Freedom Line Blog

Meditate on this excerpt from an op-ed by former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

“An inclusive party would welcome the party’s most conservative activists right alongside its most liberal activists,” the actor-turned-politician said. “There is room for those whose views, I think, make them sound like cavemen. And there is also room for us in the center, with views the traditionalists probably think make us sound like progressive softies.”

As usual, Schwarzenegger is being too soft on himself.  After promising to “blow up the boxes” in Sacramento and get tough on a legislature full of “girly men,” Schwarzenegger passed seven laughably unbalanced budgets that everyone acknowledged were premised on accounting gimmicks that are illegal in the private sector.  He signed into law AB 32, the global warming regulatory scheme that burdens California’s economy without making a single degree of difference in the global temperature.  He supported a multi-billion dollar bond initiative to fund embryonic stem cell research despite the industry’s pivot toward adult stem cells as an ethically better, more scientifically promising avenue for treatment.

Ignoring the laws of fiscal gravity?  Cursing the sun while your neighbors grow their economies?  Defying science to serve a political ideology?  Who’s the real caveman in all this Mr. Schwarzenegger?

H/T: Catalina Camia at USA Today

Veteran White House correspondent Keith Koffler on why presidential press conferences – and Barack Obama’s distaste for them – are an important issue:

Press conferences are extraordinarily important for several reasons. A number of questions are asked on different topics. The pressure of being on national TV forces the president to explain his thinking. The public gets to actually see the president think and understand how he comes to his conclusions, an invaluable public service.

What’s more, the prospect of a press conference forces the White House to think through its own views. Everybody in the West Wing, including the president, has to stop and consider just what they are doing and why. Often the agencies are mined for answers about current policies so that White House aides can prepare the president, giving the West Wing valuable feedback about what’s going on.

My guess for why Obama doesn’t submit himself to rapid-fire questions about the issues of the day: there are no witty phrases to justify regulations and rhetoric that keep millions out of work while adding trillions to the deficit.

Better to just stay quiet.

On Monday, I shared a story about how Ron Paul’s fervent supporters are outmaneuvering the Romney campaign in the state-by-state process of selecting delegates to the GOP’s nominating convention in Tampa, FL.

Here’s more evidence from the Washington Times:

Exploiting party rules, loyalists for the libertarian congressman from Texas in recent days have engineered post-primary organizing coups in states such as Louisiana and Alaska, confirming what party regulars say would be an effort to grab an outsized role in the convention and the party’s platform deliberations.

In Massachusetts, the state where Mr. Romney served as governor, Paul loyalists over the weekend helped block more than half of Mr. Romney’s preferred nominees from being named delegates at state party caucuses — even though Mr. Romney won his home state’s primary with 72 percent of the vote.

And from the Las Vegas Sun:

In a letter delivered Wednesday to GOP Chairman Michael McDonald, the RNC’s chief counsel said if Ron Paul delegates are allowed to take too many slots for the national convention, Nevada’s entire contingent may not be seated in Tampa.

John R. Phillippe Jr. said that while his letter is not binding, “I believe it is highly likely that any committee with jurisdiction over the matter would find improper any change to the election, selection, allocation, or binding of delegates, thus jeopardizing the seating of Nevada’s entire delegation to the National Convention.”

Clearly, the RNC fears that mischief at the Sparks convention this weekend could result in Ron Paul delegates taking Mitt Romney slots and then not abiding by GOP rules to vote for the presumptive nominee on the first ballot in Tampa. So they are trying to force McDonald to ensure that actual Romney delegates fill 20 of the 28 national convention slots, thus removing any mystery of who they will vote for.

H/T: Teagan Goddard’s Political Wire

John Fund nails liberal Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren for being a consistent fraud.  In the last week her bid to unseat Scott Brown has taken two steps backward with the revelation that although she listed herself as a Native American for over a decade as a law professor, she – at most – is only 1/32 Cherokee; and even that connection is in dispute.

The incident confirms Warren as a practitioner of the liberal art of claiming multiple diversity status; in her case as a woman and a Native American.

