Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Leviathan on a Fishing Expedition
SAN FRANCISCO -- The huge humpback whale whose friendliness precipitated a surreal seven-year -- so far -- federal hunt for criminality surely did not feel put upon. Nevertheless, our unhinged government, with an obsession like that of Melville's Ishmael, has crippled Nancy Black's scientific career, cost her more than $100,000 in legal fees -- so far -- and might sentence her to 20 years in prison. This Kafkaesque burlesque of law enforcement began when someone whistled. Black, 50, a marine biologist who also captains a whale watching ship, was with some watchers in Monterey Bay in 2005 when a member of her crew whistled at the humpback that had approached her boat, hoping to entice the whale to linger. Back on land, another of her employees called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to ask if the whistling constituted "harassment" of a marine mammal, which is an "environmental crime." NOAA requested a video of the episode, which Black sent after editing it slightly to highlight the whistling. NOAA found no harassment -- but got her indicted for editing the tape, calling this a "material false statement" to federal investigators, which is a felony under the 1863 False Claims Act intended to punish suppliers defrauding the government during the Civil War.
Boot Iran From the UN
Every fall, it seems, Americans are subjected to the ugly spectacle of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad coming to New York to address the UN General Assembly. There, at the podium, he is placed on a par with President Obama, Prime Minister David Cameron, France's Francois Hollande, and other leaders of civilized states. Ahmadinejad has used this podium to spew his anti-American, anti-Israel hatred. And yet he receives hearty applause from the Islamist delegates seated before him. Iran signed the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights as long ago as 1948. That's when Iran was ruled by the Shah. That UNDHR contains this provision, Article 18.
Eat More Chicken
Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy is in hot water with the LGBT community because he committed the cardinal sin in an age of political correctness: Thou must not speak ill of anything gays, lesbians, bisexuals or transgenders wish to do. In an interview with the Baptist Press and later on a Christian radio program, Cathy, whose father, the philanthropist Truett Cathy, founded the company, defended marriage between a man and a woman and when asked about the company's support of traditional marriage said, "Guilty as charged. We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit." Cathy believes American society is rotting (and where is evidence to the contrary?) because the country has turned away from God.
The New Improved Cardiff Giant
In October, 1869, there came news that workmen digging a well at a farm in Cardiff, a town near Syracuse, New York, had uncovered a petrified 12-foot giant. The owner of the farm erected a huge tent over the giant and was soon charging people a quarter to see the attraction. Soon, the price went to 50 cents, and still the crowds came. When a group of Syracuse businessmen offered the farmer the fantastic sum of $37,500 for the giant, he sold. It turned out to be a good investment because once the giant was placed on display in a Syracuse store front, the local economy enjoyed a boom. Eventually there came a day when archaeologists examined the giant and announced it to be a fraud. At which point, a factory owner named George Hull admitted that he had commissioned the hoax in order to prove how gullible Americans were.
From The Comedy Store
The National Oceanic lab scientists warned that radioactive ocean water is headed for the West Coast from last year's Fukushima reactor leak. The Japanese may expose Americans to nuclear radiation. So it's true that what goes around, comes around.
If You Can't Win on the Facts ...
I am normally very understanding of the need for Presidential vacations, Presidential weekends off, or even Presidential naps. It's a tough job and there is always someone, somewhere doing something illegal, dangerous, and/or stupid somewhere on the planet that demands your attention. Having written that, I am becoming increasingly irritated with the fact that the total Obama campaign strategy is: Destroy Romney personally. There is an old saying that goes something like: "If you can't win on the facts, argue the law. If you can't win on the law, call your opponent names." The Obama campaign can't win on the facts; The economic situation is what it is and it is not good. They can't win on the law; about the only thing they've gotten passed is Health Care and you know how popular that is.
The Left's Orwellian Assault on Chick-fil-A
To punish dissenters, left-wing politicians promise to use the full force of the government.
Blueprint for States to Reject and Replace Obamacare
Here's the blueprint for how the states can reject three central pillars of Obamacare and set the stage for replacing it, if Mitt Romney takes the White House and the GOP takes the Senate this November. Two reasons compel dismantling Obamacare. First is restoring individual liberty by empowering states against the national government and citizens against both. Second is recognizing that free markets outperform centrally-planned markets, so private-sector healthcare will better serve Americans than government-controlled Obamacare ever could.
