Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Mr Obama, Stop Your Holy War Against Christian and Jews
President Barack Hussein Obama is instructing our only staunch allies in the Middle East to risk destruction at the hands of one of the most radical terrorist organization in that troubled area, and he must be stopped before some of the world's holiest historical sites are closed to the tens of thousands of pilgrims who visit them every year. Incredibly, the president is demanding that Israel revert to the 1967 borders, which would expose the Jewish state to attacks from the terrorist organization Hamas, which now controls the government of neighboring Palestine. Unless we want these terrorists to control Christianity's history in the Holy Land we must prevail upon the president to abandon this dangerous and wrong-headed policy.
The Huntsman Factor
WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump's pathological political exhibitionism has ended, Newt Gingrich has incinerated himself with an incoherent retraction tour, Mitt Romney has reaffirmed his enthusiasm for his Massachusetts health care law, rendering himself incapable of articulating the case against Obamacare and the entitlement state generally, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee and Mitch Daniels, aware of the axiom that anyone who will do what must be done to become president should not be allowed to be president, are out. Watching this from his new home in Washington's tony Kalorama neighborhood and his office at 1455 Pennsylvania Ave., Jon Huntsman, 51, former Utah governor and recently resigned ambassador to China, contemplates moving his office two blocks west. The Republican contest may soon acquire a photogenic family and a distinctive foreign policy voice.
Circumcision and the Special City
In 2010, San Francisco supervisors banned Happy Meals. They showed no regard for parental choice. So it should not come as a shock that activists have managed to put a measure on the November ballot that essentially would outlaw the circumcision of baby boys. If it passes, parents won't be able to choose to circumcise their infant sons. The penalty for the "genital cutting of male minors" will be a $1,000 fine and/or up to a year in jail.
Supreme Court to California: 'Release the Hounds'
"Today the court affirms what is perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation's history." So began Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's enraged dissent. Release up to 46,000 convicted felons, the court recently ordered the state of California. In a 5-4 decision, the court gave California two years to reduce its prison "overcrowding" -- or set tens of thousands free. The ACLU, which brought the suit, successfully argued that poor prison conditions violated the prisoners' rights as a class, not individually, thus the threat of mass premature release.
Defunding Defense
Can America's defense budget be cut? Yes. Unfortunately, President Obama is going about it exactly backwards. He has asked the Pentagon to identify $400 billion in savings. But coming up with an arbitrary figure and telling our military to find some way to hit it isn't the smart -- or safe -- way to make the necessary cuts. What comes first should be obvious: the mission. What do we want our armed forces to accomplish? When and how do we want them to do it? What can wait for another day?
The Factory of Selective Moral Outrage
Democrats in Congress recently went all out to try to pass the Dream Act, an amnesty for illegal-alien students willing to enroll -- and stay -- in college. Most who opposed it were derided as heartless at best, racist at worse. An insolvent California -- still struggling with its $15 billion budget shortfall -- is trying to advance its own version of the bill that would contravene federal immigration law and cost millions of dollars. At about the same time, the state has announced plans to release about 40,000 prison inmates due to a shortage of funds needed to address overcrowding. Highly taxed Californians can borrow money to send illegal aliens to school, but not to keep felons in prison.
An Impostor's Complaint
WASHINGTON -- Here we are now in the afterglow of another Memorial Day. The flags and the bunting are being put away. The memories endure for another year of our honored dead, of the brave wounded, of the veterans -- some grizzled, some still youthful -- all deserving their country's gratitude. Then there are the impostors, who have created -- often from zilch military honors -- whole careers, records of heroism and splendid triumphs. What wretches! One is Joseph Brian Cryer, 45, who claimed to be a U.S. Navy SEAL and boasted online of his "77 confirmed kills" during a glorious operation in Libya in 1986. A genuine SEAL, Don Shipley, exposed Cryer as an impostor. Shipley has taken it upon himself to expose frauds and veterans who engaud their war records. It must be a full-time occupation. This kind of thing happens surprisingly often and very much in public. A best-selling historian was suspended for a year from his college teaching position for bragging to his students of his Vietnam War feats, and oh, yes, he claimed exploits on the football field, too. Both claims were fabrications. Now with SEAL Team 6's exploits in snagging Osama bin Laden, SEALs are turning up everywhere.
Weiner's Penis Photo Dispute to Be Settled in Small Claims Court
Sometimes I wonder if Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., is too nice for his own good. An evil swine hacks into Weiner's Twitter account and posts an embarrassing photo of spindly legs topped by a small erect penis draped in dingy gray briefs no male over the age of 11 would wear -- and Anthony just wants to forget the whole thing! Instead of angrily demanding an investigation like anyone else would, Anthony has gone all St. Francis of Assisi on us.
Boneheaded Stimulus Never Works
With a flamboyant downgrade of the outlook for economic growth, jobs and profits, Wednesday's 280-point Dow plunge to launch the so-called June stock swoon is a warning shot across the bow. The Dow tanked alongside a batch of dismal economic data. The ISM manufacturing index, ADP employment, Case-Shiller home prices and consumer confidence are all pointing to 2 percent growth or less, rather than the kind of 5 percent growth we ought to be getting coming out of a deep recession.
