Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Court Ruling Proves: Kagan Must Recuse
U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle, a Clinton appointee, ironically provided evidence last week that seals the case that Justice Elena Kagan is required by law to recuse herself from cases challenging Obamacare. The law in question is 28 U.S.C. 455. It mandates that a justice "shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might be reasonably questioned" or "(w)here he has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated as counsel, adviser or material witness concerning the proceedings ..."
Tracking Uganda's Lords Resistance Army: The Regional Context
For almost two decades, Joseph Kony, senior commander of the Ugandan rebel Lords Resistance Army, has practiced a peculiarly evil brand of the sociopathic warfare that curses central Africa. Listing the horrors committed by Kony and his thugs numbs the mind, but also substantiates the case for dispatching U.S. special operations soldiers to help Ugandan forces combat the killers. The very public deployment of such a small but technically capable U.S. force also sends a diplomatic signal. There are bad actors in central and east Africa who benefit from violent instability throughout the region -- bad actors who encourage and seed LRA-style vicious anarchy.
Death of a Hero
There are very few people we come across who profoundly touch our lives -- parents, teachers, friends. Almost all have one aspect in common: They spend copious amounts of time with us. Then there are the rarities, folks who move us deeply even after just a few meetings. These are people who don't require time to make their presence felt. These people leave their indelible mark simply by being who they are. We are lucky to come into contact with them.
A Green Whitewash
Walter Cronkite's longtime producer Leslie Midgley once wrote that, "News is what an editor decides it is." News today is what TV producers decide can help President Obama. News that hurts isn't news at all. In the last week, network anchors like Brian Williams repeated endlessly that the Occupy Wall Street protests are "increasingly resonating." It's the story reporters will declare, "isn't going away" -- and they're going to see to it. They are using their microphones like yellow Hi-liter pens to draw attention to it.
Wall Street Protesters Half Right
What's there to say about Occupy Wall Street? The answer isn't so simple. Some complain about taxpayer bailouts of businesses. Good for them. In a true free market, failing firms would go out of business. They couldn't turn to Washington for help. But many protesters say they're against capitalism. Now things get confusing. What do they mean? If by "capitalism" they mean crony capitalism (let's call it crapitalism), a system in which favored business interests are supported by government, I'm against that, too. But if they mean the free market, then they are fools. When allowed to work, the market has lifted more people out of the mud and misery of poverty than any government, ever.
Washington Considers China Trade War
For the past few years, fear of China's predatory mercantilism has been steadily growing in America, both amongst the public and in elite business and political circles. But last week, for the first time, one could discern the genuine possibility that America might actually do something about it -- even if it means a trade war. It's not that anything new has been revealed about China's practices, but rather that something new has emerged about the nature of Washington's opposition to it. Last week, the Senate passed a bill that would force U.S. retaliation against China's currency manipulations. The bill passed with 63 votes -- including 16 Republican votes.
The Anatomy of a Protest
Gravity has its laws courtesy of Sir Isaac Newton, and protest has its authoritative field notes by Eric Hoffer. A longshoreman and philosopher in pretty much that order, Eric Hoffer described the protesters of his time, the Hippies and Yippies of the Sixties, with such enduring insight that he might have been talking about Occupy Wall Street today. The specific focus of protests, if any, may change with the times. But the general spirit remains remarkably the same. It's a kind of free-floating dissatisfaction with the world. Or maybe the dissatisfaction is just with the protesters' place in it.
The EduJobs III Bailout
One of my son's Suzuki violin teachers had a wise twist on an old saying: "If at first you don't succeed, try something else." The corollary? "When you do succeed, don't stop. Do it again." The White House could use some remedial Suzuki lessons in economics. They've got everything completely bass-ackward. In February 2009, President Obama signed the trillion-dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Nearly $115 billion was earmarked for education. The stimulator-in-chief's crack team of Ivy League economists predicted the law would hold the jobless rate under 8.5 percent.
Obama Wears a White Hat
Weirdest Friday news dump ever. Very late in the day on Oct. 14, the Obama administration released a lot of politically problematic information, including the news that the deficit for 2011 hit $1.3 trillion (the second biggest ever, after 2009) and that it's abandoning the CLASS Act, one of the more expensive and unwieldy appendages of "Obamacare." One other thing: The White House announced we're putting boots on the ground in sub-Saharan Africa.
What Makes a Great Teacher?
I have no idea what kind of job Andrea McKenna does as a teacher at her middle school in Springdale, Ark. I do know she's just been picked as the only teacher in the state of Arkansas to receive a prized Milken Educator Award this year. The award includes a cash stipend ($25,000) and is a big deal in American education, which needs all the attention it can get.
