Freedom Line Blog

Thankfully, Joe Klein (almost) proves the adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day. As recently documented, Klein has an inability to set aside his partisan pom-poms and see the real issue in a news story. But not when it comes to the White House’s war on Fox News:

The problem with war is that it diverts attention from the actual news. The Administration has tried to pursue a sophisticated, difficult domestic and foreign policy. It doesn’t offer the quick-fix irresponsibility of a tax cut or an invasion. It needs space, time and patience to explain. This is an enervating, midstream moment. It’s not certain that the President’s efforts from health care to Afghanistan will succeed. We’ll know a lot more in a month, but I really hope the White House hasn’t launched this attack to fill the public space while the other issues are being sorted out. The long-term costs of stooping to Fox’s level are not just bad posture; they are diminution of the office and its primary occupant.”

Now, Klein has a few more hours to be right again.  The clock is ticking…

In the growing rift between the Obama Administration and its military advisors, reports are surfacing that Vice President Joe Biden is upset with General Stanley McChrystal for making a closed door presentation to NATO defense ministers. In the briefing McChrystal explained his rationale for increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan. Apparently, the defense ministers liked what they heard.

Here was Biden’s reaction:

Diplomatic sources say NATO endorsement of General McChrystal has led to anger in the Biden camp. They had criticized the commander for promoting his strategy, including a visit to London, while President Barack Obama is still weighing up the options.”

In short, Biden thinks the best way to win in Afghanistan is to reduce the number of troops there while implementing a counter-terrorism plan that expands the war into neighboring Pakistan, since that is where some members of al-Qaeda are based. McChrystal, on the other hand, wants to introduce 20,000 to 40,000 new troops and pursue a counter-insurgency strategy that would focus on eliminating the security threat inside Afghanistan. And yet, Biden is seen as the White House official most in favor of de-escalating America’s military involvement in the region.

If Joe Biden was Dick Cheney, would the Vice President’s aggressive push to expand the theater of war while reducing the number of ground troops be reported on as a moderate approach?  Well, at least the White House can’t be faulted for ignoring the advice of their military experts and applying its own ideological notions of sound war planning…

One of the eternal irritations about mainstream media coverage of conservatives is how often unabashedly liberal journalists are tasked to write “objective” pieces about the political dynamics within the GOP. The results tend to be about as unpredictable as a Horatio Alger story.

The narrative usually goes something like this: Ideological zealots (read: conservatives), abandoning all pretense of pragmatism (apparently it isn’t practical to have principles) are threatening to drive the party of a cliff. Yet one enlightened moderate, free of all that ideological ballast, holds the potential to lead the party boldly into the future if only the flat-earthers would get out of his way.  The moderate is sensible, temperate, and judicious.  The conservative is either mentally unhinged or has sold his soul to Karl Rove.

That’s basically the tact that Time’s Joe Klein (whose consistent ability to be wrong in print deserves a Pulitzer) takes in his profile of the GOP primary contest for the open U.S. Senate seat in Florida.  Klein portrays Florida’s moderate governor, Charlie Crist, as a good-natured centrist being driven to the wall by wild-eyed right-wing activists.  Meanwhile, conservative former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio is shot down on the grounds that (a) the Florida GOP chairman doesn’t like purists (since all of us recognize the unalloyed majesty and power of state chairmen) and (b) Jeb Bush’s decision to create public hurricane insurance half a decade ago proves that limited government won’t work in the Sunshine State.

Of all the candidates aiming to leap onto the national stage in gubernatorial or senate races next year, Rubio is far and away the most impressive addition to the conservative movement.  An enterprising conservative or moderate journalist (or even an intellectually honest liberal) would have seen that the real story here is how a relatively unknown, underfunded conservative has started destroying the lead of a popular moderate govenor in one of the nation’s largest states. That’s not the story that Joe Klein wrote. Unfortunately, it’s probably not one he’s capable of writing.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino comments on how the culture of corruption in Washington has gotten worse, not better, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership.  Watch the video below.

