Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
The Media on Wisconsin? A Bad Joke
The battle in Madison, Wis., between new Gov. Scott Walker and the public-sector union hacks offers an amazing study in journalistic double standards. The same national media that have spent the last two years drawing devil's horns and Klan hoods on the tea party protesters have switched sides with lightning speed. In the Wisconsin protesters, they find sweetness and light, "hope and change." From her Sunday soapbox, ABC host Christiane Amanpour snobbishly deplored the tea party as not conservative but as "extreme" last fall. In a special "town hall" episode of her show on the ground zero mosque debate, she accused an incredulous Gary Bauer of encouraging vandalism at a Tennessee mosque because somehow Christian rhetoric is offensive. The accusation itself was offensive because it was entirely baseless.
Reality-Based Politics
At the risk of giddy over-optimism, I have the hunch that the American voting public is beginning to demand legislating that actually deals with the nation's problems. There is creeping -- still ambiguous -- evidence of this, starting with the national polling data. I argued last December that President Barack Obama's support for the extension of the Bush tax cuts would not end up helping him once the 2011 legislating season started picking up steam, because by principle the president was toward the left side of the political spectrum -- and the public was toward the right -- particularly on the matter of public debt and deficit.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
What Madison Revealed: Teachers as Rent Seekers
The particular defunct economist who most dominates the minds of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party is Keynes himself. But events in Wisconsin and a few other states are bringing other economists -- some still very much alive -- to the fore. In Wisconsin and other states facing severe budget crises, we are witnessing the clash of special interests versus the public interest. Though the term "special interests" is usually deployed as an epithet by Democrats and is meant to refer to oil companies, "the rich," or other undesirables, in fact, as economist James M. Buchanan and other "public choice" theorists explain, a special interest is any community that attempts to gain a particular advantage from government.
Madison Madness
The Democratic/government-union days of rage in Madison, Wis., are a disgrace. Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan calls it Cairo coming to Madison. But the protesters in Egypt were pro-democracy. The government-union protesters in Madison are anti-democracy -- they are trying to prevent a vote in the legislature. In fact, Democratic legislators themselves are fleeing the state so as not to vote on Gov. Scott Walker's budget cuts. That's not democracy. The teachers' union is going on strike in Milwaukee and elsewhere. They ought to be fired. Think Ronald Reagan PATCO in 1981. Think Calvin Coolidge police strike in 1919.
Reckless Spending
Nothing more clearly illustrates the utter irresponsibility of Barack Obama than his advocacy of "high-speed rail." The man is not stupid. He knows how to use words that will sound wonderful to people who do not bother to stop and think. High-speed rail may be feasible in parts of Europe or Japan, where the population density is much higher than in the United States. But, without enough people packed into a given space, there will never be enough riders to repay the high cost of building and maintaining a high-speed rail system.
How to Deny a Birthright
One of the uncounted, indeed oft intangible, ways in which the United States of America is an exceptional country is that here citizenship is not a matter of race, creed, color or national descent. Nor of blood-and-iron or whatever barriers other nations may erect to protect their Kultur or further their mission civilisatrice. Ours is a different, more open and embracing bond, to wit: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." --Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
In the Center of the Storm
MADISON, Wis. -- Hitherto, when this university town and seat of state government applauded itself as "the Athens of the Midwest," the sobriquet suggested kinship with the cultural glories of ancient Greece. Now, however, Madison resembles contemporary Athens. This capital has been convulsed by government employees sowing disorder in order to repeal an election. A minority of the minority of Wisconsin residents who work for government (300,000 of them) are resisting changes to benefits that most of Wisconsin's 5.6 million residents resent financing.
Stifling the Voice of Conscience
Last week, the Obama Administration jettisoned a Bush-era regulation that protected the conscience rights of health care workers, replacing it with a stripped-down version. The new regulations remove conscience protections from pharmacists and other health care workers, and limit the scope of remaining protections. While doctors and nurses still cannot be fired for refusing, on the basis of conscience, to perform abortions or sterilizations -- others in the health care field will now be forced to participate in procedures and practices that may violate their deeply held religious convictions.
Coolidge-Reagan-Walker?
When three-fourths of the Boston police department went on strike in 1919, leading to broken shop windows and looting, then-Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge called out the state militia and broke the strike. Coolidge declared, "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time." His courage propelled him to the vice presidency and eventually to the presidency.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Daniels and Christie Light Fuse Under GOP Lawmakers
As congressional Republicans mull whether to address the government's long-term fiscal problems -- House Republican leaders are being pushed by the 87 freshmen to do so, while some Senate Republicans are seeking some bipartisan accords with Democratic colleagues -- two Republican governors barreled into Washington with the message that the lawmakers better get moving. And that congressional Republicans might do just fine politically if they do. The two Republican governors are Mitch Daniels of Indiana, who spoke to a Conservative Political Action Committee dinner Feb. 11, and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who spoke at American Enterprise Institute (where I am a resident fellow) on Feb. 16.
