Freedom Line Blog

Remember when then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that while Obama’s likening himself to Martin Luther King, Jr., was nice, it was really President Lyndon Johnson who changed civil rights from a rhetorical dream into legislative reality?  As usual, Clinton was criticized for speaking truth in public.  But her observation – and comparison – still rings true today.

Flash forward to President Obama’s remarks to Senate Democrats on Sunday.  While his midday sermon was long on admonishments to find common ground, it didn’t give any direction on how on to find it.  The lack of setting down definitions or benchmarks for success, or even support for moderates needing a safe harbor during tough re-election campaigns, indicates that Obama has no clue how to line up 60 votes in his own caucus.  LBJ never seemed to have that problem.  Hillary Clinton’s recognition of this indicates she may have learned more from her failures as First Lady health czar than Obama has over a lifetime of risk aversion.

This is a trend.  Since at least his time in law school, Obama has studiously avoided even the appearance of a paper trail.  He’s also managed to spend a decade as an elected legislator without authoring a single consequential piece of legislation.  Simply put, the man doesn’t know how to horse trade, cajole, and get a bill on his desk for signature.  One wonders how much less effective he’d be without a majority in both chambers.

With all the attention devoted to health care reform this fall it is little wonder that the federalization of the college student loan system is getting scant notice. As the Wall Street Journal points out, there is a quiet takeover occurring of the student loan market that, if successful, would eliminate private lending companies from competing with the federal government’s alternative.

The typical tale of a free-speech controversy on campus involves administrators landing on some poor undergrad who violates political correctness. But in this story the administrators have been afraid to speak as the Department of Education pressured them to drop private lenders and embrace the department’s own Direct Lending (DL) program. The pending bill, which has passed the House but is stalled in the Senate, would ban private lenders from making federally guaranteed loans after July 1, 2010.

Congress has already enacted regulations in recent years to discourage making loans without a federal guarantee. And many lenders have quit the business. Now the White House and Democrats like California Rep. George Miller want to go further and convert students from private loans largely backed by the taxpayer into government loans made and serviced by government and backed by the taxpayer. Think of this as a prelude to how Congress will rig the rules for any public option in health care.

Sound familiar? It gets worse. Even though the bill requiring a private loan be backed by a federal guarantee is not yet law, the Department of Education (DOE) is already contacting schools to make sure they are in compliance. Thankfully, there is still time to contact your senator while the upper chamber considers amending the House bill to allow private lenders to stay in business. If nothing else, tell them you support the free market, because it’s the only thing supporting Congress’ spending addiction.

The Wall Street Journal offers some penetrating analysis on the inevitably inverse relationship between government financing of “guns” and “butter.”  When tax receipts dwindle, appropriators often choose between funding social welfare programs (butter) and national defense (guns).  Unsurprisingly, the European welfare state provides a cautionary example.

The overlooked culprit here is the rise of the modern welfare state. Since World War II and especially from the 1960s, Europe has built elaborate domestic income-maintenance programs, with government-run health care, pensions and jobless benefits. These are hugely expensive, requiring high taxes and government spending that is a huge proportion of GDP.

The Europeans’ obsession with income stabilization through higher taxes means there is less economic growth and less money to spend.  These continental priorities mirror the massive increases in social spending enacted or proposed under President Obama – economic stimulus, health care “reform,” cap-and-trade and job creation. 

As the U.S. federal deficit balloons, politicians and bureaucrats will look for ways to balance the books.  And given the current Administration’s and Congress’  love affair with “butter,” unfortunately, they’ll likely look to slash spending on national defense while our nation is at war.

Remember when sub-prime mortgages had Congress demanding more accountability (i.e. oversight) of the housing industry? It seems like a lifetime ago that the spark igniting the current recession (derivatives of risky mortgage deals) was a priority on Congress’s to-do list. That was before health care, cap-and-trade, and Afghanistan moved it to the back burner. Apparently, the issue is still simmering because there’s news of an impending compromise between Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Barney Frank (D-MA). At issue is whether to head the yet-to-be-created “Consumer Financial Protection Agency” (CFPA) with a single director or board of commissioners.

And just what would be the CFPA’s mandate? Here’s a description from the L.A. Times:

To begin with, be aware that the agency’s powers and oversight would extend far beyond mortgages and real estate — into all credit cards, debit cards, consumer loans, payday loans, credit reporting agencies, debt collection, stored-value cards and even investment advisory and financial advisory services, to name only part of the list.

