Freedom Line Blog

Two weeks ago on the local news in Mobile (the great WKRG), I explained some of the numbers behind the budget. Watch here. What I said then still applies. I noted that if Barack Obama only went a little way back towards an apples-to-apples domestic discretionary spending equivalence with what that Scrooge (NOT!) Bill Clinton thought was acceptable, we would be more than $250 billion (over ten years) closer to an agreement, before doing any of a number of other cost-saving measures.

Anyway, the clip is just about 150 seconds long.

I’ll have more to say on this subject soon; for now, suffice it to say that it is Obama, not Boehner, who is being entirely unreasonable (and irresponsible) in these negotiations.

For more than four years I have been convinced that Barack Obama was not just an arm’s-length devotee of radical activist Saul Alinsky, but a by-the-letter disciple of Alinsky’s. For almost as long, I have believed it is possible that Obama is a firm adherent of the Cloward-Piven strategy of deliberately causing government to spend more than it possibly can bear, in order to cause such a crisis in society that, rather counter-intuitively, only the government is left as an institution strong enough to step in, thus giving government vast new powers to create a Leftist version of Utopia — which of course is actually a dystopia.

For both Alinsky and Cloward-Piven (as for Obamite Rahm Emanuel), a crisis is not only not something to be avoided, but is actually something very much to be desired — and, further, something to be striven for, as long as the blame for getting there can be pawned off on someone else.

Hence we come to the so-called Fiscal Cliff. Does anybody really think Obama fears the consequences of not getting a deal?

It would be foolish to think he does so fear them. As the Wall Street Journal reported the other day (as discussed by Ashton in a post a couple of days ago), Obama threatened Speaker John Boehner that if Boehner didn’t fold, Obama would simply use a special speech plus the State of the Union address to blame Boehner and Republicans. Obama’s not playing for a better short-term outcome for the American people; he is playing for near-total anihilation of his political opponents, en route to long-term political power for himself and his allies.

A crisis combined with a cynical, hardball blame game is exactly what he wants.

The political right seems unable to communicate in a way effective enough to push the blame right back where it belongs, which is on Obama’s shoulders. This could be a very rough ride.

In keeping with the Christmas theme (from the post below), conservatives of a certain age love to quote the wisdom from the comic-strip Pogo that “we have met the enemy, and he is us.” On Christmas, it might be better to quote Pogo’s version of a famous Christmas carol:

Deck us all with Boston Charlie

Walla walla wash, and kalamazoo

Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley

Squalor dollar cauliflower, alle-garoo

Don’t we know archaic barrel

Lullabye, lilla-boy, Louisville Lou.

Trolley Molly don’t love Harold

Boola boola, Pensacoola, Hullabaloo!

Try singing that song at a family party this week, especially if you can’t carry a tune, and the enemy you meet will indeed be you.

Or something like that.

Merry Christmas!

A few thoughts completely unrelated to politics, in a couple of American Spectator columns. In the latter, I deal with this problem into which I sometimes fall:

Sometimes it’s easy to strive too hard to find new meanings in the old familiar Christmas story. The symbology is in some senses profound but also so obvious, and in some ways so simple, that it can seem hackneyed, especially in our modern, jaded world. The impulse is either to give mere lip service to the Christmas message or, for those with a different cast of mind, to try to complicate it in search of some great new insight.

My eventual conclusion is that there’s nothing wrong with simplicity.

Merry Christmas.

With news reports saying that South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley today will appoint U.S. Rep. Tim Scott to fill the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Jim DeMint, it’s worth revisiting a column I wrote on Scott when he was first running for Congress back in 2010. I believe mine was only the second major piece on Scott in a non-S.C. publication (Fred Barnes beat me by a week with an excellent piece). I loved the story he told about how his odyssey toward success was launched at a Chick-fil-A:

Young Mr. Scott did, however, hold down a part-time job taking tickets at a movie theater. The Chick-fil-A was next door. He bought fries there regularly. The restaurant’s proprietor, a guy named John Moniz – a “Christian conservative white Republican, although I didn’t know it at the time,” Mr. Scott said – “just started recognizing me, and one day he came up and sat down next to me and started talking.”

