Right Opinion

Immoral Beyond Redemption

Benjamin Franklin, statesman and signer of our Declaration of Independence, said: "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." John Adams, another signer, echoed a similar statement: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Are today's Americans virtuous and moral, or have we become corrupt and vicious? Let's think it through with a few questions. Suppose I saw an elderly woman painfully huddled on a heating grate in the dead of winter. She's hungry and in need of shelter and medical attention. To help the woman, I walk up to you using intimidation and threats and demand that you give me $200. Having taken your money, I then purchase food, shelter and medical assistance for the woman. Would I be guilty of a crime? A moral person would answer in the affirmative. I've committed theft by taking the property of one person to give to another.

Obama Threatens Florida Over Purging Non-Citizen 'Voters'

Deep corruption and the Justice Department’s mission to sabotage fair elections exposed.

Public Employee Unions: Can They be Tamed?

Government unions, what else? -- trying in Wisconsin to give their Republican governor, Scott Walker, the bum's rush from office. There's a fitness, a propriety, in the match-up of reformer (Walker) and encrusted power machine (the Wisconsin public employee unions). I've two reasons for saying so. By the way, I write shortly in advance of the vote on retaining Walker in office -- midway through his term -- or heaving him out the window -- obedient to the unions' summons to punish the guy for muddying their landscaped terrain. Reason 1: In spite of what surely must be the moral excellence of numerous public employee union members in Wisconsin, the state no longer can afford the unions at present pay scales. When Walker became governor after the 2010 elections, he found the state facing a short-term deficit of $137 billion, with a $3.6 billion gap to be closed by 2013. Which couldn't have been the unions' fault entirely. However, the taxpayers were funding 94.2 percent of state workers' pension costs and 88.4 percent of their health care premiums, and government wages were high in relation to private sector pay -- the consequence of collective bargaining.

Playing With Words

Would anyone work to support themselves or their families -- and then turn over a chunk of that hard-earned money to somebody else, just because of the words used by that somebody else? A few people may be taken in by the words of con men, here and there, but the larger tragedy is that millions more are taken in by the words of politicians, the top-of-the-line con men. How do politicians con people out of their money? One example can be found in a recent article titled "The Autism-Welfare Nexus" by Paul Sperry in "Investor's Business Daily." Genuine autism is a truly tragic condition, both for those afflicted by it and for their parents. Few people would have any problem with the idea that both voluntary donations and government expenditures are well spent to help those suffering from autism.

The Great Destroyer

My newly released book, "The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic," picks up where my previous book "Crimes Against Liberty" left off, chronicling President Obama's record since mid-2010, and it's not pretty. I firmly believe that Obama is heading this nation toward financial catastrophe, is greatly undermining our national defenses, the Constitution and the rule of law, is severely damaging our energy industry and our energy independence, is dangerously expanding government and smothering the private sector and small and large businesses, and is polarizing this nation in a way that we haven't seen in many decades, along racial, gender and economic lines.

Can a General Call Suicide 'Selfish'?

On his army blog of January 19, the commanding general of Fort Bliss (Texas), Major General Dana Pittard, wrote regarding members of the military who commit suicide: "I have now come to the conclusion that suicide is an absolutely selfish act. I am personally fed up with soldiers who are choosing to take their own lives so that others can clean up their mess. Be an adult, act like an adult and deal with your real-life problems like the rest of us." According to the National Journal, "Pittard's blunt comments about suicide have raised eyebrows throughout the military. . . . Suicide-prevention experts believe that Pittard's blog posting has already conveyed precisely the wrong message to emotionally-fragile troops.

Party Stereotypes Matter

One elementary law of politics that the Obama campaign does not seem to have internalized is this: Don't play against type. Last week White House spokesman Jay Carney brazenly asserted that President Obama's spending binge never happened. "The rate of spending -- federal spending -- increase is lower under President Obama than all of his predecessors since Dwight Eisenhower, including all of his Republican predecessors." This was too much even for the usually worshipful press. The Associated Press issued a full-dress debunking, as did the Washington Post. Though Politifact, betraying its own unreliability, rated the administration's claim "mostly true." As the AP explained, the facially hilarious claim that Obama was the reincarnation of Calvin Coolidge arose from one columnist's creativity with numbers. Rex Nutting, of Marketwatch, employed the usual Washington legerdemain of counting reductions in the rate of increase as cuts. He then assigned all of the spending in fiscal year 2009 to former President Bush's account, the better to claim that Obama's increase in the rate of spending after 2009 wasn't all that huge.

On, Wisconsin!

If the polls are right, the vote today in Wisconsin on whether to recall Gov. Scott Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and four Republican state senators could amount to a redial of their original victory. Voters who first elected the conservative Walker on a promise to fix the state's dismal economy and crushing debt appear ready to reaffirm their judgment. They would be making the right decision given the results Gov. Walker appears to have produced.

Progressivism: An Adolescent Ideology

One of the things I learned growing up is that, in order to actually grow up, you have to be man enough to admit when you're wrong. In one sense I feel sorry for those people who are unable to do so, because I know they're stuck in a self-imposed purgatory of semi-permanent adolescence. On the other hand, when those people are running things -- into the ground -- and dragging the adults along with them, my sympathy meter moves back to zero. Millions of people in Europe and America are going to bear the brunt of economic pain far longer than they have to. And they'll do so because people with colossal egos can't admit that their socialist utopian schemes are utter failures.

