Right Opinion

The One Thing You Won't See on TV at the State of the Union

Tuesday, when you see President Obama give his State of the Union address, you will see four things: the president entering the hall, the president ascending the rostrum to be greeted by the vice president and the speaker of the House, the president giving his speech and the reactions of members of the Congress and others in the hall. Here is the one thing you will not see and probably have never seen. You won't see what is behind the president and above the vice president and the speaker of the House. And because you won't see it, you won't know that you are missing something of surpassing importance.

New Heroes vs. Old

When I mention that my family used kerosene lamps when I was a small child in the South during the 1930s, that is usually taken as a sign of our poverty, though I never thought of us as poor at the time. What is ironic is that kerosene lamps were a luxury of the rich in the 19th century, before John D. Rockefeller came along. At the high price of kerosene at that time, an ordinary working man could not afford to stay up at night, burning this expensive fuel for hours at a time.

Beware of Centrists Bearing Gifts

Where is this "center" nearly everyone in America wants to stand on, at least by the accounting of the commentators and political pros striving to figure out the next two years? Is it over there -- this center -- where Barack Obama has his feet planted? The jobs center, the investment and competitiveness center? The center marked by "common ground" where we all meet, have a beer or a Slurpee, and bury our hatchets for the sake of "tomorrow"? The president's re-election agenda -- and that of his new advisers -- seems to point that direction, and one can easily enough see why. The old agenda, the agenda of more and more and more government, worked until the voters took the votes away from some of the main implementers of said agenda. Obama's task for the next two years is to beckon his countrymen toward a new and, as he will constantly assure us, higher ground where all work and earn and save together.

The Spending Cuts Challenge

By now those holiday bills have arrived. Those who have charged too much have cut back on spending until the bills are paid. Some have gone on the spending wagon, cutting their plastic into tiny pieces. Not the U.S. government. Unlike mere mortals, the government can print and borrow seemingly limitless amounts of money and so has little incentive to stop spending. Some blame China for our predicament, but that's like blaming American Express for your monthly bill. China is merely the banker. Our spending habits are the problem.

Obama Moving to the Center? Wanna Buy a Bridge?

For those who argue that Obama deserves a second chance at proving he's not at war with American business and the free market, I ask what he has done to indicate he's changed his philosophy that drives that war. It's admirable to give people the benefit of the doubt in personal relationships, but we are talking about more than a personal relationship here and have a responsibility not to ignore the evidence. That evidence tells us that he is still an intractable left-wing ideologue committed to destructive progressive policy prescriptions.

Feudin' and a-Fussin'

When you saw the lengths to which the left went in their attempt to connect loony Jared Loughner to Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and/or the Tea Party, the surprise is that they never thought to connect the dots between Charles Manson and Barry Goldwater or Jeffrey Dahmer and Ronald Reagan. Even though it was obvious that Loughner was as crazy as a bedbug and as political as a beanbag, it didn't stop the likes of Dick Durbin, Paul Krugman, Steny Hoyer, Charles Rangel, Al Sharpton or Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, from trying to turn him into the poster boy for the Republican party.

Shriver and Lieberman Take JFK Link With Them

Last Thursday was the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech, and while the anniversary did not go unmentioned, it got less attention than I expected. I suspect that those of us who can remember that snowy day -- why do we schedule our great national outdoor ceremony for a day that is as likely as any to be the coldest of the year? -- are inclined to overestimate the hold that Kennedy has on Americans five decades after he took the oath of office. Two events just before that anniversary fortify that conclusion and snap the links between us and President Kennedy. On Tuesday, Sargent Shriver died at age 95. This Kennedy in-law never attained elective office as the three Kennedy brothers and assorted offspring did, but he achieved something as important, or more so.

Jerry Brown Takes on Redevelopment

GOP Assemblyman Chris Norby is a former Orange County supervisor with a longtime and deep aversion to California's 425 redevelopment agencies. Some redevelopment zones may eliminate blight and provide low-income housing as originally intended, he concedes, but redevelopment also allows billions of tax dollars to bankroll the building of a lot of half-empty shopping malls, as well as sweetheart deals that pad the pockets of well-connected developers. As Norby put it, redevelopment served as an "unknown government" that feeds "the most wasteful, the most fraudulent and the most abusive" spending in California government.

A Burr Under Our Saddle Again

WASHINGTON -- America is a creedal nation and the creed is, as Robert Penn Warren wrote, the "burr under the metaphysical saddle of America." It is a recurring source of national introspection, discontent, self-indictment and passionate politics. We are in the midst of a recurrence. The tone of today's politics was anticipated and is vindicated by a book published 30 years ago. The late Samuel Huntington's "American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony" (1981) clarifies why it is a mistake to be alarmed by today's political excitements and extravagances, a mistake refuted by America's past.

GE's Immelt on the Hot Seat

Can GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt talk President Obama into a major corporate tax cut? Immelt has been appointed to the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which replaces the disbanded Paul Volcker Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Immelt was a member of that original board. Now he has a more elevated position in the Obama 2.0, allegedly pro-business, move-to-the-center Clintonesque White House.

