Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Monday, March 3, 2014
My Brother's Keeper -- or Big Brother's Keeper?
Fortunately for President Obama, there is one job where his approval ratings are soaring: fatherhood. Bitter policy debates aside, the dad-in-chief has been from the public's perspective a good role model where it counts -- at home. We may disagree the views he's instilling in his daughters, but in a society as broken as ours, we applaud the fact that he was there to instill them at all. Like almost half of all kids today, having a father in the home was a luxury Barack Obama didn't enjoy. And Thursday, he launched a new program designed to spare other children that same fate. "By almost every measure," the President said at the Rose Garden event, "the group that's facing some of the most severe challenges in the 21st century in this country are boys and young men of color. We assume this is an inevitable part of American life instead of the outrage it is." After rattling off a series of sobering statistics on poverty, education, and crime, the President unveiled an initiative called My Brother's Keeper to improve the odds for the next generation of men.
The Mad Hatter Rules
While recuperating from surgery and the flu, I risked a relapse by watching Bill O'Reilly interview Barack Obama in an event that could have been titled "The Clash of Egos." I understood what was in it for the two of them. O'Reilly got an audience several times larger than the few million who tune in to his show on Fox. Obama got to tell people that Benghazi, the IRS and ObamaCare, not only weren't scandals, but were old news. The real question is what the heck I was doing watching the farce unfold. Sacrificing for my art, I suppose.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
A Health Reform Republicans and Democrats Agree On
The most important question in health reform is this: How should the government subsidize private health insurance? And both parties are in broad agreement on the answer. The subsidy should be in the form of a fixed sum tax credit. Consider the traditional way of encouraging health insurance. For employer-provided insurance, the subsidy is in the form of an exclusion. Unlike wages, employer premium payments are not included in the taxable income of the employee.
GOP Choosing Candidates More Wisely
In today's unforgiving politics, both parties often think: "If at first you don't succeed, don't darken our door again." Ken Buck, however, had another idea. In 2010, he peeved national Republican leaders by seeking the Colorado party's Senate nomination against a candidate preferred by those leaders. He won the primary but maladroit campaigning erased his mid-October lead against Democrat Michael Bennet, who won the election -- and now is chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Last Wednesday, Buck complicated Bennet's task of helping Democrats retain control of the Senate.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Ted-ious Nugent
I understand that right-wing celebrities are in such short supply that we conservatives can't help swooning over those whose politics jibe with ours. Still, should we be so enchanted that we are willing to overlook the fact that Ted Nugent appears to be both dumb and a potty mouth? Mr Nugent certainly has the right to say whatever he pleases about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but when conservatives applaud his every obscenity, they do a disservice to our movement, and when Republican politicians like Greg Abbott, who hopes to be the next governor of Texas, embrace him, they do a disservice to their campaigns.
Bitcoin Is Not Real Money
Just before the bankruptcy of the Mt. Gox bitcoin digital-money (or virtual-currency) exchange, Japanese finance minister Taro Aso predicted the inevitable failure. "No one recognizes them as a real currency," he told reporters. "I expected such a thing to collapse." I totally agree with Mr. Aso. For weeks and weeks I have been tweeting and broadcasting that bitcoin is not real money. It is not a reliable medium of exchange, nor is it a reliable store of value. It has no central-bank regulation, network operations or even centralized issuance. And because of its wild price fluctuations, bitcoin can never be a reliable payment system.
From The Comedy Store
The Washington Post ripped President Obama for making laws by executive orders without Congress. It's perfectly legal. Law professors say his executive orders are unconstitutional but it's not true, he just issued an executive order making them constitutional.
Friday, February 28, 2014
Uganda's Anti-Gay Laws and Leftist Silence
On Monday, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda signed into law harsh, anti-gay legislation. The law includes provisions that would jail repeat offenders for life, outlaw any promotion of homosexuality, and require the Ugandan people to denounce it. In the face of genuine persecution of gay people, of course, the LGBT community and their supporters are conspicuously silent. And while the Obama administration has released a statement criticizing the law, most black activists remain completely MIA as well, including the man leading the charge against the anti-gay marriage agenda in America, Eric Holder. This largely non-reaction to the far more serious developments in Uganda stands in stark contrast to the efforts by both entities on the home front. Holder, who wholeheartedly embraces the selective law enforcement agenda that has become the trademark of the Obama administration, has extended that agenda to the gay marriage debate. Speaking to the National Association of Attorneys General on Tuesday, Holder advised his state counterparts that they needn't defend the laws of their states they consider discriminatory.
Something Old, Something New
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." --Mahatma Gandhi I listen to the song "I go to Extremes" by Billy Joel quite often. In fact, as I am writing this, I am listening to it. Given my personality, it fits. It's probably why I love the weather and the challenge of forecasting its extremes; it's in the blood. I'ts also why I am well acquainted with what the weather has done and what it can do, which is why to me this whole climate fight is turning into some kind of silly bad dream. The average is a product of all events, some more extreme than anything we are seeing now. In fact I believe by making the public aware of what the weather has done and the extremes that are a *natural* part of life on the planet, we do a service by helping people to understand this is nothing mysterious, and is forecastable.
Brewer Ditches Facts to Save Face
At 680 words, Arizona's SB 1062 didn't take a yeoman's effort to read. But it was an effort, unfortunately, that few people bothered to make. If they had, the debate over the state's religious liberty measure would have been met by more yawns than pitchforks. Instead, Arizona's innocent attempt to tweak a law once embraced by the likes of Ted Kennedy turned into a blowup of national proportions. In a matter of days, liberal activists from across the country descended on Arizona and whipped up a frenzy of opposition based on what even liberal law professors called "egregious misrepresentations." The media's coverage stunned supporters of SB 1062, who wondered how the press could be talking about the same bill the legislature had just passed. To hear reporters tell it, the measure was a license for widespread discrimination -- when in reality, the only thing being discriminated against was the truth! All SB 1062 did was ensure the government couldn't force business owners to violate their religious beliefs.
