Freedom Line Blog

How’s this for a breach of the public’s trust?  From Judicial Watch:

The Obama Administration has abruptly sealed court records containing alarming details of how Mexican drug smugglers murdered a U.S. Border patrol agent with a gun connected to a failed federal experiment that allowed firearms to be smuggled into Mexico.

This means information will now be kept from the public as well as the media. Could this be a cover-up on the part of the “most transparent” administration in history? After all, the rifle used to kill the federal agent (Brian Terry) last December in Arizona’s Peck Canyon was part of the now infamous Operation Fast and Furious. Conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the disastrous scheme allowed guns to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels.

Instead, federal law enforcement officers lost track of more than 1,000 guns which have been used in numerous crimes. In Terry’s case, five illegal immigrants armed with at least two semi-automatic assault rifles were hunting for U.S. Border Patrol agents near a desert watering hole just north of the Arizona-Mexico border when a firefight erupted and Terry got hit.

The report goes on to say that Border Patrol officials have been kept out of the loop on why the Mexican national charged with killing Terry has yet to be tried almost a year after the murder.

Just before the court documents were sealed, the Washington Times published an article showing why U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and others responsible for the Fast and Furious scandal want the details of Terry’s murder under wraps:

A now-sealed federal grand jury indictment in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry says the Mexican nationals were “patrolling” the rugged desert area of Peck Canyon at about 11:15 p.m. on Dec. 14 with the intent to “intentionally and forcibly assault” Border Patrol agents.

At least two of the Mexicans carried their assault rifles “at the ready position,” one of several details about the attack showing that Mexican smugglers are becoming more aggressive on the U.S. side of the border.

According to the indictment, the Mexicans were “patrolling the area in single-file formation” a dozen miles northwest of the border town of Nogales and — in the darkness of the Arizona night — opened fire on four Border Patrol agents after the agents identified themselves in Spanish as police officers.

Two AK-47 assault rifles found at the scene came from the failed Fast and Furious operation.

Imagine if some corrupt machine politician tried to keep in the dark a metropolitan police department on why politically appointed prosecutors were delaying justice for a mafioso cop-killer and sealing his records.  The cops – and the public – wouldn’t stand for it.  Neither should the Border Patrol and the American people.

H/T: Mark Hemingway at the Weekly Standard

It’s an old trope that Democrats are the Santa party while Republicans play Scrooge.  But if the experience of this group of veteran Santa Claus impersonators is any guide, it looks like Old Saint Nick is learning the value of managing (economic) expectations.

Fred Honerkamp, a Santa graduate who also lectures at the school, said that he had come up with his own story of an errant elf to in the North Pole explain why children can’t have everything.

He said: ‘It’s hard to watch sometimes because the children are like little barometers, mirrors on what the country has been through.

‘In the end, Santas have to be sure to never promise anything.’

The school has also been advising its pupils on how to deal with such questions as: ‘Can you bring my daddy a job?’

Santa student Tom Ruperd told the New York Times that he tends to guide children towards more realistic gifts and tells them that ‘Santa’s been cutting back too’.

Faced with an impossible question, such as finding a job for a parent, his reply is: ‘Santa specializes in toys, but we can always pray on the other’.

Pray, and work hard to elect government officials who know that the truth told with respect for another’s dignity is a much better gift than empty promises.

H/T: Daily Mail

Here’s a story that serves as a great response to people who say there’s no difference between the Tea Party and Occupy movements.  The Tea Party in Richmond, VA, got a business license, rally permits, and paid $10,000 for the privilege of exercising their First Amendment rights to speech and assembly.  The Occupy Richmond mob, on the other hand, squatted on public property for days without jumping through any of the legal hoops that ensure the health and safety of a civilized society.  When the Tea Party complained, the City of Richmond sent them an audit claiming the group failed to pay excise taxes for its events.

What hypocrisy!  Lawbreakers are allowed to devalue public goods like parks while law-abiding citizens who follow the rules are sent an extra bill to pick up the tab.  If local government officials aren’t careful they are going to teach all Americans that the rule of law only applies when you want it to.  If that’s the governing philosophy going forward, it’s time to renegotiate the social contract.

