Right Opinion

White House Website Gone Wild

We'll never know what Ronald Reagan would have done with WhiteHouse.gov, the official website of the White House But I know my father wouldn't be abusing it the way Barack Obama is. WhiteHouse.gov is owned and operated by the federal government, but the incumbent gets to run it and design it to his own political tastes. Like nearly anything the federal government touches, the White House website is a decent idea gone bad.

A President Not Fit for Man or Beast

First, They Came for Cory Booker

Cory Booker is, by most accounts, a reasonable man. He went to Stanford and Oxford, as well as Yale Law School; now he's the mayor of Newark. He's also African-American. That last fact is only important because liberals have made it so. Booker has been a strong backer of President Obama -- so strong, in fact, that in 2009, Obama offered him a slot in his administration as head of the Office of Urban Affairs Policy. Booker turned it down on the grounds that he wanted to fulfill his job as mayor.

The Bad/Good Idea of Removing Assad

Who could not despise the tottering Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in Syria? The Syrian strongman has killed some 10,000 protestors over the last year; thousands of Syrians are now refugees. The autocracy arms and aids the terrorist organization Hezbollah. It targets democratic Israel with thousands of missiles, and still does its best to ruin neighboring Lebanon. Theocratic and terrorist-sponsoring Iran has few allies -- but Syria remains its staunchest. Almost no country over the last half-century has proved more hostile to the United States than has Syria.

Cocooned Liberals Are Unprepared for Political Debate

It's comfortable living in a cocoon -- associating only with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only reinforces them, avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide. Liberals have been doing this for a long time. In 1972, the movie critic Pauline Kael said it was odd that Richard Nixon was winning the election, because everyone she knew was for George McGovern. Kael wasn't clueless about the rest of America. She was just observing that her own social circle was politically parochial.

Catholics vs. Obama

On Monday, 43 Roman Catholic organizations filed lawsuits in a dozen different federal courts, challenging the Obama administration's mandate requiring insurance coverage for "preventive health services" inimical to their faith. The litigation represents the latest stage of a battle that began January 20th, when the administration announced that the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would require Catholic institutions and individual Catholic employers to provide contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs to all of their employees. The Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services Departments are being sued by Jones Day, a law firm representing all the plaintiffs pro bono. "We have tried negotiations with the administration and legislation with the Congress -- and we'll keep at it -- but there's still no fix," said Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan in a statement.

Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame

When President Barack Obama appeared at Notre Dame in 2009 to accept an honorary law degree and deliver the university's commencement address, he did not dodge the fact that he favored legalized abortion and that Notre Dame -- and the Catholic Church to which it belongs -- does not. Obama went so far as to suggest that the wholesale state-sanctioned killing of innocent human beings in their mothers' wombs was just one of those things that intelligent, well-educated people in a civilized society ought to be able to agreeably disagree about.

Keeping Business Honest

Instinctively, we look for people's motives. We need to know whom we can trust and whom we can't. We're especially skeptical of business because we know business wants our money. It took me too long to understand that business's desire for profit is a good thing. To get our money, businesses -- if they can't look to the government for favors -- need to give us what we want. Then they must make continuous improvements and do it better than the competition does.

Is That a Spy in Your Pocket?

In January, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that tracking a suspect's movements by attaching a GPS transmitter to his car counts as a "search" under the Fourth Amendment. But because the majority opinion emphasized the physical intrusion needed to surreptitiously install the transmitter, it did not resolve the constitutional implications of surveillance using cellphones, the tracking devices that Americans voluntarily carry in their pockets and purses.

Jaczko the Jerk: Harry Reid's Sexist Crony Gets the Boot

The embattled chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission resigned this week. It's a victory for Republican oversight on Capitol Hill, women and sound science. But it's also a lesson in the futility of Bush-era bipartisanship. When you cut deals with bullies, it's a timeless and bitter recipe for more bullying. Gregory Jaczko served as appropriations director and science policy adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., before joining the NRC in 2005. The anti-nuclear advocate was sworn in by his brass-knuckled boss and protector, Reid, who pressured the Bush administration to appoint him as a condition for moving through any other NRC nominations.

