Freedom Line Blog

Though skeptical of a Donald Trump presidential administration, show me in the Yes column for a spirited campaign by the billionaire.  For rhetorical firepower and the brashness to speak truth without consequences, there may be no more entertaining presidential hopeful than The Donald.  Consider this description of his speech today at CPAC:

“The United States has become a whipping post for the rest of the world,” Trump said. “The world is treating us without respect. They are not treating us properly. America today is missing quality leadership, and foreign countries are quickly realizing this.”

Trump laced his speech with heavy criticisms of President Obama and declared himself to be pro-life, against gun control and an opponent of the health care reform law. He said that Obama “came out of nowhere” and seemed to question the president’s documented personal history, claiming that people who went to school with Obama “never saw him. They don’t even know who he is.”

On foreign policy, Trump sounded particularly skeptical of the intentions of China and the OPEC nations and said that if he had “an admiral and a couple good ships” to deal with Somali pirates, he would “blast them out of the water so fast.”

The best result of a Trump presidency?  Seeing him turn around during his inaugural speech, look President Barack Obama in the eye and say, “You’re fired.”

H/T: Scott Conroy of Real Clear Politics

Leave it to liberals like Arianna Huffington to treat the little people she champions exactly like a corporate stooge.  Debra Saunders highlights the hypocrisy fueling this week’s announced merger of AOL News with The Huffington Post:

Remember HuffPo’s big scoop during the 2008 presidential election? Writer Mayhill Fowler recorded then-presidential candidate Barack Obama as he told swells at a San Francisco fundraiser that blue-collar voters “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

Last year, Fowler quit writing for HuffPo because the website refused to pay her. “Citizen journalist,” Mayhill Fowler discovered, has a very specific meaning: Free.

The savings Arianna realizes from not paying many of her contributors undoubtedly helps make her website more profitable.  It also lets her hide her lust for money behind the guise of anti-corporate rhetoric.  Saunders continues:

Fowler keeps waiting for the moment when high-profile Democrats realize “that they cannot say one thing and do another: to talk sympathy for working people and yet blog at a site that treats its writers badly.” Fowler should not hold her breath.

Huffington is an entrepreneurial genius at self-promotion. She fiercely surfed the left’s discontent with mainstream – read: corporate – journalism by promising to keep mainstream – read: paid – news media “honest.”

So, on the one hand Huffington lets ‘citizen journalists’ like Fowler do the heavy lifting of reporting breaking news while leveraging the resulting readership into a $315 million payday.  Not a bad day’s work for the divorced wife of a multi-millionaire.  Maybe now folks like Fowler will remember that liberals like Arianna are just as eager to make a buck as anyone else – they just aren’t as up front about it as the rest.

H/T: San Francisco Chronicle

Political Wire has the astounding sums failed gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman (R-CA) paid to campaign consultants last year.

Key staffers: Campaign manager Jill Hasner ($948,000); senior adviser Jeff Randle ($550,000); finance director Sara Myers ($439,438); deputy campaign managers W. Todd Cranney ($389,000) and Tucker Bounds ($324,572.)

Overall, the campaign cost Whitman $178 of her $1 billion+ fortune.  All that to lose by 13%; how much to lose by 20%?

Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott unveiled his much-anticipated budget proposal on Monday in front of a crowd teeming with Tea Party activists.  Slashing $4.6 billion from last year’s budget, Scott takes aim at many sacred cows.  AOL News lists the five most controversial:

(1)   10% cut in education spending

(2)   Eliminating 1,690 jobs from the Department of Corrections

(3)   An 8,700 overall reduction in the state government workforce

(4)   Tax cuts worth $4 billion

(5)   A $4 billion Medicaid reform

None of these changes, however, may be as consequential as Scott’s proposal to require state public employees to start contributing 5% of their paychecks to their pensions.  If state retirement funds are ever to become solvent the employees who benefit from them will have to put some money in the kitty.  Scott also wants to put new state hires into a 401(k)-type retirement system, a shift that would move the state toward a pension system of defined contributions instead of defined benefits.

If Scott is successful in Florida other states might follow suit.  For the sake of taxpayers in the Sunshine State and beyond, let’s hope he prevails.

Recently, Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) signed on as a co-sponsor to Senator Richard Shelby’s (R-AL) balanced budget amendment bill, marking the first time a Democratic senator has supported such a measure since Zell Miller (D-GA) did eight years ago.

