Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Full-Throttle Drill, Drill, Drill
If you buy into the energy speech President Obama delivered on Wednesday, it sure sounds like we're headed for drill, drill, drill. It would be a total reversal of policy. I guess $100-plus oil and near $4 gas at the pump -- along with a consumer economic-political revolt -- will do that to you. After bashing oil and gas companies for a couple of years and instituting a virtual drilling moratorium, President Obama now says yes to offshore oil and makes a big pitch for natural gas. There may even be incentives for faster leasing and smaller royalty payments to the government. Is it credible? Well, when you get to the fine print, it may not be.
School Choice: A Real Test Awaits
Imagine you could buy a car at only one dealership. Shop for clothes at only one outlet. Buy food at only one grocery store. What kind of service would you expect? Mediocre at best. Which isn't surprising. We all know competition promotes quality. When you can shop wherever you please, merchants know the only way to woo your business is to offer a superior product. So if the rule applies to cars, clothes and food -- and hundreds of other things -- why shouldn't it apply to our children's education?
Measuring Force
You don't just walk up to the local bully and slap him across the face. If you are determined to confront him, then you try to knock the living daylights out of him. Otherwise, you are better off to leave him alone. Anyone who grew up in my old neighborhood in Harlem could have told you that. But Barack Obama didn't grow up in my old neighborhood. He had a much more genteel upbringing, including a fancy private school, in Hawaii.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Department of Injustice
One of the requirements to become a Dayton, Ohio police officer is to successfully pass the city's two-part written examination. Applicants must correctly answer 57 of 86 questions on the first part (66 percent) and 73 of 102 (72 percent) on the second part. Dayton's Civil Service Board reported that 490 candidates passed the November 2010 written test, 57 of whom were black. About 231 of the roughly 1,100 test takers were black. The U.S. Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Eric Holder, rejected the results of Dayton's Civil Service examination because not enough blacks passed. The DOJ has ordered the city to lower the passing score. The lowered passing grade requires candidates to answer 50 of 86 (58 percent) questions correctly on the first part and 64 of 102 (63 percent) of questions on the second. The DOJ-approved scoring policy requires potential police officers to earn the equivalent of an "F" on the first part and a "D" on the second. Based on the DOJ-imposed passing scores, a total of 748 people, 258 more than before, were reported passing the exam. Unreported was just how many of the 258 are black.
Ahead of the Game
LITTLE ROCK -- It is a truth universally acknowledged among baseball fans: There is life and there is the off-season. The off-season now thrashes to an end in the throes of March Madness, which features proto-professional athletes running around in baggy shorts under hoops while everybody else in the country dives into betting pools. They don't call it madness for nothing. But the fit will soon be past, and even now life returns like health after a long sickness. Its first sprouts -- verdant, clear, promising -- can be found in the friendly confines of your nearest minor-league ballpark.
Money for Moochers
As the Supreme Court heard a First Amendment challenge to Arizona's rules for public financing of political candidates on Monday morning, it became clear that the state's Clean Elections system was doomed. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is expected to provide the decisive vote, telegraphed his position by plainly describing the system's essence, albeit in the form of a question. "Do you think it would be a fair characterization of this law," Kennedy asked Institute for Justice attorney William Maurer, "to say that its purpose and its effect are to produce less speech in political campaigns?" It is difficult to conclude otherwise after considering how Arizona's Citizens Clean Elections Act works and how its supporters justified it.
Students Who Get It!
I went to Princeton in 1969, where they taught me that government could solve the world's problems. Put the smartest people in a room, give them enough taxpayer money, and they will fix most everything. During those years, I heard nothing about an alternative. How things have changed! I recently spent time with several hundred college-aged people at a Students for Liberty conference in Washington, D.C. Here were hundreds of students who actually understand that government creates many of the problems, and freedom -- personal and economic liberty -- makes things better.
Obama's 'Empty Words': Our Constitution
President Barack Obama shares at least one thing in common with one of the lesser Founding Fathers. He and Pierce Butler, a South Carolina delegate at the Constitutional Convention, both flip-flopped on their interpretation of the Constitution's war power. The difference between Obama's flip-flop and Butler's is that Butler's was defensible. In fact, it can now help contemporary Americans understand exactly where the Framers intended the war power to reside. You see, Butler took the wrong position at the Constitutional Convention itself, during the actual debate on the war power -- before it and other elements of the document were finalized and sent to the states for ratification.
Obama's Libyan War
Think of all the militant anti-war types who were thrilled at the removal of the Bush "war machine" in 2008, only to see President Obama's strained endorsement of military action in Libya. Oh, how the political wave of the hard left has crashed ashore. It seems like only yesterday when they were celebrating Cindy Sheehan as she flagrantly called President Bush "the biggest terrorist in the world." Then they elected Obama and it all went to hell. Over the last two years, these chagrined radicals have watched in stunned disbelief while their hero Obama continued the Iraq War wrap-up on the generals' timeline and then added more troops in Afghanistan. They listened in shock as Team Obama announced it was reversing itself on indefinite detentions at Guantanamo.
America Is Burning
Two weeks ago, I visited New York City with my wife, who was interviewing at a local medical school located in the Bronx. I dropped her at the school. Since I was lacking a car, I hopped on a public bus, intending to take it to the local subway station. I have never been so frightened for my country in my life. The bus itself was fine; all the people on it had places to be. It was the subway station that was truly scary. The station itself looked like a bomb had hit it. Debris covered the shattered tile floor. The stench of vomit and urine permeated the place. Rust layered the tracks; wooden boards between the tracks moldered into dust. The station had clearly been beautiful at one point, but now it looked like a leftover set from "The Omega Man."
