Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, May 10, 2013
Benghazi-Gate
Politics or policy? Policy or politics? Those were the questions posed to me by MSNBC's Chris Jansing Wednesday morning an hour before the curtain was due to go up on the hearings before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). I said that it is always a combination of both. Are Republicans in the U.S. House looking for an edge in the on-going battle with the Democrat-controlled Senate across the Capitol Building and the Democratic Administration down Pennsylvania Avenue?
The Crucifixion of Jason Richwine
How low will supporters of the Gang of Eight immigration bill go to get their way? This low: They've shamelessly branded an accomplished Ivy League-trained quantitative analyst a "racist" and will stop at nothing to destroy his career as they pave their legislative path to another massive illegal alien benefits bonanza. Jason Richwine works for the conservative Heritage Foundation. He's a Harvard University Ph.D. who co-authored a study that pegs the cost of the Ted Kennedy Memorial Open Borders Act 2.0 legislation at $6.3 trillion. Lead author Robert Rector is a senior research fellow at Heritage, a former United States Office of Personnel Management analyst and the intellectual godfather of welfare reform. He holds a master's degree in political science from Johns Hopkins University.
Heritage's Scare Tactics
The immigration debate has taken a sudden and nasty turn with the publication of a new report by The Heritage Foundation claiming that reform legislation will end up costing American taxpayers $6.3 trillion. The Heritage Foundation, one of the most respected conservative organizations in the U.S., has sullied its reputation by lending its name to this tendentious piece of propaganda. First, the study grossly exaggerates the "cost" of immigration reform by assuming that all of those who gain legal status will claim welfare and other social service benefits as soon as they become eligible. While it is true that Hispanic immigrants new to the U.S. are, on average, substantially poorer than the native-born population, they do not remain so. What's more, low-income immigrants access welfare benefits at lower rates than the native-born and receive, on average, benefits that are significantly less than native-born recipients, according to a study by the Cato Institute.
Free Speech for Conservative Students?
It sounded like a freedom-of-religion case when a Columbus, Texas high school relay-race team was disqualified from the state track championship because Derrick Hayes pointed heavenward after his team won the race. That would seem odd in a red state like Texas. It turned out that officials were so strict, they warned runners to make no hand gestures after the finish line. Hayes had apparently pointed forward, and then upward, and for that he was out. It can be tough to be a student in today's public schools. Never mind restrictions on the schools. It is becoming impossible to express a socially conservative or Christian viewpoint -- as a student. Across the land, everyone is ordered to welcome without a discouraging word any expression of the gay or transgender variety. But try to say the G-word or oppose abortion, and watch someone lower the boom.
Bad Faith and Benghazi
"Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference -- at this point, what difference does it make?" That was how then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously brushed off the question of when she knew that the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11 that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were, in fact, a terrorist assault and not a "protest" of an anti-Islam video that got out of hand. Clinton's fans, in and out of the press, loved her defiant response, and they should be ashamed of themselves for it.
Hawking's Moral Calculus
Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned physicist and celebrity, has cancelled a planned trip to Israel to participate in a conference sponsored by Israeli President Shimon Peres. His explanation: "I have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics. They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw from the conference." It's an odd world isn't it? By what inverted moral calculus does someone of Hawking's stature find it morally problematic to set foot on the soil of the region's only democracy? One wonders how many other nations has Hawking declined to visit in order to express his disapproval of their policies?
There's Way Too Much Administration Smoke on Benghazi
A former National Security Council spokesman, Tommy Vietor, is representative of the arrogance of the Obama administration in mocking the congressional hearings on Benghazi, Libya, which he contemptuously derided as "amateur hour" and conspiratorial. In a tweet to The Washington Post's Dana Milbank, Vietor mocked Rep. Jason Chaffetz, saying, "What do you think Rep. Chaffetz will disclose today? Moon landing photos? Map of Area 51?" Very funny, Mr. Vietor, but your snark does nothing to explain many anomalies concerning the administration's mishandling of the Benghazi attacks -- though it reveals how indifferent certain administration loyalists are to its misbehavior. Not as indifferent, perhaps, as the administration itself ("This happened a long time ago" and "What difference does it make?") but indifferent nonetheless.
Pink Line Over Damascus
WASHINGTON -- You know you're in trouble when you can't even get your walk-back story straight. Stung by the worldwide derision that met President Obama's fudging and fumbling of his chemical-weapons red line in Syria, the White House leaked to The New York Times that Obama's initial statement had been unprepared, unscripted and therefore unserious. The next day Jay Carney said precisely the opposite: "Red line" was intended and deliberate. Which is it? Who knows? Perhaps Obama used the term last August to look tough, sound like a real world leader, never expecting that Syria would do something so crazy. He would have it both ways: sound decisive but never have to deliver.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Do They Even Look?
**Baffled German Government Concedes! "Global Warming Has Stopped…Warming Pause Is Remarkable…Unexpected"** This is a headline in my friend Pierre Gosselin's Blog "No Tricks Zone." The article is here for you to read, but in it, there is an admission that global warming has stopped and it's baffling as to why.
College Bubble Bursts After Decades of Extravagance
Markets work. But sometimes they take time. That's the uncomfortable lesson that proprietors of America's colleges and universities are learning. For many years, market forces didn't seem to apply to them. There was a widespread societal consensus that a college education was a good economic investment. Politicians gave lip service to the idea that everyone should go to college. No one should be stopped by a lack of money.
