Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
What Is Fair?
President Obama says he want to make society more fair. Advocates of big government believe fairness means taking from rich people and giving to others: poor people; or people who do things politicians approve of, like making "green" energy equipment (Solyndra); or old people (even rich ones) through Social Security and Medicare. The idea that government can "make life fair" is intuitively appealing to people -- at least until they think about it. I'll try to help.
MSNBC'S Sharpton Sinkhole
A few nights back, Mark Levin made a powerful point on his radio show: Fox News boss Roger Ailes is a well-known and infamous name in media circles, like some sort of cable-news Voldemort or Darth Vader. Meanwhile, MSNBC boss -- quick, can you name him? -- Phil Griffin is unknown and not the least bit controversial after hiring, as Levin unforgettably put it, a "conga line of morons."
A Hateless Hate Crime
After Dharun Ravi was convicted of "bias intimidation" crimes that carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison, many people wondered why he had rejected a plea deal that would have kept him out of jail. Ravi's lawyer explained that the 20-year-old defendant's parents "didn't believe their son acted with hate, or bias, and they didn't want him labeled like that for life." But it turns out you can be convicted of a hate crime without hating anyone, which only compounds the injustice of laws that punish people for their bigotry.
Obama's Algae Racket
Pond scum stinks. And so do the Obama administration's enormous, taxpayer-funded "investments" in politically connected biofuel companies. While the president embarks on a green rehabilitation tour this week to quell growing public outrage about big green boondoggles, the White House continues to cultivate a cozy algae racket. Obama's promotion of algae as a fuel source at a campaign speech in Miami last month caught the nation's attention. But algae companies have been banking on administration support from Day One. In December 2008, when the White House announced the nomination of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the CEO of Florida-based biofuels startup Algenol, Paul Woods, exulted to Time magazine: "You see this smile on my face? It's not going away. Everyone is really excited by this."
Obama Faces 'The Crunch'
It was Winston Churchill who first used that term, "the crunch" in that way. It means, of course, that crisis when a leader has to make a judgment. It is when lives, perhaps millions of them, hang on the outcome of the decision the leader makes. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower faced such a crunch on June 5, 1944. Storms had already delayed for 24 hours his long-planned invasion of Normandy. There appeared to be a momentary break in the weather. Could he afford to go now and risk the largest landing ever being disrupted and defeated by severe storms on the beaches? Or, could he keep tens of thousands of heavily armed and ready men on board their ships, getting sicker and weaker by the hour? In that crunch, General Eisenhower listened to all the competing claims, all the contradictory advice. Then he said quietly: "OK. Let's go."
Tattooed Scholars
You can attend an entire season of eighth-grade basketball games and never see a 14-year-old boy adorned with a tattoo. Turn on the NCCA basketball tournament, now down to the Sweet Sixteen, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a game where at least one player on each team is not to some degree tattooed. Sometime between his early teens, when he was in middle school, and his late teens and early 20s, when he made the college team, the tattooed athlete let some "artist" somewhere permanently embed ink in the only the epidermis he will ever have.
Fillet of Faith: Do You Really Believe?
The militant atheism behind this month's upcoming "Reason Rally" on the Mall in D.C. isn't the only flavor of skepticism these days. In fact, instead of blaming people of faith for the woes of the world, some atheists now are actually speaking out on behalf of religion. But their reasons for doing so are as different as one could imagine.
I Know It When I See It
This column may well generate about 40,000 "Unsubscribes" this morning, but there you are. In the early 1960s a man named Nico Jacobellis was arrested after the showing of a French movie in his theater by the name of "The Lovers" on the grounds that the film was obscene. This case would doubtless be relegated to punishing second year law school students were it not for the fact that (a) the case went to the U.S Supreme Court and (b) in a concurring opinion Justice Potter Stewart penned one of the most memorable phrases in Court history.
Obama and the Future Fallacy
Speaking to students at a Maryland community college, President Obama indulged one of the left's favorite vanities -- the claim to represent "the future." His topic was energy. The president warned against Republicans who want "an energy strategy for the last century that traps us in the past." He compared today's Republicans who are less enthusiastic than he about government subsidies for "wind, solar and biofuels," to the "flat earth society" and to President Rutherford B. Hayes, who supposedly disdained the telephone.
