Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
The Democrats' Friends 'n Fat Cats Protection Plan
As the budget stalemate in Washington continues, Democrats are ratcheting up their class-warfare caterwauling. Time to bring out your earplugs and hypocrisy meters: Liberal political strategist Donna Brazile took to Twitter to assail fiscal conservatives for "taking medicine from seniors" and cutting taxes for "the rich and their corporate donors." Do-nothing House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi attacked Republicans for paving a "path to poverty for America's seniors and children and a road to riches for big oil."
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Political Statistics
When someone gives you a check and the bank informs you that there are insufficient funds, who do you get mad at? In your own life, you get mad at the guy who gave you a check that bounced, not at the bank. But, in politics, you get mad at whoever tells you that there is no money. One of the secrets of the growth of the welfare state is that politicians get a lot of mileage out of making promises, without setting aside enough money to fulfill those promises.
Goldstone: You Cannot Undo a Slander
Richard Goldstone, the formerly respected South African jurist who disgraced himself by lending his name to a sinister and libelous U.N. report condemning Israel for war crimes, has now issued a very public retraction. "If I had known then what I know now," he wrote in The Washington Post, "the Goldstone Report would have been a different document." New information has persuaded him, he said, "that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy" by Israel. While this recantation is better than none, it invites the question: How could Goldstone not have known the relevant facts? A 10-year-old could have known the relevant facts.
Treasury: True Government Spending Topped $11 Trillion Last Year
If you look at the historical tables attached to President Barack Obama's latest budget proposal, they say the federal government took in $2.165 trillion in revenues in fiscal 2010 and spent $3.720 trillion, leaving a federal deficit of approximately $1.555 trillion. This looks like a horror story, of course. Yet the true story is more horrible. To find that story, you have to look at the financial statements quietly posted by the U.S. Treasury on the website of the Financial Management Service. These documents show the actual accounting for the federal government in much the same way your bank statements show the actual accounting for your household.
Misogynist Video Games
Karen's nine-year-old son came home from a birthday party at a locally owned "family fun" center with plenty to tell. The party was great, especially the laser tag and the pizza. But he didn't like the arcade games, one in particular. "It had, like, men hitting girls. Beating them up and killing them. I didn't like it." Karen was appalled, first that a facility that depends on family patronage would even have such a game, and second, that this violent, misogynist game was being used by young children.
Why God Isn't Doing Well These Days
God is not doing very well these days. Here are four reasons: The first is that increasingly large numbers of men and women attend university, and Western universities have become essentially secular (and leftist) seminaries. Just as the agenda of traditional Christian and Jewish seminaries is to produce religious Christians and religious Jews, the agenda of Western universities is to produce (left-wing) secularists. The difference is that Christian and Jewish seminaries are honest about their agenda, while the universities still claim they have neither secularist nor political agenda.
Democratic Demagoguery on the Budget
One reason Democratic policies have made America such a worry-free land these last couple of years is the uniqueness of Democratic gifts and abilities. For instance, did you know Democratic spokesmen can see into the future? Well, they can. Days before House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a Republican, was to lay out his $4 trillion plan for controlling federal spending and reviving the economy, Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) knew what was in it. He had odor, flavor and contents down pat. Not a bite of it would we want to ingest. Trust him.
Spreading Wealth the Right Way
During the 2008 presidential campaign when candidate Barack Obama told "Joe the Plumber" that he wanted to "spread the wealth around," it sounded to a lot of conservatives like socialism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," in the words of Karl Marx. There is a kind of wealth spreading, however, that ought to meet the political litmus test of conservative Republicans, liberal Democrats and radical Independents. At a time of high unemployment, too many layoffs and too few new jobs in the private sector (230,000 jobs were created last month, according to the Labor Department, but unemployment continues to officially hover at just under 9 percent and Gallup calculates it, without seasonal adjustment, at 10.0 percent), it is disheartening to see so many CEOs having recovered enough from their personal recession to pay themselves salaries and benefits that would have shamed the super-rich in America's Gilded Age.
Hatch and Lee's Balanced Budget Amendment: A Win for America
Senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee introduced a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) to make it a constitutional requirement for Washington, D.C., to end our deficit spending and culture of debt. And our national grassroots organization, Pass the Balanced Budget Amendment, is working with them to compel lawmakers to approve this change to the Supreme Law of the Land. The BBA requires that the U.S. cannot spend more than it takes in. There are a few exceptions, such as allowing two-thirds of the House and Senate to suspend it for a specific reason for one year, with lower thresholds to respond to a military threat to our national security or an official, declared war against a specific nation (not some open-ended or global military operation).
Democrats Not Governing, But Lying in Wait
Do you believe Rep. Paul Ryan when he says we only have a few years left to get our fiscal house in order, or we're going to face European-type austerity? How about the co-chairmen of the bipartisan deficit commission, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, who have essentially issued the same warning? Have you taken a hard look at President Obama's 10-year budget with a view to whether it would marginally address the crisis? Are you aware of the gargantuan deficits it projects -- averaging some $1 trillion per year -- and that this is before considering the Congressional Budget Office's scoring that revealed that its projected cumulative deficits were understated by a staggering $2.3 trillion?
