Freedom Line Blog

Everything you need to know about the Obama political team’s total ignorance of Republican politics can be summed up with one fact: when Obama chose then-Utah Governor Jon Huntsman to serve as his Ambassador to China in 2009, he did so thinking that he was removing a formidable opponent for the presidency. Huntsman’s tepid performance as a 2012 candidate — and his total inability to connect with the conservative base — have comprehensively given the lie to that notion, an outcome that the president’s political team could have envisioned if they had actually talked to any Republicans.

Now, the best minds in the Democratic Party are at it again. With Newt Gingrich leading in the polls in Iowa and South Carolina — and closing the gap in New Hampshire — they’re issuing a new television ad targeting … Mitt Romney?

Reports indicate that the White House is convinced Romney will be the nominee and wants to soften him up early. That’s silly for a couple of reasons. First, it shows (as did the Huntsman calculation) that these strategists don’t realize that being the Democrats’ favorite Republican doesn’t automatically launch you to the front of the field. Second, Romney’s continued inability to get above about 25 percent in the polls (his favorability has actually been dropping of late) and Gingrich’s surge make it extremely premature to assume a nominee. And third, even if the White House’s hunch is right, what difference is a general election ad airing a month before the primaries going to make?

The alternative, more Machiavellian interpretation is that the White House wants to weaken Romney in order to bolster Gingrich, who they view as the more beatable candidate. If that’s true, watch this video and ask yourself if this is a man you’d be spoiling for a fight with:

If this is how Team Obama plays offense, they better hope they have a hell of a defense in 2012.

We’re way overdue for a Chris Christie video here on Freedom Line. Thankfully, the New Jersey governor is back in the saddle and he’s seemingly competing with Newt Gingrich to see who can blister the sitting Commander-in-Chief more thoroughly. This is a thing of beauty:

I’ve been shouting from the rooftops for as long as anyone would listen that the Congressional Supercommittee was (a) a bad idea (b) doomed to failure and (c) destined to put the funding of America’s military forces in danger because of triggered cuts that could add up to more than a trillion dollars.

Now that’s all coming true and the lines are beginning to get drawn in the sand. From today’s coverage in Politico:

Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) vowed to eliminate the automatic cuts, which would take effect in 2013, citing dire warnings from his panel’s analysts and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about the impact of an additional $500 billion reduction on the nation’s security.

“I will not be the armed services chairman who presides over crippling our military,” he said just before the supercommittee admitted defeat Monday afternoon…

President Barack Obama later said he would veto any attempt to undo the spending cuts. “There will be no easy offramps on this one. We need to keep the pressure up to compromise, not turn off the pressure,” he said.

The president’s callousness is stunning. Fully funding the men and women of the United States military is not an “easy offramp” — it’s a strategic and moral necessity. An easy offramp would be proposing an increase in the debt ceiling without offering any spending cuts during a time of record national debt. An easy offramp would be allowing Congress to grope its way through the supercommittee process without any leadership from the White House. In short, an easy offramp would be everything President Obama has done to avoid any responsibility for reducing the national debt.

It’s time for the Congress to make a stand — and not just the Republicans. Many Democrats will understand that it’s both good policy and good election-year politics to keep the Pentagon from being gutted. And let’s hope they’re not just limited to Capitol Hill. Nothing would put the issue in starker terms than Defense Secretary Leon Panetta — a good man and one who has consistently opposed this reckless policy — standing in solidarity with a bipartisan congressional majority against the president. If he’s worthy of his job, that’s exactly what he’ll do.

As if we needed further proof of union venality, get a load of this stomach-turning story out of the Wolverine State:

Remember this the next time you hear Big Labor claim to be standing up for the little guy.

h/t BreitbartTV

Though we’re still a few years away from full implementation of Obamacare, we all know the program’s general drift: greater government control of everything from what kinds of care health insurance policies must cover to which medical procedures or pharmaceuticals doctors can provide. Yet at the same time, we’re seeing how the remarkable power of freedom and voluntary collaboration — the exact opposite of the Washington model — can revolutionize our health. From a remarkable piece at Reason:

For more than 10 years, health researchers have been stumped by an enzyme that helps retroviral infections like AIDS reproduce. Biologists studying the enzyme were unable to model its shape, a crucial first step in figuring out how to beat it.

