Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
What Can Israel Do?
When Israel took action against Hamas in the Gaza Strip last year, the world media did its damndest to try to paint the Jewish state as a human rights violator. One of their chief cards in this effort was a photo of BBC video editor Jehad Misharawi holding his son Omar's body. Supposedly Omar had been killed in an Israeli missile strike. The picture quickly went viral. The Washington Post ran with the story. The BBC suggested that Israel was responsible for the death. BBC Middle East bureau chief Paul Danahar tweeted, "Questioned asked here is: if Israel can kill a man riding on a moving motorbike (as they did last month) how did Jihad's son get killed." The story became ubiquitous, a sign of Israeli brutality in an impoverished area of the world. There's only one problem: the story wasn't true.
Frack to the Future
Celebrities are now upset about fracking, the injection of chemicals into the ground to crack rocks to release oil and gas. With everyone saying they want alternatives to foreign oil, I'd think celebrities would love fracking. I'd be wrong. Lady Gaga, Yoko Ono and their group, Artists Against Fracking, don't feel the love. Yoko sang, "Don't frack me!" on TV. Stopping fracking is the latest cause of the silly people. They succeeded in getting scientifically ignorant politicians to ban fracking in New York, Maryland and Vermont. Hollywood gave an Oscar to "Gasland," a documentary that suggests fracking will shove gas into some people's drinking water, so the water will burn. It's true that some water contains so much natural gas that you can light it.
What Rand Paul Got Right
I hope I'm not too late to the fight. Last week, freshman Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held an old-fashioned filibuster against the nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA. Paul's stated reason for taking to the floor and talking for 13 hours was that the Obama administration wouldn't give him a straight answer on the question of whether the president can unilaterally order the killing of American citizens on American soil with "lethal force, such as a drone strike ... and without trial." In other words, if an American member of al-Qaeda is sitting at a Starbucks, can the president sic one of his death-dealing robots on him? Attorney General Eric Holder had replied with a muddled yes-and-no in a letter to Paul: The White House "has no intention of doing so," but it would not rule it out if it was deemed necessary by the administration.
Educational Rot
American education is in a sorry state of affairs, and there's enough blame for all participants to have their fair share. They include students who are hostile and alien to the education process, uninterested parents, teachers and administrators who either are incompetent or have been beaten down by the system, and politicians who've become handmaidens for teachers unions. There's another education issue that's neither flattering nor comfortable to confront and talk about. That's the low academic preparation of many teachers. That's an issue that must be confronted and dealt with if we're to improve the quality of education. Let's look at it. Schools of education, whether graduate or undergraduate, tend to represent the academic slums of most college campuses. They tend to be home to students who have the lowest academic achievement test scores when they enter college, such as SAT scores. They have the lowest scores when they graduate and choose to take postgraduate admissions tests -- such as the GRE, the MCAT and the LSAT.
Intellectuals and Race: Part II
Once we recognize that large differences in achievement among races, nations and civilizations have been the rule, not the exception, throughout recorded history, there is at least some hope of rational thought -- and perhaps even some constructive efforts to help everyone advance. Even such a British patriot as Winston Churchill said, "We owe London to Rome" -- an acknowledgement that Roman conquerors created Britain's most famous city, at a time when the ancient Britons were incapable of doing so themselves. No one who saw the illiterate and backward tribal Britons of that era was likely to imagine that someday the British would create an empire vastly larger than the Roman Empire -- one encompassing one fourth of the land area of the earth and one fourth of the human beings on the planet.
Time to Get Government Out of the Marriage Business
Marriage is, at bottom, a religious custom -- a place where government's writ must not run.
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Hagel's Afghanistan Visit and Obama’s Disastrous 'Good War'
Mission accomplished: Thousands of American lives wasted for failure.
A Better Way to Banish the Bomb
Robust missile defense renders nuclear arms race futile
Marijuana: Another Gift of the Left to America's Youth
Denver television station CBS4 reports that Colorado has seen a sharp spike in marijuana use among teenagers since Colorado voters passed Amendment 64 last November legalizing recreational use of the drug. As described in The Economist, along with a Washington State measure also legalizing marijuana, Amendment 64 is "an electoral first not only for America but for the world." That means two American states are to the left of the Scandinavian countries, Holland, and every other liberal country regarding marijuana.
The Sound of Inevitability
Given his track record on marital fidelity, former President Bill Clinton is not the person I would consult about "committed, loving relationships." Clinton used those words in a Washington Post op-ed last week, urging the Supreme Court to overturn the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman, which he signed into law. In his column, Clinton said that 1996 "was a very different time." No state recognized same-sex marriage and supporters of DOMA "believed that its passage 'would diffuse a movement to enact a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which would have ended the debate for a generation or more.'" Clinton says he now supports same-sex marriage based on justice, equality and the Constitution.