A Plea to Unendow the Arts

For years, I have argued against the very existence of the National Endowment of the Arts. If an artist can't be self-sustaining in a capitalist country as large and as rich as America, he should get into another line of work. It's certainly not the business of the politicians and the bureaucrats, who you notice aren't spending their own money, to support him and his artistic pipedreams.

From The Comedy Store

Would James Madison Play Video Games?

If we've learned one lesson from the massacre in Tucson, it's that cause and effect are poor guides to explain human behavior. "Let us remember," President Obama said at the memorial service, "it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy. It did not." Those last three important little words were not in his speech when he stood up to deliver it. He added them during delivery because he knows the importance of staunching false blame. Rhetoric can make connections that reality must undo.

MTV's Sordid 'Skins'

The cultural left would like you to think that children should be free to experiment persistently in the Laboratory of Life without soul-stifling rules. They have limits to libertine behavior, to be sure. No high school bake sales (encourages obesity), no bottled water (destroys the environment) and absolutely no uncivil bullying of people who are different than you (unless they belong to the tea party, in which case you can blame them for random shootings). Now those secular progressives at MTV have opened a new front. They feel one should enjoy a childhood stuffed with sex, drugs and alcoholism. That would be the message of their new teen drama "Skins." Adapted from a British series and filmed in Canada, MTV boasts that the actors are actually under 18 -- in another interpretation, we call them "children" -- and that the show's writers are barely out of high school, so its libertine escapades are authentic, "the real secret lives" of teenagers.

The Philadelphia Horror: How Mass Murder Gets a Pass

Let's give the "climate of hate" rhetoric a rest for a moment. It's time to talk about the climate of death, in which the abortion industry thrives unchecked. Dehumanizing rhetoric, rationalizing language and a callous disregard for life have numbed America to its monstrous consequences. Consider the Philadelphia Horror. In the City of Brotherly Love, hundreds of babies were murdered by a scissors-wielding monster over four decades. Whistleblowers informed public officials at all levels of the wanton killings of innocent life. But a parade of government health bureaucrats and advocates protecting the abortion racket looked the other way -- until, that is, a Philadelphia grand jury finally exposed the infanticide factory run by abortionist Kermit B. Gosnell, M.D., and a crew of unlicensed, untrained butchers masquerading as noble providers of women's "choice." Prosecutors charged Gosnell and his death squad with multiple counts of murder, infanticide, conspiracy, abuse of corpse, theft and other offenses.

Why Everything Starts With Repeal

WASHINGTON -- Suppose someone -- say, the president of United States -- proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I've got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield a savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion. He'd be laughed out of town. And yet, this is precisely what the Democrats are claiming as a virtue of Obamacare. During the debate over Republican attempts to repeal it, one of the Democrats' major talking points has been that Obamacare reduces the deficit -- and therefore repeal raises it -- by $230 billion. Why, the Congressional Budget Office says exactly that.

House Vote to Repeal More Than Symbolic

Time will tell, but I reject the somewhat cynical view that the House Republicans' vote to repeal Obamacare is purely symbolic. I think it's quite significant. We are engaged in a war to save our nation from crippling debt and systematic assaults on our Constitution and our liberties and to preserve our prosperity. No setback has to become a permanent defeat. But neither will any victory remain secure, for the forces working against us are tireless and relentless. No matter how many times history has proved socialism disastrous, there will always be those promoting it, as if the past never occurred or its lessons are unlearnable.

Who Needs Democracy?

What a bother having to deal with Congress, public opinion, elections, the whole complicated web that the Founders in their antiquated vocabulary referred to as the consent of the governed. How much simpler to pass your own laws. Just call them executive orders or administrative rules, official regulations, whatever designation applies. Hesto, presto, a provision nixed after long hours of tedious debate and much public furor can be enacted by arbitrary decree. It's so much quicker that way, and nobody needs to know. At least till the public wakes up.

The Bloomberg Syndrome

After the recent Tucson, Ariz., shootings, Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik, a Democrat, almost immediately and without evidence claimed that conservative anti-government speech had set off alleged killer Jared Lee Loughner. Yet the more the unfolding details informed us that the "Communist Manifesto"/"Mein Kampf"-reading Loughner was mentally unstable, apolitical and without discernible interests in contemporary issues, the more the flamboyant Dupnik went on television to expand his cast of culpable characters. He finally ended up blaming everyone from Tea Party opponents of President Obama to talk-show host Rush Limbaugh -- and became an instant celebrity and hero to left-wing partisans.

Civility Not Censorship

Civility in public discourse is important, but it should not be used as an excuse to stifle legitimate debate or denude our language of color, passion, or good metaphor. Unfortunately, some in the media don't seem to understand the difference. CNN's John King, for example, apologized on air this week for a guest's use of the phrase "in the cross hairs" in reference to the Chicago mayoral race. Others have suggested that words like "target" shouldn't be used as either a verb or noun when discussing political campaigns. In the wake of the horrific murders of six people in Tucson and the maiming of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and more than a dozen others, reluctance to engage in shooting metaphors might be understandable. But it's foolish to think using such words had anything to do with what happened -- and curbing such metaphors lends credence to that theory. Jared Loughner, the man charged with the shootings, is, most likely, a paranoid schizophrenic with no ties to any political party or ideology.