H/T: Fox News

Matt Welch of Reason magazine has a wonderfully critical review of New York Times columnist’s Tom Friedman’s newest paean to government action, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.  In a wide-ranging essay that faults as well NYT columnist David Brooks and CNN contributor (and one-time Bush speechwriter) David Frum for their simplistic preference for more government power to fix all that ails America, Welch explains how the ‘do-something’ crowd endangers freedom.

First, a definition:

Do something. Is there a two-word phrase in politics more loaded with disguised ideological content? Embedded within is both an urgent call for powerful government action and an up-front declaration that the policy details don’t matter. The bigger the crisis, the more the urgency, the sparser the detail.

Try as its cheerleaders might, there is nothing essentially new about ‘do-something’-ism:

As The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent pointed out in response to Miller, “many of those calling for a third party are refusing to reckon with an inconvenient fact: One of the two partiesalready occupies the approximate ideological space that these commentators themselves are describing as the dream middle ground that allegedly can only be staked out by a third party. That party is known as the ‘Democratic Party.’ ” By dreaming up a third way to deliver ideas and rhetoric already associated with Barack Obama, the centrists are making the implicit admission that the president is ineffectual in the face of GOP intransigence.

As usual, claimants for a ‘third way’ are really just calling for a formula that results in an overall subtraction of individual freedom:

Fortunately for Brooks—and unfortunately for us—there is a distinct third way. Though vague on details, it involves increased taxes (especially on energy), short-term spending boosts, long-term entitlement cuts, and roughly the same foreign policy commitments as today. It calls for renewed citizen engagement, a return to political civility, and a rejection of coarse cynicism. Better teachers, trained workers, and cleaner air. Although advocated by pundits from all over the traditional political spectrum, the program is remarkably uniform when it comes to giving the government more power. Just don’t call it ideological.

Read the entire piece, here.

Hat tip to the Heritage Foundation for sending along the text of President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving Day Proclamation:

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well as the iron and coal as of our precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the imposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purpose, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.

You know political differences are coming to a head when state and local leaders takes step – albeit unrealistic – to break away from misbehaving neighbors.  Earlier this year liberal Pima County made noise about seceding from Arizona.  A county official in conservative Inland California called for meetings to legally distance themselves from spendthrift Sacramento and the loony Left Coast.  Now, two Republican state lawmakers in Illinois have introduced a bill to divide Illinois into two states: liberal Cook County (home of Chicago), and the other 101 municipalities.  Claiming that “Chicago-style politics” are dominating all other concerns in the state, the GOP legislators want to part ways and limit the influence of Second City Mayor Rahm Emanuel to a smaller geographic area.

Will any of these ideas work?  Almost certainly not.  But the popularity of political separation just underscores how divided America is becoming.  That we’re still together is something to be thankful for, if not an occasion for perpetual rejoicing.

Apparently, the media – and I – misread Mike Huckabee’s remarks to South Carolina Tea Party members as an endorsement of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  Here’s a fuller quote of Huckabee’s answer to whether conservatives should stay home on Election Day 2012 if Romney is the Republican nominee:

“It would be real tragic if they stayed out. Mitt Romney may not be their first choice, but Mitt Romney every day of the week and twice on Sunday is going to be a much more effective president for issues that they care about than Barack Obama.”

In other news, one-time 2012 aspirant Senator John Thune (R-SD) did endorse Romney today in Iowa.  Even without Huckabee’s support, Romney is building up Beltway conservative bona fides with Thune and freshman Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) coming on board.

It’s official: Eric Holder is now a campaign issue.  GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry says that because of Holder’s false statements about his knowledge and oversight of the Fast and Furious fiasco, the U.S. Attorney General should resign or be fired immediately.

This is a welcome development to those of us at CFIF who have been calling for Holder’s ouster for quite a while.  With the Solyndra scandal looking increasingly likely to take down Energy Secretary Steven Chu, it would be a shame if by comparison Holder held onto his job since someone actually died under his watch.

