Freedom Line Blog

Six years ago, then Rep. Pat Toomey (R-PA) angered the GOP establishment by running against incumbent Republican Senator Arlen Specter in the primary.  Toomey lost, in no small part to conservative GOP Senator Rick Santorum’s support for the very liberal Specter.  Since then, Specter won and switched parties, Santorum was defeated by Democrat Bob Casey, Jr., and Toomey ran the Club for Growth.

Now, Toomey is the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee to knock off Specter in this year’s general election while Santorum nurses plans for a presidential run in 2012.  With Toomey outpolling Specter and Santorum counting on conservatives like Toomey to make him electorally viable, it’s nice to see a limited government politician winding up in the driver’s seat.

You know a candidate is a serious contender when the opposition starts blasting away.  The problem for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is that Republican Charles Djou is about as squeaky clean as congressional candidates come.  The recent subject of a CFIF profile, Djou is running hard on a platform of low taxes and economic growth, even signing the Americans for Tax Reform pledge.  Of course, to the DCCC’s ears, that sounds like backhanding the economic little guy.

Since Hawaii’s economy relies heavily on tourist dollars, it isn’t likely that Aloha State voters will buy what national Democrats are selling, even if House leadership decides to back one of the two contenders challenging Djou in the open special election on May 22^nd.

Sometimes, voters just prefer good, honest, straightforward candidates.

How will we halt the growth of big government when a majority of citizens contribute less than they receive in benefits from the state?

As Congressman Paul Ryan (R – Wisconsin) and others note, when that “tipping point” is reached, it will incentivize voters to perpetually increase government spending and taxes, since “the rich” are the only ones paying for the largess.  Unfortunately, we continue to approach that dangerous point in America.  According to the Tax Policy Center, an astonishing 47% of Americans owed the federal government no income taxes in 2009.  In other words, almost half of Americans are immune from actually paying income tax for the benefits everyone enjoys, such as national defense, education, police, fire and highways.  Moreover, despite absurd claims that “the rich don’t pay their fair share,” the top 10% of income earners pay almost 75% of the nation’s income taxes.  In contrast, the bottom 40% of income earners actually profit from the federal income tax, because they receive more dollars in tax credits than they otherwise owe.

Those on the left welcome this phenomenon, because it encourages voters to further enlarge the nanny state (as in, Nanny Pelosi state?).  And why not?  The suckers who actually work hard and increase their incomes will have to pay for it all, anyway.

John Podhoretz pens a spirited defense of sharp-elbowed partisan politics in his piece for Commentary today.  After noting that treating politics as war helps to avoid war itself, Podhoretz crystallizes President Barack Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to claim that “the time for talk is over” whenever he hears criticism.  For President Obama, politics is talking; governing is doing.

The problem for Obama, as Podhoretz points out, is that Republicans in Congress and members of the Tea Party movement agree: the time to engage Democrats as honest partners in public policy is long past gone.  The time for organizing and campaigning against their Statist agenda is now.

No wonder President Barack Obama continues to campaign for his signature domestic policy – precious few people have a clue what it does or when it does it.

Questions reflecting confusion have flooded insurance companies, doctors’ offices, human resources departments and business groups.

“They’re saying, ‘Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?’ ” said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com. The California-based company sells coverage from 185 health insurance carriers in 50 states.

McLean said the call center had been inundated by uninsured consumers who were hoping that the overhaul would translate into instant, affordable coverage. That widespread misconception may have originated in part from distorted rhetoric about the legislation bubbling up from the hyper-partisan debate about it in Washington and some media outlets, such as when opponents denounced it as socialism.

“We tell them it’s not free, that there are going to be things in place that help people who are low-income, but that ultimately most of that is not going to be taking place until 2014,” McLean said.

But don’t worry; you’ll start paying for the benefits this year.

H/T: Miami Herald

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.

Marking a very welcome victory for individual liberty and the free market, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ruled that the Federal Communications Commission does not possess the authority to impose bureaucratic “Net Neutrality” rules upon the Internet sector. 

