Freedom Line Blog

In anticipation of the debt ceiling debate/crisis/hysteria, Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University tweeted a graph of all the times the debt ceiling has been raised since 1980.

It’s a simple but shocking illustration that tells the story of how America went from a national debt of $930 million to a national debt of $16.7 trillion in just over three decades.

The graph indicates that we clearly have two big government presidents to thank for putting Americans and the American economy in such a dire predicament: George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Why hasn’t the Keystone XL pipeline been built yet? After all, it would benefit the United States with tens of thousands of jobs, reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil, generate millions in state and local tax revenues and reduce energy costs for Americans.

A major reason seems to be the behind-the-scenes arm twisting and the very public advertising assault led by Tom Steyer. The shady billionaire and progressive campaign funder claims his opposition to Keystone XL is rooted in environmental concerns, which seems more than a little puzzling since the federal government completed an “exhaustive environmental review… with a finding that the pipeline would have limited adverse environmental impacts during construction and operation.”

In a piece I authored for The Daily Caller, I explain Steyer’s real motivation for trying to kill the pipeline.

It turns out that if Keystone XL fails, Steyer stands to make millions of dollars because of his investment in the TransMountain pipeline. Without Keystone in the way TransMountain would have a monopoly in transporting oil from Alberta to refineries and shipping terminals in the U.S. and Canada. Cha-Ching!

Oddly, Steyer has refused to criticize the TransMountain pipeline – even though TransMountain pipeline is functionally identical to Keystone.

Read the whole disgusting story of Steyer’s sleazy behavior here.

In a wide-ranging indictment of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), Philip Klein describes just how easy it is for government-run health care to turn into a nightmare.

“One of the most recent scandals has its roots in the 1990s, when the NHS established a set of best practices for providing care to patients at the end of their lives. Known as the Liverpool Care Pathway, it has since been applied to hundreds of thousands of people,” writes Klein.

“Last November, the Mail reported, an independent review found that 60,000 people were put on the pathway without their consent and a third of the time families weren’t even informed. Thus, they had no idea that their close relatives were removed from life support equipment and were being denied nourishment. In extreme cases, nurses shouted at relatives who attempted to give their dying loved ones sips of water. According to the Mail, hospitals were given incentive payments for putting more people on the pathway – effectively, the government was providing bonuses for ending people’s lives earlier.” (Emphasis added)

After a huge outcry, NHS is abandoning the Liverpool Care Pathway, admitting that “Caring for the dying must never again be practiced as a tick-box exercise and each patient must be cared for according to their individual needs.”

This is welcome news for those saved from murder, but it is cold comfort for the 60,000 Britons who were intentionally killed by their caregiver.

As this example from the world’s most famous single-payer health system attests, death panels are a logical extension of government-run health care. Cost-benefit calculations can easily be made to discard individuals for the sake of the faceless collective; especially when the doctor, the actuary, and the bean counter all work for the same government.

Interestingly, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) didn’t mention any of the horrors Klein catalogues in his op-ed to Britons explaining why Obamacare is a “good first step” toward a single-payer system like NHS.

No wonder.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CST to 6:00 p.m. CST (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EST) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 (CST)/5:00 pm (EST): John Lott, Jr., author, researcher, teacher, and former chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission: “Dumbing Down the Courts: How Politics Keeps the Smartest Judges Off the Bench”;

4:30 (CST)/5:30 (EST): Megan Brown, Partner at Wiley Rein LLP: Supreme Court Preview October 2013 Term;

5:00 (CST)/6:00 pm (EST): Dan Epstein, Executive Director of Cause for Action: The Threat ObamaCare Poses to Privacy of Americans; and

5:30 (CST)/6:30 pm (EST):  Drew Johnson, CFIF and  Senior Scholar for the Taxpayer Protection Alliance: Government Shutdown and Government

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

Regardless of what you think of the political strategy at work, the federal shutdown we’ve been enduring over the last few days has been an object lesson in how much government we could cut without ever missing it — as I detail in my column this week. In the piece, I look primarily at the bloat in the federal employment rolls, but today brings some underreported news on another key metric: federal regulations.

Last year, the federal government completed work on 1,172 new regulations (less than 30 percent of the full portfolio it was working on). That comes out to about 23 new regulations every week, many of them with massive price tags attached (57 of last year’s new regs were estimated to have costs of at least $100 million apiece). Thus, this bit of news from The Hill is a pure delight:

The Federal Register is practically dried up due to the ongoing government shutdown. There are only two new rules announced for Monday’s edition, and both of them are relatively minor.

