Freedom Line Blog

This week’s edition of the Liberty Update, CFIF’s weekly e-newsletter, is out.  For those readers who don’t receive it in their e-mail inboxes or if you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, below is a summary of its contents:

Lee:  Global Warming Dead-Enders Imitate Gilligan’s Island
CFIF Staff:  Will President Obama Make Recess Appointments?
Ellis:  If It’s Broke, Fix It: Paul Ryan’s Plan to Make Government Programs Sustainable
Senik:  Diary of a Conservative

Freedom Minute Video:  Forget Green – We’ll Take Jobs of Any Color
Podcast:  John Yoo Provides An Historical Perspective on Today’s Controversies Over Executive Power
Jester’s Courtroom:  Debtor Sues to Hang Up Student Loan Company’s Debt Collection Practices

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 CFIF’s Liberty Update, sign up here.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

A few years ago, in more innocent times, I decided to find and read all the “non-partisan” government reports in order to get a better handle on the details of policy.  When I asked a friend of mine who worked in D.C. for recommendations on where to start, he said, “Don’t.  There aren’t any unbiased reports because they’re all consensus documents created to support a political agenda.”  Even the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review?!  “Yes,” came the reply.

Any doubt in my mind was erased after reading that the military’s most recent review designates “climate change” as a national security threat.  (Small digression: I thought progressives like Obama got votes in the presidential campaign for scoring Republicans on being the Party of Fear.  Now, every issue from childhood obesity to global warming is a threat akin to a terrorist attack.)

Maybe bureaucratic sclerosis is to blame since the parts dealing with climate change are based on the same faulty evidence in the now discredited report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  If that’s the case, though, that means the Obama suits writing the top brass’s most important self-assessment are not only wrong, they’re outdated.  My guess is the odds of this section being the only one with glaring deficiencies is pretty low.  Thank you, Washington, for creating another report unworthy of reading.

H/T: National Review Online

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer got herself into hot water with conservatives last year by proposing tax increases to address state budget shortfalls soon after replacing Democrat Janet Napolitano.  Thankfully for Arizona residents hit particularly hard by the real estate downturn, however, Governor Brewer has corrected course by withdrawing from the regional Western Climate Initiative’s (WCI) plan to impose a carbon cap-and-tax scheme in 2012. The WCI’s misguided system would place arbitrary limits on the amount of carbon that businesses could produce in seven western states and four Canadian provinces, and allow sale and purchase of emission credits among businesses.

Former Governor Napolitano agreed to the plan in 2007 before joining the Obama Administration as Secretary of Homeland Security, where she embarrassed herself by claiming that the “system worked” after an al Qaeda terrorist nearly destroyed an airliner in the skies above Detroit.

Noting the economic basket case that next-door California has become by implementing precisely these sorts of regulations, Governor Brewer wisely said, “no, thanks.”  She stated in her executive order that Arizona simply would not participate in a plan that would raise costs for employers and consumers in this period of economic difficulty.  Among other things, the scheme would have increased costs for automobiles and other struggling industries.

The Sierra Club was predictably dismayed, but what’s bad for the environmental activist agenda tends to be good for everyday citizens.

Anyone needing a reminder that the government’s idea of enhanced security is destroying personal privacy should read this article from CNET. Soon, a federal appeals court will hear oral arguments about whether law enforcement agencies like the FBI have the authority to demand information giving the physical location of a person’s cell phone from telecom companies without a warrant. According to the Obama Administration, people using cell phones don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy when they use items like a cell phone. The rationale is that when you share information with another person or entity, you forfeit your Fourth Amendment rights.  And since the cell company keeps a record of the transmission tower you link to when calling, all the government needs to do to check on your whereabouts is “ask” the company for it’s records.

So, fair warning: the next time you call Aunt Agnes from your cell phone, Uncle Sam will be “asking” your wireless provider for your whereabouts. But remember – it’s for your protection.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses why another taxpayer-funded stimulus package and government “investments” in so-called green jobs are not the answers to the nation’s future prosperity.

What if you can’t beat nobody even after one of your greatest achievements is the war in Iraq?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s senior health care advisor said this week that Democratic leadership has settled on a procedural strategy to pass ObamaCare. 

