Freedom Line Blog

The always-provocative strategist George Friedman (head of Austin-based STRATFOR) is out with a new analysis of President Obama’s Middle East policy today on RealClearWorld (caveat: Friedman is always provocative, but not always accurate. He wrote a 1991 book titled “The Coming War with Japan”). As usual, Friedman’s work is rife with insight, but no single passage deserves quotation as much as his dispassionate diagnosis of the Arab Spring:

The central problem from my point of view is that the Arab Spring has consisted of demonstrations of limited influence, in non-democratic revolutions and in revolutions whose supporters would create regimes quite alien from what Washington would see as democratic. There is no single vision to the Arab Spring, and the places where the risings have the most support are the places that will be least democratic, while the places where there is the most democratic focus have the weakest risings.

The piece deserves reading in its entirety for its thorough analysis of the region, but this is perhaps its most important point. The Middle East needs real change before hope becomes an appropriate response. Newsroom revolutions are not adequate.

Three cheers today for my (intermittent) home state of Tennessee, which has just passed a package of education reforms that should be held up as national models:

Cheer # 1 — The Volunteer State is doing away with tenure-based layoffs, in which teachers who’ve been on the job the longest are insulated from dismissal regardless of job performance.

Cheer # 2 — Tennessee is abolishing the cap on public charter schools, institutions that are controlled by the government but given much greater administrative flexibility than traditional public schools. This will allow for much broader educational competition — a move that will create more opportunities for children trapped in failing institutions.

Cheer # 3 — The state is also creating universal access to charters. Previous iterations of the policy had restricted which students were eligible to attend the schools.

With these reforms, the state of Tennessee has shown that it understands the most important principle of public education: the needs of the students come before those of bureaucrats and public employees. We salute their courage and look forward to the results.

Yesterday, we noted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was headed to his Washington meeting with President Obama ready for confrontation after the the president unilaterally changed the proposed terms for Middle East peace.

Unlike Obama (he of the “limited engagement” in Libya), a promise from Netanyahu means something. And he made that apparent within the White House walls earlier today. Reuters reports: 

Netanyahu’s remarks after the White House talks underscored how a new U.S. push for Middle East peace had opened one of the deepest divides in years in relations between the United States and close ally Israel.

“Peace based on illusions will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle East reality,” an unsmiling Netanyahu told Obama in the Oval Office.

Netanyahu told Obama that Israel was willing to make compromises for peace but flatly rejected the idea of going back to 1967 borders, which he described as “indefensible.”

The hubris by which Obama thought he could dictate terms for Middle East peace is breathtaking. The fact that these terms were disproportionately unfavorable to one of our closest allies even more so. But the insult added to this injury was that the Israelis apparently received no advanced notification of the policy shift and that it was announced on the eve of their prime minister’s visit to Washington. The best possible reading of the Obama Administration’s behavior is halting incompetence. The worst (and more likely) is that it was a calculated insult. Given that fact, Netanyahu was totally within his rights to return the favor.

President Obama welcomes (if that’s the word) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House on Friday. Oh, to be a fly on that wall.

The president chose to spend the day before his meeting with the head of the Jewish state’s government calling on Israel to return to its 1967 borders, meaning that it would give up all claims to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights — all of which are essential to Israeli security as long as the nation is surrounded by enemies.

Don’t expect Netanyahu to roll over. As the New York Times reports:

Mr. Netanyahu said in a pointed statement just before boarding a plane to Washington that while he appreciated Mr. Obama’s commitment to peace, he “expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of American commitments made to Israel in 2004 which were overwhelmingly supported by both Houses of Congress.”

Those commitments came in a letter from President George W. Bush which stated, among other things that “it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” another way of describing the 1967 boundaries.

The next time Obama chooses to be so imperious with his prescriptions for Middle East peace, he’d do well to remember one of the salient differences between himself and the Israeli Prime Minister: only the latter’s consent is essential for a deal.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has had an uneven tenure at the Pentagon. In his time serving both the Bush and Obama Administrations, Gates has often been a voice of prudence. At other times, however, he has sounded like a facile opinion columnist, as when he paraphrased Douglas MacArthur to a group of West Point cadets earlier this year, saying, “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.” Defense secretaries craft policy in reaction to specific conditions throughout the world. As such, it’s unwise for one of them to opine in such absolute terms — particularly when their words could be used to unjustly assail one of their successors.