The two rules? One limits the hauls of vermillion snapper that commercial fisherman can take in through the rest of the year; the other sets up a temporary safety zone around a bridge in Texas where the Coast Guard is making repairs. Were that this was the way the Federal Register looked every week.

In my column last week, I wrote about how rapidly predictions of catastrophic global warming are unraveling. Despite the fact that the case for skepticism is probably better than ever, the Obama Administration is still proceeding with new EPA regulations to cap carbon emissions, which will have the practical effect of crippling the coal industry.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about this crusade is that the EPA claims the problem can be handled through carbon sequestration — a technology that’s not commercially viable (though this should come as no surprise coming from the same people that think solar and wind power are the wave of the future). As Larry Bell notes at Forbes:

EPA’s latest climate battle plan is to prohibit construction of new coal-fired power plants that can’t achieve 1,100 pound per megawatt hour carbon emission limits. To accomplish this will require plant operators to capture and store (“sequester”) excess CO2, something that cannot be accomplished through affordable means, if at all. [The Institute for Energy Research estimates] that this “regulatory assault” will eliminate 35 gig watts of electrical generating capacity…10% of all U.S. power. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute observes, “If the carbon dioxide emissions standard for power plants proposed by the EPA today is enacted, the United States will have built its final coal-fired power plant.”

The liberal environmental establishment wants to bankrupt the coal industry. That’s their prerogative. But they should at least be honest about it instead of acting like they’re simply helping the industry transition to the next best thing. Perhaps they could take a page out of this fella’s book:

The Obama Administration seems happy to continue its despicable tactic of making the government shutdown seem more harsh than it actually is (including barricading access to the open-air WWII Memorial,ordering the service academies to suspend all intercollegiate athletic events and forcing a privately funded colonial living history farm to close its doors).

At the same time that the Administration is locking doors, barricading entrances and sending people home unnecessarily, the White House is staffing up its website and pleading with Americans to send in dramatic stories of how the government shutdown impacted them.

Apparently Obama and Co. are going to use the sob stories to vilify Republicans and tug at the heartstrings of Americans in the hopes ending the shutdown – or, more likely, score political points.

It’ll be interesting to see what stories are released. It’ll be even more interesting to find out if the stories that are released are actually real.

Disfiguring the truth seems to be one of the primary skill sets at Covered California, the state’s Obamacare-aligned insurance exchange.

When the online platform launched on Tuesday, it erroneously stated receiving 5 million hits. A day later, that number was revised down to 645,000.

“Someone misspoke and thought it was indeed 5 million hits. That was incorrect,” said a Covered California spokesman.

This isn’t the first time the Golden State’s Obamacare exchange has been caught misstating the truth.

Earlier this year it misleadingly announced that individual insurance premiums in 2014 would be lower than they are today. The news was quickly circulated as a refutation of the criticism that Obamacare’s heightened coverage requirements will necessarily result in more expensive plans.

But Covered California’s own press release showed that the exchange was comparing apples to oranges. Instead of comparing individual insurance rates from 2013 to 2014, it compared small business rates from 2013 to individual rates in 2014. This sleight-of-hand had the effect of creating a more favorable (i.e. higher) baseline from which to compare Obamacare’s higher individual rates.

In other words, it was a distortion meant to persuade people that Obamacare does the opposite of what it actually did.

And now Covered California is issuing “incorrect” opening day numbers that artificially inflate its popularity.

Call me a cynic, but I think I see a pattern here…

This week’s edition of the Liberty Update, CFIF’s weekly e-newsletter, is out. Below is a summary of its contents:

Lee:  In Televised Interview, Increasingly Desperate Obama Encourages Markets to Panic
Senik:  Government Shutdown Reveals Extent of Federal Waste
Ellis:  ObamaCare: “A Good First Step Toward Single Payer”?

Video:  Green Hysteria
Podcast:  ObamaCare Is Unworkable
Jester’s Courtroom:  When Is a Fruit Really a Fruit?

Editorial Cartoons:  Latest Cartoons of Michael Ramirez
Quiz:  Question of the Week
Notable Quotes:  Quotes of the Week

If you are not already signed up to receive CFIF’s Liberty Update by e-mail, sign up here.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the rhetoric and actions of global warming alarmists and how the actual facts contradict their ideological crusade.

It took United Airlines offering to bailout the Pentagon, but it looks like the privately funded Navy-Air Force college football game will be played as scheduled this Saturday.

On Tuesday, Obama administration officials at the Department of Defense had suspended all athletic contests at the three service academies because of the government shutdown.

But after an outcry over the cravenly political move, United Airlines offered to fly the entire Air Force football team for free to Annapolis. That, apparently, shamed Pentagon officials into letting the game go on as scheduled.