Just as revealing is her decision year after year to pay Massachusetts’ lower state income tax rather than a voluntary higher rate as she insists wealthy people like her should do.

Fund’s conclusion:

Warren is free to believe that she has Native American ancestry, just as she is free to keep as much of her money as she is legally entitled to. But her choices in filling out forms are instructive. In checking the boxes claiming Native American status for so many years and in not checking the box to pay a higher state income-tax rate, she has revealed more than we need to know to brand her as yet another sanctimonious liberal who wants to have it all ways.

If Warren’s misfires keep up, Scott Brown will once again benefit from running against an unusually self-destructive liberal.

No, I’m not suggesting Romney atone for his past sin of strapping his family dog to his car on vacations by making a canine his running mate.  (Though most veeps at campaign time are called attack dogs.)

Rather, I’m reacting to an intriguing interview between Juan Williams and Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID), a Tea Party congressman from the Class of 2010 who also happens to be Mormon and from Puerto Rico.

He opposes the DREAM Act, but is a staunch advocate for reforming the cumbersome legal immigration process.  As Williams says, Labrador “has been involved in trying to block virtually every one of President Obama’s major legislative initiatives.”  He also “openly mused” about supporting a Tea Party challenger to Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) when it looked like Boehner might cave-in to President Obama’s demands to avert a government shutdown last summer.

As for how Labrador would advise Romney to reach out to Hispanic voters after a bruising primary season:

“I would tell, Romney, as I would tell anybody, is that we need to start talking about being a party of inclusion, we need to start talking about how we’re a, a party for legal immigration, that we actually want to reform the system so people can actually come to the United States in a legal, safe way.”

Sounds like a reasonable pitch to me.

Avik Roy, a health policy expert at the Manhattan Institute, posits an interesting option for fiscal conservatives looking for something to replace Obamacare with, if Republicans capture Congress and the White House this November: Bushcare.

The Bush plan was formulated by the White House’s National Economic Council, under the leadership of Allan B. Hubbard. The core goal of the plan was to equalize the tax treatment of employer-sponsored and individually-purchased health insurance, without increasing the deficit. (As regular readers know, the fact that employers can purchase health insurance for their workers tax-free, whereas individuals can’t, is the original sin of the U.S. health-care system.)

…

Bush’s proposal sought to eliminate the unlimited tax break for employer-sponsored insurance, replacing it with a standard deduction for everyone. Under the plan, anyone—employed or not—who bought at least catastrophic insurance would not pay income or payroll taxes on the first $7,500 of their income, or the first $15,000 for a family plan.

…

The Bush plan’s numbers were designed with 2009 insurance prices in mind, and the tax-deduction thresholds would grow with CPI inflation. The Treasury Department estimated that the plan would lower taxes for 80 percent of those with employer-sponsored insurance, and increase taxes for the remaining 20 percent. It would have especially benefited the 18 million people who then bought insurance on their own, along with many of the uninsured, who would suddenly find health insurance to be significantly less expensive.

…

In contrast to Obamacare, however, the Bush plan would have turbocharged the market for consumer-driven health plans, tied to health savings accounts, because the most economically efficient use of the deduction would be to purchase a sufficiently generous consumer-driven plan that allowed individuals to put a maximal amount of money into HSAs. Obamacare significantly constrains the use of HSAs in its regulated insurance markets.

Among the criticisms of Bush’s health care proposal is that it “only” expanded health insurance coverage to an additional 11 million people.  Obamacare’s supporters claim – perhaps erroneously – that it would cover 33 million.  But even if we take the estimates at face value, there’s another number that’s arguably more important.

The cost of Obamacare’s 33 million newly covered citizens is agreed by all sides to be in the trillions of (new) dollars.  Bush covered 11 million for zero dollars in increased federal spending commitments.

Food for thought if the Republicans run and win on a platform to repeal and replace Obamacare.

The Daily Caller explains the (tortured) delegate math that is giving GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul – yes, he’s still running – control of state delegations to the national convention; and with them, the ability to impact Mitt Romney’s march to the nomination.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul claimed another come-from-behind caucus victory this weekend, announcing that approximately 74 percent of the delegates to Louisiana’s state GOP convention will be Paul supporters.

