Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Why the Bell-Obama Connection Matters
The verdict is in: The mainstream media believes that Derrick Bell is not a story. They believe it so deeply that they've had members of the Breitbart.com team on national television repeatedly; they've spent thousands of words covering it; and they've mentioned it on radio and the Internet incessantly. All to say that there's nothing to see here. Unfortunately, for President Obama, there's something to see here. Back when President Obama was a 28-year-old student at Harvard Law, he gave a speech in support of controversial racialist Professor Derrick Bell. The raw tape of that video was parceled out in bits and pieces over the subsequent years -- much of it is still apparently missing -- but last week, the most relevant section was released. It showed Obama telling a crowd, "Open your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell." He then gives Bell a bear hug.
Complex Societies Need Simple Laws
"If you have 10,000 regulations," Winston Churchill said, "you destroy all respect for law." He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That's what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can't keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules "incomprehensible." They are. They are also "uncountable." Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total.
Golden State Gloom
For a number of years, California has maintained its reputation as a "cutting edge" state, the incubator of grandiose ideas that eventually find their way to the more "benighted" regions of the country. California is indeed ahead of the curve in that it offers a compelling look at where unfettered progressivism in all its destructive glory eventually leads. It is a destructiveness the Obama administration aims to impose on the rest of the nation should the president win re-election in 2012.
'The Vision Thing'
Rick Santorum protests that Mitt Romney "can't close the deal" with GOP voters -- a truism that, truth to tell, could apply with equal force to Rick Santorum, not to mention Newton Leroy Gingrich or even, come to think of it, Ron Paul. The Republican presidential campaign has been dispiriting, all right. With Gingrich and Santorum doing their best to render it more dispiriting still, with their forecasts of calamity should the probable nominee -- Romney -- become the actual nominee. Propped figuratively against the classroom lectern, Prof. Gingrich warns us the party has produced no weaker nominee since Warren G. Harding in 1920. At least Harding won the election, Gingrich fails to note, before dying in a morass of scandal, bequeathing us the sensible, if underrated, Calvin Coolidge as president.
The Big Hoax
There have been many frauds of historic proportions -- for example, the financial pyramid scheme for which Charles Ponzi was sent to prison in the 1920s, and for which Franklin D. Roosevelt was praised in the 1930s, when he called it Social Security. In our own times, Bernie Madoff's hoax has made headlines. But the biggest hoax of the past two generations is still going strong -- namely, the hoax that statistical differences in outcomes for different groups are due to the way other people treat those groups.
A Change of Trajectory: Summit Ministries
Vaclav Havel, who helped overcome communist rule in Czechoslovakia once said, "It's not that modern man knows less and less about the meaning of life. It's that it bothers him less and less." He might well have been talking about many teenagers today. As Diana West noted in her book, The Death of the Grownup, many young adults struggle to, well, grow up. It's been called "Failure to Launch," or "Peter Pan Syndrome," or "perpetual adolescence."
Who Is Happy?
After 25 years of lecturing on happiness, writing a book on the subject ("Happiness Is a Serious Problem") and devoting an hour of my radio show every week for the last 13 years to happiness, here are some conclusions about who is happy.
Thanks President Obama, but I Need More
Dear President Obama, As a certifiable member of the female sex, I want to thank you for preventing the Republican Party from conducting a "war on women." Some cynics might say that you were worried about women's declining support for Democrats. While 56 percent of women voted Democrat in 2008, only 48 percent did so in 2010. And while the percentage of women with a favorable view of your leadership has been climbing back up recently (women seem more willing than men to give you credit for improving economic numbers), you need a really lopsided proportion of the women's vote to compensate for your weakness among men. A February Quinnipiac poll, for example, found that white men disapproved of the way you are handling your job by a two to one margin.
Where's the Hope?
You've got to hand it to Democrats and the Obama re-election campaign. Like a quarterback who looks left to draw the defense away from his intended target on the right, Democrats have managed to divert our attention. Instead of debating President Obama's dreadful record on just about everything, Democrats have managed to get Republicans talking about sex and morality. Rather than figuring out what to do about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, Democrats have put Republicans on the defensive over the use of vulgar words applied to liberal women. For their use of equally offensive or similar words applied to conservative women, they mostly get a pass, because this isn't about the words; it's about politics.
Cataloging Liars & Loons
At times, I find myself wondering if, after a thousand postings, I will eventually run out of things to carp, whine and scream about. I should only be so lucky, for it would mean that liberalism had finally all but vanished from our nation's capital, and the likes of Barack Obama, Harry Reid , Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Henry Waxman, Sheila Jackson Lee, Patty Murray, Charles Schumer and Pat Leahy, had all been returned to the various zoos from which they'd been on loan.
