Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Bad News Is No News
Last Friday's top-line unemployment figures -- showing only 80,000 jobs were created during the month and the unemployment rate remaining unchanged at 8.2 percent -- was far worse than anyone in the Obama campaign or in the political shop at the White House could have expected. One reporter traveling with President Obama in Ohio Tweeted that he had spoken for 40 minutes with only about 26 seconds on the job number. To which I responded: "Bad news is no news." But, in Presidential politics there is no such things as "no news." And the news for the Obama campaign has not been good since then.
Why Is Obama Offering All Women Free Sterilization?
No previous president ever promoted a giveaway more peculiar than Barack Obama's mandate that all health care plans must offer free sterilizations to all women -- but not all men -- capable of breeding. This mandate is Obama's defining act as president -- just as his adamant opposition to a bill that would have defined a born baby as a "person" was his defining act as an Illinois state senator. Obama's Department of Health and Human Services proposed the mandate last August and finalized it in January. It takes effect Aug. 1.
In Defense of Brad Pitt's Mom
Hollywood and the American left love diversity, except when it offends their "progressive" value system. Witness the reaction to actor Brad Pitt's mother, Jane, who publicly opposed President Obama's re-election. Mrs. Pitt's pro-life, anti-gay marriage statement to her local paper last week enflamed the Tolerance Mob. And her mere expression of dissident political views exposed the glittering hypocrisy of the left-wing "No H8" campaign. In a letter to the editor for Missouri's Springfield News-Leader, Mrs. Pitt responded to another reader who argued that Christians should not support Mitt Romney because of his Mormon faith. Arguing for interfaith tolerance, she praised Romney's "high morals" and "business experience." The celebrity mom urged "prayerful consideration" from fellow Christians before voting for Obama -- "a man," she pointed out, "who sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for years, did not hold a public ceremony to mark the National Day of Prayer, and is a liberal who supports the killing of unborn babies and same-sex marriage."
Obama's Stump Speech Myths
Barack Obama has trouble telling the truth. This is the man who admitted his memoir "Dreams from My Father" was semifictional. "For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I've known, and some events appear out of precise chronology." Translation: On some pages, I'm taking poetic license with the facts to burnish my image. The problem is, Obama's still using poetic license. So where are the reporters to point out when he doesn't tell the truth? Let's take just one typical Obama stump speech, on July 5 in Sandusky, Ohio, and look for the fibs and stretches. They're not hard to find.
Difficult Economics Lessons
One of the more difficult lessons to teach economics neophytes -- and, many times, trained economists -- is that economic theory cannot say anything definitive about subjective statements, such as what's better, good, bad or worse. Let's try a few examples to make the point. Cabernet sauvignon wine is better than fume blanc. Turkey is better than pork. Matter in the solid state is better than the plasma state. Each of those statements begs the question: Where's the proof? With subjective statements such as those, disagreements can go on forever. It's simply a matter of personal opinion. One person's opinion of what's better or worse is just as good as another's.
Obama's Re-election Strategy: Promising to Raise Taxes
Why the public will reject the president's latest campaign gambit.
Blame Barclays, Not Capitalism
Why aren't more people furious about the Libor scandal? That's a question mostly being asked on the political left these days, and they're right to ask it. Here are the basics: Barclays is the second-largest bank in Britain and one of the largest in the world. It has admitted to U.S. and British regulators that it manipulated the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which basically measures how much it costs banks to borrow money from one another for various periods of time. If you ever read the fine print on a home mortgage, credit card agreement or car loan, you've seen reference to Libor.
Budget Insanity
Last year, Congress agreed to $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts, unless politicians find other things to cut. They didn't, of course. So now, with so-called sequestration looming in January, panic has set in. Even the new "fiscally responsible" Republicans vote against cutting Energy Department handouts to companies like Solyndra and subsidies to sugar producers. Many claim that any cut in military spending will weaken America and increase unemployment. It's another demonstration of the politicians' addiction to spending -- and how we are complicit. "One more infrastructure bill" or "this jobs plan" will jumpstart the economy, and then we'll kick our spending addiction once and for all. But we don't stop. For most of American history, government was tiny. But since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the promise that government would cure poverty, spending has gone up nonstop. This is not sustainable.
The Invincible Lie
Anyone who wants to study the tricks of propaganda rhetoric has a rich source of examples in the statements of President Barack Obama. On Monday, July 9th, for example, he said that Republicans "believe that prosperity comes from the top down, so that if we spend trillions more on tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, that that will somehow unleash jobs and economic growth." Let us begin with the word "spend." Is the government "spending" money on people whenever it does not tax them as much as it can? Such convoluted reasoning would never pass muster if the mainstream media were not so determined to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Barack Obama. Ironically, actual spending by the Obama administration for the benefit of its political allies, such as the teachers' unions, is not called spending but "investment." You can say anything if you have your own private language.
Violence Is Not Victory
Early last year, when the death toll from Mexican President Felipe Calderon's crackdown on the cartels stood at 35,000 or so, Michele Leonhart, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, told reporters in Cancun that "the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs." The results of last week's presidential election, in which the candidate of Calderon's National Action Party (PAN) finished a distant third, suggest Mexican voters are no longer buying that counterintuitive argument, if they ever did. Even if the "fight against drugs" were winnable, it would be an outrageous imposition. Why should Mexicans tolerate murder and mayhem on an appalling scale (more than 50,000 deaths since Calderon launched his assault in December 2006), not to mention the rampant corruption associated with prohibition, all in the name of stopping Americans from obtaining psychoactive substances that their government has arbitrarily decreed they should not consume? That sort of arrogant expectation is becoming increasingly untenable.
