Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, April 5, 2013
North Korea Provokes, Dems Retreat
Why does the Left oppose protecting the defenseless eastern seaboard from attack?
Korean Craziness
WASHINGTON -- On Sunday, June 25, 1950, the Korean People's Army attacked across the 38th parallel, captured Seoul -- capital of the Republic of Korea -- and began driving south. The battered South Korean army and their U.S. military advisers quickly were pushed into the "Pusan Perimeter" on the southern tip of the peninsula -- and U.S. President Harry Truman took the case to the United Nations Security Council. American leadership and the absence of the Soviet ambassador resulted in swift passage of Security Council Resolution 84. The measure -- perhaps the last time in history that the U.N. acted with dispatch -- authorized the use of force against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. During the bloody three-year war that followed, troops from 10 European countries and from 10 others around the world fought beside U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in Korea -- finally securing an armistice July 27, 1953.
Smiley-Face Lies and Homicide Hogwash in Dem Hellholes
President Obama's hometown of Chicago still goes by the old nickname "Windy City." But after three miserable decades of strict gun control and permanent Democratic rule, Chicago has cemented its reputation as America's Bloody City. No amount of statistical whitewashing can cover up the stains of the left's ideological failures there. But as Obama continues to wage war on law-abiding gun owners, his home team is trying its hardest to spread smiley-face lies upon damned lies to downplay Chicago homicide statistics. On Monday, April Fools' Day, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy held a press conference to tout a "dramatic" drop in the city's homicide rate. The headlines read: "March homicides drop dramatically in Chicago" (USA Today); "Murders fall 42 percent in America's deadliest city: Chicago" (NBC News); and "March homicides drop 69 percent in Chicago" (Las Vegas Sun)."
Farewell to Hollywood's Favorite Bureaucrat
Now that it's almost departure time for Julius Genachowski, Obama's first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, The Hill newspaper has noted one important sign of his priorities. In his four years at the helm, the FCC hasn't issued one fine to Hollywood for indecent content on broadcast television. Now there's a legacy. Hollywood sends its gratitude, Mr. Chairman, for an absolutely perfect record of inaction. Who says that in Obama's America, your campaign contributions can't buy regulatory paralysis in Washington when needed? Few media outlets noticed. Communications Daily described Genachowski's perfect zero as a "restrained approach." He wasn't restrained. He was completely inert.
What Has Happened to Liberal Education?
Liberal education once stood for something grand and good: the study of the arts, humanities and sciences with the aim of improving the mind through the acquisition of knowledge and the pursuit of truth. But some of America's most elite colleges and universities have all but abandoned this goal. Instead, many selective schools favor the faddish, the politically correct and the dogmatic, all the while proclaiming their devotion to promoting "critical thinking" and tolerance. Conservatives have complained of this for decades, with little effect. A slew of books over the past 25 years have exposed what goes on in the ivory towers, from Allan Bloom's treatise "The Closing of the American Mind" to Dinesh D'Souza's polemic "Illiberal Education." But none had provided a careful, in-depth study of a single school until the National Association of Scholars (NAS) this week released its 360-page report "What Does Bowdoin Teach?"
A Government of the Crisis, by the Crisis, and for the Crisis
When President Obama's former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said that "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste," many didn't realize he was inaugurating a new credo for governance. Rahm's statement was originally understood as the administration's intention to capitalize on actual crises while they were hot, to promote legislation liberals had craved for decades but didn't have public support to pass. But some suspected he was talking about manufactured crises, as well. I usually avoid conspiracy-type theories, especially where Obama is concerned because his policies and tactics are so egregious on their own that I see no reason to risk undermining the credibility of our criticisms by indulging those too much. But I do think it's interesting that an infamous radical professor duo, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, and Obama mentor Saul Alinsky advocated the strategic use of manufactured crises to advance the leftist political agenda.
