Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Obama's 'Non-Profit' Sells Political Access
An incestuous relationship brews between the mega-wealthy and the White House.
Higher Minimum Wages
In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama proposed raising the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour. That would be almost a 25 percent increase. Let's look at the president's proposal, but before doing so, let's ask some other economic questions. Are people responsive to changes in price? For example, if the price of cars rose by 25 percent, would people purchase as many cars? Supposing housing prices rose by 25 percent, what would happen to sales? Those are big-ticket items, but what about smaller-priced items? If a supermarket raised its prices by 25 percent, would people purchase as much? It's not rocket science to conclude that when prices rise, people adjust their behavior by purchasing less.
The Malignancy in Federal Medical Research
When George W. Bush was stumping as a "compassionate conservative" in the closing days of the 2000 presidential campaign, he went to Florida and repeated a campaign promise to double the funding for the National Institutes of Health. "I will lead a medical moon shot to reach far beyond what seems possible today and discover new cures for age-old afflictions," Bush said. After he won Florida by a famously narrow margin -- and thus was elected president despite losing the nationwide popular vote -- Bush basically made good on his funding promise.
The White House Court Jesters of Sequester
Traffic alert: There's a massive clown car pileup in the Beltway. And with the White House court jesters of sequester behind the wheel, no one is safe. Fiscal sanity, of course, is the ultimate victim. President Obama has been warning America that if Congress allows mandatory spending "cuts" of a piddly-widdly 2 percent to go into effect this week, the sky will fall. The manufactured crisis of "sequestration" was Obama's idea in the first place. But that hasn't stopped the Chicken Little in Chief from surrounding himself with every last teacher, senior citizen and emergency responder who will be catastrophically victimized by hardhearted Republicans. Curses on those meanie Republicans! How dare they acquiesce to the very plan for "cuts" -- or rather, negligible reductions in the explosive rate of federal spending growth -- that Obama himself hatched?
How Obama Wins
President Obama is one of the great political knife-fighters in modern history. He is a failed president -- his economy is bleak, his foreign policy bleaker, his vision for American even bleaker still. But he wins. He wins by losing. President Obama has only had two major policy victories during his tenure: the stimulus package and Obamacare. Both are massively unpopular. The stimulus package launched the tea party movement. Obamacare led to the Republican wipeout of 2010.
Where Does a Cop With an 80-pound Dog Search? Anywhere He Wants
Imagine that a police officer, after taking it upon himself to search someone's car, is asked to explain why he thought he would find contraband there. "A little birdie told me," he replies. Most judges would react with appropriate skepticism to such a claim. But substitute "a big dog" for "a little birdie," and you've got probable cause. Or so says the U.S. Supreme Court, which last week unanimously ruled that "a court can presume" a search is valid if police say it was based on an alert by a dog trained to detect drugs. The court thereby encouraged judges to accept self-interested proclamations about a canine's capabilities, reinforcing the alarmingly common use of dogs to justify invasions of privacy.
A Ruling on Racial Progress
I can only hope that the scourge of racism is finally purged from Stewartstown and Pinkham's Grant. These are two of 10 New Hampshire towns covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which requires local officials to get permission, or "preclearance," on any changes to their election laws. Stewartstown has just over a thousand souls in it and is 99 percent white. In 1970, when it was put under the authority of Section 5, the census listed two blacks out of its 1,008 residents. Pinkham's Grant boasts nine residents, and it must also beg Washington for permission to make any changes to how it votes. In 1970, New Hampshire required all of its citizens to pass a literacy test to register to vote. But Pinkham's Grant, Stewartstown and the other eight towns also had low voter-participation rates. These two factors -- a test of any kind for voting and participation rates under 50 percent -- met the criteria for oversight under Section 5.
Libertarians' Awkward Bedfellows
Last week, Conservative pundit Ann Coulter told me and a thousand young libertarians that we libertarians are puss- -- well, she used slang for a female body part. We were in Washington, D.C., at the Students for Liberty conference, taping my TV show, and she didn't like my questions about her opposition to gay marriage and drug legalization. "We're living in a country that is 70 percent socialist," she says. "The government takes 60 percent of your money. They take care of your health care, your pensions ... who you can hire ... and you (libertarians) want to suck up to your little liberal friends and say, oh, we want to legalize pot? ... If you were a little more manly, you'd tell liberals what your position on employment discrimination is."
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
CUNY Welcomes Jew-Hating Gay Activists
Anti-Israel hate-fest set to bash the only safe haven for homosexuals in the Middle East.
Exiting the Road to Ruin
"Sequester." It's a word that used to come up rarely. It nearly always referred to a jury being locked away to deliberate a verdict. Now it's all over the news, a stand-in for the automatic spending cuts scheduled to hit the federal budget Friday. The only jury is an American public that has grown all too accustomed to seeing politicians dodge the tough choices necessary to bring spending under control. "There will be no easy offramps on this one," one senior statesman said as he defended sequestration in November 2011. "We need to keep the pressure up to compromise, not turn off the pressure. The only way these spending cuts will not take place is if Congress gets back to work and agrees on a balanced plan to reduce the deficit by at least $1.2 trillion. That's exactly what they need to do. That's the job they promised to do, and they've still got a year to at least figure it out."
Environmentalism and Human Sacrifice
Last week, Bjorn Lomborg, the widely published Danish professor and director of one of the world's leading environmental think tanks, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, published an article about the Philippines' decision, after 12 years, to allow genetically modified (GM) rice -- "golden rice" -- to be grown and consumed in that country. The reason for the delay was environmentalist opposition to GM rice; and the reason for the change in Philippine policy was that 4.4 million Filipino children suffer from vitamin A deficiency. That deficiency, Lomborg writes, "according to the World Health Organization, causes 250,000 to 500,000 children to go blind each year. Of these, half die within a year."