Louisiana has a unique system of selecting delegates to the Republican National Convention. Twenty delegates are selected based on the results of the state’s March 24 primary and another 26 delegates are based on the outcome of the state’s caucus process.

If you’re confused it’s probably because you remember that Rick Santorum won 49 percent of the Louisiana primary vote back in February.

And that’s not the only Santorum victory that ultimately went to Paul:

Earlier this month, Paul won 20 of 24 delegates awarded by Minnesota congressional district conventions. Paul had received a significant 27 percent of the vote in the state’s Feb. 7 caucuses, but Santorum had won nearly every county in a major blowout.

According to The DC, Paul is also on the verge of winning a majority of the GOP’s delegates from Iowa, even though he came in third behind Mitt Romney and Santorum in the Hawkeye State.

Moreover, there are as many as six other states where Paul is poised to control a majority of delegates even though he didn’t win a majority of the primary votes cast in any of them.

If you, like me and perhaps Mitt Romney’s crew, considered Paul’s campaign an afterthought, it may be time to move the Veepstakes chatter to the backburner and ask a much more interesting question – What, exactly, does Mr. Paul want in exchange for his endorsement at the GOP’s Tampa convention?

Just when he thought it was safe to grab hold of the GOP presidential mantle, Mitt Romney gets the worst kind of endorsement – a thumbs-up from Jimmy Carter.

Said Carter: “I’d rather have a Democrat but I would be comfortable — I think Romney has shown in the past, in his previous years as a moderate or progressive… that he was fairly competent as a governor and also running the Olympics as you know. He’s a good solid family man and so forth, he’s gone to the extreme right wing positions on some very important issues in order to get the nomination. What he’ll do in the general election, what he’ll do as president I think is different.”

To be sure, Carter’s statement about being “comfortable” with Romney isn’t as bad as the former Democratic president’s labeling one-time Romney rival Jon Huntsman as an “attractive” candidate and “very attractive to me personally.”

However, Carter’s justification for being comfortable with Romney does reinforce the conventional wisdom that Romney’s conservatism is a veneer whereas his “moderate or progressive” past is the truer indicator of how he’ll govern as president.

To paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, maybe we’ll have to elect Mitt to see how he’ll govern.

H/T: Political Wire

Today’s Wall Street Journal highlights a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center showing a drastic change in Mexican immigration patterns into the United States over the last decade.

During America’s economic boom from the 1990’s until 2005, millions of illegal immigrants were attracted to border-states like Arizona for lucrative work in industries like construction.

Between 2005 and 2010, however, the numbers of Mexicans migrating back to Mexico roughly matched the numbers of those coming into America.  In 2011, evidence suggests that more Mexican immigrants returned to Mexico than came to America.

The WSJ author’s final paragraph gives a glimpse how the Pew report might be used by liberals to undermine Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law being argued before the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court begins a review of Arizona’s anti-illegal immigrant law. That law, and similar ones drafted in other states, has led some undocumented Mexicans to go home. Lawmakers should take the shift into account to ensure policies reflect current reality, said Roberto Suro, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California.”We have turned the page in terms of migration,” he said. “We haven’t turned the page yet in terms of the policies.”

Justified laws that achieve their intended purpose should be applauded, not repealed.  In Arizona’s case, the state had unacceptably high levels of illegal immigration and it passed a law to help state law enforcement officers identify and deport illegals who had then committed a second crime (the first being illegal entry).

If the Pew findings are true and illegal immigrants took Arizona – speaking through its law – at the state’s word, then the present reality of less illegal immigration supports continuing the law’s enforcement.  To follow the logic of USC’s Professor Sura about success mandating repeal is foolish and denies the important role law plays in deterring bad behavior.

In a presidential election year like 2012, it’s easy for national issues to crowd out state and local concerns at the ballot box.  But thanks to Obamacare’s costly mandate on states to create health insurance exchanges, fiscal conservatives running for state offices can easily make opposition to more government a central plank in their campaign platform.

