Freedom Line Blog

Ashton is right on target on the Independent Payment Advisory Board, and the Goldwater Institute deserves a lot of credit for challenging it. I think the challenge has a great deal of merit. I wrote on it here.

Jim Geraghty at NRO has the story:

A report by Greater New Orleans Inc., an organization of businesses large and small in Southeast Louisiana, lays out how the Obama administration is approving only a fraction of the new permits, significantly less than preceding administrations in both deepwater projects and shallow water projects, that getting approval from Obama’s Department of Interior takes much longer than before he took office, and how Obama’s administration rejects a much higher percentage of proposals for drilling than before he took office….

The three-year average for shallow-water drilling permits had been 14.7 per month; the Obama administration now has that down to 2.3 per month…. The average approval time has increased from an average of 60.6 days in the preceding five years to 109 days in 2011….

I wrote about this general topic last year right here. And here. Meanwhile, as has been reported numerous places elsewhere (I believe I first broke the story four years ago in the Washington Examiner, or at least broke it within the US), Obama has gone out of his way to help promote and subsidize Brazil’s efforts to develop its own oil industry.

This is madness. And it is costing Americans a fortune.

Last week I wrote this column here, arguing that the Common Core education standards are, predictably, being misused by the Obama adminstration in a dangerous way. Key line: “Control of educational content by the national government risks creating a national system of indoctrination, without local recourse to diversity of thought.”  Today at the Weekly Standard comes this report along the same lines. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is trying to repeal her state’s participation in Common Core: “Just as we should not relinquish control of education to the Federal government, neither should we cede it to the consensus of other states,” Haley wrote. “Our children deserve swift action and the passage of a clean resolution that will allow our state to reclaim control of and responsibility for educating South Carolinians.”

It is now a hot topic here in Alabama. I served as MC for a candidates’ forum last night at the University of Mobile, and the hottest dispute involved just this issue, which is the central battle in a state school board race. I was interviewed on it here.

And at Education Week, Rick Hess also blasts Obama’s end run around federal law on this issue:

Prominent Common Core proponents have been telling Duncan’s team, literally for years, that its ham-handed tactics were doing more harm than good. It’s ludicrous for Duncan to pretend otherwise. Race to the Top, the administration’s “ESEA blueprint,” and the waivers all reward the adoption of Common Core, while RTT included $330 million to develop Common Core assessments–funds that, with little concern for the niceties of statutory prohibitions, are helping to develop curricular and instructional “materials.”

Three takeaways: First, given the likelihood that this administration will have five more years to run, but may never reclaim unified control of Congress, there will be increasing temptations for the administration to bypass Congress and rule by fiat. The prospect of an endless series of state’s petitioning to amend their waiver and RTT plans means we’re already closer to this state of affairs than I’d have thought possible a year ago. This is bad for democratic government; for education policy; and for students, teachers, and schools.

Conservatives have every reason to fight back against this administration’s lawless centralization of education.

Hans von Spakovsky had an eye-opening piece this past week at Pajamas Media about horribly abusive prosecution by the legal thugs in the Obama/Holder Justice Department, led by chief legal thug and mendicant Thomas Perez at the Civil Wrongs, er Civil Rights, Division.  It seems as if DoJ is trying to prosecute entirely peaceful protesters outside abortion clinics, with zero evidence of criminal behavior. Read all about it at the link above. I’ve written numerous times about these lawless goons at DoJ. So has Hans. I repeat: They are a menace to a free society.

The always thoughtful, always interesting former U.S. Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama has a superb essay on affirmative action, in response to the Supreme Court announcing it will hear a new case challenging race-based admissions. Davis is more in the middle on the issue than I am — I am dead set against using race as a factor in any way, pro or con, because I believe in absolute legal color-blindness — but he does make good points to the effect that the lack of ANY racial consciousness probably would have the short-term effect, at some schools, of a lower rate of black admissions and enrollments.