In a head-scratching move, Mike Huckabee told South Carolina Tea Partiers that it’s time to support Mitt Romney for president.  How’s this for emphasis:

“I think Republicans and conservatives and the Tea Party need to get behind him and say, ‘You may not be our first choice, but between you and Obama, I’ll vote 40 times to get you elected,” Huckabee said.

The biggest loser with the socially conservative Huckabee’s endorsement of the socially moderate Romney is GOP candidate Rick Santorum.  Pundit chatter pegged Santorum as the beneficiary of the anti-Romney social conservatives in Iowa, but current poll numbers show Santorum still trailing badly.  There’s still time for him to make a move, but Huckabee’s endorsement of Romney just cut it in half.

Glenn Beck’s The Blaze reports on a highly visible casualty of the economic downturn that is costing Americans’ jobs and now memories: decades-old restaurant chains.

Here’s a list of the Top Ten restaurants that are contracting in today’s tight  economy:

(1)   Bennigan’s Grill and Tavern

(2)   Ground Round Grill & Bar

(3)   Baker’s Square

(4)   Damon’s Grill & Sports Bar

(5)   Don Pablo’s

(6)   Gloria Jean’s Coffees

(7)   Big Boy

(8)   Tony Roma’s

(9)   Country Kitchen

(10) Black Angus Steakhouse

These corporate losses are just another source of lost jobs and opportunities.  Mr. President and the “super” committee, are you listening?

Washington Post columnist and failed CNN host Kathleen Parker caused a stir this weekend with a piece claiming that the alleged ‘know-nothingness’ of Sarah Palin is infecting Republican primary voters.  The evidence, as Byron York of the Washington Examiner points out, points the opposite way.

So far, there have been three Republican candidates who rose and fell quickly in the polls: Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Cain.  Each rose because voters liked some combination of his or her message, experience, and personal appeal.  But each fell mostly for one reason: Republican voters became concerned about whether they knew enough to be president.

Because the GOP base is conservative, and because the candidates each presented a strong conservative message, it’s hardly a surprise that each received a friendly response early in the game.  But once each candidate’s performance in debates or on the stump raised questions about whether he or she had a base of knowledge broad and deep enough to serve as president, Republican supporters began to peel away.  Bachmann now ranks sixth in the RealClearPolitics poll standings, while Perry is fourth.

The candidate who has consistently stayed near the top of Republican polls is Mitt Romney.  There are no questions about whether he knows enough to be president.   The candidate who is rising at the moment, as Parker points out, is Newt Gingrich, about whom the same is true.  And the candidate who has stayed around the middle tier of the race is Ron Paul, who, for whatever problems exist in some of his policy positions, has not faced questions about his knowledge of the issues.  At the bottom tier of the race, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman have also not faced such questions.

Somehow Parker styles all of this — informed candidates rising, uninformed candidates falling — as a “tide of know-nothingness” engulfing the Republican party.  If that were really the case, wouldn’t it be the other way around?

As J. Robert Smith of the American Thinker reasons, Parker’s position on Palin and the GOP is less about sound analysis, and a heckuva lot to do with her tack to the left as she’s ascended the media ladder from National Review to the Washington Post.  Parker might want to stop by the offices of George Will and Charles Krauthammer to hear how her fellow Post columnists kept their principles and their audience.  After all, conservatives don’t need another David Frum telling them how out-of-touch they are.

In case you didn’t read the National Review cover story about him, the New York Times has a nicely condensed biographic piece on Ted Cruz, the former Texas Solicitor General running to be the state’s next U.S. Senator.  Here’s a sample of his background:

Mr. Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, where his parents were working in the oil business. Back in Houston for high school, he entered speech contests run by the Free Enterprise Institute. Students learned the “Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom,” a government-out-of-the-economy manifesto based on the work of libertarian thinkers like Mr. Hayek, Frédéric Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, then wrote and memorized 20-minute speeches about it. As one of the citywide winners for four years, Mr. Cruz traveled the state, speaking to civic groups for $50 or $100 a speech.