This week’s installment of the Liberty Update, CFIF’s weekly e-newsletter, is out.  For those readers who haven’t had a chance to read it, below is a summary of its contents:

Humber:  All the President’s Boys and Girls
Senik:  The Inconvenient Truths Behind Health Care Reform
Lee:  From “Honest Abe” to “Double-Talk Barack“

Freedom Minute Video:  Nancy Pelosi Coddling Corruption
Podcast:  12 Looming Questions on Health Care Reform – Interview with The Washington Examiner’s Susan Ferrechio
Jester’s Courtroom:  How Much Exactly Is a Billion Trillion Dollars?

Editorial Cartoons:  Latest Cartoons of Michael Ramirez
Quiz:  Question of the Week
Notable Quotes:  Quotes of the Week

If you are not already signed up to receive the Liberty Update, sign up here.

Apparently, the White House’s “Enemies List” has exhausted its reservoir of Republicans, so it’s now targeting Democrats.

According to this morning’s Washington Post, senior Obama advisors anticipate a resounding defeat in the Virginia governor’s race between Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds. Accordingly, the article reports that the White House fears a Republican victory “would likely be seen as a sign that Obama’s popularity is weakening in critical areas of the country.”

So how does the White House respond?  Simple – scapegoat Deeds, and ignore Obama’s plummeting popularity in Virginia, which voted for a Democrat in the presidential race for the first time in over four decades.  The White House conveniently claims that Deeds should have targeted the bloc of younger and African-American voters who propelled Obama in 2008, but the fact is that those 2008 surge voters are deflated after nine months of disastrous performance by Obama.

The lesson?  Democrats across America can no more count on steadfast loyalty from the Obama White House than foreign allies such as Poland, Afghanistan, Israel, Honduras or Colombia can.

Charles Krauthammer – White House Tactics Go Too Far
Senator Judd Gregg – U.S. Maxes Out On Credit
Politico – Reid Leaning Toward Public Option
Huffington Post – Snowe Warns Reid on Public Option
Breitbart – Video Released of Philadelphia ACORN Visit

Politico – NY-23 Race First Test of Tea Party Power
Chris Cillizza – Palin Endorses Hoffman
Political Wire – Support for Public Option Grows
Washington Post – FCC Taking Steps Toward Web Regulation

Federal Debt: $11.956 trillion

According to a Rasmussen public opinion poll released today, both Republican candidates in the 2010 Florida Senate race lead their likely Democrat counterpart.

Current Republican Governor Charlie Crist leads Democrat Kendrick Meek by a 46% to 34% margin in the contest to replace retired Republican Senator Mel Martinez.  Similarly, former Republican Congressman Marco Rubio leads Meek by a 46% to 31% margin.  Interestingly, Rubio’s 15-point lead is larger than his 13-point lead from August, whereas Crist’s 12-point lead over Meek is down from his 19-point lead in August and 21-point lead last June.  Accordingly, the GOP primary shapes up as an interesting race, with Rubio receiving increasing publicity and praise from such conservative publications as National Review.

In light of the fact that Florida “turned blue” in the 2008 election, the Republicans’ substantial lead appears to suggest that Sunshine State voters do not like President Obama’s policy prescriptions, and are expressing a sort of “buyers’ remorse.”  Stay tuned…

A new poll released by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that Americans are becoming less enthusiastic about capping greenhouse gas emissions.  According to the survey, only 35% say global warming is a very serious problem.

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) commented, “Perhaps the most interesting finding in this poll, aside from the precipitous drop in the number of Independents who believe global warming is a problem, is that the more Americans learn about cap-and-trade, the more they oppose cap-and-trade.”

Surprisingly, 55% of respondents said that they have heard “nothing at all” about cap-and-trade (legislation that would impose new energy taxes) proposals being debated in Congress.

For more info see here and here.

Call Congress at 202-224-3121 and urge your representatives to oppose new energy taxes.

The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 along party lines this morning to advance the process of imposing strict net neutrality regulations on the Internet.

According to a report in The Hill:

With Thursday’s vote, the five-member panel began the process to move forward with open-Internet regulations announced last month by the agency’s chairman, Juilus Genachowski. His proposal would formally codify the FCC’s current four principles intended to prevent Internet service providers from giving preferential treatment to certain content and services and therefore deciding which applications consumers have access to. He also proposed two additional principles, one to ensure providers do not discriminate between applications and another to require Internet companies to disclose their network management practices to consumers.

