Right Opinion

Baseball as Civic Theater

Dear Baseball Fan, It was wholly a pleasure to get your letter wondering how the home team here in Little Rock, the Arkansas Travelers, is doing this season. Much better, thank you for asking. After a fumbling start, the Travs' pitching seems to have kicked in, and they've got a beautiful young ballplayer in center field who's a joy to watch. He looks like the platonic ideal of a ballplayer that was in vogue when I started going to games as a boy in the long-ago '40s and '50s. More often than not, he even plays like that ideal.

Fix the IMF, Go for Growth, End Bailout Nation

As the International Monetary Fund gets ready to choose a successor to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who resigned following his arrest on charges that he sexually assaulted and raped a hotel housekeeper, it would be a good thing to step back for a moment and ask: What should the IMF do? More specifically, can the IMF possibly morph itself into a worldwide force for economic growth instead of Bailout Nation? Yes, it's a powerful global economic agency. It's also one with a very checkered past. Usually opting for austerity policies, such as currency devaluation and tax increases, the IMF has bungled a lot of rescue missions down through the years.

French Should Feel Shame, But We're No Puritans

Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned as the head of the International Monetary Fund. He would like to spend more time with his family. But that's not why he resigned. He'd like to spend more time with his family, as opposed to potentially spending time with inmates, because he's been charged with the sexual assault and attempted rape of an African-immigrant hotel maid. "DSK," as he's known in France, is socialist royalty and was the presumed shoo-in to beat Nicolas Sarkozy in next year's presidential race.

The News in Obama's Speech

WASHINGTON -- Herewith President Obama's May 19 Middle East speech, annotated: "It will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy." With this Barack Obama openly, unreservedly and without a trace of irony or self-reflection adopts the Bush Doctrine, which made the spread of democracy the key U.S. objective in the Middle East.

Dancing With Arafat's Ghost

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- On Thursday, Barack Obama went to the State Department to "mark a new chapter in American diplomacy." The president's handlers boldly billed his lengthy address "A Moment of Opportunity" for the Middle East. It was neither. Instead, he delivered a naive, revisionist lecture that was sufficiently utopian and self-centered to have been drafted by Jimmy Carter. Unfortunately, he also demanded major concessions from the only democracy in the Middle East and America's most steadfast ally in the region, Israel.

Defining Deviancy Down, Way Down

NEW YORK CITY -- The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan caught the decline of the culture two decades ago, observing that we're "defining deviancy down" -- lowering the bar for what was once considered deviant behavior, giving a pass to things society once scorned. Not much has changed over 20 years. The senator was talking mostly about criminal behavior, but it applies now to just about everything. Raunchy, obscene and scatological subjects, once taboo, are the stuff of prime time.

Obama's Abandonment of Israel

President Obama's major speech on the Middle East Thursday will come back to haunt him. He said nothing that will have any impact in deterring Syrian government violence against pro-democracy protestors, but the president did make pronouncements that threaten another state in the Middle East: Israel, America's strongest ally in the region. In his speech Thursday, the president paid lip service to Israeli security but laid down dangerous markers for restarting peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. With this speech, Obama became the first American president to require that Israel accept its pre-1967 borders as a starting point to negotiations with the Palestinians.

Obama and Democrats, Not Republicans, Need to Answer for Debt Ceiling

What kind of surreal world are we inhabiting where the political party that is trying to address our debt problem is on the defensive at the hands of the reckless party that chooses to mock, demagogue and delay? The national dialogue, at least the one being choreographed by Democrats and their amen chorus in the liberal Beltway media, has been distorted beyond measure. We are asking the wrong questions and getting the wrong answers.

The Tyranny of Hurt Feelings

Call it testosterone poisoning: A group of fraternity pledges at Yale, blindfolded and led in a line, each with his hands on the shoulders of the boy in front of him (the Yalie bunny hop?), were paraded in front of the Women's Center. There they shouted vile and puerile slogans including "No means yes, yes means anal" and "My name is Jack, I'm a necrophiliac, I f--- dead women." "It makes you want to slap those kids," laments Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Idiotic behavior like that of Delta Kappa Epsilon makes his job -- defending free speech and common sense in the Orwellian universe of the American academy -- that much more difficult.

Adult Baby Syndrome

Welcome to the land of the freeloaders and the home of the depraved. No image captures America's regressive ethos better than that of 30-year-old Stanley Thornton Jr., self-proclaimed "Adult Baby." Profiled on a recent National Geographic reality television show, Thornton claims to suffer from a bizarre infantilism that leads him to wear diapers, lounge around in an oversized crib and seek constant coddling. The nappies may be extreme, but let's face it: Thornton Jr. -- let's just call him Junior -- is a symptom of our Nanny State run amok, not an anomaly.

