Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
A King Dollar GOP?
Out on the campaign trail, Fed head Ben Bernanke is an unpopular guy. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have both said they would replace Bernanke, not reappoint him. Rep. Ron Paul would swap the whole Federal Reserve monetary system for a gold-linked dollar, making the yellow metal legal tender. And it was Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, before he dropped out of the race, who said more quantitative easing by the Fed would be "almost treasonous."
From The Comedy Store
Facebook raised billions after the company went public with a stock offering. It's good for the economy. Facebook has created half a million jobs just from replacing the people who got fired for posting drunken photos of themselves on Facebook.
Screwballs and Screwdrivers
When people voice their disgust with the legal system, it's not merely because of such obvious miscarriages of justice as O.J. Simpson and Casey Anthony being found not guilty by a jury of their (really stupid) peers or the nuisance lawsuits filed against doctors, forcing them to insist on unnecessary tests and procedures simply to protect their heinies; it's because lawsuits have become so numerous and absurd, it's become the equivalent of trick-or-treating for grown-ups.
Campus Radicals on the March
The latest attempt by the radical Left to capitalize on the neo-communist movement known as OWS is emanating from an old source. The "new" Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which derives its name, inspiration, and mission from the original SDS of the '60s, is calling for a "Day of Action" scheduled for March 1st.
A Job Too Good to Be True
Imagine a job where you earn an above-average salary. Enjoy plenty of paid leave and enviable health benefits. Get to retire at age 56 with a generous pension. Sound good? For far too many Americans, the "imagine a job" part is taxing enough. Add the other features, and it sounds like a fantasy. But it isn't. There's a large group of workers for whom the description above is real: federal workers. And as a new report from the Congressional Budget Office shows, they're making significantly more than their private-sector counterparts.
The GOP Race Gets Messy
OK, I give up. About a week ago, I wrote a column making a case for Mitt Romney as the GOP nominee. My argument was aimed at fellow conservatives who just can't get their minds -- or at least their hearts -- around a Romney candidacy. The details aren't important right now (and they're easy enough to look up with the interwebs these days). The reason I wrote the column in the first place was that I felt the cold steel barrel of reality's revolver pressing up against the back of my head, saying "write it."
Another Fleeting Failure for NBC
Super Bowl XLVI was a good football game, marred once again by the bohemian elite at NBC. NBC could have prevented, but failed to stop, the broadcast of a female rapper "flipping the bird" at 114 million viewers during Madonna's halftime show. It was another "fleeting expletive" of the hand-gesture variety, and somehow, despite elaborate rehearsals, no one at NBC could seem to stop it. The same network skillfully edited God out of a clip of children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance during last year's U.S. Open golf tournament.
'To Stop the Multiplication of the Unfit'
If you aren't creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren't listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up. When a bunch of wealthy white women and elite Washington bureaucrats defend the trampling of religious liberties in the name of "increased access" to "reproductive services" for "poor" women, the ghost of Margaret Sanger is cackling.
Referendum on the Incumbent
Conventional wisdom suggests that the current refusal of the GOP base to accept Mitt Romney as the de facto presidential nominee will doom the party to failure in the fall. The thought is that too many debates, too much sniping among the candidates, and an overall enthusiasm deficit will leave the nominee -- and the odds still favor Romney -- mortally wounded. But this election was never going to be decided so much by voters affirmatively choosing the Republican candidate as by whether they were going to reject Barack Obama. Second-term elections are always a referendum on the incumbent, not the challenger. And when Americans have chosen to turn out a sitting president, it has rarely been because the challenger was so much more appealing. The qualities of the challenger aren't irrelevant; they're just not as decisive as the perceived success or failure of the incumbent.
Obama Invites Backlash on Conscience Rule Betrayal
As God's instrument, Moses parted the Red Sea. Well, it appears President Obama has a different idea. With a wave of his hand, he's going to reunite our bitterly divided political waters on the hottest of hot-button issues. Don't get me wrong; Obama's conscious effort to divide Americans on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and wealth for political purposes is alive and thriving. That's a separate phenomenon.
The Gospel According to Obama
WASHINGTON -- At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, seeking theological underpinning for his drive to raise taxes on the rich, President Obama invoked the highest possible authority. His policy, he testified "as a Christian," "coincides with Jesus' teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.'" Now, I'm no theologian, but I'm fairly certain that neither Jesus nor his rabbinic forebears, when speaking of giving, meant some obligation to the state. You tithe the priest, not the tax man. The Judeo-Christian tradition commands personal generosity.
Do You Speak Conservative?
