Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, February 14, 2014
ObamaCare's War on Jobs
In the ongoing saga of the Affordable Care Act, oddly referred to by Democrats as the law of the land even as it is amended at will by presidential fiat, we are beginning to understand the extent of its war on jobs. First, the Congressional Budget Office triples its estimate of the drop in the workforce resulting from the disincentive introduced by Obamacare's insurance subsidies: 2 million by 2017, 2.3 million by 2021. Democratic talking points gamely defend this as a good thing because these jobs are being given up voluntarily. Nancy Pelosi spoke lyrically about how Obamacare subsidies will allow people to leave unfulfilling jobs to pursue their passions: "Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance."
ObamaCare Is a Mess, but We're Stuck With It
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the White House has chosen -- for the 13th time in a year -- to make changes to the Affordable Care Act delaying its full implementation. The law is a mess -- passed by Democrats, most of whom hadn't bothered to read the legislation, without a single Republican vote. Nonetheless, the latest changes announced this week should embarrass even the most sycophantic Obamacare enthusiast. The act was sold on the promise that the estimated 40 million Americans who were without health insurance would finally be covered. The law forces employers with 50 or more workers to offer health care plans to all of their employees -- and insists that those plans make no exceptions based on pre-existing conditions and cover everything from birth control to substance abuse treatment.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Did I Move?
With all the smirking on the left about their electoral victories, it's important to remember that Democrats haven't won the hearts and minds of the American people. They changed the people. If you pour vinegar into a bottle of wine, the wine didn't turn, you poured vinegar into it. Similarly, liberals changed no minds. They added millions of new liberal voters through immigration. So why are Republicans like Trey Gowdy, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and John Boehner making fools of themselves in order to spot the Democrats three more touchdowns? The House Republicans' "Standards for Immigration Reform," for example, contains this fat, honking nonsense: "One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents."
Taking the Law Into His Own Hands
"If at my convenience I might break them (laws), what would be their worth?" -- Charlotte Bronte, "Jane Eyre" We've come a long way since Justice Charles Evans Hughes remarked a century ago, "...the Constitution is what the judges say it is." Or have we? According to the Galen Institute, a nonprofit public policy research organization based in Alexandria, Va., "...more than 27 significant changes already have been made to Obamacare: at least 10 that President Obama has made unilaterally, 15 that Congress has passed and the president has signed, and 2 by the Supreme Court." Add one more now that he has decreed that small businesses with 50-99 employees will be given another year before they have to pay a penalty for failing to comply with the Obamacare law.
Beyond Belief: The World of the Persecuted Church
Habila Adamu will never be a household name in America -- but to the millions of persecuted Christians in Eastern Africa, he is a symbol of the fierce courage it takes to live by faith in the face of death. Fourteen months ago, the Nigerian businessman was at home when two masked gunman showed up at his door and ordered his wife to leave. We're here, they said, "to do the work of Allah." Pointing their AK-47s in his direction, the shooters asked if Habila was a Christian. "Yes," he replied. They asked him why he hadn't accepted Islam, despite hearing the message of Mohammed. Again, he told them, "I am a Christian. We are also preaching the gospel of the true God to you and to other people who do not yet know God." "Are you ready to die as a Christian?" the men sneered. "I am ready to die as a Christian," he told them. They asked him one more time -- and before Habila could finish, a bullet silenced him, permanently.
Ethics & Education
For a long time, I've thought that people must be really starved for role models if they keep looking to those in the public arena to fill the vacuum. I am not one of those people who believe that every politician is venal and corrupt, but neither am I someone who thinks that we should admire those whose only accomplishments consist of casting votes and giving speeches. Recently, Robert Gates garnered a great deal of attention for writing a book in which he took Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, to task. Once you got past the totally insincere compliments he apparently felt obliged to pay the first two, he basically made a case that none of them was to be trusted. Inasmuch as I had already come to that conclusion without his prompting, my question is why he didn't resign when he first discovered the truth about them.
Is the American Dream Dead?
President Obama recently warned Americans that too many members of our society never climb the ladder to success -- they're defeated before they even begin. When children have no future, it poses "a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe." He actually got that right.
Wake Me When Someone 'Comes Out' as a Black Republican
Michael Sam appears to be a fine young man. But, no, he isn't the first openly gay male U.S. athlete to play in a major sport. And "brave"? Can we please dispense with the absurd Jackie Robinson comparisons? Wake me when a black collegiate pro prospect "comes out" as a Republican. A starting senior on the University of Missouri football team, Sam looks like a mid-round draft pick in the NFL. He recently "came out" to his teammates, many of whom said they already knew or suspected. Neither teammates nor coaches had an issue. Most normal people ask, "Who cares?" or "Can he play?"
Welcome to the Presidential Race, Hillary
It is happening again. The media tell us there is a huge groundswell of support for Hillary to run for the presidency in 2016. Already an enormous political action committee has been formed. She is again -- as she was in 2008 -- the Inevitable Candidate and, by the way, the Inevitable President. Moreover, the mainstream media are, of course, with her. These are what I have been calling for over 20 years the media's Episodic Apologists. Their professional lives have followed a well-worn arc since at least 1992 when the Clintons first emerged nationally -- though the arc was there in Arkansas back in the 1980s.
