Freedom Line Blog

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino calls the recent departure of several senior White House staff “a good start,” then recommends further cuts in the president’s cabinet.

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.

How’s this for drive-by media bias?  Today’s Washington Post runs the deceptive headline “Report Gives Stimulus Package High Marks.” Hmmm.  That sounds like a counterintuitive “Man Bites Dog” story worth reading.  So who issued the report?  The Post’s first paragraph admits that it comes from White House itself.  Worse, it was overseen by that respected rock of good judgment and common sense, Vice President Joe Biden.

Even with that baked-in bias, the White House report doesn’t seem to focus on how the $814 billion “stimulus” supposedly succeeded.  Rather, it emphasizes how the effort has already distributed 70% of the allocated funds, and managed to avoid “the fraud charges that plague more routine government spending programs.”  That’s it?  That’s the best that even Joe Biden can claim?  That should actually come as discouraging news, not encouraging news, to “stimulus” proponents.  After all, if 70% of its funds have already been spent, but we still haven’t experienced its promised results, what remains other than $814 billion added to our nation’s debt?  The White House promised that unemployment would top out twelve months ago at 8% if the bill passed, but we remain stuck at 9.6%.  Instead of igniting our economic furnace, it has merely clouded growth and undermined the business and hiring climate.

The White House and its apologists speculatively claim that the “stimulus” averted another great depression, but today’s Wall Street Journal carries an analysis by former Senator Phil Gramm devastating that assertion.  Gramm compares U.S. growth and employment figures to other developed countries that didn’t engage in the irresponsible “stimulus” profligacy we did, and shows that we lag far behind.  As the Post story notes, Obama’s “stimulus” was “the largest effort in U.S. history to counteract the effects of a recession.”  All it has done is prove once again that government doesn’t create jobs or growth, but economic uncertainty and debt.

In Friday’s Liberty Update commentary “The ObamaCare Fit Hits the Shan,” we noted how quickly the negative consequences of ObamaCare are arriving in the form of higher health care spending and insurance rates.

Well, Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary, seems to believe that she can terrify the economic laws of supply and demand into deference.  Attacking private health insurers for doing nothing more than adjusting their bottom lines to meet business realities imposed by ObamaCare mandates, Sebelius ordained:

There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases.  We will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections.”

Karen Ignagni, who leads America’s Health Insurance Plans, provided an Economics 101 primer that Sebelius should have received in college by saying, “It’s a basic law of economics that additional benefits incur additional costs, and the impact on premiums depends on the type and amount coverage policyholders had before.”

Simple economics aside, who does Sebelius think she is?  A Soviet-era commissar who can cow American citizens and businesses by thundering such threats?  Ms. Sebelius, you’re about to receive a true lesson in “zero tolerance” when Americans head to the ballots in November.

In one of the most telling departures from the previous Administration, Obama officials decided to eliminate the White House’s fact-checking team soon after taking office.  After President George W. Bush received heavy criticism for 16 words he said in his 2003 State of the Union Address, The Decider decided to hire a team of fact checkers to confirm the validity of every word the president spoke to the public.

The result was a process that killed any portion of presidential remarks that couldn’t be 100% verified.  The moral of the story: facts matter.  At least they did to the last occupant of the White House.

Now it seems like facts are inconveniences that can be swept under the rug.  That is, unless their absence appears on top of the new Oval Office rug in the form of a misattributed quote.  On President Obama’s redesigned floor emblem appears the quote “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Though it’s attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., it actually belongs to antebellum abolitionist Theodore Parker.

Unlike Vice President Joe Biden, King didn’t forget to give credit for a line he made his own.  Next time, Mr. President, get the facts straight before you commit taxpayer money to honor something that isn’t true.

Victor Davis Hanson has some terrific commentary at National Review Online drawing out the distinctions between the well-paid, over-worked White House aides recently profiled by the New York Times, and the everyday Americans grinding it out during the Great Recession.

The Times wants to draw a sympathetic portrait of the heroic Obama cadre that suffers so much on our behalf. These are six-figure jobs that wear out one’s hands on the Blackberry, true, but serve as valuable stepping-stones to even higher-paying corporate jobs. And this is still a recession. This raise-the-bar griping will not go down well with the coal worker in Montana, the welder on a 30-story scaffold, or the oil worker offshore (e.g., it is not as if a Blackberry is going to blow up in one’s hands, or an acoustical tile is going to fall and crush one in the West Wing). It is all too reminiscent of the various explanations we’ve heard for why Michelle’s Costa del Sol sojourn was an understandable and much-needed refresher before the more arduous odyssey ahead on Martha’s Vineyard.

See if you can make sense of the following two paragraphs:

Tens of thousands of gallons more oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday after an undersea robot bumped a venting system, forcing BP to remove the cap that had been containing some of the crude.

