Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Liberalism Versus Blacks
There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds? San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city's total population has grown. Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.
Control Politicians, Not Guns
If laws were enough to deter criminal behavior prisons would be empty. The latest effort to "control" guns in America is as likely to deter someone intent on breaking the law as outlawing lust would affect one's libido. What's in a heart can't be controlled by restricting what's in a hand. Following the Newtown tragedy, President Obama vowed to seek the passage of an assault weapons ban and hastily assembled an administration-wide gun control task force, an effort that amounts to little more than a political act designed to impress what Rush Limbaugh calls "low-information voters." Government must be seen doing something to keep mad men from shooting children and moviegoers, even if that something will likely prove ineffective.
Digital Medical Hubris
Now the other shoes begin to drop. Voters knew in November that many of the promises Obama made in 2008 had been broken. The economy had not revived as he had promised it would ("or we'll be talking about a one-term proposition"). He has not "changed the tone in Washington" -- except for the worse. He didn't prevent lobbyists from holding positions in his administration. He didn't cut the deficit in half; he increased it radically. But voters apparently decided that the president deserved credit for good intentions. How long will that indulgence last? The next four years, whatever else they may bring, will tally the results of Obama's first term policies. Some of those will not be felt until 2014, when Obamacare comes fully online. Others will be subtle, like the depressing effect of Dodd/Frank on lending. Still others will be obvious -- Obama's "chickens coming home to roost." One of these deserves close attention because it so perfectly captures what's wrong with the president's (and the Democratic Party's) approach to government.
Obama's Ongoing Distraction Gambit
President Obama's latest news conference was further confirmation that his voracious appetite for spending was not satisfied but whetted by the fiscal cliff deal, which he views as an appetizer. We were told that the GOP achieved a coup in the fiscal cliff negotiations because they lured Obama into an agreement to lock in the Bush tax rates except for the highest-income earners. Never mind that Obama agreed to no spending cuts or entitlement reform after demanding a "balanced approach" to deficit reduction; they told us he'd be forced to address those matters in a couple of months in the debt ceiling negotiations. They argued that by agreeing to make the Bush rates "permanent," Obama had tacitly admitted that he couldn't sustain the welfare state through tax increases on the middle class and that he'd now have to -- grudgingly or not -- turn his attention to spending cuts and entitlement reform.
Monday, January 14, 2013
The Payroll Tax
The big hoo-hah over taxes we had to suffer through last month had to do with income tax rates and some specialty items that largely attached to corporations. As you may know if you've ever made the mistake of saying "about half of those who work pay no taxes at all" in front of a Liberal, everyone who shops pays sales taxes, everyone who drives pays gasoline taxes, and everyone who works pays ... payroll taxes. Payroll taxes, as the term is typically used, are those you pay into the Social Security system (officially known as *Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance* and Medicare (officially known as Medicare's *Hospital Insurance* program -- Part A). Taken together, these are known as "FICA" taxes for the Federal Insurance Contributions Act that authorized them.
A 'Path to Citizenship' for Illegals?
Obama and Democrats push ahead with sweeping immigration "reform."
An Open Letter to General Powell
Dear General Powell, I was disappointed with the clear implication in your Meet The Press interview that those of us, in the GOP who defend life, protect traditional marriage and advance religious liberty are intolerant. It was obvious to anyone who watched the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, that NO! had it. There was no way the convention chairman could have heard a two-thirds vote for the YES! position. Three times the chairman asked them to vote. Three times they denied God. Denied Him Thrice! What has happened to the Democratic Party that,in the 1960's, provided such leadership for the cause of Civil Rights? It was Democrats like John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey who supprted the fight for civil rights among the white majority in the1960s. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, was in good company in his church. Roman Catholic Bishops were among the first to strike out against segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was surely a Baptist preacher, but he could rely on thousands of Catholic priests and nuns to join his great March on Washington in 1963. And when he wrote his famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail, he cited St. Thomas Aquinas to make his case that an unjust law was no law at all.
