Freedom Line Blog

In a commentary published earlier this week, I chastised Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for his “escape hatch” debt ceiling plan, which would allow President Obama to unilaterally raise the nation’s credit limit while giving Republicans the political cover of being allowed to vote against him. It would be a perfectly reasonable strategy if the imperative issue of the moment was GOP political tactics. It’s not, however. Rather, the issue of paramount significance is the nation’s economic future. By that measure, the McConnell plan — which allows more of the same limitless spending — is an utter failure.

In that same column, I praised Speaker of the House John Boehner’s resoluteness, as indicated by his holding the line against the president’s proposed tax increases. Yet only a few days later, the speaker already seems to be going wobbly. According to Politico:

Speaker John Boehner on Thursday left the door open to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s last-ditch plan to raise the debt limit.

“I think it’s worth keeping on the table,” Boehner said.

McConnell’s plan would give President Barack Obama the power to raise the debt ceiling three times through 2012, unless Congress stops it with a two-thirds majority vote. Under that plan, Republicans could vote against raising the debt ceiling without risking default.

Shame on Boehner. Republicans have every right to look out for their political needs, but they must also work tirelessly to protect what’s left of the American economy. Obama’s “grand bargain” (flush with tax increases) meets neither standard. McConnell’s punt only satisfies the first.

Instead, Republicans should pass a debt ceiling increase relying solely on spending cuts. It would serve our economic needs by cutting the size of government and staving off fears of a default. And it would serve the GOP’s political needs by ensuring that a crisis could only come courtesy of Obama’s veto pen.

The incomparable Veronique de Rugy (Reason columnist and economist at the Mercatus Center) was recently a guest on Bloomberg TV, where she was tasked with rebutting the faulty economics behind the gigantic economic stimulus program that’s still holding back the American economy. As the video below shows, it was child’s play for this intellectually rigorous defender of free markets:

It should come as no surprise given the United Nations’ disgusting Goldstone Report (blaming Israel for war crimes during the Gaza war) and the body’s seeming rush to recognize Palestinian statehood, but it seems that the UN’s envoy for human rights in the Palestinian territories has been freelancing in just the kind of anti-semitism that is the trademark of Turtle Bay. Alana Goodman at Commentary’s Contentions blog has the story (our more sensitive readers should note that the linked cartoon will be deeply offensive to most decent sensibilities):

The controversy began when Richard Falk, the UN envoy for human rights in the Palestinian territories, posted a cartoon of a yarmulke-wearing dog chewing on a bloody skeleton and urinating on Lady Justice on his personal blog last month.

 After he was confronted about the cartoon’s anti-Semitic connotations, he initially denied posting it. “It is a complete lie,” he reportedly wrote on his blog. “I know nothing about such a cartoon, and would never publish such a thing, ever.” A few minutes later, Falk backtracked, removing the post from his blog and explaining he “didn’t realize that it could be viewed as anti-Semitic, and still do not realize.”

And now Falk has finally issued an “apology,” clarifying that he opposes any denigration of individuals “based on ethnicity, race, religion, stage of development.”

“My intention has never been to demean in any way Jews as a people despite my strong criticisms of Israeli policies, and some versions of Zionist support,” said Falk.

There can be little question that Falk is profoundly stupid. But one wonders if — just maybe — the institutional culture at the UN is such that passing around this kind of filth falls within the range of acceptable (or at least tolerable) behavior.

It’s good that the cartoon is no longer on his blog. It would be better if the ideas that inspired it were no longer in the United Nations.

In a recent Freedom Minute video, we chronicled the decline in basic standards of decency and civility amongst America’s political class. And one of the examples we cited was Florida Congresswoman (and newly-installed DNC Chairwoman) Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Here’s one of Wasserman Schultz’s greatest hits, prompted when a television interviewer recently asked her about the Republican push to require photo identification at the polls in order to combat voter fraud:

[I]f you go back to the year 2000, when we had an obvious disaster and – and saw that our voting process needed refinement, and we did that in the America Votes Act and made sure that we could iron out those kinks, now you have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally – and very transparently – block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. And it’s nothing short of that blatant.

Even the verbally incontinent chairwoman had to walk this one back, later explaining that “Jim Crow was the wrong analogy to use.” But while such thoughtless mistakes can be expected from the congenitally inept Wasserman Schultz, former President Bill Clinton doesn’t have that excuse. Here’s what Clinton told a group of young liberal activists gathered in the nation’s capital today, according to Politico:

“I can’t help thinking since we just celebrated the Fourth of July and we’re supposed to be a country dedicated to liberty that one of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time,” Clinton said at Campus Progress’s annual conference in Washington.

