Right Opinion

Congressional Hearings Show Obama Treading Dangerous Global Path

There were two extraordinary disclosures in Thursday's testimony of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey before the Senate Armed Services Committee. One is that there was no communication between them and Barack Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the seven hours of Sept. 11, 2012, when Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were attacked and murdered in Benghazi. This is a vivid contrast with those photos we've seen of the president and his leading advisers watching the video of the attack on Osama bin Laden.

Denial

There was a time, not long ago, when both Republicans and Democrats agreed that something had to be done about entitlement spending -- especially spending on the elderly. But no longer. Although he promised in his first run for the presidency to reform Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Barack Obama seems increasingly unwilling to do any of that now. The leftwing of the Democratic Party seems increasingly shrill in its insistence that there is no need for any fundamental reform of entitlement spending. Even in the left-of-center think tanks and on the liberal blogs, one finds increasing denial that any fundamental change is needed.

The Bankbuster

WASHINGTON -- With his chronically gravelly voice and relentlessly liberal agenda, Sherrod Brown seems to have stepped out of "Les Miserables," hoarse from singing revolutionary anthems at the barricades. Today, Ohio's senior senator has a project worthy of Victor Hugo -- and of conservatives' support. He wants to break up the biggest banks. He would advocate this even if he thought such banks would never have a crisis sufficient to threaten the financial system. He believes they are unhealthy for the financial system even when they are healthy. This is because there is a silent subsidy -- an unfair competitive advantage relative to community banks -- inherent in being deemed by the government, implicitly but clearly, too big to fail.

A Derelict Commander-in-Chief

When does laziness become derelictions of duty? Consider the following exchange between Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta at a Senate hearing regarding the attacks in Benghazi that left four Americans dead. While you read it, remember that: a) President Obama is Commander-in-Chief, and b) the very next day, he attended a fund-raiser in Las Vegas. Ayotte: So [the president] didn't ask you what ability we had in the area [of Benghazi] and what we could do? Panetta: No I think, I mean, he relied on both myself as Secretary and and General Dempsey's capabilities. He knows generally what we've deployed into the region, we've presented that to him in other briefings. So he knew vernally what was deployed out there, but as to specifics about time etc. etc., no he left that up to us.

Frozen

President Obama's senior thesis at Columbia University has been embargoed. It is said to be an endorsement of the Nuclear Freeze Movement that was so much the cause célèbre of the left here and throughout Western Europe in the Reagan years. We may have to wait for his presidential library to open to find out. And we may have to wait until then, too, to learn whether young Barack Obama attended the massive, one million plus Nuclear Freeze rally in Central Park in June, 1982. It's hard to imagine that the young student who, he tells us in his book *Dreams from My Father*, consciously sought out the Marxist professors on campus would have missed this huge anti-nuclear demonstration unfolding on his doorstep. It's odd, too, that he seems never to have been asked about this during two campaigns for the White House or during any press conference.

Some Really Inconvenient Truths

Barack Obama would like you to believe that it's white guys with assault weapons and NRA memberships that commit most of the murders in this country. But the truth, and he knows it, is that although whites comprise 67% of the population, Hispanics 16% and blacks, just 13%, blacks are responsible for roughly half the murders in America. ... [T]he number of accidental gun deaths in America averages around 1,500-a-year. The number of accidental deaths caused by physicians and hospitals is over 120,000. I leave it to you to decide which poses the greater danger, guns or healthcare providers.

Why I Am More Egalitarian Than Most Liberals on Health Care

Most people would place me on the political right. Yet when it comes to health care, I am more egalitarian than almost everybody on the left. I always have been. By that I mean I am more egalitarian than the defenders of the British National Health Service (NHS) and the defenders of Canada's system of socialized medicine. I'm also more egalitarian than Paul Krugman and the leaders of the Physicians for a National Health Program.Not only that, but a great many Republicans agree with my approach to health care -- even as they oppose ObamaCare. One thing that adds to so much confusion is that people on the left have a huge investment in seeing themselves as more altruistic and more caring than everybody else. Paul Krugman, for example, refers to the Republican Party as the party of Scrooge and sees most elections as Dickensian morality plays -- even though research shows that right-of-center folks are actually more generous than folks on the left, on the average.