Net Neutrality’s looming regulatory encroachment into the Internet, which has thrived like no other sector of the American economy precisely because regulators have generally maintained a “hands-off” approach, threatened to stifle broadband investment and expansion.  Fortunately, a unanimous Court ruled that, “the commission has failed to tie its assertion of ancillary authority over Comcast’s Internet service to any statutorily mandated responsibility.”

For months, Barack Obama has promised to turn his focus toward job creation, but instead obsessed over destructive agenda items like ObamaCare and alienating our international allies like Israel and Britain.  Meanwhile, unemployment festers at approximately 10% despite Obama’s promises over a year ago that it would not exceed 7.8% under his borrow-and-spend “stimulus” program.

So what is the Obama Administration doing now to address American jobs?

Encourage more legal action against employers.

Obama’s Labor Department Secretary Hilda Solis announced last week its “We Can Help!” program, which encourages employees to pursue legal claims against their employers.  This program promises “the use of Spanish/English bilingual public service announcements — featuring activist Dolores Huerta and actors Jimmy Smits and Esai Morales” in order to “address such topics as rights in the workplace and how to file a complaint with the Wage and Hour Division.”

Yes, just the thing to reduce burdens on strapped employers and encourage job creation – more litigation and bureaucratic persecution of private businesses.  Never mind that swarms of ambulance-chasing litigators stand ready to wrench nuisance dollars from employers via litigation – the Obama Administration seems to believe that the pressing issue in our employment picture is not enough employer prosecution.  This program will merely divert employers’ resources toward litigating these cases, taking even more money away from the job creation that our economy needs so desperately.

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.

The defining battle in the war of competing political philosophies today is the one being waged between proponents of large and small government.  Clifford Asness makes a sterling contribution to the latter in his essay, “The Way Forward for Republicans, Tea Partiers.”  A sample:

We must beat them by repeatedly making the hard arguments as to why liberty works and why it is the moral choice.

We must win by explaining, no matter how long it may take and hard it may be, that free people acting in a free market is what this country stands for, is the only ethical way to live, and happens to be the greatest anti-poverty and civil rights program on earth. This is harder than saying “here’s some free stuff, now vote for us forever or you’ll lose it.” But, it’s the right thing to do for America, and even the right thing to do politically. If the other party is trying to hook the American people by pushing drugs (entitlements and such) on them, we won’t win elections by pushing slightly less attractive drugs!

The disadvantage to this approach is, again, it’s far harder. It does not fit well in a sound bite. It requires faith in our audience. I think the American people are ready for it, and will reward the party that shares the truth with them. I think so no matter how much more complex the truth is than simpler feel-good lies.

It looks like Texas Governor Rick Perry isn’t the only state official who thinks the Obama Administration’s “Race to the Top” education funding competition is a game not worth the candle.  With 45 states participating, and 14 making the final round, only 2 states (Delaware and Tennessee) won.  The Department of Education also announced a cap on future awards – but not on federal requirements that follow the money – prompting several states to reconsider before reapplying.

But there is one benefit so far:

In Colorado, Van Schoales, executive director of Education Reform Now, a national advocacy group that supports Colorado’s participation in the competition, said the new award limit had strengthened the hand of teachers’ unions and rural school boards that, in opposing further participation, denounce federal intrusion.

“I’m surprised to see that there is a growing tide of people, an unholy alliance between unions and rural educators, who want us to say no to reapplying,” Mr. Schoales said.

If such an “unholy alliance” is what it takes to get states to kick their addiction to quick-fix federal dollars, so be it.

Freedom Line readers in the Denver area should consider attending next week’s Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Primarily to keep me from getting strung up.

I’ll be in attendance all week, one of about four conservatives (out of hundreds of panelists). I’ll be participating in panels on the future of California, the military-industrial complex, President Obama’s foreign policy, globalization, U.S. relations with China, the  GOP’s prospects for renewal, special interest politics, “the politics of fear”, and the maturation of President Obama (details here). I’ll also be speaking at the Boulder County GOP’s Lincoln Dinner on Wednesday night.