One thing he missed, though, is the strong evidence that black students, or any students for that matter, admitted to more competitive institutions than they otherwise would qualify for tend, in turn, to fail at higher rates — whereas if they went to slightly less competitive institutions, they succeed, and end up better off in the long run. In fact, in the Texas case heading to the Supreme Court, three members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Gail Heriot, Peter Kirsanow, Todd Gaziano) make that point exactly.

Without discussing that point, though, Davis still notes that there are plenty of less competitive, but perfectly competent schools, that will indeed take students turned down by, say, the Ivy League schools, and then writes:

But the reflexive instinct that ending race conscious college admissions is a disaster in the making? It’s no longer a serious claim. Even a full-scale retreat would hardly disenfranchise African American students or consign them to sub-par schools that lack adequate resources. The market of higher education is much too robust for that. 

This is great stuff. Conservatives do need to recognize that it is important, in one way or another, to ensure that opportunities are not closed, for cultural or whatever other reasons, to black Americans. (Other reasons might include semi-legitimate practices such as preferences for “legacy” candidates.) Those of us who oppose affirmative action should always keep in mind that even if racism isn’t at work, black Americans proportionately do seem to suffer from fewer opportunities, in practice, than white ones. This doesn’t mean the law should discriminate in their favor, but it does mean the culture still needs work.

Meanwhile, let’s hope the high court does the right thing and strikes down the racial preferences in Texas…..

The excellent once and (potentially) future U.S. Rep. David McIntosh explains here how Congress can work to override Barack Obama’s assault on religious liberty. Good stuff.

[Cross-posted at The American Spectator]

At the University of Mobile’s twelve23 site, I again examine the Obama assault on religious liberty.

Key passage:

To be very clear, this is a matter extending far beyond Catholic institutions. A recent letter by 300 leading scholars objecting to the mandate included signatures by Mike O’Neal, the president of Oklahoma Christian University; Thomas Hibbs, Honors College Dean at Baylor University; Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; professors of neurobiology, chemistry, biochemistry and other sciences from numerous colleges; law professors from across the country; Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik, Director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, Yeshiva University; and Chuck Colson, the beloved founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

The letter called the rule “unacceptable,” “morally obtuse” and “an insult to the intelligence of Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith and conscience.”

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has been taken over by leftist activists, is taking comments through Friday on a proposed report on phthalates, which are used in most plastics. At the American Enterprise Institute, Jon Entine has a superb report on what’s at stake. The key line: “Federal regulators need be careful about demonizing proven safe chemicals, and replacing them with potentially risky substitutes that have not been tested.”

This is all part and parcel of a continuing story of overzealous overregulation by the CPSC. I’ve written (or done the first draft of editorials) on the broader topic several times, including here for CFIF.

The CPSIA, the law on which a lot of this is based, was another of the idiocies the Bush administration either pushed or let get through. But the interpretation thereof, going well beyond the ordinary, logical meaning of the law in order to regulate far more strictly and counterproductively than the law itself would otherwise allow, is entirely the work of the Obamites who now run the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The economy suffers as a result.

David Catron has a superb column today on the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. He notes that it has set the stage for making the case for free-market reforms within Medicare. Its costs are about 40 percent below earlier estimates. Both the premiums paid by individuals and the cost to the taxpayers have been well below the original projections. Plus, the bill in question actually provided for Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) throughout the health-care system, not just in Medicare — a big win for conservatives, and, for that matter, especially for Rick Santorum, who had led the fight for HSAs for 11 years.

I know more than the usual about all this. For just over a year, I worked as a PR person helping run the effort (project manager) to fight off a Democratic bill to have government “negotiate” insurance prices for Part D rather than letting the market work. It was THE free-market fight of 2007. Thank goodness, we won. The reason we won was because the statistics were all in our favor. When Part D was passed, the Dems wanted to set the monthly premium at $35 (with subsequent hikes for inflation) because they feared the market would drive prices much, much higher than that. Good thing conservatives didn’t let them. When the smoke cleared, the average premium, even after two years, was about $24 — $11, or about 30%, LESS than the Dems would have insisted upon. Five years later, the average premiums are still well below Democratic projections; the reason for the lower prices is speficially because government “negotiators” were kept OUT of the system.

