Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Bradley Manning's New Crusade
Bradley Manning, the Army private who was sentenced to 35 years in prison for disclosing highly damaging national intelligence, now wants to live the rest of his life as a woman. In order to do so, however, he wants expensive surgery and hormone treatments, none of which the government is likely to provide him at Ft. Leavenworth, where he will serve his prison term. Manning, who now wishes to be called Chelsea, is clearly a troubled young man -- and yes, no matter how feminine he "feels," he is a man. Surgery and drugs may transform his physical appearance, but no amount of surgery or hormones changes an individual born with a Y chromosome into a female.
How Oberlin Manufactured the Hate-Crime Hoax of the Year
Busted. Stone-cold busted. Just as I suspected, "progressive" pranksters at Oberlin College have been definitively unmasked as the perpetrators of phony campus "hate crimes" that scored international headlines in March. The blabbermouth academic administrators who helped fuel the hysteria are now running for cover. The Associated Press, The New York Times, MSNBC, Yahoo News and the Huffington Post were among the media outlets that trumpeted the story of supposed racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism run amok at my alma mater. Throughout the winter, anti-black and anti-gay graffiti, swastikas, and a shadowy figure in a "KKK hood" surfaced on the tiny campus outside Cleveland, Ohio. Black Entertainment Television News decried the hate outbreaks and "KKK sighting."
Is Obama Good for Black Americans?
Buried in a New York Times story about the economy was this arresting statistic: Median family income for black Americans has declined a whopping 10.9 percent during the Obama administration. It has declined for other groups as well -- 3.6 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 4.5 percent for Hispanics - but the figure for blacks is huge. This decline does not include losses suffered during the financial crisis and the recession that followed, but it instead measures declines since June 2009, when the recession officially ended. That's not the only bad news for African-Americans. The poverty rate for blacks is now 25.8 percent. The black labor force participation rate, which rose throughout the 1980s and 1990s, has declined for the past decade and quite sharply under Obama to 61.4 percent. The black unemployment rate, according to Pew Research, stands at 13.4 percent. Among black, male, high school dropouts, PBS' Paul Salmon reports, the unemployment rate is a staggering 95 percent.
Stop and Frisk Doesn't Target Minorities, It Protects Them
New York City seems on the verge of making the same mistake that Detroit made 40 years ago. The mistake is to abolish the NYPD practice referred to as stop and frisk. It's more accurately called stop, question and frisk. People were stopped and questioned 4.4 million times between 2004 and 2012. But the large majority were not frisked. The effectiveness of this police practice, initiated by Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1994 and continued by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is not in doubt. The number of homicides -- the most accurately measured crime -- in New York fell from a peak of 2,605 in 1990 to 952 in 2001, Giuliani's last year in office, to just 414 in 2012.
MSNBC Has Full Deck of Race Cards
"Why do they seem so determined to also make it racial?" So asks Joy-Ann Reid, the managing editor of The Grio, a web magazine owned by NBC News whose mission is to "focus on news and events that have a unique interest and/or pronounced impact within the national African Americans audience." The "they" in question are conservatives and journalists asking, among other things, why President Obama hasn't inserted himself into this case the way he did in the Trayvon Martin tragedy.
The Choice in Egypt
WASHINGTON -- Egypt today is a zero-sum game. We'd have preferred there be a democratic alternative. Unfortunately, there is none. The choice is binary: the country will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood or by the military. Perhaps the military should have waited three years for the intensely unpopular Mohamed Morsi to be voted out of office. But Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi seems to have calculated that by then there would be no elections -- as in Gaza, where the Palestinian wing of the Brotherhood, Hamas, elected in 2006, established a one-man-one-vote-one-time dictatorship.
Mark Levin: A Modern-Day Constitutional Prophet
When Mark Levin decided to write his book "The Liberty Amendments" to advocate a convention to propose a series of amendments to the U.S. Constitution, he may not have realized how quickly and deeply his profound idea would resonate. But throughout the nation, people are inclining their ears. The first obstacle Levin faced was the widespread misconception that he is calling for a constitutional convention that could be hijacked by enemies of our founding principles and converted into a forum to hammer the final nails into our constitutional republic by fundamentally and radically changing our founding document.
Thursday, August 22, 2013
The Triple Crown of (Climate) Cooling
A few years ago, when I started challenging people to make forecasts on where temperatures would be by 2030, I coined a term called the Triple Crown of Cooling. It's really more the Triple Crown of Climate. This was to make it clear that the sun, the oceans and stochastic events, such as volcanoes, were so important to the climate that it rendered CO2 -- at .04% of the atmosphere and 1/100th of the greenhouse gasses -- for all intents and purposes powerless in changing the earth's climate. That is not to say it does not have a role. I like the idea that the 33 degree Celsius of warming that is attributed to GHGs allows for .4 to .7C to be from CO2. But the magnitude of factors stacked against it keep it boxed in that range.
The Thug Culture That Killed Chris Lane
The Left's unseemly alliance with those who market self-destruction to the black community.
