Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Connecticut's Draconian Anti-Second Amendment Bill
The most extreme gun-control law in America is poised to pass -- but it still wouldn't have prevented Newtown.
The Open-Borders Reporters Who Banned 'Illegal Immigrant'
File this in the overflowing cabinet labeled: No Wonder the Mainstream Media Is Dying. On Tuesday, the Associated Press announced that it is banishing the phrase "illegal immigrant" from its famous stylebook. The world's largest newsgathering outlet now advises reporters that "illegal" will "only refer to an action, not a person." AP directs writers not to use the terms "illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented" anymore, except "in direct quotations." It won't be long before illegal border crossers, illegal visa overstayers, illegal deportation evaders, document fraudsters and illegal alien traffickers are all referred to as "our fellow Americans." Without the quotations. Mark my words.
Defending Marriage, Fighting Democracy
In two cases last week, lawyers urged the Supreme Court to respect the democratic process by upholding bans on legal recognition of gay marriages. But only one of those bans can plausibly be portrayed as representing the will of the people. Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot initiative that overturned a California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, reflected popular opposition to what was perceived as arrogant meddling by unelected judges. Although the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was driven by a similar populist impulse, in practice it frustrates the will of the people in states where voters or their elected representatives decide to treat gay and straight couples equally.
Stockton Was Murdered
Were a rational person given the assignment to search this planet to find the best place for human beings to live and build wealth, he might well settle on San Joaquin County, Calif. That is where Americans built a city called Stockton -- the municipality a federal bankruptcy judge just declared dead. How did Stockton die? It was cold-blood murder.
Conservatives Shouldn't Own Newspapers?
The Los Angeles Times is up for sale, and there are super-wealthy conservative bidders. Get out the popcorn out and watch the liberals squeal. The hilarious kickoff came when two leftist collectives -- the Daily Kos website and the California-based Courage Campaign Institute -- set out to buy an ad in the LA Times to protest the Koch brothers pondering a bid. I kid you not, the ad began: "WE NEED NEWS, NOT MORE SPIN." This would assume that today's Los Angeles Times -- which just endorsed Obama's re-election -- is an oasis of objectivity in a desert of media bias. They were outraged when the Times used their owner's prerogative and refused to run the ad. The Koch brothers are unqualified to own a newspaper, according to this ad. Why? Because they're conservative: "They bankroll the Tea Party. They deny global warming. They buy politicians and bust unions."
Green Tyranny
Environmental activists and politicians would like you to think that we must love their regulations -- or hate trees and animals. I love trees and animals. But you can love nature and still hate the tyranny that environmental regulations bring. The Environmental Protection Agency just announced it will boost gas prices ("only" a penny, although industry says 6 to 9 cents) to make another minuscule improvement to air quality.
Is Disability the New Welfare?
The government in Britain recently did something interesting. It asked everyone receiving an "incapacity benefit" -- a disability program slowly being phased out under new reforms -- to submit to a medical test to confirm they were too disabled to work. A third of recipients (878,000 people) didn't even bother and dropped out of the program rather than be examined. Of those tested, more than half (55 percent) were found fit for work, and a quarter were found fit for some work. But that's Britain, where there's a long tradition of gaming the dole. Americans would never think of taking advantage of the taxpayers or misleading the government. Well, except for the couple dozen people who have pleaded guilty to scamming the Long Island Rail Road's federal disability system in a $1 billion fraud scheme. A billion bucks would pay for a lot of White House tours.
Middle East 'Democracy'
The Obama administration treated the creation of "democracy" in the Middle East as a Good Thing. Ironically, those who created the United States of America viewed democracy with fear-- and created a Constitutional republic instead. Everything depends on how you define democracy. In its most basic sense, democracy means majority rule. But there can be majority rule in a free country or in a country with an authoritarian or even a dictatorial government. In this age of sloppy uses of words, many people include freedom in their conception of democracy. But whether democracy leads to freedom is an open question, not a foregone conclusion.
Minority Student Needs
Professor Craig Frisby is on the faculty of University of Missouri's Department of Educational, School and Counseling Psychology. His most recent book is "Meeting the Psychoeducational Needs of Minority Students." It's a 662-page textbook covering a range of topics from multiculturalism and home and family influences to student testing and school discipline. There's no way full justice can be given to this excellent work in the space of this column, so I'll highlight a few valuable insights he makes that would help educators do a better job with minority students. Quack multiculturalism is the name Frisby gives to the vision of multiculturalism that promotes the falsehoods and distortions that dominate today's college agenda, sold under various names such as "valuing diversity," "being sensitive to cultural differences" and "cultural competence." He identifies different brands of multiculturalism such as boutique, Kumbayah, light-and-fluffy, and bean-counting multiculturalism. Insider language used to promote multiculturalism includes terms such as "practice tolerance," "celebrate diversity," "equity with excellence" and "differences are not deficits." Escalating costs and budget crunches don't stop colleges from hiring vice presidents, deans and directors of diversity.