An Orwellian Nation of Obamathink
The nightmare societies portrayed in the George Orwell novels "1984" and "Animal Farm" gave us the word "Orwellian." That adjective reflects a vast government's efforts not just to deceive and control the people, but also to do so by reinventing the meaning of ordinary words while rewriting the past itself. America, of all places, is becoming Orwellian. The president repeatedly reminds the American people that under his leadership, the U.S. has produced a record level of new oil and natural gas. But didn't Obama radically curtail leases for just such new energy production on federal lands? Have the edicts on the barn wall of "Animal Farm" been changed again, with the production of new oil and gas going from bad to suddenly good?
Lessons From the Abbey
Many "Downton Abbey" watchers are nostalgia gluttons who grieved when Lord Grantham lost his fortune in Canadian railroad shares. There are, however, a discerning few whose admirable American sensibilities caused them to rejoice about Grantham's loss: "Now perhaps this amiable but dilettantish toff will get off his duff and get a job." This drama's verisimilitude extends to emphasizing that his lordship had a fortune to squander only because he married an American heiress. By battening on what they disdained, this republic's commercial culture, many British aristocrats could live beyond their inherited means -- actual work being, of course, unthinkable.
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
The Lawless Presidency
Will Congress finally hold Obama accountable for his usurpation of power?
No, Death Isn't 'Too Good' for Tsarnaev
Of all the reasons to oppose the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev if he is found guilty of the Boston Marathon terror bombings, none is less convincing than the claim that executing the murderer of Krystle Campbell, Lingzi Lu, Martin Richard, and Sean Collier would amount to rewarding him. Seek Tsarnaev's death and you give him just what he craves, runs this argument, which has been made by law professor Alan Dershowitz, criminologist James Alan Fox, and death-penalty critics in the media. Executing Tsarnaev will succeed only in making him a martyr and a hero, they say; it will drive more attention to his cause. "His face would appear on recruiting posters for suicide bombers," Dershowitz warned last year in an essay for The Guardian. "The countdown toward his execution might well incite other acts of terrorism."
Culture of Corruption Postscript: The Hilda Solis Files
Put on your super-shocked faces, everyone: Former Obama administration official Hilda Solis, who is now running for yet another government position in Los Angeles, is embroiled in yet another union corruptocracy scandal. The Hope and Change hits just keep on coming. Solis served as President No More Business As Usual's first secretary of labor. Remember waaaay back then, when "most transparent administration in history" had not yet become an automatic punchline? Well before Solis' confirmation, it was already clear she was a poster child for left-wing sleazeball politics: --Solis' husband's businesses failed to pay thousands of dollars in tax liens, which were 16 years old, until she was nominated.
How Much Power Will Congress Let Obama Seize?
Would Congress stop President Barack Obama if he unilaterally declared he was raising the federal income tax rates for families that earn between $50,000 and $99,000 per year? This week, Obama swept aside the plain and unambiguous language in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that he personally signed and fought all the way to the Supreme Court to maintain, so he could unilaterally suspend the law's requirement that the government extract penalty "payments" from businesses that do not comply with a mandate to provide their workers with health insurance.
Joe Biden, the Media's Secret Quayle
Hidden just below the surface of the liberal media is a barely noticed trend of patronizing contempt: Joe Biden is the Democrats' Dan Quayle, but because he is a Democrat, they'll do anything to avoid treating him like they treated Quayle. The Washington Post recently trumpeted a new poll that showed Hillary Clinton was cleaning Biden's clock in an early poll among Democrats, 73 percent to 12 percent. The Post saw this as great news for Clinton but not as disastrous news for the man who's currently in his second term as vice president. Try to imagine Al Gore pulling 12 percent in a presidential poll during Clinton's second term.
GOP Lives to Fight Another Delay
Most people have seen the movie *Groundhog Day* -- and now, thanks to ObamaCare, they're living it! Every morning, Americans are waking up to the same health care headlines: another day, another delay. For voters, who have watched this same scenario play out for three years like a bad rerun, the President's constitutional contempt is almost routine. Since 2011, it's been déjà lawlessness in an administration that's done more legislating than the House and Senate combined. For the President, the avalanche of changes is only helping to desensitize Americans to the administration's tyrannical tendencies. The White House's latest announcement, that it will shelve a key part of the employer mandate for an extra year, is the latest in a long line of ObamaCare do-overs that never had the authorization of Congress.
The Privileged People
Politicians say, "We're all equal," and pretend that they represent everyone. But, in fact, they constantly pick winners and losers. America is now like the place described in George Orwell's book "Animal Farm": "All animals are equal," but some are "more equal than others." "Animal Farm" was about Communism, but today the allegory applies to our bloated democracy, too. During the "fiscal cliff" negotiations that Congress and the media made sound so tough -- as if every last penny were pinched -- Congress still managed to slip in plenty of special deals for cronies.
Why Democrats Hate Work
Last week, the Congressional Budget Office released a report discussing the ramifications of Obamacare. The report revealed that the work-hour equivalent of approximately 2.5 million jobs would disappear from the workforce, thanks to Obamacare, in a voluntary process in which employees would simply dump out of their jobs, knowing they could get health care through expanded Medicaid and federal subsidies they would lose by working. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., an ideological leftist thought leader, spun the report as a massive positive for Obamacare: "The single mom, who's raising three kids (and) has to keep a job because of health care, can now spend some time raising those kids. That's a family value." And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., celebrated the report as a defeat for the dreaded condition known as "job lock" -- the situation in which you have to stick at a job you don't like for the benefits. "We have the CBO report," Reid stated, "which rightfully says, that people shouldn't have job lock. If they -- we live in a country where there should be free agency. People can do what they want."