Right Opinion

Obama's Poll Numbers Give Demos the Midterm Blues

It wasn't supposed to be like this. At the end of 2013, the Washington Post's electoral number-crunchers calculated that the Democrats had a 1 percent chance to win back the House of Representatives. Barely into 2014, that already seems pretty optimistic. In the last week, several Democratic representatives saw the writing on the wall and voted with their feet, or with their seat, and announced they will be retiring. Even a popular president can usually expect disappointing midterm results for his party. What makes things particularly dire for Democrats is that a president's approval rating has a significant impact on his party's prospects. Obama's approval rating is in the low forties, and while things can change, few would bet it will improve all that much between now and November.

Obama Administration Mandates Racism in Schools

The Departments of Education and Justice have teamed up to make the lives of students in tough neighborhoods even tougher. Framed as a measure to combat discrimination against black and Hispanic children, the guidelines issued by the Obama administration about school discipline will actually encourage racial discrimination, undermine the learning environments of classrooms and contribute to an unjust race-consciousness in meting out discipline. Claiming that African-American and Hispanic students are more harshly disciplined than whites for the same infractions, the Obama administration now advises that any disciplinary rule that results in a "disparate impact" on these groups will be challenged by the government.

An Admission: Nature in Control

This article caught my eye. Its authors examine reasons for the pause in global warming, and coincidentally, the sun, the oceans and stochastic events show up. I say coincidentally because that's exactly what I opined would cause cooling, and got roundly trashed for by global warming proponents, seven years ago on The O'Reilly Factor in what I termed the triple crown of cooling.

Our Clueless President

Let me get this straight. For five years Barrack Obama has been president. For five years he's demonstrated -- with amazing consistency -- that he has no clue what we need to get out of the ditch and back on the road to real economic recovery. He's repeatedly demonstrated that he can't work with a divided Congress and he can't, or just plain won't, lean on Harry Reid to allow the Senate to vote on the stack of jobs bills that has been sent over by the House.

Is Chris Christie Less Believable Than Tawana Brawley?

I agree with MSNBC. I find it hard to believe that Gov. Chris Christie knew nothing about his staff's plotting a massive traffic jam on the ramp to the George Washington Bridge for political retribution. On the other hand, I also find it hard to believe that Obama didn't know his own IRS was auditing his political enemies. And I find it hard to believe that Obama didn't know you wouldn't be able to keep your doctor under Obamacare. But most of all, I find it hard to believe that MSNBC host Al Sharpton didn't know Tawana Brawley was lying when she claimed to have been gang-raped by rogue cops on the Wappingers Falls, N.Y., police force.

Why Do We Have 'Bridgegate' -- But Not 'Gatesgate'?

The media quickly came up with a term for the apparently politically orchestrated George Washington Bridge traffic jam: "Bridgegate." Now what catchy term do the media attach to the explosive new book castigating the incumbent wartime commander in chief? "Gatesgate"? Hardly. Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is suspected of orchestrating, for political payback, a traffic jam on the GW Bridge. "Meet the Press" spent more than half of its most recent show -- 28 minutes not counting commercials -- on "Bridgegate," less than 11 minutes on the Gates' allegations, another 12 minutes reporting on women living in poverty and exactly zero seconds on the just-released jobs report.

The NHS: Dogma vs. Experience

While the Obama administration offers life support to its Affordable Care Act, in the UK a growing number of people are asking whether it's time to pull the plug on the National Health Service (NHS), which is in critical condition. For many years the UK media have carried stories that not only bode ill for the future of government-run health care, but also continue to serve as a "code blue" warning to the U.S. as to what might be in our future if we decide to go down that road. Writing in The Daily Telegraph under the headline, "It's time to make difficult decisions about the NHS," columnist Judith Woods says, "The NHS, dying on its feet for decades, is in a critical state. The promised injection of cash may stabilize it temporarily, but the chances of a full recovery are nil."

The Left's Disdain for the Will to Live

A New York Times editor and his wife's obsession with one cancer patient's fight for survival.

Bible Belt Won't Buckle on Marriage

After watching from a distance as the marriage debate ignited out west, Oklahomans were horrified Tuesday to see the battle march directly into their backyards. From Tulsa to Tipton, the news dropped like a bombshell, stunning the million-plus voters who'd exercised what they thought was their constitutional right to define marriage. Under the 68-page opinion of a single judge, that right no longer exists for Sooners. Like New Jersey, New Mexico, and Utah before them, Oklahomans are feeling the deep betrayal of a judicial system overrun by political activists. In a country where lawlessness is more contagious than the common cold, U.S. District Judge Terence Kern smothered the votes of 76% of the state and substituted his judgment for that of 1,075,216 Oklahomans.