“Genachowski had the full support of Democratic Commissioners Micheal Copps and Mignon Clyburn, as expected. Republican Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Atwell Baker dissented to the idea that government regulation is needed to keep the Internet open, but supported the beginning of a fact-finding process to learn more about the technical and legal questions surrounding net neutrality.”

At an event put on earlier this week by the Safe Internet Alliance, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) cautioned against the imposition of net neutrality regulation, calling it the “fairness doctrine for the Internet.”

Peter Feaver writes a wonderful post today for Foreign Affairs where he recounts the growing mistrust between the Obama White House and the military establishment. The problem is what to do about Afghanistan, how soon, and at what price. There is evidence that National Security Advisor Jim Jones was dispatched to tell war planners to tailor their advice to fit the President’s political calculations. Feaver also hypothesizes about the involvement of the ever-present Bob Woodward in shaping the increasingly tense interactions between military commanders and their civilian bosses. This does not bode well for the troops on the ground.

For those perturbed by the federal government’s lack of responsiveness to the will of the people, California’s voter initiative process shows the danger of the opposite extreme. Recently, Ronald George, Chief Justice of California’s Supreme Court, questioned the wisdom of the state’s constitutional-amendment-by-initiative process. In a speech to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, George criticized the ease with which voters can change the fundamental law of California, a practice that has yielded 500 amendments since 1879. To compare, the United States Constitution contains 17 amendments, plus the 10 known as the Bill of Rights, over a time period spanning twice as long.

George’s lament is that frequent and easy changes to the primary source of law are not the criteria for sustained, peaceful government. Instead, the continuous use of such measures (and the threat of more in the future) renders government dysfunctional by making the legislative process merely the starting point of a policy debate, not its conclusion. Moreover, legal challenges to popularly passed initiatives put judges in the unenviable position of trying to discern the voters’ intent without the benefit of the usual contextual sources (e.g. legislative history, factual findings, committee reports, etc.). If California goes forward with calls for a constitutional convention, one hopes that the delegates remember the virtue of constraining lawmaking to a system governed by checks and balances, the separation of powers, and representative democracy. As we see with the current White House, though, hope alone won’t ensure a better government.

Despite claims from some on the left, including the White House, that health care reform will lower visits to the ER, new statistics from Massachusetts prove that individual mandates could actually increase ER visits.

A survey of Massachusetts emergency physicians found that 42% said emergency care had “somewhat increased,” while 22% of respondents said ER care had “significantly increased.”

The main platform of health care reform in Massachusetts is an individual health care mandate for virtually all residents.  (Residents who fail to obtain coverage can face fines of up to $912.)  Dr. Angela Gardner, President of the American College of Emergency Physicians, noted, “The idea that emergency departments are filled with people who don’t need to be there is simply not true.”

Thus, despite increased access to care in Massachusetts, ER’s across the commonwealth are still inundated with patients.  This finding isn’t too surprising.  Sure enough, people will actually go out of their way to save their lives, even if government tries to get in the way.

George Will – Obama’s Senior Moment
RedState – Remember the TARP Money? It’s Gone
National Review Online – Hope and Change in New Jersey
Dallas Morning News – Net Neutrality Draft to be Unveiled Today

WSJ Editorial – The Public Option Comeback
Political Wire – Neck-and-Neck in New Jersey
WSJ – Rep. Grayson Explains
News Journal – New Social Security Payments a Burden

Federal Debt: $11.964 trillion

Jonah Goldberg has a great op-ed today about the populist mood currently gripping the nation’s electorate. The money passage:

The tea-party protesters are in large part the heirs of Perotism, and they are being subjected to the same insults. Liberal commentators are deaf to the tea partiers’ disdain for both political parties, preferring to cast the protesters as a deranged band of birthers and racists or hired guns of a Republican “AstroTurf” campaign.