Immelt, the Jobs Czar From Hell
The New York Times reported last month that General Electric earned $14.2 billion in international profits, including, $5.1 billion in the United States. Yet GE did not pay a dime in federal income taxes last year. Oddly, President Obama chose GE Chairman and chief executive Jeffrey Immelt to head his President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. According to the Associated Press, Immelt's compensation package doubled to $15.2 million last year, while this year, GE is seeking major concessions from the unions that represent its shrinking American workforce. That makes Immelt the wrong guy for the job of jobs czar.
Monday, April 4, 2011
GOP Shouldn't Panic If Whites Become a Minority
Are whites on the verge of becoming a minority of the American population? That's what some analysts of the 2010 Census results claim. Many go on, sometimes with relish, to say that this spells electoral doom for the Republican Party. I think the picture is more complicated than that. And that the demise of the Republican Party is no more foreordained than it was a century ago when Italian, Jewish and Polish immigrants were pouring into the United States in proportions much greater than the Hispanic and Asian immigration of the past two decades.
Barack and Friends
In many ways, it must be very nice being Barack Obama. I'm not even referring to all the rounds of golf, where a 50-foot putt is regarded as a gimme; the basketball games, where the Secret Service makes damn sure nobody blocks him out on his way to the hoop; or even all the paid vacations to exotic locales. I'm referring to all the things he does, knowing full well that the love-sappy Democrats will never get so upset that he need worry about receiving their financial support or their votes in 2012.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Sign of Our Times
WASHINGTON -- A dialectic of judicial deference and political arrogance is on display in St. Louis. When excessively deferential courts permit governmental arrogance, additional arrogance results as government explores the limits of judicial deference. As Jim Roos knows. He formed a nonprofit housing and community development corporation that provides residences for low-income people. Several times its properties have been seized by the city government, using "blight" as an excuse for transferring property to developers who can pay more taxes to the seizing government.
'No Blood for Oil' Is for Sale!
"No blood for oil" was a popular slogan chanted by the left in opposition to President George W. Bush's push to send U.S. forces into Iraq. Now that President Obama authorized Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya, I have been waiting to hear chants of "no blood for oil." I am happy to report, I don't hear them.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
It's Time, Mr. President: A Time for Clarity
When, oh, when is the Obama administration going to recognize the rebels in Benghazi as that country's legitimate government? Those ill-equipped, ill-organized freedom fighters remain the world's best hope of dislodging Libya's still dangerous dictator in Tripoli. Just as our Afghan allies proved capable of driving the Taliban from Kabul with a little help, and maybe more than a little, from an America striking back at al-Qaida after September 11th.
Views From Burt's Perch
Many years ago, I recall seeing Clement Freud on TV and he made a lasting impression. The grandson of Sigmund, he had spent some time in an English mental institution. At the time I saw him, he had decided to run for Parliament. When the interviewer asked him what qualified him to help decide national policy, he said that when he was released from the asylum, he was given a certificate of sanity. He was quite convinced that he was the only politician in the land who had official verification of that fact. Wouldn't it be great if we had some politicians who could make that claim? Instead, we're up to our ears in such mentally challenged dunces as Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Weiner, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee and Charles Schumer. The fact is, when I look at folks like Henry Waxman, John Kerry and Harry Reid, I find it hard to believe they were delivered by storks. A far more likely means of transport would have been vultures.
From The Comedy Store
The Bronx Zoo had to be shut down Monday after a highly poisonous cobra escaped and crawled into New York. It got a lot of attention. The surest sign yet that the economy is recovering is that the snakes are leaving their nests and heading back to Wall Street.
A Re-election Jobs Report?
Did the big March jobs report put President Obama back on the road to re-election? If so, he can thank the GOP, whose tax cuts saved him from himself. You could hear cheering all the way from the West Wing when the Labor Department showed a 216,000 gain in non-farm payrolls, the biggest number in quite some time. Plus, the unemployment rate continued its decline to 8.8 percent. Not so long ago it was nearly 10 percent.
Of Gods and Men
It's a discussion for another day as to why those entrusted with the delivery of news so stubbornly refuse to cover the very deadly war being waged at this very moment against Christianity in the Middle East. The aggressors are radical Islamists, the victims Christians, especially those wearing the cloth. Every week, another report detailing another attack seeps through the wall of non-information, of men condemned to death in Saudi Arabia for the crime of conversion, of Catholic churches bombed in Baghdad on Christmas Day, of Coptic congregations slaughtered in Egypt and the like. Sad and troubling to be sure, but it's over there ... over there. Do you have any recollection of the story 15 years ago of the small community of Trappist monks in Algeria kidnapped in a prisoner-exchange plot and then murdered? To the extent I was aware of the brutal story, it was something I quickly filed away in the memory banks under "Oh, dear." Nothing more.