So Catron is right on all those counts.

Now, does that mean I would have voted for Part D in 2003? No. I opposed it with every fiber of my being. It was an unfunded expansion of an entitlement, and its free-market reforms were applicable only to Part D, not throughout the whole of Medicare. I argued then, and still believe today, that in return for expanding the entitlement so drastically, Congress should have included it as part of a systemic reform of all of Medicare, in order to avoid the bankruptcy of the system and all the other ills that stem from an out-of-control, bureaucrat-centric entitlement.

I also objected, vociferously, to the utterly corrupt method by which Tom DeLay and company, with the help of the Bush White House, pushed the bill through the House after holding the vote “open” for three hours, beginning at 2 a.m., while twisting arms and even using tactics and alleged tactics that really threatened the line of legality. It was one of the most corrupt congressional actions of my lifetime. It was sickening.

All of which leads us….. where? Well, it means that Catron is right that those in the SENATE (which didn’t use the same corrupt tactics) did at least have some decent reasons for supporting the bill — especially Santorum, whose HSAs were the culmination of 11 years of good, conservative work. Nonetheless, it still probably was a net minus for the cause of good government. And those in the House who voted for it are all guilty of aiding and abetting not just fiscal irresponsibility, but also corruption (at least procedural, and maybe otherwise) of the sort that ended up stinking so badly that it contributed mightily to the GOP losing the House AND (indirectly) to Obama becoming president.

(If I had been in the House and in FAVOR of the bill, I would have switched my vote AGAINST, and urged others to do so, in order to protect the integrity of the House.)

In sum, conservatives looking back at it should understand that Part D did some good, that the Senate vote wasn’t as bad as the House vote, and that the political pressures in favor of it were substantial. It STILL was a bad bill. But, on the Senate side at least, support for it is hardly disqualifying for national leadership.

Sorry for the internal links. Go here for details.

The irreplaceable J. Christian Adams has the latest on the growing chances for massive vote fraud in the fall elections, on behalf of Barack Obama, aided and abetted by Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

The Pew Center on the States estimates nearly 2,000,000 dead voters are on the rolls, and 2,800,000 people are registered in more than one state. This is precisely the mess that the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) was designed to prevent….

The Justice Department refuses to enforce Section 8 of the NVRA [which requires that states eliminate the names of dead voters and other ineligibles from the voter rolls]  because, as political appointee Julie Fernandes revealed in a Voting Section meeting in 2009 that I attended, removing dead people from the rolls “doesn’t increase turnout. It stops people from voting.” Seriously….

[D]eliberate decisions have been made to ignore Section 8 of NVRA. Not a single case has been brought to clean up voter rolls during the Obama administration. Ironically, Holder, in his confirmation hearings, criticized the Bush Justice Department for “cherry picking” which voting laws they want to enforce and which they didn’t. Like so much from Eric Holder’s mouth, the statement has been shown to be a devious misdirection. Holder blames his political opponents for conduct in which he engages.

This is serious stuff. These people are ruthless, and amoral. They will do anything they can get away with, in order to seize ever more power. They are a menace to the republic.

I wish to associate myself with the excellent post by Troy on Barack Obama’s latest bid to kill the DC Opportunity Scholarships. The data is all in favor of the program, and so is common sense. And, most importantly, supporting the program is, as Troy said, the humane thing to do. Don’t believe us? Just try watching this video sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and narrated by Juan Williams, with its highly moving related interviews with children who actually benefit from the program, and then still try to say with a straight face that the move to kill the program is abominable.

This is a great program. It must be saved. And Barack Obama, if he had any shame at all, would and should be ashamed for trying to kill it.