And this from CNN:

The consumer agency would be a brand new regulator whose chief concern is looking out for consumers. It would write rules aimed at ensuring that financial products like mortgages and credit cards are fair, more transparent and more easily understood.

Raise your hand if you remember the last time a government agency made a process, form, or program easier to understand. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if the new regulator is a single director or a board of commissioners. The most direct effect of creating yet another federal agency will be an increase in both taxes to fund it and transactions costs to comply with it. If Democrats really wanted to help consumers and taxpayers, they’d step back and let prosecutors and plaintiffs sue for fraud. After all, no court will enforce a contract that was signed under duress.

Then again, that’s not really the point, is it?

There were three people at the center of the federal government’s response to the economic meltdown during the latter months of 2008. President Obama still employs two. Tim Geithner got a promotion from heading the New York Federal Reserve to Treasury Secretary. Now Fed chief Ben Bernanke is up for rehire. And while the Senate Banking Committee had some heated words for the Fed’s handling of the worsening economic downturn, it offered “measured support” for the man responsible for handling the Fed. This, despite labeling the Fed itself as a “failed” regulator doing a “horrible job.”

And yet, Bernanke is widely expected to be confirmed for a second term. Coupled with Geithner’s tax evasion, one is left to wonder what could have possibly disqualified former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson from getting a plumb assignment in the Obama Administration.

Today President Obama hosts a “jobs summit” at the White House, and apparently he’s looking for ideas. Unfortunately, the folks in Congress have one in the shape of a second stimulus package – this time to be packaged and sold as a “jobs bill.” And just what’s in a “jobs bill”? Make work projects, short-term subsidies, and tax gimmicks all designed to give businesses an incentive to hire people they can’t afford without a government check. Like the first stimulus package, this kind of fix merely prolongs and deepens the problems facing businesses; namely uncertainty about the future.

If the president is truly interested in getting ideas about how to create more jobs, he should read John Stossel and meditate on this pearl of wisdom:

When government sets simple rules that everyone understands and then gets out of the way, free people create jobs.

Granted, we might lose some middle men. But until the tax system is simplified and the government stops intervening in the free market, people may get jobs, but they won’t have the kind of stability they – or their employers – need to get back to work.

For those following the most recent Iranian hostage crisis involving British sailors, Meir Javedanfar has an interesting analysis in The Guardian.  Aside from Iran seemingly picking a fight with the lesser partner in the Anglo-American alliance, the mullahs who run the country may also be responding to a threat from a source they can’t easily control: a Persian language news station operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

BBC’s Persian language radio service dates back to 1940, while its newly inaugurated TV service is now almost one year old. In this short space of time, the TV service has attracted large audiences in Iran, and the reason is simple: it is the most impartial Persian language broadcast available.

This has not been an easy endeavour as it has meant being subject to heavy criticism from both sides. For example, many anti-regime elements, especially monarchists, have at times accused it of being pro-Khamenei, because of its refusal to toe their line of attacking the regime at every opportunity. The fact that the service also looks at the positive aspects of the regime, and portrays the views of both sides has given it much credibility, as well as audience. So when it does broadcast about developments in Iran, especially those that cast the regime in a negative light, many more people are willing to accept its findings, thanks to its credibility and reputation for airing both sides of the story.

A government lashing out at a news outlet because of its fair and balanced reporting?  Only in Iran…

In his book “America Alone”, Mark Steyn discusses the “strong horse, weak horse” theory of foreign affairs. When terrorists like Osama bin Laden see a strong horse and a weak horse, they will necessarily like the strong horse. Traditionally, weakness was shown by the absence of power. Among many modern nations, it is evidenced by the refusal to use power. In either case, weakness is a provocation to those seeking to do harm.

And, as Ivan Krastev describes in today’s Washington Post, President Obama’s weakness on foreign affairs – silence on the killings of Iranian dissidents, making nice with dictators, bowing to the Japanese emperor – is signaling an over matched man in critical times. The Russians are familiar with a leader whose celebrity masks his country’s drop in prestige.

Obama himself is largely viewed in Russia as the American Mikhail Gorbachev, but Russians are less impressed than other Europeans have been with Obama’s brilliance and rock-star popularity. They remember the Gorbi-mania that conquered the globe at the moment the Soviet Union was about to crumble. Russians are tempted to view Obama’s global reformism and his progressive agenda as an expression of American weakness and not as an expression of America’s regained strength and legitimacy.