“There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,” Clinton added.

If Clinton wants to bask in the adulation of being an elder statesman, he ought to begin acting like one. He knows that saying Republicans across the nation want to suppress the vote is a baseless attack on the character of decent men and women. Republicans want to suppress voter fraud, a goal that Democrats profess to share (in practice, however, they’ve done little to effectuate it).

Debating the means by which we attain that end is an utterly justifiable pursuit. But tarring the opposition to score cheap applause from the Daily Kos’s farm team? That’s just not presidential. Of course, why start now?

For a state with an overwhelmingly Republican tilt, Utah can produce some political headscratchers. Consider:

Utah’s former governor, Jon Huntsman, is running for president as the most moderate candidate in the GOP field, despite being the former chief executive of the nation’s most Republican state. Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz, a hardcore conservative beloved by the Tea Party, is a former Huntsman staffer, but he’s also likely to challenge incumbent Senator Orrin Hatch next year with the argument that Hatch is too much of a RINO for residents of the Beehive State to send back to Capitol Hill. At the same time, it was announced today that Chaffetz is backing former Massachusetts governor (and one-time Utah resident) Mitt Romney for president, on the grounds that Romney is the most electable candidate in the GOP field.

It’s hard to keep all these machinations straight, but one thing’s for certain: the usually laudable Chaffetz will pay a price with his Tea Party base for coming out early for Romney. Romney’s Massachusetts health care reform was a dry run for Obamacare, right down to the individual mandate that makes tea partiers shutter.

By Chaffetz’s own admission, Romney is a friend. But while that loyalty is laudable, it need not extend to elevating Romney over other presidential contenders this early in the process.

Chaffetz claims Romney’s economic experience makes him the logical choice in 2012. For his sake, he better be right. As Mitt would probably tell him, there’s nothing worse than saddling yourself with an illiquid asset that goes bust.

It’s as clear a statement of what works (and what doesn’t) in providing economic growth and well-being as you’ll find. It’s a guide to not only the rightness but the utility of freedom. And it can be viewed in the time it takes to wait for a stoplight to change. It’s the new video from the good folks (yes, we’re not afraid to say it) at the Charles Koch Foundation. The only thing wrong with this project? That there aren’t more videos like this one:

You would’ve thought that the leaders of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — the Senate GOP caucus’s in-house mechanism for supporting candidates for the upper chamber — would have learned their lesson in 2010. Rather than waiting for Republican nominees to emerge before throwing their support behind them, the NRSC intervened in primaries throughout the nation, opposing such strong conservative candidates as Florida’s Marco Rubio and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey. It should have been a source of public shame. Yet it doesn’t look that way, based on a report in the New York Times’ Caucus Blog:

A group of placard-waving Tea Party activists converged on the headquarters of the National Republican Senatorial Committee early Monday afternoon, demanding that its leaders refrain from supporting incumbents facing primary challenges, and serving as a reminder that the intraparty fight over party purity continues…

One reason the activists are angry with the Republican senatorial committee is that it is holding fund-raisers for [Utah Senator Orrin] Hatch — they waved signs reading “Retire Hatch.” But more generally, they want the committee to withhold political or financial support from any incumbents in the primary.

“It’s like they haven’t learned the lessons of the midterms,” said Brendan Steinhauser, an organizer for FreedomWorks who urged on the marchers.

And indeed, the committee has heard this tune before, particularly in the 2010 Florida primary for United States Senate, when the committee initially backed Charlie Crist, then a popular Republican governor, over a scrappy challenger, Marco Rubio. Mr. Rubio did so well in polls that Mr. Crist abandoned the party, ran as an independent, and lost, badly, to Mr. Rubio, a Tea Party darling.

Of the 47 Republicans currently serving in the United States Senate, none is as likely to someday become president as Marco Rubio. And his ascendancy was nearly extinguished at the hands of the NRSC. If that isn’t a sign that they shouldn’t be weighing in during primaries, it’s hard to imagine what would be.

For John McCain — who has never met an evil anywhere on earth that doesn’t require Spartanesque military might from the U.S. — Republicans that question America’s role in Libya and the continued need for a large footprint in Afghanistan are part of a worrying trend. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

“There has always been an isolationist strain in the Republican Party,” McCain said on ABC’s “This Week,” “but now it seems to have moved more center stage…. That is not the Republican Party that has been willing to stand up for freedom for people all over the world.”