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Obama's Amnesty: An Attack on the Poor
Why the victims of immigration "reform" will be minorities and the economically vulnerable.
The Why Before the What on the Upcoming Hurricane Season
It is an honor to blog at *The Patriot Post*. A commenter in the last post I did mentioned how tiring it is having to talk about global warming. I agree 100%. This should be a non-issue. But here is our problem: The people involved in this are not going away. Far from it. They are trying to implement draconian policies that would severely limit freedoms in the long run. In addition, their tactics -- now that there are increasing signs that not only has earth stopped warming, but may be, as some of us fear, cooling -- are increasingly bombastic and non-factual. They are relying on the idea that most people do not know and understand past weather and climate events to elevate what is going on today. It's almost as if they think the bigger the lie they tell, the more people have to believe it. Since most people would not tell lies that big, they assume others will not.
Guns Save Lives
We all know that guns can cost lives because the media repeat this message endlessly, as if we could not figure it out for ourselves. But even someone who reads newspapers regularly and watches numerous television newscasts may never learn that guns also save lives-- much less see any hard facts comparing how many lives are lost and how many are saved. But that trade-off is the real issue, not the Second Amendment or the National Rifle Association, which so many in the media obsess about. If guns cost more lives than they save, we can always repeal the Second Amendment. But if guns save more lives than they cost, we need to know that, instead of spending time demonizing the National Rifle Association.
Inconvenient Headlines
It's a deeply felt conviction among liberals that they are the caring party. It's not too much to say that liberals are quite confident that they are nicer, more moral people than conservatives. It must require truly titanic powers of denial for the "moral" and "compassionate" party to maintain its position on abortion -- a position that leads them into some macabre rationalizations. Consciences among the morally superior party are agreeably quiescent. But recent headlines have not been similarly cooperative. In Florida, the legislature is considering a variant of the "Born Alive Infants Protection Act," which would require that abortionists provide medical assistance to infants who are "accidentally" born alive and kicking during an abortion. (Then State Senator Barack Obama vociferously opposed similar legislation in Illinois.)
Why Do Liberals Fear Success?
There are many successful liberals, so why do so many of them wish to subsidize failure for the poor, instead of showing them how to succeed? Take Dr. Ben Carson, as one example. Dr. Carson, the renowned neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md., is enjoying a certain amount of celebrity unrelated to his profession for speaking his mind about how individuals and the nation might succeed if more Americans were less dependent on government. Dr. Carson, who is African-American, has been denounced as insufficiently black because he won't toe the liberal line when it comes to big government and the implication that those in the African-American voting bloc, huge supporters of the Democratic Party, who fall below the poverty line, cannot succeed without it. The fact that many have not succeeded with government has apparently escaped the notice of his critics.
Who Are Obama's Real Enablers?
I was reading the Old Testament book of Amos a few days ago and was reminded that liberation theologians get much comfort from that prophet's decrying the mistreatment of the poor. At about the same time, I read a piece by a brilliant conservative analyst with whom I sometimes disagree who was arguing that some conservatives don't take the formidable Barack Obama seriously enough and, in effect, give him cover with their over-the-top depictions of Obama as a Marxist and worse. He erroneously assumes that these supposedly hyperbolic characterizations are motivated by greed (stirring up audiences yields more revenues) and, in any event, only serve to enable Obama. Please stick with me; I will tie these first two paragraphs together before I'm finished.
The Bible vs. Heart
I offer the single most politically incorrect statement a modern American -- indeed a modern Westerner, period -- can make: I first look to the Bible for moral guidance and for wisdom. I say this even though I am not a Christian (I am a Jew, and a non-Orthodox one at that). And I say this even though I attended an Ivy League graduate school (Columbia), where I learned nothing about the Bible there except that it was irrelevant, outdated and frequently immoral. I say this because there is nothing -- not any religious or secular body of work -- that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.
Marriage a la Mode
The American public's apparent surrender to same-sex marriage -- the Pew Research Center says 49 percent of us now support it, with just 44 percent opposed -- has been much remarked lately. I think I can explain it in part. The problem is with the failure of the culture to take marriage itself with the seriousness it used to receive. Connected more with pleasure than with responsibility, marriage functions more and more as just as a set of personal preferences. If it feels good, tastes good, looks good, etc., -- hey, why not? If none of the above, never mind. Each to his own. It 's one big case of the modern moral disorder, the one known as ... "whatever."
Monday, April 1, 2013
A New Birth of Education Freedom
As the nation has focused on the Supreme Court hearings on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, news from the state of Indiana could prove far more important regarding the nation's future. The Indiana Supreme Court has just ruled unanimously, 5-0, that Indiana's school voucher program, signed into law in 2011, the most expansive school voucher program in the nation, does not violate the state's constitution. Those who challenged the law argued that the voucher program is unconstitutional because it allows public funds to be used for religious education.