Moniz (now deceased) somehow struck a chord with the young customer. Moniz talked about the virtues of discipline and concentration. They talked often and built a cross-generational friendship.

And Scott is a solid conservative:

To listen to Mr. Scott himself is to hear the clear echoes of former Housing and Urban Development secretary and vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp, whom Mr. Scott revered. “That’s what I want to model as a public official. If it has to be done, let it be done by me with my own sweat equity. … The War on Poverty was four decades, and the same people are living in the same neighborhoods and the same bad houses, in the same poverty. A person who is full of compassion who is a conservative has to say that small business in a neighborhood creates jobs, not government. Government intervention does not lead to a more promising future. Entrepreneurship changes lives for real.” Also: “As a small-business owner, I cannot pay higher taxes and hire more people.”

Mr. Scott, though, seems far more comfortable talking about limiting government than Mr. Kemp was…

Now some might argue that Scott’s single term in Congress makes him a less qualified person for the Senate than some others who might have been chosen. But that ignores his 13 years on the Charleston City Council (four as chairman), his term in the state legislature, and his record of from-the-bootstraps successful business development. This extensive background in entrepreneurship and in more local levels of government is, arguably, exactly what is needed in the Senate. It should make him more dedicated to principles of federalism, and keep him better grounded. And it provided him with great experience in down-home, practical politics. He’s not just a talking head; Tim Scott is someone who produces results.

President Obama bargains in bad faith. Or, rather, he doesn’t bargain at all, but pretends to do so — so, technically, I guess his pretensions to bargaining are the proof of bad faith.

I cannot name a single important instance in which President Obama actually gave any substantive ground to Republicans, on anything. There wasn’t a single concession to anybody right of center in ObamaCare. There was no concession in the “debt limit” negotiations, but instead merely a postponement of the situation until he hoped political circumstances would be more favorable. And now, in these “Fiscal Cliff” talks occurring now, every time John Boehner makes an offer, Obama actually moves in the other direction.

Back in the last talks 18 months ago, Obama reportedly originally asked for $800 billion in new revenues. Then he demanded $1.2 trillion, but said it could all be accomplished without higher rates. Now he demands $1.6 trillion, and says he won’t even come to the table unless rates are raised (not just loopholes and deductions limited) on exactly those he always has targeted, those couples making over $200 annually. Plus, rather than limiting spending, he is demanding more “stimulus” largesse and an unlimited, automatic extension of the debt limit.

So, even with Boeher now offering higher rates for those actually making $1 million or more a year — a HUGE concession for Republicans — Obama has rejected that out of hand, and did so within an hour or so.

This man has no interest in keeping the government solvent. Just the opposite: He obviously wants it to spend, spend, spend, and grow, grow, grow, no matter what. He’s playing a long-term game, for total federal-government control, no matter what the short-term damage he does.

One can easily be forgiven, based on this record, for thinking he really is trying to enact the Cloward-Piven strategy of causing economic collapse so bad that the only institution left with any power is the central government, which then can reformulate the entire system under its own, all-powerful auspices. Hence, also, Obama’s assault on the intermediary institutions of society, including faith-affiliated social services.

Whatever his real goals — whether Cloward-Piven, or something else — there is not a single shred of evidence to suggest he has any intention at all of getting the problems of deficit and debt under control. And there is no evidence that he is even searching for common ground. Obama’s behavior certainly approaches the sinister; it is like nothing this country has ever seen before. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” said his fish-mailing thug aide Rahm Emanuel — and, by extension, never fail to try to foment a crisis, as long as you think you can blame the other side for it.

