Right Opinion

Crafting a Moral Budget

Media Go Leaner on Weiner

Last July, ABC and NBC highlighted a temper tantrum from Rep. Anthony Weiner, alleging on the House floor that the Republicans were denying health care to the heroes of 9/11. To Diane Sawyer, Weiner spoke for all of America: "Every now and then, someone seems to express the nation's frustration with the endless wrangling and delay in Congress." Remember Weiner when liberal journalists roll their eyes at the stupidity of conservatives. Weiner's social-media sex scandal was underplayed by the national media precisely because they thought their ultraliberal star was far too smart to commit these stupid sex pranks with women he barely knew on the Internet.

Elena Kagan's Telltale Recusal

When Elena Kagan became solicitor general of the United States in March 2009, she applied a high standard in recusing herself from her job as the administration's top advocate in federal court disputes. This standard was exemplified by the case of Horne v. Flores. Horne v. Flores, in which a school superintendent contested the efforts of federal courts to micromanage how his state's public schools helped Spanish-speaking students learn English, came out of Arizona. Kagan came out of Cambridge, Mass. -- a long way geographically and philosophically from Arizona.

Ends and Means: Suicide Is Not a Medical Treatment

Jack Kevorkian's first suicide machine, which he called the Thanatron, delivered the same three chemicals commonly used to execute condemned prisoners: the barbiturate sodium thiopental to induce sleep, pancuronium bromide to paralyze the muscles and sodium chloride to stop the heart. After his medical license was suspended in 1991, Kevorkian had trouble obtaining the drugs, so he switched to the Mercitron, a mask attached to a tank of carbon monoxide. In both cases, death was a favor that Kevorkian, who proudly eschewed payment for his services, dispensed to people who convinced him they had good reasons for wanting to die. By contrast, the suicide kits that Sharlotte Hydorn sold from her home in El Cajon, Calif., were available to anyone with $60 and a mailing address. Unfortunately, to the extent that the government recognizes a right to suicide, it takes its cues from Kevorkian, who died last Friday at the age of 83, rather than Hydorn, a 91-year-old entrepreneur whose business was shut down by the FBI the week before.

It's Obama's Economy, Stupid

"Now, my administration has a job to do as well, and that job is to get this economy back on its feet," President Obama declared on July 14, 2009, in Warren, Mich. "That's my job, and it's a job I gladly accept. I love these folks who helped get us in this mess and then suddenly say, well, this is Obama's economy. That's fine. Give it to me." OK. It's yours.

Obama's Egghead Economic Saboteurs

Official motto of the White House economic team: Those who can, do. Those who can't, fantasize in the classroom, fail in Washington and then return to the Ivy Tower to train the next generation of egghead economic saboteurs. Life is good for left-wing academics. Everyone else pays dearly. Take Austan Goolsbee, please. President Obama's "fresh-faced" University of Chicago econ professor arrived in Washington in December 2008 to fill two slots: chief economist/staff director of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and member of the Council of Economic Advisers. In September 2010, he replaced CEA head and fellow academic Christina Romer, who retreated to the University of California at Berkeley last August when unemployment hit 9.5 percent. (She infamously projected that the Obama stimulus would hold the jobless rate below 8 percent.)

Irksome Things

There are a lot of things, large and small, that irk me. One of them is our tendency to evaluate a presidential candidate based on his intelligence or academic credentials. When Obama threw his hat in the ring, people thought he was articulate and smart and hailed his intellectual credentials. Just recently, when Newt Gingrich announced his candidacy, people hailed his intellectual credentials and smartness as well. By contrast, the intellectual elite and mainstream media people see Sarah Palin as stupid, a loose cannon and not to be trusted with our nuclear arsenal. There was another presidential candidate who was also held to be stupid and not to be trusted with our nuclear arsenal who ultimately became president -- Ronald Reagan. I don't put much stock into whether a political leader is smart or not because, as George Orwell explained, "Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them."

The Cancer of Regulation

Politicians care about poor people. I know because they always say that. But then why do they make it so hard for the poor to escape poverty? Outside my office in New York City, I see yellow taxis. It's intuitive to think that government should license taxis to make sure they're safe and to limit their number. It's intuitive to believe that if anyone could just start picking up passengers, we'd have chaos. So to operate a taxi in NYC, you have to buy a license, a "medallion," from an existing cab company (or at a once-in-a-blue-moon auction). Medallions are so scarce, they now cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Conservatives Insuperable If Inseparable

I had the honor of speaking last weekend at the Faith and Freedom Conference, at which most of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination were the star attractions. The conference, led by Ralph Reed, brought together the nation's leading (what is called) social conservatives. Politico's reporting of the two-day event typified the tone. "The day after Haley Barbour implored the crowd not to put ideological purity over pragmatism for the general election as they pick a 2012 GOP candidate, Rick Santorum took to the podium at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington to make a different case. In a strong pitch to the mostly evangelical crowd on Saturday morning, the former Pennsylvania senator cast social conservative issues as the defining ones for the country -- and for the Republican Party."

