Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Report: Los Angeles in 'Crisis' – 10 Steps to Fix it
The Los Angeles City Council asked Mickey Kantor, President Clinton's ex-secretary of commerce, to head a commission to assess the shape of American's second largest city. The report pulled few punches. Los Angeles, said the report, "suffers from a crisis in leadership and direction." L.A., it says, risks becoming "a city in decline." These problems include: a public school system with a high inner-city drop-out rate, where many of those who do graduate are unable to read, write and compute at grade level; the worst traffic in the nation; nearly $30 billion in unfunded pension liabilities (more than Detroit); last in job creation among big cities since 1992 and the only one of the seven largest cities "where the number jobs has actually declined since 1990"; and according the a recent study by the liberal Brookings Institution, now last in job creation for young people in the 100 largest metropolitan areas.
God and Caesar (Again)
"Well, then," Jesus said, "give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God." (Mark 12:17 Living Paraphrase) When considering what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, what happens when the federal government seeks to replace God by defining "church" and when life begins to have value, the latter having been done in Roe vs. Wade and subsequent court rulings? While there are other issues in the Hobby Lobby case argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, these are the major ones.
The Solution to Discontentment
The dishwasher is broken again. Your to-do list is growing. The bills need to be paid, the kids need this and that, your work deadline is fast approaching and you're in desperate need of a good night's sleep. Life is a constant battle for your attention. There just doesn't seem to be enough. There's not enough time, not enough energy, not enough money, not enough focus, not enough of you to go around. And it's a vicious cycle. When you can't recharge your batteries, you move slower, and items on your to-do list pile up faster. You lose sight of God. You know he is there -- somewhere -- waiting, but everything is swirling around you and when you reach for him, you come up empty. Even when you pull out your Bible, the words seem flat and you can't bring yourself to focus. It would be easier if he would just make everything stop and come meet you where you are. If only he would *reveal* himself.
Doc Dynasty: House Deals with Health Care Curveballs
The White House must be having fun blowing through its $52 million ObamaCare advertising budget, because it just gave itself another two and a half weeks to spend it. The administration, which never met a deadline it didn't like to postpone, confirmed the delay late Tuesday night to the Washington Post's Amy Goldstein. For HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the optics are less than flattering. Exactly two weeks ago, the health care boss sat before the U.S. House and insisted that the sign-up cut-off was firm. Asked if she was going to delay open enrollment beyond March 31, Sebelius replied, "No, sir." Her answer was echoed by Julie Bataille, a spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services -- who, unlike the rest of the administration, seems to understand why it shouldn't. "We don't actually have the statutory authority to extend [it]..." she admitted.
Travels with POTUS, FLOTUS and the 'Riddler'
Come on guys, let's start focusing on the important stuff like ObamaCare, Ukraine and winning the Senate. All this outrage in the conservative media about how much money it's costing for Barack Obama's trip to Belgium and for Michelle Obama's travels to China is just a waste of time. Yes, the cost of their trips, whether they're measured in millions of dollars or thousands of hotel-room nights, is outrageous. But what POTUS (the president of the United States) and FLOTUS (the first lady of the United States) are doing on their travels is nothing new or abnormal.
Screw You, Mickey Kaus
I've been thrown off my health insurance -- THANKS, OBAMACARE! -- and have spent hours and hours over the past month trying to figure out my options now that the Democrats have made my old plan, which I liked, "illegal." (I prefer to think of my plan as "undocumented.") Whom do I bill for the hours of work Obamacare forced me to perform? How about you, Mickey? You're the smartest living liberal (faint praise), and you assured us that Obamacare was going to be *fantastic*. By now, Obama has issued "waivers" from Obamacare to about 99 percent of the country. (Perhaps you've heard, there's a big midterm election this year.) As one of the few Americans not granted a waiver, I'm here to tell you: You have no idea what's coming, America.