As readers here are probably aware from all the prior pieces I’ve written on this topic, I believe one of the worst items in ObamaCare is the medical device tax, and I believe one of the worst pieces of political malpractice committed by the Romney team was the failure to campaign against it. Well, here’s more proof  of just how potent a political issue it should have been and of how awful a tax it is: Sixteen Democratic U.S. Senators and two Senators elect have written to Harry Reid asking that the device tax be “delayed.” (Quoting from a piece by Byron York) :

“[The senators wrote that] The medical technology industry directly employs over 400,000 people in the United States and is responsible for a total of two million skilled manufacturing jobs,” the senators wrote in a December 4 letter to Reid.  “We must do all we can to ensure that our country maintains its global leadership position in the medical technology industry and keeps good jobs here at home.”

Beyond that, the senators say, the medical device industry “has received little guidance about how to comply with the tax” — a reference to the apparently confused and halting nature of the Obama administration’s implementation of Obamacare.

Several of them have gone further, calling for full repeal of the tax. This should be an easy issue. It should be part of a stand-alone bill, not part of Fiscal Cliff negotiations. It enjoys a veto-proof majority. It’s time to kill this bad policy before it takes effect — or, at least, such seems to be the reasonable sentiment behind this letter from these oft-unreasonable senators.

Basel, Switzerland: Abroad for the past eight days attending to family matters, I have had plenty of time to do various and sundry chores while CNN International aired in the background. It’s awful. It’s level of anti-U.S. bias is astonishing. Again and again its reports include small (and sometimes not-so-small) digs against the United States. Much of its coverage is of third-world horrors which, I guess, are indeed news, although the overall tone of lefty crusading is rather annoying. But almost any time the United States is mentioned, the tenor of the mention is negative. Christian Amanpour is particularly obnoxious, repeatedly portraying the U.S. as a thug or bully, or at least otherwise immoral and a “bad guy” on the world stage.

Look, apart from Candy Crowley’s debate moment on Libya and John King’s misguided debate handling of the Gingrich adultery question, CNN’s U.S. election coverage this year was almost uniformly excellent, as I noted in several blog posts. Frankly, I have found CNN’s domestic coverage in the past year (Piers Morgan excepted) to be a marked improvement from some prior years and often a credit to the trade of journalism. But this international version of the network is just disgusting.  And, considering that it is one of the world’s three major sources of international news (along with the BBC and al-Jazeera), and the only one basically headquartered in the United States, its anti-U.S. bias is a horrendous detriment to American interests and of course horrendously unfair. With this trash airing worldwide, no wonder the United States is disliked in so many places across this globe of ours.

The reality is that no nation in the history of mankind has given so much blood and treasure, without hope of conquest, to save the lives and liberties of so many other people, and/or to secure the peace or to serve humanitarian interests, as has the United States of America. It is shameful that CNN International so badly distorts that reality. Harsher language deserves to be addressed CNN’s way, but this is a family-friendly website.

A good source reports this to me, in his own words which I have shamelessly appropriated:

Here’s the skinny, a part of TARP was the so called TAG program.  What it did was remove the cap on insured deposits without limit as long as there was no interest being paid on the account.  Now tell me who is paying interest bearing checking anymore?  So in other words, TAG now makes the federal taxpayers liable for another 1.4 trillion dollars in deposits.  Like TARP, it was supposed to be a temporary measure to calm bank depositors, but it was extended in Dodd Frank and now the bankers (who love it of course) are racing to get it extended.  The scary part is that a number of Republicans may help the Dems jam it through the Senate next week on a party line vote without amendment.  Pretty ironic that Reid and Schumer think taxes need to go up on people making 250k per year, but they are willing to lift the insurance cap on deposits of a similar size for their buddies in the banking industry and dump the liability of the Treasury.  It stinks.

See this WSJ editorial from August.  It was assumed this thing was dead but it looks very live according to sources in the GOP Senate leadership and Banking Committee.  BTW, worth noting as usual Shelby, who opposed TARP and is Ranking on Banking is opposing it.

