Freedom Line Blog

In this week’s Liberty Update, we highlight the ironic absurdity of the “authentic” label constantly applied to 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, as his long career exposes him as perhaps the least authentic candidate of all.  His behavior simply doesn’t match his professed beliefs, including on so-called “campaign finance reform” laws (which violate Americans’ First Amendment rights).

In that vein, The Washington Post today highlights how the powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU), perhaps the most powerful labor union of all, plans on spending a whopping $150 million – a record amount – to elect Democrats in November:

The Service Employees International Union plans to spend $150 million this year to get out the vote for Democrats in November, its largest political investment ever.

The union will deploy canvassers across more than 40 states, but its efforts will mainly focus on turning out infrequent voters from the African American and Latino communities across the eight battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

SEIU President Mary Kay Henry previewed the strategy to defeat President Trump during an extended interview in her office off DuPont Circle in Washington.  The union, which represents 2 million members, has opted not to endorse in the presidential primary, at least for now, but to focus instead on building a massive field operation to help whoever emerges from the convention this summer, as well as Democrats down the ballot.”

Wait…  A DuPont Circle office?  Pretty posh for an organization pretending to represent the interests of working-class members.  And if things are as bad for American workers today as the SEIU and leftists constantly claim despite all of the evidence to the contrary, why are they redirecting $150 million from dues paid by their own members toward nakedly partisan political purposes?

And more broadly, aren’t leftists the ones constantly claiming that we must “get money out of politics?”  Any chance that any of the Democratic candidates who stand to benefit from this will call them out and practice what they preach?

Don’t risk suffocation by holding your breath.

As if the Obama Administration’s campaign to bureaucratize the Internet through Net “Neutrality” wasn’t absurd and dangerous enough, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now going to regulate blogging for the first time.  You read that correctly.

Under threat of $11,000 fine, injunction and other damages per each violation, online writers must now meticulously disclose any free product or other gratuity from any company whose products they have reviewed.  So before you decide to pick or pan some product from the comfort of your computer, you’d better ensure that you haven’t received some gift from the subject company.  

This obviously opens the door to any number of potential prosecutions by the new federal blog police, just as McCain/Feingold laws literally create the possibility of jail time for citizens who actually dare to criticize a candidate within 30 days of an election, First Amendment be damned.  So before you go on Facebook and speak positively of your new favorite brand of bubble gum, you’d better make sure that you didn’t receive it for free in your mailbox or as you exited the supermarket.