From The Comedy Store

President Obama allowed his Jobs Council to expire without renewing its charter despite high unemployment and a contracting economy. The members never met anyway. The Jobs Council was only intended to save one job, and now its work is done.

Droning On

Oujda, Morocco -- To catch you up on my travels, I have been (and still am) in Morocco on a teaching/training mission with Legacy International. We spent Wednesday in Casablanca including a must-do lunch at Rick's Café (see the Mullfoto of me at the piano) then onto Oudja for the rest of the week. Oujda is pronounced "OOZH-duh." It is located about 8 miles from the Algerian border on the eastern edge of Morocco. Mullings Director of Standards & Practices Alert: We did *not*, in spite of my begging and pleading, go any closer than about two kilometers to the border and I was never in any danger of being taken into custody as a cute-as-a-button 66-year-old American by Algerian slavers.

In Defense of Rove

The wisdom of avoiding the needless surrender of power.

Doubling Down on Anti-Gun News

Everyone can imagine the horror of a madman shooting up an elementary school, especially the horror of losing your six-year-old in the melee. But at some point, the news media's wallowing in Newtown reminds one of Don Henley's satirical song "Dirty Laundry," and how the anchors' eyes gleam through plane-crash news because "it's interesting when people die; we love dirty laundry." The "O" word that defines the media at times like these isn't "objective." It's "opportunistic." To be sure, the "news" manufacturers aren't hoping for a school shooting. But that doesn't mean they aren't ready to exploit it. Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen was explicit back in 1999: ""Perhaps it will take one more school shooting to move the majority of Americans into a position more powerful than that of the NRA. Perhaps it will take one more school shooting to move us from people who support gun control to people who vote it."

The Blame Righty Mob Falls Silent

Question: How many times over the past four years have exploitative liberal journalists and Democratic leaders rushed to pin random acts of violence on the tea party, Republicans, Fox News and conservative talk radio? Answer: Nearly a dozen times, including the 2009 massacre of three Pittsburgh police officers (which lib journos falsely blamed on Fox News, Glenn Beck and the "heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces"); the 2009 suicide insurance scam/murder hoax of Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman (which New York magazine falsely blamed on Rush Limbaugh, "conservative media personalities, websites and even members of Congress"); the 2009 Holocaust museum shooting (which MSNBC commentator Joan Walsh blamed on Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and yours truly); the 2010 Times Square jihad bomb plot (which Mayor Michael Bloomberg falsely blamed on tea party activists protesting Obamacare); and the 2011 Tucson massacre, which liberals continue to blame on former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Strange Bedfellows for Conservatives

As conservatives debate what to do about immigration reform in the wake of the GOP's disastrous showing among Hispanic voters in the 2012 presidential election, they might consider that the groups they've allied themselves with to date are strange bedfellows. I've been writing for years about the odd history of anti-immigration groups -- and they are *anti-immigration,* not just anti-illegal immigration. Groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA, and others have little in common with conservatives. Now, a new and comprehensive analysis of these organizations details why conservatives should be uncomfortable with the company they keep. Author Mario Lopez, writing in the fall issue of Human Life Review, traces the modern anti-immigration groups back to their roots in the population control movement, and their predecessors' ties to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. While some of this evidence has been known and documented before, Lopez does a much more thorough job than any previous attempt to lay out the facts, interconnections and questionable background of FAIR, CIS, NumbersUSA and their affiliated groups.

Send in the Clowns

TIBERIAS, Israel -- Atop the Golan Heights, there are thousands of fruit trees, vineyards, acres of wheat, vegetables, herds of cattle and a half-million or more land mines. The livestock and produce were brought here and cultivated by Israeli citizen-soldiers -- people who beat their swords into plowshares to wrest farmland from a battlefield. The land mines were planted by the Syrian army. The Golan plateau is an object lesson for American policymakers who believe that the Israelis need only trade a little more land in exchange for peace. It just isn't so. While we were en route to the Golan plateau, the U.S. Senate confirmed John Kerry as America's new secretary of state. Kerry says "the Mideast peace process" is his "No. 1 priority." By the time we returned to this ancient city beside the Sea of Galilee, the Senate Armed Services Committee had commenced confirmation hearings on former Sen. Chuck Hagel's fitness to serve as secretary of defense.