According to Cato Institute scholar Michael F. Cannon, outside of the U.S. Supreme Court’s potentially striking down Obamacare’s individual mandate, the most important health policy battle to be waged is state government opposition to creating Obamacare’s state-based health insurance exchanges.

As I’ve written previously these exchanges are a subtle way to coerce states into spending millions of dollars to set-up a government-controlled, taxpayer-subsidized “market” for health insurance.  Thereafter, when Obama’s bureaucrats at HHS decide the state version isn’t performing exactly the way they want, Obamacare grants HHS the power to take over any state’s exchange and run it from Washington, D.C.  Thus, the bait-and-switch is yet another way for Obamacare to hide its impact on the federal budget deficit by shoving some of its start-up costs onto the states.

Cato’s Cannon outlines a different strategy, with talking points that to me seem ready-made for a state campaigner’s website:

Jobs. Refusing to create an exchange will block Obamacare from imposing a tax on employers whose health benefits do not meet the federal government’s definition of “essential” coverage. That tax can run as high as $3,000 per employee. A state that refuses to create an exchange will spare its employers from that tax, and will therefore enable them to create more jobs.

Religious freedom. In blocking that employer tax, state officials would likewise block Obamacare’s effort to force religious employers to provide coverage for services they find immoral — like contraception, pharmaceutical abortions, and sterilization.

The federal debt. Refusing to create exchanges would also reduce the federal debt, because it would prevent the Obama administration from doling out billions of dollars in subsidies to private insurance companies.

The U.S. Constitution. The Obama administration has indicated that it might try to tax employers and hand out those subsidies anyway — even in states that don’t create an exchange, and even though neither Obamacare nor any other federal law gives it the power to do so. If that happens, the fact that a state has refused to create an exchange would give every large employer in the state — including the state government itself — the ability to go to court to block the administration’s attempt to usurp Congress’s legislative powers.

A lower state tax burden. States that opt to create an exchange can expect to pay anywhere from $10 million to $100 million per year to run it. But if states refuse, Obamacare says the federal government must pay to create one. Why should states pay for something that the federal government is giving away?

Bye-bye, Obamacare. That is, if the feds can create an exchange at all. The Obama administration has admitted it doesn’t have the money — and good luck getting any such funding through the GOP-controlled House. Moreover, without state-run exchanges, the feds can’t subsidize private insurance companies. That by itself could cause Obamacare to collapse.

There is no reason a state should agree to spend millions of dollars laying the groundwork for a federal takeover of health care.  Fiscal conservatives running for office this cycle should articulate this argument well and often.

Once upon a time, liberals scoffed at the idea that legislation needed to be constitutional in order to be lawful.  Remember then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s infamous response to the question of where in the Constitution did Congress have the power to pass Obamacare: “Are you serious?”

Well, after the U.S. Supreme Court scared the daylights out of the liberal commentariat with pointed questions about Obamacare’s constitutionality, it seems that opponents of Indiana’s recent right-to-work law are trying their hand at interpreting the text instead of the spirit of the document.

The Daily Caller summarizes the argument:

Indiana’s law prohibits employers from making union membership a condition of getting or keeping a job. The union’s February lawsuit claimed the law violated its members’ Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of “equal protection” under the law.

But an amended complaint filed on Wednesday added a Thirteenth Amendment claim as well. The new lawsuit suggests that when nonunion employees earn higher salaries and better benefits because of the union’s negotiation on behalf of its members, the union has been forced to work for those nonunion employees for free.

And being forced to work without compensation, the union suggested in its revised lawsuit, is slavery.

It’s the height of hypocrisy for union leaders who’ve spent decades coercing membership and dues from any worker falling under their legally-sanctioned monopoly to claim that economic enslavement only occurs when its members have to subsidize benefits other people don’t value.

In a sane world, the union’s lawsuit would be thrown out with prejudice as a waste of court time and resources.

But this is the Age of Obama.  How much longer can it be before the Department of Justice and the National Labor Relations Board weigh-in with briefs defending the indefensible?

