Freedom Line Blog

Remember the line that President Obama used so often to soothe the anxieties of Americans worried about healthcare reform? “If you like your health insurance, you can keep it”? Well, things have gotten a litte more complicated since those earlier, more innocent days. Just ask Joel Ario, the HHS bureaucrat charged with overseeing Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges. According to The Hill’s Healthwatch Blog:

“If it plays out the exchanges work pretty well, then the employer can say ‘This is a great thing. I can now dump my people into the exchange and it would be good for them, good for me,’ ” Ario continued.

A kindly reminder from those of us not serving in the Obama healthcare politburo. If, like the majority of Americans, your employer provides your healthcare, you don’t get to choose whether or not you keep your current healthcare. And the government is putting its hand on the scales.

Republicans in Congress are currently split on whether to accept incremental budget cuts in the name of political pragmatism or to hold a hard line — and face the possibility of a government shutdown or a freeze in the debt ceiling — in the name of principle. Freshman Florida Senator Marco Rubio takes to the editorial pages of the Wednesday edition of the Wall Street Journal with a message that leaves no doubt where he stands:

“Raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.” So said then-Sen. Obama in 2006, when he voted against raising the debt ceiling by less than $800 billion to a new limit of $8.965 trillion. As America’s debt now approaches its current $14.29 trillion limit, we are witnessing leadership failure of epic proportions.

I will vote to defeat an increase in the debt limit unless it is the last one we ever authorize and is accompanied by a plan for fundamental tax reform, an overhaul of our regulatory structure, a cut to discretionary spending, a balanced-budget amendment, and reforms to save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

For months now, we’ve heard “sober” politicians tell us that it’s time to have “an adult conversation” about the size and cost of government in which “everything is on the table”. It looks like Marco Rubio is calling their bluff.

Last week we told you about how President Obama’s steadfast refusal to open up America’s energy resources is keeping prices at the pump artificially high. But as we transition into the summer driving season, it’s important to remember that Obama isn’t the first Washington busybody who wanted to micromanage your gas tank.

Though current oil volatility will mask its effect, decades old federal regulations mandate that gas stations sell a “summer blend” gasoline from June 1 to September 15 (some localities extend the period). The blend is intended to cut down on air pollution in local areas, but it also adds an average of 10 cents per gallon to the cost of gasoline. Just what we needed.

In the continuing debate over the size and cost of government, Democrats are fond of saying that there’s not much in the way of waste when it comes to federal employment. In a piece up on the Daily Caller today, Chris Moody begs to differ:

The Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs needs someone to run the Facebook page for the Dept. of the Interior and they’ll pay up to $115,000 a year. Over at the Dept. of Defense, they’ll drop nearly 50k a year for a new mail room clerk, plus the glorious benefits that comes with government work.

In Washington, D.C., there are more than 1,000 openings this month alone. These include a “student internship” program at the Federal Housing  Finance Agency that pays the equivalent of $48,304 a year; a $155,000-a-year gig at the Peace Corps to ensure the agency is complying with Equal Opportunity Employment standards; and a similar job at the Dept. of Transportation that promises nearly $180,000 a year.

Needless to say, this is an unquestionable example of Washington excess. But it has implications for the private sector too. After all, what college kid will want to take the risks of creating the next world-changing company when he can make six figures a year — with total job security and lavish benefits — at taxpayer expense?

As developments in the Middle East and a wayward monetary policy send gas prices consistently north, President Obama — no friend of hydrocarbons he — seems to be turning over a new leaf on the topic of oil exploration. The only problem? He wants other countries to do the heavy lifting so that we can then import the black gold. An editorial in today’s Investor’s Business Daily has the POTUS dead to rights:

Now, with a seven-year offshore drilling ban in effect off of both coasts, on Alaska’s continental shelf and in much of the Gulf of Mexico — and a de facto moratorium covering the rest — Obama tells the Brazilians:

“We want to help you with the technology and support to develop these oil reserves safely. And when you’re ready to start selling, we want to be one of your best customers.”

Obama wants to develop Brazilian offshore oil to help the Brazilian economy create jobs for Brazilian workers while Americans are left unemployed in the face of skyrocketing energy prices by an administration that despises fossil fuels as a threat to the environment and wants to increase our dependency on foreign oil.

Despite some of the more emotional pleas for energy independence, there’s nothing inherently wrong with importing fuel from foreign sources. In fact, developing new oil production anywhere lowers the price everywhere. However, someone might want to tell President Obama that this maxim applies to U.S. sources as well.