The institute then chose him to be one of its “Constitutional Collaborators,” who spent hundreds of hours debating the Constitution. Using a mnemonic device to memorize it, they toured the state, writing it out for audiences.

It made Mr. Cruz an early adopter of the worldview that now characterizes Tea Party politics, where federal involvement in health care or the economy (and many of the roles it has assumed since the New Deal) is socialism and an abuse of the Constitution. At Princeton, he wrote his thesis on the Ninth and 10th Amendments, the core of the states’ rights argument.

It also directed him toward politics. He graduated from Harvard Law School, then clerked for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, and served in the Bush administration at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department.

How many U.S. Senators do you know who could write out the Constitution from memory?  Perhaps the Lone Star State will give us at least one.

Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute writes a thought-provoking piece for the fall edition of Breakthrough Journal.  In it, the conservative environmental expert and presidential historian discusses how to deal with three facts of modern political life:

(1)   Neither liberals nor conservatives will ever defeat the other side so decisively as to be able to govern without the consent of the other side

(2)   The divisions between Left and Right are fundamental and unbridgeable because each side has conflicting modes of moral reasoning that cannot be easily synthesized or bridged

(3)   The welfare state, or entitlement state, is here to stay

On this last point Hayward voices support for some of the reforms in Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity budget plan, and other conservative attempts to make social programs more fiscally sustainable by changing eligibility requirements.  Citing Ronald Reagan’s retreat from serious entitlement reform as a prime example of how unlikely it is for modern conservatives to simply do away with entitlements, Hayward offers a cautionary analysis against perennial cost-control proposals like “starve-the-beast” and balanced budget amendments.

As the GOP presidential voting gets underway in less than 50 days, this is a piece well worth reading, considering, and applying to those who would replace President Barack Obama.

Recently, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) delivered the keynote address after receiving the Claremont Institute’s Churchill Award for Statesmanship.  The text of his remarks are available here, with the conclusion reminding us why Ryan will likely be the first name on any GOP Vice President list next summer:

Congresses are elected to promote the common good of our country. And Congress has the power to take control of our nation’s fate, and to reclaim popular trust in government.

We face a choice of two futures in this country. But I am optimistic that if we give Americans a clear choice, they will do the right thing. As Churchill put it, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing… but only after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”

Look, Republicans didn’t always get it right as a party ourselves. But if there ever was a time to gather our political courage and reclaim our ideas, it is now. The country is facing a very precarious moment.

Your leaders owe you a real choice. Do you want the President’s path of debt, doubt and decline, where government goes from promoting equal opportunity to equalizing the results of our lives?

Or do you want the American idea: the opportunity society with the safety net, dedicated to liberty, equality of opportunity, and upward mobility?

It is our moral obligation, as elected representatives, to give the American people this choice.

And if we do our jobs right, then we will soon have the duty, and the privilege, to make that vision a reality.

Let it be said of us, as Churchill said of his people in their most difficult hour: “We ought to rejoice at the responsibilities with which destiny has honored us… and be proud that we are guardians of our country in an age when her life is at stake.”

Michelle Malkin takes no prisoners with her analysis of the newest example of Obama’s crony capitalism gone wild.  As I wrote about yesterday, the $433 million taxpayer giveaway to the politically connected pharmaceutical firm Siga Technologies will rival the $535 debt incurred thanks to Solyndra going belly-up.  When you tack on an additional $115 billion in R&D the feds gave Siga to create the drug they’re selling to HHS, these two scandals combined have cost American taxpayers over $1 trillion.

When will any of the GOP presidential candidates make this a theme of their campaign?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Hillary Clinton’s State Department is opening a brand new “Bureau of Energy Resources” today.  Amid the bureaucrat gushing about a “six-fold increase in personnel,” perhaps it’s worth considering just how unnecessary is this new office since its mandate seems to overlap substantially with other agencies.  Here are the “new” duties according to the article:

• Shore up stable supplies of affordable energy for the U.S.
• Promote clean energy and changes in markets to make alternative-energy technology more competitive
• Manage the geopolitics of the energy world
• Unabashedly support the export of U.S. technology, working with countries to put in a level playing field so U.S. goods can compete internationally
• Direct the development of the shale gas revolution in the U.S.