Gates is right, however, about the aftermath of the assasination of Osama Bin Laden. As Politico reports today:

The amount of information released about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound has raised concerns about jeopardizing future missions, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said Wednesday.

“My concern is that there were too many people in too many places talking too much about this operation. And we [had] reached agreement that we would not talk about the operational details,” he told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. “I am very concerned about this, because we want to retain the capability to carry out these kinds of operations in the future.”

The code of silence shouldn’t be limited to operational details, however. In the aftermath of Bin Laden’s death, it would have been best for the military and intelligence community to act as if there was little real intelligence to be gleaned from Obama’s Abbottabad hideout, thus keeping from the enemy the fact that our knowledge of terrorist identities and operations was growing exponentially.

Since that cat’s already out of the bag, it’s essential that no information of a more specific variety gets out. The intelligence we collected represents a great asset. But keeping members of a worldwide terrorist network on the run because they’re unsure about what we know is an even bigger one.

Ever since its inception, it’s been clear that the waiver program being run by the Obama Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services represents that age-old liberal trend: suffering for thee, but not for me. The waivers allow certain institutions to bypass the onerous requirements put in place by Obamacare. But since they are dispensed according to the whims of the Obama HHS, the recipients tend to be interests favored by the White House — a process that makes a mockery of the rule of law.

A piece in today’s Daily Caller reports yet another suspicious trend:

Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

…

Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers.

Other common waiver recipients were labor union chapters, large corporations, financial firms and local governments. But Pelosi’s district’s waivers are the first major examples of luxurious, gourmet restaurants and hotels getting a year-long pass from Obamacare.

All hail the Democrats, party of the working man — assuming he works in a San Francisco bistro.

The New York Daily News carries a shameless story today seeking to sow controversy over President Bush’s decision not to join President Obama for today’s ceremony at Ground Zero:

WASHINGTON – George W. Bush won’t be at Ground Zero with President Obama Thursday in part because he feels his team is getting short shrift in the decade-long manhunt for Osama Bin Laden.

“[Bush] viewed this as an Obama victory lap,” a highly-placed source told the Daily News Wednesday.

Bush’s visit to the rubble after the 9/11 attacks was the emotional high point of his presidency, but associates say the invitation to return with his successor was a non-starter.

Those of us who served President Bush know that the NYDN’s account has nothing to do with reality. The former president’s ethos, particularly in retirement, has always been to put the needs of the current president — and the nation — above his own. His decision not to attend the ceremony was a gesture of respect toward the president who caught Bin Laden, not a snub born of petulance. The Daily News’ anonymous source is unnamed for a reason: he or she is unreliable. The paper should be ashamed.

In the wake of Osama Bin Laden’s demise, it may be all too easy to forget about the other poweful madmen who continue to be the authors of human suffering throughout the world. One prime example: the leaders of North Korea. Slate reports the disturbing news from the hermit kingdom:

In a new commentary on the death of Osama Bin Laden out today, I wrote:

Bin Laden’s death also reminds us of just how intemperate the climate is amongst our fair-weather friends in the War on Terror. Consider: Pakistani officials were not notified of the operation until its completion, despite the fact that American forces were opened up to the prospect of attack as a result. The only calculation that could justify such a risk? That elements within the Pakistani government may have tipped off Bin Laden if they had the relevant intelligence.

No sooner had the piece been published than Politico reported this nugget from Langley:

The Obama administration didn’t tell Pakistani officials about its plans to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound out of fear that they might warn the Al Qaeda leader or his supporters about the mission, according to CIA director Leon Panetta.

Early on in the planning of the attack, “it was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission” because “they might alert the targets,” Panetta told Time Magazine, which on Tuesday morning published Panetta’s first interview since bin Laden was killed.