The story was first reported by Congress Daily (which can only be accessed with a subscription).  Here’s how LifeNews.com reported it:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s top health care aide Wendell Primus admitted top Democrats have already decided on the strategy to pass the Senate’s government-run health care bill…

Primus explained that the Senate will use the controversial reconciliation strategy that will have the House approve the Senate bill and both the House and Senate okaying changes to the bill that the Senate will sign off on by preventing Republicans from filibustering.

“The trick in all of this is that the president would have to sign the Senate bill first, then the reconciliation bill second, and the reconciliation bill would trump the Senate bill,” Primus said at the National Health Policy Conference hosted by Academy Health and Health Affairs.

 “There’s a certain skill, there’s a trick, but I think we’ll get it done,” he said.

The news had The Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott pondering, “[W]hy call a health care summit and challenge congressional Republicans to come with their best ideas when the plan is already in place to use legislative trickery to pass Obamacare?”

Good question.  One that Tapscott himself answered very adequately by writing:

The most logical answer would seem to be that the summit is part and parcel of a White House/congressional Democratic strategy to distract attention from what is about to happen on the Hill. It’s the classic magician’s trick of distracting you with the left hand while the right hand does the “trick.”

The Founding Fathers deliberately included in the Bill of Rights the Tenth Amendment, which states:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

This notion of federalism, or “states’ rights,” was obviously a core tenet of our Constitution and one that provided the reassurance necessary for ratification.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, however, suggests that this vital, fundamental aspect of the Constitution is merely code for slavery, segregation or racism amongst those inconvenient Tea Partiers.  During his February 9 “Hardball” broadcast, Matthews reacted to those such as Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry and fellow Republican candidate Debra Medina who seek to reclaim greater federalist balance by angrily asking, “who is this, John Calhoun?!?!”

You recall John Calhoun, that early-18th century Vice President from South Carolina who supported slavery.  According to Matthews, advocating simple Tenth Amendment concepts is tantamount to advocating slavery, apparently.  Matthews proceeded to quote Martin Luther King, Jr. for any of his loyal viewers who failed to comprehend his oh-so-subtle Calhoun reference.

This is the same Chris Matthews, of course, who fawns over Barack Obama by describing the thrill that runs through his leg when listening to another teleprompted speech, and who childishly attempts to slur Tea Party activists by referring to them as “tea baggers.”

We’ve come a long way from states’ rights proponents James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann.  Still believe in Darwinism?

The Associated Press reports:

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — The New York Senate has passed a resolution opposing trials of terrorists being held in New York City.

The resolution passed Tuesday urges President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to move trials of those linked to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks back to the military tribunal system.

President Obama and Attorney General Holder are reportedly considering alternative venues for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial.  But both still believe it best to try the 9-11 mastermind in a civilian court.  They may be the only two people left in America who feel that way.

Somewhere in the White House, there is a speechwriter who, if she has any sense, is perusing the classified section on Craigslist.

This would be the person responsible for First Lady Michelle Obama’s remarks yesterday about the threat of child obesity (a crusade I’ve previously chronicled here).

Having labored in a speechwriting shop or two in my day (including the one at the White House), I’m sympathetic to the plight of a writer who needs to get five pages out of a topic where one sentence would suffice (in this case, “step away from the eclair”). It usually involves a lot of excess verbiage and a few stretches of the imagination. But the First Lady’s invocation of obesity as a national security threat rivaled her husband’s propensity for audacity. To wit:

“A recent study put the health care cost of obesity-related diseases at $147 billion a year,” Mrs. Obama said. “This epidemic also impacts the nation’s security, as obesity is now one of the most common disqualifiers for military service.”

While advocating for everything from revamping the food pyramid (is there anything First Ladies aren’t responsible for?) to “help[ing] places like convenience stores carry healthier food options” (I have no idea what that means, but I’m sure it includes some subsidies), Mrs. Obama also waxed inspirational about the task ahead:

“This isn’t like a disease where we’re still waiting for a cure to be discovered – we know the cure for this,” Obama said. “This isn’t like putting a man on the moon or inventing the Internet. It doesn’t take some stroke of genius or feat of technology.

Hmmm. But it does take a major program run by the federal government, huh? You’ve got to love liberals. If you’re below a certain rung on the socio-economic ladder, they want to give you everything for free. If you’re above it, however, they want to pry the money right out of your pocket — and now the cheddar bacon potato skins right out of your mouth.