It’s good to see that college kids training to defend our nation won’t be used as pawns by liberals trying to score political points over the funding impasse. But it’s still distasteful that this disgusting strategy was used in the first place.

First the Obama administration barricaded veterans from visiting the open-air World War II monument.

Then it ordered the forced closure of a privately-funded colonial farm.

Now comes word that the Department of Defense is ordering the service academies to suspend all intercollegiate athletic events during the government shutdown because of “optics.”

On Tuesday, a soccer game between the Naval Academy and Howard University was postponed indefinitely due to an order from DOD.

Up next may be the nationally televised football game between Navy and the Air Force Academy scheduled for Saturday.

“The potential revenue loss to the Naval Academy Athletic Association would likely exceed $4 million,” a Naval Academy spokesman told the Capital Gazette. “That money comes from ticket sales, sponsorship, parking and concession revenue. The largest revenue stream is the payout NAA receives from CBS Sports Television.”

The worst part about this – The athletic program at Navy is completely funded by private donors. Air Force could make the trip without using any government money as well.

In other words, all expenses for Saturday’s game could be held without congressionally appropriated funding, yet the political officials running the military won’t allow it to happen.

When asked for DOD’s rationale, Navy’s Athletic Director said he was told it was about “optics.” “It’s a perception thing. Apparently it doesn’t resonate with all the other government agencies that have been shut down,” he said.

This isn’t politics. It is ugliness pure and simple.

H/T: National Review Online

In a disgusting PR stunt intended to sensationalize the government shutdown, the federal government barricaded a small living history farm and museum in McLean, Va., and ordered it closed – even though the historical reenactment site receives no federal resources to operate.

The Claude Moore Colonial Farm uses costumed interpreters and authentic recreations of period clothes, tools and buildings to transport visitors to 1770s Colonial America. At least that’s what the Farm did until Tuesday when the National Park Service ordered law enforcement personnel to remove staff and volunteers from the property and barricaded the facility due to the government shutdown.  The Farm sits on NPS land but is operated entirely with private funds.

In an email to supporters, Anna Eberly, the managing director of the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, called the government’s decision to close the facility “utter crap.”

“In previous budget dramas, the Farm has always been exempted since the NPS provides no staff or resources to operate the Farm,” Eberly wrote. “In all the [46] years I have worked with the National Park Service … I have never worked with a more arrogant, arbitrary and vindictive group representing the NPS.”

Eberly said that Farm administrators pleaded with the NPS to remain open, but “Every appeal our Board of Directors made to the NPS administration was denied.”

In her email, Eberly points out that closing the Farm actually costs the federal government money, while taxpayers would pay nothing if the facility remained open:

We have operated the Farm successfully for 32 years after the NPS cut the Farm from its budget in 1980 and are fully staffed and prepared to open today. But there are barricades at the Pavilions and entrance to the Farm. And if you were to park on the grass and visit on your own, you run the risk of being arrested. Of course, that will cost the NPS staff salaries to police the Farm against intruders while leaving it open will cost them nothing.

“You do have to wonder about the wisdom of an organization that would use staff they don’t have the money to pay to evict visitors from a park site that operates without costing them any money,” she said.

By forcing law enforcement personnel to shutter a historical reenactment site meant to educate children about our nation’s history in order to make the government shutdown seem worse than it actually is, the Obama Administration has sunk to new lows.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Unlikely? Sure. But nonetheless a group of pro-Putin Russians sent a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize committee requesting consideration for their country’s president.

“The group says Putin deserves the honor for his efforts in brokering an agreement for Syria to hand over its chemical weapons under international control, a plan the group says helped avert a ‘new world war,’” according to Breitbart.com.

Then the story stops being funny.

Drawing a contrast to President of the United States Barack Obama, the group’s leader says that Putin, “who is trying to stop the war and suggest a political solution, is more worthy of such a title.”

Now, of course Putin – the man who invaded South Ossetia during the 2008 Summer Olympics – is no peace-loving reincarnation of Ghandi. The lifeline he threw to Obama over Syria was nothing more than a canny power politics move that makes it easier for his authoritarian allies in Damascus to oppress their people with impunity.

Still, the argument that Putin deserves a fair hearing to receive the Peace Prize is at least plausible since the committee in charge of conferring it debased its standards by awarding its 2009 installment to Obama on the pretext that he might do something worthy to receive it.

Four years later, Obama was poised to start a war until Putin negotiated a European-style system of endless weapons inspections and diplomatic meetings. Had the roles been reversed, Obama supporters would be claiming their man made good on the Nobel’s committee’s prediction. But since history played out the other way, perhaps the American president can do the Norwegians a favor and mail their devalued token to Russia.