Roe v Wade, Forty Years After
The number forty has great significance in the Bible. Perhaps best known is the forty years that the Israelites were condemned to wander in the desert before being permitted entry into the Promised Land. Maybe this mystical quantity will bear significance as we note, this month, the fortieth year since the Roe v Wade decision legalized abortion in America. Forty years we have lived with the silent, and sometimes not so silent, holocaust in our midst as the lives of 55 million innocent and unborn children have been killed, plucked from their journey to enter this world.
Pretend Gun Control
The mood in America right now seems to be that "something" must be done about guns. Many Democrats are now openly talking about bringing back the assault weapons and high-capacity magazines ban, while they had previously shivered in fear of gun owners and the violence those heavily armed crazies commit against chads.
What's Meant When Liberals Say 'Compromise'
Barack Obama and his stooges are forever complaining that Republicans are obstructionists, unwilling to compromise and meet them halfway. What's so irksome about these nitwits is that when they say compromise, what they really mean is unconditional surrender. During the campaign, Obama played to the rabble that constitutes his base by promising to stick it to millionaires and billionaires. As soon as he eked through to victory, he made it clear that he regarded those making as little as $200,000 as fat cats. And because his biggest fans make a lot less than that, they were fine with his usual blend of hocus and pocus. But, then, the truth is that his disciples are so unprincipled that so long as they make $49,999.99-a-year, they would be happy to see taxes raised on everyone making more than $50,000. For left-wingers, for whom envy is a way of life, it's never enough to soak the rich; they want to soak the richer.
History Suggests That Entitlement Era Is Winding Down
It's often good fun and sometimes revealing to divide American history into distinct periods of uniform length. In working on my forthcoming book on American migrations, internal and immigrant, it occurred to me that you could do this using the American-sounding interval of 76 years, just a few years more than the Biblical lifespan of three score and 10. It was 76 years from Washington's First Inaugural in 1789 to Lincoln's Second Inaugural in 1865. It was 76 years from the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865 to the attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Going backward, it was 76 years from the First Inaugural in 1789 to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which settled one of the British-French colonial wars. And going 76 years back from Utrecht takes you to 1637, when the Virginia and Massachusetts Bay colonies were just getting organized.
Bad Guys' Lawyers
Lawyers representing three of the men charged in the New Delhi gang rape case said last week that they would enter pleas of not guilty on their clients' behalf. In most criminal prosecutions, that would be unremarkable. But the lawyers who stepped forward to represent the suspects in this case did so in the face of emotional protests by fellow attorneys, many of whom insisted that no one should defend those accused of such a terrible crime. "There was a good response from the members, and they will not represent," the president of the local bar association had warned. So when attorneys V. K. Anand and Manohar Lal Sharma offered to serve as defense counsel, reported The New York Times, the result was "a chaotic courtroom scene in which other lawyers tried to shout them down."
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Guns & Goons
In case you missed it, Obama is so opposed to guns that he recently signed a bill that nullifies earlier legislation that offered an ex-president and his family Secret Service protection for only 10 years after vacating the White House. The Obamas, along with George and Laura Bush, will now be protected for life. I'm sure the Bushes were only included so that Obama could claim he was being bi-partisan. I suppose you'd really have to be a politician, one of those hypocrites who are forever referring to themselves as "public servants," to imagine that your life is more deserving of protection than the folks whom you've sworn to serve.
