Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Obama Distracts His Way to Victory
President Obama is a gifted politician. He is gifted with rhetoric virtuosity. He is gifted with the ability to lie directly to camera without blinking. And he is gifted with some of the most incompetent conservative opposition in the history of the country. How else to explain the fact that after years of President Obama holding up one hand to wave a wand to grab attention while using the second hand to stuff a rabbit into his hat, Republicans are still staring slack-jawed at the wand?
Privatize Everything
The market is fine for some things, people will say, but other activities are too important to be left to the market. Or too complicated. Or too fundamental to our democracy. I say: Privatize everything. To some of you, that will sound callous -- but failure to privatize services, keeping them in government hands instead, is what impoverishes and kills people. Nothing compassionate about that.
Congressionally Duped Americans
Last week's column, "Is There a Way Out?", generated quite a few responses, some a bit angry. Some people were offended by my reference to Social Security and Medicare as entitlements or handouts. They said that they worked for 45 years and paid into Social Security and Medicare and how dare I refer to the money they now receive as an entitlement. These people have been duped by Congress and shouldn't be held totally accountable for such a belief. Let's examine the plethora of congressional Social Security lies. I'll leave the Medicare lies for another column.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Thanking Our Veterans
It's one thing to say, "Thank a veteran." It's another to actually do something to show that gratitude. Take the World War II veterans that made headlines last month during the government shutdown. Largely overlooked in the furor that erupted when they were barricaded from their own memorial is how they got to Washington, D.C., in the first place: through a nonprofit group known as the Honor Flight Network (HFN).
The Obama Mess: Who Done it? We Done It
It may well be -- I wouldn't deny it for a minute -- that Barack Obama has less to recommend him as a U. S. president than any predecessor of the past century. Vain, cocksure, morose, disabled from admitting a mistake or a bad guess -- what a guy! Small wonder no present poll shows him with majority public support.
Conservative Parents, Left-Wing Children
There is a phenomenon that is rarely commented on but which is as common as it is significant. For at least two generations, countless conservative parents have seen their adult children reject their core values. I have met these parents throughout America. I have spoken with them in person and on my radio show. Many have confided to me -- usually with a resigned sadness -- that one or more of their children has adopted left-wing social, moral and political beliefs.
ObamaCare Is Obama Unmasked
Everyone is focusing on Obamacare because it is such an obvious disaster, but in fact, it is but a microcosm of Barack Obama's entire presidency. Obamacare is Obama unmasked. Aren't some of you tired of making lame excuses for him that only serve to make things worse? He has made a mess of nearly everything his policies have touched, and he's mostly avoided the blame; but he owns Obamacare, and he has nowhere to hide.
Disillusioned With Obama, Will Media Investigate Benghazi?
The question many on the left are asking as they witness the Obama administration flail in response to HealthCare.gov's debut disaster is: How could this happen? Obama is so brilliant, so capable and so wise. How could he bungle his signature initiative? He isn't, but even if he were, it wouldn't make a particle of difference. One of the central delusions of progressives is that government is efficient and effective and that complex human societies are amenable to centralized control and direction.
Greece, N.Y., Enters Debate on Public Prayer
The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week about prayers in public life, this latest deliberation revolving around a case from Greece, N.Y., and the recitation of prayers during town board meetings. The board used to begin each of its meetings with a moment of silence. When that moment of silence was replaced by spoken prayers, they turned out to be overwhelmingly Christian, and a suit was filed. Last year a federal appeals court ruled, according to The Washington Post, "...that such a 'steady drumbeat' of Christian invocations violates the Constitution's prohibition against government endorsement of religion."
We the People v. ObamaCare
Obamacare is a disaster -- not because of the clunky, costly, inoperative website, but because President Obama and his HHS minions have grabbed control over our personal health care decisions and they won't let go. First, the top-down control means that the President and his know-it-all bureaucrats mandated that every adult purchase health insurance, even if they don't want it. (The Supreme Court's ruling that the mandate is only a "tax" provided helpful cover for the Administration.)
Boiling Frogs
ObamaCare is merely the natural extension of the welfare state we've evolved into over the past century. We now offer 99 weeks of unemployment insurance, which acts to discourage its recipients from seeking employment; affirmative action, which officially condones racism; a disability insurance program that's an open invitation to fraud; food stamps for nearly 50 million Americans, including the young and able-bodied; an immigration policy that encourages foreigners to sneak into the country and become wards of the state; the unionization of civil servants, which means that those bureaucrats, whom it's nearly impossible to fire, now make more money, have bigger pensions and better health care, than those of us who are forced to pay their salaries; and Social Security, which was a Ponzi-like con game from its inception.
Audacious Wildcatters Trigger Fracking Revolution
Capitalism, said economist Joseph Schumpeter seven decades ago, is a process of creative destruction. New inventions, new processes, new methods of organization lead to the creation of new profitable and efficient businesses and to the destruction of old ones unable to compete. There are few accounts of the creative side of Schumpeter's phrase more vivid than The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters, a new book by Wall Street Journal writer Gregory Zuckerman.
An Old 'New' Program
Like so many things that seem new, ObamaCare is in many ways old wine in new bottles. For example, when confronted with the fact that millions of Americans stand to lose their existing medical insurance, as a result of ObamaCare, defenders of ObamaCare say that this is true only when those people have "substandard" insurance.
Monday, November 4, 2013
It's the ENDA the World as We Know It...
Life hasn't exactly been rosy for the business community under this administration. First, the President's policies kept the economy in the tank. Then he strangled the financial and energy sectors by passing a health care law that's trampling employers' freedom and crushing their bottom lines. Now, as if those burdens weren't enough, the President's party wants to tell companies how they should run their business, who they should hire, and what they can and can't believe.
Saving the Motor City
At the time when I served as Mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio, my city and others across the country looked to Detroit as an industrial and cultural center of America. Motown Records, started by Berry Gordy in Detroit, created some of the best music in the world with hits from The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye. After World War II, Detroit became the North Dakota oil boom of its day, as engineers and workers flocked to the city to prosper and make the classic, gas-guzzling muscle cars which would come to represent everything great about America. By 1960, with the highest per capita income in the nation, almost two million people lived there.
Which ObamaCare Shoe Will Drop Next?
First it was the debacle of Healthcare.gov, the botched ObamaCare website, that dominated coverage of the Affordable Care Act's rollout. The new insurance exchanges were a disaster -- technical malfunctions, frozen screens, interminable wait times, error messages, lost data. President Obama had promised that the new system would make getting health insurance as easy as shopping online -- "the same way you'd shop for a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon," he'd said. What he delivered instead, as Democratic Senator Max Baucus predicted months ago, was a "huge train wreck."
DMV Doctors
In a debate last Friday, Kathleen Murphy, a Democrat running for the House of Delegates in the state of Virginia, decided that government's ability to enforce their wishes at the so-called point of a gun was an idea whose time has come. She advocated a law that would force doctors to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off
It recently occurred to me that Washington, D.C., is like a supermarket for lobbyists. It provides them with the convenience of one-stop shopping. Speaking of our nation's capital, in response to the controversy swirling around the Washington Redskins, some wag suggested that the truly offensive word wasn't Redskins, it was Washington.
Has the President Been Lying?
It's as though two completely separate conversations have been going on. From day one, the health policy community has correctly seen the Affordable Care Act as an attempt to completely change the health care system. This isn't even controversial. It's accepted by all as an undisputed fact.