Newt Gingrich knows the lingo. He makes conservative audiences roar with approval when he compares the efficiency of FedEx and MasterCard to the post office and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He never loses an opportunity to attack the press for its moral preening. Conservatives adore this table turning. Nothing makes them angrier than to be derided as heartless by people who define virtue by their willingness to give away other people's money. Rick Perry quickly lost his own conservative luster when he used the word "heartless" about his Republican rivals.
What's Really at Stake: Leviathan's Appetite
Make no mistake. The raging controversy over the Obama Administration's refusal to exempt religious organizations from onerous health care mandates is a big deal. A very big deal. But why? What's really at issue here? Despite what the media and the Obama Administration are telling you, it's not just a battle between the so-called "archaic beliefs" of the Catholic Church on the one hand and advocates of women's health on the other. It's not just about access to abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization, bad as that is.
Freedom From Religion
WASHINGTON -- "We don't need you, so shut up!" That's the message the Obama administration has sent loud and clear to America's Roman Catholics. And it's a message now being sent to U.S. military chaplains -- to the detriment of our armed forces. During World War II, the War Department and the Department of the Navy urged -- the operative word is "urged," not "ordered," mind you -- U.S. military chaplains to encourage soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen and Marines that God was on our side in the global battle against fascists, Nazis and the godless heathens running rampant across Asia and the Pacific. The hymns "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" were sung with fervor at chapel services regardless of denomination.
Gay by Choice? Wait a Minute...
For years we have been told that homosexuality is something people are born with -- like the color of one's skin -- and that it can't be changed. Gay-rights activists insist this is so, because, they say, if people don't choose to be gay, it would be wrong to discriminate against them in things like marriage, adoption, and legal benefits. And heaven help those who disagree. Just ask actress Cynthia Nixon, who in a recent New York Times Magazine article, had the gall to admit that she chose to be gay.
Liberals are the True Aggressors in Culture Wars
If you're not with us, you're against us. President Bush popularized this expression after 9/11 to describe his foreign policy doctrine: Countries couldn't support or indulge terrorists and be our friends at the same time. But his detractors quickly turned it into a fairly paranoid vision of domestic political life, as if Bush had been talking about domestic opponents and dissenters. The irony is that few worldviews better describe the general liberal orientation to public policy and the culture war. The left often complains about the culture war as if it's a war they don't want to fight. They insist they just want to follow "sound science" or "what works" when it comes to public policy, but those crazy knuckle-dragging right-wingers constantly want to talk about gays and abortion and other hot-button issues.
GOP Must Convince Young People It's the Party of Options
The Republican presidential candidates, except for Ron Paul, haven't been paying much attention to young voters in the primaries and caucuses so far. But any Republican nominee -- which is to say probably Mitt Romney, or maybe Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum -- had better be paying attention to them in the summer and fall. The reason three of the four Republicans haven't paid much attention to young voters is that the under-30 folks have been turning out in the Republican contests in miniscule numbers.
The Delousing of a Movement
WASHINGTON -- As the tents were coming down at McPherson Square, the dead rats and mice being retrieved, the urine and feces and filthy bedding disposed of by District of Columbia employees dressed in hazardous-materials suits like their contemporaries at Fukushima, I thought of the left-wing press. You see, I read the left-wing press. Not the urban throwaway rags, but I read The Nation, The Progressive, The American Prospect, and more -- I read them all. They have been raving for months about the exciting prospect of a great wave of reform coming out of the Occupy movement. It was here to stay, and for a while, silly old me took them seriously.
The Secular Media vs. Religious Liberty
The Obama administration is waging war on Christianity. Somehow, the networks haven't seen this as newsworthy. On Jan. 20, Obama's Department of Health and Human Services announced its perverse attempt to force Catholic schools, hospitals and other charitable agencies to finance sterilization, abortifacients and contraceptives in their insurance plans starting in 2013. Speaking for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Timothy Dolan roared like a lion in a press statement: "In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences." He asserted, "To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable."
GOP's Murky Rhetoric on National Defense
WASHINGTON -- Through 11 presidential elections, beginning with the Democrats' nomination of George McGovern in 1972, Republicans have enjoyed a presumption of superiority regarding national security. This year, however, events and their rhetoric are dissipating their advantage. Hours -- not months, not weeks, hours -- after the last U.S. troops left Iraq, vicious political factionalism and sectarian violence intensified. Many Republicans say Barack Obama's withdrawal -- accompanied by his administration's foolish praise of Iraq's "stability" -- has jeopardized what has been achieved there. But if it cannot survive a sunrise without fraying, how much of an achievement was it?