Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Egypt's Torturer-in-Chief Headed to Washington
Obama fulfills promise to host Morsi even after Muslim Brotherhood savagery is exposed.
Is Rice Really So Bad?
The Republicans' opposition to Susan Rice's potentially becoming the next secretary of state is pretty hard to understand. It wasn't long ago that Republicans were all for a different black woman named Condoleezza Rice taking the same job -- is the GOP just bigoted about the name Susan? Republicans' stated objections to Rice make no sense. They complain that she's "dishonest" and "incompetent," to which she could easily respond, *Well, duh, that's why I work for the government.* When did Republicans start insisting on approving only competent, honest people, especially with regard to the Obama administration? Is it just me, or did that come completely out of left field?
No Time to Get LOST
"It is an outrage." The source of Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta's anger? The fact that the United States has yet to approve a treaty known as the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which often goes by the acronym LOST. Mr. Panetta was speaking after the election. His ire about LOST's status suggests that the Obama administration may well make this a second-term priority. The treaty has come close to being ratified by the United States -- it dates back to 1982. However, LOST has never been able to gain enough supporters in the Senate.
Why Liberalism Doesn't Work
Reason No. 1 not to tremble at the prospect of liberal ascendancy, world without end: Liberalism doesn't work. At any rate, not the way liberals commonly suppose it's going to work when they devise enormous taxpayer-funded, government-run programs, minimally connected, if at all, to the realities of human existence. An article in the Dec. 9 New York Times, of all places, gleams in the darkness of the present political moment as the Obama administration works to rub away resistance to its vision of an all-encompassing federal government. "This is painful for a liberal to admit," admits Nicholas D. Kristof, a Times columnist who, oddly, doesn't see his job as requiring regular trashing of conservatives, "but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America's safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire." Do tell. Kristof's careful examination of anti-poverty programs in Appalachia presents a viewpoint far more nuanced than, say, a Barack Obama speech urging the overhaul of capitalism. He finds that giving people too much free money for too long can create disincentives to live non-dependent lives. He talks about parents who pull illiterate kids out of literacy programs to avoid forfeiting a $698 monthly Supplement Security Income check meant to "help" the intellectually disabled.
Conservative Media Are Not the Problem
It is really getting old to hear liberal politicians and pundits complaining about conservative media as being destructive, as if the country would be better off returning to the halcyon days of the monolithic liberal media. That seems to be the view of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who complained about "the right-wing control of the American media, particularly starting with Fox News." During a discussion on HuffPost Live, Kennedy said, "Ninety-five percent of talk radio in our country is right-wing ... so a whole section of our country that's what they're hearing." "Twenty-two percent of Americans," continued Kennedy, "say their primary news source is Fox News. It's divided our country in a way that we haven't been divided probably since the Civil War, and it's empowered these large corporations to get certain kinds of politicians and ideologues who are in the United States Congress elected -- the tea party ideologues who control the Republican Party."
A Victory for Demagoguery
I'm in the camp that believes Republicans have no choice but to agree to raise taxes on the top 2 percent of earners. The party has been successfully caricatured as the servant of the rich. This is unjust, yes, but justice is imperfect in this life. It's political suicide for Republicans to stand fast on maintaining current rates for high earners even at the cost of raising taxes for everyone else. Imagine if we went over the fiscal cliff. In January, Obama would call upon Congress to pass a law restoring the tax rates for 98 percent of filers. What could Republicans do then, refuse? There is a time for strategic retreat. Republicans are not without tactical opportunities, though. They can reply, as my friend Michael Medved has suggested, that if the Clinton tax rates are desirable, so are the Clinton spending rates. They could resurrect a budget from 1998 and pass it. Democrats would protest that 1998 spending rates are not remotely commensurate with our needs. But wait, don't they argue that the Clinton years were economic utopia? Were people living in cardboard boxes on the streets in the 1990s? While they're at it, they could propose Clinton levels of regulation, too.
You Gotta Have Hope
"You gotta have hope; mustn't sit around and mope." -- "Damn Yankees" Sitting in the room at the Jack Kemp Leadership Award dinner last week, listening to Senator Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, and Rep. Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican and of late the GOP vice presidential candidate, I sensed more than a generational shift in party leadership. It was a "back to the future" moment as the mostly, but not exclusively, conservative gathering considered the optimism that defined Kemp, the late Buffalo congressman, former vice presidential candidate, HUD secretary and enterprise zone promoter. At my table were two African-American Republicans who answered the familiar question about how Republicans can win a larger percentage of the minority vote. "Just show up," said one, who works as a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill. The other nodded in agreement.
Christmas Books
During the holidays, a shopping mall can be more like a shopping maul. One way to avoid that scene is to give books as Christmas gifts, since books can be bought on-line, painlessly. A book that fits in with the holiday spirit is "No, They Can't!" by TV show host John Stossel. It is written with a light touch, but gets across some pretty heavy stuff about economics. The title is a take-off on Obama's old slogan, "Yes, we can!" It is the first book I have read that asks a question about electric cars that should have been asked long ago: How much pollution do they cause?
Obama Pushing Federal Control of Public Schools
How the president and his radical cohorts are coercing states to cede authority to Washington.
Nine Thousand Years of Turmoil
Here's how you know a country has been around for a while. When BBC.com's "Timeline" starts at 7000 BC with "Settlement of Nile Valley begins." For the next 9,000 years, it's mostly downhill from there...
