Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Ban This! Ban That! Ban This and That!
I like to bet on sports. Having a stake in the game, even if it's just five bucks, makes it more exciting. I also like playing poker. "Unacceptable!" say politicians in much of America. "Gambling sometimes leads to 'addiction,' destitute families!" Well, it can. So politicians ban it. It's why we no longer see a poker game in the back of bars. Half the states even ban poker between friends -- though they rarely enforce that. After banning things, politicians' second favorite activity is granting special privileges to a few people who do those same things -- so big casinos flourish, and most states run their own lotteries. Running lotteries is one of the more horrible things our governments do. The poor buy the most tickets, and states offer them terrible odds. The government entered the lottery business promising to end the "criminal numbers racket." Now states do what the "criminals" did but offer much worse odds. Adding insult to their scam, politicians also spend our tax money promoting lotteries with disgusting commercials that trash hard work, implying that happiness comes from hedonism.
Education Spending That Isn't Smart
Not long after President Obama proclaimed in his second inaugural that "an economic recovery has begun," we learned that the U.S. economy actually shrank in the last quarter. Many economists believe this is a temporary setback. This recovery may be the weakest in American history, but the economy isn't cratering either. Still, you can bet that if the economy continues to contract, Obama will propose the same remedy he always has: more "investments" in education, infrastructure and various industries of the future. It seems that whatever the ailment, Dr. Obama always writes the same prescription. This is hardly shocking: Building roads and schools is a big reason why God created Democrats in the first place. And identifying the Next Big Thing -- and taking credit for it -- is something of a vocation for many liberal policymakers.
Prophets and Losses: Part II
People on both sides of tax issues often speak of such things as a "$300 billion tax increase" or a "$500 billion tax decrease." That is fine if they are looking back at something that has already happened. But it can be sheer nonsense if they are talking about a proposed increase or decrease in the tax rate. The government can only raise or lower the tax rate. Whether the actual tax revenues that the government will collect as a result will go up or down is a matter of prophecy. And these prophecies have been far too wrong far too often to base national policies on them. When Congress was considering raising the capital gains tax rate from 20 percent to 28 percent in 1986, the Congressional Budget Office advised Congress that this would increase the revenue received from that tax. But the Congressional Budget Office was wrong, not simply about the amount of the tax revenue increase, but about the fact that the capital gains tax revenue actually fell.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Obama Administration Offers Direct Talks with Iran
The calculating Islamic Republic hails the U.S.'s new direction.
Getting Immigration Right
A bipartisan effort is under way to overhaul the nation's immigration system, improve border security and provide a path to citizenship for those here illegally. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Those of us who have been in Washington for a while certainly have. The plan announced recently by a group of senators dubbed the "Gang of Eight" may be touted as a new and novel approach. But it sounds eerily familiar to the one enacted in 1986. At that time, greater border security and better enforcement of our laws governing immigration was promised in exchange for granting citizenship to illegal immigrants.
A Morally-Confused Marine
Last week, the Washington Post published an opinion piece by a Marine captain titled, "I Killed People in Afghanistan. Was I Right or Wrong?" The column by Timothy Kudo, who is now a graduate student at New York University, is a fine example of the moral confusion leftism has wrought over the last half century. Captain Kudo's moral confusion may predate his graduate studies, but if so, it has surely been reinforced and strengthened at NYU. The essence of Mr. Kudo's piece is that before he served in Afghanistan he was ethically unprepared for killing, that killing is always wrong, and that war is therefore always wrong.
How Guns Are Like Nukes
I stand out among my conservative friends in disliking guns. I favor reasonable restrictions on the Second Amendment, such as bans on fully automatic weapons, background checks for purchases and forbidding the sale of guns to those with histories of mental illness or criminality. Yet I cannot agree with liberals that more gun control will lead to fewer gun crimes. President Obama's choice for defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, actually illuminated one of the weaknesses of the gun control case. Hagel had been closely associated with Global Zero (though he's since repudiated it), a movement dedicated to "the elimination of all nuclear weapons." Hagel isn't alone in endorsing this cause. President Obama supports the concept, as well. Liberals like Hagel and Obama think nuclear weapons are a problem in themselves. Call it the instrumental view. It's the weapon, rather than the person wielding it, that presents the danger. But American possession of nuclear weapons didn't threaten world peace. On the contrary, our nuclear arsenal arguably kept the peace for the whole second half of the 20th century. On the other hand, a nuclear weapon in Iran's hands would be a profound threat to the world.
