Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
The Super Bowl and Sex Trafficking
On February 2 of this year, thousands will gather at Met Life Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., to watch the Seattle Seahawks battle the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII. As the athletes take the field and the fans cheer, they will be oblivious to the tragedy unfolding around them in dark hotel rooms across East Rutherford. Sex trafficking has become a stealth parasite that attaches itself to major sporting events, taking advantage of a large number of fans and the demand for illicit sex. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott echoed the stunning revelation, gripping so many with his statement about the 2011 Super Bowl in Dallas: "It's commonly known as the single largest human trafficking incident in the United States."
March for Life & Pro-Life Movement Now Led by Young Adults
Equal protection under the law for preborn human beings is headed our way -- and from the work of a surprising demographic: adults under 30. A 28-year old dynamo working on college campuses across the nation, Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, exemplifies why hers is the "pro-life generation", and why they will be successful.
Senate Report -- CIA: 'Libya: Al-Qaida Establishing Sanctuary'
When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a brief self-congratulatory trip to Tripoli, Libya, in October 2011 -- with U.S. military assets lurking offshore in case they needed to rescue her -- she joked, in the presence of then-Ambassador Gene Cretz and Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman, that they had not-so-long-ago been worried that the ambassador might end up the target of a murderous Libyan assault. "As Gene and Assistant Secretary Feltman and I were walking through here, they were talking about how the last time Jeff was here was when we were very worried that Gadhafi and [Libyan intelligence chief] Senussi were going to kill you," Clinton said in a speech to the staff at the U.S. Embassy.
Abortion and the Suicide of the West
Jenelle Evans, 22, had an abortion this year. Originally featured on MTV four years ago as a pregnant teenager, Evans, who loves to party, had a son, gave the son to her mother to raise, got into heroin, got married and went to jail; her husband ended up in jail as well on drug charges. They got divorced. He didn't know that Evans was pregnant. She got an abortion. He found out about it on the commercials for "Teen Mom 2." Now she's pregnant again. With a third guy. Who may or may not be seeing another woman on the side.
You're Right to Choose This Movie
What happens when a teenager who came into the world as an unplanned teenage pregnancy ends up with an unplanned pregnancy of her own? Will she bend to all the "helpful" insistence that she needs to exercise her "right to choose" before she is, as one callous presidential contender put it, "punished with a baby"? This is the plot of "Gimme Shelter," a new movie that departs from the feminist pack mentality of Hollywood. Agnes "Apple" Bailey -- played in a breakout role by "High School Musical" star Vanessa Hudgens -- looks like a poster child for Planned Parenthood at the film's beginning: 16 years old, down and out after living in a series of foster homes, and now living with a drug-addicted mother who sometimes beats her.
Lessons for Shove Guv Andrew Cuomo
Not so fast, Andrew Cuomo. We see what you did there. After publicly bashing conservative New Yorkers as "extreme" people who have no place in his state, the intolerant Democratic governor wants to blame the media for his unmistakable contempt for those who oppose abortion, support gun rights and defend traditional marriage. Newsflash: Crapweasel politicians can backtrack and scapegoat, but they can't hide.
ObamaCare: Only the Good Buy Young
The NBA's Chris Paul hawks everything from PowerAde to deodorant -- but ObamaCare may be his toughest sell yet. Like Magic Johnson, Alonzo Mourning, and Steph Curry, the all-star point guard is one of many celebrities who agreed to start pitching the President's health care plan to young people. And not a moment too soon, based on the White House's latest data. After months of keeping Americans in the dark, the Obama administration finally let the cat out of the bag on its enrollment numbers. And while business certainly picked up on the exchanges before Christmas, there's still one thing missing: young people. Early on, experts agreed that the system would need at least 2.7 million 18-34 year-olds to stay afloat. That's a far cry from what the government has now. With only 2.2 million *total* sign-ups (and who knows how many actual premium-payers), the numbers barely scratch the surface of sustainability. For ObamaCare to work, it will take millions of healthy people buying insurance to offset the costs of the older and less healthy populations.
Fact-Free Liberals: Part II
Words seem to carry far more weight than facts among those liberals who argue as if rent control laws actually control rents and gun control laws actually control guns. It does no good to point out to them that the two American cities where rent control laws have existed longest and strongest -- New York and San Francisco -- are also the two cities with the highest average rents. Nor does it make a dent on them when you point out evidence, from both sides of the Atlantic, that tightening gun control laws does not reduce gun crimes, including murder. It is not uncommon for gun crimes to rise when gun control laws are tightened. Apparently armed criminals prefer unarmed victims.
Obama's Privacy Epiphany
Last June, after news reports revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) was surreptitiously collecting everyone's telephone records, President Obama called this massive dragnet a "modest encroachment" that "the American people should feel comfortable about." Last Friday, he portrayed the program as a significant threat to privacy. Which is it? Evidently the answer depends on the latest polls, which find that the American people are not as comfortable with the NSA's snooping as Obama said they should be. The president's obvious lack of conviction about the threat posed by mass surveillance makes it hard to believe he is serious about addressing it.