Roll Call has a behind-the-scenes look at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s opposition research team, and the findings aren’t pretty.

As any number of elections have taught us, a candidate’s personal history is just as relevant to voting decisions as his or her policy stances.  What makes the profile of the DCCC outfit stomach-churning, however, is the glee staff members exude from discovering the lowest points of other people’s lives:

Diana Asti, a newly promoted research analyst, finished a 204-page book on a target following seven days on the ground, 30 Freedom of Information requests and finding every word from the candidate ever on record. That morning in the DCCC’s second-floor conference room, Asti finally had the opportunity to reveal one of her biggest discoveries about her target: his secret first marriage.

“My head just went in all different directions, like maybe they’ve divorced and he hasn’t paid alimony, or maybe he has a child and he hasn’t paid child support,” exclaimed the 23-year-old Asti afterward in an interview. “I went into a million different directions of what this could possibly be. It was a very exciting moment.”

In case you’re wondering, the reason so few politicians seem “real” is because they live in fear of people like Diana Asti.

And let’s not forget her colleague Jonathan Pullum, a man who confesses the following desire whenever he sees his Republican target:

Occasionally, Pullum still sees his quirky research subject around Capitol Hill. Johnson doesn’t know the 24-year-old from any other young staffer, but Pullum describes his reaction as giddy.

“I have this real desire to be like, ‘How’s it going, buddy? Let’s talk about your diet,’” Pullum said. “It’s all these bizarre things that you know.”

Bizarre, indeed.

A delightful surprise in my inbox today from the Heritage Foundation:

From the preamble to the 27^th Amendment — The Heritage Guide to the Constitution Online is a completely searchable reference tool with leading expert analysis of the Constitution. The site features clause by clause analysis of our timeless reference book, links to essays, as well as a teaching companion.

ConstitutionOnline.com provides clear, concise analysis for users who are trying to further their understanding of the Constitution.

No document is more central to securing “the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” than the United States Constitution, and no website is more thorough than ConstitutionOnline.com.

The links above are hosted by an internal email system, so in case you have trouble accessing the site, use this link ( http://www.heritage.org/constitution ).

When you visit the site check out the bevy of essays explaining “About This Guide,” “What the Constitution Means,” “How It Was Formed,” and “The Originalist Perspective.”

There’s also a link to a “Teacher’s Companion” that’s great for Tea Party meetings and reading groups, as well as formal classroom settings.

With the primary season effectively over, now is a great time to brush-up on the Constitution, its meaning, and history.  Goodness knows conservatives will need every argument we can muster come the general election if the Republic is to survive.

Michelle Malkin says that while the million-dollar junkets enjoyed by General Services Administration officials at taxpayer expense deserve outrage, the real scandals are the $25 million+ paydays the GSA gives to Big Labor thanks to a rule implemented by President Barack Obama.

As I’ve reported previously, the linchpin is E.O. 13502, a union-friendly executive order signed by Obama in his first weeks in office. It essentially forces contractors who bid on large-scale public construction projects worth $25 million or more to submit to union representation for its employees. The blunt instrument used to give unions a leg up is the “project labor agreement,” which in theory sets reasonable pre-work terms and conditions. But in practice, it requires contractors to hand over exclusive bargaining control, to pay inflated, above-market wages and benefits, and to fork over dues money and pension funding to corrupt, cash-starved labor organizations.

One analyst told Congress that “the adoption of a PLA amounts, in effect, to a conferral of monopoly power on a select group of construction unions over the supply of construction labor.”

Since 85 percent of construction laborers are non-union, Obama’s GSA-enforced PLA is a financial boon to the shrinking unionized sector.

Echoing Malkin, the GSA administration’s luxuriant trips to Las Vegas and other locales should be prosecuted fully, but let’s not be distracted from the crony capitalism wasting several times those amounts just about every time a new federal building gets constructed.

If there’s going to be oversight – and there should be – let’s hope the bulk of it zeroes in on unwinding President Obama’s disastrous PLA.

Politico has a great article grappling with the question, What happens to all the agencies and personnel funded by ObamaCare if the Supreme Court rules the health care reform bill unconstitutional?

