Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Texas Law Larger Than Life
Governor Rick Perry has signed his name tens of thousands of times -- but rarely is it more gratifying than today. Just by picking up his pen and signing a bill, the Governor of Texas protected women and saved countless young lives. Despite everything the Left threw at him (and would have thrown, if the police hadn't intervened), local conservatives watched with pride asTexas joined the growing coalition of states listening to voters and moving to protect innocent unborn children.
The Zimmerman Case: A Touch of Sanity
WASHINGTON -- "No justice, no peace" chants the telegenic mob. In a civilized society, however, where the mob doesn't rule, justice is defined by the verdict that follows a fair trial. It's the best that humans can do. And in the case of George Zimmerman, we have a verdict. It followed a trial every minute of which was seen by the world. Nothing secret, nothing hidden. Where in the trial was there racial bias? What evidence of the case being tilted toward the defendant because the victim was black? What sign of any racial animus in the jury?
Opposing Extremism Is Not Extremism
Bless The New York Times for, yet again, selflessly exposing the political fault lines of the GOP and encouraging it to become more like the Democratic Party so it can start winning presidential elections again. I'm trying not to laugh. In his piece "Has the G.O.P. Gone Off the Deep End?", Thomas Edsall lines up establishment Republican after establishment Republican to testify to the "extremism" of the dominant forces in the party. And he blames conservative talk radio, one of the few remaining bastions of sanity in this country, for the GOP's demise.
A Better System for Picking Presidential Candidates
You can get agreement from almost all points on the political spectrum that the worst aspect of our political system is the presidential nomination process. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is the one part of the system not treated in the Constitution. That's because the Founding Fathers abhorred political parties and hoped that presidents would be selected by something like an elite consensus. But we have political parties, the oldest and third oldest in the world, and they are not going away. Surely a better system is possible. The current system of primaries, caucuses and national conventions is the result of reforms initiated by Democrats in the late 1960s and constantly fiddled with, mostly but not entirely by Democrats, ever since.
The Conversation Holder Doesn't Really Want
Eric Holder dismissed America as a "nation of cowards" because we wouldn't, he argued, have a "national conversation" about race. It's a slander wrapped in a farce. We talk of race unremittingly. That's the farce. The slander is hydra-headed. No honest conversation about race is possible when accusations of racism replace reasoned arguments. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who mentioned high rates of crime among black males, was rewarded with the racist label within minutes by some of those (The Atlantic, Slate) who presumably agree with Holder that we are too timid when discussing race.
After Repeated Controversies, Sharpton Is Still Smokin'
If Tom Wolfe were writing "The Bonfire of the Vanities" today, he'd need a scene in the Grand Havana Room in New York City. It's an Olympian den fit for what Wolfe called "Masters of the Universe" -- the super-rich gods of finance who today go by "the one percent." Taking up the penthouse floor of 666 Fifth Ave., the Grand Havana Room is a private, by-invitation-only cigar club and four-star restaurant. Through its windows, you can see the toiling salary men 39 floors below as they scurry about like ants, some furtively smoking in doorways, ever fearful of Nanny Bloomberg's All-Seeing Eye. Named by Business Insider as one of the "11 exclusive clubs Wall Streeters are dying to get into," the Grand Havana Room is where powerbrokers and celebrities hobnob with captains of industry in one of the last places where it's still legal to smoke in the Big Apple.
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Reid It and Weep!
Despite a three and a half hour meeting in the Old Senate Chamber, very little of the 19th century inspiration rubbed off. The two parties emerged from the symbolic space late Monday night with the makings of at least a temporary cease fire on the Senate's filibuster rules. Although the media is reporting that the chamber finally arrived at a deal, some conservatives might disagree. The word "deal" implies that Republicans actually got something in exchange for their deep concessions on the confirmation process. Instead, it seems that Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and President Obama were the big winners of the day -- especially since the GOP promised a quick vote on five of the White House's most outrageous nominees.
R.I.P. Britain's Patient-Killing 'Pathway to Death'
And how ObamaCare will bring it to America.
To Avoid Looking Like a Criminal, Don't Commit a Crime
Black liberals keep bemoaning the danger to their own teenage sons after the "not guilty" verdict in George Zimmerman's murder trial. To avoid what happened to Trayvon Martin, their boys need only follow this advice: Don't walk up to a stranger and punch him, ground-and-pound him, MMA-style, and repeatedly smash his head against the pavement. The Justice-for-Trayvon crowd keeps pretending there hasn't been a trial where the evidence overwhelmingly showed that Trayvon committed the first (and only) crime that night by assaulting Zimmerman. Instead, the race agitators are sticking with the original story peddled by the media, back when we had zero facts. To wit, that Zimmerman had stalked a young black child and shot him dead just for being black and wearing a hoodie.
The Zimmerman Soap Opera
In a better world we should never have been subjected to the Zimmerman trial. But politically motivated prosecutors in Florida turned a local tragedy into a race crime, and then the media turned a murder trial into a primetime soap opera. The trial accusing George Zimmerman of murdering Trayvon Martin wasn't about seeking justice. It was a ginned-up, politically motivated morality play presented on the national media stage.
