Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
From The Comedy Store
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was targeted by a poison ricin letter. The police sketch artsist was able to draw a composite of the suspect. It is an obese woman giving her baby bottled milk while drinking a thirty-two ounce Coke and smoking indoors.
Scandals, Jobs and the Economy -- Obama's Precariously Thin Margin
When President Richard Nixon collided with the Watergate scandal, he was a very unpopular man. The nation at the time was suffering one of the worst recessions in history and one of the highest inflation rates, too. So Watergate sunk Dick Nixon, but for good measure, the economy sunk him even more. Roughly 25 years later, Bill Clinton was impeached because he lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. But despite his personal transgressions, he never really lost his popularity. Why? The economy was roaring. So you might say scandals are less scandalous during prosperity and more scandalous during recession.
Friday, June 7, 2013
Opposite Time in Bizarre World of AGW
The climatic ambulance chasers are out in full force now, using every event they can get their hands on to claim that man is dooming the planet. However, there is now an extra edge. They simply say the opposite of reality. At least before, though not caused by man, there were some things going on that gave one pause. All pretense of telling the truth is now gone.
Tracking My Calls
I am trying to get spun up over the story about the National Security Agency tracking every phone call made by every customer using a cell phone over the Verizon network. But, I can't. I don't think it's a big stretch to think that the NSA is also tracking your calls if you are on AT&T's network, T-Mobile, Sprint or the Harry's Cell Phones & Discount Beer network. As I understand it, the NSA isn't listening in to our phone calls -- or at least they haven't been caught at it yet. They are tracking the number called, the calling number, the duration of the call, and the location of the calling and called phones.
Big Brother Barack
Obama's dragnet serves as an ominous reminder that inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out.
OPM Is the Problem, Not the IRS
Suddenly, Democrats are in a tizzy about wasteful government spending. At hearings this week into the IRS's misuse of taxpayer dollars to fund staff junkets, Rep. Elijah Cummings, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, bemoaned, "The money that was spent on that -- that's my money! That's the lady who got the early bus this morning. That's her money. The one who makes $35,000. Hers. The gentleman up the street from me who makes 45 (thousand dollars) hauling trash. That's their money! So, it was wasted." But he shouldn't be surprised. What went on at the IRS is built into the system. It's not an IRS problem. It's a problem whenever individuals are free to spend Other People's Money. The more removed those who spend OPM are from those whose money they're spending the greater the likelihood for corruption.
Lying Liar Anthony Weiner's Underage Girl Problem
Touchy, touchy. Despite Team Anthony Weiner's best efforts at political rehabilitation, there's just no way to shore up his sorest scandal spot. As the New York Post reported this week, Weiner had a bit of a snit fit when a local Democratic official boldly slammed his sexting habits with underage girls. Chris Owens, the Dems' state committee member in northwest Brooklyn, called out the skeezy ex-congressman at a mayoral candidate forum. "I am outraged and disgusted by you," Owens told Weiner. "Both by what you did and by the fact that you have the arrogance to run for mayor. I want to understand how you explain to us how you used a public facility to tweet offensive material to ... minors you did not know, you then lied about it ... and now you come back."
Guns and Grade-School Panic
The specter of school shootings has brought a too-typical staple to local newspaper sections: the boys disciplined at (or suspended from) grade school for bringing a toy gun or anything resembling a gun. The Washington Post just found the latest wild overreaction, from Calvert County, Md., a blue state that's cracked down on gun rights. "A kindergartner who brought a cowboy-style cap gun onto his Calvert County school bus was suspended for 10 days after showing a friend the orange-tipped toy, which he had tucked inside his backpack on his way to school," according to the family.
Time to Dial Up Some Healthy Skepticism
The U.S. government is trying "to create a database of every [phone] call ever made." That's how one informed person described the National Security Agency's effort to USA Today. That newspaper also confirmed that not only is the government collecting every phone record from Verizon -- as first reported by the British newspaper The Guardian -- but it's also collecting similar data from other phone companies. It's important to emphasize that the NSA isn't listening to the content of these calls. Indeed, it couldn't if it wanted to, given the sheer volume of conversations. It'd be like one person trying to eavesdrop on every single conversation in a packed football stadium.
Obama's Twofer Appointments a Double-Bird to the People
Just try to wrap your arms around the magnitude of defiance and chutzpah that led to and accompanied President Obama's appointment of the discredited Susan Rice as national security adviser. But don't let this outrage distract you from his equally disturbing appointment of leftist Samantha Power to replace Rice as UN ambassador. Though Democrats and their supporting liberal media, with a few notable exceptions, have aggressively downplayed the multifaceted Benghazi scandal, none of them has laid a glove on the irrefutable claim that Rice delivered the talking points that had been altered by the administration to distort the facts in order to mitigate any damage to Obama's reelection efforts.
