Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Paul Ryan: A Bold Smart Choice
Choosing Paul Ryan is a game-changer. Ask the Chicago Gang and its publicists in the mainstream media. They're terrified. They know that when Mitt Romney chose Ryan for his vice president, it re-defined the Romney campaign overnight. It proved Mitt was not as boring, cautious and moderate as conservative Republicans feared and the Obama Left hoped. In one bold, smart move, Romney's VP choice makes it clear that this election is about one thing -- the economy.
Paul Ryan Is Not Freddy Krueger
Mitt Romney made a smart executive decision selecting Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate. Ryan's genial personality, serious policy wonkery and political courage have dazzled conservatives and won respect even in a few liberal circles. Romney scores points for political courage as well. He knew liberal politicians and journalists would talk in punishing terms about Ryan's budget ideas. They did not disappoint. It took only minutes for the onslaught to begin. At the same time liberal media outlets acknowledge the country now faces two opposing visions of government, why is *only* the Romney-Ryan vision "polarizing" and "extreme"? To be sure, Ryan's early press clips weren't terrible when compared to the immediate viciousness that greeted Sarah Palin four years ago. Still, reporters predictably unloaded with the Freddy-Krueger talk of "budget-slasher" and Ryan "ripping" into the middle class.
Obama's Educational Excellence Initiative
President Barack Obama recently wrote an executive order that established a White House initiative on educational excellence for black Americans that will be housed in the Department of Education. It proposes "to identify evidence-based best practices" to improve black achievement in school and college. Though black education is in desperate straits, the president's executive order will accomplish absolutely nothing to improve black education. The reason is that it does not address the root causes of educational rot among black Americans. It's not rocket science; let's look at it.
Obama's Ironic Lie About an American Icon
To justify expanding the power of the federal government and increasing the burden of debt on federal taxpayers, President Barack Obama has repeatedly lied about a peerless icon of America's pioneering spirit -- the Golden Gate Bridge. "During the Great Depression, America built the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge," Obama said in his January State of the Union Address. "After World War II, we connected our states with a system of highways. Democratic and Republican administrations invested in great projects that benefited everybody, from the workers who built them to the businesses that still use them today." Obama suggested here that the federal government invested in the Golden Gate Bridge. Elsewhere, he has used a royal "we" to seemingly credit the federal government.
Black Like Us: The Race Clownery of Obama-Biden
Looks like Vice President Joe Biden has been taking extracurricular Democratic jive-talking lessons. The results of condescending liberals' cynical racial pandering attempts are, as always, seismically cringe-inducing. At a campaign event in Danville, Va., the gaffetastic veep dropped his g's and picked up a bizarre twang in front of an audience of black voters. Middle-Class Joe swapped his Home Depot apron for an A.M.E. preacher's robe and sermonized about the big, bad GOP.
Republicans Roll Over on Debate Moderators
Either Mitt Romney and the Republican party doesn't get it about the media, or they're just plain stupid. Monday, the moderators for the presidential debates were announced. ... Leftists masquerading as even-handed, one and all. Virtually guaranteed to frame both the issues and the questions in the best possible light for Democrats in general, and Barack Obama and Joe Biden in particular.
There Ought Not to Be a Law
I'm a libertarian in part because I see a false choice offered by the political left and right: government control of the economy -- or government control of our personal lives. People on both sides think of themselves as freedom lovers. The left thinks government can lessen income inequality. The right thinks government can make Americans more virtuous. I say we're best off if neither side attempts to advance its agenda via government. Let both *argue* about things like drug use and poverty, but let no one be coerced by government unless he steals or attacks someone. Beyond the small amount needed to fund a highly limited government, let no one forcibly take other people's money. When in doubt, leave it out -- or rather, leave it to the market and other voluntary institutions.
Death Rites and Speech Rights
On June 21, 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Texas law that made flag burning a state crime, ruling that it violated the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. A month later, Rep. Jack Brooks, D-Texas introduced a bill that made flag burning a federal crime. Approved by Congress that fall, the new law was overturned by the Supreme Court the following year. The Sanctity of Eternal Rest for Veterans Act, signed into law by President Obama last week, seems destined for the same fate. The law, which prohibits protests within 300 feet of a military funeral from two hours before the ceremony until two hours afterward, represents the same sort of willful constitutional defiance as the short-lived federal ban on flag burning, sacrificing liberty in an ostentatious display of patriotism.
Obama Campaign Goes Racist, Anti-Semitic
Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate has utterly unhinged the Obama campaign. Last week they were happily jabbering about Romney's record at Bain Capital, implying that he had killed a man's wife, stating that he was a tax cheat and blaming him for outsourcing jobs. This week they're stuck defending Barack Obama's $700 billion cuts to Medicare and spending addiction. That leaves the Democrats with one solution: get ugly.
Romney-Ryan: Real Change
Last Thursday's Wall Street Journal editorial "Why Not Paul Ryan?" made the case for his selection as the Republican vice-presidential nominee in this statement: "Romney can win a big election over big issues. He'll lose a small one." After Ryan's serious proposal to restructure Medicare -- which virtually everyone knows must be reformed -- the response from Democrats was an unserious TV ad, which showed a Ryan look-alike pushing an old woman in a wheelchair over a cliff. If Ryan and Romney can effectively respond to such silliness, they will not only win the election; they will actually accomplish something that will benefit all Americans.