While Shelby’s version differs in some ways from the framework promoted by CFIF’s “One More Vote” initiative, Udall’s surprise support is welcome news.  Getting bipartisan consensus on the need to rein in federal spending is the sine qua non of real budget reform.

My hat is off to Udall for putting himself on the record in favor of spending restraint.  Now, it’s time to convert his Democratic brethren.

H/T: U.S. News & World Report

In a bold speech at Saturday’s Munich Security Conference, British Prime Minister David Cameron lashed the rise in Islamist extremism to the permissive multicultural attitude of state bureaucracy.  Announcing a dramatic shift in policy, Cameron called for “making sure that immigrants speak the language of their new home and ensuring that people are educated in the elements of a common culture and curriculum.”

Kudos to the British Prime Minister for delivering a stirring alternative to the bureaucratic-enabled formula of claiming a grievance against the government, getting public funding, and still working to violently attack the hands that coddle.  Care to wager how long it will be to get a similar statement of national principle from the American President?

The herald of the Tea Party movement is once again telling truth to pundits:

Since a majority of the smart people in Washington, D.C., agree that the nation’s astronomically high $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, chattering class consensus says all the “sane” members of Congress will stand together and once again extend America’s line of credit.  With that in mind, GOP budget cutters are proposing to get deep spending cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling.

Not so fast, says Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.  Playing his faux apolitical persona to the hilt yesterday, Bernanke said House Republicans should “not play around” with the debt ceiling vote to extract any spending concessions.  That would make a fiscal issue too political.  Instead, they should treat spending and tax issues separately; exactly the unconditional debt raising approach espoused by the Obama Administration.

But the logic of the Republicans’ negotiating tactic is clear: get spending cuts now so that the debt limit becomes a true ceiling once more instead of a temporary marker.  Having a limit on one’s credit card does not require the user to treat it as a goal.  It’s an emergency option, not a default.  Because fiscally conservative House and Senate members are the only public officials actually trying to get control of the budget, demanding concessions from the debt ceiling vote may be the only way to make progress in a fractured government.

If Bernanke is too partisan to see that, he should at least recognize that politics isn’t just an exercise in means; it’s the attainment of principled ends as well.

If the dire predictions about Egypt’s impending descent into Islamic government turn out to be true, it would behoove Americans to read up on the group most likely to run the show.  The Muslim Brotherhood can claim quite a few firsts in its 60+ year history.  Among the lowlights:

• Assassination of Egypt’s Prime Minister in 1948
• Creation of the founding documents of modern political (i.e. radical) Islam
• Spawned other terrorist groups including Hamas, al Qaeda, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad

The Muslim Brotherhood is for the kind of radicals who want to end Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and institute Sharia law as the measure of justice.  For a full account of the Brotherhood’s history and actions, click here.

H/T: Discover the Networks

How great a law could ObamaCare be if companies like McDonald’s need a compliance waiver?  The surge in waivers granted by Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is fast-approaching 800, or a little more than two a day since the law went into effect.  At some point, exceptional cases swallow the rule.  This seems to be the thinking behind today’s Rasmussen Reports poll:

Sixty-one percent (61%), in fact, think that if selected companies receive an exemption from certain aspects of the health care law, all companies should be treated the same way. Twenty percent (20%) now disagree and say all companies should not be given that exemption, but 19% more are undecided. These findings are comparable to the previous survey.

Where’s the fairness in granting waivers only to a few?  Aren’t we all in this socialized health care pool together?  Or are some companies too big to comply?  If liberals had the courage of their convictions, they’d implement their health care takeover immediately so people would know exactly what it does.  Since the law and its proponents would go down in flames in that scenario, instead we’ll continue to see HHS boil the economy slowly, hoping “only” 61% of the people notice.

I’ve yet to read a better sentence synthesizing the spirit of the Founding Fathers, the current Tea Party movement, and the threat to the American ideal embodied in ObamaCare than this passage from yesterday’s decision declaring the entire law unconstitutional:

“It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place,” wrote the judge, a Reagan appointee who sits in Pensacola, Fla.

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson, intentionally or not, makes a great argument for keeping the federal government within its historic bounds.  That Obama Administration officials are quietly pouting over the supposed dig makes it even better.

H/T: Evan Perez of the Wall Street Journal

This may be the one good use of Al Jazeera, right now the most watched, up-to-date video feed of the Egyptian situation.

If drawing a word picture of the increasingly uncivil unrest in the Middle East – and especially Egypt – the image would be dominated by the words “democracy,” “protest,” “youth,” and “change,” among others.  If the on-the-ground reporting and television pictures are to be believed, the one word uniting these themes is “hope.”  Specifically, hope in an end to corrupt government that robs people of wealth and ambition, as well as freedom and justice.

