Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
The Baby Bust Generation
Fertility in America has been declining for years. According to the Pew Research Center, the nation's birth rate hit an all-time low in 2011 -- just 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. It was almost twice as high -- 123 births per 1,000 women -- at the peak of the Baby Boom in 1957. As babies and children disappear from a society, what takes their place? One answer, as journalist Jonathan V. Last observes in a forthcoming book, "*What to Expect When No One's Expecting*," is pets.
While Feds Dawdle, States Tackle Fiscal Problems
Democrats in Washington declare that they will absolutely, positively allow no changes whatever in the nation's unsustainable entitlement programs -- Social Security and Medicare. But out in the states, politicians of both parties aren't averting their gaze from impending fiscal crises. They are working to change policies that put state governments on an unsustainable trajectory. The most obvious example was the passage of a right-to-work law last week in Michigan, the birthplace of the United Auto Workers union. This was retaliation for a failed power grab by both the UAW and public sector unions -- Proposition 2, which would have enshrined collective bargaining in the state constitution.
Sharia Law, American Style
It's liberals who are always accusing conservatives of sticking their noses into places where they don't belong. Being liberals, those places nearly always involve s-e-x. For instance, when left-wingers push for same-sex marriages, abortions on demand for teenagers and tax-funded birth control pills, and conservatives push back, the Left condemns the Right for meddling in personal matters, ignoring the fact that they're the ones who insist on putting these things into their party's platform.
Michigan's Watershed Moment
WASHINGTON -- Rick Snyder, who is hardly a human cactus, warned Michigan's labor leaders. The state's mild-mannered Republican governor, currently in his first term in his first public office, has rarely been accused of being, or praised for being, a fire-breathing conservative. When unions put on Michigan's November ballot two measures that would have entrenched collective bargaining rights in the state Constitution, Snyder told them they were picking a fight they might regret. Both measures lost resoundingly in the state with the fifth highest rate of unionization (17.5 percent, down from 28.4 percent in 1985) and, not coincidentally, the sixth highest unemployment rate (9.1 percent). And Republicans decided to build upon that outcome by striking a blow for individual liberty and against coerced funding of the Democratic Party. Hence the right-to-work laws passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature to prohibit the requirement of paying union dues as a condition of employment.
Clearing the Desk
Every so often, I find myself being buried in memos I have jotted down. It is then that I decide it's time to unburden myself, lest my wife walks into my office one day and finds our dog frantically trying to dig me out. To begin with, in the aftermath of the election, I found myself thinking that, as hopeless as things look, if Germany, Japan and Italy, could all recover from the mess that Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini, got them into, it's just possible that we will ultimately be able to survive Obama. But I sure wish we didn't have to wait four years to find out. I was also reminded of something I believe Winston Churchill once said: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with a typical voter."
Decision Deficit Disorder
QUANTICO, VA -- Until I joined the Fourth Estate, it was my experience that most soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen and Marines usually eschewed contact with members of the media. Regard for the potentates of the press used to be about equal to that of chiggers, ticks, scorpions and fire ants. When I was on active duty, I had an aerosol can of bug spray hand-labeled: "Reporter Repellant." And if a military person had to co-habit space with any of these assorted insects, the last thing anyone wanted to do was to discuss politics. Things have changed. Shortly before the presidential election, our Fox News team was embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Though nearly all acknowledged applying for absentee ballots, few of them were able to follow the presidential campaign or the debates, and fewer still had the time or inclination to speculate about what the outcome might be. Now that the issue is decided, they are no longer reticent about expressing their frustrations with the power brokers in Washington.
From The Comedy Store
Speaker John Boehner accused President Obama of wasting another week in the fiscal cliff talks. The president refuses to consider spending cuts while Republicans refuse to raise taxes. Ten percent of Americans polled are rooting for a settlement as the politicians approach the cliff, while ninety percent are rooting for gravity and a low tide.
Rice Falls Flat
Article II, Section 2, paragraph 2 of the U.S. Constitution: >[The President] ... **shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors** ... One of the officials that requires Senate confirmation is the United States' Permanent Representative to the United Nations. As this person generally holds Ambassadorial rank the common shorthand is Ambassador to the U.N. The person who currently holds that position is Susan E. Rice. Ambassador Rice was, as we say, "floated" as the next Secretary of State when the current Secretary, Hillary Clinton resigns -- perhaps to prepare to deliver the next Jefferson-Jackson Day speech in Des Moines.
Obama Concedes Defeat on Susan Rice
When a full-blown investigation into Benghazi just isn't worth it.
Obama's Electronic Medical Records Scam
Here's more evidence that government "cures" are inevitably worse than the "diseases" they seek to wipe out. Buried in the trillion-dollar stimulus law of 2009 was an electronic medical records "incentive" program. Like most of President Obama's health care rules, this top-down electronic record-sharing scheme is a big fat bust. Oversight is lax. Cronyism is rife. The job-killing and privacy-undermining consequences have only just begun. The program was originally sold as a cost-saving measure. In theory, modernizing record-collection is a good idea, and many private health care providers have already made the change. But as with many government "incentive" programs, the EMR bribe is a tax-subsidized, one-size-fits-all mandate. This one pressures health care professionals and hospitals across the country into radically federalizing their patient data and opening up medical information to untold abuse. Penalties kick in for any provider that hasn't switched over by 2014.
Merry Christmas, America-Haters?
When TNT was preparing its annual special "Christmas in Washington" with the president of the United States, you'd think the last star musician they would consider to join the official caroling would be Psy, the South Korean rapper. What on Earth is Christmasy about this man's invisible-horse-riding dance to his dorky disco-rap hit "Gangnam Style"? It's not exactly the natural flip-side to "O Holy Night." But TNT couldn't resist this year's YouTube sensation. This inane publicity stunt backfired when the website Mediaite reported on Dec. 7 that Psy (real name: Park Jae-sang) had participated in a 2002 protest in which he crushed a model of an American tank with a microphone stand. But that's nothing compared to the footage of a 2004 performance after a Korean missionary was slaughtered by Islamists in Iraq. These lyrics cannot be misunderstood.
