Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Obama Losing Rock-Star Status Among Young Voters
Last week, Barack Obama delivered speeches at universities in Chapel Hill, N.C., Iowa City, Iowa, and Boulder, Colo. The trip was, press secretary Jay Carney assured us, official government business, not political campaigning. It's part of a pattern. Neil Munro of the Daily Caller has counted 130 appearances by the president, vice president, their spouses, White House officials, and Cabinet secretaries at colleges and universities since spring 2011.
The Government's College Money Pit
If insanity is doing the same thing again and again but expecting a different outcome, then the federal government's strategy for keeping higher education affordable is crazier than Norman Bates. For decades, American politicians have waxed passionate on the need to put college within every family's reach. To ensure that anyone who wants to go to college will be able to foot the bill, Washington has showered hundreds of billions of dollars into student aid of all kinds -- grants and loans, subsidized work-study jobs, tax credits and deductions. Today, that shower has become a monsoon. As Neal McCluskey points out in a Cato Institute white paper, government outlays intended to hold down the price of a college degree have ballooned, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $29.6 billion in 1985 to $139.7 billion in 2010: an increase of 372 percent since Ronald Reagan's day.
Our Marie Antoinette President
On Friday, in yet another report tagged with the word "unexpected," economic growth in the United States slowed to a 2.2 percent annual rate, well below economists' predictions of 2.5 percent. This anemic trend represents part of the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. Most Americans understand that such a reality requires a certain amount of belt-tightening on their part. President Obama and the First Family? Not so much. A series of upscale vacations, substantial portions of which are underwritten by taxpayers, continue to be an integral part of the Obamas' lifestyle.
Saucy Apple
According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple (neé Apple Computer) "is the most valuable company" in the world. On the heels of its quarterly report last week, stock in Apple reached nearly $620 per share before settling back to end the week at $602. The WSJ reported that Apple "posted a 94% profit jump to $11.6 billion and a 58.9% revenue increase to $39.2 billion." This is not a stock picking column, and that is about everything I know about the stock market, but I wanted to tell you that so that what follows made more sense.
The ABM Treaty: A Decade Later
"Unnecessary, unwarranted and unwise." That's how Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, described it when President Bush announced that the United States would withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The arms-control crowd seemed certain that our "go-it-alone" attitude would only antagonize Russia, China and all of Europe, leaving us without a friend in the world. Today, 10 years after our withdrawal became official, we can see that these dire predictions were wildly overblown. In fact, the ABM Treaty was making the world arguably less safe by enshrining the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD, aptly enough). The idea was that neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union would launch a missile attack if it knew it would suffer a devastating retaliatory strike.
Mysteries Worthy of Sherlock Holmes
Because Barack Obama repeats himself so often, I'm never sure when I see him on TV insisting that his energy policy involves "all-of-the-above" whether I'm watching one of his 2008 campaign speeches or one that he delivered yesterday afternoon. Either way, I know he's lying. The reason that he gets applause from an audience of college students or public sector union members is because these trained seals know that whenever he pauses in the middle of a sentence, it's their cue to begin clapping. These dolts have no idea that "all of the above " theoretically refers to gas, coal, oil, nuclear, solar and wind. If they actually understood that the only two options he favors are the last two, they might stop cheering long enough to wonder why he doesn't just say so, instead of pretending that the other, more realistic options are actually on the table.
All the Way With LBJ
WASHINGTON -- Around noon on Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963, almost exactly 24 hours after the assassination in Dallas, while the president's casket lay in the East Room of the White House, Arthur Schlesinger, John Kennedy's kept historian, convened a lunch at Washington's Occidental restaurant with some other administration liberals. Their purpose was to discuss how to deny the 1964 Democratic presidential nomination to the new incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, and instead run a ticket of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Sen. Hubert Humphrey.
What's Iran Up To? We Know, Says Netanyahu
It was just a short clip on CNN. Reporter Erin Burnett recited some statistics that suggest Iran's oil tankers are all tied up, that the Islamic Republic's oil revenues have been hard hit. Economic sanctions have been tightened on the Mullahs' tyrannical regime by the UN, the European Union, and the U.S. "It appears the sanctions are working," said Burnett. She challenged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's assessment of Iran's headlong drive to build a nuclear weapon.
Geithner Goes Over the Edge
Is Tim Geithner the most politically partisan treasury secretary in history? Certainly sounds like it these days. As the government's chief financial officer, he's spending a lot of time firing campaign barbs at various Republicans and their policies.
From The Comedy Store
Colombian hooker Dania Suarez admitted she ignited the Secret Service sex scandal. She's one of twenty hookers who made two hundred dollars an hour at the party. Four years ago President Obama promised better-paying jobs for women, and he delivered.
