Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Government's Heavy Hand Favors Abortion Over Faith
For decades Dr. James Dobson has been the voice of strong families, vibrant faith, and conscientious citizenship. His personal integrity and strong commitment to help families raise Godly children is legendary. Millions have relied on his sage advice and sound wisdom, broadcast on radio stations across the country, first through the *Focus on the Family* ministry he founded, and now through his new ministry (on whose board of directors I serve), "Family Talk". And of course, his unrelenting defense of pre-born children is well-known -- and backed up over the years by his support for women in crisis pregnancies and for adoption ministries, as well as his personal compassion towards those in need.
ObamaCare Drag Show Aims to Heel
It looks like the President really is skirting the issues with ObamaCare. Thanks to a new partnership with a Louisiana drag queen show, the administration thinks it's finally be tapping into a market it needs to boost enrollment numbers. With the help of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a troupe of transvestites called Wednesday Night Tea has started promoting HealthCare.gov as part of its act. (If the law lacked legitimacy before, wait until a cast of cross-dressing men get through with it!)
The Pope and Capitalism
Pope Francis, in his apostolic exhortation, levied charges against free market capitalism, denying that "economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world" and concluding that "this opinion ... has never been confirmed by the facts." He went on to label unfettered capitalism as "a new tyranny." Let's look at the pope's tragic vision. First, I acknowledge that capitalism fails miserably when compared with heaven or a utopia. Any earthly system is going to come up short in such a comparison. However, mankind must make choices among alternative economic systems that actually exist on earth. For the common man, capitalism is superior to any system yet devised to deal with his everyday needs and desires.
ObamaCare: Silence of the Insurers
When will the insurers revolt? It's a question that's popping up more and more. On the surface, the question answers itself. We're talking about pinstriped insurance company executives, not Hells Angels. One doesn't want to paint with too broad a brush, but if you were going to guess which vocations lend themselves least to revolutionary zeal, actuaries rank slightly behind embalmers. Still, it's hard not to wonder how much more these people are willing to take. Even an obedient dog will bite if you kick it enough. Since Obamacare's passage, the administration has constantly moved the goalposts on the industry.
Look Back in Liberty 2013
This wasn't a great year for liberty. A few disasters that government caused: --Obamacare. It was supposed to "bend the cost curve" downward. The central planners had lots of time to perfect their scheme. For a generation, the brightest left-wing wonks focused on health care policy. The result? Soviet-style consumer service comes to America. --Government shutdown. The real disaster was the unnecessary panic over it. Zoos would shut down, and baby pandas would starve. The media made it sound like America might not survive even slightly limited government. They were happy to echo the politicians' claim that there's no wasteful or stupid spending to cut.
Are You Consenting to Surveillance Right Now?
After her purse was snatched in 1976, Patricia McDonough began receiving threatening phone calls from a man who identified himself as her robber. Following one of the calls, she saw a car she recognized from the scene of the crime slowly pass by her house in Baltimore. Police later spotted the same car in McDonough's neighborhood, driven by a man who matched her description of the purse snatcher, and used the license plate number to identify the owner as Michael Lee Smith. Based on this information, the police asked the phone company to install a "pen register," which recorded the numbers dialed by Smith for a couple of days. One of those numbers was McDonough's.
The Crony Obama Donors in Charge of DHS
Dirty Harry Reid sabotaged the filibuster, and now the Democrats are running wild in Washington. Mark my words: We all will pay a price. Thanks to Reid's crony-coddling rule change, unqualified stooges will manage the Obama Department of Homeland Security. It's a bundler's world, and we're just living in it. God help us. On Monday night, Senate Democrats voted 57-37 to end debate on the nomination of Jeh Johnson to head DHS. That's three votes short of the traditional 60-vote filibuster threshold that Reid nuked last month. Johnson went on to win his appointment by a 78-16 margin. The White House performed its Snoopy happy dance soon after, with President Obama declaring Johnson "a strong leader with a deep understanding of the threats we face and a proven ability to work across agencies and complex organizations to keep America secure."
ObamaCare Hurting Those It Means to Help
We've all heard the Obamacare horror stories: members of the individual insurance marketplace who watched their plans get canceled; business owners watching their costs rise; and employees finding out that more is coming out of their paychecks for approximately the same benefits. But the underlying logic of Obamacare was that those in need would benefit from the rest of us suffering. As Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic wrote back in November, "a system that discriminates against some people inevitably discriminates in favor of others."
Safeguarding Obama Throughout 2013
Liberal journalists were glowing and full of hope after President Barack Obama won a second term. As 2012 drew to a close, there was the traditional hour of ABC's Barbara Walters fawning: "Mr. President, Mrs. Obama. There is a photograph of you (hugging) that went viral, became the most shared photograph in the history of Twitter. How do you keep the fire going?" As the second inauguration neared, Newsweek put out a cover image even though it had stopped printing magazines. Over a picture of Obama, it read: "The Second Coming. America Expects. Can He Deliver?" He laid an egg.
