Right Opinion

Censor the Constitution, Too

It's not enough that the professoriate has decided it can improve on Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," which is not only a great American novel but a popular nominee for The Great American Novel. This latest act of literary vandalism was committed out of regard for the tender sensibilities of a politically correct age, which can be brutal when it comes to suppressing language, that is, ideas. Especially any that come dangerously close to truly representing the past.

Shut Down the Government

It sounds harsh and cruel, but U.S. House Speaker John Boehner's threat to shut down all but essential federal government services if the Democrats on Capitol Hill can't actually reign in spending is not only the fiscally responsible approach, it is also one that would be popular with the public. Enough with the gamesmanship of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the silliness of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. It's time for Republicans to let America know that the GOP means business -- cut the budget deeply, or shut her down!

President Obama's Pathetic Scalpel

Well, now we have the answer to the question posed Nov. 2: Will President Obama, faced with an electorate infuriated by big government overreach, pivot as Bill Clinton did in 1995 and become a centrist? By offering a budget that adds a gob-smacking $8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, the president has answered that question in the negative. At his press conference, the president displayed all the classic symptoms of what could be called Liberal Obduracy Syndrome (or LOS). For Obama, every single appropriation in the monster we call a federal budget is precious -- so that he must approach it with "a scalpel, not a meat ax," as he once put it.

Obama's Louis XV Budget

WASHINGTON -- Five days before his inauguration, President-elect Obama told The Washington Post that entitlement reform could no longer be kicked down the road. He then spent the next two years kicking -- racking up $3 trillion in new debt along the way -- on the grounds that massive temporary deficit spending was necessary to prevent another Great Depression. To prove his bona fides, he later appointed a deficit reduction commission. It made its report last December, when the economy was well past recession, solemnly declaring that "the era of debt denial is over."

End Racial Preferences Now

As new figures from the Census tell us, the United States is becoming an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse nation -- with a population that doesn't fit neatly into the racial boxes constructed for "diversity" purposes. So why is it that some universities and other institutions continue to use the old paradigm of granting preferences to members of groups that are deemed "underrepresented"? The Center for Equal Opportunity, which I founded in 1995, has been documenting the use of racial and ethnic preferences in college and professional school admissions for more than a dozen years. Sad to say, too little has changed in this period. Except in a handful of states that have banned the use of race or ethnicity in state employment, contracting, and education -- California and Michigan, most prominently -- many public colleges and universities still give preference in admissions to blacks and Hispanics.

Moral Ambiguity

WASHINGTON -- For days after protests started in Cairo, the Obama administration struggled to find its voice about the "revolution" in Egypt. When the O-Team eventually decided Hosni Mubarak had to go, the White House and the State Department began chattering about a "democratic outcome." In the end, they settled for a military coup while proclaiming a "victory for the people." Now, with violent anti-government protests in the streets of Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Iran, President Barack Obama's moral ambiguity is increasingly evident -- and dangerous. The current predicament of what to do and say about the increasingly volatile situation in the Middle East is the direct consequence of totally inadequate intelligence and Obama's own vague Utopian goals for the region. It has been that way since the beginning of his tenure.

A Case for Untying Gulliver

WASHINGTON -- At first, the banquet audience at the 38th annual Conservative Political Action Conference paid Mitch Daniels, Indiana's Republican governor, the conventional compliment of frequently, almost reflexively, interrupting his address with applause. But as they realized they were hearing something unconventional -- that they were being paid the rare compliment of being addressed as reflective adults -- they reciprocated his respect with quiet attention to his elegant presentation of conservatism for grown-ups.

Multiculturalism Has Failed

WASHINGTON -- Now the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has joined the chorus. The other day, he said, "My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure." The "it" was multiculturalism, and he was on French national television. In pronouncing multiculturalism defunct, the French president joins German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Australia's former prime minister John Howard, Spain's former premier Jose Maria Aznar and, most recently, British Prime Minister David Cameron in heaving a failed policy into history's dustbin. The question is, What will replace it? Or actually another question, How did multiculturalism ever become a policy of these European countries, anyway?

Traitor to My Cause

Once upon a different time the communists and their fellow travelers had a simple slogan and strategy: No enemies to the left! It sounds better in French -- pas d'ennemis à gauche -- not just because so many things do, but because the concept originated with the French, and explains why their intellectual life can be both so rich and so mistaken. Sometimes fatally. Why? Because those who are willing to sacrifice enduring principle or even elemental decency for a transient political alliance may find themselves the first put up against the wall.

Democrats: Emboldening America's Enemies and Terrifying Her Allies Since 1976

The Middle East is on fire again, and crazy Muslims with funny names aren't helping things -- Mahmoud, ElBaradei, al-Banna, Barack ... The major new development is that NOW liberals want to get rid of a dictator in the Middle East! Where were they when we were taking out the guy with the rape rooms? Remember? The one who had gassed his own people, invaded his neighbors and was desperately seeking weapons of mass destruction? The guy who emerged from a spider hole looking like Charlie Sheen after a three-day bender? Liberals couldn't have been less interested in removing Saddam Hussein and building a democracy in Iraq. So it's really adorable seeing them get all choked up about democracy now. Say, as long as liberals are all gung-ho about getting rid of out-of-touch, overbearing dictators, how about we start with Janet Napolitano?