Reid may file cloture and move to a vote as early next week.  Republicans, as if is possible, should be ashamed to let this happen and bless it in the midst of the beating they are taking on the Cliff issues and  all their moaning about spending and federal liabilities.

The IRS has finalized rules for the medical device tax that goes into effect in just a few short weeks. Need a pacemaker? Pay a tax. Develop a life-saving device for a very small segment of the population, so there can be achieved no economies of scale? Tough toenails: The device tax on gross sales means you can’t afford to produce the devices — which means the would-be patients will die.

As I wrote here (I hereby acknowledge a mistake: prosthetic limbs are not covered by the tax), “what could be an easier campaign issue?” Yet, in perhaps the biggest example of campaign malpractice from an idiotic campaign guilty of many gross examples of malpractice, the Romney campaign never even tried to make a major issue of the device tax. Every time I think about it, I clench my teeth and want to start throwing heavy objects across the room. Failure to use issues like this has relegated this nation I  love to four more years of the most dangerous president in U.S. history. Mitt Romney and his top aides should slink away in shame.

But I digress. One way or another, people in both chambers in Congress ought to get serious and, no matter what else they do, repeal this dreadful tax. Lives depend on it.

I have always had extremely mixed feelings about Newt Gingrich, admiring much about him and being appalled by much about him. Usually, when he is NOT directly in the political arena he makes more sense commenting on the arena than he does as an actor in the arena. So it is with the passage quoted by Ashton below.

Here is the key part of that quotation: “At any point they wanted to, the President and the Congress could reduce the “cliff” to a series of foothills by breaking the problem into ten or twenty component parts. They could then focus on solving each problem on its own merits and out in the open with public hearings, public understanding and public involvement.”

Gingrich is absolutely right on this. Maybe he learned from his mistakes as speaker, when he repeatedly tried to put big packages together rather than break things into, yes, component parts. Not that it was all Gingrich’s fault, and not that I had much of an audience then, but as a leadership press secretary I talked myself blue in the face (I wasn’t important enough to have the ear of somebody who could do anything about it, I guess) complaining that we kept forcing all-or-nothing, edge-of-cliff battles rather than fighting and winning discrete skirmishes where we could stake out the high ground and dominate the field.

In fact, Republicans in 1995 were winning the budget battles until Gingrich let Bill Thomas talk him into including a tiny little Medicare “fix” in what had been a clean fight over Appropriations. Once that happened, Clinton was able to unleash his “Mediscare” campaign and seize the upper hand.

Way back in the early 1990s, New Orleans Mayor Sidney Barthelemy wanted to push through major tax reforms and other changes, and he put them into one huge package. At Gambit Weekly, we urged him to break it down into component parts and present a menu to the voters. He didn’t, and his initiative lost big. He came back the next time and did it our way, and got almost everything he wanted. And that’s what usually happens: Give citizens a chance to look at things in chewable bites, and common sense often wins. Try to make them swallow something massive, and they can’t grasp the whole thing, so they buy the liberal media narrative, whatever it is.

Anyway, I’m rambling here, but the point is that whatever Gingrich’s history — some of it excellent as speaker, some of it awful — he is right on target in the remarks cited above, and he should be listened to. Actually, I have a version of the “component part” idea waiting for this week’s column, already written.  Messrs. Boehner and McConnell really should take Gingrich’s advice.

Last week I blogged here about the decent prospects for several remaining court challenges to ObamaCare. One of those cases I mentioned was that of Liberty University. Today, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the Fourth Circuit to be reconsidered — which, as ScotusBlog explains, is a step forward for the case, by keeping it very much alive.

Summary paragraph:

The Supreme Court on Monday arranged for a Virginia university to go forward with new challenges to two key sections of the new federal health care law — the individual and employer mandates to have insurance coverage.  The Court did so by returning the case of Liberty University v. Geithner (docket 11-438) to the Fourth Circuit Court to consider those challenges.  The Court last Term had simply denied review of Liberty University’s appeal, but on Monday wiped out that order and agreed to send the case back to the appeals court in Richmond for further review.

