Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
May 2012 Be a Referendum on Obama's Perverse Vision for America
Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign was grounded in meaningless platitudes, such as "hope and change." His 2012 re-election effort is grounded in meaningful platitudes centered in the destructive politics of class warfare. Despite his best efforts to paint his abominable economic record in a favorable light, Obama simply cannot run on it, unless he succeeds in completely changing the traditional yardsticks by which we have always measured economic success: growth, unemployment, inflation and general prosperity.
A Frank 'Cure' for the Fed
WASHINGTON -- "If two people always agree," says Ben Bernanke, "one of them is redundant." So, imagine what the Federal Reserve chairman thinks of Rep. Barney Frank's legislation designed to dampen dissent within the Fed. Fond of diversity in everything but thought, a certain kind of liberal favors mandatory harmony (e.g., campus speech codes). Such liberals, being realists at least about the strength of their arguments, discourage "too much" debate about them (e.g., restrictions on campaign spending to disseminate political advocacy). Now Frank wants to strip the presidents of the Fed's 12 regional banks of their right to vote as members of the policymaking Federal Open Market Committee.
Supreme Court Might Kill ObamaCare Before Election -- If Obama's Lucky
Editor's Note: Mark Alexander is away at National Security briefings at NORAD. He will return next week. Enjoy this week's guest column from Larry Elder. Why did the Obama administration, after dragging out the various court challenges to ObamaCare, suddenly step on the gas? The administration surprised court watchers by passing up a chance to slow down ObamaCare's long march to an eventual Supreme Court ruling. In failing to request a hearing by all the appeals court judges of the 11th Circuit -- to overturn an anti-ObamaCare decision by three of its members -- the administration now puts the matter on a faster track to the Supreme Court.
Cutting Through the Political Manure
When Obama insists that tax hikes will be offset by future spending cuts, run -- don't walk! -- and hang on to your wallets. When it comes to keeping their promises, politicians are notoriously untrustworthy. Back in the 70s, Nixon and Kissinger agreed to withdraw from Vietnam on the condition that Congress would continue supplying our South Vietnam allies with money and armaments. Congress didn't, and as a result, the Communists massacred millions of Southeast Asians.
Get Serious!
There's an old curse that begs, "O that mine enemy would write a book." That's a desire getting a big play in the debates between Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who are both trashing my Dad Ronald Reagan's so-called "11th Commandment," that Republicans must refrain from attacking each other in public. Like just about everybody else I'm being wearied by both Mitt Romney and Rick Perry citing passages from each other's books to prove a point. All they do is prove that they can read and write. We need more than that in a president.
Does Rick Perry Have a Performance Problem?
Liberals, whose entire political strategy is the smoke and mirrors of showbiz, have concluded that Rick Perry put in a poor performance at last week's Republican debate and has got to step up his debating technique to get back in the game. Actually, it wasn't Perry's "performance" that was a problem. It was his "answers." No fancy wordsmithery is going to get Perry out of supporting in-state tuition for illegal aliens. (Although I did think it was nice that he gave his answer in Spanish.)
Liberalism Always Goes Too Far
WASHINGTON -- One of the causes that has brought the great and worthy movement of Liberalism to its present state of decrepitude has been remarked upon in this column many times before: Liberalism always goes too far. Even in the case of a noble impulse, it goes too far. Public events in recent days, in that magnificent monument to liberalism called San Francisco, show us once again the example of Liberalism over the edge. But to review my thesis -- Liberalism goes too far. It started with the workingman trying to organize a union in the 1930s. It ended with the unions barring everyone save a particular type of man from the union shop. In the 1950s, about a decade before the liberal crack-up got going, it barred women from the union; and, of course, it barred Blacks and Latinos. Moreover, no one who was non-union could still work in the union shop. Liberalism always goes too far.
Health Care Taxing America's Workers
On Tuesday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan gave a talk at Stanford's Hoover Institution on what should become the Republican Party's template behind its bid to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. Ryan cited the unintended consequences that employer-paid health care plans have delivered: "The system that shields us from the cost of services has actually left us paying much, much more." On the same day, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report that bolstered Ryan's argument. Over the past year, average annual cost for employer-sponsored health care plans rose 9 percent. Premiums have more than doubled since 2001. The average annual premium is now $15,073 per family -- and that doesn't include out-of-pocket payments.
About That Article You Hated ...
Dear Irate, Blame me. I'm the editor here at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette who put that article that so offended you -- and a number of other valued readers -- on the cover of our Sunday opinion September 11th. It was wholly a pleasure to hear from you all because it gives me an opportunity to explain why I would do such a thing.
Obama: Our Henry VIII
When Thomas More was in the Tower of London waiting to be tried for refusing to take an oath that claimed Henry VIII was the supreme authority over the church in England, he explained to one of his daughters why it did not matter to him if almost every other man in England was willing to take that oath. "Verily, daughter, I never intend -- God being my good lord -- to pin my soul at another man's back, not even the best man that I know this day living; for I know not whither he may hap to carry it," More said, according to documents published online by the Center for Thomas More Studies at the University of Dallas.
Does Fast and Furious Put Impeachment on The Table?
"The story is one of not covert activity alone," intoned Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, "but of covert foreign policy .... It is a tale of working outside the system and of utilizing irregular channels and private parties accountable to no one, on matters of national security, while ignoring the Congress and even the traditional agencies of executive foreign policy making. The story is both sad and sordid." Sen. Inouye was speaking not of the biggest scandal of the Obama administration, but of the biggest scandal of the Reagan administration -- the Iran-Contra scandal. In that scandal, the United States sold weapons to parties in Iran in an attempt to free Lebanese-held hostages, then funneled the weapons cash to the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua. The outcome of that scandal: indictments against the secretary of defense, the national security advisor, the assistant secretary of state, the chief of covert ops at the CIA and several others.