Race and Rhetoric
One of the things that turned up, during a long-overdue cleanup of my office, was an old yellowed copy of the New York Times dated July 24, 1992. One of the front-page headlines said: "White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80's, Census Shows." The 1980s? Wasn't that the years of the Reagan administration, the "decade of greed," the era of "neglect" of the poor and minorities, if not "covert racism"? More recently, during the administration of America's first black president, a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center has the headline, "Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics."
'Courting' Disaster
The Supreme Court of the United States, whose inveterate habit is telling Americans what's good for them, will do the honors once more after weighing the merits and demerits of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, generally and ominously known as Obamacare. Formal arguments before the court, commencing March 26, will last three days. In the end, five or six justices will advise us how much power the federal government may exercise over our method of providing health care and how we're to pay for it. Assuming, we ever manage to pay for it.
The Real Reason the NAACP Went to Geneva
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, has gone to the United Nations -- specifically the U.N. Human Rights Council -- for, in the words of USA Today, "help battling what the organization views as forces attempting to push back voting rights." Those "forces" are laws being passed by various states that require a photo ID for voting.
Forcing Women to Marry Their Rapists
While American progressives remain in high dudgeon over a woman's "right" to "free" government-provided contraception, a genuine woman's rights issue has been unfolding in Morocco. In Larache, near the city of Tangiers, 16-year-old Amina Filali committed suicide after she was forced by a judge to marry. Whom did the judge force her to marry? Her rapist. "The prosecutor advised my daughter to marry, he said 'go and make the marriage contract,'" said Lahcen Filali, the girl's father. Thus, once again the wonders of Sharia-based jurisprudence are revealed.
They Call These Accomplishments?
If you read through the Washington Monthly's list of Obama's top 50 accomplishments, you'll quickly understand why my brother, Rush, properly wanted him to fail. When Rush said he wanted Obama to fail, everyone knew he was talking about his policies, and for those few who pretended otherwise, he explained it a thousand times: He wanted his policies to fail because his policies are disastrous for America.
Whoville vs. Sparta: The Return of Infanticide
"A person's a person, no matter how small," was the refrain from Dr. Seuss' famous children's story, "Horton Hears a Who!" Horton the elephant has to convince his fellow jungle-dwellers that there really are tiny people on a speck of dust. When they find out Horton is right, they're ashamed of their efforts to destroy the microscopic town of Whoville.
The Main Event
Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear three days of oral arguments in the healthcare lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, otherwise known as "Obamacare." We now know the law was based on phony predictions about its cost. After promising the price would be under $940 billion over 10 years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has issued a correction of its initial estimate, which appears to have been based on sleight of hand accounting tactics by congressional Democrats and the White House. CBO now projects the measure will cost taxpayers at least $1.76 trillion over a decade.
Redistricting Not a Big Story in 2012
The 2012 congressional redistricting cycle following the 2010 Census is just about over and done with. And it seems likely to make much less difference than many of us expected. Redistricting is when state legislatures, governors and/or commissions draw new lines for congressional districts after the 435 seats in the U.S. House are reapportioned according to a statutory formula into which are plugged the figures from the 2010 census.
On the Health-Insurance Mandate, Romney Plays Both Sides
They say all things must end, but the wrangling over Mitt Romney's support for an individual health-insurance mandate persists without letup. t has been nearly six years since Romney, with much fanfare, signed the Massachusetts health-care overhaul into law. On the eve of the signing ceremony he had praised the bill's requirement that every resident obtain health insurance, and suggested with pride that the rest of the nation might want to follow the Bay State's lead. "How much of our health-care plan applies to other states?" he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. "A lot."
Put on Your Shoes: We Can Win This One
The most important talking point used by those who support the HHS contraception mandate is that the Catholic Bishops and their allies are "out-of-touch" and represent a minority view. You have no doubt heard things like "98 percent of Catholic women use contraception" and "most Americans, especially women, support the HHS mandate." Well, it's not true. The first assertion is based on a study by the Guttmacher Institute, which as an affiliate of Planned Parenthood, is hardly an objective observer. Even the Washington Post compared the media to Pinocchio for using these statistics.
Gas Pains and Debt Bombs
Democrats are very sanguine regarding president Obama's re-election chances. Yet two economic issues could derail Mr. Obama. One is fraught with delicious irony, and remains in the forefront of the news. Yet issue number two, despite its far more serious implications, remains largely under the radar.