Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Mike Bloomberg's Irresponsible Riot Tactic
New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, in a radio interview on Friday, warned that high unemployment could lead to widespread rioting. That's right. He actually said that. At a time when European cities have suffered massively from hooliganism, and at a time when U.S. towns like Philadelphia and Kansas City have suffered huge human and commercial tolls from so-called flash riots. For Bloomberg to come out with this statement is irresponsible and incendiary.
He Made It Worse
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." --Mr. Micawber It's a sad, and dangerous, thing when governments lose sight of Micawber's Rule, first enunciated in Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield" and demonstrated many times over since.
Specter of a Sequester
WASHINGTON -- It must take some getting used to. Leon Panetta, the secretary of defense, knows the Pentagon is under 24-hour cyber siege. There constantly are thousands of what he calls "exploitive" cyber probes from nations "pulsing the system," trying to devise tools to disrupt the control systems without which complex societies such as ours cannot function. Panetta, a seasoned Washingtonian who laughs easily and a temperate Californian who frets about the San Francisco Giants' bats, is not given to hyperbole. But he says any cyber attack that "crippled our (electricity) grid or took down our financial system would make Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined look mild" in terms of social disruption.
Rick Perry's Bad -- Mixing Sex, Power and Mandates
Texas Gov. Rick Perry is getting hammered because he signed an order requiring that sixth-graders be vaccinated against the HPV virus in 2007. Perhaps the most toxic mix in GOP presidential politics is the combination of sex, power and mandates. All three elements play a role in this controversy.
From The Comedy Store
The White House set up an Internet site called Attack Watch asking people to report all criticisms of President Obama. They want to know every nasty remark. The next day the servers crashed from all the traffic, and that was just from the Democrats in New York.
Dick Morris and Other Questionable Characters
It's bad enough having those well-spoken, snazzy-dressed, spokesmen for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), getting all huffy over opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque, but what makes them particularly unbearable is the silence they maintain over the way their brethren burn churches, bibles and Christians, in the Middle East. In a way, it reminds me of the way that Barack Obama chastises Republicans for being uncivil, but never utters a word when his various stooges refer to Republicans as hostage-taking terrorists and when Rep. Andre Carson calls the Tea Party a lynch mob.
Racial Preferences in Wisconsin
The campus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison erupted this week after the release of two studies documenting the heavy use of race in deciding which students to admit to the undergraduate and law schools. The evidence of discrimination is undeniable, and the reaction by critics was undeniably dishonest and thuggish. The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO), which I founded in 1995 to expose and challenge misguided race-based public policies, conducted the studies based on an analysis of the university's own admissions data. But the university was none too keen on releasing the data, which CEO obtained through filing Freedom of Information Act requests only after a successful legal challenge went all the way to the state supreme court.
Dancing the Ayatollahs' Tune
WASHINGTON -- When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrives in New York next week to address the United Nations General Assembly, he will present himself as a great "humanitarian." Many of the America haters at the U.N. will shower him with accolades and commend his "untiring efforts" to gain the release of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, two Americans jailed in Tehran since they were detained on the Iraq-Afghanistan border in 2009. And seeing as past is prologue at the annual UNGA soiree, the participants will then get down to the work at hand: bashing the United States and Israel, demanding recognition of "Palestinian independence" and ignoring the most serious threat to world peace, Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Pageants and Prosti-Tots
People who love reality television often have a special attraction to "train wreck" shows. For two years now, the tasteless titans of the cable channel TLC have been exploiting the spectacle of hyper-ambitious stage mothers parading around "beauty queens" just barely out of diapers in thousand-dollar gowns. The program is titled "Toddlers and Tiaras." But now it's even worse: They're dressing up little girls as what radio hosts are calling "prosti-tots."
Camelot Revisited: Jackie Spins the Kennedy Era From the Grave
Jackie Kennedy is back, but the world she knew as first lady is gone forever. The woman Mamie Eisenhower said looked "younger than Barbie," the fashion icon who didn't want to wear hats but capitulated at Jack's inauguration with a chic pillbox worn on the back of her head so it wouldn't ruin her bouffant hairdo, the widow who described her husband's administration as Camelot, a romantic notion as fanciful as the legend from which it was based, speaks again through a gossamer haze of pre-feminist politics.
AttackWatch.com Is the Administration's Latest Propaganda Arm
President Obama's official re-election campaign has set up a website ostensibly to defend him against false attacks, but its obvious purpose is to smear Republicans and propagandize. What could be more shameless? Jim Messina, Obama's re-election campaign manager, in a fundraising email announcing the website, said: "Forming the first line of defense against a barrage of misinformation won't be easy. Our success will depend on a team of researchers and writers to stay on the lookout for false claims about the President and his record, bring you the facts, and hold our opposition accountable."
