Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
When Push Comes to Pulpit...
Congress has its hands full keeping the Obama administration in check, and in most Americans' opinion, leaders could use some help -- from the church. The key to confronting the President's agenda may be as simple as encouraging more pastors to speak out. So said 61% of Americans surveyed in FRC's latest poll -- the results of which we announced yesterday at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention (NRB) in Nashville. With Christianity under attack as never before, the country is looking to its spiritual leaders to engage in the fight. As our First Freedom, religious liberty serves as the foundation for all other freedoms -- which will all be at risk if it crumbles. If pastors would just speak to the issues from a redemptive heart, most people agree that we would see this country turn around.
Where Is Our Shame?
Clive Crook, who for many years was a senior editor at The Economist, wrote the other day that he used to think his finest moment at the magazine was in June 2000, when he approved what became one of the most memorable covers in the publication's history -- a photo of North Korea's ruler Kim Jong Il, "looking wonderfully absurd" as he waved stiffly to an audience. The headline above the picture: "Greetings, earthlings." Now, having read the new UN report on the Kim regime's institutionalized barbarity, Crook feels a "pang of shame" at the thought of that cover. North Korea jokes no longer seem so funny.
Ted Nugent Apologized – When Will Spike Lee?
Ted Nugent apologized. Now it's Spike Lee's turn. Rocker Ted Nugent, a Republican and a fierce defender of the Second Amendment, said this about President Obama: "I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame, enough Americans to be ever-vigilant not to let a Chicago communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America."
Is Cruz Out of Control?
What you think of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) depends on who you believe. Is the freshman senator on an "ego trip," putting himself before country (Dana Milbank, The Washington Post), or is he standing on his principles (Cruz's conservative supporters)? ABC chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl says Cruz is "so hated" among GOP senators that "he's going to need a food taster."
New Benghazi Witnesses
National Security Advisor Susan Rice appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday and said that when she had appeared on several news outlets back in September 2012 to state that the attack on an American diplomatic installation in Benghazi was a "spontaneous reaction" to an American-made film that appeared on YouTube she had used "the best information we [the White House] had at the time." Senator John McCain responded to her statement Sunday that it left him "almost speechless."
Perfect Climate for Liberals
The many jaundiced assessments of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on the fifth anniversary of its enactment were understandable, given that the sluggish recovery, now drowsing through the second half of its fifth year, is historically anemic. Still, bleak judgments about the stimulus spending miss the main point of it, which was to funnel a substantial share of its money to unionized, dues-paying, Democratic-voting government employees. Hence the stimulus succeeded. So there. This illustrates why it is so sublime to be a liberal nowadays. Viewed through the proper prism, most liberal policies succeed because they can hardly fail. Each achieves one or both of two objectives -- making liberals feel good about themselves and being good to liberal candidates.
Oscars & Other Frauds
As you may have heard, an Academy Award nomination for the title song from the movie "Alone Yet Not Alone" has been rescinded. Naturally, even the Motion Picture Academy lacked the nerve to say it was because the song and the low-budget film promoted Christian values. Instead, they insisted it was because emails had been used to help promote the song to Academy voters. That's the sort of bald-faced lie that should even have secular liberals in Hollywood chuckling. The fact is that everyone in Hollywood campaigns for nominations and awards. It would take a Jesuit to explain why it is okay to mail DVDs to voters and to take out any number of ads in the Hollywood trade papers, but employing the far less expensive alternative of emails is strictly verboten.
America's Quiver of Outrage Is Empty
Don't step over the line and re-militarize the Rhineland. Absorbing Austria would cross a red line. Breaking up Czechoslovakia is unacceptable. Get out of Poland by the announced deadline. The rest was history. Don't dare blow up another American military barracks overseas. Don't ever consider another attack on the World Trade Center. Don't even try blowing up one more American embassy in East Africa. Don't ever put a hole in a U.S. warship again. The rest was history. President Obama issued yet another one of those sorts of warnings to stop the violence to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych just before protestors drove him out of office. "There will be consequences if people step over the line," Obama threatened.
Beating the Spring Break Status Quo
Amidst the freezing temperatures across the country, Spring Break plans are well underway. And, unless your head has been in the sand or the clouds for the last few years, we all know what the typical college, or even high school, spring break entails. So many of our sons and daughters get swept up into wild parties and regrettable decisions. The culture tells them that drinking and "hooking up" are the best ways to make memories and unwind from the stress of school. Instead, many of them end up with broken hearts.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Piers Morgan Is the American Left
This week, CNN's Piers Morgan announced that "Piers Morgan Live" would be coming to an ignominious end sometime in March. His replacement has not yet been chosen. But his television demise came not a moment too soon for millions of Americans who had tired of his sneering nastiness. The New York Times chose not to see it that way. Instead, the Times insisted, Morgan's problem sprang from his British accent and heritage: "Old hands in the television news business suggest that there are two things a presenter cannot have: an accent or a beard ... Mr. Morgan is clean shaven and handsome enough, but there are tells in his speech -- the way he says the president's name for one thing (Ob-AA-ma) -- that suggest that he is not from around here."