What does all this mean for the “reset” policy? First, it means that Russians will not be in a hurry to respond to the positive signals coming from Washington, and any perception of Washington weakness will diminish Moscow’s willingness to cooperate even in areas of common interest and common concern. It is not Obama’s deference but his strength that can persuade the Kremlin to cooperate with Washington. Simply put, to persuade Russians to join him, Obama must first demonstrate that he does not need them. He needs a clear victory, whether against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear ambition or Beijing’s habit of devaluing its currency. Obama must show strength for the “reset” policy to succeed.

Chances are Obama’s decision tonight to send less than the requested amount of troops to Afghanistan will do nothing to achieve either a clear victory in Afghanistan or more esteem for the Russians (or anyone else for that matter).

Apparently, consumers still like options and the technology that provides them.  Since late night host Jay Leno moved down the clock to the 10pm hour, NBC’s ratings have taken a substantial nosedive because people are recording his show on DVR while watching other shows when they air.  The problem for NBC doesn’t just stop at drops in air time viewers.  NBC’s advertisers are feeling the pinch because later viewings on DVR recordings make it possible to skip commercials.  The less people watch ads, the less companies will pay to air them, which means the less money networks like NBC will make to produce television shows.

Obviously, something must be done.  Simply put, it’s time for Congress to act because Jay Leno is too big (a chin) to fail.  Network television executives just need a little help from Big Brother in “equalizing” the market in their favor.  Think of it as “net neutrality” for broadcasters and advertisers.  Since the mantra around Washington right now is to do anything that increases consumption, it’s time to ban the DVR as an impediment to economic growth.

Turns out Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) told the truth when he yelled “You lie” after President Obama said illegal immigrants would not be covered under the health care reform bill. A report by the Washington Times shows that both the House and Senate versions of the legislation fail to prohibit illegal immigrants from getting taxpayer-funded health coverage.

The House bill mandates, and the Senate bill strongly encourages, businesses to extend health care coverage to all employees. But the bills do not have exemptions to screen out illegal immigrants, who usually obtain jobs by using false identities and are indistinguishable from legal workers.

A rough estimate by the Center for Immigration Studies suggests that the practical effect of the mandates would be that about 1 million illegal immigrants could obtain health insurance coverage through their employers.

Democrats who wrote the House bill said that employer coverage for illegal immigrants is not intentional, but rather the outcome of people breaking the law.

Well, it may not be intentional, but it certainly logically follows. The failure of Democrats to address this loophole (and others like it) is the reason the health care “reform” will become seemingly uncontrollable. Of course, no social welfare program the government creates is truly uncontrollable, so long as there is diligent enforcement of means testing. But then, what’s the point of having universal health care if everybody (citizen or not) isn’t in the same system?

In what may be a lesson for budding progressive politicians, the career paths of President Barack Obama and the new European Union foreign minister offer insight into how to position oneself for stardom while ascending in darkness.  It turns out that like Obama, Lady Catherine Ashton has a dodgy past full of close ties to political radicals on the Left.  As a paid organizer for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), then Ms. Ashton rubbed shoulders with a group that Russian Communist leaders found helpful during the Cold War.

Yet the fact remains that the Kremlin found CND and other “peace movements” useful ways of undermining the unity of NATO, weakening the West’s defence posture and stoking anti-Americanism. The ex-dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, an expert in Soviet penetration of the West, says: “the worldwide disarmament campaign in the early 1980s was covertly orchestrated from Moscow. To a substantial extent it was also funded by the Soviet bloc”.

Like Obama’s well-documented connection to ACORN, though, the row over Lady Ashton’s past affiliation with folks proclaiming “better red than dead” probably won’t be enough to force her resignation as the embodiment of European foreign policy.  Who knows; maybe she’ll be able to broker a deal with a resurgent Russia to help combat the rise of an Islamic Republic inside the continent.

Whither evidence-based public policy? In the wake of the metastasizing scandal over falsified global warming data, the Obama Administration is acting as though the only debate over climate change is when to stop it. As Richard Wolffe reports, President Obama’s recent Asia trip was a crucial part of brokering a deal to set new restrictions on carbon emissions at next month’s Copenhagen conference.

Beyond the photo ops and press statements, Obama was pushing President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for the kind of climate deals that eluded him at the G8 summit in Italy in the summer – and have eluded international negotiators for the last decade. China and India have played central roles in blocking past agreements, alongside the US, in a seemingly intractable dispute between fast-developing economies and the older, wealthier polluters.

