Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
The Human-Hating Roots of the Green Movement
Behind the environmentalist facade lies a totalitarian agenda that is already being enacted.
Investigate Employer Who Filed 37,375 Bad W-2s in One Year
I have a challenge for members of Congress now vowing that the federal government will enforce the immigration laws in the future if we just let them take the illegal aliens in the United States today and put them on a "pathway to citizenship." It is this: Investigate the employer who -- according to the Office of the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration (SSA) -- filed 37,375 inaccurate W-2s in tax year 2005. In fact, investigate all employers who have similarly filed massive numbers of bad W-2s. Forget the employers who filed 100, 200 or even 500 bad W-2s per year. Give them a pass -- for now. Focus only on those that filed thousands.
The Bogus 'Public Safety' Exception
Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, captured last Friday evening, was not informed of his right to remain silent and his right to a lawyer until Monday morning, nearly three days after his arrest. The FBI said the delay was justified under the "public safety" exception to Miranda v. Arizona, the 1966 ruling in which the Supreme Court said the now-familiar warnings are required to enforce the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against compelled self-incrimination. But the public-safety exception itself is not justified, which becomes clear when you consider the 1984 decision that announced it. New York v. Quarles involved a late-night confrontation between police and a suspected rapist at an A&P supermarket in Queens, N.Y. Officer Frank Kraft chased Benjamin Quarles into the back of the store, losing sight of him briefly before stopping, handcuffing and frisking him. Discovering an empty shoulder holster, Kraft asked where the gun was. "The gun is over there," Quarles said, nodding toward a box where Kraft found a .38-caliber revolver.
Remembering Howard Phillips
Howard ("Howie") Phillips was unique. The year was 1987 and the Reagan administration had announced the INF Treaty to limit short-range nukes. Many conservatives were opposed. I elected to host a press conference to make that point publicly. The night before, we met privately. As ringleader, I issued a directive: No attacks on Ronald Reagan. Our beef was with the treaty, not with the Gipper. My co-conspirators agreed unanimously. But while we were meeting President Reagan was sitting down for an interview with Tom Brokaw and said about conservative opposition, "Some conservatives just believe in the inevitability of nuclear war."
The Boston Marathon Bombing and the Dangers of a Bored Society
The American public now knows the identity of the Boston marathon bombing suspects. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was a former boxer and Chechnyan immigrant, radicalized in the United States by an Islamist mentor. He turned against the West in liberal Cambridge, Mass. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, 19, was a pot-loving college student at the University of Massachusetts. Last Friday, Tamerlan was killed during a shootout with police after his brother reportedly ran him over with a car. Dzhokhar was captured hours later hiding in a boat. Few who knew Tamerlan seemed surprised at the news that he had masterminded the bombings of the Boston Marathon. "Of course I was shocked and surprised that he was Suspect No. 1," said Elmirza Khozhugov, the ex-husband of Tamerlan's sister, Ailina. "But after a few hours of thinking about it, I thought it could be possible that he did it."
America's Insane Asylum for Jihadists, Hustlers and Frauds
In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon killing spree by foreign-born jihadists, see-no-evil bureaucrats in Washington are stubbornly defending America's lax asylum policies. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told the Senate Tuesday that the screening process is rigorous, effective and extensive. These people can't handle the truth. Or tell it. The Tsarnaev brothers reportedly were granted asylum by "derivative" status through their parents. After entering on short-term tourist visas, the mother and father (an ethnic Chechen Muslim) won asylum and acquired U.S. citizenship. Next, younger son Dzhokhar obtained U.S. citizenship. Older son Tamerlan, whose naturalization application was pending, traveled freely between the U.S. and the jihad recruitment zone of Dagestan, Russia, last year before the bombers' gunfight in Watertown, Mass., last week left the Muslim terrorist dead.