The Senate Must Reject Hagel
The Senate's "advice and consent" role doesn't require it to rubber-stamp a presidential appointee for secretary of defense who senators believe would weaken America in this increasingly dangerous world. Notwithstanding former Sen. Chuck Hagel's diminished view of the post -- "I won't be in a policymaking position" -- the secretary of defense is an exceedingly important position and must be filled with someone who understands the complexity and gravity of the threats we face. In his testimony at his confirmation hearing, Hagel demonstrated a remarkable unwillingness to clarify his past statements, a stunning misapprehension of the identity, intentions and capabilities of our enemies, and a disturbing ignorance of the critical subject matter on which he would be advising the president. For example, he was unaware that the sequester cuts come out of the Budget Control Act.
Government Shouldn't Define 'Church'
Under pressure from religious and conservative groups, the Obama administration has offered another compromise on the issue of birth control coverage within the Affordable Care Act. While exempting churches and some religiously affiliated institutions, such as hospitals and universities, from supplying the coverage, the new proposal calls for their employees to receive stand-alone private insurance policies providing birth control coverage at no cost. Insurance companies will foot the bill, but only the naive can possibly think the cost won't find its way back to the institution in the form of higher health premiums. Numerous lawsuits filed against this and other portions of "Obamacare" will proceed and for good reason: the federal government seems intent on setting rules on matters of conscience and worse, defining what constitutes a church, or religious institution.
Prophets and Losses
Now that the federal government is playing an ever larger role in the economy, a look at Washington's track record seems to be long overdue. The recent release of the Federal Reserve Board's transcripts of its deliberations back in 2007 shows that their economic prophecies were way off. How much faith should we put in their prophecies today -- or the policies based on those prophecies? Even after the housing market began its collapse in 2006, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in 2007, "The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained." It turned out that financial disasters in the housing market were not "contained," but spread out to affect the whole American economy and economies overseas. Then Chairman Bernanke said: "It is an interesting question why what looks like $100 billion or so of credit losses in the subprime market has been reflected in multiple trillions of dollars of losses in paper wealth."
The Women's Annihilation Movement
Male or female, those of us who've been around for a while can recall clearly the objectives of the feminist movement as it geared up in the early 1970s. Workplace fairness was the goal. A lot of manufactured indignation attended the feminist rising; e. g, who says we have to wear bras? Basically, nonetheless, what the rebels said they wanted was opportunity too long denied them by chauvinistic males. Opportunity they received from government, and in a larger sense, from the hand of a culture they prodded or embarrassed into agreement with most of what they said. Jobs opened up; power, avenues to self-determination, rights galore, culminating the other day in what I guess we might call the right to be blown to smithereens or take a burst of machine gun slugs in the abdomen.
Monday, February 4, 2013
Obama and Gun Control
Difficulty in getting change in our country is an ongoing source of frustration. Particularly when we have huge problems facing us as we do today. But the founders knew what they were doing setting up the checks and balances of our constitutional republic. The delicate arrangement we call freedom should never submit with ease to a charismatic demagogue or to an emotion filled crisis. The current push for gun control is case and point. It is at a time like this that we should be grateful that changing our laws is hard to do. Every normal and decent American wants to live in a country where we will never again see life lost as result of a weapon held and fired by some deranged individual.
Diplomats & Secretaries
I am in Morocco with Mullpal Peter Fenn as a bipartisan team to meet with and help train young people in and out of the Moroccan government on communication strategies. The trip is sponsored by Legacy International through a grant from the U.S. Department of State. I am not going to make you read 750 words about Morocco, but I wanted you to know why I am not grading the Superbowl ads: Morocco is five hours ahead of Washington, DC so as I begin typing this, it is 11:30 PM and the Superbowl is about to start in New Orleans. The Superbowl was mentioned exactly zero times today here in Northwest Africa and it is not on local TV so I am watching a black-and-white Egyptian movie -- in Arabic, which I don't speak -- to provide background music.