Sowell Does It Again
I plunged into Thomas Sowell's latest book "Intellectuals and Race" immediately upon its arrival but soon realized that I needed to slow down. Many writers express a few ideas with a great cataract of words. Sowell is the opposite. Every sentence contains at least one insight or fascinating statistic, frequently more than one. His newest offering is only 139 pages (excluding notes), but tackles a huge question -- the damage that bad ideas on matters of race peddled by self-satisfied intellectuals have had and continue to have on the world. Race is almost a national psychosis for Americans, distorting our perceptions and inhibiting rational debate. Sowell places our obsession in context both historically and internationally.
The Trigger and the Poison Pill
WASHINGTON -- Is a bipartisan immigration deal at hand? It's close. Last week, the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce worked out a guest-worker compromise that allows in foreign workers on a sliding scale of 20,000 to 200,000, depending on the strength of the economy. Nice deal. As are the other elements of the Senate's bipartisan Gang of Eight plan -- the expansion of H-1B visas for skilled immigrants, serious tracking of visa overstayers and, most important, a universal E-Verify system that would make it very risky for any employer to hire an illegal immigrant. But there's a rub. It's the perennial rub. Are Democrats serious about border enforcement? It's supposed to be the trigger that would allow illegal immigrants to start on the path to citizenship.
The AP's Complicated Word-Association Test
In what may be the greatest victory to date for the sophisticatedly asinine organization "No Labels," the Associated Press has embraced a new policy against "labeling people." For instance, its widely used and influential style guide is being purged of such terms as "schizophrenic" in favor of "diagnosed with schizophrenia." Most of the chatter about the AP's move has been over its decision to drop the term "illegal immigrant." AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll explained that the change on "illegal immigrant" was based on the no-labeling policy. "We concluded that to be consistent, we needed to change our guidance," Carroll said. This was the AP's first mistake. Consistency is an impossible standard to apply to the English language. I myself wish people would write about a "feckful foreign policy," or an "ept remark," or "ert" gasses.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Dogfight Ahead in Stockton, CA Bankruptcy
A precedent-setting government spending case likely headed to the Supreme Court.
Renew Our Founding Principles
Billions of Christians around the world celebrated Easter last Sunday, but not our media. Once again the holiest day of the Christian year slipped under their godless radar. I saw Easter pop up in the news a only few times last weekend, but the stories had nothing to do with God or religion, or the importance to Christianity of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Easter "news" was Easter egg hunts. ABC and USA Today covered the 135th annual White House Easter Egg Roll like it was a nuclear arms treaty.
Don't Knox This 'Serious Network'
ust days after the Turner Broadcasting System CEO claimed that CNN "is a serious news network," it aired a childish report on "Anderson Cooper 360" about convicted murderer Amanda Knox, which appears to have been written by Amanda's parents. Next up: "The Charles Manson story, reported by Squeaky Fromme." Amanda, you may recall, was charged, along with her Italian boyfriend and another of her acquaintances, of sexually assaulting and murdering her English roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy, in 2007. Amanda and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted, the convictions reversed and then the reversal reversed.
Obama: Constitution 'Constrains' Me
In his pursuit of overarching gun control legislation in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre, President Barack Obama has been dogged. He's been relentless. He's been demagogic, too, whether flanking himself with schoolchildren (the implication being that his political opponents don't care about dead kids) or suggesting that if just one life can be saved by his legislation, we ought to buy into it wholeheartedly (a proposition that would justify almost any sort of government overreach). But on Wednesday, President Obama took his gun control push a step further: He admitted that only the Constitution stands between him and full gun confiscation. Rejecting concerns that new background checks might be a prelude to gun seizures, Obama suggested that worries about gun seizures were empty, and were only designed to feed "into fears about government. You hear some of these folks: 'I need a gun to protect myself from the government. We can't do background checks because the government's going to come take my guns away.' The government's us. These officials are elected by you. ... I am constrained as they are constrained by the system that our founders put in place."
The National Rifle Association's Deterrent to Gun Violence
WASHINGTON -- Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City ought to know by now that gun owners do not trust him. The more he agitates against guns, the more they dig in their heels. The more magnificoes he gets behind his Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the more gun owners and advocates of the Second Amendment see him as their enemy. He and his colleagues might only oppose the ownership of small cannons. They might only oppose extending gun ownership to convicted killers and to the criminally insane. Still gun owners and Second Amendment supporters will be suspicious of him. They quite rightly perceive Mayor Bloomberg as harboring ulterior motives in his sonorous pronouncements on guns. Small cannons today, but handguns and pea-shooters and slingshots tomorrow. Frankly, I side with those who suspect the mayor of treachery.