For the past decade, America has spared the rod in its relationship with Pakistan because of the conviction that the country’s shortcomings were outweighed by its partnership in the War on Terror. If the leadership there couldn’t be trusted to assist tracking down the biggest target in that war, it would represent a failure. But if it was actively abetting the enemy, it represents a betrayal. America should respond accordingly.

The American Interest’s Walter Russell Mead is one of the nation’s most consistently insightful pundits. He’s also an Obama voter and a Democrat, albeit one of unusual intellectual independence. That’s just one of the reasons that it must be so bracing for denizens of the White House to read Mead’s most recent entry at his Via Meadia blog at AI. In an essay rife with criticism’s of President Obama’s leadership style, Mead distills it all down to one scathing two-paragraph passage:

Here is the paradox we face:  The President is a consensus-seeker whose decision making style rewards polarization and a conciliator who loses friends without winning over enemies.

The President’s problem is not, I think, that he seeks compromise.  It is that the type of compromise he chooses is so ineffective.  Splitting the difference is not leadership; leadership is looking at the positions of two sides and finding creative new directions that give something to all sides — but move the ball down the field.

Forget the liberal base or the intellectually capricious swing voter. If Obama can’t secure the allegiance of a left-leaning mind as sharp as Mead’s, he has serious problems going into 2012.

Last week, Ashton examined California’s economic failures courtesy of a John Fund piece that used restaurant CEO Andy Puzder as an object lesson in the Golden State’s fiscal insanity. Puzder recently appeared on Fox Business’s “The Wild Card” to explain the state’s travails in greater detail. Watch it and weep.

As we prepare for the beginning of the era of the Federal Reserve as PR machine, we can anticipate a glut of federal statistics hand-picked to convince the public that the growing evidence of inflation is psychosomatic. Of course, it helps that the Fed’s core measure of inflation excludes such basic staples as food and energy. But as Jeffery Lord points out at the American Spectator, the main street indices tell a sharply different story than the Wall Street rationalizations:

Milk. A gallon of skim. At the local Giant in Central Pennsylvania:

January 11, 2011: $3.20
February 28, 2011: $3.24
March 6, 2011: $3.34
April 23. 2011: $3.48

That would be a 28 cent rise in a mere 102 days, from January to April of this year. The third year of the Obama misadventure.

Then there’s the celery. Same sized bag. Same store.

January 11, 2011: $1.99 a bag.
March 6, 2011: $2.49 a bag.

A rise of 50 cents in 54 days.

If this trend continues, the Fed will have to find an even more counterintuitive metric for gaging inflation. Perhaps one that doesn’t include prices.

Faced with the decline and eventual insolvency of America’s welfare state, congressional Republicans led by Paul Ryan laid out a 73- page plan to reform entitlements for a new generation and right America’s economic course. Democrats, on the other hand, cut this ad, a new low in demagoguery:

I don’t ever want to hear another Democrat refer to the GOP as “The Party of No”.

You probably don’t need any more sources of gloom on this tax day. But what you do need is an understanding of just how destructive America’s current tax regime is. And for that you couldn’t do much better than the words of conservative economist extraordinaire Arthur Laffer, who writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

There is a lot more to taxes than simply paying the bill. Taxpayers must spend significantly more than $1 in order to provide $1 of income-tax revenue to the federal government.

To start with, individuals and businesses must pay the government the $1 in revenue plus the costs of their own time spent filing and complying with the tax code; plus the tax collection costs of the IRS; plus the tax compliance outlays that individuals and businesses pay to help them file their taxes.

In a study published last week by the Laffer Center, my colleagues Wayne Winegarden, John Childs and I estimate that these costs alone are a staggering $431 billion annually. This is a cost markup of 30 cents on every dollar paid in taxes.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s the equivalent of a 30% tax on … well, paying taxes.

If you’ve lost National Review — the most consistently conservative child of William F. Buckley — you’ve lost the conservative moment. Thus, House Speaker John Boehner should be insecure about NR’s new staff editorial reacting to the recently revealed gimmicks in last week’s budget deal, ominously entitled “Strike One.” Reading the content won’t assuage those fears:

There’s realism and then there’s cynicism. This deal — oversold and dependent on classic Washington budget trickery — comes too close to the latter. John Boehner has repeatedly said he’s going to reject “business as usual,” but that’s what he’s offered his caucus. It’s one thing for Tea Party Republicans to vote for a cut that falls short of what they’d get if the controlled all of Washington; it’s another thing for them, after making so much of bringing transparency and honesty to the Beltway, to vote for a deal sold partly on false pretenses.