Rep. Ryan, Please Follow Rand Paul's PR Model
There are three major factors that stand in the way of entitlement reform and the other responsible budgetary measures that must be taken to avert an eventual national financial catastrophe, and they have a common source. The first is that too many American people remain, amazingly, in the fog about the scope of the problem. The second is that a certain political ideology refuses to substitute a designated driver for the intoxicated entitlement state, which is driving the American bankruptcy bus. The third is that the leader of this noxious ideology has a further conflict of interest precluding a solution to the crisis, which is that he is hellbent on inflicting harm on the only political party pushing for reform and on successful entrepreneurs, who are critical to economic growth -- a key component of any reform measure.
How Not to Appraise a Pope
Church-state separation never seems more a reality in America than when the media begin to appraise both the qualifications for a new pope and the challenges he -- whoever "he" turns out to be -- must face. The idea arises quickly on these occasions that the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church are choosing a chief executive like the president of General Mills or, for that matter, the president of the United States. Thus what we need (it seems) is a genial man with obvious people skills. A spiritual Bill Clinton? We may or may not need a European. It seems to depend on whether the church needs to reflect in its supreme head the changing ethnic nature of Roman Catholicism.
Intellectuals and Race
There are so many fallacies about race that it would be hard to say which is the most ridiculous. However, one fallacy behind many other fallacies is the notion that there is something unusual about different races being unequally represented in various institutions, careers or at different income or achievement levels. A hundred years ago, the fact that people from different racial backgrounds had very different rates of success in education, in the economy and in other endeavors, was taken as proof that some races were genetically superior to others. Some races were considered to be so genetically inferior that eugenics was proposed to reduce their reproduction, and Francis Galton urged "the gradual extinction of an inferior race."
Women Troubles
If there's one sure way to capture the attention of the usual suspects in the press, it's to highlight the problems of women with high-powered careers, as billionaire Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has done. In her Ted talk three years ago and now in a book that has received lavish attention, Sandberg laments that women "are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story ... 190 heads of state -- nine are women. Of all the people in parliaments in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top ... 15, 16 percent." Sandberg appears not to be complaining about sexism so much as encouraging women to stop sabotaging their own success. Studies show that women are less likely to attribute their success to their own merit than are men, she reports. They are less likely to ask for raises or to negotiate for better terms in a job search. When they are successful, they are less likely than comparable males to be considered "likable."
Monday, March 11, 2013
The Gruesome Reality of Racist South Africa
For decades, the country of South Africa was the focus of an international rallying cry against the injustices of apartheid. On June 17, 1991, South Africa's Parliament abolished the legal framework for the practice of racial persecution. In 1994, Nelson Mandela and his Marxist African National Congress (ANC) assumed the reins of power. The international community looked away, satisfied that justice had prevailed. They continue to look away, even as South Africa has degenerated into another racist pit, best described by an Afrikaner farm owner: "It's politically correct to kill whites these days." In July of 2012, Dr. Gregory Stanton, head of the nonprofit group Genocide Watch, conducted a fact-finding mission in South Africa. He concluded that there is a coordinated campaign of genocide being conducted against white farmers, known as Boers. "The farm murders, we have become convinced, are not accidental," Stanton contended. "It was very clear that the massacres were not common crimes," he added -- especially because of the absolute barbarity used against the victims. "We don't know exactly who is planning them yet, but what we are calling for is an international investigation," he added.
Background Checks Won't Make Us Safer
In April of 2007, a mentally disturbed student showed up at the campus of his school, Virginia Tech, brandishing two semi-automatic pistols, and murdered 32 students, teachers and school employees and wounded 17 others. Then he took his own life. It was the one of deadliest mass shooting incidents in American history. The nation was in shock, as it is now following the December mass murder at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The press and public outcry was the same then as now. How can we stop horrors like this from occurring? We've got to stop criminals and nut cases from getting their hands on guns.
Major & Minor Annoyances
The macro problems with most movies today are that they are way too long, the acting isn't very good, the scripts are worse, and the target audience seems to be teenage boys. The micro problems are, one, that directors seem to think they are being artful when they under-light scenes when all they're doing is turning movies into radio shows, and, two, that far too many movies don't believe in opening credits. It makes a certain amount of sense when TV shows open on action because they want to grab the viewer before he has a chance to start channel surfing. But with movies, the sucker has already paid for his ticket, and is not about to switch over to "The Bachelor" or some dumb talk show featuring Katie Couric or Joy Behar.
Education Liberation
The Boston School Committee will vote this week on a plan to overhaul its broken system for assigning students to schools, a complicated lottery-based maze that for years has been a source of frustration, waste, and despair.
Obama Flails as Republicans Stand Firm on Sequester
They're flailing. That's the impression I get from watching Barack Obama and his White House over the past week. Things haven't gone as they expected. The House Republicans were supposed to cave in on the sequester, as they did on the fiscal cliff at the beginning of the year. They would be so desperate to avoid the sequester's mandatory defense cuts, the theory went, that they would agree to higher taxes (through closing loopholes) on high earners. But the Republicans didn't deal. They decided to take the sequester cuts and make them the basis for a continuing resolution funding the government for the rest of the fiscal year.