Recently scientists turned the problem over to an unusual team of collaborators: video gamers. Using Foldit, a free online protein folding game developed at the University of Washington in 2008, those gamers competed to see who could produce the most accurate virtual model of the real-life enzyme.

In just three weeks, gamers accomplished what scientists had been unable to do for more than a decade—no special scientific under- standing required.

An ingenious marriage of technology and creativity. Does anyone expect to see more of this when Washington is in the driver’s seat?

Begin the countdown. November 23 — one week from today — is the deadline for the bipartisan, bicameral congressional “supercommittee” to deliver its plan to cut $1.2 trillion from the federal deficit. Only problem? No one expects it to happen. From today’s Washington Post:

White House officials are quietly bracing for “supercommittee” failure, with advisers privately saying they are pessimistic that the 12-member Congressional panel will find a way to cut $1.2 trillion from the deficit as required…

Obama has stopped short of issuing a blanket veto threat if the committee tries to undo the severe cuts that would take effect in 2013 if an agreement is not reached. Obama has simply said that Congress “must not shirk its responsibilities” and, in a news conference from Hawaii, said he would not comment on the potential for a veto.

Oh, so now it’s Congress that’s shirking its responsibilities? Where was President Obama’s veto pen when more than $4.2 trillion was being added to the federal debt under his watch (more than the total federal debt from George Washington to George H.W. Bush)? And if the role of Congress is so important, why leave the task of debt reduction to a dozen congressmen out of a body of 535? And why keep members from being able to so much as amend the proposal, making the compromise that will be necessary for such a grand bargain that much harder to ascertain?

The answer, of course, is that this process has been intended all along to grease the skids for tax increases. And by threatening the welfare of the men and women of the U.S. military (failing to pass a plan would result in automatic cuts to the Pentagon’s budget that could add up to over $1 trillion), liberals are hoping they can force conservatives’ hand.

The supecommittee process deserves to end in failure. The automatic spending cuts deserve to be overridden by Congress, as does any veto that President Obama may subsequently issue. And every member of the legislative branch who helped midwife the president’s record-breaking debt deserves a one-way ticket home.

Rick Perry got some (admittedly earned) grief last week after a cringe-worthy moment at the CNBC Republican Presidential Debate in Michigan, when he couldn’t recall the third of three cabinet departments he wants to abolish (for the record, they were the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and — the one he blanked on — the Department of Energy).

The media fixation on the gaffe overshadowed a bigger point: Rick Perry is proposing some of the most dramatic reforms to the federal government of any presidential candidate in decades. At a speech in Iowa earlier today, the Texas governor laid out an agenda that makes clear that the cabinet proposals were far from an aberration. Check out this list of proposals from the remarks:

• Term-limiting federal judges
• Converting Congress into a part-time legislature, with half the salary and half the staff
• Tying legislative pay to balancing the budget
• Bringing federal spending down to 18 percent of GDP
• Passing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution
• Privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
• Privatizing the TSA
• Dramatically scaling down and repurposing the EPA
• Performing a full audit of the federal government
• Creating an across-the-board moratorium on new federal regulations and auditing all regulations from the past five years
• Freezing federal salaries (Except for military and law enforcement) and cutting the president’s salary in half until there is a balanced budget.

Perry may be faltering in the polls, but this list reminds us why he was a contender in the first place. At the very least, let’s hope that the eventual Republican nominee has the good sense to co-opt this agenda.

A few weeks ago, Ashton gave us a column’s worth of examples of President Obama’s rhetorical stupidity, much of which involved running down the nation he governs. Well, the Schoolmarm-in-Chief is at it again. From coverage of the APEC summit going on in Hawaii:

Note the palm trees in the background if you want to fully understand the moral force of the president’s example. Effort may be the issue, but we’re not sure the private sector is the culprit.

If you need another reason to hope for a Republican majority in the U.S. Senate next fall, here you go: a resolution to overturn net neutrality — the Obama Administration’s attempt at a government takeover of the internet — failed today in the upper chamber by a narrow vote of 52-46 (it had previously passed in the House, 240-179).

Of the Republicans who fought the good fight, none put the issue in as sharp relief as Florida freshman Marco Rubio. This a man who gets the bigger picture, as the Daily Caller reports:

“The FCC and the federal government cannot keep pace with the Internet and the technology industries, and the government should not attempt to catch up through regulation or legislation,” said Rubio.