That’s the question Congressman Darrell  Issa (R-CA) is hoping to get answered with regard to President Obama’s promise, made during a speech before a joint session of Congress last September, to consider medical malpractice reform as a means of lowering U.S. health care costs.

During his nationally-televised September speech, Obama said:

Now, finally, many in this chamber – particularly on the Republican side of the aisle – have long insisted that reforming our medical malpractice laws can help bring down the cost of health care. … Now, I don’t believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet, but I’ve talked to enough doctors to know that defensive medicine may be contributing to unnecessary costs. So I’m proposing that we move forward on a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first and let doctors focus on practicing medicine. I know that the Bush Administration considered authorizing demonstration projects in individual states to test these ideas. I think it’s a good idea, and I’m directing my Secretary of Health and Human Services to move forward on this initiative today.”

However, according to a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report on the benefits of capping non-economic damages and passing other tort reform measures released last week, it appears the President wasn’t being sincere when he made that directive.  The report, on page 4, reads:

Committee staff inquired of HHS whether they had an updated figure [on how much the federal government spends annually for malpractice coverage and the costs of defensive medicine], but staff was told by personnel of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation that the report in question involved medical litigation which ‘is not a priority for this Administration.’”  

“The first question I have for President Obama is if he still stands by his call for tort reform or was he just lying to Congress when he directed Secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius to pursue an initiative addressing the costs of defensive medicine,” Issa, who is the ranking Republican on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a statement released Monday. 

With all due respect Congressman, do you even have to ask?  The President’s commitment to meaningful tort reform is about as sincere as his commitment to bipartisanship.  Both are simply “not a priority for this Administration.”

The fraudulently-labeled Employee “Free Choice” Act (EFCA) is one of the most dangerous legislative proposals since Barack Obama assumed office.

EFCA would literally eliminate the sacred democratic secret ballot during union elections, which has caused overwhelming majorities of Americans to oppose this scheme.  It would also do such things as allow federal arbitrators to dictate wages and work rules upon employers and organized employees for the first time.  During this period of economic difficulty, with Big Labor already causing American jobs to disappear or move overseas, now is hardly the time to make employment even more difficult in this country.

Fortunately, EFCA appears temporarily stalled in Congress.  But that isn’t preventing the Obama Administration, Harry Reid, Big Labor and liberal activists from seeking alternative ways of imposing EFCA and its toxic job-killing provisions upon the American economy.

Namely, Obama has nominated radical union activist Craig Becker to serve on the five-member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to achieve their goal.  As Stewart Acuff of the Utility Workers Union of America has baldly stated, “if we aren’t able to to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, we will work with President Obama and Vice-President Biden and their appointees to the National Labor Relations Board to change the rules governing formation of a union through administrative action.”

And you thought ObamaCare was the only thing liberals were going to try to force down America’s throat against our will?

Please contact your Senators immediately (locate your Senators’ contact information here) and demand that they support the Senate filibuster against Craig Becker.  Otherwise, EFCA may soon become a reality despite our successful efforts so far to stop it in Congress.   The American economy and everyday workers will otherwise pay the price.

So, maybe the progressive elites currently running the federal government aren’t insane so much as handicapped.  A new study finds that people with a certain type of brain lesion are less inhibited to take extreme risks with money than those with brains functioning normally.

They studied two women with a rare genetic condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease, which damages the amygdala, the almond-shaped center in the brain that controls fear and certain other acute emotions.

The researchers compared the women’s responses to 12 people with undamaged brains. They noted this kind of study usually involves only a few people as it is not possible or ethical to deliberately damage a person’s brain to see what happens.

The volunteers were asked to make gambles in which there was an equal probability they would win $20 or lose $5 (a risk most people will take) — or would win or lose $20 (one most people will reject).

The two patients with damaged amygdalas fearlessly risked a $50 pot.

The researchers concluded that “this shows that the amygdale is critical for triggering a sense of caution toward making gambles in which you might lose.”  But how about those occasions when you know a certain decision will lose money?  Like, for example, intentionally proposing a $1.3 trillion budget deficit?  Or pushing a health care “reform” bill taxing citizens for years before it starts delivering care?  Or how about imposing an energy tax on carbon emissions with the primary effect being less economic output?

Thanks to this study, there is finally a rational explanation for such behavior: Democratic leaders may have brain lesions.  Whew!  Here I thought they were insane; turns out they’re just suffering from a diseased brain.