I’d love to see any of you there. If only to double the conservative population of Boulder.

I guess there had to be at least one negative aspect of the Reagan legacy. It’s temperamental. The Gipper was famous for the sign on his desk reading “It CAN be done”. What a great American sentiment: sweet-tempered, optimistic, tenacious. It helps, of course, when the goal in question CAN be done.

Not so “energy independence”, which has become something of a Fox News shibboleth the last few years. While there’s a strong case to be made for allowing increased domestic energy production, the idea that it will free us from the vagaries of the global energy market is a pipe dream. But don’t take my word for it. Noted conservative economist Irwin Stelzer (a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard) makes the point in a very judicious analysis of President Obama’s push for increased oil exploration published in today’s D.C. Examiner:

More important, and this is no fault of the president’s, even if these offshore areas are eventually opened up, their development cannot eliminate the security threat and economic consequences of our dependence on foreign oil. Fuel autarchy is not in our future.

There just isn’t enough oil offshore to replace our imports from unfriendly countries such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. No matter what happens in the newly permitted areas, we will need their oil.

Sober, but entirely accurate. Call it Coolidge Conservatism.

One of the curious things about business people turned political candidates is how much they retain the language of commerce, yet shuck its practice.  The best example is of self-funded multi-millionaires (or billionaires) spending gobs of their own money at an unsustainable clip while excoriating career politicians for being fiscally irresponsible.  Although you can’t run a government exactly like a business, the notion that spending should match revenue is perhaps the one financial concept that applies to any endeavor not operating on the barter system.

All of which makes a Republican candidacy like Meg Whitman’s for California governor so paradoxical.  Like her political mentor, Mitt Romney, Whitman is loaning her campaign tens of millions of dollars from her personal wealth to fund her run.  The money is going to support a top-notch staff, endless media buys in California, and a slick website.  It is not, apparently, attracting an equal amount of financial contributions from people with a different bank account.  So, in order to make it to the June primary, Whitman will have to cut herself another check.

That approach won’t fly as governor.  One of the chief criticisms of Whitman’s campaign narrative is that she can’t fire underperforming bureaucrats and politicians in Sacramento the way she did as CEO of Ebay.  Now, it looks like her candidacy can’t muster enough popular support to prop up her big spending ways.  Californians already have a political class accustomed to spending money without regard to sustainability.  It is a lesson with consequences they don’t need to learn from a governmental rookie.

Let me start by saying I don’t have anything against the Leader of the House Republicans, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH).  It’s just that I don’t have much of anything for him, either.  That’s not the case with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who’s constant stream of ideas and commentary should make House Republicans seriously consider elevating him to the Speakership if the GOP, as expected, wins a majority of seats in the midterm elections this November.

Check out this excerpt from Ryan’s column today:

We are challenged to answer again the momentous questions our Founders raised when they launched mankind’s noblest experiment in human freedom. They made a fundamental choice and changed history for the better. Now it’s our high calling to make that choice: between managed scarcity, or solid growth … between living in dependency on government handouts, or taking responsibility for our lives … between confiscating the earnings of some and spreading them around, or securing everyone’s right to the rewards of their work … between bureaucratic central government, or self-government … between the European social welfare state or the American idea of free market democracy.

What kind of nation do we wish to be? What kind of society will we hand down to our children and future generations? In the coming watershed election, the nature of this unique and exceptional land is at stake. We will choose one of two different paths. And once we make that choice, there’s no going back.

Add his impassioned floor speech before the final House vote on Obamacare, and his leadership with the Young Guns candidate recruitment effort, and Ryan is starting to look like the congressional Republican best suited to be the Washington counterweight to President Obama.  For conservatives who don’t think we can wait until January 2013 to inaugurate the next standard bearer, I hope we’re not overlooking the right guy in favor of the one who’s next in line.