J. Christian Adams has an eloquent commentary today on the import of the Obama Administration’s latest effort in its war against traditional Christianity, and on the resistance to it from well-motivated people of all faiths.

One key passage is here:

The real reason the White House was steamrolled is that the Left doesn’t understand what it is up against.  Rachel Maddow, for example, thinks people of faith oppose the Obama mandate because it provides “a convenient partisan cudgel to use against Democrats.”  To Maddow, profound religious conviction couldn’t explain the backlash.  Instead, “partisan cudgels” provide an explanation more familiar to her.

Consider further the always caustic and usually wrong Eric Boehlert of the Soros-funded Media Matters.  Boehlert says the fight with the churches “feels like 1962, we’re arguing over ‘birth control’ in 2012.”  Boehlert doesn’t understand this fight isn’t about birth control, but religious freedom.

Boehlert doesn’t understand that the usual Leftist tactic of mockery and ridicule won’t work on these opponents.  Name calling is nothing compared to what faith communities are willing to endure.

As many others have noted, the president’s “compromise” announced Friday is no compromise at all. It’s still an authoritarian violation of religious freedom. And it still is part of a larger war by the administration, one which, fortunately, it has been losing, as in the 9-0 shellacking the Supreme Court gave to Obama in the Hosanna-Tabor case.

This president has no regard for freedom, and none for traditional Christian or Jewish faith. He is dangerous. It’s a good thing, as Adams points out, that faith and freedom are not so easily cowed.

As The Weekly Standard reports, polls now show Rick Santorum has a chance to do very well indeed in three different contest on Tuesday. If he does, it should become a two-man race between him and Romney. If he doesn’t, Romney is home free, I believe.
But there’s the deal: Rasmussen now has Santorum as the only Republican running who beats Obama head to head. It just goes to show that, over time, Santorum wears well with voters.

The question is, why have so many conservative leaders been so unwilling to rally around him? Why haven’t more of them endorsed him? (That said, in the past week some brave souls have started what Santorum must hope will turn into a stampede: Michelle Malkin, Tom Tancredo, Jane Norton, Bob Schaffer, David Limbaugh, Phyllis Schafly, Pat Boone.)

If they don’t like Romney, and they get stuck with him, they have only themselves to blame.

Ashton’s column today on direct-pay medicine is superb. Combine it with an expansion of the health savings accounts that Rick Santorum fought for during a 12-year span and helped authorize in 2003, and with allowing sales of health insurance across state lines, and with competition throughout Medicare rather than just in Part D, and with block grants to states for Medicaid so the states themselves will have freedom and incentive to promote market competition and efficiencies…. and, pretty soon, we would be well on our way to a thriving, multi-layered, market-based health-care financing system in which people would have all sorts of viable options. (Other ideas for free-market approaches for health care as a whole also abound.) It’s a shame President GW Bush never made such things a priority while he had House and Senate majorities. If somehow the American people (or the Supreme Court, in effect) can force the repeal of Obamacare, we’ll finally have the chance to put such ideas into play. As Ashton wrote, “there is a need for reform that opens up the healthcare industry to a lower-cost, transparent pricing system.”

Hear, hear!

Conservatives have been up in arms about ABC’s airing last week of the interview in which Marianne Gingrich said her ex-husband asked her for an open marriage. But their anger is misplaced. The problem wasn’t in airing the interview; the problem was in what ABC left out.

ABC filmed well over an hour of footage with Ms. Gingrich. They aired — what was it, maybe seven minutes of that footage?

The question is, what did the network leave out, and why?

Here’s what I’m told by people familiar with the interview: first, that in much of the rest of the interview she was complimentary towards her former husband, and second, that she was trying to give a full, contextual picture of his character — a context left on the cutting room floor when ABC concentrated only on the sex/adultery/betrayal angle. “They left out the essence of her,” said one of my sources. What they left out is that she, a dedicated conservative, is proud of what she and her husband accomplished together for causes such as balanced budgets and welfare reform.

