Freedom Line Blog

That’s the question raised in four states after recent events suggest that state and local Democrat officials are backing several alleged Tea Party candidates.  According to a report by Politico, incidents in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Florida and Michigan are prompting calls for more scrutiny of third party challengers in tight races.

The accusations range from helping tea party activists circulate candidate petition sheets to underwriting the creation of official tea parties, which then put forth slates of candidates that local conservatives accuse of being rife with Democratic plants.

In all of the affected races, the outcome is expected to be close enough that a third-party candidate who wins just a few percentage points could end up swinging the outcome to the Democratic congressman or candidate.

So far, there is no direct evidence of an official Democrat-directed conspiracy to recruit and fund Tea Party candidates.  However, a third party spoiler strategy makes much more sense than the Democratic National Committee’s recent pledge to convince Americans that the Tea Party and GOP are one in the same.

Could this be another example of “government” working better at the local level?

Already navigating a turbulent economic sea, Americans are bracing for the single largest tax increase in history this January 1.

Democrats fighting for their political lives believe they have a winner soaking “the rich,” but we’ve noted the destructive effect that raising taxes on the top bracket will have on the struggling economy.  Not only will they hit small businesses (which create most new jobs in America) particularly hard, but individuals in that bracket carry a disproportionate burden of consumer spending, which makes up 70% of our overall economy.   In this video clip from CNBC, even often left-leaning Don Peebles considers tax increases for the highest income bracket a destructive idea:

If we spend more money paying taxes, then we will have less money to invest, less money to employ workers…  We can’t take a bad situation and make it worse by taxing people more at a difficult time.”

Liberals cannot win this debate on the substance, so they instead hope to win on the rhetoric by framing the issue as “the Bush tax cuts.”  But Bush will have been gone from the White House for two full years by the time the tax increases hit.  We’re not debating new tax cuts, and Bush is long gone.  Rather, what we’re talking about are looming tax increases.  Namely, Obama’s tax increases.

You know that obnoxious college undergrad who tries to prove his worldliness by being overly deferential to any foreign culture he comes across? He won the electoral college.

Buried deep in a report by ABC News’ Christiane Amanpour on the White House’s diplomatic engagement with Iran comes this little nugget:

A senior U.S. official said the administration is waiting to see if Iran comes back to the negotiating table after Ramadan as it has publicly indicated in the past, but there have been no direct contacts with Iran about engagement.

In politics, as in romance, deadlines mean something. And apparently Iran is busy washing its hair on Ramadan.

Let’s be clear: Iran blows us off when we ignore them and blows us off when we try to engage them. They’re irascibale when there are sanctions in place and irascible when there are none. They hate us on Ramadan and they’re not wild about us on Hanukkah.

Mr. President: They’re just not that into you.

From a story today in The Hill:

Four House Democrats who have proposed significant spending cuts were chastised at a recent caucus meeting for targeting programs senior appropriators had deemed vital, according to lawmakers and aides.

Reps. Gary Peters (Mich.), John Adler (N.J.), Jim Himes (Conn.) and Peter Welch (Vt.) introduced an amendment to the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development spending bill that would cut a dozen programs — totaling $1.4 billion — that had been added on top of President Obama’s initial budget request.

It was an effort to target a few government programs to chip away at a massive budget deficit — just as House leaders, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), have ordered committee heads to do.

Read the full story 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.

Should the range of potential punishment for leaking classified Afghanistan data include the death penalty?

The statute codifying the subject offense, Title 18 U.S.C. Section 794(b) specifically includes that possibility:

Whoever, in time of war, with intent that the same shall be communicated to the enemy, collects, records, publishes, or communicates, or attempts to elicit any information with respect to the movement, numbers, description, condition, or disposition of any of the Armed Forces, ships, aircraft, or war materials of the United States, or with respect to the plans or conduct, or supposed plans or conduct of any naval or military operations, or with respect to any works or measures undertaken for or connected with, or intended for the fortification or defense of any place, or any other information relating to the public defense, which might be useful to the enemy, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life.”