A Bear of a Problem for Obama
"You woke the bears! Why did you do that?" That's from one of my favorite scenes in "Anchorman." In the Oscar-robbed film, Ron Burgundy (played by Will Ferrell) loudly leaps into a bear pit to rescue his girlfriend and then falsely blames her for waking them up. Watching President Obama these days reminds me of that scene. In March 2010, liberal columnist Peter Beinart argued that, for decades, Democratic politicians treated America's innate conservatism like a slumbering bear: If you make no sudden moves and talk quietly, you can get a lot done. But if you wake the bear, as Democrats did in the late 1960s and early '70s, the ursine silent majority will punish you.
Governments Don't Create Prosperity
Politicians say they create jobs, but they really don't. Or rather, they rarely create productive jobs. Government has no money of its own. All it does is take resources from one group and give them to another. The pharaohs might have claimed they created work when they ordered that pyramids be built, but think how much richer (and freer) the Egyptians would have been if they'd been allowed to pursue their own interests. It's individuals in the marketplace who create real jobs -- when they have the protection of life and property under the rule of law.
President's Foreign Policy Failures Increase
President Obama, like most American presidents, is lucky that the public pays little attention to foreign policy and rarely casts its votes on the basis of presidential foreign-policy performance. It required something as dramatic as the November 1979 Iranian seizing of our diplomats as hostages, followed the next month by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to turn Jimmy Carter's foreign policy mess into a major negative issue for him in his failed 1980 re-election bid. A political danger for presidents is that precisely because the public pays little attention to foreign policy until a explosion occurs (usually metaphoric), the White House does not get public pressure to improve the situation as it does with, say, a failing domestic economy. As the economy gets worse and worse, the public complains more and more, and the White House is on political alert to try to do something about it, usually. However, the political danger of a foreign-policy failure tends to just fall out of the politically clear blue sky on an inattentive White House.
Sudanese Genocide Attention Fatigue?
Remember Darfur, site of the genocide in Western Sudan? Two years ago, in August 2009, the then-United Nations peacekeeping force commander claimed the war in Darfur had "effectively ended." He argued that major attacks had declined to the point that he thought the war would soon be over. This month, September 2011, the U.N. issued a press statement that said attacks had declined 70 percent since late 2008.
Our White House Bully Problem
Spin, baby, spin. Throughout his frenetic jobs tour across the West this week, President Obama tried to seize the narrative. Republicans, he told champagne-sipping, tea party-trashing Hollywood moguls and tech titans, are intolerant bigots, know-nothings and thugs. They've made his hair "grayer" and left him "all dinged up." But who's battering whom? Since Day One, Obama has been the Chicago bully in victim's clothing. The mask is wearing thin.
An Ugly Sunrise for Republicans
No one thinks Barack Obama is sitting pretty in this race for the White House. The Real Clear Politics average of the mid-September approval-rating polls measures him at 43 percent approval, 51 percent disapproval. With these numbers, they should be measuring his political coffin. But to listen to the networks talk, it's the Republican field that is a mess in desperate need of new talent, and its debate audiences are a bloodthirsty horror movie. One place that Democratic contenders go for positive publicity is the network morning shows. Their audiences are diminished, but they remain a powerful national platform, especially for female voters. Rich Noyes and Geoff Dickens of the Media Research Center have demonstrated how ABC, CBS and NBC set a pretty pleasant table for the Democratic candidates (and potential candidates like Al Gore) from Jan. 1 through July 31, 2007.
Illinois Eavesdropping Act Shields Public Officials From Public Scrutiny
On Jan. 13, 2009, Michael Allison brought a digital recorder to the Crawford County Courthouse in Robinson, Ill., where he was contesting a citation, because he had been told there would be no official transcript of the proceedings. He was immediately confronted by Judge Kimbara Harrell, who accused him of violating her privacy and charged him with eavesdropping, a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Because Allison had recorded conversations about his legal situation with police and other local officials, he soon faced four more eavesdropping charges, raising his possible sentence to 75 years. The case against Allison vividly shows how the Illinois Eavesdropping Act, the target of a constitutional challenge that was recently heard by a federal appeals court, undermines transparency, civil liberties and legal equality.
Politics vs. Economics
They say "all politics is local." But economic decisions impact the whole economy and reverberate internationally. That is why politicians' meddling with the economy creates so many disasters. The time horizon of politics seldom reaches beyond the next election. But, in economics, when an oil company invests in oil explorations today, the oil they eventually find and process may not make its way to market and earn a profit until it is sold as gasoline a decade from now. In short, the focus of politicians is extremely limited in both space and time -- and all the repercussions that lie beyond those limits carry little, if any, weight in political decisions.
The Financial Mess in the US and Europe
What's the common thread between Europe's financial mess, particularly among the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain), and the financial mess in the U.S.? That question could be more easily answered if we asked instead: What's necessary to cure the financial mess in Europe and the U.S.? If European governments and the U.S. Congress ceased the practice of giving people what they have not earned, budgets would be more than balanced. For government to guarantee a person a right to goods and services he has not earned, it must diminish someone else's right to what he has earned, simply because governments have no resources of their very own. The first order of business in reaching a solution to the financial mess in Europe and the U.S. must be the recognition that governments have been doing a class of unsustainable things, mostly giving people special privileges and things that they have not earned. It's a matter of not simply what's good or bad for the beneficiaries but what its effect is on society at large and the welfare of a nation.