The Butler from Another Planet
There you go again, Hollywood. You've taken a great story about a real person and real events and twisted it into a bunch of lies. You took the true story of Eugene Allen, the White House butler who served eight presidents from 1952 to 1986, and turned it into a clichéd "message movie." "Lee Daniels' The Butler'" stars Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, a fictional character supposedly based on Eugene Allen's real life. But let's compare the two White House butlers.
Arab Spring: Worst Soap Ever
I didn't care for the "Arab Spring," but the "Arab Summer" is a blockbuster! Liberals' rosy predictions for Egypt's Islamic revolution didn't turn out as planned. Who could have guessed that howling mobs in Tahrir Square in 2011 would fail to produce a peaceful democracy? Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had supported U.S. policy, used his military to fight Muslim extremists and recognized Israel's right to exist. So naturally, Obama told him he had to go.
The Day Dad Received the Congressional Gold Medal
Given the choice between having a Marine Corps of 5,000 whites and 500,000 blacks, then-Marine Corps Commandant Lt. Gen. Thomas Holcomb said he would much rather have the whites. That was over 70 years ago. America has travelled quite some distance from the time of that racist statement to the election and re-election of a black President. Friday, Aug. 16, 2013, was not just another picture-perfect sunny California day. It was the proudest day of my life and in the life of my family. My father, Randolph Elder, posthumously received the highest civilian award Congress can grant, the Congressional Gold Medal.
Iraq, the Perfect Ingrate
WASHINGTON -- Maybe Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq should not have been in such a hurry to bid American troops adieu as he was back in 2007. What is more, maybe President Barack Obama should have come up with a few more compelling proposals for American troops to stay in Iraq for a few more years. After all, we did expend all that blood and treasure in getting the Sunni and the Shiite to live together peacefully -- no car bombs, no suicide bombers. I think Prime Minister Maliki would agree with me. Iraq was a relatively peaceful place to live when there were American troops stationed nearby.
With Online Gambling Fight, Congress Must Regain Constitutional Powers
Congress has been ceding power to the executive branch for more than two decades. In the 2008 presidential election, President George W. Bush was often criticized by then-candidate Barack Obama for his executive overreaches. Candidate Obama even promised to "reverse" the Bush Administration's expansion of executive authority in 2007. However, no president in modern history has done more to circumvent Congress and rewrite legislation than President Obama has.
Obama's De-Nile
I would like to spend a little time wandering through those weird cavernous echo chambers that pass for brains in the skulls of Obama, Kerry, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. But only if I knew I could get out and not be trapped inside with all those stalagmites. While the Republican pinheads speak of reconciliation of all parties in Egypt, the Democrats wring their hands over the "rolling back of human rights" and the refusal of the military to allow for "peaceful demonstrations." On what bizarre planet do these ignoramuses live? And is there sufficient oxygen to support human life?
How to Fix Presidential Debates
At their meeting in Boston last week, Republican National Committee members voted unanimously not to sponsor or sanction any presidential primary debate with NBC or CNN during the 2016 election cycle. Both networks have projects about Hillary Clinton in the works that Republicans predict will be "little more than extended commercials" promoting a potential run for the White House by the former secretary of state. (NBC is planning a miniseries about Clinton starring Diane Lane; CNN will produce a full-length feature film to be shown in theaters next year.) The RNC, saying it's fed up with the media's liberal favoritism, will refuse to partner with either NBC or CNN as the next primary season gets underway.
Two Americas
Two quite different 21st-century Americas are emerging. The nation is not so much divided by "wars" between the rich and poor, men and women, or white and non-white. Instead, there is the world of reality versus that of triviality. In the vast plains of the Dakotas and the American West, thousands of men and women of all classes and colors are fracking oil and gas to create new energy for millions of homeowners and commuters -- while giving America a second chance at strategic energy independence. Yet the beneficiaries mostly ignore these elemental efforts. They instead prefer to fixate on the alleged sexual creepiness of big-city political mediocrities like Bob Filner and Anthony Weiner.
Final Warnings About Obamacare
PORTSTEWART, Northern Ireland -- Each visit to the U.K. brings new horror stories about the National Health Service (NHS). Last month, Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS, issued a forensic report, commissioned by the government, which found that 14 underperforming hospitals in England had substandard care, contributing to the needless deaths of nearly 13,000 people since 2005. Earlier this year, it was reported that a single hospital in Staffordshire recorded 1,400 "excess" deaths.
A Court's Order: Obey the Law
WASHINGTON -- Nowadays the federal government leavens its usual quotient of incompetence with large dollops of illegality. This is eliciting robust judicial rebukes, as when, last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia instructed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to stop "flouting the law." Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh said: "It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case."
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
We Are Raising a Nation of Savages
Christopher Lane was gunned down in cold blood -- shot in the back as he jogged alongside a road in Duncan, Okla. His alleged attackers were teenagers who told police they were bored and killed the college athlete for "the fun of it." The 22-year-old was attending school at East Central University -- an Australian native who played baseball. Good Samaritans saw the shooting and immediately rushed to offer aid. One person called 911. Another tried to administer CPR. But it was too late. The young athlete with a promising future lingered for several minutes -- gasping for air. And then he died -- on a lonely stretch of an Oklahoma roadway.