“And that’s an important point. We are asking this government, we are asking this bureaucratic structure which struggles to keep pace with issues we have been facing for the last 20 years, to somehow keep pace with issues and the technology and the innovations that arrive in the Internet world. Not only do I think that is asking too much, I think it’s impossible.” 

Rubio is right on the money, sounding the same cautionary note that CFIF’s Timothy H. Lee has repeatedly emphasized. America has had no more dynamic sector of the economy in the last two decades than the internet, a development that would have been impossible without a relatively light hand from the federal government. If Washington gets in the driver’s seat, we should expect the same results that have characterized government involvement in everything from health care to postal service to education: lower quality at higher prices with less convenience. It’s a Wi-Fi world and we’re handing off the internet to a dial-up government.

Four years ago at this time, we were all being told about the unrivaled intelligence of both candidate Barack Obama and his presidential campaign. Now, as the One prepares to launch his reelection campaign in earnest, we see how far the mighty have fallen. From Fox News:

The Obama administration has imposed a 15-cent tax on Christmas trees in order to pay for a new board tasked with promoting the Christmas tree industry.

There are still about eight weeks left in the year, but the odds are pretty good that this is the single dumbest sentence you will read about American politics this year. Even John Maynard Keynes deep into the eggnog would have a hard time working out the economic rationale of taxing an industry in order to finance a campaign promoting that same industry. And is there an epidemic lack of public awareness about Christmas trees in America? (Side note: are the PC police okay with calling them “Christmas trees” as long as we’re taxing them?)

More than anything else, this is just incredibly amateurish politics. With the flood of public workers who have come to D.C. during the Obama years, you’d think there’d be at least one political apointee with the savvy necessary to point out that a president presiding over a prolonged economic downturn (including 9 percent unemployment) may not want to make his contribution to the holidays a tax on the foundational symbol of the season. I suspect the principle may not sink in until next Christmas, when the president’s stocking is stuffed with a first-class ticket back to Chicago.

UPDATE: ABC News is now reporting that the administration is “going to delay implementation and revisit this action” in light of the uproar. It’s hard to know whether to be thankful that media scrutiny could cause such a swift retreat or depressed that it had to get this far down the road before the White House realized there was a problem.

As Ashton notes below, I’ve been peddling a theory for the last several weeks that Newt Gingrich is poised to end up in a one-on-one showdown with Mitt Romney for the Republican Presidential nomination. The reason is simple: despite his seeming meltdown early in the campaign, Newt has been playing the long game, eschewing attacks on the other Republican candidates, and using the debates as a cost-free method to display his intellectual mastery of the issues and his ample abilities as a communicator.

It’s a savvy strategy, though like all “great in hindsight” moves it has benefited a lot from luck. If Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, or Herman Cain had been able to to convince the primary electorate that they had presidential deliverables, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Even the leaden Tim Pawlenty campaign may have been getting a second look if the former Minnesota governor had stayed in the race. But they haven’t, and Newt (who probably enjoys a five-point premium in the polls just because of the number of Republicans who’d love to watch him debate President Obama) is now riding high: a new poll out of Iowa yesterday had him second, only four points behind Herman Cain, who is likely to start taking a serious nosedive any day now.

One note of caution: as Ashton mentions, I have my doubts on whether Newt can overtake Romney in the final tally, as two factors will come into play once the former speaker is seen as a formidable threat. First, his intemperance while leading the House of Representatives will be brought back to the fore. Newt can reasonably argue that he’s even better equipped to lead the nation having learned the lessons of those years. Fair enough, as such things go. The other issue will be his messy personal life, which is the factor most likely to torpedo the campaign. If Gingrich has learned anything from the Herman Cain debacle, hopefully it’s that he should be candid about his past — and do so as quickly as possible. That will allow him to better control the story and adequately separate fact from fiction. Expect to hear a lot about Newt’s new-found religious convictions when those issues take center stage.

As for Romney, he should hope that Newt stumbles on one of these issues, but be prepared for him not to. The front runner has had it easy thus far, with most of his major opponents taking themselves out of contention without the former Massachusetts governor having to so much as lay a finger on them. Ask any Democrat from the last few decades: Newt will not be nearly so easy a target.