Dividend Tax Folly
While Washington pols pose and posture on whether to raise taxes next year, American businesses are busy taking action to avoid the hit their shareholders are likely to take come January. It's an old lesson that liberals never seem to learn. No matter how clever the tax hikers think they are, those who stand to be hurt by higher taxes usually figure out a way to protect themselves. The Obama administration hopes to raise more revenue by allowing the top tax rate to rise to 39 percent (or 43.4 percent if you include the new tax to pay for Obamacare) on those small businesses and individuals earning more than $250,000 a year. But it also intends to hike rates on long-term capital gains and dividends, which are now taxed at a rate of 15 percent regardless of the income of the taxpayer. The dividend rates will revert to ordinary income tax rates, a more than 250 percent increase even before the Obamacare taxes are included.
Federalism Could be the Solution to GOP Branding Problem
To understand why Republicans have a "branding problem," you first need to understand how the system is rigged against conservatives. Such is the schizophrenic dysfunction of our politics: We constantly demand "conviction" politicians who will "do what's right" and then condemn them, often in the same breath, for being unwilling to put aside their conviction and their sense of what's right. But such condemnation does not fall equally on conservatives and progressives alike. For the progressive's principle is, at its core, more. Do more. Spend more. Spend more doing more. Any compromise of progressive principle in this regard is seen as "pragmatic." Hence, the progressive's heart is always in the right place.
The Right-to-Work Dilemma
WASHINGTON -- For all the fury and fistfights outside the Lansing Capitol, what happened in Michigan this week was a simple accommodation to reality. The most famously unionized state, birthplace of the United Auto Workers, royalty of the American working class, became right-to-work. It's shocking, except that it was inevitable. Indiana went that way earlier this year. The entire Rust Belt will eventually follow because the heyday of the sovereign private-sector union is gone. Globalization has made splendid isolation impossible. The nostalgics look back to the immediate postwar years when the UAW was all-powerful, the auto companies were highly profitable and the world was flooded with American cars. In that Golden Age, the UAW won wages, benefits and protections that were the envy of the world.
Republicans Do Have Leverage; Use It!
At this stage of the fiscal cliff pseudo negotiations, do the American people have any idea what the Republicans stand for other than to protect the wealthy and cut Medicare and Social Security to harm the sick and aged? People constantly invoke Ronald Reagan, but one thing is certain and very relevant: If Reagan were on the national stage today, the public would not be confused about what the Republican Party stands for and why it matters. The GOP is having difficulty even consolidating around a central message, much less selling it to the public. There is no excuse for that. Though following its election defeat the party has all the confidence of an abandoned stepchild, it needs to shake the dust off, stand up and begin fighting like it truly believes the nation is worth fighting for.
Don't You Dare Open a Door for Me!
Chivalry is back in the news. The always-alert Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute draws our attention to an item in the Psychology of Women Quarterly. A new study on what the authors are pleased to call "benevolent sexism" (which, as Murray translates, seems to mean gentlemanly behavior) found that both women and men are happier when men behave like gentlemen. This being a sociological publication, though, the findings are not written in English, but rather in academic argot. It's full of sentences like this: "A structural equation model revealed that benevolent sexism was positively associated with diffuse system justification within a sample of 274 college women and 111 college men." If you spend more than $100,000 on an undergraduate and graduate education in women's studies, you can learn to be this impenetrable, too.
Dem Senators Plead for Delay in ObamaCare Taxes
Thousands of jobs and medical innovation are on the line.
Taxman to Middle Class: 'Bend Over'
President Barack Obama in 2008, and again during the 2012 election, promised absolutely, positively no tax hikes on the middle class. The rich, however, must pay more: "It's not me being stubborn, it's not me being partisan -- it's just a matter of math." How does Obama intend to pay for our cradle-to-grave welfare state? Why, by charging the dastardly "millionaires and billionaires" who "can afford to pay a little bit more." No more extending the Bush-era tax rates for the rich. To do so, Obama tells us, would "cost" $700 billion -- over 10 years. So this "break" for the rich "costs" $70 billion a year -- or a mere 6 percent of the trillion dollar annual deficits that Obama has rung up since he became president.
Misdirected Anger
All those union thugs who were rioting in Michigan Tuesday were angry about the wrong thing. They were demonstrating -- which in union-speak means breaking things and punching people -- against Michigan's decision to become a right-to-work state. If you believe the union spin, or the mainstream liberal media's spin, or the Obama spin, which all come from the same propaganda factory, that means Michigan no longer cares about workers, the right to organize, living wages, etc., etc. But what Michigan's new law really means is that the voters and a majority of the politicians in the state have miraculously decided that a citizen's freedom of choice should extend to the freedom to be able to choose not to join a union.
Tax Rich Liberals
Republicans have been forced into a Hobson's choice of either letting the Bush tax cuts expire for everyone or agreeing to a tax hike on the top 2 percent of income earners (not to be confused with "the rich," who have already made, inherited or married their money). If Republicans object to the Democrats' hitting job creators with a tax hike, three things will happen: Taxes will go up for everyone; Republicans will be seen as the "party of the rich"; and the inevitable economic collapse will be blamed on Republicans. If Democrats were merely trying to raise taxes on the rich in a vacuum, it would be easier for Republicans to oppose raising anyone's taxes. But because the Bush tax cuts are only temporary, unless the high-income earners' taxes go up, everyone's taxes revert to pre-Bush tax rates.