How Much of Your Life Should Government Track?
The zeal and expertise of the federal government in using modern technology is not evenly distributed across all its functions -- legitimate and otherwise. Our government cannot build a website to efficiently sell insurance to people whom it has compelled by law to buy insurance, but it can collect the domestic phone records of Americans and store them for years in a massive database. That database is theoretically so efficient -- as opposed to the Obamacare website -- that the government can use it to track down terrorists operating clandestinely in the United States.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Big Dem Cities, Big Dem Poverty
The startling truth about America's biggest poverty centers and the politics that produces them.
Capitalism's Carping Critics
A system that fosters work, saving and investing is the key to prosperity
Boehner's Successful Year on Policy and Politics
All this year, House Speaker John Boehner has been taking criticism from all quarters. He is a squish selling out to the Obama administration and the Democrats, many conservatives charged when he engineered bipartisan (mostly Democratic) approval of higher tax rates on high earners rather than go over the fiscal cliff. He is a radical hostage-taking Confederate-sympathizing terrorist, cried Democrats when he led House Republicans to pass a bill refunding the government but defunding Obamacare.
When No One Is Watching
The Black Guerilla Family prison gang controlled the Baltimore City jail. According to a federal indictment, 27 correctional officers, along with 17 others, "were in bed with BGF inmates." That would be literally and figuratively. Gang leader Tavon White impregnated no fewer than four female guards. One had "Tavon" tattooed on her wrist. Guards smuggled in cellphones, drugs and other contraband. Inmates who were not gang members were forced to pay protection money to the BGF, or get family members to do so.
'Tolerance' Now Means Gov't-Coerced Celebration
Jack Phillips owns the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., about 10 miles from downtown Denver. In July 2012, two gay men, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, asked Phillips to provide the cake for their wedding celebration. Though same-sex marriage is not allowed in Colorado -- the Colorado Constitution states that "Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state" -- the two men had been married in Massachusetts.
Culture of Death (Continued)
During the Christmas season when many celebrate a unique and miraculous birth, what the late Pope John Paul II called "a culture of death" continues its march. Last week, the upper house of the Belgian Senate voted to extend a 2002 law legalizing euthanasia for adults so that it includes incurably ill children. The amended law will now have to be voted on by the Parliament's lower house, a vote expected to take place before elections in May, but if passed, writes The New York Times, children afflicted with "constant and unbearable physical suffering" and "equipped with a capacity for discernment" could then be legally euthanized in Belgium.
Establishment GOP Biting Its Feeding Hand?
Just when President Obama is on the ropes with Obamacare and the rest of his failed policies, scandals and deceptions, the GOP seems determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory -- a victory not just for the GOP, but also for the American people. Instead of focusing on their common Democratic "enemy," Republicans are firing at one another. Let me try to unpack this a bit. So-called establishment Republicans tend to believe tea partiers are uncompromising, impractical, overly aggressive kamikazes who are willing to destroy the nation just to make a point. Many tea partiers, in turn, believe there is little difference between the establishment wing and Obama Democrats.
Of 'Equality' and Other Ancient Frauds
The minimum wage fracas emerging in politics highlights the mother of all political fracases: the one titled, Who Gets What? Anybody surprised to see the question emerge in early 21st-century America must have been doodling on the history book cover when -- just for example -- the French Revolution heaved into sight. Who started and carried on the revolution? The self-defined many, as over against the execrated few. "Being nearly an hundred to one," Lord Acton would write, "they deemed they were virtually the substance of the nation, and they claimed to govern themselves with a power proportioned to their numbers." As for those then possessed of power and money, off with their heads!
I Now Pronounce You Man and Wives...
Turns out, marriage isn't about two people who love each other -- it's about three or five or six. That was Judge Clark Waddoups's opinion in the most explosive ruling the media isn't talking about. Late last week, the U.S. District Judge's ruling should have kicked off the evening news in every major market across America. Instead, his 91-page pro-polygamy bombshell is nothing but a back-page blip. And that's no accident. When Waddoups struck down Utah's criminal ban on "plural marriages" last Friday, the networks started tiptoeing around the story like the cultural grenade it is.
Satan's Little Imps
When I contemplate the damage being done to America, it's difficult for me to imagine that it's the work of mere mortals. Surely the Devil must have a hand in it. That notion ties in to my suspicion that Scratch must be working day and night to expand Hell to make room for all the left-wingers who will be taking up residence over the next 30 or 40 years. I suppose, if push comes to shove, he can always rent additional space in Detroit.