School for Scandal
My first question after reading about seven teachers in an Atlanta, Ga., public school accused of altering standardized test scores to make it appear students performed better than they actually did was: How could they!? The seven were nicknamed "the chosen" and, according to Georgia state investigator Richard Hyde, the less than magnificent seven sat in a locked room without windows, erasing wrong answers and inserting correct ones. It's one thing for a child to cheat on a test; it's quite another for teachers to do it. Compounding the cheating scandal is that the children in this elementary school are mostly poor and African-American. How are they helped to develop a moral sense, not to mention an academic foundation that will lift them out of poverty, if they get the message that cheating is better than achieving?
Term Limits & the Catholic Church
Recently, Thomas Sowell wrote an excellent piece dealing with term limits. The point he made is that if the idea behind limits was to rid us of those people who spend their entire lives doing little more than voting, we've gone about it in a really stupid way. For one thing, as we've seen here in California, it merely means that once one of these palookas has termed out in, say, the state assembly, he merely runs for the state senate or for governor or lieutenant governor or attorney general. In short, he moves on, he doesn't move out. Another problem is that once elected to the House or Senate, where term limits are never even considered, it's next to impossible to dislodge the likes of Harry Reid, Charley Rangel and Henry Waxman.
Fox's Juan Williams Gets It Half Right on Guns
My latest book, "Dear Father, Dear Son," focuses on the importance of fathers -- and the increasing number of children who grow up in homes without one. Fox's Juan Williams understands this -- sort of. He gets the "what," but not the "why." Williams, in a Wall Street Journal piece called "Race and the Gun Debate," writes: "Gun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities. Murders with guns are the No. 1 cause of death for African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34. But talking about race in the context of guns would also mean taking on a subject that can't be addressed by passing a law: the family-breakdown issues that lead too many minority children to find social status and power in guns."
After Obama
We can imagine what lies ahead in 2017 -- no matter the result of either the 2014 midterm elections or the 2016 presidential outcome. There will be no more $1 trillion deficits. About $10 trillion will have been added to the national debt during the Obama administration, on top of the more than $4 trillion from the prior eight-year George W. Bush administration. That staggering bipartisan sum will force the next president to be a deficit hawk, both fiscally and politically. In addition, there will be no huge new federal spending programs -- no third or fourth stimulus, no vast new entitlements. The debt is so large and voters so tired of massive borrowing that the next president will talk not of "investments" but of balancing the budget. In 2016, President Hillary Clinton or President Marco Rubio will tell us that cutting spending and living within our means is the new cool.
Propaganda as Pedagogy
WASHINGTON -- The real vocation of some people entrusted with delivering primary and secondary education is to validate this proposition: The three R's -- formerly reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic -- now are racism, reproduction and recycling. Especially racism. Consider Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction. It evidently considers "instruction" synonymous with "propaganda," which in the patois of progressivism is called "consciousness-raising." Wisconsin's DPI, in collaboration with the Orwellian-named federal program VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America; the "volunteers" are paid), urged white students to wear white wristbands "as a reminder about your privilege, and as a personal commitment to explain why you wear the wristband." A flyer that was on the DPI website and distributed at a DPI-VISTA training class urged whites to "put a note on your mirror or computer screen as a reminder to think about privilege," to "make a daily list of the ways privilege played out" and to conduct an "internal dialogue" asking questions such as "How do I make myself comfortable with privilege?" and "What am I doing today to undo my privilege?"
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Work for What You Need
Regular readers know that I have the same understanding of global economics as a three-year-old has of quantum physics. I watch CNBC's Squawk Box every morning because I know a lot about politics and don't need to watch (a) people I know talking about what I know or, (b) people I don't know making stuff up about things they don't know. I have never made a dime in any investment so, hope springing eternal, I like to listen to people who have made multiple dimes. About two weeks ago the economic world was frozen by the specter of Cyprus -- CYPRUS -- going broke.