Learn From History
History is one of our greatest teachers. It's just too bad so many of our young people think history started with the death of Princess Di or the birth of the iPhone. I was painfully reminded of America's historical illiteracy and the failure of our educational system last week while golfing with a few strangers in Burbank, Calif. One of the young men in my foursome was about 30 and ran a restaurant in Los Angeles.
Beware of Liberals Who Come in Evangelicals' Clothing
Every few months since at least 2006, The New York Times takes time out from brow-beating Evangelicals to praise them for supporting amnesty for illegal aliens. Most of the "Evangelicals" the Times cites are liberal frauds, far from "unlikely allies" in amnesty, as alleged. It is a specialty of the left to pose as something they're not in order to create the impression of a zeitgeist. The only one I haven't seen quoted yet is the ACLU's minister, Barry Lynn. The Times keeps touting Evangelicals for Amnesty as evidence of a "shift," a "change of heart" and a "secret weapon." Breaking the same news story every two months since 2006 isn't a shift; it's propaganda.
The Left Hates Us
WASHINGTON -- Though it pains me to say it, I have made my final judgment about the left. They do not like conservatives very much. In fact, they come to an immediate boil when we enter their admittedly quite limited range of perception. It all began back in the 1960s when radical thought gained a footing with American liberals. Back in those days liberals relished America, the mixed economy (as they called capitalism), our system of government, and they were free of the bees in their bonnets that eventually drove them to collective suicide: feminism, socialism, identity politics, and all the little stuff: consumerism, the sky is falling, something about organic foods. Taken one thing with another, it finally consumed liberalism, moving me last year to administer the last rites to the whole gaudy set of bugaboos and to pronounce liberalism dead in a sad little book, "The Death of Liberalism."
Hero Charles Ramsey -- Media Delete His 'Pretty White Girl' Comment
Three young Cleveland girls missing and presumed dead turned up alive and in good health. A hero of the story is a neighbor, Charles Ramsey, a black man who helped free the girls from the home in which they were apparently imprisoned for some 10 years. Among other things, Ramsey said: "I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Either she homeless, or she got problems. That's the only reason she run to a black man." Presumably the black man the "pretty white girl" ran up to was Ramsey himself.
Taxing Internet Sales
In 1998 when President Clinton signed the bipartisan Internet Tax Freedom Act, which prohibited state and local taxation of Internet access and Internet-only services, the purpose was to promote the commercial potential of the Internet, especially for start-ups and small businesses. Congress extended the bill three times, the latest until 2014. Now there's the Marketplace Fairness Act, which, writes the Washington Post, "would allow states and local governments to require large Internet retailers and other 'remote sellers' with sales over $1 million annually to collect sales taxes and send the revenue to the appropriate location." This bill, which the Senate voted 69-27 to approve, would undo the protections Republicans and Democrats once felt necessary to promote e-commerce.
A Pox on Politicians
Until I read Amity Shlaes's tribute to Calvin Coolidge, I had assumed that Ronald Reagan was the last true fiscal conservative we've had in the White House. Well, it seems I only missed by 60 years. I was aware that Reagan had lowered the marginal tax rate from 70% to 28%, but I hadn't been aware that federal spending increased by 40% during his eight years in office. In other words, both parties want to increase the number of dollars flowing into Washington. Where they differ is in which way they believe the larger amount will accrue, be it from raising or lowering tax rates. Alas, neither side regards reduced spending as a virtue. I believe this country is in deep doo-doo. But I believe that Obama is the result of the national malaise, and not entirely the cause, as some would insist. After all, with reporters working as enablers of all things left-wing, with professors indoctrinating students with communist swill, and with the majority of Americans casting votes for any swine who promises them freebies, I am not convinced that things would be a lot better with someone else in the Oval Office.
Hoping for Change in Syria
Remember when President Obama used to warn Syria's Bashar al-Assad to stop his mass killing and step down? Muammar Gadhafi's dictatorship had then just collapsed under Western bombing. The murders of Americans in Benghazi and the subsequent postwar tribal mess in Libya were still in the future. In those heady days of 2011, the rage was "lead from behind," the blooming Arab Spring and social-media types calling for democracy in the streets of Cairo. The Muslim Brotherhood was proclaimed to be largely "secular." Echoing the pseudo-disavowals of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini years earlier, the American-educated Mohamed Morsi insisted that his Islamist movement was not interested in running Egypt.
For Obama, 2014 Is His Number
WASHINGTON -- Thirty-one months ago Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell affronted the media and other custodians of propriety by saying something common-sensical. On Oct. 23, 2010, he said: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." He meant that America needed conservative change from the statist course of Obama's presidency (the stimulus, Obamacare, etc.), therefore America needed a president who would not veto such change. By similar reasoning, Obama today could sensibly say, and probably to himself has said, that the single most important thing he wants to achieve now is for Democrats to win control of the House in 2014. That redoubt of conservatism is an insuperable obstacle to the change he favors -- ever-larger government as an instrument of wealth redistribution.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Men Behaving Badly
Mark Sanford is the worst example of what passes for a political professional in the United States. He will, in the next few days, be sworn in as the Member of Congress from the First District of South Carolina having won a special election against a woman whose only reason for running is that she is the sister of comedian Stephen Colbert. What a choice. Sanford, you will remember, was the Governor of South Carolina. In 2009 he sort of disappeared for about a week. This did not go unnoticed in the Palmetto State and questions were asked.