Moving Forward
There is a great deal of hand-wringing and finger-pointing going on in Republican circles after the recent election. Much of it is justified. After all, how is it possible that after four years of Obama's policies that have resulted in a terrible economy, a weakened military and ObamaCare, Mitt Romney could possibly receive two million fewer votes than John McCain? On the other hand, it's not too shocking that Harry Reid and the Democrats picked up two additional Senate seats. Did nobody think to check Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock for signs of insanity before allowing them to win their GOP primaries? When one of these guys talks about legitimate rape and the other schmuck suggests that rape just might be part of God's overall plan, they don't belong in the U.S. Senate, they belong in a loony bin. For those who can't see the difference between the two places, I'm referring to the one with the padded walls.
Mexican Migration May Be Over
Is mass migration from Mexico to the United States a thing of the past? At least for the moment, it is. Last May, the Pew Hispanic Center, in a study based on U.S. and Mexican statistics, reported that net migration from Mexico to this country had fallen to zero from 2005 to 2010. Pew said 20,000 more people moved to Mexico from the United States than from there to here in those years. That's a vivid contrast with the years 1995 to 2000, when net inflow from Mexico was 2.2 million people. Because there was net Mexican immigration until 2007, when the housing market collapsed and the Great Recession began, it seems clear that there was net outmigration from 2007 to 2010, and that likely has continued in 2011 and 2012.
Powerball's Other Big Winner: The Taxman
There may have been two winning tickets for that $587.5 million Powerball jackpot last month, but there were three big winners. Mark and Cindy Hill of Dearborn, Mo., opted to take their half of the big prize in a lump sum of $193,750,000, and it's likely that whoever bought the other winning ticket in Fountain Hills, Ariz., will do the same thing. But a whopping share of the jackpot will go to a greedy uninvited partner who didn't even bother to play: Uncle Sam. The Internal Revenue Service treats lottery winnings as ordinary income, and a nine-figure income is subject to the highest federal tax rate of 35 percent. That means the first thing the Hills had to do after landing their big prize was surrender $67 million of it to the US Treasury. The lucky owner(s) of the Arizona ticket will fork over the same amount. There are also state taxes to kiss goodbye. In Missouri, where the income tax rate is 4 percent, the Hills will be charged almost $8 million; the Arizona winner will pay at least 5 percent: nearly $10 million.
A Case for Targeted Killings
President Franklin Roosevelt was truly astonished when told by a reporter that Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, had been shot down by U.S. planes over a Pacific island after Americans decrypted Yamamoto's flight plans. FDR had encouraged this "targeted killing" -- destroying a particular person of military importance -- a phrase that has become familiar since Israel began doing this in 2000 in combating the second Palestinian intifada.
Beck, Marriage and The State of The Union
My buddy, Glenn Beck, has made a great contribution to the TEA party movement and to a renewal of popular interest in our Founding Fathers and their ideals. For all that he deserves praise. But, I believe, he is making a serious error in abandoning the civil right of marriage. The Republican Party was founded in opposition to two historic wrongs. The party's first platform in 1856 denounced "slavery and polygamy -- the twin relics of barbarism." Slavery was finally put down with a terrible toll -- 630,000 Americans dead in the Civil War. The new movie, *Lincoln*, tells the dramatic story of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery.
GOP Strategic Retreat?
Republicans are divided. President Obama won't budge. And more and more, it looks like the fiscal-cliff deadline of Dec. 31 will be missed. It's now clear that Team Obama wants higher tax rates *and* revenue-raising tax-deduction caps to meet their $1.6 trillion revenue target. Spending cuts and entitlement reforms are vague to nonexistent. In fact, it could be that Obama not only rejects the across-the-board budget sequester, but that he actively seeks to *raise* spending, not cut it.
From The Comedy Store
Mitt Romney was invited to the White House to have a private lunch with President Obama and share ideas on how to spur the economy. The president served turkey chili and a green vegetable for lunch. Mitt didn't have to ask if Michelle was in town.
The Occupy Pennsylvania Avenue Movement
Some people were surprised that in their desperation to recover from some of the damage that Romney inflicted on Obama during the Denver debate, the Democrats sprang to the defense of Big Bird. Frankly, I saw it coming as soon as Romney told Jim Lehrer that as much as he liked Big Bird and Lehrer himself, he saw no good reason for the American taxpayer to subsidize Public Broadcasting. It figured that when recent events in the Middle East confirmed that Obama's foreign policy is every bit as awful as his fiscal policy, the Great Pretender was going to throw up some silly smokescreen. One time, it was Sandra Fluke and her birth control pills. The next time, it was accusing Romney of being the Grim Reaper where cancer victims are concerned. It stood to reason that David Axelrod would send his hand puppet off to defend the world's tallest Muppet.
The American Welfare State
Throughout the presidential campaign, Republican candidates pointed to the number of food stamp recipients -- increasing from 33 million people in 2009 to 43 million in 2012 -- as a sign that poverty had skyrocketed under President Obama. But a new study suggests that the reason there has been such an increase in food stamp recipients during the last four years is even more pernicious. The study's authors, George Mason University's David Armor and Sonia Sousa, argue that the food stamp program can no longer be regarded as an anti-poverty program because nearly half of its recipients are above the poverty line, many of them substantially so. And other anti-poverty programs have an even higher percentage of the non-poor among their recipients.
This 'n That
I am in desperately searching for something to write about that doesn't include the words "fiscal cliff." Maybe we'll just cruise around the net and see what catches our attention. Here's one. Remember that unbelievable photo of the 13-year-old Afghan girl who was on the cover of National Geographic in 1985? It was taken by Steve McCurry. If you're old enough, you do. If you're not, it's worth looking at. The National Geographic folks recently auctioned off much of its photo library and that particular picture sold for $178,900.