Facebook's Expatriate and the Senate's Demagogues

An Unconscionable Mandate

"We have tried negotiation with the [Obama] administration and legislation with the Congress -- and we'll keep at it -- but there's still no fix. Time is running out." Running out, that is, for many religious organizations across the country that provide services to people in need. For when Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the words quoted above, he was defending the right of these groups to serve inner-city children, the elderly, deaf, HIV/AIDS patients, developmentally disabled and homeless -- among many others. All together, 55 religious organizations have joined 23 separate lawsuits filed in district courts nationwide. Their common foe? The Obamacare anti-conscience mandate.

Those Economic Data

I am in Normandy for the annual D-Day commemoration on Wednesday. As part of this year's festivities the World War II Foundation, headed by Tim Cook is presenting a statue of Major Dick Winters who was the central character in "Band of Brothers." More about that on Wednesday. As I type this it is 5 AM Monday morning in France. That means it is 11 PM Sunday night on the East Coast of the United States. That is only useful because I am looking at the Asian markets as they open for business after Fridays dreadful jobs numbers. As of this moment both the Japanese and Hong Kong market indices are down two percent. The European markets are set to open lower in that same range which means if the Dow follows suit it will lose nearly 250 more points today and end well below 12,000.

Obama the Impaler

Several centuries ago, Vlad III, the king of Romania, was so notorious for his cruelty that he singlehandedly put his birthplace, Transylvania, on the map and was nicknamed the Impaler for his preferred means of torture and execution. Years later, he served as the model for Bram Stoker's Dracula, thus providing everyone from Bela Lugosi to George Hamilton with a handsome livelihood. In his own way, Barack Obama reminds me of Vlad. For one thing, he is merciless when it comes to his enemies. And he regards anyone who is not a friend, aka a contributor to his war chest, as an enemy. In his latest crackdown on freedom-loving Americans, he pushed through a piece of legislation known as HR 347, which makes it a felony to stage a protest against Obama in any venue where the Secret Service is present. As it only applies to American citizens, I believe that the defrauded hookers would have been free to show up outside the Colombian hotel, carrying placards reading "Secret Service Agents Unfair to Working Girls."

Are We at a Demographic Inflection Point?

Demographic forecasts generally take the form of predicting more of the same. Old people have been moving to Florida for the past several years, and old people will move there for the next few years. Immigrants have been streaming in from Mexico, and they will continue to do so. You get the idea. Most of the time these forecasts prove right. But sometimes there are inflection points, times when some trends stop and others begin. My read of recent demographic data suggest we may be at such a point right now.

Wisconsin's Temper Tantrum

This state, the first to let government employees unionize, was an incubator of progressivism and gave birth (in 1932 in Madison, the precursor of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) to its emblematic institution, the government employees union -- government organized as a special interest to lobby itself to expand itself. But Wisconsin progressivism is in a dark Peter Pan phase; it is childish without being winsome.

From Berlin to Jerusalem

The Obama administration refuses, time and again, to say that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Victoria Nuland, speaking from the State Department, recently repeated over and over that the status of Jerusalem is subject to final status negotiations. Israel thus becomes the only country recognized by the U.S. that is not allowed to name its own capital. But the U.S. recognizes Germany's capital. It's Berlin. This is most curious. The United States, in organizing the United Nations in 1945, required that only those nations that had declared war on Germany could be members. President Roosevelt told Stalin and Churchill at Yalta that he had written to the presidents of the Latin American states urging them to declare war on Germany (Yalta: The Price of Peace, by S.M. Plokhy, p. 194) We did not require that they declare war on Japan, too, since the USSR by agreement would only declare war on that Asian Empire ninety days after Germany surrendered.

A Grim Jobs Report for America

You would think $1 trillion in spending stimulus and $2.5 trillion of Fed pump-priming would produce an economy a whole lot stronger than 1.9 percent gross domestic product, which was the revised first-quarter number. And you'd think all that government spending would deliver a whole lot more jobs than 69,000 in May.

Breaking the Tyler Cycle

Someone sent me something called the Tyler Cycle. Alexander Tyler, a Scottish historian (1747-1813), allegedly discovered that democratic societies, such as the one that existed in ancient Athens, are doomed to repeat a vicious circle that begins in Bondage, then proceeds through Spiritual Faith, Courage, Liberty, Abundance, Selfishness, Complacency, Apathy and Dependence, before inevitably arriving back at Bondage. Well, it seems that there was a Scottish historian named Alexander Tyler, but like so many of those things on the Internet that are attributed to the likes of Andy Rooney, Al Capone and Robin Williams, Mr. Tyler had no hand in creating the cycle that now bears his name. For the life of me, I do not understand why people insist on putting words in other people's mouths, but, then, I have no idea why the person, who saw to it that my quote about the three female California politicians being reminiscent of the witches in "MacBeth" went viral, decided to identify me as an L.A. Times columnist, which is something I haven't been for 34 years.

From The Comedy Store

South Dakota park police arrested a fifty-year-old Chicago man they caught trying to scale Mt Rushmore. It was a long afternoon for everyone. It took them an hour to explain to President Obama that climbing Mt. Rushmore doesn't entitle you to say that you're on it.

It's Time for Beltway Barnacle Orrin Hatch to Go

Six-term entrenched incumbent Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is attacking his conservative challenger, Dan Liljenquist, over his alleged support for tax hikes in Washington. My sides ache. Liljenquist has never voted for federal tax hikes or massive entitlement spending or multibillion-dollar bailouts or serial debt-limit increases in Washington because he has never served in Washington. Never. Hatch, by contrast, has spent the last 36 years racking up a Big Government record that cannot be whitewashed away.