McCain is engaging here in the logic fallacy known as “hasty generalization”. Just because some Republicans question the utility of some military missions, it doesn’t follow that they have a principled and categorical objection to America acting overseas. Tony Blankley makes the point with his trademark gusto in his column in today’s Washington Times:

… Almost two years ago, I was one of the first GOP internationalist-oriented commentators or politicians to conclude that the Afghan war effort had served its initial purpose, but it was time to phase out the war. As a punitive raid against the regime that gave succor to Osama bin Laden, we removed the Taliban government and killed as many al Qaeda and Taliban as possible.

But as the purpose of that war turned into nation-building, even GOP internationalists have a duty to reassess whether, given the resources and strategy, such policy is likely to be effective (see about a dozen of my columns on Afghan war policy from 2009-10).

Now many others in the GOP and in the non-isolationist wing of the Democratic Party are likewise judging failure in Afghanistan to be almost inevitable. That is not a judgment driven by isolationism. Neither are we – along with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and almost the entire uniformed chain of command – isolationist when we see no national interest in Libya.

This is not isolationism. It is a rational effort at judging how best to advance American values and interests in an ever-more witheringly dangerous world. The charge of isolationism should be reserved for the genuine article. Such name-calling advances neither rational debate nor national interest.

Bravo to Blankley. McCain is an honorable man — but one who ought to be a little more careful when throwing around ideological labels.

A few weeks ago, as CFIF’s own Ashton Ellis was busy delineating the parade of horribles that is former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman’s record, he noted that one of the more chilling (and insightful) stories involving Huntsman in recent months was the quasi-endorsement offered to him by Jimmy Carter.

Well, Huntsman (who is an official GOP presidential candidate as of this morning) keeps bringing the hits. The latest comes from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. As CNN’s Political Ticker reports:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ventured into the 2012 presidential waiting game Tuesday, offering up his pick for the Republican presidential nomination.

“If I had a choice, I would favor Huntsman over Romney,” Reid told reporters after a meeting on Capitol Hill. “But I don’t have a choice in that race.”

Poor Harry. He’s been through a lot because of the declining influence of Democrats in Congress over the last year. And now he won’t even get one red cent for creating a pitch-perfect campaign ad for Mitt Romney.

As for Huntsman, he’s now earned the approval of President Obama, former President Carter, and Harry Reid. He’s one endorsement in The Nation away from being the next Democratic presidential nominee.

Reasonable people disagree on the way forward in Afghanistan. Reasonable people, however, don’t tend to work at NPR.

That’s the conclusion we can take from remarks made by John Hockenberry, host of NPR’s “The Takeaway” (full disclosure: I’ve appeared on Hockenberry’s show before — not that it’s earning him any lenience). As the Daily Caller reports:

In an interview with Christine Fair, assistant professor at the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Hockenberry challenged the notion of the Taliban being an enemy of the United States and declared that the idea it could again make Afghanistan a haven for terrorists “an absurdity.”

“I guess, Christine Fair, I’m wondering why this is even a debate,” Hockenberry said. “The Taliban has never been an enemy of the United States. They don’t love us in Afghanistan, but they’re not sending planes over to New York or to the Pentagon and it seems to me much more broadly that the debate needs to happen is what is the sort of multi-state strategy for dealing with rogue nations of all kinds. Yemen is about to fall apart. You’ve got Somalia problems. The idea that terrorists just go to Afghanistan and launch weapons at the United States it seems in 2011 is an absurdity.” 

I’m sure the monotone sophisticates of NPR don’t need any math lessons from out here on the right wing. But, Mr. Hockenberry, a quick review of the transitive property: The Taliban harbored Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. (by sending planes over to New York and to the Pentagon, as I recall). Thus the Taliban is a demonstrated enemy of the U.S.

You can keep the tote bag.

Conservatives who’ve spent much time in Washington often grow weary of the professional class at the State Department. Though the Foreign Service’s job is to represent the United States abroad, its members often end up doing precisely the opposite. They too often practice the mantra of “blame America first” and view the U.S. as culturally inferior to wherever they’re posted.