Hypocritical Intolerance of Homosexual Activists
The entire nation is watching to see if the Boy Scouts are going to cave under relentless pressure from homosexual activists whose demands, if successful, will destroy the finest organization for young men our nation has ever known. The Scouts own Board of Directors may very well end up being the actual cause of the organization's demise as they meet this week to consider making the Scout pledge meaningless and Scouting irrelevant. If the Board votes to destroy the Scout standards, they will have caved in to the hateful demands of one of the most hypocritical and intolerant movements in America, the homosexual activist.
A Popular Secretary of State, Not a Great One
Hillary Clinton stepped down after four years as secretary of state amid swathes of flattery excessive even by Washington's sycophantic standards. "I think that when we look at the outstanding secretaries of state in our history of our country you will be right up there at the very, very top," Representative Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat, fawned during a congressional hearing last month. "You have just been indispensable." Clinton had been summoned to answer questions about the Benghazi consulate debacle, an egregious security breakdown on her watch that had resulted in the murder of four US diplomatic personnel. But to hear the chorus singing her praises -- extolling her "remarkable leadership," hailing her "strength and poise," saluting her as "a hero" -- you might have thought she was receiving a Nobel Prize for statecraft. "She showed acuity, eloquence, humanity and charm," Chris Matthews gushed on MSNBC.
Insanity Is a Contagious Disease
You might even say that insanity is a growth industry. For example, the liberals are tripping all over themselves to pass new gun control legislation. To prove how sincere they are, they have put Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein in charge. Joe Biden is so dumb that schools have renamed dunce caps in his honor, and Feinstein is such a political hack that even after swearing to get to the bottom of the national security leaks to the NY Times, once she realized the footprints led back to the Oval Office, she never again mentioned it. Even people as stupid as Sen. Patty Murray and Mayor Michael Bloomberg know that federal bans on assault weapons were in place for 10 years starting in the mid-90s and did nothing to diminish gun violence. They also know that Illinois has very strict gun laws in place, and yet over 500 people were gunned down in the streets of Chicago in 2012, making it the murder capital of every locale this side of Syria.
Fewer Dollars and Babies Threaten Social Programs
Our major public policies are based on the assumption that America will continue to enjoy growth. Economic growth and population growth. Through most of our history, this assumption has proved to be correct. These days, not so much. Last week, the Commerce Department announced that the gross domestic product shrunk by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. And the Census Bureau reported that the U.S. birth rate in 2011 was 63.2 per 1,000 women age 15 to 44, the lowest ever recorded. Slow economic growth and low population growth threaten to undermine entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. Despite contrary rhetoric, they are programs in which working age people pay for pensions and medical care for the elderly.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Haggling Over Hagel
Frankly, I don't think it will make much difference whether or not Chuck Hagel is confirmed. After all, he will be taking his marching orders from the single greatest menace America has ever had to endure. Still, that's no reason to confirm the man who has made a career out of demeaning Israel and sucking up to Iran to such an unseemly extent that Iran's foreign minister has applauded his nomination. If nothing else, when your nation's archenemy gives a big thumbs-up to the guy who's being considered as your Secretary of Defense, it should give even Democrats pause. Not only has Hagel displayed an open bias against American Jews, insisting that something he refers to as the Jewish/Israel lobby intimidates members of Congress into doing dumb things, but when Sen. Lindsey Graham asked him to identify a single senator who's been intimidated or to mention even one of those dumb things, Hagel turned into Porky Pig.
The Price of Moral Grandstanding
Politics becomes amusing when liberalism becomes theatrical with high-minded gestures. Chicago's government, which is not normally known for elevated thinking, is feeling so morally upright and financially flush that it proposes to rise above the banal business of maximizing the value of its employees' and retirees' pension fund assets. Although seven funds have cumulative unfunded liabilities of $25 billion, Chicago will sacrifice the growth of those assets to the striking of a political pose so pure it is untainted by practicality.
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Mr. President: Chuck Hagel!
Former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel's nomination to be Secretary of Defense should be withdrawn now. He delivered what may be the worst performance at a confirmation hearing ever given. He was described as "confused," "befuddled," and "self contradicting." One of Mr. Hagel's own backers deplored the lack of "charisma" the nominee showed during the hearings. Was this just a "Bad Hair Day"for Mr. Hagel?