Writers of all stripes are focusing on the importance of President Barak Obama’s administration to ‘get it right’ on its position towards the protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria, Lebanon, and Jordan.  To date, Obama’s only foreign policy precedent in this realm is the lack of solidarity he showed towards pro-reform forces in Iran.  Could this week’s much wider conflagration see the implosion of Obama’s claim to be the worldwide symbol of change-hope-youth-democracy-uplift?

The complicating factor in all this is an American strategic interest that supports secular dictators over Islamist radicals.  Continuing that choice makes sense if those are the only options, but the remarkable thing about the protests is that Islamist groups (like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood) are not (yet) at the forefront of the movements.  Right now, it seems like most people are rebelling against the type of Mafioso government that keeps vast swaths of citizens repressed.

If nothing else, the knowledge and skill required at this level of foreign policy should serve as a warning to any 2012 presidential contenders (including the man likely to want a second term).  In these situations, you only get one chance to make the right decision, so you’d better be prepared.

And so it is that Rahm Emanuel is back on the ballot for Chicago mayor.  In a not unsurprising ruling, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned an appellate court’s decision to remove Emanuel’s name since he didn’t physically reside in the city for the year prior to next month’s election.  You (and everyone else reading this blog) may remember Emanuel was President Barack Obama’s White House Chief of Staff during that time.

No matter.  Saying that the appellate court’s commonsensical application of law to facts had “no basis in Illinois law” the state supremes ruled 7-0 in favor of judicial activism.  Nowhere in the relevant statute does it mention an “intent to return” exception to the residency requirement.

Never mind, though.  The “people” of Chicago support Emanuel’s candidacy by over 50%, meaning he’s likely to avoid a run-off and win outright next month.  In the event Emanuel does become the Second City’s next mayor, don’t be surprised if his conception of the rule of the law involves whatever interpretation serves him at the moment.  After all the “people” will have gotten the leadership they deserve.

It’s funny to whom the media chooses to give a pass in political coverage.  Conservative Senator John Thune (R-SD) has some in the Beltway crowd buzzing about an imminent presidential run, but the rationales given thus far should make thoughtful voters wary of jumping on the Thune 2012 bandwagon just yet.  From Time:

For some Republicans, Thune is the answer to their anxieties: the current crop of GOP contenders is dangerously weak, party leaders privately grumble. (Mitt Romney? Been there. Sarah Palin? Too divisive. Tim Pawlenty? Yawn.) His fans say Thune, 50, offers voters a fresh face, a tall and square-jawed profile plus a solid set of conservative credentials. He’s been a GOP hero ever since he unseated then Senate majority leader Tom Daschle in 2004. His home state’s proximity to all-important Iowa doesn’t hurt either. And he has at least one prominent cheerleader in the current Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell. “I’m a big John Thune fan,” McConnell said on Jan. 25. “I think he should [run].”

According to this description of Thune’s assets, the gentleman from South Dakota brings height, geography, and conservative positions to the presidency, but little else.  If the Republican establishment is looking for their party’s equivalent of Barack Obama (lanky, genial, and bereft of significant policy success), then Thune may be their man.  Should Thune run, however, Republican primary voters should insist on specifics from him as a guard against electing the Republican version of Barack Obama (inexperienced, politically tone deaf, and poor legislative skills).

Being a “fresh face” in politics means one doesn’t have the scars that come with surviving important political battles.  America is waging a war for her soul; now isn’t the time to elect someone else president because he’s too new to appreciate the old.

Perhaps the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should get credit for making the road to serfdom a little easier to travel.  Beset by criticisms that ObamaCare grants HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “dictatorship” status with powers including on whom to bestow compliance waivers, HHS confirmed it handed out 500 new get-out-jail-free cards.

The purpose of the year-long waivers is to provide a compliance-free bridge for employers who would otherwise opt to pay the penalty for canceling out-of-compliance insurance plans.  That bridge only extends to 2014.

Alex Cortes at The Daily Caller notes that the waivers (averaging about two a day so far for 729 total) will only be granted until 2014 when ObamaCare’s state-run insurance exchanges come online.  Then, companies that stop offering insurance will pay the fine, but their employees will be able (i.e. forced) to use the exchanges or be fined themselves for ignoring the individual mandate.