Putin's Ukraine Gambit
Henry Kissinger once pointed out that since Peter the Great, Russia had been expanding at the rate of one Belgium per year. All undone, of course, by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Russian President Vladimir Putin called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century." Putin's mission is restoration. First, restore traditional Russian despotism by dismantling its nascent democracy. And then, having created iron-fisted "stability," march. Use the 2008 war with Georgia to detach two of its provinces, returning them to the bosom of mother Russia (by way of Potemkin independence). Then late last year, pressure Ukraine to reject a long-negotiated deal for association with the European Union, to draw Ukraine into Putin's planned "Eurasian Union" as the core of a new Russian mini-empire.
When Will America End Cash-for-Visas Racket?
This may be the first and last time I ever write these words: America, follow Canada. Our neighbors to the north finally have wised up to the international cash-for-visas scam. Last week, the country ended its foreign investor program that put residency up for sale to the highest bidder. We should have done the same a long time ago. Canada's Immigrant Investor Program granted permanent residency to wealthy foreigners who forked over 800,000 Canadian dollars for a five-year, zero-interest loan to one of the country's provinces. The scheme turned out to be a magnet for tens of thousands of millionaires from Hong Kong and China. But as the Canadian Ministry of Finance concluded in its annual budget report this year, the program "undervalued Canadian permanent residence" and showed "little evidence that immigrant investors as a class are maintaining ties to Canada or making a positive economic contribution to the country."
Big Brother vs. Little Sisters
Why aren't more people outraged over the Obama administration's war on religious liberty? The administration insists on coercing full compliance with the Obamacare mandates, even when 99.9 percent compliance would fully serve its purposes, and chooses to impose its iron will even against American citizens' God-given and constitutionally and statutorily protected religious freedoms. Despite straight-facedly promising that he would protect the religious liberties of people and groups and would not violate their conscience rights by forcing them to provide or support contraceptive or abortion services, President Obama has vigorously engaged in a scorched-earth campaign to do just the opposite.
Let Authority of 'Hidden Law' Rule in Arizona
Future historians will likely be flummoxed by the moment we're living in. In what amounts to less than a blink of an eye in the history of Western civilization, homosexuality has gone from a diagnosed mental disorder to something to be celebrated -- or else. Indeed, the rush to mandatory celebration is so intense, refusal is now considered tantamount to a crime. And, in some rare instances, an actual crime if the right constable or bureaucrat concludes that you have uttered "hate speech." Or, if you refuse to bake a gay couple a cake for their wedding. That was the horror story that sparked much of this foofaraw.
Modern Family?
The traditional family is dead, so we've been informed. It's been replaced by blended families, cohabitation, single-parent families, and, if the latest scientific controversy regarding mitochondrial DNA pans out, multiple biological parents for a single child. It's not wrong to declare that the face of the American family is changing (even if most of the changes have been for the worse), but it may be overwrought. The only way to sing a dirge for the "traditional" family is to define it exceedingly narrowly -- and even then, it's not dead, just diminished. If you define "traditional" as a father working and mother not working outside the home, and 2.4 children (OK, kidding about the .4), then yes, only about 23 percent of families fit that model today. But if you broaden the definition a bit to include households in which one spouse, usually the husband, works full time and the other, usually the wife, works only part time in order to care for children, then you get a majority of married couples. Among parents of children younger than 6, married mothers are less likely to be working at all, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, making those families look very traditional indeed.
Conservatives Debate Immigration Reform
A new debate has arisen among prominent conservatives over whether passing an immigration overhaul would be good or bad for Americans, with syndicated columnist George Will weighing in on the pro-reform side and talk-show host Laura Ingraham arguing against. This is a good thing. Until now, few prominent conservatives have been willing to venture into the pro-immigration reform camp, which meant that the arguments advanced in favor of reform tended to be dismissed by grassroots conservatives. Now maybe the actual arguments will get proper attention. Three issues are central to the debate: border security, assimilation and the economic effects of immigration. Those on the right who oppose reform focus especially on the first two. But the facts don't bear out conservative hand wringing on either one.
Protesters in Ukraine and Venezuela Seek the Rule of Law
What motivates people to demonstrate in central squares, day after day and week after week, against repressive regimes at the risk of life and limb? It's a question raised most recently by events in Ukraine and Venezuela. The leaders and backers of the Yanukovych regime in Ukraine and the Maduro regime in Venezuela have had a ready answer. The demonstrators are fascists, neo-Nazis and criminals. Russian President Vladimir Putin's sidekick, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, called the demonstrators "masked and armed people" with "black masks and Kalashnikov rifles" using "terrorist methods."
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Revenge: Obama's Targeting of Standard and Poor's
What emails reveal about the administration's vindictive activities after America's credit downgrade.
Raise the Minimum Wage to $14 an Hour Using This One Weird Trick!
Democrats believe they've hit on the perfect issue to distract from the horror of Obamacare in the 2014 elections: the minimum wage. Apparently, increasing the minimum wage was not important for American workers during the first five years of Obama's presidency -- least of all his first two years, when Democrats controlled Congress and could have passed *anything*. (And did!) No. The minimum wage did not become a pressing concern until an election year in which the public's hatred of Obamacare is expected to be the central issue.