That’s galling enough when it comes from workaday public servants, but even worse when it comes from our Ambassador Corps. Now one of those international diplomats is back stateside and about to launch a presidential campaign. But someone needs to tell Jon Huntsman (our recently-returned Ambassador to China) to keep his Embassyitis overseas. This is the lede the Washington Post managed to bury this weekend, placing it near the bottom of a lengthy profile:

On the campaign trail, Huntsman often dwells on how America is viewed from abroad. “From 10,000 miles away, folks, let me just tell you that we lack humanity, we lack civility, we lack basic respect for which this country should be known,” Huntsman told one crowd.

There hasn’t been a campaign in recent history where the notion of American Exceptionalism has been more important on the right. Into that fray rides Jon Huntsman, a man who tells us that the butchers of Tiananmen Square think us insufficiently humane. We’ve got a great consolation prize waiting for you, Jon.

In recent weeks, CFIF’s own Ashton Ellis has been a one-man truth machine, making sure that conservatives are aware of the moderate-to-liberal record of former Utah Governor — and soon-to-be presidential candidate — Jon Huntsman. Well, if the former chief executive of the Beehive State has his way, the day may soon come when Ashton Ellis doesn’t have Jon Huntsman to kick around any more. The reason: Huntsman now appears to be embracing the same political strategy that doomed Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential bid.

Huntsman has already taken a pass on contesting Iowa, where he’s unlikely to play well with social conservatives (as of today, it appears that Mitt Romney may be making the same calculation). That means that the New Hampshire primary (where undeclared voters more sympathetic to his views) will be of critical importance to his campaign.

This is much the same position that Giuliani found himself in during the 2008 race. But Hizzoner’s aversion to retail politics led him to run a drive-by campaign in New Hampshire and focus on larger states where the race would primarily be run in the media. We all know how that turned out.

Now comes news that Huntsman can’t be bothered with some of the vagaries of Granite State politics either. From Politico:

Jon Huntsman’s decision to skip the first New Hampshire presidential debate on Monday has Republicans in the state confused — and predicting that he’ll suffer politically for it.

“As a guy who has said publicly he’s going to skip Iowa, it seems like he’d want to be here for that debate,” said Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire GOP chairman who met Huntsman at one of his early events in Durham. “It’s the first real debate and for a guy who seems to be all-in in New Hampshire.”

Cullen was one of a half-dozen local GOP players raising concerns about Huntsman’s absence from a debate that will feature both Tim Pawlenty and, for the first time, Mitt Romney.

“I think skipping the first debate is very serious,” said Mike Dennehy, a longtime New Hampshire consultant who helped lead John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008. “I think it shows either you’re afraid to join the others on stage for the first time or you’re unwilling to — both of which don’t give voters a lot of confidence in a candidate.”

What is it about this election cycle that produces such lethargic work ethics?

As Ashton noted earlier, Newt Gingrich is having one of the worst days of an already bad campaign. As of this evening, it’s now looking increasingly clear that the injury of his staff’s departure is going to be augmented by the insult of most of them lining up behind Texas Governor Rick Perry. It was just a rumor when Ashton posted earlier, but now it’s looking more like a sure thing. Over at the Daily Caller, Matt Lewis reports:

Two separate and reliable sources in Texas tell me serious preparations are being made for Governor Rick Perry, 61, to seek the Republican nomination for president.

Dave Carney and Rob Johnson — the former top Perry aides who on Thursday left Newt Gingrich’s floundering campaign — are said to be heading to Texas soon to join in on preparations for the run. I am told this is now “ninety percent likely to occur.” Additionally, Perry allies have begun holding meetings in the state and have been instructed to quietly reach out to contacts in early primary states.

All of this drama six months before the first votes are cast. Get ready for a long and exciting primary season.

I’m going to have to make some concessions to Tim, which means I may start drinking before I’m finished writing this post (just kidding, Tim is consistently on point … and I started drinking long before I started drafting).

The source of this doff of the cap is the performance of one Tim Pawlenty, who Mr. Lee took to this blog to defend when I lamented the state of the Republican presidential field upon Mitch Daniels’ non-entry.

As the invisible primary picks up steam, Pawlenty is showing some real grit (he opposed ethanol mandates despite the importance of Iowa to his electoral strategy, for instance) and consistently sharpening his message. Giving a major economic address in Chicago today, the former Minnesota governor brilliantly characterized his formula for reducing government:

“We can start by applying what I call ‘The Google Test,’ Pawlenty said Tuesday. “If you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be doing it.”

Pundits on the left are already hitting Pawlenty for being reductionist. There may be some ever-so-slight truth to that. You can find health care services online, but that doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable for the government to provide funding for the poorest among us. Still, having the government provide it? I’d have to say the Pawlenty formula is right about 98 percent of the time.

