Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
The Entertainment President
For years, conservatives have puzzled over President Barack Obama's continued personal popularity in the face of his dramatically uninspiring performance as commander-in-chief. Obama seems to inspire a bizarre personal loyalty among his advocates, particularly among young people who should by all rights be concerned with their fading futures and collapsing prospects. Why do his numbers remain so stubbornly mediocre? The answer came Tuesday in the form of a ridiculous video cut by Obama with the help of "The Hangover" star Zach Galifianakis and the online outlet Funny or Die. Funny or Die is in the viral video business; it often features celebrities in bizarre skits designed to draw clicks. But Funny or Die also has a political agenda: In September, the Los Angeles Times reported that Funny or Die honcho Mike Farah had become an integral part of "the campaign to ensure the success of President Obama's healthcare law." Obama enlisted Farah in July 2013 during a meeting with Hollywood bigwigs in which Obama recruited his arts team to rally to the Obamacare cause.
Lynching the Koch Brothers: The Dems' Midterm Strategy
The Left's big gamble to distract from ObamaCare.
Federalizing 4-Year-Olds
Will America be a better and freer country three decades from now if the children who turn four in this decade spend most of their waking hours with members of a government teachers union rather than with their moms? President Barack Obama's vision of America, not surprisingly, starts with very young children spending their time in the custody of government employees. "I believe we should start teaching our kids at the earliest ages," Obama said last week.
I Do Not Like Green Regs and Scams...
It was a lot of hot air about a lot of hot air. That's how the AP explained the Senate's 20-hour global warming pajama party. While the rest of the country was sleeping, liberals tried to put other doubts to rest -- specifically, the skepticism over climate change. Even one of the most brutal winters on record didn't stop two dozen liberals from taking turns in an all-night "talkathon" aimed at getting Americans to "wake up" on the issue. But the reality is, Americans *have* woken up -- to cold temperatures, school closures, and snow plows. Last week, if you'd have asked anyone in D.C. about global warming, they'd have laughed out loud. And after Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) used his turn to read directly from Dr. Seuss's *The Lorax*, they probably were.
CBS Allows a Real Journalist to Resign
After months of pressing the CBS News brass to get out of her contract, reporter Sharyl Attkisson was finally granted her request. While that is good for her, it ought to underline how CBS has abandoned hard-hitting reporting in the Obama era. Politico's Attkisson headline was "The right loses its hero at CBS," and liberal blogs tried to guess how long it would take for her to sign up with Fox News Channel. That might happen. Roger Ailes loves scooping up talent from other networks. That's meant as an insult, of course. Only those dreadful right-wing propagandists challenge Team Obama.
The Irrelevance of Ukraine's Constitution
Next Sunday the people of Crimea are scheduled to vote on whether to secede from Ukraine and become part of Russia. President Obama says the referendum is illegitimate because it violates the Ukrainian constitution. But the president's respect for the Ukrainian constitution is highly selective, and that document's relevance is dubious in any case. It is true that Ukraine's constitution does not allow Crimea's regional parliament to unilaterally hold a plebiscite on secession (even leaving aside the question of whether a free and fair vote can take place while Russian forces control the peninsula). But neither does the constitution allow the national parliament to peremptorily remove the president from office, as legislators purported to do with Viktor Yanukovych last month.
My Family's Misadventures with ObamaCare, Continued
Back in September, our family received an Obamacare-induced health insurance death notice. We joined millions of other Americans whose individual market health plans died after Democrats lied about our ability to keep the plans and doctors we liked. President Obama tried to "fix" the mess he created. But as usual, the federal government's solutions have made things even worse. Confusion and chaos reign not just in our household, but across the country. As I reported last fall, our letter from Anthem BlueCross BlueShield of Colorado informed us that we could no longer keep our high-deductible PPO plan with a wide doctor network because of "changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA)."