They do in Britain if the subject of the security scan is under 18. As for everybody else, it looks like Heathrow personnel are taking their time deleting near naked images of celebrities like India’s Shahrukh Khan. Even more troubling, they may be printing and sharing them.

Who knew people charged with security would abuse their power in such a way?! Especially since they work for the government! It’s almost as if the people working at airport checkpoints are the same type of folks who would illegally access confidential information about an ex-spouse’s new squeeze while working for the FBI.

It is now clear to all but the mentally challenged (you won’t read no retard talk here), that President Obama’s plan for a televised health care summit has zero to do with listening to Republican ideas, but everything to do with trotting out the snake oil bill yet again to demonstrate to five-and-a-half liberals who care deeply that the vast Republican minority is obstructionist.

Based on enough polling numbers to make up the deficit, it is also clear that Americans who vote (not those who are voted for or increasingly against) would like to send that bill on the last American flight to space.

Given a White House that has mastered no known public relations discipline, including the sort of fundamental “know your audience” one, we’d be betting that there is going to be a mudslide off the summit right back into the President’s lap.  That is, of course, unless some as yet unidentified White House smart person gets it canceled on the basis that George W. Bush didn’t do one and everything the White House is in trouble on must be based on what George W. Bush did.  (Should Bush be prosecuted for getting an illegal third term by proxy?)

We further suspect that the primary reaction of the summit’s television audience (see Americans above), complete with a Frank Luntz focus group to prove it, will be, “Didn’t we tell you morons to focus on jobs and the economy, not producing an SNL skit?”

Do a quick Google search of the terms “Obama,” “corpsman” and “Washington Post.”

Not a whole lot jumps to the forefront, at least from The Washington Post itself.  Notably, it provides a transcript of the very speech in which Obama’s teleprompter failed to phonetically spell out the military term “corpsman,” leading the supposed intellectual Obama to mispronounce it “corpse-man.”

The same Google search results in an avalanche of separate commentaries on the matter, of course, as well as readers’ follow-up comments to the Post transcript pointing out Obama’s embarrassing (and revealing) error.  But the Post itself apparently considers it unworthy of substantive note.  Evidence undermining the Obama Myth is unwelcome there, apparently.

But Sarah Palin?  Toward her, the Post can’t seem to relent in its obsession over her use of hand notes during a speech.  Who knows, perhaps Palin just didn’t want to waste the untold thousands of dollars necessary to secure a teleprompter and an entire staff of speechwriters as Obama does.  But even with all the King’s horses, all the King’s men and all the King’s teleprompters, Obama still couldn’t manage to pronounce “corpsman” correctly.

Imagine for a moment the Post’s hysterics if George W. Bush had committed an error that revealing.  Or if Sarah Palin had.

From Rasmussen Reports: 

Voters are madder than ever at the current policies of the federal government.

“A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 75% of likely voters now say they are at least somewhat angry at the government’s current policies, up four points from late November and up nine points since September.  The overall figures include 45% who are Very Angry, also a nine-point increase since September.”

By party affiliation, angries include 89% of Republicans, 78% of Independents and 61% of Democrats.

It’s worth it to read the rest here.

Think of it as the “demon sheep” ad of the Super Bowl (though with much better production values).

During last night’s NFL championship– an event that has become an annual testimony to the incompetence of Madison Avenue ad firms — German automaker Audi aired a commercial intended to showcase that their A3 model is both stylish and green. Boy, did it backfire.

Rather than talking about the closing seconds of the ad, where the A3 breaks out of gridlock to show off its moves, the public focused more on the first 90 percent of the ad — which showed a world dominated by “green police” monitoring the public’s every environmental trespass. It took some pretty tin-eared writing to pitch a green car with the right’ s narrative of environmental statism. It doesn’t work as advertising — but it was a delightful change of pace for those of us who are sick of the MSM hawking global warming ad nauseam.

Saturday marked the 99th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth.  It was also the day on which “Snowmageddon” dumped two feet of snow on Washington, D.C., closing government agencies into this week.

Coincidence?  Or yet another win for the Gipper?

After all, Reagan once lamented the federal government’s counterproductive overactivity:

“We have all heard that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.  Today, if you build a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.”

Well, let’s consider this a symbolic reverse birthday gift from President Reagan, since every day on which the federal government is shut down is a day on which it isn’t devising a better mouse to unleash on us all.