Monday’s news cycle has been very good to two men who don’t receive a lot of sunshine in their lives these days.

The first is former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was in a New York City courtroom this morning to plead not guilty to the charge that he sexually assaulted a Big Apple hotel maid. While his circumstances are still unenviable, the media spotlight abandoned the French financier in favor of the equally prurient Anthony Weiner, the Democratic New York congressman who admitted at a press conference earlier today to committing every gross act you already suspected he committed. The irony must be galling to Weiner, who, had he followed Strauss-Kahn’s lead and pursued a career in French politics, would doubtless be up for a cabinet position after his recent revelations.

The second is Michael Steele, the former RNC chairman whose two-year tenure was marked by a parade of rhetorical gaffes and accusations of gross mismanagement. Steele, however, looks like a man with the message discipline of a Soviet apparatchik in comparison to the new DNC chairwoman, Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

As our own Quin Hillyer has repeatedly (and persuasively) argued, Wasserman Schultz is a public official who elevates inanity to an art form. Prior to today, her most egregious exercise in vapidity had been her characterization of Paul Ryan’s plan to reform Medicare:

[Republicans] would take the people who are younger than 55 years old today and tell them, ‘You know what? You’re on your own. Go and find private health insurance in the health care insurance market. We’re going to throw you to the wolves, and allow insurance companies to deny you coverage and drop you for pre-existing conditions.  ‘We’re going to give you X amount of dollars and you figure it out.’

Asinine and, as is now well-documented, totally wrong. But if Wasserman Schultz seemed to have found a floor for exhibitionist stupidity with that remark, she has now gone subterranean. Asked this weekend about the possibility of stricter state voting laws, this was the controlled implosion that ensued:

“Now you have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally — and very transparently — block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates,” she told host Roland Martin on “Washington Watch” this weekend [emphasis hers]. “And it’s nothing short of that blatant.”

Some remarks speak for themselves. But just a few notes for the gentlewoman (I suppose) from Florida:

1. The word “literally” only has one meaning. This isn’t it. No matter what Joe Biden has told you.
2. If Republicans actually were enthusiastic about Jim Crow laws, they’d have to take tutorial sessions from Democrats — who actually authored them.
3. On behalf of all conservatives everywhere … please do more media availability.

As I wrote earlier this week, a bipartisan coalition in Congress is growing tired of President Obama’s refusal to involve the legislative branch in the policy-setting for the conflict in Libya. Today that irritation grew to a head on the floor of the House of Representatives. The Washington Times reports:

Crossing party lines to deliver a stunning rebuke to the commander in chief, the vast majority of the House voted Friday for resolutions telling President Obama he has broken the constitutional chain of authority by committing U.S. troops to the international military mission in Libya.

In two votes — on competing resolutions that amounted to legislative lectures of Mr. Obama — Congress escalated the brewing constitutional clash over whether he ignored the founding document’s grant of war powers by sending U.S. troops to aid in enforcing a no-fly zone and naval blockade of Libya.

The resolutions were non-binding, and only one of them passed, but taken together, roughly three-quarters of the House voted to put Mr. Obama on notice that he must give explain himself [sic] or else face future consequences, possibly including having funds for the war cut off.

The word “including” in the last sentence is a bit of an overstatement. Since the courts will almost certainly refuse to intervene in this matter under the political question doctrine, cutting off funds is virtually the only way for Congress to impose real consequences (it’s also something of a proxy for a vote on policy, given that many White Houses argue that approving funds is the same as approving a war).

It’s not clear that this would be a wise move, however. Regardless of the initial rationale for the Libyan expedition (which was not compelling in terms of American national security interests), the reality is that the strategic landscape has shifted since the West has intervened. Leaving now in a rush has the potential to be more destablizing than not intervening in the first place. It would be better instead to set a few hard and fast objectives (killing Gaddafi, securing rebel control of certain parts of the country, etc.), achieve them, and go home, hopefully leaving that nation no worse than we found it.

That prescription may be less dramatic than the Congress wants. But that’s what they get for not speaking up sooner.

In 2009 and 2010, the news out of Washington was dominated by stories of Congress rushing through legislation without reading it, voting in the middle of the night, and generally disregarding the adjective in the term “representative government.” Perhaps more than the specifics of policies like the stimulus package, Obamacare, and cap and trade, it was this disdain for honest dealing that set the public firmly in opposition to the Pelosi-Reid Congress and precipitated the blowout midterm elections of 2010.