If the media had any interest in listening to the Tea Party crowd rather than just mocking them, this would be obvious. Look at the New Jersey governor’s race and the special election for the House seat in New York’s 23rd district and you’ll see that Republicans are underperforming not because of Democrats but because of perceptions that they’re insufficiently conservative (NY-23) or insufficiently reformist (New Jersey). The new zeitgeist is libertarian, populist, and reform-minded. It’s also extremely angry (there’s a reason that the Boston Tea Party is the symbol of choice).

Republicans (many of whom deeply disappointed the tea party crowd during the Bush years) can’t win back this disaffected crowd just by being the second-ugliest girl in the room. Until there’s a party that’s legitimately committed to smaller government and more freedom, the ranks of unaffiliated and irascible voters will only swell.

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, penned a great op-ed in Roll Call this week about the climate change legislation (aka Cap-and-Trade) being pushed by the Obama White House and the majority leadership in Congress.

No matter how many times Congress debates it, and no matter how environmentalists couch it, cap-and-trade will do virtually nothing to stop global warming, and cap-and-trade, as Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) said, ‘is a tax, and a great big one.’ These are the fundamentals in the cap-and-trade debate…

We need to remind the American public, for example, that the 1,400-page Waxman-Markey monstrosity is a monument to big government that will make food, gasoline and electricity more expensive, increase mandates on small businesses, and increase the size and reach of the federal bureaucracy — all while doing nothing to affect climate change.

The Kerry-Boxer legislation introduced Sept. 30 is, in many ways, worse than the Waxman-Markey bill. This reflects the attitude of one of the bill’s sponsors, who said recently that, because of the recession, businesses should be expected to make even more expensive emissions reductions. While it’s never a good time to pass a national energy tax, one would have thought that imposing such a tax during a recession is especially bad.”

Read the full column here.

P.T. Barnum, the American businessman, politician and showman remembered most for his celebrated hoaxes, is widely credited with coining the phrase, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  Judging by the fortune he was able to acquire on his traveling band of circus freaks, one would be hard-pressed to argue Barnum’s point.  Indeed today, nearly 150 years later, the so-called leaders of the current Congress are seemingly taking Barnum’s words to heart.

“Medicare for Everyone” — That’s the headline branded above the fold today on the front page of the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill.  The accompanying story leads with:

Say hello to ‘Medicare Part E’ — as in, ‘Medicare for Everyone.’

“House Democrats are looking at re-branding the public health insurance option as Medicare, an established government healthcare program that is better known than the public option.

“The strategy could benefit Democrats struggling to bridge the gap between liberals in their party, who want the public option, and centrists, who are worried it would drive private insurers out of business.”

In other words, Congressional Democrats have resorted to scheming up a public relations re-branding campaign in an effort to sell their government-run public option (the hoax) to an American public (in their minds, the sucker) that has thus far rejected it at every turn.

Step right up folks!  Welcome to the modern day version of “The Greatest Show on Earth” that is “health care reform.”

HT: Breitbart and James O’Keefe

Proponents of ObamaCare have couched their language in terms familiar to conservatives and libertarians: choice, option and freedom.  We’ve been told that a ‘Public Option’ will be available to compete with private health care companies.  White House officials want Americans to forget that more than 88 million patients could lose their private health care and be forced into the government option.

Peering into Harry Reid’s newest health care incarnation, which you can read here (with our commentary here), the new Senate health care bill is all about force, not choice.  In the first 100 pages alone, there are dozens of examples of “requirements” on doctors, patients, states and the federal government.

Here is a brief snippet of what to expect.  Of course, this represents just over 6% of the new mandates and regulations contained in the 1,502 page bill.  Unfortunately, most of the language below is completely unintelligible.

1) Requiring that all new health benefits plans offered to individuals and employees in the individual and small group markets be qualified health benefits plans.

2) SEC. 2201. GENERAL REQUIREMENTS: New plans must be qualified health benefits plans. Each State shall provide that each health benefits plan which is offered in the individual or small group market within the State shall be a qualified health benefits plan.

3) An offeror of a plan shall not be treated as meeting the requirements of this subsection unless the plan also accepts, renews, or continues in force coverage of an individual who is eligible for enrollment in the plan by reason of their relationship to the named insured under the plan.