The Education Blob's Revenge
I wrote recently how teachers unions, parent-teacher associations and school bureaucrats form an education "Blob" that makes it hard to improve schools. They also take revenge on those who work around the Blob. Here's one more sad example: Ben Chavis, founder and principal of the American Indian Public Charter Schools, got permission to compete with the Blob in Oakland, Calif. Chavis vowed, "We'll outperform the other schools in five years." He did. Kids at the three schools he runs now have some of the highest test scores in California. His schools excel even though the government spends less on them.
Immigration Gambles
Britain's late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said it all when she wrote that the world has "never ceased to be dangerous," but the West has "ceased to be vigilant." Nothing better illustrates her point than the fact that the West has imported vast numbers of people who hate our guts and would love to slit our throats. Political correctness has replaced self-preservation. The Boston Marathon killer who set a bomb down right next to an eight-year-old child is only the latest in an on-going series of such people. Senator Patrick Leahy has warned us not to use the Boston Marathon terrorists as an argument against the immigration legislation he advocates. But if we are not to base our laws on facts about realities, what are we to base them on? Fashionable theories and pious rhetoric?
Academic Cesspools
Over the past 10 years, I have written columns variously titled "Academic Cesspools," "Academic Dishonesty," "The Shame of Higher Education," "Academic Rot" and "Indoctrination of Our Youth." Therefore, I was not surprised by David Feith's April 5th Wall Street Journal article, "The Golf Shot Heard Round the Academic World." In it, Feith tells of a golf course conversation between Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein. Klingenstein voiced disapproval of campus celebration of diversity and ethnic differences while there's "not enough celebration of our common American identity." Because Klingenstein wouldn't help finance the college's diversity craze, Mills insinuated, in remarks to the student body, that Klingenstein is a racist. Mills also told students: "We must be willing to entertain diverse perspectives throughout our community. ... Diversity of ideas at all levels of the college is crucial for our credibility and for our educational mission."
'Right Wing' Doesn't Equal 'Terrorist'
"If history were to repeat itself," warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address, "and we were to return to the so-called normalcy of the 1920s, then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home." The "normalcy" of the 1920s that Roosevelt referred to was a time of peace and prosperity. The decade began with Republican President Warren Harding commuting the sentences of political prisoners jailed by the Wilson administration, including the socialist leader Eugene Debs. "Normalcy" meant the end to the Palmer raids aimed at rooting out dissidents, the end of economic rationing, the cessation of domestic surveillance and the state propaganda of the World War I years.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
By Any Name, It's Still Amnesty
It's not amnesty, we're told. Oh, no. Yet the immigration bill that was recently introduced in the U.S. Senate would give legal residency to the estimated 11 million people who are here illegally. News flash: That's amnesty. The bill's supporters may be motivated by a desire to create a clean slate. Just accept those who have already made their way here, they're saying in effect. We'll crack down on the borders and make sure this flow stops. Yes, sir we'll lay down the law. This time we mean business.
A Crumbling Progressive Facade
Last week was a tough one for progressives. The Boston marathon bombers turned out to be something other than: right wing extremists, Bible or gun "clingers," Tax Day protestors, Patriot Day protesters, Tea party members, or any other check-the-box category that would have satisfied progressives' warped sensibilities. Yet over the weekend, it remained clear that the president was willing to double down on the another warped progressive priority: maintaining a self-imposed blind spot regarding the reality that Boston was victimized by *Islamic* terrorism. It is a reality that this president has managed to downplay, due to a combination of determined law enforcement efforts -- and blind luck. "They failed because the people of Boston refused to be intimidated," the president said referring to the brothers Tsarnaev. "They failed because, as Americans, we refused to be terrorized." That statement in and of itself is curious. First, the people of Boston *were* terrorized, even if it was a short-lived emotion. Furthermore, if three people killed and more than 170 wounded, several of whom have had limbs completely blown off, is considered a "failure," one can only imagine what this president considers a "success."
Lessons From Boston and Chechnya
We cannot bring back the stolen lives. We cannot bring back the lost limbs or the lost hearing. And we cannot mitigate the infinite grief of the victims' loved ones. But there is something we can and must do: We must learn all the lessons we can.