Taxi Medallions Shackle Cabbies
Have you ever met a sharecropper? If you've been in a taxi in Boston -- or virtually any major US city -- the answer is almost surely yes. Like tenant farmers in colonial Ireland or the post-Civil War South, the typical modern cabbie pays dearly for the right to do his job. Taxi medallions -- the government-issued licenses that let a car be used to transport passengers for hire -- are insanely expensive: The going rate for one in Boston is about $500,000. Most would-be cabbies thus have little choice but to rent a medallion from somebody who owns one, paying through the nose for the privilege of working long shifts at low wages, in a job with high expenses, no paid vacation, and little prospect of ever being in business for themselves.
Romney May Recapture Upscale Whites for the GOP
In the cold, gray numbers of election returns and exit poll percentages, a reader with some imagination can find clues to people's deep feelings, their hopes and fears, their self-images and moral values.
Israel Under the Bus
When one is an acolyte of the Marxist/socialist, command-and-control approach to governance, nothing aggravates more than that which is beyond one's command and control. Couple that tendency with an all-encompassing narcissism and a facility for prevarication and what do you get? A United States president more than willing to put Israel's very existence on the line so as not to weaken his chances for re-election in 2012. Last Thursday, Israeli newspaper Maariv, citing unnamed Western diplomatic and intelligence sources, claimed that the United States offered Israel advanced weaponry, such as bunker-busting bombs and refueling planes, in exchange for Israel's agreement not to attack Iranian nuclear sites prior to the 2012 election.
Submission: Turning a Blind Eye
For the past year, Christians in northern Nigeria have been the victims of murder and ethnic cleansing by an al Qaeda-affiliated group named Boko Haram. The group, whose name means "book learning is forbidden," has pledged to kill every Nigerian Christian in its effort to impose Sharia on Africa's most populous nation. Recent attacks on the group by Nigerian security forces dealt Boko Haram a deadly setback, but not before more than 500 Christians were killed by the group. These Christians joined countless of the brethren worldwide as victims of radical Islamic intolerance -- an intolerance Western media seems uninterested in.
A Century of Cherry Blossoms
Into every life, they say, a little rain must fall. And a little snow as well. In fact, here in Washington, some are rooting for snow before spring arrives. "Every night before going to sleep," Japanese Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki told reporters recently, "I pray: 'Fall the snow. Blow the cold wind.'" It's not that Fujisaki wants to witness at firsthand the capital city's famously inept response to winter weather -- he's just hoping that the city's cherry trees will wait a few more weeks before blooming.
Those Pesky Things Called Laws
Two policies of the Obama administration illustrate an axiom: As government expands, its lawfulness contracts. Consider the administration's desire to continue funding UNESCO and to develop a national curriculum for primary and secondary education.
Privacy v. Technology
The expanding conflict between constitutional rights and technological advances has taken another turn in Texas. On February 29th, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled it is now legal for police to search cell phones without a warrant. ... Technology is rapidly eliminating anything resembling a genuine the right to privacy. Sadly, in a nation of people enthralled with posting the details of their lives on Internet websites, or loading substantial portions of those lives into cellphone and other portable devices, much of that elimination has been voluntary.
Hillary's 'Toughest Sanctions' on Iran Won't Work
Secretary Hillary Clinton took to the air yesterday to boast of the "toughest sanctions" yet imposed by the international community on Iran. Recall, this administration came to office three years ago offering olive branches to the mullahs who rule Iran. President Obama even sent Persian New Year greetings to the same men who held our hostages for 444 days in Tehran in 1979-81. Our American diplomats and Marines were subjected to daily beatings and threats of execution.
From The Comedy Store
President Obama compared himself to Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in the struggle to bring about change. The comparison is flawed. They spent years in jail before taking political power, while politicians from Chicago do it the other way around.
Why I'm Fed Up With Rick Santorum
Until recently, I didn't dislike GOP contender Santorum. Although I preferred Mitt Romney, I regarded Sen. Santorum as a decent second choice. I no longer feel that way. It was the Michigan primary that brought about my change of heart. Until then, the worst thing I could say about him was that he was a bit of a self-serving ditz when it came to term limits. Although he claimed to favor them, when I interviewed the man who had served two terms in the House and two terms in the Senate, and asked him why he had run for a third term, he replied that he didn't believe that two Senate terms were enough. Most people would think that 16 years in Congress was more than enough, especially for someone who claimed to favor limits.