Boundaries of the Permissible
"I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it." -- Col. Nathan Jessep to Lt. Daniel Kaffee, "A Few Good Men" (1992) WASHINGTON -- "You," said Jack Nicholson's Jessep to Tom Cruise's Kaffee, "have the luxury of not knowing what I know." Viewers of the movie "Zero Dark Thirty" will, according to some informed persons, lose the luxury of not knowing about hard but morally defensible things done on their behalf. Other informed persons, however, say viewers will be misled because the movie intimates (actually it is ambiguous about this) a crucial role of "enhanced interrogation" in extracting information useful to tracking Osama bin Laden. In "A Few Good Men," Col. Jessep insists that a harsh -- and proscribed -- training method ("Code Red") saves lives: "You f---in' people ... you have no idea how to defend a nation." "Zero Dark Thirty" explores the boundaries of the permissible when defending not *a* nation but *this* nation. Viewers will know going in how the movie ends. They will not know how they will feel when seeing an American tell a detainee, "When you lie to me I hurt you," and proceed to do so.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
President Obama: The Great Demancipator
President Obama will take the oath of office later this month "on a stack of Bibles," the *Washington Post* tells us. He will place his left hand on Bibles owned by Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Well, that's a relief. Interestingly, not included in the stack is the Koran, about which Mr. Obama spoke so glowingly in Egypt four years ago. (No Bibles openly displayed there.) Now, swearing on a stack of Bibles ordinarily conveys seriousness of purpose and deeper commitment to carry through on the words you have just uttered. President Obama four years ago told us he thought the "signing statements" employed by his predecessor, George W. Bush, were not only improper, but they were *unconstitutional*. Coming from a constitutional law professor, who was sworn in on Lincoln's Bible, those are serious words.
Obama Is at Fault
Do you remember what the mainstream media mainly talked about as the country careened toward the fiscal cliff? Did they talk about the harmful economic effects of impending tax increases? Did they talk about which tax increases would be worse than others? Did they talk about the need to get rid of waste in government without causing economic harm? No. None of that. The taking heads and opinion writers focused like a laser on one and only one question: who was going to get the blame if we went over the cliff. Up next will be the debt ceiling deadline (in a matter of weeks), then the automatic sequester of federal spending (in less than two months), and then (in three months) comes a close-down-the-government-moment, when Congress will have to pass a continuing resolution, because it can't seem to ever pass a real budget. Through it all, expect more of the same. Instead of real issues, the media will treat these events like a boxing match. Who's landing a blow? Who's getting hurt?
Ringing in the New Year
In the same way that whoever is elected president in 2016 will be fortunate because he or she will be compared to Barack Obama, the worst person who has ever disgraced the office, 2013 will only need to be better than 2012. And considering that we suffered through 10 months of non-stop electioneering only to re-elect Obama, 2013 should have a pretty easy time of it. The other tragic events of 2012 involved the massacre of Ambassador Stevens and three other exemplary Americans in Benghazi, and the murder of 27 people in Newtown, CT. Predictably, the administration, with the help of the media, lied about the first, and then used the second in order to promote their endless assault on the 2nd Amendment.
An Unqualified Jack Lew Will Tax and Spend
The worst part of the Jack Lew nomination for treasury secretary is not simply that he has no qualifications, standing or experience in the financial world or international sphere (think G20 and European debt crisis). Nor is it simply that he doesn't have any seasoned currency opinions (under Obama, the greenback has dropped 10 percent, while gold has doubled). Yes, these are big disqualifiers. But the real problem is that Lew is a left-liberal Obama spear-carrier, whose very appointment signals a sharp confrontation with the Republican House over key issues such as the debt ceiling, the spending sequester, next year's budgets and taxes. From all the way back when Lew was staff advisor to Tip O'Neill, he has been a man of the left. So as treasury secretary, I expect the former Obama budget director to push for trillions of dollars in new tax hikes, absolutely minimal spending restraint and no serious entitlement reform.
From The Comedy Store
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was hospitalized to treat a minor blood clot Sunday in New York City. She's described as doing just fine and improving rapidly. However Bill Clinton paid a visit to her hospital room, and minutes later he took a turn for the nurse.
Friday, January 11, 2013
This Time I Mean It
Earlier this week I was whining about having what I declared to be "the fluh" which was the flu without the fever. I am over it. But, the flu -- the real flu -- is on a tear and this year may be the worst for "seasonal flu" in more than a decade. Yesterday the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has upped the ante and announced that this flu season is starting earlier, the virus is infecting more people, and this year's main strain (H3N2) may kill as many as 50,000 in the United States. Let's do that again. As many as 50,000 people may die from the flu this year in the United States. It would be better if you were not one of them.