Right Opinion
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Friday, December 24, 2010
An Angry Anti-Christmas at School
The metaphor "the War on Christmas" can be mocked -- as if Santa and his reindeer are dodging anti-aircraft fire. But many of our public schools have church-and-state sensitivity police with an alarming degree of Santaphobia. Anyone who's attended a school's "winter concert" in December with no traditional Christmas music -- not even "Frosty the Snowman" -- knows the drill. The vast Christian majority (that funds the public schools) is told that school is no place to celebrate one's religion, even in its most watered-down and secularized forms.
The Real Outrages
A newly formed organization of black clergy has lashed out at supporters of the so-called 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, providing a graphic illustration of liberal America's favorite target -- the mixing of church and state. According to The Conference of National Black Churches, (said to represent nine of the largest historically black denominations with 30 million people and more than 50,000 churches in America and worldwide), the tax cuts are to be extended without any evidence that they helped the economy.
Post-Census Party-Pooping
It's a festive time: singing on the sidewalks, good cheer erupting at home and the office. I'm of course referring to the revelry that descends on the library carrels and fluorescently iridescent cubicles around Washington when the census data comes out. Particularly giddy these days are the Republicans who've picked up a few more seats in Congress and a few more electoral votes for the presidential election, thanks to the demographic tide pulling out of the economically stagnant East and Midwest and moving toward the more vibrant South and West. (Note that this trend stops at the eastern California border, as that state, as well as Oregon and Washington, suffer from the Americanized version of what we used to call "Eurosclerosis.")
So, What if the Bible Really Is True?
I'd like to challenge you to consider that the "good news" we celebrate during the Christmas season really is true. You may choose to believe the Bible is merely a book of fables with nice moral lessons, but there is more abundant and accurate manuscript evidence for the New Testament than any other book from antiquity. Moreover, the number of witnesses to Christ's life, death and resurrection, as well as the nature of their testimony, is strong evidence of the reliability of the scriptural accounts, as are the corroborating secular testimony and archeological evidence.
Obama's New Start
WASHINGTON -- Riding the lamest of ducks, President Obama just won the Triple Crown. He fulfilled (1) his most important economic priority, passage of Stimulus II, aka the tax cut deal (the perfect pre-re-election fiscal sugar high -- the piper gets paid in 2013 and beyond); (2) his most important social policy objective, repeal of "don't ask, don't tell"; and (3) his most cherished (achievable) foreign policy goal, ratification of the New START treaty with Russia. Politically, these are all synergistic. The bipartisan nature of the tax deal instantly repositioned Obama back to the center. And just when conventional wisdom decided the deal had caused irreparable alienation from his liberal base, Obama almost immediately won it back -- by delivering one of the gay rights movement's most elusive and coveted breakthroughs.
Snow on Hitler's Parade
BERLIN -- Berlin, Paris and London lie becalmed beneath a blanket of winter white. People come and go, talking only of snow, snow, snow. They're obsessed with the weather, as if their winters are usually balmy seasons of sunshine and warmth. They've forgotten, if only for a fortnight or so, fears of terrorism and anger over intimate pat-downs. Tourists are furious over cancelled airline flights. Museums are the winners. People are eager to stay inside. An especially sensitive and painful exhibit is drawing crowds in Berlin, breaking taboos and reviving a lively subject that no one could have expected to be a crowd pleaser. The German Historical Museum looks at Hitler and the ways the German people embraced him. For a nation where selling "Mein Kampf" or displaying Nazi memorabilia is forbidden, there's lots about how Germans of all ranks in society participated in the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Enumerated Powers Make a Comeback
It was always for our own good. It was always for a very good reason. It was always within the American tradition of this, that, or the other. That's what they've told us, that's how they've patronized us, for generations, as the long tendrils of the federal government have spread and multiplied into every realm of American life. It had become so utterly unremarkable, this robotic and seemingly inexorable aggrandizement of federal power, that when Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked, in 2009, where in the Constitution Congress was granted the authority to force people to buy health insurance, she didn't even seem to understand the question. "Are you serious?" she asked. "Are you serious?"
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Every Man a King
As the year in politics closed, Congress and President Obama were arguing over maintaining the Bush-era income tax rates. Conservatives insisted that the top 5 percent of households already accounted for nearly 60 percent of the aggregate tax revenue and that it was suicidal to hike taxes on the job-creating classes. Liberals countered that the wages of the middle class have become stagnant over the last decade, and it is time for the wealthy to pay more for others. Meanwhile, both sides talked of American decline and assumed that the federal government was either the problem or the solution.
The Uncivil War
I got an e-mail the other day from a fellow who scolded me for being so naïve as to imagine that just because someone wasn't a conservative, he must be a liberal. I always think it's peculiar to find myself standing accused of saying or writing something I never said or wrote. After all, if someone wishes to chastise me, there's all that goofy stuff I have said and written. Why bother making things up? I am, of course, aware of the fact that, politically speaking, every single American isn't necessarily just one thing or another. There are some people whose major concerns aren't even political. Instead, they devote a great deal of their waking hours to promoting the virtues of atheism, promiscuity and/or marijuana, and couldn't care less about such items as Muslim terrorism, taxes and the minimum wage.
Kitchen Is Not a Dirty Word
We are rapidly becoming a nation whose distaff leadership is allowing radical feminists to redefine the role of motherhood. Our moms are being all but ostracized by a raging cadre of radical feminists should they dare to consider cooking for their families to be a major part of their traditional role as wives and mothers. In modern America, the feminists would take Mom out of the kitchen and put her in the drive-thru lane at the local fast-food chain (ironically, that's verboten also). They have eulogized the nation's First Lady for assuming the role of a food czar who instructs us on what chow is good for us and our children, who should cook it, and what foods should be kept off the national menu.