Obama's Six Months of Blunders
WASHINGTON -- The other day another pundit came to my side. I have been watching this steady trickle of sages joining the cause ever since the spring of 2012 when I pronounced, at book-length complete with footnotes, "The Death of Liberalism." Now the veteran columnist Daniel Henninger of the nigh unto infallible Wall Street Journal has pronounced the glum news. On July 10, Dan wrote, "July 3 was the quiet afternoon that a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy announced in a blog that the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate would be delayed one year." And Dan stated with marmoreal solemnity: "Mark July 3, 2013, as the day Big Government finally imploded." Others, too, have made similar discoveries, none more memorably than Victor Davis Hanson who celebrated July 4, 2011 by stating that the Founding Fathers' vision of government had been vindicated. Obamacare had been rushed into law and with its trillion-dollar overruns atop all the other federal overruns would prove to be "unsustainable." He called the liberals Frankensteins. I called them zombies. Nonetheless, whatever living corpse you choose, with Obamacare came the last gasp of liberal overreach.
Placing a Bounty on Progressives
How dangerous are liberals? Well, here in California, where the Democrats hold super majorities in both state houses, there are bills pending in the Assembly that would give additional rights to bums and gang members, allow illegal aliens to vote in our elections and allow high school students the choice of which locker rooms and bathrooms they decide to use, regardless of their official gender. I realize that even some conservatives are up in arms over the NSA mining phone numbers. I attribute this mainly to the fact that the federal government has been acting sleazier than usual lately. Between Benghazi, the IRS and the monitoring of AP and Fox reporter James Rosen, even normal people could find themselves indulging in a little paranoia.
What Does It Take for America to Wake Up?
Someone did an experiment to test an old tale -- that a frog placed in a pot of cool water, which is then slowly and continuously heated, will be boiled to death. By contrast, if thrown directly into scalding hot water, the frog jumps out. But it turns out that, no, once the water got hot enough, the critter hopped out of Dodge. This raises a question. At what point does the continuous growth and intrusiveness of government make people wake up? This is not just a matter of theory or philosophy. People are hurting -- as a direct result of President Barack Obama, his party and the inability of the GOP to make the case for a smaller, less expensive and less intrusive government.
The Strange Case of Mexican Emigration
There are many strange elements in the current debate over illegal immigration, but none stranger than the mostly ignored role of Mexico. Are millions of Mexican citizens still trying to cross the U.S. border illegally because there is dismal economic growth and a shortage of jobs in Mexico? Not anymore. In terms of the economy, Mexico has rarely done better, and the United State rarely worse.
16-Year-Old Has a Brave Heart
BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- While American cable TV news engaged in saturation coverage of the closing arguments and verdict in the George Zimmerman murder trial, the BBC and Sky News carried an inspiring speech by Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head last October by the Taliban for advocating the education of girls. On her birthday, Malala addressed in barely accented English a special youth gathering at the United Nations in New York. She wore a shawl that had belonged to the late Pakistani President Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated by Islamic extremists in 2007.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
In Store Wars, the Empire Strikes Back
When religious liberty collides with same-sex "marriage," something has to give. And usually, that "something" is Christians' rights. In this mad dash to redefine marriage in America, many in society are so focused on giving homosexuals their way that they aren't stopping to see who gets tramples underfoot. The real victims, who include children, religious business owners, and employees across the country, have been lost in a convenient storyline of inequality and discrimination.
The Greatest Deliberative Body
The national press corps held its collective breath on Monday night as members of the United States Senate wrangled over whether the holiest of holies -- the filibuster rule -- would be changed or scrapped altogether by the 55 Democrats in the majority. This is known as the "nuclear option" and it is generally threatened by the Majority Leader -- Republican or Democrat -- when the Minority Leader -- Republican or Democrat -- successfully uses the existing filibuster rules to slow progress on legislation or nominations to a crawl. The modern version of a filibuster can be broken if the majority can muster 60 votes. As the AP's Dave Espo wrote: "While a simple majority vote is required to confirm presidential appointees, it takes 60 votes to end delaying tactics and proceed to a yes-or-no vote."
America, Forever Racist?
The central criticism of the George Zimmerman trial is that there was one. It was simply impossible to convict him of anything beyond a reasonable doubt. The central criticism of the coverage of this trial was that there was any. How did this story merit consideration as national news? Why was the death of Trayvon Martin a thousand times more newsworthy than any other person shot on an American street? Answer: because Al Sharpton and other race-hustlers wanted it that way.
Eric Holder's Stand Your Ground Squirrel
Welcome to the Obama administration's cringe-inducing non sequitur of the week. On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder continued stoking the fires of racial resentment over a Florida jury's acquittal of George Zimmerman. In an address to NAACP leaders, who are demanding federal intervention, Holder attacked Stand Your Ground self-defense laws. All together now: Squirrel!