This is very good news to those of us who believe in liberty — and, of course, for Liberty, too.

Votes continue to trickle in. But as of now. Mitt Romney has received 59,995, 405 votes. Four years ago, in a poor effort, John McCain received 59,948,323. So, by 47,000 votes, Romney at least has surpassed McCain. Of course, this is hardly a great accomplishment: McCain ran under much more difficult conditions. The real comparison should have been to GW Bush’s 62 million votes in 2004, when there were 19 million fewer Americans. Bush’s total should have been a floor for Romney, not a ceiling. So Romney terribly underperformed. But at least critics can no longer say he didn’t match McCain’s raw vote total.

We interrupt this Thanksgiving to consider the opening portion of Ronald Reagan’s first official Thanksgiving Proclamation as president, in the midst of a recession, when things looked bleak:

America has much for which to be thankful. The unequaled freedom enjoyed by our citizens has provided a harvest of plenty to this nation throughout its history. In keeping with America’s heritage, one day each year is set aside for giving thanks to god for all of His blessings.

On this day of thanksgiving, it is appropriate that we recall the first thanksgiving, celebrated in the autumn of 1621. After surviving a bitter winter, the Pilgrims planted and harvested a bountiful crop. After the harvest they gathered their families together and joined in celebration and prayer with the native Americans who had taught them so much. Clearly our forefathers were thankful not only for the material well-being of their harvest but for this abundance of goodwill as well.

In this spirit, Thanksgiving has become a day when Americans extend a helping hand to the less fortunate. Long before there was a government welfare program, this spirit of voluntary giving was ingrained in the American character. Americans have always understand that, truly, one must give in order to receive. This should be a day of giving as well as a day of thanks.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving in 1981, we should reflect on the full meaning of this day as we enjoy the fellowship that is so much a part of the holiday festivities. Searching our hearts, we should ask what we can do sass individuals to demonstrate our gratitude to God for all He has done. Such reflection can only add to the significance of this precious day of remembrance.

Please note the bolded portion. Also note that charity was a private affair, not something done at the confiscatory force of a government gun. Let us commit ourselves to giving not just thanks but alms of the right sort, through private initiative. And let us pray that government does not interfere with such good works by trampling the freedoms with which faith-based groups use their own initiative to provide aid according to the dictates of their own consciences.

At a conference in Colorado earlier this week on defense and foreign-policy issues — a conference sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and the El Pomar Foundation — there was plenty of food for thought on a host of topics. But as we move into Thanksgiving, I’ll focus here on how we should give thanks — and more than thanks, give the right sort of assistance — to those, less than 1 percent of the population, who wear this nation’s colors while bearing arms to protect us.

One of the most galvanizing speakers at the conference was Col. David W. Sutherland (Ret.), former special assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and now a full-time advocate for service personnel and veterans.

“We’re not victims,” he said. “We’re veterans. We don’t need pity; we need opportunity.” Veterans, he said, need “recognition and ‘connection’.”  They need education, employment, and access to health care. The approximately 50 percent of veterans who emerge unscathed from their service make better workers, have more education already, earn more money, and overall just make better citizens. But some 50 percent of veterans suffer from wounds physical or mental; they too can, and usually do, make more productive workers and citizens, but they need outreach from the community to help get them re-engaged with civilian life.

An average of 350,000 active-duty service members transition out of the military every year — but next year, some 1 million will do so. The Veterans Administration does a good job providing services to vets once the vets are in the VA system — but, alas, the average time for processing initial claims is an astonishing three years. Those just happen to be the three most important years during which a veteran either does or doesn’t re-engage productively. Obviously, in addition to improving the VA’s screening process to make it more helpful, more efficient, and in some cases less outright antagonistic, the VA should also do a much better job at helping veterans connect with the tens of thousands of non-profits and other agencies that provide all sorts of assistance, opportunities, etcetera.