Gov. Scott to Voters: Never Mind
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Gov. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) was one of those tea party stars whom voters believed had the courage of his convictions when he promised, as recently as last summer, to block The Affordable Care Act in his state. But last week, writes the Orlando Sentinel, "Scott made an abrupt about-face, embracing a three-year expansion of Medicaid coverage for about 1 million low-income Floridians that will be paid for by the health care law." Scott said, "I think this is a common-sense solution to dealing with this for the next three years where it will give us the time to think about how we can improve the system." Sounding like a Democrat, he added that the state is obligated to help "the poorest and weakest among us." No, governor, charities and religious bodies are obligated to help the weak and poor. State and federal governments have no such obligation. To claim they do empowers bureaucrats and politicians who are having a difficult enough time fulfilling their constitutional responsibilities. It also undermines the work ethic.
Obama's Game Playing Is Wearing Thin
President Obama told a meeting of the National Governors Association: "At some point, we've got to do some governing. And certainly, what we can't do is keep careening from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis." Really? Yes, really. He added, referring to the sequestration: "These cuts do not have to happen. Congress can turn them off anytime with just a little bit of compromise." Obama has repeatedly demonstrated that he does not consider himself bound by a duty of good faith to square with the American people. He has shown that he is unafraid to utter the most egregious distortions and exaggerations; he has no fear of being called on them.
The Devil, You Say!
Hardly had the shooting stopped at Sandy Hook Elementary School before the national commentary machine cranked up. Everyone and his dog had something to say: Most of it, as events would show, centered on the compelling need, or lack of it, for gun control. To the Rev. Dr. Bill Dickson, it seemed the time had come for a metaphorically deeper treatment, focused on the seething, slithering abode of evil itself and the inhabitants thereof. "Something shocking is going on in the world," Dr. Dickson, rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Fort Worth, told me the other day. "It's not explained in human nature. We need to realize we are in a spiritual battle, facing an evil opposition that wants to destroy us."
Bread and Circuses
*"People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions -- everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses" --Juvenal* Isn't it grand that we have such a cool couple in the White House? Hollywood would never have deigned to invite any other First Lady to present the award for best picture at its annual self-worshipping soporific. Mrs. Obama knew just how to flatter the nearly inexhaustible vanity of people who sell tickets to shows. "I am so honored to ... help celebrate the movies that lift our spirits, broaden our minds and transport us to places that we have never imagined. ... They made us laugh; they made us weep, and they made us grip our armrests just a little tighter. They taught us that love can endure against all odds and transform our lives in the most surprising ways and reminded us that we overcome any obstacle if we dig deep enough and fight hard enough and find the courage to believe in ourselves. These lessons apply to all of us no matter who we are or what we look like or where we come from or who we love, but they are especially important for our young people. ... I want to thank you here tonight for being part of that vitally important work." Oh, sorry, did I doze off?
Shepherds and Sheep
John Stuart Mill's classic essay "On Liberty" gives reasons why some people should not be taking over other people's decisions about their own lives. But Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has given reasons to the contrary. He cites research showing "that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging." Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that "people make a lot of mistakes." Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes, including some that were very damaging. What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other than people, are going to override our mistaken decisions for us. That is the key flaw in the theory and agenda of the left.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Preserve Gun Rights, Save Black Lives
This past Friday my organization, CURE, sponsored a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, to bring attention to the importance of rigorously defending the right of all Americans, guaranteed under the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution, to own a gun. Our event provided a forum for black leaders from the world of politics and public policy in Washington, from the business community, from academia, and from the clergy to express their deep concern about efforts currently underway to limit our God-given and constitutional individual right of self-defense. Why would an organization like CURE, whose mission focuses on the relevance of American values of faith and freedom to minorities, be so concerned about guns?
Cars & Movies
Let's start with my theory about the Academy Awards. I am not anti-Oscar. Neither am I anti-NBA playoffs. I want to know who won, but I don't want to sit through the agony of watching the processes. With that in mind, I am free to type this beginning at 7:30. I have closed Twitter for the evening while still wondering how Danica Patrick went from 3rd to 8th in about 50 yards on the last lap of the Daytona 500 yesterday afternoon.
Spending Junkies and Their Shameless Scare-mongering
In Friday's Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan compiled a nice list of "horrors" that will befall our nation, should the latest, never let a crisis go to waste "calamity" known as sequestration come to pass. "Seven hundred thousand children will be dropped from Head Start," she writes. "Six hundred thousand women and children will be dropped from aid programs. Meat won't be inspected. Seven thousand TSA workers will be laid off, customs workers too, and air traffic controllers. Lines at airports will be impossible. The Navy will slow down the building of an aircraft carrier. Troop readiness will be disrupted, weapons programs slowed or stalled, civilian contractors stiffed, uniformed first responders cut back." That's a remarkable list, and for the sake of argument, let's suppose it's all true. (Before you get started, anyone with a brain knows this manufactured hysteria is just that, but bear with me). If it *is* true, what occurs to me is that people are looking at this whole drama one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase.
Calvin Coolidge Gets New Deal in Revisionist History
For years, most Americans' vision of history has been shaped by the New Deal historians. Writing soon after Franklin Roosevelt's death, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others celebrated his accomplishments and denigrated his opponents. They were gifted writers, and many of their books were bestsellers. And they have persuaded many Americans -- Barack Obama definitely included -- that progress means an ever bigger government. In their view, the prosperous 1920s were a binge of mindless frivolity. The Depression of the 1930s was the inevitable hangover, for which FDR administered the cure.