Alec Baldwin, Drama Queen
Bad boy-turned-bellyacher Alec Baldwin threw a 5,000-word, seven-page pity party for himself in the entertainment media he says he abhors. Hey, what better way for a Hollywood narcissist to protest the attention-starved shallowness of celebrity life than to wallow in it to the bitter end? The rage-filled actor's bloated face is on the cover of New York magazine this week next to the headline "I Give Up." Inside, his rambling and nutty "as told to" confessional bids adieu to "public life." Baldwin seethes about, well, everything.
Indefinite Detention of Sex Offenders Flouts the Rule of Law
Although Macon Baker completed his prison sentence in 2006, the state of Missouri kept him behind bars, repeatedly trying to commit him as a "sexually violent predator." After three juries deadlocked on the question of whether Baker suffers from a "mental abnormality" that makes him "more likely than not" to commit new sex crimes after he is released, a fourth jury on Friday unanimously agreed he does not. In effect, the state retroactively extended Baker's sentence from 10 years to 17. The military prison at Guantanamo Bay is notorious as a place where people can be held indefinitely without charge because the usual rules of criminal justice do not apply. Twenty states have their own versions of Guantanamo Bay for sex offenders, a fact that attracts little attention and generates little outrage because the detainees are even less sympathetic than suspected terrorists.
Eric Holder Is Wrong Because MLK Was Right
Attorney General Eric Holder is now arguing that state attorney generals who refuse to defend provisions in their state constitutions restricting marriage to the union of one man and one woman are following in the footsteps of the civil rights movement. "Mr. Holder has said he views today's gay-rights campaigns as a continuation of the civil rights movement that won rights for black Americans in the 1950s and '60s," the New York Times reported Tuesday. Holder provided an example of what the Times was talking about when he spoke earlier this month at a dinner sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's most prominent advocate of same-sex marriage.
Discrimination Is in the Eye of the Holder
There are few people less qualified to give career advice than Attorney General Eric Holder. But that didn't stop the first sitting Cabinet member ever to be held in contempt of Congress from delivering a lesson in lawlessness to the states. On the eve of the National Association of Attorneys General conference, Holder -- a five-year case study in "what not to do" -- felt compelled to give the AGs some unsolicited advice in one area he knows plenty about: dereliction of duty.
Want an America That Works? Innovate, Don't Regulate
Down with stakeholders. The American Academy of Pediatrics has come out against affordable health care for kids. Retail medical clinics -- at drugstores, Walmarts, etc. -- are cropping up across the nation, thanks in part to the expected longer waiting times and out-of-pocket expenses stemming from Obamacare. And the pediatricians don't like it. "While retail clinics may be more convenient and less costly, the AAP said they are detrimental to the concept of a 'medical home,' where patients have a personal physician who knows them well and coordinates all their care," reported the Wall Street Journal. You say "medical home," I say locked-in customers. Tomayto-tomahto.
Codgers Freaking Out
America's most popular cable news host is upset. "Marijuana use, video games and texting (are) creating major social problems," says Bill O'Reilly. "This is an epidemic that will lead to a weaker nation!" Give me a break. Crotchety old geezers always complain about "the kids." The Boston Globe frets about "Idle Trophy Kids." The New York Post asks if millennials are "The Worst Generation?" Older folks (my age) complain that young people spend so much time texting each other that they can't communicate. And because they spend hours playing violent video games, violence is up.
Solutions to Black Education
A fortnight ago, my column focused on how Philadelphia's schoolteachers have joined public-school teachers in cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, Columbus, New York and Washington in changing student scores on academic achievement tests. Teachers have held grade fixing parties, sometimes wearing rubber gloves to hide fingerprints. In some cases, poorly performing students were excused from taking exams to prevent them from dragging down averages. As a result of investigations, a number of schoolteachers and administrators have been suspended, fired or indicted by states attorneys general. Most of these cheating scandals have occurred in predominantly black schools across the nation. At one level, it's easy to understand -- but by no means condone -- the motivation teachers have to cheat. Teachers have families to raise, mortgages, car payments and other financial obligations. Their pay, retention and promotions depend on how well their students perform on standardized tests.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
The Merchants of Smear
The sanctioned punishment of climate skeptics becomes more than just a few aberrant ideas, and is following some historical parallels