Corrupting We Will Go

Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey is having a bad month. He recently wrote a check to a large donor for nearly $60,000 reimbursing him for the generous gift of trips on a private jet. The paperwork had "fallen through the cracks," an aide explained. Under investigation by the FBI regarding allegations that he engaged underage prostitutes during visits to the Dominican Republic (the destination of those jet trips), the senator was also recently embarrassed when it emerged that an 18-year-old intern on his staff who was helping with immigration issues was 1) an illegal alien and 2) a registered sex offender. Two AP stories suggest that the young man's arrest was delayed by federal officials until after Nov. 6, when Menendez was safely reelected to a second 6-year term. None of this came up when Menendez, the presumptive new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was interviewed on ABC's "This Week." Martha Raddatz confined her questions to immigration and such. The press often claims that scandal stories are interesting chiefly if they involve "hypocrisy" -- as when a senator who voted for the Defense of Marriage Act was caught attempting something in an airport men's room.

Two Cheers for Rebranding

Ever since Mitt Romney lost the presidential election, there's been a lot of talk about how the Republican Party needs to "rebrand" itself. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal wants, among other things, for the GOP to stop being "the stupid party." Rep. Paul Ryan has concluded that the watchword for the Republican Party needs to be "prudence." Sen. Marco Rubio is the front man for the most tangible aspect of the rebranding effort: getting on the right side of the immigration issue. In the process, he's become something of the de facto point person for the party. The latest entrant into this effort: House Majority leader Eric Cantor. On Tuesday, Cantor gave a well-received speech at the American Enterprise Institute (where I am a fellow), titled "Making Life Work." In it, Cantor argued for utterly reasonable conservative solutions that would improve the plight of the working poor and the middle class.

Call Obama's Sequester Bluff

WASHINGTON -- For the first time since Election Day, President Obama is on the defensive. That's because on March 1, automatic spending cuts ("sequestration") go into effect -- $1.2 trillion over 10 years, half from domestic (discretionary) programs, half from defense. The idea had been proposed and promoted by the White House during the July 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations. The political calculation was that such draconian defense cuts would drive the GOP to offer concessions. It backfired. The Republicans have offered no concessions. Obama's bluff is being called and he's the desperate party. He abhors the domestic cuts. And as commander in chief he must worry about indiscriminate Pentagon cuts that his own defense secretary calls catastrophic.

Obama's Imperiousness Doesn't Have a Permanent Shelf Life

President Obama and his liberal cohorts are noticeably puffed up after his re-election and are making their move on a wide array of fronts. The liberals' voracious appetite is incapable of satiety. Obama's cockiness was on full display during the fiscal cliff negotiations, during which he treated Republicans, the only ones remotely serious about addressing our deficits and debt, as annoying stepchildren he has to endure as a nuisance. Actually listening to their ideas is not on his playlist. We've also seen Obama's cockiness in his behaving as though he is above the law and doesn't have to answer to Congress, the courts or the Constitution. Obama has brazenly ignored his legal duty to submit a budget, as if he were King Henry VIII. This is not some ministerial function, mind you, but the budget, which is at the heart of the nation's problems today.

The Battle of Athens

In 1946, there was a rebellion in McMinn County, Tennessee, that came to be known as the Battle of Athens. Frankly, I had never heard of it until recently. I guess it took the latest campaign against the Second Amendment to remind people that there was a time when Americans had to depend on their guns to ensure their rights against their fellow Americans. It was shortly after the end of World War II. A group of rotten politicians, a crooked sheriff and his corrupt deputies, were once again trying to steal an election by confiscating the ballot boxes and reporting the tally. It had been a way of life in the city of Athens, but this time was different. This time, a bunch of returning veterans, who had just got done fighting and bleeding for liberty in Europe and Asia, decided to put a stop to it. And thanks to their guns, they did just that by storming the sheriff's office and rescuing the votes before they could once again be miscounted.

Life After Energy: What if Fossil Fuels Disappeared Tomorrow?