As with most pathologies in American politics, what’s bad in Washington is usually even worse in Sacramento. The Sacramento Bee reports today:

Numerous bills to crack down on California lawmakers have been shelved quietly by the Legislature in recent weeks.

Casualties included proposals to bar middle-of-the-night legislative sessions, to restrict lawmakers from receiving pay for serving on state boards within four years of leaving office, and to require annual disclosure by public officials of their pay, benefits, travel and other compensation.

Legislators opted not to dock per-diem pay for absences or to create a “do not call” list for campaign robocalls.

What’s consistently fascinating about California politics is that, for all the dysfunction of state government, the Golden State doesn’t have a criminal political culture akin to Illinois or New Jersey, states where the capstone of a successful electoral career is often a stint in federal prison. And why would it? With six-figure legislative salaries and virtually guaranteed appointments to one of the (literally innumerable) state boards and commissions that act as legislative rest homes, one need not break the law to plunder the taxpayers.

As with most of its deficiencies, California would do well to replicate the example of Texas, a state that has shown that a massive population and a sophisticated economy do not necessitate governmental incompetence. Texas has a part-time legislature that only convenes once every two years. The stated goal of this policy: to protect the liberties of the people of Texas. Considering that Texas has created more jobs in the last five years than every other state combined, that seems to be a decent formula.

The upshot: California can take Texas’s principles or Texas can take California’s jobs. Reforming the way the Golden State’s feckless legislature does business would be a good start towards the former end.

It’s one of the stranger alliances imaginable in the current Congress, but it looks like a possibility. Per a story in Roll Call:

Frustrated by the White House’s handling of the civil war in Libya, House Republicans will meet Thursday to discuss what steps Congress should take to intervene — including the possibility of backing Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s resolution calling for an end to U.S. involvement.

Although GOP support for the Ohio Democrat’s resolution is far from certain, an aide said the fact that it is even being discussed is a sign of how unhappy Republicans are. “Members are really angry with the way the administration has handled this,” a GOP aide said.

The opposition has a good case on the merits. As I’ve chronicled before, the Libyan mission is an orgy of confusion with a tangential (at best) connection to American national security interests.

It will be interesting, however, to see how Republicans in particular deal with the legal issues surrounding the war. President Obama has already exceeded the 60 day window given to him by the 1973 War Powers Resolution to receive Congressional authorization for the war, which could be a solid Republican talking point — except for the fact that huge swaths of the conservative foreign policy and legal intellegentsia consider the War Powers Resolution to be an unconstitutional infringement on the president’s war-making powers. To complicate matters even further, Obama himself was a vigorous opponent of presidents using that war-making authority in exactly the way he has in Libya.

So what happens next? It seems the only thing we can expect for sure is inconsistency all around.

In my column this week and a discussion here on the Freedom Line blog with Tim, we focused on the current state of the GOP presidential field, which has been defined in recent weeks by a series of high profile non-starters: Mike Huckabee, Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour, Donald Trump, and John Thune, amongst others. After Daniels — the most recent to take a pass — made his intentions public last weekend, conventional wisdom began to congeal around two intertwined propositions: that the GOP field was essentially set and that grassroots Republicans were dissatisfied with the field. Not so quick.

Not only is the field not set in stone, it may be about to get a shot in the arm courtesy of three potentially top-tier candidates. Reports this week have Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Palin, and Rick Perry all seriously eying a run. For those keeping score at home that’s one of the most successful Republican executives in the last half century, the most dynamic personality that the GOP has produced since Reagan, and the governor of a state that has been an economic powerhouse in the midst of a national downturn, respectively. Get ready for an interesting summer.

Believe it or not, they occur once in a blue moon. The AP reports:

Oil spill prevention requirements will no longer apply to spilled milk. Gasoline pumps wouldn’t need devices for trapping vapor pollutants, and there would be fewer bureaucratic hurdles for doctors who want to dispense medical advice to a distant patient.

These were among hundreds of existing regulations that the Obama administration said Thursday it wants to revamp or eliminate in a government-wide effort to ease burdens on business. Overall, the drive would save hundreds of millions of dollars annually for companies, governments and individuals and eliminate millions of hours of paperwork while maintaining health and safety protections for Americans, White House officials said.

No jokes. No irony. Just a thanks to the folks at the White House behind this initiative. And a question: can we have some more please?