Obama and Occupy Wall Street Are One
President Obama acts as though he merely sympathizes with the Wall Street occupiers' "broad-based frustration" about how America's financial system works, but he's doing a lot more than sympathizing. He's fanning their flames. Perhaps we should take a look at what, exactly, Obama is supporting and contrast it with the tea party movement he so roundly condemns.
To Live or Die 'On the Floor'
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sometimes sounds as if she has cast aside any attachment to reality. Responding to a bill co-authored by Rep. Joe Pitts, Pennsylvania Republican, that would prevent federal funds from going to pay for abortions under the slowly unraveling health care law critics call "Obamacare," Pelosi said that if Republicans vote for the measure, "they will be voting to say that women can die on the floor and health care providers do not have to intervene." The Protect Life Act passed the House last week, but will likely die in the Democrat-controlled Senate.
Why Is Class Hatred Morally Superior to Race Hatred?
The major difference between Hitler and the Communist genocidal murderers -- Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot -- was what groups they chose for extermination. For Hitler, first Jews and ultimately Slavs and other "non-Aryans" were declared the enemy and unworthy of life. For the Communists, the rich -- the bourgeoisie, land owners, and capitalists -- were labeled the enemy and regarded as unworthy of life. Hitler mass-murdered on the basis of race, the Communists on the basis of class.
Steve McEveety on Secularism
Recently I had the opportunity to ask Steve McEveety, famed producer of such powerful and meaningful films as The Passion of the Christ, BraveHeart and We Were Soldiers what he believes the culture challenge of our time is. He answered without hesitation, "Secularism." He said that our culture is dead set on teaching our children that they are merely "material beings," that there is nothing more to life.
Playing the 'Greed' Card
"The protest against corporate greed born last month on New York's Wall Street spread across the world Saturday," according to The Los Angeles Times. But hold on! The Times is engaged in a question-begging exercise -- one with tendencies that deserve to be, but certainly won't be, shut down promptly. Such is the nuttiness of our era. "Greed" has brought us to this crummy pass. That's what we are to infer from these protesters, but they don't have proof. Greed is the motive principle of capitalism: More moola for me, the capitalist, less for you, the "99 percenters." The protesters want greed to stop now. But how? That's the sticking point: Nobody knows the means of legislating an end to the currently most conspicuous of the seven deadly sins.
Steve Jobs and American Exceptionalism
Steve Jobs was more than the creative force behind a successful company. He was a living refutation of all that liberals constantly tell us about our country -- that we’re falling behind others and live in a “post-American world,” as one of Barack Obama’s favorite books puts it in its title. Ask anyone who’s handled an Apple product or had his life improved by the technological innovations our system has produced in just the last decade. They’ll tell you that innovators such as Jobs epitomize that immeasurable quality the left often decries: American exceptionalism.
Random Thoughts
Random thoughts on the passing scene: Like so many people, in so many countries, who started out to "spread the wealth," Barack Obama has ended up spreading poverty. Have you ever heard anyone as incoherent as the people staging protests across the country? Taxpayers ought to be protesting against having their money spent to educate people who end up unable to say anything beyond repeating political catch phrases. It is hard to understand politics if you are hung up on reality. Politicians leave reality to others. What matters in politics is what you can get the voters to believe, whether it bears any resemblance to reality or not.
Scrapping CLASS Act Is the Right Thing to Do
On Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that the Obama administration was ending the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports, or CLASS, Act -- enacted as part of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. In doing so, the administration killed off a major provision of Obamacare -- a new voluntary program designed to offer affordable long-term care -- yet the story barely was reported in the press. The Obama administration did the right thing -- and it could not have been easy. Democrats had been promoting the plan, brainchild of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, as a means of protecting middle-class families from having to sell their assets if they needed long-term care.
Alienating the Middle
It doesn't come as a huge surprise that President Obama has decided to embrace the Occupy Wall Street movement. There has always been a certain drum circle flavor to this administration. In fact, nothing illustrated the point so well as when, a couple of weeks ago (before the president decided that OWS was his ticket to re-election), Vice President Biden referred in a radio interview to one of the agitators as "Van Jones, whoever he is." The program's host interjected that Jones was the former "green jobs" czar in the Obama administration. Ah.
The Political Facts of Life
After years of being exposed to the American media in all its forms, I've concluded that conservatives resent being lied to nearly as much as liberals hate being told the truth. It has also occurred to me that expecting socialists to be logical and to learn the lessons of history, even very modern history, is totally unrealistic. You might as well ask Gloria Steinem's famous fish to ride that bicycle she once suggested a fish needed as much as a woman needed a man. Of course, to be fair to Ms. Steinem, that was many years before she met the millionaire of her dreams and married David Bale. Although rumor has it that she only married him because he faced deportation for overstaying his visa, who's to say that at the age of 66, Ms. Steinem hadn't simply outlived her voguish cynicism?