Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, February 6, 2014
ObamaCare: 'Liberating' the Workers
The Left explains why choosing not to work because of the health care law is a good thing.
Nice Work if You Can Quit It...
Selling ObamaCare may be a tough job -- but it's one of the few the law hasn't killed. Work hasn't exactly been easy to come by under this administration, but it's nothing compared to the employment famine headed America's way courtesy of the Affordable Care Act. Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office -- the government's nonpartisan number-crunchers -- released a new report that might as well double as Republican campaign ads. In one of the most damning assessments of ObamaCare yet, CBO blames the law for killing as many as two million full-time jobs by 2017 (double what the agency originally estimated) -- and as many as 2.5 million in the next 10 years.
The Bay State's Model of Health Care 'Reform': Wait for It
Is Massachusetts, now in its seventh year under Chapter 58, the health-care overhaul signed into law by Governor Mitt Romney in 2006, a preview of what the rest of the country can expect under ObamaCare? If so, my fellow Americans, you'd better get used to waiting. According to a national survey of approximately 1,400 medical practices in 15 major metropolitan markets, the average wait for new patients scheduling a non-emergency doctor appointment between June and November 2013 was 18.5 days. In Boston, however, patients had to wait an average of 45 days, and considerably more than that for some specialties. The wait was 66 days to see a family physician and 72 days to see a dermatologist.
A Tale of Two Droughts
Despite recent sporadic rain, California is still in the worst extended drought in its brief recorded history. If more storms do not arrive, the old canard that California could withstand two droughts -- but never three -- will be tested for the first time in memory. There is little snow in the state's towering Sierra Nevada mountains, the source of much of the surface water that supplies the state's populated center and south. The vast Central Valley aquifer is being tapped as never before, as farms and municipalities deepen wells and boost pump size. Too many straws are now competing to suck out the last drops at the bottom of the collective glass.
The Stakes of a Special Election
Because it is this year's first federal election, attention must be paid to the March 11 voting to fill the congressional seat vacated by the death in October of Florida Republican C.W. "Bill" Young, who served in Congress 43 years. If Democrat Alex Sink wins, the significance will be minimal because she enjoys multiple advantages. Hence if Republican David Jolly prevails, Republicans will construe this as evidence that Barack Obama has become an anvil in the saddle of every Democratic candidate. Matters are, however, murky. Tip O'Neill's axiom that "all politics is local" has been rendered anachronistic by the national government that liberals such as O'Neill created. Today's administrative state touches everyone everywhere, so all politics is partly national. Politics in Florida's 13th Congressional District today concerns the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).
On the Abortion Front, Good News for Babies
Does everyone agree that the recent news on abortion is actually quite promising? Abortions are in decline. Abortion is at its lowest level since Roe v. Wade in 1973 legalized it. There were 1.05 million abortions in 2011, down 13 percent from the 1.21 million abortions committed in 2008. We are heading back in the direction of the 1.03 million abortions committed in 1975. All this information comes from the Guttmacher Institute's report "Abortion Incidence and Service Availability in the United States, 2011," and the Guttmacher Institute favors abortion along with the more humane forms of birth control. So when even the Guttmacher Institute agrees abortion is down, it has got to be down.
Think Power Inequality
On my wife's side, I have a very large family in Fairbanks, Alaska. Culturally, Fairbanks is a lot further from New York City (where I grew up) or Washington, D.C. (where I live now), than the several thousand miles on the map might suggest. Alaska wins a lot of comparisons, and not just the obvious ones such as physical beauty or salmon fishing. For instance, Alaska ranks second best in terms of economic equality (just behind Wyoming) while New York and the District of Columbia compete for dead last. Frankly, I don't much care about the issue of income inequality beyond its status as a symptom for real problems such as poor economic mobility, chronic unemployment and family breakdown. But lots of people do. President Obama even says it's the "defining challenge of our time." So it's at least fun to note that Sarah Palin's Alaska beats the competition.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Federal Educa-shun: Common Core's Growing Resistance
The cheerleaders of Common Core didn't do themselves any favors during last Friday's education roundtable at the far-Left Center for American Progress (CAP). The event, which was supposed to help drum up support for the President's hugely controversial classrooms standards, only gave Americans greater cause for concern. Unfortunately for the White House, the wheels were already coming off its push to centralize more education power in Washington -- and away from local schools and parents. Last week, Massachusetts Education Secretary Paul Reville only confirmed families' fears that Common Core is just another way for the Left to seize control of the classroom and use it as yet another laboratory of social indoctrination. Reville, who shrugged off the opposition as "a tiny minority," raised plenty of eyebrows with his it-takes-a-village approach to Common Core. "Why should some towns and cities and states have no standards or low standards and others have extremely high standards when the children belong to all of us?"
The ObamaCare Security Nightmare Gets Worse
Fraudsters on the inside, hackers on the outside. Here we are, stuck in the middle with the security nightmare called Obamacare. Can it get any worse? Yes, it can. After the spectacular website crashes during last fall's federal health insurance exchange rollout, enrollees will soon wish the entire system had stayed down and dead. "404 Error" messages and convicted felon Obamacare navigators may be the least of our health care tech problems now. The latest? U.S. intelligence agencies notified the Department of Health and Human Services last week that the Healthcare.gov infrastructure could be infected with malicious code.
DNI: Al-Qaida's Syrian Rebels Have 'Aspirations' to Attack U.S.
Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes announced last June that President Barack Obama had decided to aid the Supreme Military Council of the Syrian rebellion. "The president has made a decision about providing more support to the opposition," said Rhodes. "That will involve providing direct support to the SMC. That includes military support." Last week, at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's annual threat-assessment hearing, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified that one of the leading groups in the Syrian rebellion -- the al-Qaida-affiliated al Nusra Front -- would like to attack the U.S. homeland.
Letter to My Newborn Daughter
Last Tuesday evening at 6:19 p.m. PST, my wife gave birth to our first child, a 7-pound, 9-ounce, 21-inch little girl named Leeya Eliana. The labor was long, approximately 26 hours, and my wife endured it heroically. Before, we were a married couple; now, we are a family. On the sixth day of her life, I wrote my little girl a letter to memorialize our hopes for her at the dawn of her life. With my wife's permission, here it is:
Wendy Davis Lies, Media Snores
As our liberal media continue to obsess over whether Gov. Chris Christie lied about knowing his aides were plotting to cause Bergen County traffic jams, it's worth remembering that our national networks don't care when Democrats lie -- even about their own life stories. Two weeks ago, reporter Wayne Slater of The Dallas Morning News -- the author of two books bashing Karl Rove for being "Bush's Brain" -- wrote an expose on liberal, abortion-loving Democrat Wendy Davis, who's been hyped from coast to coast as "single mom to political phenom." Lots of details aren't true. Even the Dallas paper's headline soft-pedaled it as "key facts blurred."
Team Obama's Topsy-Turvy Rhetoric Escalates the War on Faith
A favorite tactic of the Obama Administration is to engage in outrageous behavior, and then -- with the support of its allies -- put its opponents on the defensive by accusing them of engaging in the conduct of which it is in fact guilty. So, for example, the Administration takes far-out positions on social issues -- then labels as "extreme" anyone who stands up for mainstream values. The White House promotes monetary policies that destroy jobs -- and then attacks the business community for driving "income inequality."
Schoolteacher Cheating
Philadelphia's public school system has joined several other big-city school systems, such as those in Atlanta, Detroit and Washington, D.C., in widespread teacher-led cheating on standardized academic achievement tests. So far, the city has fired three school principals, and The Wall Street Journal reports, "Nearly 140 teachers and administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of the nation's largest cheating scandals." Investigators found that teachers got together after tests to erase the students' incorrect answers and replace them with correct answers. In some cases, they went as far as to give or show students answers during the test.
Bios & Biases
Every so often, so many items capture my attention that I either have to get them down on paper or accept the fact that I can never hope to catch up. But never let it be said that Prelutsky took the easy, logical, sane, commonsensical, approach. To get the ball rolling, let me confess that I not only tend to shy away from non-fiction books in general, but even more so when it comes to biographies. I have multiple problems with them. To begin with, they are written by researchers and academicians, and so I usually find the writing dry and humorless. For another, they tend to begin with a rundown on the subject's ancestors. Although parents and grandparents may have played a huge role in the way the person turned out, if I wanted to read about them, I'd be reading *their* biographies. My third reason, shameful as it must sound to many of you, is that I'm not that interested in reading five or six hundred pages about any one person.
Reputation Versus Regulation
Do you like to cook? Throw dinner parties? Many people enjoy that, but paying for the food, plus accessories, is expensive. Would you host more often if you could get your guests to cover the costs? Or suppose you'd like to *go* to a dinner party to meet new people in your neighborhood. Or maybe when you travel, instead of eating at restaurants, you'd like to see how the locals live. Good news! Today both cooks and diners can get what they want. A new Internet business brings them together.
Recovering From a Punitive Panic
When he was 26, Douglas Ray Dunkins Jr. received a mandatory sentence of life without parole for participating in a Fort Worth, Texas, crack cocaine operation. If that business had involved cocaine powder, the mandatory minimum would have been 20 years, and Dunkins would be free by now. Instead, he is a middle-aged man condemned to die behind bars for an offense that violated no one's rights. In 2010, Congress sought to ameliorate this sort of injustice by reducing the arbitrary sentencing disparity between the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine. But the Fair Sentencing Act, which passed almost unanimously, did not apply retroactively, and so thousands of nonviolent offenders like Dunkins continue to serve prison terms that nearly everyone now agrees are excessive.
Free the Keystone XL Pipeline, Mr. Obama
Welcome to the "year of action." In last week's State of the Union address, the president vowed to do whatever he must to help the economy, even if that means working around Congress: "What I offer tonight is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class. Some require congressional action, and I'm eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still, and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that's what I'm going to do." The White House has touted the fact the president has a "phone and a pen" and he's not afraid to use them.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Sunday's Super Brawl: Obama v. O'Reilly
If you thought the Super Bowl was rough, you should have seen the pregame. President Obama squared off against Bill O'Reilly for a match-up that proved a lot more spirited than the actual game. Two hours before kick-off, O'Reilly and Obama sparred over a range of topics -- from the White House's missteps on everything from ObamaCare and the IRS to the tragedy in Benghazi. Both men got their jabs in, with the President occasionally showing his annoyance with Fox News along the way. For his part, President Obama offered many of the same explanations for the botched ObamaCare roll-out, insisting that no one, not even his team of experienced contractors, could have known that HealthCare.gov was so deeply flawed. "I don't think anybody anticipated the degree of problems," President Obama said. Three years and millions of tax dollars later, shouldn't someone have known, O'Reilly asked? And if they didn't, isn't that ultimately the responsibility of Secretary Kathleen Sebelius?