Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Long, Hard Slog Ahead in Presidential Race
Just as the political air is filled with talk of the inevitability of Barack Obama's re-election -- we are told that the kids at his Chicago headquarters are brimming with confidence -- in come some poll numbers showing him behind. Not by anything statistically significant, mind you. But when you get the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls and the Politico/George Washington University Battleground poll all showing Mitt Romney leading Obama by 1 point, an Obama victory seems far from inevitable.
Obama Evolves, Politics Devolves
This week, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan essentially endorsed same-sex marriage. The Obama campaign, however, wary of minority and blue-collar voters, promptly announced that President Obama was against same-sex marriage -- sort of -- but that his position was "evolving." Like a flower waiting to bloom, eventually Obama?s support for same-sex marriage would spring full-fledged into existence.
Conrad Black's Example
WASHINGTON -- Conrad Black is back in Canada. He controlled the third-largest string of English-language newspapers in the world before he became entoiled with the Unites States Department of Justice. For his friends, it was a terrible loss. We missed him, and we have missed his newspapers. He made the Telegraph papers in London a beacon of civilized discourse and a sound source of news. They provided better information on the high-jinks of Bill Clinton than any news source here, save the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and, ahem, The American Spectator. The Telegraph papers were great newspapers and his other publications, for instance, Spectator of London, were eminently civilized too. They still are, though they miss Conrad's journalistic touch.
Evangelicals Will Rally for Romney
Elections are about choices, and 2012's pivotal election showcases two very different visions for America's future. Governor Mitt Romney is quickly consolidating the Republican base to enthusiastically support him this November. His speech this weekend at Liberty University illustrates these efforts, providing an opportunity to underscore Romney's embrace of American exceptionalism in both his public and private life.
Taxing Jobs Out of Existence
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Bill Hewlett and David Packard, tinkering in a California garage, began what became Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and a friend built a computer in the California garage that became Apple's birthplace. Bill Cook had no garage, so he launched Cook Medical in a spare bedroom in an apartment in this university town. Half a century ago, in flight from Chicago's winters, he settled here and began making cardiovascular catheters and other medical instruments. One thing led to another, as things have a way of doing when the government stays out of the way, and although Cook died last year, Cook Medical, with its subsidiaries, is the world's largest family-owned medical devices company.
The Martians Have Landed!
I'm sure I'm not the only person who periodically finds himself wondering if it's all just a dream or if he's found himself starring in one of the more bizarre episodes of "The Twilight Zone." For instance, Bret Baier reported that Joe Biden recently had the following to say about Republicans: "Those guys don't have a sense of the average folks out there. They don't know what it means to be middle class."
Chameleon Nation
Sometimes a trivial embarrassment can become a teachable moment. It was recently revealed that Harvard professor and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren had self-identified as a Native American for nearly a decade -- apparently to enhance her academic career by claiming minority status. Warren, a blond multimillionaire, could not substantiate her claim of 1/32 Cherokee heritage. (And would it have reflected any better on her if she could have?) Instead, she fell back on the stereotyped caricature that she had "high cheekbones."
Covert Mission Thwarts Al-Qaeda
On Monday it was revealed that the CIA had thwarted a new al-Qaeda-sponsored terror plot hatched in Yemen. The scheme was brought down by a man said to have been a mole for the CIA and Saudi intelligence. After infiltrating the Yemeni cell, the agent enlisted in a suicide mission designed to bring down a U.S.-bound airliner, but turned over his equipment and intelligence once the plan was set in motion. The success of the counterterrorism mission -- a story full of intrigue, double agents and high-stakes deception -- is a testament to the prowess of U.S. defense capabilities, to be sure. Yet, the event also serves as a grim reminder that recent declarations by Obama surrogates suggesting that the war on terror is "over" have been overstated, to say the least.
Investor-Class Dead Heat
While President Obama is out on the campaign trail talking about how bad things were four years ago, and how we have to go "forward" to his second term to see just how great things are going to be in the next four years, the biggest problem he's got is the here and now. Real gross domestic product in the second quarter stalled at 2.2 percent. There were a paltry 115,000 new jobs in April. The labor force shrank by 342,000 for the month, and the 63.6 percent labor-force participation rate is now the lowest since 1981. There are roughly 23 million people classified as either unemployed, underemployed or no longer looking. And median household income has dropped by $4,300 during Obama's time in office. This all adds up to a tough indictment of the administration's economic policies.
Fox News, 'America's Poison'?
The New York Times really loathes Rupert Murdoch. The Gray Lady almost achieved nirvana on the front page the other day when a group of laborites in the British Parliament asserted in a "damning report" that Murdoch was "not fit" for major media ownership. Bill Keller, recently the paper's executive editor, devoted his latest column to Fox News with the headline "Murdoch's Pride Is America's Poison." The man who edited The New York Times is blunt: "I would argue that -- at least for Americans -- Fox News is Murdoch's most toxic legacy." If that's not ridiculous enough, try this: He claims the problem is not that Fox is conservative, but because ... wait for it ... Fox pretends to be objective instead of openly admitting it's partisan. Unlike, say, The New York Times.