Such sober voices as Tony Blankley, who actually opposes the Afghan war, suggest that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should not be protected “from being prosecuted and possibly executed by the U.S. government for wartime espionage.”  Whatever one’s opinion on the war itself, Assange’s conduct has clearly jeopardized American troops’ lives, not to mention the lives of Afghans (and their families) who have taken great risk in assisting us against the Taliban and al Qaeda.  Indeed, Assange should pray that his punishment comes at the hands of U.S. authorities, not some vengeful person horribly affected by his crime.

As usual, Jay Cost has an eyebrow raising piece of analysis – today discussing in Technicolor detail how President Barack Obama’s narrow geographic popularity foretold of a need to govern from the center of the country; not the center of his party.

What he should have done instead was disarm his opponents. If he had built initial policy proposals from the middle, he could have wooed the moderate flank of the Republican party, marginalized the conservatives, and alleviated the concerns of those gettable voters in the South and the Midwest. This is precisely what Bill Clinton did between 1995 and 2000, and it is what the President’s promises of “post-partisanship” suggested.

Our system of government can only produce policy when geographically broad coalitions favor it. The Senate, more than any other institution, forces such breadth. Obama created breadth the wrong way. He watered down initially liberal legislation to prompt just enough moderate Democrats to sign on. Instead, he should have built policy from the center, then worked to pick up enough votes on either side. The left would have been disappointed, but the right would have been marginalized and, most importantly, Independent voters – who have abandoned the President in droves – might still be on board.

One of the great ironies of liberal politicians is that they so often discount the yen of conservative intellectuals to participate in policy making.  People like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) are driven by ideas, and enjoy the process of fashioning policies that get as many of them enacted as possible.

But they are not necessarily “my-way-or-the-highway” types.  Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future is a multi-decade plan for balancing the budget.  Implicit in its longevity is Ryan’s willingness to work out compromises that preserve Social Security and Medicare while making them fiscally sound.  For his part, Gingrich has always been the kind of politician willing to hammer out solutions with the other side, as he attempted to do with Bill Clinton.

People wonder why we don’t have bipartisan breakthroughs anymore.  In part, it’s because politicians like Barack Obama don’t have the political sense to “spread the success around” turning their adversaries into cooperators.

As CFIF reported, there is more to Kris Kobach than being the principal drafter of the Arizona’s illegal immigration law SB 1070.  Last night, Kobach secured the Kansas Republican Party’s nomination for Secretary of State.  The accomplishment makes him likely the highest profile SOS candidate in the country, and is sure to put election law-related issues at the forefront of the midterm elections.  First up on Kobach’s agenda?  Requiring all voters to provide a photo ID when casting a ballot.

Stay tuned.

Regular Freedom Line readers know well my affection for the two men I consider to be America’s best governors: Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Chris Christie of New Jersey.

Stylistically, the two couldn’t be further apart. Daniels is a quiet, avuncular midwesterner who, through some sort of charisma jiu-jitsu, makes it incredibly hip to be square. He’s also turned Indiana into an economic powerhouse and one of the best-governed states in the nation.

Christie, by contrast, is an Irish-Italian tornado, possessed of the sort of everyman bravado that you’d expect from the best elected official to come out of the land of Bruce Springsteen and Tony Soprano. It’s as if Rudy Giuliani woke up one day with a full head of hair and a passion for philly cheesesteaks.

With congressional Republicans understandably locked into opposition mode, Daniels and Christie are great examples of proactive GOP leadership that works. And Rich Lowry does a nice job of summarizing why in today’s New York Post.

On Daniels:

… The skinflint second-term governor has slimmed down and improved his state’s public sector. He inherited a $200 million deficit in 2004, which he turned into a $1.3 billion surplus – just in time for it to act as a cushion during the recession. He has reformed government services and rallied his administration around one simple, common-sense goal: “We will do everything we can to raise the net disposable income of individual Hoosiers.”

