Right Opinion

Stop ATF's Anti-Gun Zealots

For 30 years, Chicago banned handguns. The crime rate skyrocketed. Murders soared. Gangs blossomed. Desperate city officials even considered calling the National Guard to combat the out-of-control violence that all the "community organizing" in the world couldn't curb. The Supreme Court struck down Chicago's individual firearms ownership prohibition last year, but the same anti-gun zealots who put Windy City citizens' lives at risk remain in power. And now one of them may soon be in charge of the scandal-plagued Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Planned Parenthood: So Accustomed to Lies

Perhaps you've seen the commercials touting the life-saving benefits of Planned Parenthood. They're very professional, very persuasive, and clearly very expensive. Viewers might wonder why, if Planned Parenthood can afford this multimillion-dollar image advertising, it would be devastated by the loss of about $300 million in taxpayer support? That Planned Parenthood is spooked by Republican efforts to withdraw funding is obvious -- though they have additional reasons to fret about their image just now. Over the course of the past few months, they've been stung by a group calling itself Live Action. In one case, a man and a woman posing as a pimp and a prostitute (yes, shades of the ACORN prank) visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in Perth Amboy, N.J. There, a Planned Parenthood manager coached the couple in how to obtain birth control, HIV tests, and abortions for prostitutes she was told were 14 and 15 years old. The manager was fired, but not before real damage was done to Planned Parenthood's reputation.

Blocking a UN Threat to the Family

Do elections matter? You bet they do! Until last November, there was a real threat that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) would be ratified by a liberal U.S. Senate majority. And we're still not out of the woods on this one. But thanks to timely action by Sen. Jim DeMint, effective action is being taken to blunt this threat. Sen. DeMint (R-S.C.) has introduced S. Res 99 to prevent the Senate from ratifying the CRC (or, as some wag has called it, the CRoC). Sen. DeMint has garnered considerable support among senators to prevent the necessary two-thirds vote to ratify CRC.

Texting Teen Sex

Revolutions are always unpredictable, depending on the way always unpredictable people adapt to them. That's true of high-tech revolutions as well as revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and a lot of other places. Humans are curious creatures. The revolution in communications, for example, for all of its benign access -- and success -- comes with social consequences that continue to surprise and occasionally alarm. Nothing seemed simpler for increasing opportunities for adults to stay in touch with their children's comings and goings than the cell phone. The cell phone that seems to grow out of the ears on every teenager's head and allows them to reach out to their friends seemed harmless enough. At first.

Finding Out

It was an auxiliary -- not a U.S. military or government source -- who encouraged me to report that allied air-ground control teams and commandos were already on the ground in Libya providing target data when the first French and British airstrikes took place near Benghazi on March 19. Afterward, I was disparaged for disclosing classified information. The critique is misplaced. My reports described why these ground control teams were essential to allied aircraft attacks on Gadhafi's armored mechanized units that were about to overrun rebel forces. I noted that these close air support missions preceded U.S. and British missile strikes and airstrikes against Gadhafi's air defense sites and that they had nothing to do with establishing a no-fly zone as we were being told by the Obama administration. The information I relayed was not classified -- but it could not be independently confirmed. Now it is.

Fight Over Florida Early Primary More Important Than Most Realize

Once again, Florida legislators are pushing to upend things by moving their state's presidential preference primaries up to the front of the pack among states. Imagine that! One of the largest states in the nation -- and one that may best represent the American electorate as a whole -- wants to be ahead of comparatively small states such as Iowa and South Carolina. And how has that Iowa gig been working out for the GOP? Oh, that's right, they voted for Mike Huckabee in the last presidential nomination process. Now he's on TV, playing a banjo or whatever. And unless my memory is shot, I believe the Iowa GOP didn't even give the nod to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Syria's 'Reformer'

WASHINGTON -- Few things said by this administration in its two years can match this one for moral bankruptcy and strategic incomprehensibility. First, it's demonstrably false. It was hoped that President Assad would be a reformer when he inherited his father's dictatorship a decade ago. Being a London-educated eye doctor, he received the full Yuri Andropov treatment -- the assumption that having been exposed to Western ways, he'd been Westernized. Wrong. Assad has run the same iron-fisted Alawite police state as did his father.

What's That He Said?

Welcome to the Muddle East, which these days extends across North Africa to Tripoli and points west. Now that Barack Obama has explained this country's policy toward Libya -- or by maybe by now it's NATO's policy, or the UN's, or the European Community's, or anybody's but his -- it's as muddled as ever. If not more so. How sum up that policy? To sum up the president's long-awaited speech about American policy toward Libya, which isn't an easy task, and may be an impossible one, the president believes that country's long-time dictator and nutcase (not necessarily in that order) must go, but doesn't believe in ousting him.

The Failure of Obama's Conventional Wisdom

In 2008 supporters of Barack Obama subscribed to the view that his election would, not to put too fine a point on it, "change everything." Maybe they were right. For the last two years, the old ways of Washington have been crashing down like pillars of Mordor at the end of "The Lord of the Rings." Then-candidate Obama was himself fond of noting that the conventional wisdom -- or "CW" -- was that a black guy with a funny name could never be elected president. His chief opponent, he explained, wasn't any candidate but "cynicism" itself. It was a clever bit of messaging, not least because it worked. Obama not only won, he captured such "impossible" states as Indiana and Virginia.