If you thought all of these mandates already apply to other entities, you’re right.  Someone should alert the Department of Energy, the U.S. Trade Representative, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Commerce – as well as a host of smaller outfits known only to the industries they regulate – that yet another federal agency is open and ready to do business harm.

At least they gave him a chance.  Only after watching U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s defiant responses to congressional interrogators did the parents of the late Brian Terry say that Holder needs to go.

Both parents want Holder to resign, citing his response to a question from Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who asked if Holder thought it was his responsibility to have known about Operation Fast and Furious.

“There are 115,000 employees in the Department of Justice,” Holder said. “I cannot be expected to know the details of every operation on a day-to-day basis.”

To which Kent said: “Holder says he has 115,000 employees. That is his job. If he can’t handle his job, he should get out of it.”

Indeed.

If you’ve ever wondered how career politicians make money while in office, here’s an answer to file away with “marry a lobbyist” and “have a trust fund.”

The Washington Times confirms that even after six months of bad press, Vice President Joe Biden will continue to charge rent from the Secret Service for the agents who live on his Delaware property to protect his life.  The Times notes that Secret Service officials can’t recall another public official charging rent from his protectors – essentially a double tax on taxpayers who’ve been subsidizing Biden’s lifestyle since he was elected to the Senate 36 years ago at the age of 31.

The amount of rent Biden will receive from the Secret Service next year – $26,400 or $2,200 a month – is a pittance compared to the trillions being wasted by the Obama Administration on its assorted boondoggles.  But it’s the way this transaction looks to have occurred that should really irk taxpayers.  From the Times report:

According to Mr. Biden’s office, the cottage had been occupied by Mr. Biden’s mother, Jean Biden, who died in 2010 at 92.

After her death, Mr. Biden asked the Secret Service about renting the property, but the agency declined and a private tenant whose identity has not been disclosed moved in. When that tenant moved out, however, the Secret Service reconsidered, approached Mr. Biden about renting the property and moved in, paying the same $2,200 per-month rate charged to the previous occupant.

Hard to believe that the Secret Service suddenly had a change of heart about granting Biden’s wish to make money off of a service offered to him by a generous nation and dedicated personnel.  Instead, it looks like the mystery tenant was just a stand-in to establish a rental price that Biden could claim was fair market value when he cajoled the Secret Service into accepting his offer.

What’s next; Biden charging AMTRAK for the privilege of ferrying him between D.C. and Delaware?

With Quin’s column this week reminding us of the lessons to learn from the War of 1812 (though the battle he writes about occurred in 1815), it’s nice to a plug for the Revolutionary War heroes flow from Eliot Cohen’s pen in today’s Wall Street Journal.  After recounting some of the highlights from America’s 200 years of military intrigue along the “Great Warpath” from Albany to Quebec, Cohen ends his masterful treatment with this poignant command from one of our nation’s first veterans:

One of the relics carefully preserved at the Fort Ticonderoga museum is the knapsack of Benjamin Warner, a some time soldier during the Revolution who, like many of his fellow citizens, fought, went home and returned to fight again, and not once but half a dozen times. Fifty years later, he left the battered canvas bag to his oldest son, with instructions to transmit it “to the latest posterity. And whilst one shred of it shall remain, never surrender your liberties to a foreign invader or an aspiring demagogue.” In this age of uncertainty and self-doubt, that spirit is yet another legacy of the Great Warpath worth pondering.

Granted, Newt has 9 staff members in the Palmetto State while Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry each have 7, but hey, he’s still #1!

Troy wrote an insightful entry analyzing Gingrich’s somewhat discussed boomlet as perhaps not enough to overtake the unfathomable Mitt Romney.  Still, if there’s anyone in this race who knows how to galvanize a movement, it’s the author of the Contract with America.

Quin, I await another onslaught on why Gingrich would not be (to put it nicely) your choice for POTUS.