Now Obama is at the point where he feels on the verge of a breakthrough, based on the kind of talks that don’t get covered by reporters obsessing about state dinners. “He had extensive conversations with President Hu specifically on climate and conversations with the prime minister of India,” said one senior White House aide. “So he has been building momentum for a political agreement to be brokered at Copenhagen.”

This is another example of what Obama meant during the campaign when he said as president he would “turn the page” on the old debates dividing America. Then, as now, the only page turning to be done is when it dismisses the opposition as unserious and uninformed. How tragic if the president succeeds in realizing Al Gore’s dream of a voluntary global energy contraction just as news is surfacing that the very data supporting it is corrupt.

In spite of the dubious value of his recent trip to Asia, now comes an announcement that President Obama will be traveling to the glorified photo op that is the denuded climate change meeting in Copenhagen on his way to Oslo to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize. In both cases Obama’s presence was assured only after any meaningful criteria were removed.
The only meaningful accomplishment possible at Copenhagen is scheduling another meeting next year. And of course, no single person on the planet can claim to live in a greater state of peace after 10 months of Hope and Change. Such is the Obama approach to international relations, which is looking and sounding resolute when there is nothing able to be resolved.

Finally, a group of Republicans are putting the calls to reemphasize GOP core values into action. In a move that was partly motivated to eliminate his primary opposition, gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis invited former Rep. Tom Tancredo and other conservatives to help write a “Contract with Colorado.” Called the “Platform for Prosperity” (pdf), the proposal seeks to give all Republican candidates for state office in the 2010 election cycle something to support. This statement of principles is the kind of party-uniting exercise sorely needed in several states throughout the union, and within the GOP’s ranks in the U.S. Congress.

A discussion of the contract’s genesis and a comparison of it to the 1994 Contract with America can be found here.

H/T: Valerie Richardson at Human Events

Just when I begin to think that California government can’t produce a worse example of willful resistance to the rule of law, the city council of West Hollywood vies for attention. Under the terms of California’s “Compassionate Use Act” medical marijuana dispensaries are supposed to be non-profit entities supplied by legal growers for distribution to people with a qualifying medical ailment. This is how the city council of West Hollywood is choosing to implement that law.

Simply, West Hollywood has no clue if its dispensaries are buying pot from gangs, organized crime and illegal grows — or someplace else.

As West Hollywood Councilman John Duran says, “We knew from the beginning that they were operating for a profit. The greater evil was to send AIDS patients back to drug dealers and back alleys.” In fact, the West Hollywood “model” of regulation, praised days ago by city councilmen Rosendahl, Dennis Zine and Paul Koretz, is a rudimentary system of rules that require closing on time, using an unarmed security guard and not attracting loiterers. The city is not even attempting to prevent profits.

But Duran concedes a darker truth, saying, “We know that the collectives are not able to get all their marijuana from California, and some are coming from drug cartels, and the pesticides are highly toxic to AIDS patients. We did advise the dispensary that they should find marijuana that won’t be harmful to patients.” Beyond that, although having only four outlets to worry about, they simply “don’t have the expertise to figure out” where all that high-end $25-per-gram pot is coming from, Duran says.

According to the same LA Weekly article, the Los Angeles city council follows a similar program of non-compliance. Amazing.

The people who brought – and won – District of Columbia v. Heller (aka “the D.C. Gun Rights Case”) are back with a lawsuit challenging a nearly identical ban on handgun possession in Chicago, IL. The Supreme Court ruled in Heller that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to own and use a firearm (not a militia’s) in the District of Columbia (i.e. a federal jurisdiction). Now the question in McDonald v. City of Chicago is whether the Supreme Court will extend its ruling in Heller to cover McDonald’s right to own and use a firearm to invalidate a state law.

But wait; there’s more! The lawyers for McDonald are advancing a provocative theory that could expand the use of “Originalist” interpretation of the Constitution. Close followers of the Court will recall that Justice Scalia is the most well known proponent of interpreting the Constitution in light of its original and public understanding of its text at the time it was ratified (i.e. 1791). In fact, Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in Heller was a triumph of sorts for Originalism as an authoritative method of interpretation. In their brief, McDonald’s lawyers argue for using Originalism to overturn a 136 year old precedent in favor of interpreting the 14th Amendment as its framers intended. That is, to guarantee the extension of the federal bill of rights against encroaching state laws.