Jobs Versus Net Jobs
One of the reasons for the popularity of political rhetoric is that everybody can be right, in terms of their own rhetoric, no matter how much the rhetoric of one side contradicts the rhetoric of the other side. President Obama constantly repeats how many millions of jobs have been created during his administration, while his critics constantly repeat how many millions of jobs have been lost during his administration. How can both of them be right -- or, at least, how can they both get away with what they are saying? There are jobs and there are net jobs. This is true not only today but has been true in years past.
Obama's Goose Is Cooked
Obama needed a filet mignon in the June employment report. But instead he got a rubber chicken. Only 80,000 new jobs were created last month, way below Wall Street expectations. It's the fourth consecutive monthly disappointment. For a few months last winter, jobs were rising at an average of 225,000 a month. But that has sloped way down to only 75,000. The unemployment rate continues at 8.2 percent, which is the 41st-straight month above 8 percent. The U6 unemployment rate, which includes discouraged workers, is just under 15 percent. As voters finalize their election impressions this summer, all of this is bad news for the Chicago incumbent.
Is President Obama Intentionally 'Destroying' America?
During my book "tour," radio hosts are forever asking me whether I believe that Obama is intentionally attempting to destroy America. It's a fair question, especially given the title of my book and because so many people legitimately believe he is. I have never been too receptive to conspiracy theories, and I'm not particularly enamored of ones circulating about Obama. But unlike many other such theories, this one is about a truly unprecedented assault on the American idea and on those first principles that have made America the unique experiment in constitutional governance that it has been. Ordinary people -- not just a small fringe group of zealots -- are really afraid today. They see the country they adore being attacked at all levels; they see their freedoms under assault, their life savings genuinely in jeopardy, an endlessly anemic economy, a longer period of sustained unemployment than we've experienced in a half-century and a national financial crisis, born of world-historic national debt, that this president will not help avert.
The Numbers Game
President Obama's attempt to spin the latest discouraging unemployment numbers as "a step in the right direction" is like telling passengers aboard the Titanic to ignore the sinking vessel and listen to the live music. A Wall Street Journal analysis of the June unemployment figures offers little comfort, nor does it produce confidence that the economy will improve before the election. "The U.S. unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.2 percent in June," the Journal reports, "but a broader measure rose to 14.9 percent as the ranks of the underemployed grew. ... The reason the rate didn't decline was that while the number of employed increased, so did the labor force by a larger 189,000 people." The broader unemployment rate includes temporary and part-time workers who would prefer a full-time job, as well as people who want to work but have given up looking for jobs. The president's policies, which appear to have stifled economic growth, continue to contribute to the dismal jobs outcome.
Obamanomics: More Ride in the Wagon
June brought the perfect encapsulation of the Obama economy: More Americans signed up for disability benefits than got jobs. According to government statistics, 80,000 Americans found work last month, while 85,000 dropped out of the labor force altogether to collect Social Security Disability payments. It is possible that an unusual number of Americans have become disabled during President Obama's tenure -- but if so, what does that say about the virtues of Obamacare? In any case, though, Obama promised that unemployment would not top 8 percent if we passed the stimulus law -- and though he predicted that the unemployment rate would be at 5.6 percent today, the private economy itself is quite disabled under this leadership.
The 'God-Particle' and God
They found the "God-Particle." That was the headline in many of America's news media. It turns out that the name actually derives from substituting "God-particle" for "goddamn particle," the original name some scientists had given the elusive particle. But the media adopted the former nomenclature. Why? Because otherwise, the bulk of humanity would not pay attention. Physicists went nuts. And no one can blame them. For decades, they have searched for the particle that may explain why there is any mass in the universe. And ten billion dollars were spent on the machine that probably proved its existence.
Dear Mr. Romney
Dear Mr. Romney: Since you apparently have advisors that are very clever people, perhaps a word from a troglodyte like me might be refreshing. In the last two weeks, you have tried to explain the difference between "off-shoring" and "outsourcing" with respect to the economy, and despite the great gift handed to you by our addled Chief Justice, John Roberts, you insisted on playing a semantical game between calling Obamacare a "constitutional tax" or an "unconstitutional penalty." Let me give you a clue: the *overwhelming* number of people who understand and/or appreciate the nuances in such parsing of the language *already know* who they're going to vote for. They're the ones who follow politics, have a far higher understanding of economics than the average American, and make an ongoing effort to pay attention to what's happening in general.
Pop Culture, Etc.
Being as old as I am, I am not the least bit embarrassed by the fact that I am not only unaware of the movies, TV shows and music, that are currently popular, but, aside from a few people named Bieber, Snooki and Kardashian, who somehow snuck through my defenses, I am proud to say I don't know the names of the current idols. One thing that I have become aware of is that the female icons of today are not as attractive as they used to be, and I don't attribute that to my age, but to their lack of faces and figures. For instance, Angelina Jolie has the pencil legs of a 90-year-old and lips that are larger than her arms; Lady Gaga looks like something the cat dragged in; and Sarah Jessica Parker looks like the homely girl that pretty girls hung out with in high school so they'd look even prettier by comparison. When you compare them to the likes of Rhonda Fleming, Rita Hayworth and Doris Day, you'd think you were comparing different species from different planets.