Will a Weakened American Character Defeat Paul Ryan?
Democrats believe that if Americans perceive that their entitlements may be affected -- even if only beginning a decade from now, and even if the American debt is thereby cut by one third, and even if they, as well as the country, will ultimately benefit -- so many Americans have become so used to government benefits, the Republicans stand little chance of winning the upcoming elections.
Paul Ryan: Mitt Romney's Line in the Sand
Mitt Romney has outdone himself in choosing Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate. The conservative base is ecstatic, and that will translate into voter intensity and high turnout. Our country faces an unprecedented debt crisis, primarily driven by our entitlement programs. We have more than $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities -- a staggering, incomprehensible number -- and we are on a collision course with national bankruptcy. Obama has offered no solutions; his Democratic majority in the Senate has failed to produce a budget in 1,200 days; and they have both obstructed the Republicans' proposed remedies. It's as if it's a game with these people and our crushing national debt is but a trifling matter.
The Paul Ryan Choice
Governor Mitt Romney's choice of Congressman Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate is one of those decisions that seem obvious -- if not inevitable -- in retrospect, even though it was by no means obvious to most of us beforehand. Anyone who wants to get a quick sense of who Paul Ryan is should watch a short video of a February 2010 meeting in which Congressman Ryan politely, but devastatingly, "schools" Barack Obama on the utter fraudulence of the statistics that the Obama administration was using to claim that ObamaCare would reduce the deficit. That video is available on the Drudge Report.
A Referendum on Us
Watch the Obama "progressives'" glee and mirth spreading across their countenances as they chunk mud balls at Mitt Romney's running mate-designate, Paul Ryan. That Ryan -- he's "a certifiable right-wing ideologue," says Obama strategist David Axelrod. ("Certifiable," don't cha know, means "legally insane.") From Robert Shrum, a Democratic strategist: "(H)is mind is rooted in Ayn Rand's idolatry of selfishness." He's "Robin Hood in deep dark reverse," according to Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the left-wing magazine, The Nation. That's besides being, in the mind of Congressman Steve Israel, the Democrat charged with retaking the House, "a nightmare for seniors who have earned their Medicare benefits."
Romney-Ryan
The selection of Rep. Paul Ryan to be Gov. Mitt Romney's running mate was an excellent choice. Nevertheless, the press corps happily bought into the Obama campaign's early response that, as the Washington Post's Dan Balz wrote: "There was no one on Romney's short list of contenders they wanted to run against more than the chairman of the House Budget Committee." The great thing about that statement is: It would have worked no matter whom Romney had picked. In this age of everything anyone has ever said or even thought about anything being available instantaneously on-line, there is no such thing as a candidate that can't be savaged in a 30 second ad by one SuperPAC or another.
Becoming Presidential
When, in his speech accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Barry Goldwater said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue," a media wit at the convention supposedly exclaimed, "Good God, Goldwater is going to run as Goldwater." When Mitt Romney decided to run with Paul Ryan, many conservatives may have thought, "Thank God, Romney is not going to run as Romney." Not, that is, as the Romney who 12 months ago, warily eyeing Iowa, refused to say a discouraging word about the ethanol debacle. Rather, he is going to run as the Romney who, less than two weeks before announcing Ryan, told the states -- Iowa prominent among them -- that he opposes extending the wind energy production tax credit, which expires soon.
Casting a Wide Net
Between the things that liberals say and the things they do, it's nearly impossible not to be overwhelmed by a tsunami of fatuousness. For instance, Greece and Spain, two nations that have destroyed their economies through socialistic entitlements, should be delighted that the EU, meaning Germany, seems willing to bail them out if they'll only change their spendthrift ways. Instead, like spoiled brats, they balk at making any concessions to reality. They are perfect examples of ingrates biting the hand that over-feeds them. Everyone knows that where the mass media is concerned, if it bleeds, it leads. The exception is when violence is done by blacks to whites. If you went by TV and newspapers, you would think it was 1812 and that it was blacks who were nearly always the innocent victims of inter-racial brutality. The truth, as is often the case where the media is concerned, is the reverse.
Why Should MA Beg Anyone to Vote?
Senator Scott Brown is right. For the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to be mailing voter-registration forms to nearly 480,000 welfare recipients -- at a cost to taxpayers of more than $275,000 -- is indeed "outrageous," as the Republican incumbent declared last week. The vast get-out-the-welfare-vote campaign "smells wrong," he says. So it does, but not for the reason he claims. The key problem with the mass-mailing nudging everyone on the state's welfare rolls to register to vote isn't that it was prompted by a lawsuit filed by several left-wing advocacy groups, one of which -- Demos -- is chaired by the daughter of Brown's leading challenger, Elizabeth Warren. It isn't that public funds and records are being deployed to drum up votes among people considerably more likely to support Democrats instead of Republicans. And it isn't that state officials agreed to settle the activists' lawsuit so quickly as to suggest the whole thing was choreographed in advance -- a ploy to benefit the party that dominates Bay State politics and already controls the rest of the congressional delegation.
Paul Ryan: A Serious VP Pick for a Serious Election
A competition of philosophies is now underway.