Who Is 'Racist'?: Part II
Around this time of year, I sometimes hear from parents who have been appalled to learn that the child they sent away to college to become educated has instead been indoctrinated with the creed of the left. They often ask if I can suggest something to have their offspring read over the summer, in order to counteract this indoctrination. This year the answer is a no-brainer. It is a book with the unwieldy title, "No matter what ... they'll call this book Racist" by Harry Stein, a writer for what is arguably America's best magazine, "City Journal." In a little over 200 very readable pages, the author deftly devastates with facts the nonsense about race that dominates much of what is said in the media and in academia.
The Most Important Election Ever
Quite honestly, the only people I ever hear from who are dopier than liberals are those who identify themselves as conservatives and insist that Republicans and Democrats are identical. Anyone who would suggest that there is no difference between Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner or Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, is one very dumb bunny. No difference between the likes of Henry Waxman, Al Franken and Charles Rangel and Darrel Issa, Peter King and Paul Ryan? No difference between Joe Biden and Dick Cheney? No difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? You have to wonder what madcap pharmacist is supplying these alleged conservatives with their stupidity pills.
Glee Celebrates the 'T'
It was a very special disco-themed episode of "Glee" on Fox the other night. A new character named Wade from a different high school shared that he was born in the wrong body. He was black, but he said he felt he was born white and decided to go out on stage at Regionals painted over as a white man. Everyone adored and applauded him as he sang "Boogie Shoes" looking just like the lead singer of KC and the Sunshine Band. If you actually watch "Glee" or just know Hollywood liberals, you know I'm kidding. Of course, he wasn't a white kid trapped in a black body. Wade was an unfortunate boy "trapped" in a male body. It was "Transgender Is Cool" night. Everyone must adore and applaud. A new wall is down.
Radical Anti-Israel Advocate Appointed to Genocide Prevention Board
Last August, president Obama created an Atrocities Prevention Board. "Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States of America," stated a presidential directive. He appointed Samantha Power, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights, as chair. Ms. Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide." That's the good news. The bad news? Ms. Power is a leftist dedicated to moral equivalence with respect to the Middle East peace process: in 2002, she called for U.S. invasion of Israel and an American-imposed two state solution to the ongoing impasse between Israel and the Palestinians.
Ghana
The reason I came to Ghana was to help publicize the introduction of two vaccines to the Ghanaian heath care system a rotaviral vaccine and a pneumococcal vaccine for newborns. These vaccines will help stave off infant diarrhea and pneumonia which kill more children under the age of five than malaria and tuberculosis combined.
Carter Redux?
Every new datum on economic stagnation -- such as Thursday's Labor Department announcement that unemployment claims remain at a three-month high -- increases the temptation to compare the 2012 presidential race to 1980's. Both years feature a Democratic incumbent, elected on a surge of high hopes, who must face the voters after four years of disappointment. In both cases, the economy is a drag on the president. In both cases, the incumbent has attempted to demonize his opposition in order to avoid running on his record. In both cases, the challenger was regarded, at first, as easy to defeat.
Obama Administration's Repeated Abuses Are Extension of Extreme Liberalism
Every day, we get a new kick in the gut from the Obama administration. Most recently, Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz was caught on video articulating his view of the agency's role in enforcing its regulations. Aremendariz said: "It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They'd go into a little Turkish town somewhere; they'd find the first five guys they saw, and they'd crucify them. Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. ... It's a deterrent factor."
While Syria Burns
WASHINGTON -- Last year President Obama ordered U.S. intervention in Libya under the grand new doctrine of "Responsibility to Protect." Moammar Gaddafi was threatening a massacre in Benghazi. To stand by and do nothing "would have been a betrayal of who we are," explained the president. In the year since, the government of Syria has more than threatened massacres. It has carried them out. Nothing hypothetical about the disappearances, executions, indiscriminate shelling of populated neighborhoods. More than 9,000 are dead.
The Secularization of the MLK, Jr.
This month at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, the faithful met to worship the Almighty and discuss the latest battles for religious liberty in an increasingly secular culture. When the Knights of Columbus' Supreme Knight Carl Anderson spoke, he made a startling observation about the new Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. monument which has not been widely reported and is quite unique among monuments throughout our nation's capital. Even though Dr. King was a Baptist minister and his history-altering speeches about civil liberties are saturated with references to natural rights and profound theological constructs, all 14 quotes carefully etched into his stone monument completely eschew references to God!
Rubio's Lifeline
Marco Rubio has thrown the GOP a lifeline; let's see whether his fellow party members are willing to grab it. The freshman U.S. senator from Florida has been a hard-line foe to illegal immigrants, both in his home state and since his election to Congress, but now he is considering drafting a new "DREAM Act," which would offer legal status to illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Similar efforts have failed in recent years, almost entirely because of Republican opposition. But according to the polls, most Americans favor such a measure. And passing it would be not only smart politics but also, more importantly, the right thing to do.