Unless the Court spells out in great detail how to unwind a bureaucratic behemoth that has already created 500 new positions in 2 new agencies – with another 3,000 new jobs in the Office of the Health and Human Services Secretary alone – it seems the answer is, no one knows.

Realistically, the issue will boil down to which party has control of the public’s purse:

“The issue you’re looking at here is cash flow,” said Jim Dyer, a former Republican staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, who is now a principal at the Podesta Group.

The federal spending pipeline is complex and secretaries have a lot of tricks up their sleeves. Even if the courts strike down the health reform law, Dyer said, the onus will still be on Congress to fully shut off the tap.

“If I’m an appropriator, … I would want to draw a hard line in the sand,” he said. The committee could immediately demand HHS stop its spending if the court strikes down the law so that it can exert tight control over how it winds the program down. Exactly how that would shake out if a Republican-controlled House committee wanted HHS to stop the spending but a Democratic-controlled Senate did not would be part of the uncertain political terrain.”

Here’s one more reason to ensure that next year’s budget process is dominated by fiscal conservatives.

Yesterday, Senate Republicans blocked consideration on President Barack Obama’s so-called ‘Buffett Rule’ to impose a minimum federal income tax on some millionaires earning income on certain kinds of investments.  As I discussed in my column last week, no tax authority thinks implementing the Buffett Rule will make a scintilla of difference in the federal deficit.  So good riddance to a time-wasting distraction.

But before we pivot to the Obama reelection campaign’s next economic inanity, let’s pause to consider what liberal support for the Buffett Rule really says about modern liberalism’s discriminatory use of the tax code.

In a splendid piece published yesterday, former Reagan advisor Richard Rahn explains that the Buffett Rule only hits the type of investment income most used by entrepreneurs, and thus blocks those trying to ascend the personal wealth ladder.

Even if the Buffett tax ever passes, it was crafted by members of Congress to hit few of their own. Very rich members of Congress, such as Sens. John F. Kerry and John D. Rockefeller IV, receive much of their income from tax-exempt state and local bonds and from trust funds, which largely avoid the tax. Members of Congress generally are restricted from entrepreneurial activities. So, of course, they have decided to increase the tax on entrepreneurs — the capital gains tax — which is a tax on becoming rich, not a tax on being rich.

Most people, such as students, are relatively poor by government methodology when they are young but rise through the income ranks as they become more productive and experienced and then fall in relative income as they near and enter retirement, even though they may have considerable net wealth. By increasing the tax on capital gains and marginal rates, the government makes it more difficult to move into higher income brackets, thus actually reducing income-class mobility.

Those who support the Buffett millionaires’ surtax as written reveal themselves either to be economically ignorant or to believe the voters are fools who will not see through their destructive games.

Three cheers for the fiscal conservatives in the Senate who blocked consideration on this atrocious bill.  It’s time to get beyond gimmicks, and implement policies that get America back to work without further distorting the tax code.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano may have perjured herself twice in testimony before Congress about what she knew about the Fast & Furious scandal, and when she knew it.

In a new book by Human Events political editor Katie Pavlich, sources tell the author that Napolitano was lying when she told Congress – twice – that she never discussed the illegal gun-walking scandal with Attorney General Eric Holder and Dennis Burke, the U.S. Attorney for Arizona.

According to Pavlich’s sources…

• “There are five emails linking [Napolitano] to [Attorney General Eric] Holder.  They go back two days after it happened – the first email was two days after Brian was killed.” (Referencing the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s by Mexican drug cartel members armed with at least one Fast & Furious gun.)

• “…Napolitano was briefed regularly by an agent from another of her agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE.” (ICE was involved in Fast & Furious because it has jurisdiction over the U.S.-Mexico border and thus had to sign-off on guns walking over the border.)

• “There was an ICE agent assigned specifically to be the co-case agent of Fast & Furious.  He had to [file] an ICE report that either mirrored or referenced every ATF report that was done.”