If, like most Americans, you’re still struggling with the physiological fallout from this weekend’s end to Daylight Saving Time, keep this in mind: you have the federal government to blame.

Though it’s now regarded as something of a natural law, DST was actually a 20th century innovation, not imposed on the U.S. until our entry into World War I, when it was justified as a means of energy conservation. It was then repealed, brought back during World War II, used sporadically after the war, and finally made federal law in 1966. Yet politicians continue meddling with it to this day, changing DST most recently in 2007, when they made it approximately a month longer.

Is there any better example of Washington’s inability to know its limitations? Our elected officials literally think they can legislate what time it is. In reality, Daylight Savings Time is a sort of temporal Keynesianism — lop off a little time here, place it somewhere else, and act as if it’s a net gain. If you want to know how that little bit of alchemy works in the real world, ask any parent who has small children whether the tykes dutifully observed Sunday morning’s time change.

This is one more example of social engineering from the feds that we can do without. When it comes to keeping government out of our bedrooms, let’s start with the alarm clock.

In what can only be described as a stroke of journalistic genius, the folks over at the Daily Caller cross-referenced the addresses of protesters arrested during the Occupy Wall Street protests with real estate listings and Google Maps. The results speak volumes. Here are just a few examples of the humble dwellings of the underclass:

Who knew it took this much square footage to fight the man?

H/T: Mollie Hemingway @ Ricochet

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sat for an interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo last week on the state of the economy. Based on her remarks here, we can conclude that — as dismal as the current downturn is — it would only be worse if the Sage of San Francisco and her ilk were still running the lower chamber:

h/t: Hot Air

Ever since he ran for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut last year, Euro Pacific Capital CEO Peter Schiff has been a hero to libertarian-leaning Republicans throughout the nation, including to a few of us here at CFIF).

With that in mind, Schiff certainly didn’t have to do anything to further establish his bona fides. Yet this financial titan — a self-identified member of “the one percent” — had the courage to wade into Occupy Wall Street and face his detractors head on. Check out the video below:

Quin writes below, quite sensibly, that, when it comes to reforming the tax code, changing corporate rates should take precedence over reforming individual rates, reasoning that the economic anemia in private sector business is one of the largest obstacles to renewed growth. I find that analysis completely salutary, although I differ with him on a few particulars in the post.

First, Cain, Perry, and Gingrich all have corporate tax reform as a part of their plans. Cain, of course, would reduce it to 9 percent (although his addition of a federal sales tax would offset some of those savings). Perry would drop it to 20 percent, while Gingrich would take it down to 12.5 percent. As Quin notes, Santorum’s plan is quite good too, although I recoil a little at the fact that he eliminates the tax only for the manufacturing sector. There’s not a particularly good economic rationale for such differential treatment of industries under the tax code (not to mention that it’s a kissing cousin to the “picking winners and losers” criticism that the right has correctly embraced of late — although at least in this case it’s about who gets rewarded the most, not punished).  This leads me to believe that this section of the plan is politically motivated, aimed at boosting Santorum with blue-collar voters of the type that are essential to winning elections in labor-heavy states like his native Pennsylvania.

I’m also not convinced that passing personal income tax reform would be a heavier legislative lift than corporate tax reform, for reasons that Quin lays out. Personal rates are visceral and instantly understandable. Because there are several intellectual steps one has to go through to understand the effect of corporate rates on personal income, I think that may be the harder sell.

These are extraordinarily minor differences in the big picture, however. We all agree on the broad thrust of the argument: without flatter, fairer, more transparent taxes, America will be unnecessarily suppressing the ingenuity that could lead to an economic renaissance. But that change won’t come unless the keys to the White House change hands in January 2013. That’s just one more reason why next year’s election is so vitally important.

I’ve posted before on how the ‘Occupy’ protests — supposedly an outlet for the disenfranchised and underprivileged — have cast their lot with powerful left-wing special interests like the teachers unions. Now, according to Big Government, ACORN is getting in on the action:

Fox News reported earlier today that remnants of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), the radical community organizing group that collapsed after its corruption was exposed by Big Government, are playing a “behind the scenes” role in organizing the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

The Fox News investigation followed Matthew Vadum’s report two weeks ago at Big Government that ACORN was paying people to attend the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York through the Working Families Party, an ACORN front group.