The Invader's Weakness
In August of 2008 at the Beijing Summer Olympics President George W. Bush had a talk with President Vladimir Putin. Georgia's anti-Moscow president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had been uttering provocative sonorities about Russia, so Russian troops marched into Georgia much as they are doing today in Crimea. Bush reminded Putin, "I've been warning you Saakashvili is hot-blooded." To which Putin suavely responded, "I'm hot-blooded, too." Bush's rejoinder was "No, Vladimir. You're cold-blooded." Well, whether the president of Russia is hot-blooded or cold-blooded or bloodless, his troops are in Crimea now, and Russia still has the same problem it had at the end of the Cold War. Its economy is not quite modern. In fact it is sickly. Its growth rate last year was 1.3 percent, hardly capable of sustaining a modern military.
When Geography Matters
Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer, said of Poland, perilously positioned between Russia and Germany: "If you pitch your tent in the middle of Fifth Avenue, it is quite likely you will be run over by a bus." Poland has been run over hard and often; indeed, between 1795 and 1918 it disappeared from the map of Europe. Geography need not be destiny, but it matters, as Ukraine is being reminded. During its hazardous path to the present, all or bits of it have been parts of Poland, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman empire, the Russian empire, the Soviet Union and now another Russian empire. Czarist Russia, which Lenin called "the prison of the peoples," is re-emerging and has in Vladimir Putin an ambitious warden.
Massaging of Critical Data Undermines Our Society
Transparency and truth are the fuels that run sophisticated civilizations. Without them, the state grinds to a halt. Lack of trust -- not barbarians on the frontier, global warming or cooling, or even epidemics -- doomed civilizations of the past, from imperial Rome to the former Soviet Union. The United States can withstand the untruth of a particular presidential administration if the permanent government itself is honest. Dwight Eisenhower lied about the downed U-2 spy plane inside the Soviet Union. Almost nothing Richard Nixon said about Watergate was true. Intelligence reports of vast stockpiles of WMD in Iraq proved as accurate as Bill Clinton's assertion that he never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. Presidents fib. The nation gets outraged. The independent media digs out the truth. And so the system of trust repairs itself.
War & Peace
It seems like almost every day someone sends me pictures of George W. Bush riding dirt bikes with injured military veterans or greeting returning vets at a Texas airport. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a fine thing for him to do, but I can't help being reminded that he was the same guy who sent them off to fight two of the stupidest wars we've ever waged. What it mainly reminds me of is John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men." The mentally deficient Lennie is eternally grateful to his cousin George for saving him from drowning; having forgotten it was George who pushed him in the river in the first place. In similar fashion, young women and blacks are grateful for the welfare that the Democrats provide, ignoring the fact that it's Barack Obama's policies that have kept them in poverty by drying up the job market, promoting dependency and driving up our national debt to over $17 trillion, thus ensuring that they, their children and their grandchildren, will remain hooked on welfare, the worst addiction of them all.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Administration: We Can Force You to Cooperate in Killing Your Grandchild
Question: Does the Obama administration claim the right to force Americans to cooperate in killing their own grandchildren? Answer: Yes. On the face of it, this seems like an outrageous claim. But it is true. The outrage is what the government is demanding Americans do. The Affordable Care Act -- aka Obamacare -- includes a "requirement to maintain minimum essential coverage." The main part of this "requirement" says: "An applicable individual shall for each month beginning after 2013 ensure that the individual, and any dependent of the individual who is an applicable individual, is covered under minimum essential coverage for such month."
Incredible, Shrinking ObamaCare
Obamacare is a fiasco. Why don't the media acknowledge that? And it's fair to ask: Why don't they ridicule it? After all, in the Bush years, the press reran President George W. Bush in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner time and again, did they not? Perhaps Joe Biden at the signing ceremony saying into an open mic that this was a "big (blanking) deal" would suffice. How do we know Obamacare is failing? Ironically, because those very same "reporters" are doing the opposite of the Bush years. They're burying the story. They aren't in denial. They know the truth. They're just choosing to ignore it. They are pretending there are no broken promises about keeping your insurance plan, or keeping your doctor, or lowering your premium by $2,500 a year. They are pretending, like Ellen DeGeneres told the president, that "everyone" in America loves Obamacare.