If It Is Tuesday, It Must Be Syria
In 1427, a ship captain sailing for his Portuguese Prince, Henry the Navigator, discovered the Azores Islands. If the question of the significance of this event had been posed, at the time, to Sultan Murad Khan (the leader of the Ottoman Empire), or to Itzcoatl and Nezahualcoyotl (the co-leaders of the Aztecs) or to Rao Kanha (one of the princes of Jodhpur in India), it is unlikely that any of them would have responded that it is an early indication of a historic explosion of cultural energy in Europe that will lead to European exploration and conquest of most of the known world, and to a renaissance of European thought that will give rise to scientific, industrial and scholarly dominance of the planet by European culture for at least half a millennium.
Project Gunrunner: Obama's Stimulus-Funded Border Nightmare
Buried in Barack Obama's failed trillion-dollar stimulus program was a $10 million bloody border racket that has now cost American lives. This goes far beyond the usual waste, fraud and abuse underwritten by progressive profligacy. It's bloodstained government malfeasance overseen by anti-gun ideologues -- and now anti-gun ideologue Attorney General Eric Holder will "investigate." Welcome to Project Gunrunner. Prepare for another Justice Department whitewash.
Barack Obama: American Exceptionalist
Once again, it's time for Candidate Obama, circa 2007-2008, to condemn President Barack Obama. For that matter, the April 2009 Obama avatar should also sneer at the current version -- if he can't find the time to attend a Washington-area protest demonstration. So why should Candidate Id kvetch about President Ego? Let's start with the third paragraph of Obama's speech addressing Libya's War of Liberation. The paragraph begins his argument for intervention: "For generations, the United States of America has played a unique role as an anchor of global security and advocate for human freedom. Mindful of the risks and costs of military action, we are naturally reluctant to use force to solve the world's many challenges. But when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act."
Taking Feminism Overseas
Feminism as a "movement" in America is largely played out. The work here is mostly done. At a time when education matters more than ever, more American women attend college than men. More women graduate, with better grades and get more advanced degrees. As Kay Hymowitz writes in her new book, "Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys": "For the first time ever, and I do mean ever, young women are reaching their twenties with more achievements, more education, more property, and, arguably, more ambition than their male counterparts."
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Voting With Their Feet
The latest published data from the 2010 census show how people are moving from place to place within the United States. In general, people are voting with their feet against places where the liberal, welfare-state policies favored by the intelligentsia are most deeply entrenched. When you break it down by race and ethnicity, it is all too painfully clear what is happening. Both whites and blacks are leaving California, the poster state for the liberal, welfare-state and nanny-state philosophy.
A Gift for the Obvious
If there were an award for stating the obvious when it comes to the Middle East it would go to The New York Times. On its front page last Friday, the newspaper ran a story headlined, "Muslim Group is Rising Force in New Egypt." What group would that be? Why, the Muslim Brotherhood, of course. We have been repeatedly assured by certain pundits and members of the Obama administration that the Brotherhood are a small minority with no major influence in Egypt and that those Cairo protesters clamoring for "democracy" that led to the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak would be the ones to chart the country's future. Each time another myth is busted, the deniers of what is happening throughout the region simply create a new myth, one they desperately cling to against all evidence to the contrary.
God's Power Is Real
Two studies caught my eye this week. One, released by the American Physical Society, presented data suggesting that religion is headed for "extinction" in nine Western countries: Canada, Ireland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
It's BACK! The Return of Stagflation
Some of us have seen this movie before -- and didn't much like it the first time. The cast might have changed but the plot is the same: A president thinks he can keep spending-and-taxing, running up deficits and adding to the national debt, but escape the inescapable result: rising inflation. More dollars, less wealth. Why work, save, invest, put in overtime or start a business if the dollars you earn are worth less and less? Inflation is the most insidious of taxes, eroding people's savings, salaries, initiative.
How Awful Is GE?
April 18 looms like a specter at this time of year, casting a pall over the forsythia and daffodils that coax us to be cheerful. Like a sick child who longs to play outside on a sunny day but must remain confined, we itemizers are chained to desks or dining-room tables littered with receipts, calendars, checkbook registers, and credit card statements for the annual spring ordeal. Not that we file our own taxes. No, like 71 percent of Americans (according to Rasmussen), and like the overwhelming majority of members of Congress, including those on tax-writing committees, we pay someone else to prepare our taxes. The pencil-chewing dining-room table tribulation is merely the necessary antecedent to the actual preparation of a tax return by a professional.
Let Voters Decide on Pensions, Spending
In Sacramento, the knee-jerk response to any crisis is to blame the Republicans. But if Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic legislative leaders can't cut a deal to win the two GOP votes in the Assembly and two in the Senate needed to qualify Brown's tax-increase extension for the June ballot, Democrats must take their share of responsibility for fudging a deal. First, there's the original sin: Brown's decision to stake his budget package on a do-over ballot measure that voters rejected by a 2-1 margin in 2009. Brown knew when he plotted this strategy that it would be career suicide for Republicans to vote for the sort of tax increases that he himself dared not advocate when he ran for governor.