Obama's Stimulus: A Documented Failure
What does President Barack Obama know about the economy and what the government can and cannot do to create jobs? A fair measure is the economic stimulus plan Obama pushed through Congress in his first month in office. Did it work? On Jan. 9, 2009, less than two weeks before Obama's inauguration, Christina Romer, who would chair Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, an adviser to Vice President-elect Joe Biden, published the incoming administration's analysis of the "job impact" they expected from Obama's stimulus.
Only Obama Is Better Off
The only person I know who is better off today than he was four years ago is President Obama. He's making more money, living in a bigger house and playing more golf. And when his wife goes on a shopping spree with her girlfriends, it's to Spain on the taxpayer's dime. If you asked President Obama if he's better off today, he'd say, "Hell, yeah! And we don't want it to stop!" Meanwhile, as the president skates through the Great Recession, his failure to get the economy back on track has turned a country known for its optimism and belief in a better future into a nation of pessimists.
The Ghastly Hellhole of Camp 14
Shin Dong-hyuk grew up in North Korea's Camp 14, one of the monstrous slave-labor prison complexes in which the world's most tyrannical regime has crushed hundreds of thousands of its citizens, working them to death in conditions of excruciating brutality and degradation. Though the North Korean concentration camps have lasted far longer than their Soviet or Nazi counterparts did, Shin is the first person born and raised in one of them to have successfully escaped abroad. His story is told in journalist Blaine Harden's Escape from Camp 14, a heart-crushing reminder that man's inhumanity to man has no limit.
Romney Feeds the Crocs
"If Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, co-opted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin?" So asked Bryan Fischer, a radio host with the American Family Association, after claiming credit for Richard Grenell's scalp. Grenell is the openly gay former foreign policy spokesman for the Romney campaign. Before that, he worked for Ambassador John Bolton at the United Nations, easily the most revered diplomatic official among the base of the Republican Party since Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Unemployment Numbers Scam
When the jobs data were released last week, it was revealed that only 115,000 new jobs were created, well below the 165,000 predicted by the media-anointed economic "experts," and significantly below the 125,000 jobs-per-month pace required just to keep pace with the number of people entering the work force. Yet in an apparent paradox, the unemployment rate dropped from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent. Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney explains half of it. "There is something about that 8.1 percent figure you ought to know," he told a crowd at a town hall-style meeting in Cleveland yesterday. "You might assume that that number came down from 10 percent to 8.1 percent because of all the jobs that were created, and that assumption would be wrong. The reason that percent came down was because of all the people that dropped out of the workforce."
The Marriage Whose Name He Dare Not Speak
"I favor legalizing same-sex marriages," Barack Obama told a gay newspaper while seeking his first term as an Illinois state senator in 1996, "and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages." When Obama ran for re-election in 1998, he took the National Political Awareness Test, which among other things asked, "Do you believe that the Illinois government should recognize same-sex marriages?" His response: "Undecided."
Scytl: Voter Fraud Facts and Fiction
With six months until Election Day, conspiracy theories are percolating on the Internet like bubbling mud pots at Yellowstone: Left-wing billionaire George Soros is going to rig the election for Barack Obama. Foreigners will oversee the nation's entire vote-counting system. The fix is in, and all is lost. Before conservatives go all Michael Moore-moonbatty, let's calm down and separate voter fraud facts from fiction. There's no time to waste worrying about manufactured scares. And there are plenty of legitimate threats to electoral integrity without having to inflate or concoct them.
Leftist Race-Baiters
MSNBC's Chris Matthews, in a recent debate with former Republican National Chairman Michael Steele, called the Republican Party the "grand wizard crowd." Grand wizard is the title given to the leader of the Ku Klux Klan. It is truly misinformed to call Republicans the party of the Klan. Throughout our history, most Klansmen and most racists have been Democrats. Here are a few racist quotes from major Democratic figures.
Creating a Risk-Free World
A child leaving home alone for the first time takes a risk. So does the entrepreneur who opens a new business. I no more want government to prevent us from doing these things than I want it to keep us in padded cells. Everyone has a different tolerance for risk. One person takes out a second mortgage to start a business. Another thinks that sounds nerve-racking, if not insane. Neither person is wrong. Government cannot know each person's preferences, or odds of success.
It's Not Obama's Fault
For a campaign that has been up-and-running since just about January 21, 2009, the Obama crowd did not have a good "official" first week. Last weekend, Barack Obama officially launched his campaign for re-election at a rally on the campus of Ohio State University. A couple of things were wrong with the event. About 14,000 people showed up, but the arena holds many more and the traveling press made much of the empty seats. That's not Obama's fault. It's the fault of the advance team and the campaign, but there you are.