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.

The Washington Times today published an op-ed authored by Timothy Lee, CFIF’s VP of Legal and Public Affairs, on the coming Internet tax and other efforts by President Obama’s FCC to over-regulate the world wide web.

Lee writes:

The Obama Era has become a protracted, nightmarish Whack-A-Mole game of tax increases and bureaucratic self-enlargement. In sector after sector of American life, another scheme to expand government and wrench more earnings from Americans’ pockets pops up.

“Its next targeted sector?  The Internet.”

Read the entire piece on the Times’ website here.

In an interview with CFIF, Brigitte Gabriel shares her remarkable story told in her book, Because They Hate:  A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America.  Ms. Gabriel also discusses ACT! for America, a non-profit issues advocacy organization she founded to educate millions of uninformed citizens about the threat of radical Islam to world peace and U.S. national security. 

Listen to the interview here.

Here’s a little secret about those of us who tend to the Freedom Line garden (though it applies equally to all our brethren in the conservative blogosphere): we’re hopeless nerds. Our reader’s digests of political and policy developments come from hours of reading, writing, and thinking about the great issues of the day. Government is for us what fantasy football is to a much broader swath of America.

When you spend that much time consuming news, however, the callouses develop quickly. It’s hard to be impressed. To break through to the sense of genuine wonder that brought us into this field usually requires either singularly great writing or a singularly great man.

I mention all this to give a full-throated endorsement to Mark Bowden’s article “The Professor of War,” a profile of General David Petraeus in the May issue of Vanity Fair (a publication whose political coverage — with some exceptions for Christopher Hitchens — is usually uneven at best). This is a piece so exceptional — and an individual so compelling — that one can only hope Bowden someday gets drafted to be Petraeus’s official biographer.

This piece is far too rich to justify through excerpt, so here’s one brief paragraph that ably represents the writing in microcosm:

Congress underestimated David Petraeus. He is a man of such distinction that in the army legends have formed about his rise. Beyond his four-star rank, he possesses a stature so matchless it deserves its own adjective—call it “Petraean,” perhaps. It is an adjective that would be mostly complimentary, but not entirely so—there can be a hard edge to the man, a certain lack of empathy, and there is something vaguely unseemly in his obvious ambition. But when Petraeus tests himself, he usually wins. When he assumed command in Iraq, he had accepted a challenge few thought even he could meet, turning around the longest and most mismanaged war in American history. But Iraq is only part of the story. Through his writing and teaching, Petraeus was at the same time redefining how the nation will fight in the 21st century. And he was doing something more difficult still: leading a cultural and doctrinal revolution inside one of the most hidebound institutions in the world, the United States Army. Whatever the fate of Iraq and Afghanistan, this transformation is a Petraean legacy that will be felt for years to come.

My favorite piece of journalism so far in 2010. Read the whole thing here.

With the ongoing write downs in the wake of Obamacare, and the appointment of two majority making union lawyers to the National Labor Relations Board, many in the private sector could be excused if they pine for the days when business was usual.  Add cap and trade to the mix, and it’s entirely possible that Progressives imagine profit to be just another word for unclaimed tax revenue.

So thank goodness for the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision restoring First Amendment speech rights to groups as well as individuals just in time for the 2010 midterm elections.  Since the Obama Administration is focused on several other toxic experiments in social engineering, any substantive legislative response to Citizens United is unlikely until next year.  Thank goodness.  In the meantime, businesses and the people who give them life have a unique opportunity to use their constitutional right to free speech in support of another pillar of the American Experiment: the free market.

One commercial I’d like to see features several different people providing the kinds of services that Progressives love to claim for government.  If you haven’t before, check out the concepts behind CVS’ MinuteClinic, the KIPP Academy, and Grameen America microfinance bank.  They and many others prove daily that – if given enough space – the free enterprise system is the quickest, best, and most sustainable way to enhance wealth and well being, for everyone.