Meanwhile, the rest of us can reach out to veterans by helping them navigate their return to civilian life. Business owners and human resources professionals, in particular, should recognize that  the training veterans receive and the character they build mean they often have far higher “upsides” as employees than the ordinary job applicant might offer — even if, on the front end, for those 50 percent who are somehow wounded by their experiences, it might take a little extra effort to integrate them into private-sector systems.

All of this is by way of poor summary of the gist of the powerful message, based on a galvanizing presentation, from Col. Sutherland. I’m actually not doing justice to the tenor of his message, which was far more upbeat than I can capture — far more focused on how veterans make superb assets to almost any organization or community.

So let’s be thankful for their service — and let’s show our gratitude by reaching out in every way we can to bring those veterans back more fully into our workplaces, our communities, our lives.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Fred Barnes has a great column at the Weekly Standard about various ways conservatives can “push back” against the Obama regency on numerous fronts. It is well worth a read. But one point merits a bit more elaboration — and, indeed, more elaboration than it will receive in this particular blog post, although this will be a down payment on said elaboration. Anyway, Barnes leads with ways that smart people can continue to push back particularly against ObamaCare, and specifically mentions the state governors fighting against the insurance “exchanges” in the program. Barnes mentions there is a lawsuit pending against the administration’s implementation of the federal version of the exchange. What needs emphasis, though, is that the lawsuit, filed by the state of Oklahoma, actually has the potential to unravel a large chunk of the whole ObamaCare scheme. Read about it here.

And that’s not the only suit outstanding against ObamaCare. When the dozens of lawsuits against the liberty-destroying HHS mandate, for example are finally consolidated and heard, I predict a very, very, very heavy likelihood that the mandate will be thrown out. Now, granted, that won’t overturn the whole law, but only that particular regulation. It does, however, allow some other, technical questions to be piggybacked upon the challenge, and those questions, too, can help unravel parts of the superstructure of the law.

Then there is Liberty University’s suit, which for now has been resurrected after wrongly being thought mooted by Chief Justice Roberts’ awful decision on the “individual mandate.” There is certainly a scenario under which a win by Liberty could actually lead to the whole law being adjudged unconstitutional. This bears watching.

Finally, and most importantly, the Goldwater Institute’s lawsuit, especially including its challenge to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, is still alive — and I believe it has tremendous merit. Indeed, I predict that Goldwater will win this case of Coons v. Geithner. And if IPAB is thrown out, there is at least an even chance, in my estimation, that the justices determine it is not severable from the rest of the law, which would mean the whole law would be ruled unconstitutional.

That lawsuit merits a full column of its own, and will receive one soon, here at CFIF.

The Enemies of the American People — a.k.a., the White House press corps — were, by normal standards, only halfway pathetic at today’s Obama genuflection exercise. But, considering that he hasn’t taken their questions for eight months, and considering the seriousness of the questions that needed to be asked, and considering that they had an opportunity to lay down a marker showing they would kowtow less to His Oneness than before, their performance today compared to what it should have been was fully pathetic. More on The Enemies later this week…..

Amidst all the bad news in this election, here’s a ray of light: Conservatives held on to a majority on the tightly contested Michigan Supreme Court, with conservative superstar Stephen Markman one of two on the right who won re-election. Michigan voters also rejected, overwhelmingly, a union-backed constitutional amendment to try to enshrine incredibly broad union powers into the state’s fundamental law.

Markman’s re-election is particularly good news. He is a veteran of the wars for a textualist interpretation of the Constitution, and also teaches at the wonderful Hillsdale College.

Especially rural ones. Disaffected workers and probably Evangelicals. Sean Trende has the story — which confirms what I said in today’s column.

I don’t think this is James Madison, but it is as wise as the original troika who together were Publius. Anyway, Publius here gives great details on vote fraud — a serious, serious threat, almost all of which comes from the Obamite left.