Public Opinion Always Beats Media's 'Conventional Wisdom'
They've tried over and over, the media and government elites who know so much more than the rest of us. They've doggedly done their best to persuade us that, months ago, the economy already had turned the corner back to emerging prosperity. In February, I wrote a column called "Prepare for the Economic Meltdown." I wasn't then and I'm not now a psychic, or even an economist. Even so, and as I noted in that piece, I used scientific public opinion data to help me read where the economy was going.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Some Things Never Change
The problem with getting old, the fellow told me once, is that you remember when everything was cheap. There's an offsetting advantage, though: You remember how long politics has been mendacious. Thus, watching a Republican operative on YouTube pushing a sweet old crone off the cliff in her wheelchair (that's how much Republicans hate Medicare!!) wasn't much different really from watching Barry Goldwater, back in '64, incinerate a little blond girl picking daisies (that's how much Republicans love war!!).
Seductive Beliefs: Part II
The only thing surprising about Barack Obama's latest blow against Israel is that there are people who are surprised. As for a Palestinian homeland, that was never a big issue when the Arabs controlled that land, up to 1967. Obama's declaration that Israel must give up the land it acquired, after neighboring countries threatened its survival in 1967, is completely consistent with both his ideology of many years and his previous actions as President of the United States.
Hollywood Hates Conservatives
Discrimination is not a pleasant accusation to level at anyone. In particular, conservatives have a tough time stomaching such allegations -- we tend to think that for the most part, people treat each other rationally. After all, that assumption is the foundation of laissez-faire economics, which states that the market will ruthlessly weed out all those who practice non-rationality-based decision-making. Sometimes, however, discrimination is very real. And in today's America, Hollywood is its epicenter.
Do We Deserve Our Fate?
The latest Social Security Trustees Report tells us that the program will be insolvent by the year 2037. The combined unfunded liability of Social Security and Medicare has reached nearly $107 trillion in today's dollars. That is about seven times the size of the U.S. economy and 10 times the size of the national debt. Those entitlement programs, along with others, account for nearly 60 percent of federal spending. They are what Congress calls non-discretionary spending. About half of discretionary spending is for national defense. Each year, non-discretionary spending consumes a higher and higher percentage of the federal budget.
Government Against Blacks
The other day, I went to Times Square to ask people what government should do to help poor people. Most everyone agreed on the answer: "more social programs and a higher minimum wage." It's intuitive to think that way. I used to think that, too. When President Johnson declared a "war on poverty," he said "compassionate government" was the road to prosperity for poor people. That made sense to me. At Princeton, I was taught that government's central planners had the solution to poverty.
Here Come the Ailes Haters
One part of the liberal media's Obama re-election effort is well under way: trying to destroy the reputation of Fox News and its president, Roger Ailes. Two long, new magazine "exposes" have attempted to demonize Ailes and his allegedly brain-dead minions as the antithesis of good journalism. The funnier one came from Rolling Stone magazine, which ran the title "How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory." How little does this rag understand good journalism? It took only a few lines before staff writer/fantasist Tim Dickinson fell on his face. After painting a picture of employees loyally cheering the boss at a holiday party, Dickinson entertained comparisons to ... Mao Zedong.
What Has Become of the Spirit of Tahrir Square?
"The police are afraid," an Egyptian reported after witnessing 80 prisoners, some armed with machetes and guns, break out of a jail in Cairo. It was one of many such jailbreaks in the past three months. Crime, an unwelcome weed in the garden of the Arab Spring, has proliferated in the months since the Mubarak regime was driven from power. Egypt today is plagued by sectarian violence, kidnapping, and hooliganism. The police, who kept order through brutality and intimidation during the Mubarak era, are now too cowed to act. At a soccer match between the Egyptian and Tunisian teams, reports The New York Times, a referee's call on behalf of the Tunisians led to a riot. Spectators rushed the field, attacking the referee and the visiting team. Two players were sent to the hospital.
Has America Opened Its Last Frontier?
Looking back from 2,000 years in the future, were a historian to see that America had sent men to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then never sent them back again, he would justifiably conclude that this nation had peaked as an historical force in the last half of the 20th century. By the time America elected Barack Obama, this historian would see, it was already on the way down. Were he to simultaneously examine the rise of the welfare state, he would notice a telltale trend: As socialism dug deeper into the soul of America, America's pioneering spirit waned.
Chasing Sarah: The Boys Behind the Bus
In the 1970s, "The Boys on the Bus" exposed how a clubby pack of male political reporters ruled the road to the White House and shaped the news. Four decades later, an outsider gal from Alaska has commandeered the 2012 media bus -- and left Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust. We've come a long way, baby. Amid frenzied speculation over her potential presidential campaign plans, former GOP Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin launched an all-American road trip with her family this Memorial Day weekend. Establishment media types didn't get reserved seats or advance notice of her itinerary. Palin rubbed the Washington media mob's institutional sense of entitlement right back in its face. "I don't think I owe anything to the mainstream media. I want them to have to do a little bit of work on a tour like this," she jabbed.
Cyberwarfare -- the Doctrine of Equivalence
Hack the United States with a crippling computer virus, and the Pentagon may respond with smart bombs and commando teams. The military and intelligence communities have known for at least two decades that "cyberwar" is war. Everyday experience has confirmed that the digital fight is very real, as cyber-attackers probe and occasionally crack the digital communications and data storage systems of military organizations, intelligence agencies, financial institutions and, frankly, just about everyone with a networked digital device.