Renewed Iranian Calls for Israel's 'Annihilation'

Monday, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Yukiya Amano met with Fereidoun Abbasi-Davani, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), in an initial conference over Iran's nuclear program. The Iranian Fars News Agency said the meeting represented the "eagerness" of the UN to "further develop cooperation with Iran in various areas of nuclear applications," and it is clear the rosiness of the state media's characterization is not without good reason. For, while the West is banking everything on an appeasement strategy with Iran, the Islamic Republic is busy broadcasting to the world its Hitlerian intentions to annihilate Israel, daring the international community to bat an eyelash.

The Wheels are Very Loose

There's a very useful idiom: "The wheels are coming off." That's not a description of the campaign of President Barack Obama. Yet. But if the past two weeks are any indication, it's time for the campaign to check the lug nuts. It started a couple of weeks ago when Vice President Joe Biden forced Obama to join him in endorsing gay marriage. The White House -- through the campaign staff -- tried to pass the word that Biden's statement on a Sunday show was a trial balloon.

Shameless Bias by Omission

You'd think the largest legal action in American history in defense of religious liberty would be a major news story. But ABC, CBS and NBC don't judge news events by their inherent importance as relates to the future of our freedoms. They deliver the news according to a simple formula: Does it or doesn't it advance the re-election of Barack Obama? If it doesn't, it isn't news.

Should Black People Tolerate This?

Each year, roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Using the 94 percent figure means that 262,621 were murdered by other blacks. Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation's population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it's 22 times that of whites. Coupled with being most of the nation's homicide victims, blacks are most of the victims of violent personal crimes, such as assault and robbery.

A Book for Republicans

Democrats have been having a field day with the cry of "tax cuts for the rich" -- for which Republicans seem to have no reply. This is especially surprising, because Democrats made the same arguments back in the 1920s, and the Republicans then not only had a reply, but one that eventually carried the day, when the top tax rate was brought down from 73 percent to 24 percent. What was the difference then?

Which Kind of Capitalism? A Debate for Obama and Romney

"This is not a distraction, this is what this campaign is going to be about," President Obama said Monday at the NATO summit. The "this" in question is Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital and what it says about Romney's economic vision for the country. Team Romney should have seen this coming. If Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry were willing to rip Romney for being too capitalistic in the Republican primary, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to expect that Obama and Vice President Joe Biden would happily do the same in the general election.

Big Lies in Politics

The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy them, and only in the short run. The current outbreaks of riots in Europe show what happens when the truth catches up with both the politicians and the people in the long run.

Do You Care? I Don't

All the Facebook tabulation of recent days -- whatever it may have meant to Mark Zuckerberg and his brokers -- brought to certain others in the great extended American community a certain sense of relief. It is not essential -- a matter of destiny -- some of us now know, to buy into the whole Facebook thing or for that matter even a sliver of it. We can safely ignore the whole thing. That is what we have learned by reading about Facebook. I have, anyway. A story over the weekend put the number of "seniors" who use Facebook at no more than a third. I cannot say what the reporter meant by "seniors." My uninformed guess would be that he meant people who remember the Kennedy assassination. This takes care, I think I can safely say, of the great majority of folk who might expect to communicate with me by means of Zuckerberg's miracle.

Rational People Fear Big Government, Not Big Business

You cannot understand the left if you do not understand that Leftism is a religion. It is not God-based (some Left-wing Christians' and Jews' claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in Leftism have as many dogmas as the most fundamentalist Christian.

Is Your 5-Year-Old Transgender?

A 5-year-old child with large dark eyes, full lips and a button nose stares out from the front page of the Washington Post Sunday edition. "Transgender at Five" declares the provocative headline. The child's hair is being cut in a close boy's cut by her father. We learn from the article that "Tyler," who was born "Kathryn," began insisting that she was a boy at the age of 2. "'I am a boy' became a constant theme in struggles over clothing, bathing, swimming, eating, playing, breathing." The child's parents, at first uneasy and later accepting of their girl's desire to be a boy, agreed to raise her as a boy. Starting at age 4, she began to wear boys' clothes, was permitted to choose a boy's name for herself, and has been introduced to family, friends, teachers, and congregants at church as a boy.