By leaving out so much, ABC did Ms. Gingrich a disservice, because the “open marriage” segment, by general agreement, made her appear somewhat bitter — whereas, in fuller context, it would have made her look more baffled than bitter. Asked on camera if she resented Callista Gingrich being with Newt when he is rich and running large accounts at Tiffany’s while she, Marianne, endured the long, lean financial years and the vitriol from the Left during his Speakership, Marianne Gingrich reportedly smiled and said, “No, I think I had Newt’s best years.”

None of that came across. Ms. Gingrich deserved better.

Granted, any TV news magazine is going to run only part of its footage. But to take out all context is absurd. Oddly enough, taking out the context ended up helping Newt Gingrich. Because viewers couldn’t see Ms. Gingrich speaking thoughtfully and with decency toward her husband, they couldn’t see just how bad a betrayal it was for her husband to treat her so shabbily. Because they concentrated on the sex, they made the interview seem like it was prurient, and thus like an unseemly attack, rather than like a reasonable examination of Gingrich’s past. It thus engendered sympathy for him … and of course played into his hands by allowing him to attack the establishment media, which is always (and usually justifiably) red meat for conservatives.

Of course Gingrich knew how to take advantage of this. He just followed Bill Clinton’s playbook. Turn the issue away from substance; make the issue about the prurience of the questioner. Express indignation. Raise your voice with just the right amount of anger. Make yourself the victim rather than the perp. Clinton did it to Gingrich during the Lewinsky scandal. When Gingrich personally ordered several last-minute commercials in the 1998 campaign attacking Clinton about Lewinsky — at least one of which clearly aimed at Clinton’s morality rather than, or far more than, at his lying under oath (which at least somewhat puts the lie to Gingrich’s claim on Wednesday that he was only criticizing Clinton’s perjury, not his sexual behavior) — it backfired on Gingrich and Republicans, big-time. Gingrich learned his lesson: A sexual sinner can win politically by playing the victim.

Conservatives also have reason to wonder what else remains in ABC’s vault. ABC has shown that its editing is suspect. Imagine what could happen, though, if Gingrich wins the nomination. One can easily see ABC saying, “Hey, remember that interview with Marianne Gingrich? Well, there was more to it than that. Here’s something else she said!”

Then, again out of context, they find some other snippet from Ms. Gingrich, this time on the substance of her ex-husband’s leadership or his beliefs, and they air it in a way that could do the absolute most damage to him in the general election. One can easily imagine that if 95 percent of the rest of what Ms. Gingrich said was complimentary, an editor still could cull some random 5% and use it in a way the ex-Speaker can’t parry anywhere near so easily. It’s harder to make yourself look good when your leadership qualities or your principles are being directly challenged — especially because, unlike with private, marital conversations, any testimony from Ms. Gingrich about Newt Gingrich’s actions related to public policy can actually be checked out by, yes, what actually happened in the public realm. In other words, if it’s true, then it’s more easily verifiable.

Again, Marianne Gingrich — by all accounts I have ever heard, a very nice lady — deserved better from ABC. So did the voters of this country.

At The American Spectator, I defend Newt Gingrich from scurrilous leftist charges that he is appealing to racist sentiments. Yet even though it is already a long post (please do read it), there is more to be said.

It is this: Have you ever noticed how seldom it is that conservatives ever actually say anything connecting food stamps or welfare with blacks — but how often it is that any time liberals hear those words, they immediately think that it is blacks who are being referred to?

At best, this is liberal paternalism in action. Worse, it could be the same thing that motivates racial preferences and other, similar liberal nostrums: namely, the assumption by the left that black Americans can’t be expected to be successes unless government helps them. It is an assumption that seems only to be applied to black people. It is a flat-out wrong assumption. But it almost always comes from the left, not the right.

In reality, there is no racial component to food stamps. It is shameful to think there is. The shame should be borne by those who do: namely, American liberals.

