Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
The Case of an Injured Thumb
This term the Supreme Court will rule on important subjects from racial preferences to restrictions on political speech, but its most momentous case, to be argued Tuesday, concerns the prosecution of a Pennsylvania woman who caused a chemical burn on a romantic rival's thumb. The issue is: Can Congress' powers, which supposedly are limited because they are enumerated, be indefinitely enlarged into a sweeping police power by the process of implementing a treaty?
Saturday, November 2, 2013
The Liberal Entitlement-State Dream Is Crumbling
May I ask this question? Why is it that Americans don't have the freedom to choose their own health insurance? I just don't get it. Why must the liberal nanny state make decisions for us? We can make them ourselves, thank you very much. It's like choosing a car, buying a home, or investing in a stock. We can handle it. So why must the government tell me and everyone else what we can and cannot buy?
From The Comedy Store
Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel blasted the U.S. government for using the NSA to datamine her telephone calls. The NSA protest has spread throughout Europe. The next day Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and France joined Germany, which is certainly a switch.
Friday, November 1, 2013
Sebelius Plays Ignorant on Abortion Funds
If the White House told insurance execs to "keep quiet" about ObamaCare, they certainly listened when it came to abortion coverage. Wednesday, even the boss of the entire system, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, managed a surprised expression when Congressman John Shimkus (R-Ill.) asked her why the agency was hiding coverage details from pro-lifers. Without skipping a beat, the HHS chief insisted she didn't know what she so clearly knew in 2009, which is that ObamaCare is the biggest expansion of taxpayer-funded abortion in U.S. history.
Is O'Care an Illegal Voter Mine for the Demo Party?
A disturbing overlooked feature of Healthcare.gov.
Michelle Obama's Big Business Bonanza
While her husband's signature health care law goes up in flames, first lady Michelle Obama is reveling in the success of her East Wing pet project, the "Let's Move" initiative. But ignore the do-gooder dressing. Mrs. Obama doesn't care about your children. What we have here is a textbook case of Washington influence peddling, which the Obamas so vigorously condemned a long time ago and far away.
An Embarrassing Visit
The White House welcome of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki this week couldn't come at a more awkward time for President Obama, whose fecklessness in foreign affairs will be his most enduring legacy. He has managed to insult our most important allies again and again -- and not just in the most recent cellphone-listening scandal involving German Chancellor Angela Merkel and others. At the same time, Obama has shown weakness to our enemies. But the Maliki visit is in a category all its own.
Jezebel, the 'Mainstream' of Feminism
Feminism isn't just a brutal philosophy for millions of unborn children. It's brutal on the Internet. Take the website Jezebel.com, a reference to the prophetess in the book of Revelation who was "teaching and beguiling my servants to practice immorality." This summer, a Catholic priest in Gainesville, Va., took to Facebook to help find an adoptive home for an unborn child with Down syndrome. It spurred a little press boomlet when hundreds of people called or emailed the church, volunteering to raise the child.
Eunuchs & Evildoers
Whenever I see Obama deliver a speech, I have a visceral reaction unlike anything I've ever experienced without having first eaten something I should have left on my plate. It isn't his politics, alone, that brings on the gag reflex; it's the fact that he lies compulsively and then never acknowledges his lies when the facts inevitably show him to be lying.
Brown Shirts at Brown U?
When New York City's strikingly successful police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, arrived to address students at Brown University, he was harassed, booed and heckled for 30 long minutes. "Racism is not for debate," they shouted. A university official pleaded with the goons, er, students to permit Kelly to speak, reminding them that they would be free to express disagreement during the Q-and-A session afterwards. "Shout him down!" responded a man in the audience, and the crowd did.
ObamaCare's Authoritarian Problem
You can't keep your insurance if you like it under Obamacare, because you're too ignorant to understand what's good for you. That's the argument we've been hearing from a lot of folks on the left -- an argument that pivots from "common good" to soft authoritarianism. President Barack Obama is all in, as well, claiming that he was merely guilty of forcing Americans to pick a "Ferrari" health care plan over a "Ford" one. (Is it really "picking" if you're forced?)
God Bless the Conservative Warriors
I just don't understand it. Everywhere we turn, we conservatives are told we need to moderate, be less extreme, be more bipartisan. The public just wants us all to get along and solve our major problems together. Democratic politicians and the liberal media harp on the alleged extremism of mainstream conservatism, the tea party, Sen. Ted Cruz, conservative talk radio and anyone else who dares to call out President Obama and his Democratic congressional cohorts in plain language for what they're doing to the country.
ObamaCare Laid Bare
Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancelation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan. Period."
Americans Moving to Low-Cost States
Where are Americans moving, and why? Timothy Noah, writing in the Washington Monthly, professes to be puzzled. He points out that people have been moving out of states with high per capita incomes -- Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland -- to states with lower income levels. "Why are Americans by and large moving away from economic opportunity rather than toward it?" he asks.
O'Care Fiasco Proves Barack No Chess Master
Often in error but never in doubt, Barack Obama could walk into the Rose Garden and step on a half-dozen rakes like Foghorn Leghorn in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and the official line would be, "He meant to do that." And the amazing thing is that so many people believe it. "Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He's smart, deft, elegant and subtle," proclaimed then-New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in 2009. It's an image of the president that his biggest fans, in and out of the press, have been terribly reluctant to relinquish -- because it confirms the faith they invested in him. Nobody every likes to admit they were suckered.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
What Will Happen to Afghan Women When the Taliban Returns?
When the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan is completed next year what will happen to Afghan women? Will a resurgent Taliban return them to wearing burqas, withdraw them from schools and force them to live behind painted glass in their homes, permitting them to leave the house only when accompanied by a blood relative?
This Halloween, House Unmasks ObamaCare
Today may be Halloween, but HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius didn't bother disguising her annoyance at Thursday's testy House hearing. In one of the most anticipated testimonies in years, the woman behind the biggest technological foul-up in American history was visibly irritated as she sat through a three-hour recitation of her agency's failures. At the outset, Sebelius tried to soften the criticism by doing what President Obama has not: owning up to the government's shortcomings.
Sebelius' Big Day of Big Lies
President Obama was never dishonest with the American people?
United Against ObamaCare
Dear Mr. President, Thank you, thank you -- sort of. You have been able to do something my father was never able to do -- bring my sister Patti and me together politically.
Thank These Republicans for ObamaCare
We have Obamacare for one reason and one reason only: For a brief, ghoulish period in recent history, Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. We don't have Obamacare because the public was clamoring for it. We have it because Republicans lost elections. First, Republicans lost their majorities in the House and the Senate in 2006, thanks to George W. Bush's highly effective "Keep the Base at Home on Election Day" campaign, which consisted of pushing amnesty for illegal aliens.