America's Financial Future: Our Choice .... But Not for Long
In August of this year, Admiral Michael Mullens, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised Congress that "The National debt is the biggest threat to our national security." In November, voter sentiment against the debt and deficit led to an historic rebuke of Congressional incumbents. In December, the President's Debt Commission laid out in stark terms the imminent economic impact of continued deficit spending. Apparently rejecting these clarion calls, the President and Congress acted in the lame-duck session to cut not one dime of federal spending, while increasing the national debt by nearly $1 trillion. They are ignoring a glaring problem that, if not addressed soon, will cause a panoply of other problems.
Conrad Black's Battle
WASHINGTON -- Last week, Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit set himself up as both judge and jury and found Conrad Black, once the head of one of the most illustrious publishing chains in the world, guilty of fraud and obstruction of justice in running his newspapers. That is somewhat of a comedown for our criminal justice system. Years ago, the Department of Justice had arrayed some 13 charges against him, including tax evasion, racketeering, various types of fraud and that lonely obstruction of justice. Black beat them back on nine of 13 charges, leaving only three fraud charges and the obstruction charge against him. He was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison. Then sanity intruded.
It's Still a Wonderful Life
To many of us, the season wouldn't be complete without at least a few scenes from "It's a Wonderful Life." The movie wasn't much of a hit when it was first released just after the Second World War, but it's acquired quite a following since -- and even a certain critical acclaim. But there are those who still give it a thumb's down. Years ago I read a (too) critical analysis of "It's a Wonderful Life" by a professor of American Studies at Boston University, bless his heart. His conclusion: While the movie shows that life can be "an enriching Norman Rockwell experience, it also can be smothering, where you end up marrying the girl you went to high school with, and you never get to go to Europe. ... It tells us George is one of the most sad and lonely and tragic characters ever imagined. I cry when I see it."
Liberals' 50 Years of Dreadful Domestic Policy
For the past 50 years, the Democrats -- and many Republicans who should know better -- have been wrong about virtually every major domestic policy issue. Let's review some of them: Taxes. The bipartisan extension of the Bush tax cuts represents the latest triumph over the "soak the rich because trickledown doesn't work" leftists.
Scrooge Was a Liberal
It's the Christmas season, so godless liberals are citing the Bible to demand the redistribution of income by government force. Didn't Jesus say, "Blessed are the Health and Human Services bureaucrats, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"? Liberals are always indignantly accusing conservatives of claiming God is on our side. What we actually say is: We're on God's side, particularly when liberals are demanding God's banishment from the public schools, abortion on demand, and taxpayer money being spent on Jesus submerged in a jar of urine and pictures of the Virgin Mary covered with pornographic photos.
The Right GOP Immigration Package
The controversial anti-immigration bill passed by Arizona lawmakers this year helped and hurt the Democrats in the November election. President Obama used it when he told Latinos that they should vote to "punish our enemies" and "reward our friends" by voting Democratic. In California and Nevada, Latino voters clearly heeded that advice.
Census: Fast Growth in States With No Income Tax
For those of us who are demographic buffs, Christmas came four days early when Census Bureau Director Robert Groves announced yesterday the first results of the 2010 Census and the reapportionment of House seats (and therefore electoral votes) among the states. The resident population of the United States, he told us in a webcast, was 308,745,538. That's an increase of 9.7 percent from the 281,421,906 in the 2000 Census -- the smallest proportional increase than in any decade other than the Depression 1930s but a pretty robust increase for an advanced nation.
Don't Fault Tobacco Firm for Death
A Boston jury last week ordered Lorillard, the tobacco company, to pay $71 million as compensation -- and another $81 million in punitive damages -- for the death of lifelong smoker Marie Evans, who died of lung cancer in 2002. Evans's son William, a Harvard-trained lawyer, claimed that Lorillard had hooked his mother on cigarettes by giving out free samples of Newports in the Boston neighborhood where she lived as a child in the 1950s and 1960s. Lorillard denied the allegation, and apparently the only evidence for it was a video-taped deposition in which Marie Evans described how she began smoking at 13. But it doesn't seem implausible to me. The great majority of smokers take up the habit before turning 18, and even I can recall packs of cigarettes being handed out on Cleveland's Public Square in the late 1970s.
Tax-Reform Fundamentalist
WASHINGTON -- Many parents have heard FICA Screams. Indignant children, holding in trembling hands their first paychecks, demand to know what FICA is and why it is feasting on their pay. FICA (the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax) is government compassion, expressed numerically: It is the welfare state; it funds Social Security and Medicare. Sometimes it makes young people into conservatives.
What If It's True?
Suppose what some call the "Christmas story" is true -- all of it, from the angels, to the shepherds, to the virgin birth, to God taking on human flesh. By this, I don't mean to suggest it is true only for those who believe it to be true, but what if it is objectively true, no matter what the deniers say? What difference would it make? Should it make any difference? The narrative and the quotations written by the physician named Luke and by John, the closest disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, are unique and exclusive. The genealogical line of Jesus compiled by Matthew the tax collector is impressive and compelling. The words spoken by Jesus and recorded by these men are phenomenal. They expose the inner darkness of Man, offering a roadmap out, while also revealing the light of God, offering directions into His presence.