "The Colbert Report," playing his version of a conservative: vicious, mean and cruel. "I wish I could come to you with some good news, but the worst imaginable thing has happened: Millions of Americans are going to get health care."
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
The EPA's Science Problem
Startling revelations about the agency's misrepresentation of data.