On Christie:

Christie has just concluded a six-month whirlwind through Trenton that should be studied by political scientists for years to come. In tackling a fiscal crisis in a state groaning under an $11 billion deficit, he did his fellow New Jerseyans the favor of being as forthright as a punch in the mouth. And it worked.

Christie traveled the state making the case for budgetary retrenchment, and he frontally took on the state’s most powerful interest, the teachers’ union. He rallied the public and split the Democrats, in a bravura performance in the lost art of persuasion. At the national level, George W. Bush thought repeating the same stalwart lines over and over again counted as making an argument, and Barack Obama has simply muscled through his agenda on inflated Democratic majorities. Christie actually connected.

Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have done a terrific job souring the public on liberals. Daniels and Christie may just have what it takes to get them excited about conservatives.

Earlier today, the Senate began its floor debate on the confirmation of Elena Kagan to serve a lifetime appointment on the United States Supreme Court.  Judiciary Committee Ranking Republican Jeff Sessions did one heck of a bang up job laying out the case against her confirmation during his opening statement.

Sessions stated that Kagan’s record leaves “no doubt what kind of judge she would be:  An activist, liberal, progressive, politically-minded judge who would not be happy simply to decide cases, but will seek to advance her causes under the guise of judging.”

Watch Senator Sessions’ opening remarks, which highlight everything you need to know about Elena Kagan, in their entirety below.

Is there any periphery bounding the absurdity of the desperate political left?

The Obama Administration’s 2009 “stimulus” continues to prove itself a failure.  It promised that unemployment would peak in October 2009 at 8%, and would be down to 7.3% by now.  Instead, we remain mired near 10%.  Further, second quarter gross domestic product (GDP) was revised downward just last week to 2.4%, a slowdown from 3.7% in the first quarter and 5.0% from the fourth quarter of 2009.  Meanwhile, we’re $1 trillion deeper in debt, and the administration admitted last month that its second year deficit will reach an astounding $1.5 trillion, exceeding even its first deficit of $1.4 trillion.

Yet according to former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, “the administration’s original sin was not spending enough.”  Commenting in today’s Wall Street Journal, Reich bizarrely adds that the Democrats’ 2009 filibuster-proof Senate supermajority somehow constituted “a fragile 60 votes” constraining Obama’s ambitions, and says that the problem with ObamaCare was that it was “not nearly large or bold enough.”  Not large enough?  Take a look at this ObamaCare flow chart, which looks more intricate than a nuclear reactor.

So how much would have been enough to satisfy Reich, anyway?  Two trillion?  Three trillion?  Ten?  It all recalls the popular bumper sticker – “Don’t Tell Obama What Comes After ‘Trillion.'”

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.

It gets a little tiresome having to read columnist Fareed Zakaria’s senate floor speeches masquerading as opinion pieces in Newsweek every seven days. Dr. Z has a tendency to write columns with grandiose titles such as “How to Salvage Afghanistan” and “Defusing the Debt Bomb”.  While it’s admirable that he’s at least trying to offer solutions, most of Zakaria’s bigthink is pretty small — conventional Washington wisdom masquerading as divine revelation.

Zakaria’s gift for analysis is not nearly as deep as he thinks and nothing proves it more than his new piece in Newsweek, entitled “Raise My Taxes, Mr. President”. Taking a page out of the Obama playbook and fashioning himself a centrist who can rise above the fray, Zakaria writes:

[The Bush tax] cuts are set to expire this year. The Republicans say they want to keep them all, even for those making more than $250,000 a year (less than 3 percent of Americans). They say that higher taxes will hurt the recovery. But for months now they have been arguing that the chief threat to the economy is our gargantuan debt and deficit. That’s what’s scaring consumers, creditors, and businesses. Given a chance to address those fears by getting serious about deficit reduction, though, they run away.

Fareed is making a mistake that should be recognizable to anybody who’s ever watched an episode of “House”. He’s making a diagnosis based on symptoms rather than an underlying cause. Yes, America’s debt is horrible. But let’s keep one of Milton Friedman’s key insights in mind: all spending is a form of taxation — it has to be paid for sooner or later, one way or another.