Unanswered Questions

The president's speech on Libya this week raised more questions than it answered. And with fighting there escalating, as Gadhafi's troops battle poorly trained and armed rebels driving them back from strategic territory they had gained, it seems likely that circumstances will force a more expansive role than President Obama outlined. We are already under pressure from our allies to provide arms to the rebels, directly or indirectly. But we are not positioned to make an informed decision unless we have a better understanding of what is happening on the ground. In his speech, the president stated U.S. goals as narrowly as possible -- to protect civilian populations from slaughter at the hands of Gadhafi's forces. He has demurred on the larger issue of whether it is the goal of the military operation to remove Gadhafi from power, though clearly, any outcome short of Gadhafi's departure would harm U.S. interests. But the problem in Libya, as it was in Iraq, is that we have too little idea what will happen after we achieve our declared military aims.

A Few Lefties I Have Known

Whenever I hear people dismissing Fox News as a propaganda machine for conservatives, I know one thing for certain, and that is that they have never watched it. At most, they've flipped past while switching from the Cartoon Network to MSNBC, or have I once again repeated myself? Frankly, there are times I find myself wishing that Fox were a bit more conservative than it is. After all, there's only so much time in a day and I hate wasting any of it listening to the inanities of Lis Wiehl, Alan Colmes, Ellis Henican, Leslie Marshall, Juan Williams, Geraldo Rivera or Columbia Professor Marc Lamont Hill, whose field of expertise is rap and hip-hop music, although you'd never know it when Bill O'Reilly has him pontificating on major issues. When any of those folks are on camera, I feel that Fox's motto should be changed to "Unfair and Unbalanced."

President Obama Apologizes to President Bush

Dear George, The Gulf oil spill opened my eyes. As with Hurricane Katrina, it happened suddenly. I barked out orders. I pounded my desk. But the oil kept flowing. Worse, the nation watched it all on television and said: "Why doesn't the President do something? Doesn't he care?" From then on, I fully understood both the expectations and the limitations of this job. I ran on "hope and change." I said I would bring the sides together. The American people, I told Republicans who opposed my stimulus plan, have spoken. And "I won."

They All Fall Down

California Gov. Jerry Brown won the blame game and lost the budget. Brown began with a proposal to put a measure on the ballot to extend the 2009 tax increases on income taxes, sales taxes and the vehicle license fee. It was a gamble. Voters rejected a similar tax measure in 2009. Most GOP lawmakers have signed no-new-taxes pledges. Even Brown didn't dare campaign on today's tax plan -- and he's a Democrat. Then came the bargaining. Republicans say that Brown wouldn't give on spending dear to the public-employee unions that helped elect him. The Brownies say that the Party of No kept heaping new terms onto their wish list so that negotiators never could get to yes.

Step Up to the Plate

I Stand With Max

NEW YORK -- Monday night, I attended a public policy discussion sponsored, not surprisingly, by The American Spectator; I say not surprisingly because I have been attending these meetings for roughly 30 years and always come away with fresh ideas. They are meant to ventilate ideas, and now that a presidential election is drawing near, we are inviting presidential candidates as our special guests to float their ideas by our assembled luminaries. At any rate, Monday night, while President Barack Obama was addressing the nation on the causes and consequences of his involvement in Libya, I listened to former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty cross that very same terrain. The dinner was off the record, but I do not believe that I betray any confidences when I say Pawlenty's discourse was very different from that of our president.

Obama Cried, Kids Died

"Humanitarian" seems to be the Democrats' new word for "absolutely no national interest." The Democrats were not so interested in a "humanitarian" intervention against a much more brutal dictator in Iraq. But, of course, taking out Saddam Hussein, a state sponsor of terrorism who harbored one of the perpetrators of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, would make Americans safer.

Is the Tea Party Pooped? It Must Keep Making Its Case

Has the wind gone out of the sails of the smaller government movement? Is the tea party movement going through a hangover? You can find some evidence for these propositions. In Washington, Democrats like former National Chairman Howard Dean look forward gleefully to a government shutdown, and Sen. Charles Schumer thinks he can drive a wedge between Speaker John Boehner and "extremist" tea partiers. And in state capitals some new Republican governors are getting hostile receptions to their plans for cutting spending and curtailing the power of public employee unions.

Breaking Trust

Let us have a "time out" from the wars and upheavals in the Middle East to consider another war taking place in too many of our homes. That would be the war against our children and the one between parent and child. A report from the website "The Daily Beast" should get our attention. The story, written by Conchita Sarnoff and Lee Aitken, reveals how new documents the writers obtained show how hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein, who last year completed a 13-month sentence for soliciting prostitution from a minor, managed to "finesse the kinds of sex-crime allegations typically associated with a hefty prison sentence." The Daily Beast found that, "despite overwhelming evidence of sex crimes with dozens of young girls," a "protracted campaign to undermine the prosecution" coupled with "fear and intimidation experienced by victims during pre-trial proceedings," resulted in "a set of charges that became a virtual slap on the wrist."

President Obama's Most Amazing Libyan Achievements

By bombing Libya, President Obama accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America: a) War-mongering liberals. Liberals are now chest-thumping about military "progress" in Libya. Even liberal television and radio cite ingenious reasons why an optional, preemptive American intervention in an oil-producing Arab country, without prior congressional approval or majority public support -- and at a time of soaring deficits -- is well worth supporting, in a sort of "my president, right or wrong" fashion. Apparently liberal foreign policy is returning to the pre-Vietnam days of the hawkish "best and brightest."

A So-So Presidential Speech

If President Obama's address to the nation the other night was meant to keep the American people up-to-date on the situation in the Middle East, it missed its mark, leaving us in a state of confusion. For starters, the president implicitly limited America's proven exceptionalism. We may be exceptional, he admits, but not in his opinion nearly enough to maintain our lead position as protectors of the rights of all people everywhere.