War on Women
You've probably heard that Democratic Party leaders decided that a way to win votes this November is to shout loudly that Republicans wage "war on women." Politico calls this a "proven, persuasive argument." Give me a break. The idea of a conservative "war on women" is as silly as propaganda I was taught in college: Aside from sex organs, genders are exactly equal, said my leftist professors, and any admission of differences between men and women is oppressive. I was taught that the only reason boys and girls behave differently is because we're raised differently. If society and parents were to treat genders the same, behavior differences would vanish. I believed it.
Governed by Rules, Not Men
What kind of rules should govern our lives? I'd argue that the best rules are those that we'd be satisfied with if our very worst enemy were in charge of decision-making. The foundation for such rules was laid out by my mother. Let's look at it. My mother worked as a domestic servant. That meant that my younger sister and I often lunched at home by ourselves during our preteen years. Being bigger and stronger than my sister, I seldom divided the food evenly, especially the desserts. After a tiring day at work, Mom would be greeted by sob stories from my sister about my lunchtime injustices. Mom finally became fed up with the sibling hassles. She didn't admonish me to be more caring, fair, sensitive and considerate. She just made a rule: Whoever cuts the cake (pie, bread, meat, etc.) allows the other the first selection. With that new rule in place, you can bet that when either my sister or I divided food, it was divided equally.
Channeling Ronald Reagan in 2016
It's on! Ostensible allies for the last couple years, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) have commenced the battle for the unofficial title of conservative front-runner. That's no surprise, but what is remarkable is their choice of weapons: foreign policy. For the last several years, there has been a lot of overblown hype about how the GOP, particularly the party base, is becoming isolationist. So it's interesting that Cruz would seek to get to Paul's right on the issue. The first round began in earnest less than 24 hours after Paul -- to no one's surprise -- won the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll by a country mile. (Ron and Rand Paul have always overperformed in such contests, and Rand has his father's machine working for him.)
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
The Parade of ObamaCare Lies Marches On
What's hiding behind the administration's statistics on the "newly insured."
SPLC: Father of the Bribe
They say you can't buy love, but that won't stop SPLC from trying! Money may be no object for the anti-Christian group, but mainstream support certainly is. Facing growing scrutiny for their tainted and biased "research" from the military to the media, Southern Poverty Law Center is resorting to bribing teachers to force their agenda into the public schools where unsuspecting children reside. In Hawaii, eyebrows shot up at the news that SPLC was giving teachers a $250 kickback just for attending a local training session on "Teaching Tolerance." The cash incentive struck a lot of people as odd, including state Representative Bob McDermott. In academia, where educators are used to paying for trainings -- not profiting from them -- McDermott thought something smelled fishy with SPLC's offer. In a letter to Hawaii State Department of Education District Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi, he asked the office to put the brakes on the session. Matayoshi refused and instead gave the department's blessing to the workshop, which SPLC held the first weekend of March.
Civic Involvement, Not Big Gov't, Empowers Americans
Nation is rising again on the shoulders of average folks
The Left Versus Minorities
If anyone wanted to pick a time and place where the political left's avowed concern for minorities was definitively exposed as a fraud, it would be now -- and the place would be New York City, where far left Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched an attack on charter schools, cutting their funding, among other things. These schools have given thousands of low income minority children their only shot at a decent education, which often means their only shot at a decent life. Last year 82 percent of the students at a charter school called Success Academy passed city-wide mathematics exams, compared to 30 percent of the students in the city as a whole.
Who Hates Minority Children?
Just try to envision the scene: A newly elected Republican mayor of a large American city takes steps to close down some of the best schools serving an almost exclusively minority population. You know how it would go. We'd be hearing that Republicans "hate" the poor. The words "cruel," "vicious" and "racist" would circle the new mayor like sharks. News organizations would examine where the mayor sent his own children, and his hypocrisy would be fiercely denounced. It is, of course, the new Democratic mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, who is shutting down a number of highly successful public charter schools. (His son attends a magnet school.) Charters are public schools run by parents or others and are not constrained by the usual public school rules, hours or curricula. Charters currently educate about 20 percent of the students in Harlem and the Bronx, boroughs known for a) poverty, b) unemployment and c) abysmal public schools.