4) Each offeror of a health benefits plan shall establish annual and special enrollment periods meeting the requirements of section 2236(d)(2).

5) Each State shall establish 1 or more rating areas within that State for purposes of applying the requirements of this title.

6) The contribution amount for any plan year may be based on the percentage of revenue of each offeror or on a specified amount per enrollee and may be required to be paid in advance or periodically throughout the plan year.

7) An employment based plan meets the requirements of this paragraph if the plan—provides benefits appropriate for individuals between the ages described in subsection (a)(2)(C) and that are certified as so appropriate by the Secretary; implements programs and procedures to generate cost-savings with respect to participants with chronic and high-cost conditions; and provides documentation of the actual cost of medical claims involved and for which reimbursement is sought under this section.

8 ) Each State shall phase in the application of the insurance reform requirements under subpart 1 to grandfathered health benefits plans offered in the small group market within the State.

9) SPECIAL RULE FOR RATING REQUIREMENTS — A State law shall not be treated as offering more protection to consumers than the protection offered by such requirements if the State law imposes ratios that are greater than the ratios specified in section 2204(b).

10) Each State shall — require each offeror of a qualified health benefits plans offered through an exchange — to provide an internal claims appeal process; to provide notice in clear language and in the enrollee’s primary language of available internal and external appeals processes and the availability of the ombudsman established under section 2229(a) to assist them with the appeals processes.

11) PLAN REQUIREMENTS — An offeror meets the requirements of this subsection with respect to a qualified health benefits plan if the plan offers a benefits package that is uniform in each State in which the plan is offered and meets the requirements set forth in paragraph (3) the offeror is licensed in each State; the offeror meets all requirements of this title with respect to a qualified health benefits plan, including the requirement to offer the silver and gold levels of the plan in each exchange in the State for the market in which the plan is offered; and the offeror determines the premiums for the plan in any State on the basis of the ratings rules in effect in that State for the ratings areas in which it is offered.

12) The State provides that the amount of the monthly premium an eligible individual is required to pay for coverage under the standard health plan for the individual and the individual’s dependents.

13) The amount of the monthly premium an individual is required to pay under either the standard health plan or the applicable second lowest cost silver plan shall be determined after reduction for any premium credits and premium subsidies allowable with respect to either plan.

14) The Secretary shall each year conduct a review of each State program to ensure compliance with the requirements of this section.

15) INFORMATION REQUIRED TO BE PROVIDED BY APPLICANTS: An applicant for enrollment in a qualified health benefits plan offered through an exchange shall provide the information required by any of the following paragraphs that is applicable to an enrollee.

The last sentence on Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter’s entry on The Huffington Post says it all:

We could all take a lesson from FDR.”

And what, pray tell, might that lesson be? Apparently, that it is the government’s job to put people back to work when the private sector can’t. The key to the Specter Plan is creating an indirect subsidy to out-of-work people via cash incentives to employers for hiring more workers. For example:

A tax credit to encourage employers to create new jobs or extend hours worked is just the kind of direct subsidy that worked so well with the cash-for-clunkers program. That was about cars. This is about jobs and people, an unquestionable priority. The moral imperative to act is aggressively clear.”

Astute readers will notice a disagreement between this author and the Gentleman from Pennsylvania about whether paying one party in order to benefit third party is a “direct” or “indirect” subsidy. Logic would seem to dictate that if one wants to help someone pay his bills, the most efficient way to do so is to skip the go-between and give the man some money. If people need help now – and many do – why not send them a check that covers the cost of bills and requires the recipient to get relevant job training? In today’s credential-crazed economy, the time and money spent earning a Microsoft Office certificate or sales license would go a lot further in landing a job than bribing employers to hire people they can’t otherwise afford.

And what about the alleged success of the cash-for clunkers program? The long-term effects of the program reduced the number of used cars thus driving up the price of those that remained. This FDR-style intrusion into the market decreased the sales of used car dealers and put car purchases out of reach for the poorest families. Now, Specter wants to spend more taxpayer money on jobs that cannot be sustained without subsidies. There may be a moral imperative to act. But like health care reform and the bank bailouts, the only worthwhile government acts are those that get the private sector moving away from the public’s money as fast as possible.