The Loonies Are Running the Asylum
Frankly, I have to confess that I was a bit surprised that Harry Reid managed to keep the Senate Democrats in line and unanimously vote not to repeal ObamaCare. I mean, when you realize that last year, he had to bribe and intimidate a number of those bozos to pass the legislation, I actually thought that between the Democrats who are bowing out in 2012 and those who will have to seek re-election with that multi-trillion dollar albatross hanging around their necks, a few liberal rodents might actually jump the sinking ship.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Wrestling Sacred Cows
WASHINGTON -- The wrestling room at Graham High School in St. Paris, Ohio, where Jim Jordan, now 47, began the athletic career that took him to the University of Wisconsin and two NCAA wrestling championships, contains this sign: "Discipline is doing what you don't want to do when you don't want to do it." Today, as a third-term congressman from Ohio and chairman of the Republican Study Committee, Jordan leads what looks like an ongoing insurgency to discipline his party's leadership in the House of Representatives. The RSC is the caucus of the most conservative Republicans in the House. Its members are determined to find whether their party's frugality is operational or merely rhetorical. Jordan is serenely confident that those in the caucus mean what they say.
Human Nature and D.C.-backed Loans
In 2009, when CNBC's David Faber asked former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan what lessons could be learned to prevent another great financial meltdown in the wake of the mortgage-financing collapse, Greenspan did not have a happy-face answer. "Somewhere in the future we're going to have this conversation again," Greenspan replied. "It will not be for quite a period of time, but it will occur because the flaws in human nature are such that we cannot change that. It doesn't work."
Saturday, February 19, 2011
From The Comedy Store
CIA Director Leon Panetta guessed wrong last Thursday telling Congress that Mubarak would resign that day. He vowed to improve the intelligence-gathering capacity at CIA headquarters. The next day, he told the General Services Administration that every office at the CIA must have cable television no matter what it costs.
Shooting Liberal Fish in a Barrel
It isn't merely that they're always wrong about everything that makes leftists so damn obnoxious, it's their unshakeable belief that they're always right. In a world that calls for logic, they have an endless supply of emotion. Talk about bringing a knife to a gunfight, these lunkheads bring a crying towel.
Too Much Tolerance for Charlie Sheen
The 911 call went out Jan. 27. Charlie Sheen was unconscious after another wild 36-hour bout with alcohol and drugs. People magazine reported paramedics found him unresponsive, drooling blood. He looked like death. He was rushed to the hospital, and there the family gathered, expecting the worst. Again, he survived. Nobody seems able to stop this train. No one can force him to change. And CBS will stop at nothing in its willingness to dote on its superstar, offering no "judgmental" analysis of his behavior. In this business, profitability comes before respectability. Sheen, star of the filthy sitcom "Two and a Half Men," is the highest-paid actor in television (at $1.2 million per episode), and he can apparently do and say anything and be welcomed back to work. It's why Entertainment Weekly calls Sheen "TV's Most Valuable Disaster."
Friday, February 18, 2011
Superstar Meets Supermom
It's not easy to perfect a formula to encourage human aspiration, but two very different women in the headlines think they've done it. Lady Gaga, who just won a Grammy for best female pop vocal performance, and the Tiger Mom, whose controversial book on "parenting" became an instant best-seller, are cut from the same cloth to make a splashy costume. Both have cleverly manufactured a personal story, sensationalized its message and packaged it in a way that sells to the insecure, the overanxious and the ill at ease. Superstar meets Supermom. Though backgrounds, methods and measurements for success may be different, they both understand that we live in an age where frustration is the mother of invention, and as with the oyster, irritation is crucial. They get a pearl even if it's fake.
Apocalypse Now: Wisconsin vs. Big Labor
Welcome to the reckoning. We have met the fiscal apocalypse, and it is smack dab in the middle of the heartland. As Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation. Let us pray it does not go the way of the decrepit welfare states of the European Union. The lowdown: State government workers in the Badger State pay piddling amounts for generous taxpayer-subsidized health benefits. Faced with a $3.6 billion budget hole and a state constitutional ban on running a deficit, new GOP Gov. Scott Walker wants public unions to pony up a little more. He has proposed raising the public employee share of health insurance premiums from less than 5 percent to 12.4 percent. He is also pushing for state workers to cover half of their pension contributions. To spare taxpayers the soaring costs of Byzantine union-negotiated work rules, he would rein in Big Labor's collective bargaining power to cover only wages unless approved at the ballot box.
Liberty, 21st Century-Style
Finally, the national conversation about democracy is relatively mature and serious. Save for some TV news anchors, just about everyone seems to understand that democracy is a tricky thing. That skepticism was hard earned. The last decade provided painful lessons for everyone, on both sides of the ideological aisle. Liberals, who were once naively optimistic about democracy promotion, turned dour when President Bush became naively optimistic about it. And then supporters of Bush's freedom agenda learned a tough lesson from, among other things, the disastrous-but-democratic elections that put a terrorist junta in charge of the Gaza Strip.
Responsible Adults Cannot Ignore These Numbers
I knew we were in for real budgetary trouble with Obama, but his recent statements on the subject make me wonder whether he is so brainwashed with liberal ideology as to be divorced from reality -- or worse. Based on his tireless rhetoric, it would appear that he thinks -- contrary to all evidence, including the failure of his $868 billion stimulus package to create jobs -- that even more spending would finally lead to jobs. This, though even his economic advisers have warned us not to expect unemployment levels to reduce to acceptable levels for years.