James Bowman’s review today, at the American Spectator, of Iron Lady, the Meryl Streep movie about Margaret Thatcher, is right on target. He complains that the movie lingers (and lingers and lingers and lingers) over an almost entirely fictional account of Lady Thatcher in her dotage (yes, she has a form of dementia now, but the film invents its manifestations from thin air), while showing very little of her actual career in public life. Indeed, the entire period from the Falklands War to the end of the Cold War (nine years) is disposed of via a montage that lasts all of about 45 seconds, or maybe a minute. We see plenty of flashbacks of her showing her iron, but very, very little that indicate what she is showing her iron about. As Bowman writes, the producers have made “a political movie from which the politics has been extracted as a taxidermist draws out the brain of an animal he is stuffing through its nose. If there were any politics in it, they would have had to pick a side and portray Margaret Thatcher as essentially right or essentially wrong, so offending a significant portion of their potential audience who are, more than 30 years later, still passionately committed to one view or the other.

But this is foolish. They still could have avoided taking sides while portraying a lot more of the events of her career from a basically neutral standpoint. This isn’t journalism, of course, but even today there are good journalists who show that an even-handed neutrality in reporting can avoid betraying any bias while still portraying events in an interesting, dramatic (but not dramatized), even gripping manner. If print journalists can do this, it should be even easier for film-makers to do so.

For instance, a film-maker need evince no position on Thatcher’s philosophy in order to have Streep-as-Thatcher recreate the famous phone call in which Thatcher told the elder Bush to not “go wobbly” against Saddam Hussein. One need not agree with Thatcher’s support of Ronald Reagan’s hard line in the Cold War to show her making a speech in support of deploying mid-range missiles in Europe. And so on. Plenteous drama is achievable without necessarily taking sides. But the film-makers do none of this. As a result, they take the remarkable life of an indomitable lady and turn it into a series of brief flashbacks supporting the story of an almost pathetically confused old dame. Again, go back and read Bowman’s review. Good stuff.

Mickey Edwards, former chairman, American Conservative Union:
“To describe Gingrich as ‘volatile’ is like describing Picasso as somebody who liked to draw.”

“[T]here are those who fear for the country if he were ever to become president.”

Wow, tough stuff. Surprised it didn’t get more play when it came out a month ago….

There are all sorts of debates out there about the ethics of ABC airing the interview with Marianne Gingrich. Here’s my take:

Here’s what journalistic ethics say: IF, repeat IF, it is legitimate news, and IF, repeat IF, you have crossed all your Ts and dotted all your ‘I’s, meaning you have checked out the accuracy of whatever can be checked out (did Newt make a speech in Erie the day after Marianne’s mother’s birthday? Was it in significant part about family values, as she claimed in the interview?, etc.), THEN, once you have your story nailed down, you do NOT “manage” the news by trying to rush it, or on the contrary to hold it, because there is an election; instead, you go with it at the earliest time you can go with it logistically, regardless of outside considerations. Otherwise, you could just as easily be accused of deliberately holding off the airing of an otherwise valid interview in order to affect the result of a primary. Think of it this way: If there were no Drudge to force ABC’s hand, and if you do not air it until after the primary, then you have DENIED the voters of South Carolina the knowledge that many of them would have wanted to have before they cast their votes. THAT, I dare say, is just as much an interference with the election as it is to air the thing now.

Again, the key question is whether it is legitimate news in the first place — a question which has nothing to do with its timing, and everything to do with journalistic standards of accuracy, completeness, relevance, fairness, etc.

I don’t like these sorts of stories about private lives, unless there is a clear relevance for public policy or for character as shown via particularly egregious hypocrisy. And of course I haven’t seen the whole interview, although sources tell me lots about it. But if ABC has made the judgment that it is indeed legitimate news, then I completely and utterly support its decision to air it now rather than to hold it until after the primary vote. Frankly, it is the only ethical decision the network could have made. If the interview should air, it should air now rather than later. Period.