From the opening graph of a story in today’s Washington Times:

As a thank-you to its most famous customer, Amtrak is renaming the train station in Wilmington, Del., after stimulus “sheriff” Vice President Joseph R. Biden — after the project received $20 million in stimulus money and came in $5.7 million over the initial announced budget.

Sanity in the debate over slashing the federal budget is coming from some odd places lately. Today, it’s courtesy of Politico’s Michael Kinsley, a liberal’s liberal if ever there was one. Writing in a terrific piece in the Los Angeles Times, Kinsley offers up some conservative wisdom in words better than any on the right have come up with:

Comparisons [of domestic spending programs proposed to be cut] with Pentagon spending are especially inappropriate, because defense spending is different. The payoffs from most types of government spending are incremental. You can decide how much you want the government to spend on, say, subsidizing symphony orchestras. There is no exact right answer: The more you spend, the more you get. More symphony orchestras are a good thing, but there are other good things you want the government to do, or of course you might want the government to stay out of it and lower your taxes instead.

But in the case of defense spending, notions like how much we can afford, or what it would be nice to have, are inappropriate. The value is not gradual or incremental. It is absolutely essential to spend whatever is necessary to keep our nation safe, and a total waste to spend a nickel more.

Another worthy use of federal money: having the passage above carved into the walls in the Democratic cloakrooms on Capitol Hill.

Washington is a town where being an intellectual means being relentlessly synchronized with the conventional wisdom, no matter how vapid. That’s how President Obama (no doubt a smart man by any reasonable standard — all presidents are, almost inevitably) has been elevated to the commanding heights of the cognitive elite by the Beltway press corps. Not so fast, says one guy who actually knows what he’s talking about.

In one brief run in a piece in the new edition of Newsweek, famed Harvard historian Niall Ferguson absolutely eviscerates President Obama’s glib reading of revolutionary history:

In the newest bit of explosive guerilla video from conservative gadfly James O’Keefe, National Public Radio senior executive Ron Schiller tells a pair of undercover filmmakers that NPR would be better off without federal funding. When you hear his denunciations of the Tea Party, “middle America”, and “zionists” in the media, you’ll be only too happy to grant his wish. Watch the truly stunning video below:

Over at The Corner, the incomparable Yuval Levin has a great explainer on why President Obama’s accomodationist tone on health care in yesterday’s White House speech to the National Governors Association was a headfake. He notes:

Speaking to a group of governors yesterday, the president said he would support legislation that would allow states to opt out of some of Obamacare’s requirements (including the individual mandate, the employer mandate, and the state exchanges) if they show they can achieve exactly the same results in some other way. Obamacare itself actually already contains such a provision, but it would allow states to apply for such waivers starting in 2017—after these mandates and requirements have been in place for three years. Obama now says he would let states apply for waivers in 2014, when the new rules begin.

This change of heart, like the one regarding the CLASS Act, is a concession to the fact that the law’s requirements are understood by many state officials (of both parties) as immensely burdensome and problematic. But like the one regarding the CLASS Act, it is also not an actual concession in practice. The states would be required to show that their alternative policies would provide the same or greater insurance benefits to the same or greater number of people, presumably as assessed by HHS. So it allows no flexibility regarding ends, and therefore very little flexibility regarding means. In fact, while it would allow conservative-leaning governors essentially no freedom to move in the direction of greater competition and more consumer-driven health care (which conservatives tend to see as the actual path to reducing costs and therefore insuring more people while improving quality) it would give liberal-leaning governors significant freedom to move in the direction of more government control. Indeed, as the New York Times notes today, while the approach Obama supports would not allow for many consumer-driven reforms it “might allow interested states to establish a single-payer system in which the government is the sole insurer.”

Though the 2012 presidential season hasn’t started quite yet, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney earned an endorsement earlier today that he’s probably not too happy about. While addressing the National Governors Association at the White House, President Obama complimented his would-be challenger in a fashion that will come back to haunt Romney come primary season. As USA Today reports:

In telling critical GOP governors they could develop their own health care plans, Obama said, “I know that many of you have asked for flexibility” under the new federal law.

“In fact, I agree with Mitt Romney, who recently said he’s proud of what he accomplished on health care in Massachusetts and supports giving states the power to determine their own health care solutions,” Obama said.

In a limited sense, Romney should take the remarks as a compliment. Though Obama’s invocation of the Massachusetts health care plan is partially intended to make Obamacare seem centrist, the president also knows that it will cause grief for the former governor with the GOP rank and file. As such, it’s a sign that Romney is a potential opponent Obama wouldn’t mind seeing knocked out of contention.