Last week, some of us held out hope that the budget deal represented real — albeit incremental — change. The disappointment that would have resulted from a less satisfying outcome would have been bad. But the betrayal that results from feeling duped by your own leadership is far worse.

File this one under “Gone, but not willing to shut up long enough to be forgotten.” House Minority Leader and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (she of “we’ll have to pass the health care bill for you to find out what’s in it”), has stepped in it again. In a speech at Tufts University in Boston earlier this week, the erstwhile Madame Speaker let the public know just how deep her reverence for the electoral process runs:

To my Republican friends: take back your party. So that it doesn’t matter so much who wins the election, because we have shared values about the education of our children, the growth of our economy, how we defend our country, our security and civil liberties, how we respect our seniors. Because there are so many things at risk right now — perhaps in another question I’ll go into them, if you want. But the fact is that elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do…But when it comes to a place where there doesn’t seem to be shared values then that can be problematic for the country, as I think you can see right now.

Our apologies to Mrs. Pelosi, but conservatives have the intellectual acumen not to confuse unilateral surrender with unanimity. Elections matter because Americans have widely varying understandings of what constitutes the best interest of the nation. If the former speaker can’t understand that, she may be well advised to consider another line of work.

Well, the worst kept secret in presidential politics is now out in the open — Mitt Romney is running for president again in 2012:

This should provide plenty of fodder for tomorrow’s editions of the major national newspapers. One problem: tomorrow will also mark the fifth anniversary of Romney affixing his signature to healthcare reform in Massachusetts. With one of Romney’s key advisers on that piece of legislation openly declaring it to the be the intellectual model for Obamacare, Tuesday’s stories may not be as glowing as the former Bay State governor imagines. Nor may the returns from the 2012 Republican presidential primaries.

His crypto-candidacy is only a few weeks old, but, as Politico reports, Donald Trump is already making big waves in the race to the be the next Republican presidential nominee:

Donald Trump is a force to be reckoned with on the national political stage, according to a new poll on Wednesday night.

The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows Trump tied for second place with Mike Huckabee, both at 17 percent, and leading the GOP pack among Tea Party supporters.

Those are huge numbers for someone who was completely absent from presidential chatter just a few months ago (of course, universal name recognition doesn’t hurt).

Let’s stipulate that the odds favor Trump’s flirtations being nothing more than some extremely sophisticated guerilla marketing. That being said, one has to wonder where the source of his appeal lies. The safest bet? Trump is popular because he is unafraid to speak his mind, directly and unapologetically. That’s a rare trait in an age where most politicians are driven by fear of losing the next election rather than hope for governing before then. To the extent that it’s present in other GOP comers — whether in the iron will of Chris Christie or the intellectual honesty of Paul Ryan — it seems to be a gene characteristic of those who won’t be running for president in 2012.

GOP White House hopefuls should take note. There’s a Trump-shaped vacuum in this presidential field.

If you follow the debates over whether voters should be required to present a photo ID at their polling place, you’ve probably heard the standard Democratic refrain before: there’s very little real voter fraud out there and voter ID policies are just a cynical Republican plot to suppress turnout amongst key Democratic constituencies. As is the prevailing tendency, however, liberal rhetoric is now being undermined by stone cold facts.

Last week, the U.S. House’s Administration Committee heard testimony on a Colorado study that used the 2010 election to put claims of scarce voter fraud to the test. The results, as The Hill reports, were shocking:

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican, told the panel that his department’s study identified nearly 12,000 people who were not citizens but were still registered to vote in Colorado.

Of those non-citizen registered voters, nearly 5,000 took part in the 2010 general election in which Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet narrowly defeated Republican Ken Buck.

Colorado conducted the study by comparing the state’s voter registration database with driver’s license records.

We applaud our Democratic friends for their efforts to increase voter turnout. We just wish they’d stick with legal voters.