The setback, yet another in the nine-week effort to stop the gusher, came as thick pools of oil washed up on Pensacola Beach in Florida and the Obama administration tried to figure out how to resurrect a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. (Emphasis mine)

Why on this great blue marble of ours is the Obama Administration trying to force the shut-down of nearly three dozen properly working oil rigs when there are now tens of thousands more gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf from a totally different site?

Maybe it’s debatable whether a moratorium should be sought.  But how can it be that this seems to be the only solution the White House is willing to fight for when it could be doing a lot more good getting the federal bureaucracy to start helping state and local governments clean up the mess right now?  Is the Office of the President of the United States really this impotent?

The Beatlemaniacs among us never would have predicted this, but what a refreshing antidote Elton John provides to Paul McCartney.

This month, McCartney put his foot in his mouth and provided even more evidence that John Lennon was the intellectual force behind the Beatles when he slurred President George W. Bush and mindlessly fawned over President Obama.  In public comments following his White House performance, and wearing a cheesy Members-Only style 1980s coat, McCartney said, “after the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is” before scurrying offstage.  This ignored Bush’s well-known prolific reading habit, and came one day after McCartney admonished reporters to “lay off” Obama.

Brilliant, Paul – the press’s primary job, after all, is to “lay off” the leader of the free world.

But now compare the case of Elton John.  This month, Sir Elton famously performed at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding, naturally upsetting the hyper-sensitive liberal chattering class.  Then, last night, John performed in Israel in defiance of other performers’ mindless boycott of that isolated nation.  He proudly stated that the other musicians’ boycotts “ain’t gonna stop me from playing here, baby,” and added, “we do not cherry-pick our consciences.”

No word yet on whether John will perform alongside Toby Keith at the next Grammy ceremony, but it’s nice to see some sanity among the pop music class.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the ongoing White House scandal involving Congressman Joe Sestak and key questions that those involved should have to answer before the White House is let off the hook.

For three months, the White House has refused to say whether it offered a job to Representative Joe Sestak to get him to drop his challenge to Senator Arlen Specter in a Pennsylvania Democratic primary, as Mr. Sestak has asserted.

“But the White House wants everyone who suspects that something untoward, or even illegal, might have happened to rest easy; though it still will not reveal what happened, the White House is reassuring skeptics that it has examined its own actions and decided it did nothing wrong.  Whatever it was that it did.” — Peter Baker, The New York Times

That’s about as succinct an explanation of a growing kerfuffle as can be written.  The kerfuffle is growing because the second worst White House Press Secretary in living memory, Robert Gibbs, decided to run a cutesy stonewall when Sestak first made his allegation (when the White House was against his candidacy before it was for his candidacy), and now has escalated it into the annals of political kerfuffledom.

It would take a Special Prosecutor longer to get an office set up than it would to resolve this. 

Someone (maybe multiple someones) carrying a White House briefcase said something to Sestak about a job,  seemingly linked to him abandoning his candidacy.  Couldn’t have been a very long conversation. 

Interview Sestak.  Interview the someone (or someones).  Conclude whether or not there is reason to believe the conversation crossed the legal line.  Conclude whether or not any party interviewed committed perjury during the really brief investigation.  Proceed to grand jury or issue a report.

But hey.  Summer’s here.  Let’s instead have yet another spittle-spewing Washington circus.

Admit it; the headline isn’t impossible to believe.  It’s even less surprising to realize that all of the major criticisms of the Manchurian Candidate-turned-President – lacks relevant experience, a paper trail, or any notable accomplishment aside from self-promotion –are being lodged against his most recent Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.  Sure, as an Assistant White House Counsel, former Harvard Law dean, and Solicitor General she’s held some important positions.  But a light scrubbing of that parchment is revealing almost no key accomplishments with any of them.

After reading all of Kagan’s scholarly publications in two decades as an academic – three law review articles, two small essays, and two brief book reviews – law professor Paul Campos makes this observation about its quality in The Daily Beast:

At least in theory Kagan could compensate somewhat for the slenderness of her academic resume through the quality of her work. But if Kagan is a brilliant legal scholar, the evidence must be lurking somewhere other than in her publications. Kagan’s scholarly writings are lifeless, dull, and eminently forgettable. They are, on the whole, cautious academic exercises in the sort of banal on-the-other-handing whose prime virtue is that it’s unlikely to offend anyone in a position of power.

How Obama-esque.  Until, that is, ultimate power is achieved and the offending can begin in earnest.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that the White House will put its “boot on the throat of BP” to make certain the oil company takes all necessary measures to control the spill and minimize its effects in the Gulf.