In a bigger sense, however, Romney is stuck with an albatross. Ask most conservatives what they consider the greatest sin of the Obama Administration and they will point to the government takeover of health care without hesitation. For any potential Republican presidential candidate, having an executive record that includes creating the program that Obama cites as his intellectual template is devastating.

Translation: it may be bad for Romney that Obama took a shot at him. But it’s much worse that Romney gave him the ammunition.

Looking for an upside to the prospect of a shutdown of the federal government? This gem from the Daily Caller’s Chris Moody ought to do it:

Fast fact: It is illegal to deliver the Gettysburg Address on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial without permission from the U.S. National Park Service.

On President’s Day — standing where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” — Phillip Howell, 25, recited Lincoln’s famous address and was quickly stopped by a Park Police officer. He told Howell that he could not give speeches on the steps of the memorial without a permit.

“He called me Abe, and then I turned around and he said, ‘Do you have a permit?’ I said ‘no’ and he said, ‘well you can’t do that here then,’” Howell told The Daily Caller. “Then I said, ‘I’m just giving the Gettysburg Address, come on, it’s President’s Day.’ And he said, ‘I don’t care what you’re giving, You’re not allowed to do that here. I don’t care what speech or what agenda you want to give.’”

As post-communist Russia has drifted further and further towards authoritarianism, one seemingly insurmountable obstacle has thwarted would-be reformers: the lack of an opposition figure who can challenge Vladimir Putin’s moral legitimacy without inviting swift reprisals from his government. That challenge is now coming from a seemingly unlikely figure: the final President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. As the UK Guardian reports:

Russia under prime minister Vladimir Putin is a sham democracy, Mikhail Gorbachev has said in his harshest criticism yet of the ruling regime.

“We have everything – a parliament, courts, a president, a prime minister and so on. But it’s more of an imitation,” the last president of the Soviet Union said.

…

Speaking at a press conference ahead of his 80th birthday, Gorbachev criticised Putin for manipulating elections.

In response to the prime minister and former president’s comments that he and his protégé, President Dmitry Medvedev, would decide between them who would run for office in March 2012, Gorbachev said: “It’s not Putin’s business. It must be decided by the nation in elections.”

He called Putin’s statements a sign of “incredible conceit”.

Asked how he thought the regime approached human rights, Gorbachev said: “There’s a problem there. It’s a sign of the state of our democracy.” He was echoing statements made by Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, during a visit to Russia last week.

Gorbachev said United Russia, the ruling party founded with the sole goal of supporting Putin’s leadership, was a throwback.

“United Russia reminds me of the worst copy of the Communist party,” he said. “We have institutions but they don’t work. We have laws but they must be enforced.”

The aging Gorbachev won’t be the figure to lead the political opposition to Putin. But his authority can provide a beacon of hope where there was none before. Bravo, comrade.

From today’s iteration of the inimitable (thank God) Dr. Krugman’s column in the New York Times:

… what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy.

If this is what makes it to print, one wonders what function it is exactly that Dr. Krugman’s ‘editor’ serves. The Grey Lady is on life support.

As commemorations and retrospectives continue to accompany the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth, the far left is taking its chance to recycle the anti-Reagan propaganda it’s had to keep on ice for the last quarter century. And when it comes to radical revisionism, no one’s better that MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, the dean of wise old leftists insulated from reality by the tenure system.

In an appearance on the program “Democracy Now”, Chomsky offered this summation of the Reagan Legacy:

 “What happened after Reagan left office was the beginnings of an effort to carry out – this Reagan legacy to try to create from this really quite miserable creature as some kind of deity and amazingly it succeeded,” Chomsky said. “I mean, Kim Il-sung would have been impressed. The events that took place when Reagan died, the Reagan legacy, this Obama business – you don’t get that in free societies. It would be ridiculed. What you get it is in totalitarian states.”

Apart from the fact that this world-renowned linguist has all the syntactical finesse of a five year old, what’s most telling is Chomsky’s bogeyman invocation of totalitarianism. Remind us again, Noam, what was your role in bringing down the Soviet Union? And what is it exactly that Hugo Chavez finds so appealing about your books?

There were many fine speeches from last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that deserved the attention of thoughtful conservatives. First among equals, however, was the address that Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels gave for Friday night’s Ronald Reagan Centennial Dinner.

The speech — written by Daniels himself — shows that the potential 2012 presidential candidate is not only a brilliant manager and a canny politician, but also an extremely sophisticated (and subtle) writer. In its defense of a prudent conservatism, the speech demonstrated that Daniels, not Barack Obama, is the great literary talent of 21st century politics. For unlike The One, Daniels speech was drenched in substance.