Terrorists and George W. Bush
While presiding over a war someone else started, George W. Bush received abuse and vilification unprecedented for a U. S. president. He still does, as a matter of fact, if you troll news sites featuring stories on the Boston atrocity of last week. The president's -- now the ex-president's -- offenses were practically historic. He was a liar! He was a warmonger and torturer and violator of civil rights, not to mention a cheap show-off (that "Mission Accomplished" business)! If only we could be cleansed from the touch of the man who stole the hanging chads and, with them, the election! The George W. Bush Presidential Center opens this week in Dallas, and the shouting, spitting, eye-gouging match over Bush's stewardship of the nation from 2001 to 2009 can commence with renewed fury. Not the least point of dispute will be the war on terror, which conflict we seem to be re-fighting in the aftermath of the Boston slaughter.
President Obama's Symbiotic Relationship With the Abortion Industry
When I read that President Obama refused to comment on the murder trial of abortion butcher Kermit Gosnell "because it's an active trial," I knew immediately he wasn't being truthful. In fact, the second I heard about Obama's excuse for dodging the question, I tweeted that ongoing investigations or trials did not preclude his publicly weighing in on the Trayvon Martin case or on the case of his friend and Harvard professor Henry Gates, about which he said the Cambridge police had acted "stupidly." If there ever has been a case of tainting the jury pool, Obama's public identification with Martin was it. So please spare us any pretense toward restraint in such matters.
The Muslim World Hates the U.S. More Than Ever
If there was one thing the left was certain about in 2008 it was this: George W. Bush had catastrophically undermined America's world reputation with his unprovoked aggression and use of torture. The advent of Obama would reverse the damage. As Andrew Sullivan wrote in 2007, among best assets Obama brought to the "rebranding" of America was "his face." The election of Obama and his friendly approach to the Muslim world would make the United States safer as well as more just. No one believed this tale more fervently than Obama himself. His first official act was to direct the closing of Guantanamo Bay within one year and the elimination of harsh interrogation techniques. The "message we are sending around the world," he intoned, "is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle ... in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals." In Cairo a few months later, he declared, "a new beginning" of relations between America and the Muslim world.
Genes and Racism
During decades of watching both collegiate and professional football, I have seen hundreds of touchdowns scored by black players -- but not one extra point kicked by a black player. Is this because blacks are genetically incapable of kicking a football or because racists won't let blacks kick a football? Most of us would consider either of these explanations ridiculous. Yet genes and discrimination were the predominant explanations of black-white differences offered by intellectuals in the 20th century. It was genes that were the preferred explanation in the early decades of that century and discrimination in the later decades, as I show in my recent book, "Intellectuals and Race."
What Next After Boston?
The last time there was a terrorist attack on America, we got the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration. Each entity has spent billions to keep us safe, but neither could stop two brothers, Tamerlan, a permanent resident, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a newly minted U.S. citizen, who lived in America and, reportedly, became radicalized jihadists, from killing and maiming innocent people at the Boston Marathon last week. According to Dana Priest and William M. Arkin of The Washington Post, "Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. ... An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. ... In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings -- about 17 million square feet of space."
Monday, April 22, 2013
Miranda
Suddenly, every cable news anchor, every pundit, every Sunday show guest, and every waiter in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia has become an expert on whether or not Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be informed of his Miranda rights. Let's assume, for the moment, that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has never watched a single episode of "Law & Order" in any of its manifestations and, thus, does not know he can ask for a lawyer -- or refuse to answer any questions with a lawyer or without.
Egypt Persecutes Christians and Americans Pay the Bill
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood's governing majority, is not actually crucifying the nation's Christians. But they are nonetheless actively persecuting Coptic Christians who are said to be one-tenth of the population of the largest Arab country. A photograph of two young men set afire during recent demonstrations is pretty striking. Demonstrations have turned into riots as Egypt's police cracked down on the Copts. The Copts were protesting against increasing sectarian violence directed at the country's Christian minority.