Until then, private sector employers and employees must go hat-in-hand begging for a waiver from Comrade Sebelius.  Don’t worry, says a HHS spokesman, the number of waiver requests denied is “more than a handful, but not a big number.”  How benevolent.

Three cheers for textualism rang out when an Illinois state appellate court ruled former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel ineligible to run for mayor of Chicago.  CFIF previously highlighted Emanuel’s dubious residency claims.  Then, it was obvious Emanuel did not meet the 1 year Chicago residency requirement because he had been living in Washington, D.C.

Tellingly, no one disputes this now.  Instead, Emanuel’s defenders (including the Chicago Board of Elections) support the theory that a candidate’s intent to return should be read-in (i.e. judicially legislated) as an exception to the residency requirement.  The state appeals court had none of it.  In a straightforward opinion, a 2-1 majority ruled for textual integrity and struck Emanuel’s name from the ballot.  Of course, he’s appealing it to the state supreme court, but that shouldn’t deter that body from applying the same plain meaning of the statute to his situation.

No one is saying that Rahm Emanuel can never run for mayor of Chicago, just that he must comply with the legal standards for assuming the office.  If that’s too much to ask of Rahm, then maybe it would be too much to expect a faithful application of other laws once he’s in office.

The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol writes a terrific defense of market forces in selecting the next Republican presidential nominee.

Here are two choice paragraphs:

This vision should be easy for conservatives to embrace. Believers in the free market understand the virtues of competition, of low barriers to entry, and of lots of opportunities for (so to speak) price discovery. We know the superiority of spontaneous order to central planning. But too many GOP bigwigs in Washington who claim to have read Hayek have succumbed to the fatal conceit. They’re meeting nonstop trying to determine for us all now, a year before the first primary—with limited information as to relevant candidate skills and almost no knowledge of next year’s political environment—who the best presidential candidate would be.

Democratic capitalists admire Schumpeter for explaining the virtues of creative destruction. But too many donors to the party of democratic capitalism are huddling in New York this winter figuring out if there isn’t some way to short-circuit this kind of healthy—if messy, to be sure—competition among entrepreneurial candidates testing their skills and their messages. Wealthy individuals who made their fortunes by defying the odds are trying to figure out who’s the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination so they can cluster behind him. Businessmen who swear by the virtues of competition decry the fact that there will be lots of competition for the GOP nomination. Shouldn’t they instead welcome the competition, even encourage it by putting a little venture capital behind several nominees to see how they do? Markets work, and political markets work too. At least, they’re better than the alternative.

Read all of Kristol’s argument for robust political competition here as an antidote for the establishment and media’s tendency to call results much too early.

Other than her congressional district, Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) true base of support comes from the millions of Tea Party members currently providing the grassroots dynamism of the Republican Party.  Bachmann raised so much money last cycle that some pundits think she’s running for U.S. Senate or even president.

The announcement that Bachmann is delivering an unofficial Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address will heighten that speculation.  It will also anger the House Republican leadership that continues to pass over Bachmann.  First, it voted her down in a bid to be the new chair of the House GOP Conference Chair.  Bachmann pressed ahead with her own Tea Party caucus, raising even more money.  Now, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is slated to give the official Republican response, but Bachmann will deliver her own via the Tea Party Express website.

There may not be a way for Bachmann to capitalize on her media stardom, unless she continues to go her own way.  This will widen the gap between her and House GOP leadership, but if she wins a Senate seat or the presidency in 2012, the onus will be on leadership to make nice with her.

Surprisingly, former Governor Mike Huckabee (R-AR) comfortably leads all other likely Republican contenders for the party’s 2012 presidential nomination.  Though the lead is of dubious predictive value, the Other Man From Hope, Arkansas continues to be a genuine political force attractive to millions of Americans.  He did, after all, win the 2008 Iowa caucuses and come within a hair’s breath of winning Missouri’s primary.  Had he won the latter, the nomination fight would have boiled down to him and Senator John McCain (R-AZ), with favorable odds for an eventual Huckabee win.

So far, Huckabee says he won’t make a final decision on running until this summer.  The reason being his distaste for an 18-month campaign; a distaste shared by many voters.  Though Huckabee ran afoul of some fiscal conservative groups for some infrastructure spending increases he implemented as governor, he rightly pointed out that all of them were either mandated by federal judicial rulings, or popularly approved by Arkansas voters.

From all accounts Huckabee is probably the most normal person likely to run for president this cycle.  That alone may explain his widespread appeal.  Time will tell if it is enough to get him the nomination this time.

H/T: Political Wire