As such, the speech deserves no less than to be read in its entirety. Failing that, however, no passage deserves isolated quotation as much as Daniels’ definition and defense of fiscal conservatism, a masterpiece of dictional economy:

We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer. When we do find it necessary, we feel a profound duty to use that dollar as carefully and effectively as possible, else we should never have taken it at all.

That’ll do, Mitch. That’ll do.

In a November commentary, I warned that Ben Bernanke’s expansionary monetary policy threatened to erode the value of the dollar and weaken the American economy. Now the leading mind of the House GOP caucus is saying the same thing to the Fed Chairman’s face. With Bernanke appearing before the House Budget Committee earlier today, newly minted Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin laid the consequences of “quantitative easing” on the line:

“There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency,” Ryan told Bernanke. “Chairman Bernanke: We know you know this. We know that you’re focused and concerned about this. The Fed’s exit strategy and future policy – it will determine how this ends.”

Ryan said he believed a “course correction here in Washington is sorely needed.”

“Endless borrowing is not a strategy,” he said. “My concern is that the costs of the Fed’s current monetary policy – the money creation and massive balance sheet expansion – will come to outweigh the perceived short-term benefits.”

“It is hard to overstate the consequences of getting this wrong. The dollar is the world’s reserve currency and this has given us tremendous benefits in the global economy,” Ryan said.

As usual, Paul Ryan is right. Unfortunately, there’s little that can be done from the outside. The Fed operates free of traditional rules of transparency (one of the reasons the push to audit its books has gained so much traction) and it works on the basis of a delusional proposition that it can be an engine of economic stimulus at the same time that it maintains the dollar as a stable store of value (a proposition that Ryan has rightly called into question). There’s still a lot of work to be done to rationalize American monetary policy. But it’s at least heartening to know that we’ve literally got our best man on it.

If you need any proof that the new generation of Republicans in Congress are breaking from the spendthrift ways of their forebears, look no further than this terrific idea, as reported by our friends at the Daily Caller:

With the 112th Congress in full swing, some members of the House’s conservative Republican Study Committee are making a renewed effort to establish a committee whose only purpose is to find programs to cut from the federal budget.

…

The idea is a throwback to the now-defunct “Joint Committee on Reduction of Non-essential Federal Expenditures,” started by former Virginia Sen. Harry Byrd in 1941. The bi-cameral committee slashed an (inflation-adjusted) $38 billion from the federal budget in its first four years. The committee cut and eliminated programs enacted under President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” but was dismantled in 1974.

This proposal has two salutary effects. First, it has the potential to move conservatives from the abstract to the specific when it comes to spending cuts. Second, it puts skin in the game for Democrats — if they oppose the proposal it will give the lie to all of the vague pieties about deficit reduction that they’ve harnessed over the last year. This is a fight the conservatives in Congress should relish.

Earlier this week, I wrote that the uprising taking place against the Mubarak government in Cairo raised troubling questions about the regime that would succeed the departing president. Now, writing in the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick makes a disquieting prediction — and she’s got the data points to back it up:

According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics. When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.

Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.

When given the opportunity, the crowds on the street are not shy about showing what motivates them. They attack Mubarak and his new Vice President Omar Suleiman as American puppets and Zionist agents. The US, protesters told CNN’s Nick Robertson, is controlled by Israel. They hate and want to destroy Israel. That is why they hate Mubarak and Suleiman.

WHAT ALL of this makes clear is that if the regime falls, the successor regime will not be a liberal democracy. Mubarak’s military authoritarianism will be replaced by Islamic totalitarianism. The US’s greatest Arab ally will become its greatest enemy. Israel’s peace partner will again become its gravest foe.

Food for thought. We shouldn’t be thinking of Cairo as Philadelphia in 1776 until it proves that it’s not Paris in 1793.

Gossip Cop has learned exclusively that President Obama has invited Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony to watch the Super Bowl with him at the White House.

Lopez’s rep confirms to Gossip Cop that the invitation was extended, and now Lopez and Anthony are arranging a trip to Washington to watch the Pittsburgh Steelers take on the Green Bay Packers with the Commander-in-Chief.

Let’s review. This Sunday, the President of the United States will welcome two of the biggest Latin pop stars of the last decade to watch a Super Bowl featuring a team owned by his Ambassador to Ireland, preceded by an exclusive interview that he’s giving to a Fox News host. We’ve gone through the rabbit hole, people.