Now, Big Government has learned that in an email sent by Fithian to Occupy organizers and supporters on October 22, 2011, she reported that the “New Bottom Line”–an effort to move as much money out of major banks as possible on November 5th–is being led by several ACORN-linked organizations: “National People’s Action, National Pico Network, and Alliance for Just and Sustainable Economy and other key state groups like ACCE in CA, NYCC in NY, or MORE in St. Louis.”

I don’t begrudge these groups their ability to participate in these protests. That’s a natural consequence of the robust rights of free association present in a liberal society. What I do object to, however, is the ‘Occupy’ movement’s continued rhetorical claims to be a voice for the voiceless when it’s doing the bidding of some of the most powerful and well-heeled liberal special interests in the nation. This isn’t a left-wing revolution promoting “people power.” It’s just the same old tax-and-spend crowd, only this time on the sidewalks.

I’m in agreement with Quin’s sentiment, expressed below, that the Republican presidential field could have benefited from a few more entrants, especially if it was accompanied by getting rid of some of the dead weight currently in the field (at this point, I’d be happy for the debates to be four-man affairs with Romney, Perry, Gingrich, and Cain). For some perspective, imagine the lineup on stage for a debate between those who passed on the race: John Thune, Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie. That’s a group that is depressingly more presidential than our current crop.

I don’t share Quin’s optimism, however that the field is going to change. Mike Pence has pretty safe odds to become the next Governor of Indiana, a prospect that’s not worth sacrificing for a long shot presidential bid out of the House of Representatives. Bobby Jindal would have engaged in something just short of electoral fraud if he jumped in the race only days after winning a second term as governor (the Iowa Caucuses will actually be held before he is even sworn in for his next term).

One factor, however, is nearly dispositive: timing. Next Monday is the filing deadline for the Florida Primary. Tuesday is the deadline in South Carolina. If we’re going to see anyone else in the field, it’s going to have to happen in the next few days. Putting together a campaign on that timeframe — particularly when most of the big donors and premium staffers have already been snatched up — is next to impossible, which means this field is almost certainly set. Like it or not, the next time you the see the candidates take the stage at a GOP debate, you’ll be looking at the future Republican presidential nominee.

It may seem perverse in the current economic atmosphere to take so much pleasure from a business model that fails to work out, but it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. From Politico:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Monday that the controversial website that’s been a thorn in the side of the U.S. government may close down by the end of the year because of financial problems.

The group has openly lamented the consequences of what it calls a “financial blockade” on WikiLeaks by various financial institutions.

“If WikiLeaks does not find a way to remove this blockade we will simply not be able to continue by the turn of the new year,” Assange said, according to the Associated Press. “If we don’t knock down the blockade we simply will not be able to continue.”

Good riddance. Rather than playing the victim before the London press corps (the context for these remarks), Assange should be thanking his lucky stars that he lives in an age that allows someone of his disrepute such a comfortable denouement. In days past, this story would have come to an end in the hangman’s noose.

If you’re a regular Fox News viewer, you’re probably familiar with Lanny Davis, the longtime Democratic political hand and former Special Counsel to President Clinton. On television, Davis can usually be seen defending Democratic orthodoxy with vigor.  He’s taken a recent turn in print, however, that shows he’s unafraid to gore one of his party’s most sacred cows: opposition to charter schools. From the piece:

The deal is this: The contract, or “charter,” allows the outside entity to operate the school free of the uniform rules applying to curriculum, teaching salaries, hiring and firing and other operating details that are applicable to all public schools; but in return, the charter school must deliver on pre-agreed goals, such as performance measured by standardized tests or graduation rates.

What does this achieve? A lot. First and foremost, it busts monopoly power, where one organization, such as the school district, has a captive group of customers, i.e., public school students, who have no choice but to be subject to the monopoly. And it provides the benefit of competition — students have choices, and if the charter school doesn’t work, they (i.e., their parents) can vote with their feet. And perhaps more importantly, the public school system is no longer a monopoly — they must do better or they will lose more students to charter schools within the public school system.

Imagine that: an institution that has to face consequences for failing its consumers. At at time when the folks over at Occupy Wall Street are casting their lot with the teachers unions that trap children in failing schools, it’s nice to see at least one liberal who realizes that “sticking up for the little guy” means defending the students, not indulging big labor.