President Obama: Quenching America's Sacred Fire

"Nuns hopeful of stay," read the headlines. No, they weren't going to be executed. Only their consciences were to be violated. The HHS Mandate was going to force them to cover abortifacient drugs that can end the lives of unborn children. Now, and only temporarily, the Supreme Court has *stayed* the execution of the HHS Mandate under ObamaCare. Never in America's long history has such a headline even been imaginable. The gravest threat to religious freedom has been part of what President Obama meant when he said he would "fundamentally transform this country." Nuns have faced anti-Catholicism, Bible riots, and various forms of Klan-instigated bigotry, but *never* has the federal government itself threatened to snuff out the lamp of freedom. Evangelicals and Lutherans, too, face a hostile administration.

Beat the Winter Blues

Grist for the Mill

The New York Times recently ran a front page story promoting the fiction that a silly video had everything to do with the Benghazi massacre, ignoring the fact that Obama and his Secretary of State had consistently denied Ambassador Chris Stevens' pleas for additional security, and then refused to deploy troops on a rescue mission the evening of 9/11/12. Even liberals had to grasp it was the partisan rag's way of ensuring that this time around nothing would come between Mrs. Clinton and her belated coronation. It was such a clumsy attempt to spin the facts, I'm rather surprised there wasn't a single Democrat with the gumption to call them on it.

Doubts Over Common Core

Viewed from Washington, which often is the last to learn about important developments, opposition to the Common Core State Standards Initiative still seems as small as the biblical cloud that ariseth out of the sea, no larger than a man's hand. Soon, however, this education policy will fill a significant portion of the political sky. The Common Core represents the ideas of several national organizations (of governors and school officials) about what and how children should learn. It is the thin end of an enormous wedge. It is designed to advance in primary and secondary education the general progressive agenda of centralization and uniformity.

Bob Gates and Politics

You will perhaps forgive me if I have found all this bellyaching about retired Secretary of Defense Bob Gates' so-called indiscretion, indignation and candor a bit hard to take. I first got to know Bob in the early 1980s, thanks to Bill Casey. Through all these years, Bob has not changed fundamentally. What has changed is Washington. It is more politicized, with especially shallow and parochial politics, and it is in need of candor, indignation and even moments of indiscretion. Bob did not let the country down when he wrote his memoir, "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense."

The Cowardice of the New Anti-Semitism

An obscure academic organization called the American Studies Association not long ago voted to endorse a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli universities. The self-appointed moralists were purportedly outraged over the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians. Given academia's past obsessions with the Jewish state, the targeting of Israel is not new. Yet why do the professors focus on Israel and not Saudi Arabia, which denies women the right to drive and only recently granted them the right to vote? Why not Russia, which has been accused of suppressing free speech, or India, which has passed retrograde anti-homosexual legislation?

New Declassified Docs Expose Obama's Benghazi Lies

What the president likely knew -- and when he knew it.

Omnibus or Omnibust? Congress Debates Trillion-Dollar Deal

This New Year's, one person who isn't going on a diet is Uncle Sam. In the spending package released Monday, Congress blows by the old sequester caps, giving leaders a trillion-dollar rope to string along taxpayers. The bill, which at 1,582 pages is about as long as the local phone book, was more than three and half years in the making. But not everyone thinks the final product was worth the wait. With the two parties racing to pass the bill, it's almost impossible to give each department's proposal the scrutiny it deserves. And, as Americans know from the ObamaCare debate, a bill longer than the Gutenberg Bible leaves plenty of pockets to hide inefficiencies, duplicities, and pork.

Joint Chiefs Chair: We Aren't Authorized to Kill Benghazi Terrorists

When can President Barack Obama use military force against Libyans without prior authorization from Congress and when can he not? Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a closed session of a House Armed Services subcommittee in October that the military cannot kill the terrorists who attacked the State Department and CIA compounds in Benghazi, Libya, because Congress has not authorized the use of force against those terrorists. "Therefore, they will have to be captured," Dempsey said in a transcript of the testimony released this week.

Tamera Mowry Is Not Alone

This made my heart ache and my blood pressure spike: Actress Tamera Mowry, who is black, wept in an interview with Oprah Winfrey over the vile bigotry she has encountered because of her marriage to Fox News reporter Adam Housley, who is white. Misogynist haters called Mowry a sellout and a "white man's whore." International news outlets labeled the Internet epithets she endured "horrific" and "shocking." Horrific? Yes. Shocking? Not at all. What Mowry experienced is just a small taste of what the intolerance mob dishes out against people "of color" who love, think and live the "wrong" way. I've grown so used to it that I often forget how hurtful it can be. Mowry's candor was moving and admirable. It's also a valuable teachable moment about how dehumanizing it can be to work in the public eye. Have we really sunk to this?

Negotiating With Space Nazis

On Tuesday, the Iranian government announced that it had reached a secret agreement with the West on its nuclear development. The details of the agreement were not released, but suffice it to say that the Iranians could not contain their glee. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani celebrated the deal with an English-language tweet claiming that the "world powers surrendered to Iranian nation's will"; Iranian Army Commander Maj. Gen. Ataollah Salehi said the diplomatic breakthrough resulted from American military "weakness"; and the Iranian foreign minister laid a wreath at the tomb of the Beirut Marine barracks bomber.