Budget or Card Trick?

Welcome to three-card monte. That’s all that the Obama administration's economic program amounts to -- a sleazy con man’s card trick. The president didn't even bother to pay any attention to the recommendations of his deficit reduction group, headed by former Sen. Alan Simpson. That would have required adhering to a modicum of fiscal discipline.

Obama's Budget: 'Go Ahead, GOP, Make My Day'

Learning nothing from his party's November "shellacking," President Barack Obama offers a 2012 budget that proves, yet again, he believes in government as fervently as President Ronald Reagan believed in the individual. Obama ignores the recommendations of his own bipartisan deficit-reduction commission, as well as polls showing voters want smaller government, and smugly proposes more spending, higher taxes and even bigger government. Obama then holds a press conference and, with a straight face that would have shamed Baghdad Bob, claims his budget "will not be adding more to the national debt."

Obama Budget Offers Inertia, Not Hope and Change

One way to judge the merits of the budget Barack Obama unveiled this week is by the comments of his political allies. "It's not enough to focus primarily on the non-security discretionary part of the budget," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad. Erskine Bowles, the Democrat whom Obama appointed as co-chairman of his fiscal commission, said the budget goes "nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare." "The president punted," began the editorial of The Washington Post, which endorsed Obama in 2008. The paper noted tartly that he "chose to duck" the fiscal commision's recommendations.

TSA and Big Labor: A Bad Union

Birthers, Truthers and Spreaders

My first reaction to stories about the Public Policy Polling survey that found that 51 percent of GOP primary voters believe President Obama was not born in the United States was disbelief. Informed Americans understand that Barack Obama is American-born. Conspiracy theories that suggest otherwise are too tortured to take seriously. And I'm sick of the left -- PPP is a Democratic polling firm, if with a reputation for accuracy -- flogging a story that makes Republicans look like rubes. MSNBC talking heads live to hype birther stories because, it seems, they so want Republicans to believe the conspiracy theory. They've helped make it a story that won't go away.

Smoke, Mirrors and Other Deceptions

On the home page of the Office of Management and Budget website, President Obama is quoted: "Rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated Washington for decades, it's time to try something new." If only he would, but the president's proposed $3.7 trillion budget is more of the same: taxing and spending for which liberal Democrats are known and "cuts" as in Pell Grants and home heating assistance for the poor he knows congressional Democrats are unlikely to approve. It is also full of assumptions about revenue and a rosy scenario on economic growth that is more than double current growth.

What's So Darn Great About Islam?

Between 9/12/2001 and January 2009, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice spent so much time telling us what a wonderful, peaceful religion Islam is, I kept expecting them to convert. Then Barack Hussein Obama took up residence in the White House and we got more of the same hooey. If anything, he put their gushing in the shade. He was a regular Old Faithful. He not only thought it was a swell idea to build a mosque near Ground Zero, but he kept telling the world that Muslims had been instrumental in the creation of the United States, all but referring to the founding fathers as Ibn Madison and Mahmud Washington.

Pruning Farm Subsidies

In times of massive deficits, why are we borrowing millions to subsidize profitable agribusiness? Lots of presidents have asked that question. George H.W. Bush tried to cut farm subsidies in the late 1980s. Bill Clinton did, too. George W. Bush wanted them ended as well. All failed. The so-called 1996 "Freedom to Farm Act" was supposed to stop farm supports for good, by offering the carrot of extending crop payouts to growers, regardless of current commodity prices, in exchange for ending the flow of federal money altogether after a slow weaning-off period of seven years. But when it came time to honor the agreement, suddenly a new rationale appeared -- that of post-9/11 security. So crop subsidies reappeared under the "Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002," on the dubious premise that in a new terrorist climate, Americans needed to ensure the prosperity of agribusiness. "Investment" in today's bureaucratese, remember, translates into the government borrowing more money to distribute to special interests.

It's the Deficits That Are Draconian, Not Their Cuts

After the riots in Athens, the Greek authorities decided to enact new laws to deal with their obvious problems. The new laws, which treat rich and poor alike for the first time, have been seen has harsh. The name of the legislator who wrote the laws is a man called Draco. The date is believed to be 621 B.C. And more than 2,600 years later, the adjectival form of his name -- draconian -- is still tossed around here in Washington anytime someone proposes real budget cuts. Of course, most of the Washington hands who hurl the "draconian" charge around probably do not know that Draco's laws were considered "just" according to Aristotle. For the first time in Athenian law, the codes were written down so that even poor people could know what was legal and what was illegal -- thus they could avoid inadvertently breaking the law.

Pharaoh or Freedom: Is an Egyptian Democratic Front Emerging?

As revolutions go, it was the first liberal democratic domino -- and 235 years later, its proclamation that human beings are endowed with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness continues to empower democratic revolutionaries challenging autocracies and dictatorships. The American Revolution also provides the emerging architects of Egyptian democracy with very practical advice: Hang together, or you'll substitute one tyrant for another.