ABC's Partial-Birth Hero

As far as I'm concerned, there's a circle in Hell reserved for late-term abortionists. But this is the Obama era, so Hollywood makes TV shows casting them as heroic figures. Such is the state of our popular culture. On the May 12 episode of ABC's "Private Practice," Dr. Addison Montgomery (played by actress Kate Walsh, a real-life Planned Parenthood activist) spewed the strongest pro-abortion -- "pro-choice" -- rhetoric as she performed a partial-birth abortion on a woman who thought she'd already had an abortion two months before.

Saving the American Dream

It's an era of competing budget plans on Capitol Hill. And with good reason: We've come to a time of decision. For too long, Congress has been on an unsustainable binge of spending, taxing and borrowing. Our nation is going broke, and we're passing the costs of these misguided policies to our children and their children. Our national government has become bloated, overextended and unrestrained. It's become oblivious of its core functions, operating far beyond its means and vastly outside of its proper constitutional bounds. Unchecked, the course it's on now will cripple our economy, undermine our prosperity, and lead to fiscal insolvency.

Alligators, Moats and Other Such Nonsense

Gingrich and Romney Run Against Their Own Party

Exit Mike Huckabee. Enter Newt Gingrich. Exit Donald Trump. It's been a busy week in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. A few questions remain to be answered. Enter Mitch Daniels? Exit Sarah Palin? But already two of the best-known candidates seem bent on ruling themselves out of contention. One is Newt Gingrich. He's being denounced for his comments on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's Medicare plan by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill Bennett, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Charles Krauthammer on Fox News.

An Honored Guest

During his visit to Washington this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deserves to be treated with the respect due to a top official of a key American ally -- treatment clearly denied him by President Obama during his last visit to the United States. As The Times of London reported during his visit to Washington in March 2010, Netanyahu was "left to his own devices" while the president had dinner in private -- something The Times called "unheard of."

The Facts Keep Changing

The facts keep changing. Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK to the cognoscenti), the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, is nabbed by New York police Saturday, having just boarded an Air France flight to Paris. Accused of sexually assaulting a maid at the Sofitel Hotel back in Manhattan hours earlier, he is hustled off the plane. DSK, also the leading candidate against France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, is taken into custody, identified by his alleged victim in a police lineup and lingers in a Manhattan holding cell. He undergoes some sort of tests wherein DNA samples are taken from his fingernails and skin -- he volunteers for this.

Saving a Dog Is More Important Than Saving a Politician

Last week, I was driving down a busy neighborhood street near my home when I spotted a fashionable-looking dog darting about in the busy traffic. Suddenly, she charged head-on into my car. What would you have done? I stopped, put on my flashers and scooped up the dog to take home with me. She appeared not to be too badly hurt. But I have no dog of my own, so I had to improvise in finding "treats" to soothe her.

The Commandments

Lately, I've been thinking about the 10 Commandments, and it strikes me that the hardest one to accept is the one about honoring one's parents. This isn't to malign my parents or yours, but merely to suggest that with a little sincere effort and a normal amount of will power, the other nine aren't really that difficult to abide by. So, while I understand that God isn't saying we have to love or even like our parents, I still think it's an unreasonable demand. Why should Stalin's kids or Pol Pot's kids or the offspring of any other mass murderer respect them? And what about the children of child abusers, rapists and serial killers? But God doesn't offer any dispensations. He just insists that we honor our parents, no matter how evil and degenerate they are, even if they, themselves, ignore all the Commandments.

Hugs and Taxes

SACRAMENTO -- Pausing in his struggle to solve, or to get others to solve, today's iteration of California's recurring fiscal crisis, Jerry Brown, the recurring governor, recently approved a new contract for the prison guards union. Henceforth, guards can cash out at retirement an unlimited number of unused vacation days. Most California employees can monetize only 80 accrued days. Many guards will receive lump sums exceeding $100,000. The Legislative Analyst's Office estimates that guards possess time worth $600 million. The union contributed almost $2 million to Brown's 2010 campaign. In 1980, according to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, 10 percent of the state's general fund went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons; in 2010, almost 11 percent went to prisons and 7.5 percent to higher education. The national average incarceration cost is $29,000 per inmate per year. California's cost is $49,000, about $7,000 more than a year's tuition at Dartmouth.

Critique of Pure Reason

Lanny Friedlander had pretty much disappeared from the world's sight for 40 years. As a college student back in 1968, he'd started a little magazine in his dorm room at Boston University -- with a ream of paper, a ditto machine, and a boundless enthusiasm for his own ideas. But he had to give up both college and the magazine, which he called Reason, when the first symptoms of his mental illness appeared. He wouldn't appear in the public prints again until his obituary was published in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, and stirred thoughts of What Might Have Been.