Hollywood's War on Chicken
The latest solid proof that Hollywood really can't stand traditional Christianity has arrived in an unfolding boycott of Chick-fil-A, a Georgia-based fast-food chain that's rapidly spreading franchises across America. Chick-fil-A demonstrates a public faith by closing all its stores on Sundays and on Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's something the left ridicules but something anyone of any faith respects. It's the company's donations through its WinShape Foundation that have launched the intolerant gay left into action. Chick-fil-A has dared to donate their profits to groups like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (Horrors!) and the Marriage and Family Foundation (No!). Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy told the Baptist Press that, "We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that." This man just has to cut it out. Who does he think he is?
Burning Bridges
GEORGETOWN, S.C. -- When Alexander the Great died at the age of 32 in 323 B.C., his once unbeatable army began a 2,900-mile withdrawal from India and headed home to Macedonia. As they retreated, the empire they had created collapsed behind them. To prevent pursuit, Alexander's royal cavalry and infantry dealt viciously with all internal dissent, destroyed cities and burned bridges. The Russians employed a similar scorched-earth tactic against Napoleon in 1812, as did the Red Army when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. It's a maneuver now being employed both domestically and internationally by Barack Obama. The re-elect Obama-Biden machine has less sanguinary methods for dealing with discord in the ranks than the Macedonian army used 2,335 years ago. There are no goblets of poisoned wine, no toxic darts -- but the Obamians and Bidenites are no less effective. It took just hours for Democrats Cory Booker -- mayor of Newark, N.J. -- and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein to recant after they had the temerity to criticize our Nobel laureate.
Stoking Class Resentment
Senate Democrats passed a so-called middle class tax cut this week on a mostly partisan vote, but the move was more political theater than tax legislation. For months, the Democrats, with President Obama leading the charge, have hammered home that they want to preserve lower tax rates for those Americans earning less than $250,000 a year and help pay for lost federal revenues by making wealthier individuals pay higher taxes. But, in fact, even if the bill were to become law -- which it won't -- most middle class taxpayers will see their taxes go up come January unless Congress gets serious about real tax reform. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says the bill is unconstitutional -- and, on its face, he appears to be right. Article I, section 7 of the U.S. Constitution requires: "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills." The House is scheduled to vote on its own tax bill next week, but the Republican-controlled House is likely to pass an across-the-board extension of existing tax rates, and compromise between the two chambers appears unlikely.
Obama: I Defy You to Believe What I Said About Business
Obama's desperate protests that his anti-business rant was taken out of context are betrayed both by that very context and because they are a part of a piece -- just one more component of his war against the American entrepreneurial spirit. He would have us believe that his words "you didn't build that" referred to roads and bridges and not businesses. Given his accompanying statements -- "you didn't get there on your own," etc. -- that is an absurd construction. But even if that's what he meant, why would he have felt compelled to point out that businesses don't succeed without access to roads and bridges? Do roads and bridges not connect the population to failed businesses? Why would any American president be inclined to think or talk this way? Of course governments -- funded by individual and business revenues, by the way -- build the roads and bridges, to successful and failed businesses.
BFD: A Biden Fabulist Dud
Vice President Joe Biden, America's textbook Beltway barnacle, still labors under the illusion that he is America's middle-class Everyman. And now, he's gone and dragged his adult children into the land of Democratic make-believe. This is a BFD: a Biden Fabulist Dud. As usual with White House class-warfare demagoguery, reality doesn't fit the wealth-bashing narrative. At the International Association of Fire Fighters 51st Convention in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Biden stoked passive-aggressive resentment of the 1 percenters. "The wealthy," he sniveled. "God bless 'em," he snarked. "I wish my kids would become wealthy," he sighed before railing against tax relief for all those evil, privileged rich people earning more than $250,000 a year.
Romney - Not Innocents - Abroad
WASHINGTON -- A generation ago, it was the three I's. A presidential challenger's obligatory foreign trip meant Ireland, Italy and Israel. Mitt Romney's itinerary is slightly different: Britain, Poland and Israel. Not quite the naked ethnic appeal of yore. Each destination suggests a somewhat more subtle affinity: Britain, playing to our cultural connectedness with the Downton Abbey folks who've been at our side in practically every fight for the last hundred years; Poland, representing the "new Europe," the Central Europeans so unashamedly pro-American; Israel, appealing to most American Jews but also to an infinitely greater number of passionately sympathetic evangelical Christians.