The Cash-for-Visas Program
As part of his warmed-over jobs plan, President Obama is repackaging "Buy American" stimulus subsidies to help hard-hit homegrown businesses. At the same time, however, Congress is pushing to expand a fraud-riddled investor program that puts U.S. citizenship for sale to the highest foreign business bidders. Call it the Buy America Cash-for-Visas plan. As I first reported 10 years ago, the EB-5 immigrant investor program was created under an obscure section of the 1990 Immigration Act. The law allows 10,000 wealthy foreigners a year to purchase green cards by investing between $500,000 and $1 million in new commercial enterprises or troubled businesses. After two years, foreign investors, their spouses and their children all receive permanent resident status -- which allows them to contribute to U.S. political campaigns and provides a speedy gateway to citizenship. The program is set to expire in 2012.
Looking for Love
"If you love me, you've got to help me pass this bill." That was part of Barack Obama's response to an exuberant fan who shouted "I love you!" at a campaign rally. And so it has come to this. "The One" has gone from messiah to pleading like a teenage boy on a date. "Come on, baby. If you love me, you'll do it." A gossip website reports that the New York Times is working on a story that the president is depressed. That's unconfirmed. But if he isn't depressed, I'd hope the self-proclaimed "paper of record" would investigate why on earth he's not.
Dinner With Ahmadinejad
The Columbia Spectator is the student newspaper at Columbia University, the school I was once proud to call my alma mater. A report in that newspaper raises the following question: Are leading American universities producing moral illiterates? According to the Spectator, a group of students who are members of the Columbia International Relations Council and Association has been invited to attend a private dinner with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he travels to New York for the United Nations General Assembly meeting next week. A student spokesman for the group, when asked whether the invitation had provoked controversy within CIRCA, seemed surprised by the question. "Everyone was really enthusiastic," said Tim Chan. "They're thrilled to have this opportunity."
The Great Ponzi Debate
WASHINGTON -- The Great Social Security Debate, Proposition 1: Of course it's a Ponzi scheme. In a Ponzi scheme, the people who invest early get their money out with dividends. But these dividends don't come from any profitable or productive activity -- they consist entirely of money paid in by later participants. This cannot go on forever because at some point there just aren't enough new investors to support the earlier entrants. Word gets around that there are no profits, just money transferred from new to old. The merry-go-round stops, the scheme collapses and the remaining investors lose everything.
Ron Paul Was Right
In the Republican presidential candidates debate Monday night in Tampa, CNN's Wolf Blitzer posed a hypothetical question. Normally, a hypothetical question should not be answered, but in this case it revealed something about the questioner and sparked a controversial, but necessary answer from Rep. Ron Paul. For those watching the two Monday Night Football games, the question was: "A healthy 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides, you know what? I'm not going to spend $200 or $300 a month for health insurance because I'm healthy, I don't need it. But something terrible happens, all of a sudden he needs it. Who's going to pay if he goes into a coma, for example? Who pays for that?"
Too Much Higher Education
Too much of anything is just as much a misallocation of resources as it is too little, and that applies to higher education just as it applies to everything else. A recent study from The Center for College Affordability and Productivity titled "From Wall Street to Wal-Mart," by Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart, Matthew Denhart, Christopher Matgouranis and Jonathan Robe, explains that college education for many is a waste of time and money. More than one-third of currently working college graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree. An essay by Vedder that complements the CCAP study reports that there are "one-third of a million waiters and waitresses with college degrees." The study says Vedder -- distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University, an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and director of CCAP -- "was startled a year ago when the person he hired to cut down a tree had a master's degree in history, the fellow who fixed his furnace was a mathematics graduate, and, more recently, a TSA airport inspector (whose job it was to ensure that we took our shoes off while going through security) was a recent college graduate."
The Case for Doing Nothing
One of the chief functions of a president of the United States is to serve as the focus of the nation's gripes. It was only to be expected that Barack Obama would be criticized even for taking a family vacation on Martha's Vineyard. Me, I think the president ought to take more time off. The less he fiddles with the economy, the better it might do. Unfortunately, the president is always being urged to Do Something.
Back to the Future: Part III
Ninety years ago -- in 1921 -- federal income tax policies reached an absurdity that many people today seem to want to repeat. Those who believe in high taxes on "the rich" got their way. The tax rate on people in the top income bracket was 73 percent in 1921. On the other hand, the rich also got their way: They didn't actually pay those taxes. The number of people with taxable incomes of $300,000 a year and up -- equivalent to far more than a million dollars in today's money -- declined from more than a thousand people in 1916 to less than three hundred in 1921. Were the rich all going broke?
September 11 Unanimity: Did G.W. Bush 'Squander' It?
Sept. 11 unified America. But President George W. Bush "squandered" this shared sense of purpose. We still hear this drivel, mostly from the left, 10 years after the terror attacks. But how did Bush blow this alleged consensus, this shared sense of purpose presumably expected to last, well, forever? Bush's critics pretty much give the same three reasons.