Minimum Wage & Minority Rights
The big brouhaha that ensued after "Duck Dynasty" patriarch Phil Robertson shared his biblical-based opinion of sodomites ended as I assumed it would. After first bending to objections from the homosexual community and suspending Mr. Robertson, the A&E network quickly reversed itself when some grown-up at corporate headquarters must have said, "Are you guys all insane? Robertson's TV show is the only thing that's keeping the lights on around here." I'm not saying that homosexuals or any other minority group shouldn't have every right to make its feelings known. I'm only suggesting it doesn't entitle them to having the final say.
OK to Feel Sorry
At one time in our nation's history, blacks feeling sorry for whites was verboten. That was portrayed in Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird." This is a novel published in 1960 -- and later made into a movie -- about Depression-era racial relations in the Deep South. The novel's character Tom Robinson, a black man, portrayed in the movie by Brock Peters, is on trial, falsely accused of raping a white woman. The prosecuting attorney, while grilling Robinson, asks him why he spent so much time doing chores for the alleged rape victim when he had so much of his own work to do. After persistent prosecutorial haranguing, Robinson timidly admits that he felt sorry for her. That response elicits shock and dismay from the prosecutor and the courtroom: How dare a black man feel sorry for a white woman?!
A New York State of Mind: Illiberal Liberal Values
On paper, "liberal intolerance" is something of an oxymoron, like "jumbo shrimp," "loyal opposition" or "conspicuous absence." But what makes oxymorons funny is that they are real things. There are jumbo shrimp. Absences can be conspicuous, opponents can be loyal, and liberals can be staggeringly and myopically intolerant. Last Friday, in a public radio interview, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo offered the sort of potted analysis of the national Republican Party one would expect from an MSNBC talk show. But he went a bit further. After nodding to the fact that, historically, the New York state Republican Party has been the most ideologically gelded of the breed (it is the birthplace of Rockefeller Republicanism, after all), Cuomo proclaimed that "extreme conservatives" have "no place in the state of New York."
Chill Out
The Hill, the newspaper that covers Congress, says this year, there will be a major policy battle over "climate change." Why? We already waste billions on pointless gestures that make people think we're addressing global warning, but the earth doesn't notice or care. What exactly is "global warming" anyway? That's really four questions...
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
ObamaCare's Attack on the Elderly
The president's macabre new year's gift: paying hospitals not to treat seniors.
The Shame of Benghazi
When anything bipartisan comes out of a polarized Washington, one should be grateful. That's why a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the September 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans represents progress of sorts. The committee, chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, (D-CA), faults the State Department and intelligence community for failing to prevent the attacks. The committee determined that the U.S. military command did not know about a CIA annex in Benghazi and that, writes The Washington Post, "...the Pentagon didn't have the resources in place to defend the State Department compound in an emergency." This communications failure between agencies, supposedly solved after the September 11, 2001 attacks, had not been. If it had, the report found, Benghazi likely could have been prevented.
The Latest From ObamaCare Central
It's time for your latest Obamacare update, and it will come as no surprise to you that things are not getting any prettier for this monstrosity. Let's just take a jog down Obamacare Avenue and see what is popping out at us from the storefronts this week. Roll down your windows so you can get a clearer look...
Slander? Depends Who Says It
Everyone knows by now that the governor (and possible presidential contender) can be a hothead. Some have called him a bully. Even if you think that's too strong, it's undeniable that a trace of bellicosity has been important to what the professionals like to call his "brand." Still, he shouldn't have said what he did in that radio interview. However strongly he may feel about those who disagree, and certainly he has his reasons for feeling aggrieved, he shouldn't have said that his opponents "have no place" in his state. It's understandable, considering the intemperance and intolerance he demonstrated, why the press is going wild with this story.
The Despotism of 'Choice'
The Little Sisters of the Poor, a 175-year-old Catholic order of nuns that cares for the elderly poor, believes itself to enjoy a constitutional right to exemption from a federal mandate hazardous to the order's self-understanding. The mandate, under Obamacare, is either to cover contraceptives and abortifacients for employees or to hand off coverage to the Little Sister's insurance carrier. The nuns oppose all artificial means of birth control.
Millennials Unhappy With Obama's War on the Young
What do young Americans want? Something different from what they've been getting from the president they voted for by such large margins. Evidence comes in from various polls. Voters under 30, the millennial generation, produced numbers for Barack Obama 13 percentage points above the national average in 2008 and 9 points above in 2012. But in recent polls, Obama approval among those under 30 has been higher than the national average by only 1 percentage point (Quinnipiac), 2 points (ABC/Washington Post) and 3 points (YouGov/Economist).
U.S. Could Learn From Hong Kong About Economic Freedom
America falls in Index of economic freedom rankings