Apart from federalism concerns, the use of the 14th Amendment to reinterpret the application of the first ten amendments could – as this blog post from the Wall Street Journal explains – make Originalism more attractive to liberal members of the Court. Why? Because instead of looking at 1791 as Scalia does, Justices like Breyer and Ginsburg would look to 1868, the year the 14th Amendment was ratified. (A time when America was rethinking the scope of state’s rights.)

The Supreme Court’s ruling in this case next year promises to be consequential. As usual, what’s at stake is far bigger than the surface level issue that got the parties through the door. Stay tuned…

The California city of Salinas is ready to give counterinsurgency a try because the gang problem is out of control.

In the space of 11 days this year, seven people were murdered in Salinas. Each killing, like the record 25 homicides the previous year, spilled from the gang warfare that this summer pushed the homicide rate in the city of 140,000 to three times that of Los Angeles. Residents retreated indoors at night, and Mayor Dennis Donohue affirmed his decision to seek help from an unlikely source: the U.S. military.

Since February, combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been advising Salinas police on counterinsurgency strategy, bringing lessons from the battlefield to the meanest streets in an American city.

“This is our surge,” said Donohue, who solicited the assistance from the elite Naval Postgraduate School, 20 miles and a world away in Monterey. “When the public heard about this, they thought we were going to send the Navy SEALs into Salinas.”

Not quite. But the lessons learned from General David Petraeus’ successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq include the importance of creating trust between citizens and law enforcement. As in Iraq, the people most affected by the violence are suspicious of those charged with protecting them. Changing that dynamic is essential in order to achieve victory. And in order to change the dynamic, Salinas is going to need more boots on the ground so that police can cover more ground while building stronger relationships in the community.

Who knows; maybe if this domestic surge works as well as the one in Iraq, the Obama Administration might stop dithering and go for the win in Afghanistan.

In an apparent expression of thanksgiving, a lawyer for one of the five terrorists to be put on trial in New York said that his client and the others are planning to plead “not guilty” in order to “give their assessment about American foreign policy.” And just what might their assessment be?

Their assessment is negative.”

Glad we’re spending millions of dollars to hear that message!  Bear in mind, the accused don’t dispute whether they are responsible for the 9/11 attacks. They just want to “air their criticisms” while standing trial in the world’s media capitol. Perhaps this Thursday we can name the bird Eric Holder in honor of the nation’s #1 turkey.

Today’s Wall Street Journal profiles Dr. Devi Shetty, an Indian heart surgeon finding a way to deliver quality health care at lower prices.

Dr. Shetty, who entered the limelight in the early 1990s as Mother Teresa’s cardiac surgeon, offers cutting-edge medical care in India at a fraction of what it costs elsewhere in the world. His flagship heart hospital charges $2,000, on average, for open-heart surgery, compared with hospitals in the U.S. that are paid between $20,000 and $100,000, depending on the complexity of the surgery.

The approach has transformed health care in India through a simple premise that works in other industries: economies of scale. By driving huge volumes, even of procedures as sophisticated, delicate and dangerous as heart surgery, Dr. Shetty has managed to drive down the cost of health care in his nation of one billion.

Using economies of scale also allows doctors working at Shetty’s hospital to specialize in specific types of heart ailments by conducting the procedure hundreds, if not thousands, of times. This kind of repetition reduces the risk of something going wrong during surgery, thus leading to better patient outcomes.

When discussing how to reduce costs while maintaining quality, Shetty offers an insight that stands in stark contrast to the “comprehensive” reform of health care currently being pursued by the Democratic Party in America. “What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation.” Perhaps the best line in the whole article is Shetty’s observation about implementing real, lasting changes that will bend the health care cost curve down. “In health care you can’t do one big thing and reduce the price. We have to do 1,000 small things.” That’s the view helping thousands of poor farmers and their children get better heart health at prices they can afford.

You can read the entire article here.

Unfortunately for Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and the Copenhagen crew, it looks like the people in charge of documenting the science that keeps the Left’s green ambitions in bloom have been cooking the books.  In emails and other documents hacked, stolen, and posted from Britain’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre several high profile climatologists discuss ways to “hide the decline” of global temperatures.

One of the first reports on the now publicized documents can be found here.

Update: Here’s a helpful paper (PDF) from the Heartland Institute discussing the use of misleading charts and graphs in the global warming debate.  The reference to “Mike’s Nature trick” in the smoking gun email from Phil Jones is to the famous “hockey stick graph” showing a dramatic uptick in global temperatures.  The discussion in the PDF specifically addresses that graph, among others.