Can We Still Call Men Heroes?
If just one man had given his life by throwing himself atop his girlfriend to shield her from bullets in that Aurora, Colo., theater, it would have been cause for amazement. That three apparently did so is deeply affecting. People earn the Medal of Honor for such courage and self-sacrifice in the military. There is no equivalent in ordinary life -- or what should be ordinary life.
Death Penalty Foes Won't Take a Stand in Colorado
In the aftermath of the Aurora, Colo., slaughter, the question went forth on all of the political chatter shows: "Will this reopen the debate over gun control?" That's the script. When heinous monsters kill people with guns, we tend to talk about the problem of guns. Or rather, people in Washington, New York and other big cities tend to talk about the problem of guns, because they think guns are the problem. There's an irony there, of course, given that such cities tend to have the worst gun-related murder rates -- Chicago these days has the equivalent of an Aurora every month -- and they are the places where guns are hardest to come by, legally. Regardless, the gun debate flashed for the briefest of moments, like a round of heat lightning that fails to herald a storm, and then disappeared.
Suppose Michele Bachmann Is Right?
Like the ghosts of Shakespeare's Banquo or Dickens' Jacob Marley, the specter of the late commie-hunting congressman from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, will always be with us. It is summoned up today, by some on the left, who use it as a tool to thwart legitimate questions about people and ideologies that seek to destroy America. According to many commentators, the McCarthy spirit has inhabited Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). In several letters to high-ranking government officials, Bachmann has raised questions about Huma Abedin, a Muslim-American, who is deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Bachmann's concern is Abedin's relatives in the Middle East some of whom -- such as Abedin's mother -- she claims "are connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations." Abedin's job, according to Bachmann, "affords her routine access to the secretary and to policy-making." And, as a result of that access, says Bachmann, "The State Department, and in several cases, the specific direction of the secretary of state, have taken actions recently that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests."
Obscurity: No Crueler Punishment!
I feel awful about what happened in Colorado, but can we stop the hugging and the teddy bears? Just as society can become inured to violence, it can also become inured to sentiment. There is nothing so hackneyed in the world of photojournalism as pictures of the hugging and the shrines with candles and teddy bears after a tragedy, with a piano softly trilling in the background. This accomplishes nothing. If you want to do something, please write a check to a good charity, a family financially harmed by the shooting, or send flowers to a specific person. It is also not helpful to have politicians and television personalities pledging not to discuss the alleged shooter. Unlike most news, that information serves an actual purpose, such has helping us recognize warning signs in other potential mass murderers in the future.
Forget the Creep
WASHINGTON -- What does James Holmes, the Colorado killer, have in common with Jared Loughner, Andres Behring Breivik, Seung-Hui Cho, Dylan Klebold, and Eric Harris? They all have massacred innocent people on a massive scale. Yet they have something else in common. They are all nobodies or losers, as the phrase has it. All were on a downward incline from a not very lofty ascent. They were troubled, but there are other troubled souls in our society. They were fascinated with violence, but so are others. Why else would major entertainment corporations invest so much money in clang & bang, blood & guts entertainments like childish movies, idiotic video games and even rap music? They were quiet, loners, and dreamy isolates. My guess is they have watched a lot of TV with canned laughter and implausible sound effects. I do not see a lot of participation in sport with these young heroes' lives. At their most active, they are probably vigorous onanists.
Conservatives Backtrack on Long Prison Sentences
Only a few lonely media outlets responded to the Aurora Mall murders by calling for stricter gun control measures. President Barack Obama and Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper made eloquent statements, as did Mitt Romney, but neither the two Democrats nor the Republican called for changes in gun laws. Many conservatives and gun rights advocates took satisfaction from this, with some cause. Congressional Democrats have mostly given up the fight for gun control after observing the defeats of many colleagues in 1994 and of Al Gore in 2000. A large majority of states have passed laws allowing qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons, and no such law has been repealed. And the Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment does recognize a personal right to keep and bear arms.