Balancing the budget through tax increases only moves the government’s burden on the private sector from debt to taxation. Think of it this way: if you want to get your personal finances in order, does it make more sense to simply pay for your reckless spending with cash instead of a credit card or to actually buckle down and stop spending as much? If you realize that the first can save you a few bucks here and there, but only the second can provide financial salvation, you’re on the right track. You’re also smarter than Fareed Zakaria.

Seems like someone at the Associated Press read our commentary “Raising Taxes on ‘The Rich’ Will Harm the Economy” from last week’s Liberty Update.  Either way, we couldn’t help but note an AP headline “Economy Weakens as Wealthy Spend Less” released today.

The AP story begins, “Wealthy Americans aren’t spending so freely anymore.  And the rest of us are feeling the sqeeze.”  The story goes on to lament that the economy appears to be slowing as “the rich” spend less:

Think of the wealthy as the main engine of the economy:  When they buy more, the economy hums.  When they cut back, it sputters.  The rest of us mainly go along for the ride.”

Noting that the Obama Administration seeks to increase tax rates on that critical income segment, the AP report states ominously that, “the wealthy may be keeping some money on the sidelines due to uncertainty over whether or not they will soon face higher taxes.”

The good news is that there’s still time for the Obama Administration to wake up and smell the same coffee the AP is smelling.

“For want of a nail the shoe was lost.  For want of a shoe the horse was lost.  For want of a horse the rider was lost.  For want of a rider the battle was lost.  For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.  And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”

Today’s lesson in unintended consequences comes from an article that covers several flash points threatening to engulf a relatively peaceful Iraq into renewed chaos.  One item shines brightest.

The Iraqi government can’t provide more than 4 to 6 hours of electricity a day to most of its citizens.  With local temperatures many degrees over 100, people are rioting because of it.

Consider what they’re not rioting about: the escape of four convicted terrorists from prison; a five month delay in forming a coalition government to lead the nation; suicide bombings that killed 50 people; a stalemate in deciding how to divide the country’s oil revenues.

And yet what’s the issue that caused people to “smash government offices” and demand change?  Keeping the electricity running.

Ideas like liberty, commerce and opportunity don’t get a lot of attention when basic services like relief from oppressive heat aren’t being delivered.

The sooner the terrorists inside Iraq figure out that merely being a competent public administrator will probably be enough to get democratic control of the national government, the sooner the Arab world’s only experiment in democracy will cease.

All for want of a steady supply of energy.

Thanks be to Hugh Hewitt who today highlights a multi-level government project to build a $50 million safety net 20 feet below the Golden Gate bridge to catch would-be suicide jumpers.  Apparently, about two dozen people a year jump to their deaths from one of San Francisco’s most popular attractions, and I’ll be the last person to quibble with the notion that every life is worth saving.

But as Hewitt points out, even the interest on $50 million could do a lot to reduce the conditions that create a suicidal decision.  Much like the economy, it would be nice if the people running government at all levels would concentrate more on creating the conditions for success instead of constructing elaborate safety nets when regulations fail people.

While I’m glad to see the Bay Area concerned with preserving at least one form of human life from senseless destruction, surely $50 million could do more good for more people than stringing out a last-ditch safety net for about 25 people a year.

H/T: Washington Examiner

Pulling the race card is beginning to carry about as much cachet as Y2K alerts.

You know things have gotten bad when even Howard “I Have a Scream” Dean feels entitled to pull it (without bothering to understand that Shirley Sherrod was fired by the Obama Administration before supposedly “racist” Fox News had even referenced her name).  Fox News commentator Juan Williams, who is actually one of the less-insane liberals in public discourse, unfortunately seemed to resort to it yesterday on “Fox News Sunday.”  Commenting on new ethical charges against Rep. Charles Rangel (D – New York) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D – California), Williams immediately raised the issue of the two defendants’ race.  Why in the world should that be the immediate consideration while discussing these serious charges?

Too bad that former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay didn’t think of this.  Hey, if Howard Dean can try it, why not DeLay?