The image evoked by Mr. Gibbs is one of the harshest I’ve seen used by the White House against a private organization. Not even Wall Street has been so rebuked. Come to think of it, this administration hasn’t used such language against a sworn enemy like Iran. Stop and think about the image Mr. Gibbs invokes. The boot belongs to the party in power, the White House, while the choking and gasping wind-pipe belongs to BP.

Of course BP is worthy of a tough reprimand and should be held responsible for its role in the Gulf disaster. It’s just unnerving when those in power use such intimidating language when talking about a civil matter.

And it’s the Tea Parties that are accused of over-the-top language?

Maybe White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel isn’t the only senior administration official who’s on uncertain terms with President Obama.  In the span of a few minutes, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs reminded reporters that imposing a national value added tax (VAT) “wasn’t something that the president had under consideration,” and a deputy of his reiterated that point after Obama appeared on CNBC.

The problem is the president himself told CNBC that the VAT is still on the table.  What to make of the press office’s bookend statements denying the substance of the chief’s own words?  Exactly what it is: denying the truth that one of the most destructive taxes available is being considered to pay for the explosion in government spending.  We were warned – sort of.

According to The Hill newspaper, Democrats reached a tentative compromise on health care just days before Massachusetts elected Scott Brown.  Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) stated that an agreement was reached on January 15. 

Of course, it is an indictment of this Administration’s transparency pledge that you’re reading about this news in February and didn’t watch the discussions live on C-SPAN.  Senator Harkin’s revelation underscores just how deceptive the White House was in negotiating the future of health care behind closed doors and how important Scott Brown’s victory was in defeating ObamaCare.

A few million Americans in Massachusetts made their voices heard loud and clear, but judging from last week’s State of the Union Address, the White House is still not listening.

Today, the White House officially released its Budget for Fiscal Year 2011.  It is $3.8 trillion and consumes four large volumes.  What does it say about fiscal responsibility when your budget is thousands of pages and costs $236?

After a $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009, the White House projects a larger $1.56 trillion gap in this fiscal year.  To “trim” the massive sinkhole of red ink, the Administration proposes raising income taxes (though President Obama bragged about his tax record during his State of the Union Address) and energy taxes to reach a “manageable” $1.27 trillion shortfall next year.

Click here for the Office of Management and Budget website to review the budget, historical tables and analytical perspectives.

Less than one year into the Obama Administration, unequivocal public opinion polls are saying a lot about his leadership ability, and may be providing an early clue into what might come to be his legacy.

Namely, unlike leaders such as Ronald Reagan or Franklin Roosevelt, he is turning the public away from his worldview, rather than persuading it to join him.

By now we’re well-familiar with Obama’s steady decline in public opinion polls.  In fact, he stands lower than any President at this point in his tenure.  But the latest Rasmussen poll shows something broader, which is good news for those of us who advocate individual freedom, but bad news for Obama.

By an enormous 66% to 22% margin, Americans state that they prefer less government and lower taxes to stronger government with higher taxes.  Amazingly, the tone-deaf White House and the Pelosi/Reid Congress continue to advance bigger government (ObamaCare, carbon cap-and-tax, new regulations over the struggling economy,etc.) and higher taxes (increase of the death tax, higher income taxes, healthcare penalties, etc.) despite these unequivocal results.

By a 62% to 21% margin, respondents also say that lowering taxes is a better way to create jobs than more federal “stimulus” is.  This is remarkable, considering the degree to which Obama, Pelosi, Reid and liberal pundits scapegoat lower taxes and less regulation as the alleged cause of our economic difficulties.  They’re obviously not making the case, and are losing the battle of ideas.

Furthermore, 62% believe that it would be better for the rest of the world and our allies to follow America’s lead, an all-time high.  In contrast, a tiny 8% report that America should increasingly follow our allies’ lead.  This again contrasts with Obama’s apologetic international demeanor and submission to new global constraints upon the U.S., especially on the heels of his Nobel Prize and Copenhagen boondoggle.

But more broadly, these striking results show that Obama is failing miserably at the task of persuading and leading Americans toward his point of view and policy agenda.  He presumably has several years to reverse this reality, but we may already be witnessing the early elements of the eventual Obama legacy.

The White House has made the decision that debt, all $12 trillion worth of it, no longer matters in America.  Instead of attempting to lower the $1.4 trillion annual budget deficit, the White House is looking for another round of stimulus pork.

According to White House Economic Advisor Christina Romer, it would be “suicide” to focus on deficit reduction to the exclusion of “job creation.”  Her solution, of course, is to repeat the past two/three failed stimulus bills and spend another $50 billion on infrastructure.   In Washington, D.C. that means $5 billion on infrastructure and $45 billion on pork and other preferred government handouts.