Message From the Ruins of Qusair
WASHINGTON -- On Wednesday, Qusair fell to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Qusair is a strategic town that connects Damascus with Assad's Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean, with its ports and Russian naval base. It's a major strategic shift. Assad's forces can now advance on rebel-dominated areas in central and northern Syria, including Aleppo. For the rebels, it's a devastating loss of territory, morale and their supply corridor to Lebanon. No one knows if this reversal of fortune will be the last, but everyone knows that Assad now has the upper hand.
Conservatives Grasp Wrong Stick to Beat Sibelius
If I were the parent of a child who might be kept alive -- if only for a few more years -- by a lung transplant, I too would move Heaven and Earth to get it done. That the parents of 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan have made her an Internet and cable news celebrity in a desperate effort to get her on the adult list for a lung transplant is completely understandable. No one with a particle of human sympathy can fail to be moved by the family's situation. The story, however, has loosed a torrent of demagoguery -- some of it coming from the very people who should be most alarmed about the politicization of cases like Sarah's and of health care generally.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
An Israel-Hater Heads to the U.N.
Can a woman who called for the invasion of Israeli territory be trusted at the United Nations?
Reform the Tax Code
Jay Leno told his studio audience the other night that President Obama should forget his plans to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and instead close the IRS. The applause was instantaneous and the laughs were loud and genuine. Most ordinary Americans would have whooped and hollered in favor of Leno's idea long before they learned the IRS has been caught targeting conservative political groups and wasting millions on moronic employee-training conferences.
Tips for Right-Wingers on the IRS Scandal
Instead of showing endless loops of IRS employees wasting taxpayer dollars line-dancing -- Breaking news: Government employees waste millions of your dollars every single day! -- I think it would be more useful for the public to hear a few crucial facts about the exploding scandal at the Internal Revenue Service. At Tuesday's congressional hearings on the IRS, witnesses provided shocking details about the agency's abuse of conservative groups.
Testimonial to a Great American
POSITANO, Italy -- I am in Positano, Italy, on the Tyrrhenian Sea, soaking up the sun and pondering the immensities. Pompeii is just down the road, or over the mountain, or somewhere nearby, and it seems to me that Pompeii is the future for America if things continue under Barack the Pitiable, not Rome as the left-wingers and the right-wingers seem to have agreed upon. Pompeii went out in a cataclysm. Rome gently declined with a few massacres and plunderings as sad punctuation marks.
The Left's War on Father's Day
"We know the statistics," said President Barack Obama, "that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves." The Journal of Research on Adolescence found that even after controlling for varying levels of household income, kids in father-absent homes are more likely to end up in jail. And kids that never had a father in the house are the most likely to wind up behind bars.
Delegating the Blame
Until the current administration came along, never in American history had so many people claimed to be taking responsibility without taking even the least little bit. Some leaders take pride in knowing how to delegate responsibility. Obama and his crew only know how to delegate blame. It's been a while, but surely you recall that when we heard about the Justice Department funneling guns to Mexican drug cartels, Attorney General Eric Holder swore he had no idea who green-lighted Operation Fast & Furious, but he was darn certain it wasn't him.
The Coming Obamacare Disaster
For years I have been writing about the failures of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) as a warning for what the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) will do to health care here in the U.S. London's Daily Mail has chronicled the growing problems with the NHS, which include declining quality of care and availability of services coupled with increased costs. This is what is in store for us, if Congress does not repeal Obamacare. According to the Daily Mail, "NHS hospitals are recruiting Spanish and Portuguese nurses in record numbers while British applicants are being refused because places on training courses have been slashed to cut costs." More than 5,000 student nurse places, it writes, "have been axed since the General Election." The reason? Foreign nurses cost less. Incredibly, they won't be checked to see if they can speak English. The potential for confusion over medication and treatment because of language differences could be significant.
With Lautenberg Gone, WW II Vets Fade From Politics
Over the last seven decades, 115 veterans of World War II have served in the United States Senate. This week, the last of them, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, died. Two World War II veterans still serve in the House -- Ralph Hall of Texas, who was a Navy pilot, and John Dingell, who joined the Army at 18 and was scheduled to take part in the planned invasion of Japan. There aren't likely to be any more members of what Tom Brokaw labeled the Greatest Generation to serve in Congress. All surviving World War II veterans (except a few who lied about their age) are at least 85 years old.