On the Road to Fatima Gate

2011's Arab Spring is an astonishing moment. Yes, somewhere on the calendar of the next decade's history a fall of lowered expectations will occur and a winter of cold disappointment -- but the hopes and passions powering it will not disappear. Michael Totten's new book, "The Road to Fatima Gate" (Encounter Books, 2011), provides a first-person look at Arab Spring's immediate predecessor, Lebanon's Beirut Spring of 2005. Totten then moves to a detailed discussion of Hezbollah's increasing power within Lebanon, followed by a compelling, on-the-ground look at the 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli war (the July War, in Lebanese parlance). Totten portrays the war as an Iranian-Israeli war, with Hezbollah as Tehran's proxy.

Different Decisions

Two unrelated news stories on the same day show the contrast between government decisions and private decisions. Under the headline "Foreclosed Homes Sell at Big Discounts," USA Today reported that banks were selling the homes they foreclosed on, at discounts of 38 percent in Tennessee to 41 percent in Illinois and Ohio. Banks in general try to get rid of the homes they acquire by foreclosure, by selling them quickly for whatever they can get. Why? Because banks are forced by economic realities to realize that they are not real estate companies.

Accusation That Voter ID Is Racist Demeans Blacks

While dining out last week, I periodically looked up at one of the television monitors to see the score of the first game of the NBA finals. As there was no sound on to interrupt diners' conversations, the monitor was in caption mode: One could read rather than hear the words spoken. At the conclusion of the game, an announcer was interviewing a member of the victorious Miami Heat players. I saw from the captions the player saying the words "they isn't." Closed captions display the words spoken. They don't correct for poor grammar.

As Britain Goes, So Goes America?

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The extinct political slogan "As Maine goes, so goes the nation," may be supplanted by what is happening in the United Kingdom. There is a form of functional political illiteracy here that does not bode well for the United States should it follow Britain's very bad example, particularly on matters involving immigration and health care. For several years, the British media have been full of horror stories about failures in the National Health Service (NHS). "Thousands of Elderly at Risk in Care Crisis" screamed the front-page headline in the Times of London last week. This is nothing new, because a headline in The Daily Telegraph nearly two years ago warned, "Cruel and Neglectful Care of One Million NHS Patients Exposed." Is anyone listening?

Giving Schools 'The Business'

"Industry Puts Heat on Schools to Teach Skills Employers Need," says The Wall Street Journal headline. Well, duh -- a phrase painfully familiar in the modern American classroom. Skills matter, knowledge matters, rational understanding is consequential to national survival because ...? Duh. It's gotten hard to explain. Fearful of waiting too long for government to lead the struggle, and it is one, for education excellence, American business is taking a hand.

Who Says History Isn't Confusing?

The liberal media's most recent effort to turn Sarah Palin into a dolt over her version of Paul Revere, on which historians are now defending her, has prompted me to share with you some confusing points of European history I have recently re-encountered in my lay study of the subject. With apologies in advance to professional and amateur historians, here are a few fun "facts."

John Edwards, Campaign Reformer

As a U.S. senator, John Edwards, a staunch defender of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, decried "a system in which huge amounts of money (continue to) flow unregulated into the campaign process and ordinary people feel as if their vote makes no difference anymore." Last week, a federal grand jury indicted the North Carolina Democrat for allegedly violating federal election law by funneling nearly $1 million in campaign contributions -- in violation of the $2,300 federal campaign contribution limit per election -- to conceal an extramarital affair while he ran for president in 2008.

Is John Edwards' Fall a Tragedy?

The Washington Post has issued a post-mortem on the career of John Edwards ("American Dream is Irrevocably Undone") and finds tragedy and pathos. "The man born Johnny Reid Edwards had it. Great gobs of potential." He might have been, the Post laments, "a great husband, could have been an enduring statesman ... president." But fate intervened. With his indictment on misuse of campaign funds last week, "America witnessed the latest distasteful episode in ... (the) fall from grace of a political comet."

Custom-Tailored History

Want to know what a major theme of our president's re-election campaign will be, at least in the rust belt? His vice president and running mate unveiled it just the other day. Here's the gospel according to Joe Biden: "Because of what we did, the auto industry is rising again. ... At the time, many people thought the president should just let GM and Chrysler go under." But the president "certainly wasn't going to abandon an industry that had meant so much to our economy...."

Believe It or Else

Years ago, a globe-trotter named Robert Ripley made a handsome living with a comic strip and a series of popular movie shorts called "Believe It or Not." It was Ripley's brainstorm that Americans would be fascinated by such oddities as people who grew their fingernails three-feet long, subsisted on a diet of bugs or constructed their homes out of ox dung. If nothing else, Ripley let us know that our relatives weren't really the daffiest folks on earth. These days, political correctness generally prevents us from shining a spotlight on the weird customs and disgusting habits of the various freaks who share the planet with us. To get around those inhibitions, let us consider this an homage to the late Mr. Ripley.

Education and Its Discontents

Dear Fellow Fan, It was wholly a pleasure to hear from another fan of that endangered species on American campuses, liberal education. It seems the more bureaucratic types in American education, whether they've burrowed into administration or become tenured members of the faculty, are busy transforming our universities into trade schools in every way but the name.