Romer’s solution is odd considering this paper she authored with her husband in April (after she began working at the White House) that concluded each dollar of tax cuts historically raised Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by $3, greater than many similar estimates of government stimulus spending.

Romer also concluded that tax increases can easily lower GDP.  As she wrote, “Our results indicate that tax changes have very large effects on output.  Our baseline specification implies than an exogenous tax increase of 1% of GDP lowers real GDP by almost 3%.”  There appears to be a big difference between Doctor of Economics Romer and White House employee Romer.

With all this knowledge about the virtues of tax cuts and the harm of tax increases, Dr. Romer should pay a visit to the West Wing occasionally and remind President Obama that his policies will continue to shrink GDP and impede job creation.

The government can’t manage to control the laws of economics like it used to.

No surprise here, but according to a new study released by the non-partisan Center for Medicare and Medicaid Studies, the House health care bill will increase health care costs by $289 billion in the next ten years.

As much as the White House talked about “bending the health care cost curve” downward, the House health care bill, H.R.3962, does the exact opposite.

For some reason the Administration can’t understand that more government spending on health care without commensurate gains in supply leads to health care inflation, driving up costs for all consumers.

Other highlights from the report:

By calendar year 2019, the mandates, coupled with the Medicaid expansion, would reduce the number of uninsured from 57 million, as projected under current law, to an estimated 23 million under H.R. 3962.

The estimated effects of H.R. 3962 on overall national health expenditures (NHE) are shown in table 5. In aggregate, we estimate that for calendar years 2010 through 2019 NHE would increase by $289 billion, or 0.8 percent, over the updated baseline projection that was released on June 29, 2009… The NHE share of GDP is projected to be 21.1 percent in 2019, compared to 20.8 percent under current law.

Public spending would increase under H.R. 3962 as a result of the expansion of the Medicaid program and other Medicaid changes, less the net Medicare savings under the bill. Private expenditures would be higher as well…

Apparently, former president George W. Bush “went against (his) free-market instincts” when he approved the Wall Street bailout towards the end of his administration.  Better late than never I suppose.

After issuing his mea culpa, “W” had some words of wisdom for his successor:

And without mentioning President Obama by name the former President did have some rather pointed comments for the current Administration claiming that generally “history shows that the greater threat to prosperity is not too little government involvement, but too much.”

Bush, who as President also signed off on massive aid to the auto industry, warned against a government takeover of the economy fearing it would eliminate free-market enterprise.  “As the world recovers, we are going to face the temptation to replace the risk and reward model of the private sector with the blunt instruments of government spending and control.”

Do as I say…

In one of the best critiques of action without regard to consequences, celebrated chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm said about overzealous experts that they were “so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

From bio-ethics to evidence-based public policy, it is astounding that the 220 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and at least a score of senators who support the Obama Administration’s health care “reform” plan cannot answer the following question:

It’s one of the most basic, kitchen-table questions of the entire reform debate: Would the sweeping $900 billion overhaul actually lower spiraling insurance premiums for everyone?

No one really knows.”

And it’s not just that people haven’t read the bill, or studies analyzing its impact on the cost of health care. It’s that the data doesn’t exist.

At a recent Senate health committee hearing, two health care rivals – Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economic adviser to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, and Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor whose work is cited often by the White House – agreed comprehensive, objective evidence wasn’t available for small and large businesses.

“It’s insane,” Holtz-Eakin said.

Agreed. Thankfully, at least one Democratic Senator thinks information – not just assurances – is needed before committing American taxpayers to a trillion dollar decision.

The lack of data prompted Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) to request a broad analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on premiums, which he said was “a basic, bottom-line question that we have to have answered before we can decide if this is an intelligent thing to do.”

Now we see why Senator Bayh didn’t make the cut to be Vice President. He likes to consult factually-based, non-partisan research before voting in favor of the largest expansion of federal social services in 40 years.

Characteristically, top Obama advisors have a different view – one that chooses the devil we don’t know instead of the devil we do.

“I think you could always use more data,” (White House Health Czar Nancy-Ann) DeParle said, but added that “we have plenty of data on where things are and where things are headed without reform.”

Did you catch the barely concealed contempt for “business as usual” and the stifled urge to blame the previous administration?

All this would be comical if there weren’t a $787 billion stimulus package in circulation, the consequences of which still defy an ability to be measured or predicted. To their credit, some Democratic caucus members are joining Senator Bayh’s (belated) rush to judge the health care “reform” bill on its merits.

Lawmakers say they are hungry for data that assures them they are not voting for a bill that does the opposite what they have intended.

“I want to see an objective, third-party analysis from people who don’t have a conflict of interest,” said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). “I like evidence.”

Good. So do the people being asked to finance health care “reform” unto the nth generation.

You can read the entire article from Politico here.