Based on the preview, Pavlich’s book seems like a must-read for anyone appalled by the disregard for the rule of law and basic safety manifested by the Secretary for Homeland Security and the Attorney General.

When all the facts are known, the fall-out from the Fast & Furious fiasco will likely be huge.  From Human Events:

Pavlich makes a strong case that when people are finally charged with crimes, Napolitano will have to answer for her perjury to Congress.

“Let me tell you something about Janet,” another source said to the author. “Janet will be lucky not to go to prison.”

Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee is the dean of California political writers and today he’s got a gem.  Walters criticizes including yet another entry on the state’s list of population groups required to be taught in a positive light in history classes.

The latest effort is Senate Bill 993 by Sen. Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, which would require social science instruction on the “braceros,” a long-expired federal program that brought workers into the country, mostly from Mexico, during and after World War II to offset farm labor shortages.

Lest Walters be accused of insensitivity, he rightly directs attention to the real crisis facing California’s schools:

In a state as diverse as California, there’s literally a bottomless well of ethnic and cultural groups that could seek inclusion not only on the instruction list but in the liturgy of those that must be portrayed only in the most positive terms.

We don’t need to brainwash our kids. We need to give them well-rounded, accurate instruction that prepares them for life beyond childhood – and our poor academic test scores indicate that we’re neglecting that important task while filling their minds with feel-good pap.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have an alternative to such a broken system by applying your tax dollars to tuition at a private or charter school of your choice?  If you think so, check out Troy’s column on Bobby Jindal’s school reform breakthrough in Louisiana.

And if you’re a pap-hating Californian with school-age kids, consider moving.

The Daily Caller profiles a new book, Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics, that explains why aging and shrinking populations in China, Japan, and Europe will dramatically alter American foreign policy.

Some of the book’s findings are startling:

• By the end of this decade India will surpass China as the most populous nation.

• Japan will lose 1 million people a year by 2060, contracting from 127 million to less than 87 million.

• Europe’s expensive social welfare model and aging populations will increasingly spur governments to scale back military spending in order to fund burgeoning entitlement program.

• Even though America’s current rate of replacing itself gives it a demographic advantage, unless serious reforms are instituted to entitlement spending, it too will continue to cut military expenditures to pay for rapidly expanding benefits for the elderly.

India surpassing China means that democracy – not a communist-controlled autocracy – will be the government adopted by the most populous country on Earth.  It may also encourage the United States and India to forge a closer strategic partnership around shared values to check China’s ambitions.

And of course, we’ve already seen how the European model of heavy on services, light on defense is making the region – though not a few individual countries – increasingly irrelevant when it comes to making the world safe.

In his budgets, President Barack Obama has chosen to increase spending on entitlements and gut defense, arguing like a European that multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and NATO can accomplish more than any one nation.

Paul Ryan highlighted this danger in his latest budget proposal, “The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal.”  In it, he faults President Obama for cutting $500 billion from the Defense Department instead of making the changes needed to entitlements so that Americans can be protected both at home and abroad.

Americans need not accept decline through badly prioritized budgets.  Instead, using innovative entitlement reforms like the ones in Ryan’s Path to Prosperity, we can have sustainable entitlement programs and a robust defense.

We’ve got the people.  Now we need to implement the right policies.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the reasons French tire company Michelin is expanding its operations in South Carolina while reducing its employment footprint in the Midwest:

Pete Selleck, Michelin’s North America president, said the state has strong technical education resources and ready infrastructure. “South Carolina has a long history with technical colleges dating back to the 1960s,” he said. The state “is also one of the least unionized states in the country, which gives us the flexibility to focus on the customer.”

“There is no significant difference between nonunion and unionized plants other than a rule book in our unionized plants that tell us what we can and can’t do,” Mr. Selleck added.

The emphasis is mine, and it tells you all you need to know about where the growth opportunities are for companies, customers, and employees.

In another part of the article Michelin is credited with paying a starting wage of $20 per hour, about a third more than the $15 per hour required under the average union contract.

Better pay and no union dues?  Maybe the iconic bumper sticker saying “Work Union, Live Better” should be changed to read, “Work Union, Earn Less.”