Bullies Rule
We're told government protects us, but protectors quickly become bullies. Take the Food and Drug Administration. It seems like the most helpful part of government: It supervises testing to make sure greedy drug companies don't sell us dangerous stuff. The FDA's first big success was stopping thalidomide, a drug that prevented the nausea of morning sickness. It was approved first in Europe, where some mothers who took it proceeded to give birth to children with no arms and legs.
World Division
In its 64 years, World Vision has been exactly that -- a kingdom view on a globe in need. Monday, the organization walked away from one of the greatest legacies in Christian ministry, trading a vision to reach the world for the world's vision of marriage. In an announcement that continues to shock and dismay its supporters, President Richard Stearns closed the chapter on six decades of an incredible witness, driving a deep and irreparable stake into the heart of Christian outreach. The billion-dollar organization, which has served more than 100 million people, will, in its words, "no longer require its 1,100 employees to restrict their sexual activity to marriage between one man and one woman." Stearns, who made the decision public on Monday, claims this radical theological departure was not the result of a lawsuit or outside lobbying. Rather, he argues, it is a "very narrow policy change" -- a description orthodox Christians would challenge.
Free Birth Control and Unfree Photographers
According to The New York Times, a case the Supreme Court heard on Tuesday, involving a challenge to Obamacare's requirement that businesses pay for their employees' contraceptives, "pits religious liberty against women's rights." Similarly, last month's controversy over an Arizona bill aimed at protecting business owners from being forced to treat homosexual and heterosexual couples alike was widely perceived as a conflict between religious liberty and gay rights. Both of these debates are more accurately described as clashes between real rights and fake rights. To put it more politely, they pit negative liberty, which requires freedom from external restraint, against positive liberty, which imposes demands on other people's resources. Under the latter vision, giving freedom to one person requires taking it away from another.
My Trip to the Pot Shop
It's 9 a.m. on a weekday, and I'm at the Marisol Therapeutics pot shop. This is serious business. Security is tight. ID checks are frequent. Merchandise is strictly regulated, labeled, wrapped and controlled. The store is clean, bright and safe. The staffers are courteous and professional. Customers of all ages are here. There's a middle-aged woman at the counter nearby who could be your school librarian. On the opposite end of the dispensary, a slender young soldier in a wheelchair with close-cropped hair, dressed in his fatigues, consults with a clerk. There's a gregarious cowboy and an inquisitive pair of baby boomers looking at edibles. A dude in a hoodie walks in with his backpack.
Time for Congress to Telecommute
Few Americans have ever met their Congresspeople. They don't see them at the grocery store; they don't meet them at the bowling alley. They're more likely to see their representatives in photographs from the Daily Grill in Washington, D.C., than at a local town hall. Constituents' closest contact with those they elect comes on Election Day, when they punch a chad next to a name. This is precisely the opposite of how government was supposed to work.
Bizarre Arguments & Behavior
Some statements and arguments are so asinine that you'd have to be an academic or a leftist to take them seriously. Take the accusation that Republicans and conservatives are conducting a war on women. Does that mean they're waging war on their daughters, wives, mothers and other female members of their families? If so, do they abide by the Geneva Conventions' bans on torture, or do they engage in enhanced interrogation and intimidation methods, such as waterboarding, with female family members? You might say that leftists don't mean actual war. Then why do they say it?
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Why We Don't Need Another Pre-School Program
Federal policymakers ought to concentrate on reforming existing initiatives
Why Ryan Matters
The defamation of Paul Ryan as a racist for noting the multigenerational persistence of joblessness in troubled neighborhoods is more than just another episode of hysterical name-calling by the left. The episode represents, in microcosm, the left's intellectual bankruptcy. Ryan's comments were not just true and well-intentioned; they were obviously so. Even if Ryan were not already known for his lifelong commitment to anti-poverty efforts for all races, even if he had not regularly accompanied John L. Lewis on his annual pilgrimage to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., and even if he had not agitated to do more 2012 campaign events in minority neighborhoods, the words he used on Bill Bennett's program tell the story.