Stormtroopers, a Wookiee and CPAC
The first "people" I recognized on arriving at last week's Conservative Political Action Committee gathering just outside Washington were two "stormtroopers" and a Wookiee from the 1977 film "Star Wars." Some of the speeches also expressed sentiments from the past, though not as cleverly as those in costume: Obama is a bad president, even a bad man. America looks weak before the world. Government is too big and taxes too high. "The Force" seemed to have left the building, or perhaps it never arrived. Perhaps the most interesting speaker was the outgoing governor of Texas, Rick Perry, who has experienced a minor makeover. Those dark-rimmed glasses he now wears give him a more serious appearance. Perry also seems to have taken a crash course in public speaking because he revealed a passion that was lacking in his brief 2012 presidential campaign.
Ready for Rand? Maybe Not Yet
"Stand with Rand" -- a nice, snappy exhortation for sure; comparable, in rhythm and energy, to "I Like Ike." Not that Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul stands, shall we say, in much danger of becoming president, despite his straw-poll victory (31 percent) at the Conservative Political Action Conference. (For comparative purposes, Ted Cruz got 11 percent, Marco Rubio 6 percent, and Rep. Paul Ryan 3 percent, a figure wholly non-commensurate with the ex-Veep nominee's qualities). When you're young and on fire, as were nearly half the straw poll participants at CPAC, you're subject to hurling obstacles out the window. For instance, does the American electorate as a whole chew its fingernails as earnestly as Paul does over federal storage of telephone call information for potential use in fighting terrorism? "The Fourth Amendment" -- illegal search and seizure -- "is just as important as the Second Amendment," the senator contends.
A Letter From Africa
I am writing this column from Cameroon during my sixth trip to Africa. Having travelled to some 20 African countries, I find myself, like so many other visitors to Africa before me, intoxicated with the continent. And I am not referring to the animals, as much as I have been enthralled by them during safaris in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Rather I am referring to the African peoples. Here, then, are some observations. First and foremost, just as when I visited Auschwitz and the killing fields of Cambodia, when I visited places here in West Africa from which Africans were sent as slaves to the New World -- and places in East Africa from which Africans were sent as slaves to the Middle East -- I was overwhelmed by the amount of cruelty human beings have inflicted on other human beings. There is no limit to suffering human beings have been willing to inflict on others, no matter how innocent, no matter how young, and no matter how old.
Good News & Bad
There are times, I'm sure we'd all agree, when it seems that good news is a thing of the past. But if you look hard enough, sometimes you'll spot a nugget. For instance, I recently learned that in Russia, 25% of the men die before the age of 55. That's because, on average, their consumption of vodka is three half-liters of fermented potatoes every week. If my cavalier attitude strikes you as inhumane, I can only say that any nation that goes from Czar Nicholas to Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin in less than a hundred years doesn't warrant anyone's sympathy. So, bottom's up, comrades. You may have noticed that when they're not calling conservatives racists, retards or homophobes, liberals like to say that we're to the right of Genghis Khan, even though there was nothing even remotely conservative about the Mongol leader. But, following their example, I would suggest that conservatives begin referring to liberals as being to the left of National Socialist (Nazi) Adolf Hitler.
Use Tolls and Ditch the Gas Tax
Last month, Barack Obama traveled to snowy St. Paul, Minn., the same place where in the sunnier days of June 2008 he predicted that his clinching of the Democratic presidential nomination would be remembered as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the earth began to heal." This time in St. Paul he addressed a lesser problem, one within the ambit of a president's powers: transportation. He mentioned the most common form of transportation -- auto travel over streets and highways -- only in passing. Instead, he hailed St. Paul's "spiffy new trains," one of which was derailed downtown two hours later.