Freedom Line Blog

C.J. Ciaramella of The Daily Caller reports: 

The Securities and Exchange Commission gave up its leasing authority yesterday and could face a Justice Department probe in light of a $550 million leasing scandal.

At a House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee meeting yesterday, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro ceded the agency’s leasing authority and admitted it had made a “terrible mistake” when it put taxpayers on the hook for a half-billion dollar lease for office space it didn’t need.

And this is the same government that now wants to increase taxes as part of a “deal” to raise the debt ceiling?

It is beyond outrageous that, at the last minute, the Obama administration is trying to stop the execution of a brutal rapist-murderer in Texas today, completely ignoring the precedent in an earlier case (Medellin) — on the grounds that the poor abused rapist/murderer wasn’t told he could contact the Mexican embassy (he was a Mexican national) before proceedings against him began.

Having looked at this, I tend to agree that the failure here to contact the embassy was a harmless error and that, unlike in countries that use summary executions and have no other procedural safeguards, this guy has had PLENTY of opportunity to have his arguments heard. I see no legal reason to halt the execution and no moral reason to pass the proposed law that would block such executions while federal courts review the cases. (In short, the legislation would give foreign nationals GREATER rights to escape scot-free than the already significant protections in law for American citizens.)

Methinks the Obama administration should worry less about protecting Mexican killers and should worry more about having given weapons to other Mexican killers who used the weapons to murder American border personnel.

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

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

In a recent Freedom Minute video, we chronicled the decline in basic standards of decency and civility amongst America’s political class. And one of the examples we cited was Florida Congresswoman (and newly-installed DNC Chairwoman) Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Here’s one of Wasserman Schultz’s greatest hits, prompted when a television interviewer recently asked her about the Republican push to require photo identification at the polls in order to combat voter fraud:

[I]f you go back to the year 2000, when we had an obvious disaster and – and saw that our voting process needed refinement, and we did that in the America Votes Act and made sure that we could iron out those kinks, now you have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally – and very transparently – block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. And it’s nothing short of that blatant.

Even the verbally incontinent chairwoman had to walk this one back, later explaining that “Jim Crow was the wrong analogy to use.” But while such thoughtless mistakes can be expected from the congenitally inept Wasserman Schultz, former President Bill Clinton doesn’t have that excuse. Here’s what Clinton told a group of young liberal activists gathered in the nation’s capital today, according to Politico:

“I can’t help thinking since we just celebrated the Fourth of July and we’re supposed to be a country dedicated to liberty that one of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time,” Clinton said at Campus Progress’s annual conference in Washington.

“There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,” Clinton added.

If Clinton wants to bask in the adulation of being an elder statesman, he ought to begin acting like one. He knows that saying Republicans across the nation want to suppress the vote is a baseless attack on the character of decent men and women. Republicans want to suppress voter fraud, a goal that Democrats profess to share (in practice, however, they’ve done little to effectuate it).

Debating the means by which we attain that end is an utterly justifiable pursuit. But tarring the opposition to score cheap applause from the Daily Kos’s farm team? That’s just not presidential. Of course, why start now?

Annette Meeks, CEO of the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, offers this damning editorial of Democratic Governor Mark Dayton’s decision to shut down the state’s government rather than sign a balanced budget without tax increases.

Among the bevy of withering arguments against Dayton’s action, Meeks points out that the budget passed by the legislature actually increased state spending by 6 percent while filling a $5 billion deficit.  The problem for Dayton: no soak-the-rich “millionaires’ tax.”

Like President Barack Obama with the nation’s debt ceiling, Governor Dayton is playing a dangerous game for the sake of fiscal discrimination.  Moreover, Dayton is unwilling to consider the state equivalent of a continuing budget resolution.

I’ll give Meeks the last word:

Last week, Republican legislative leaders, in a desperate move to stave off closing the government, proposed a “lights on” budget resolution that would have allowed services to continue while negotiations continued. In a crass, cynical move, Dayton rejected this good-natured offer.

We are here for one reason — Dayton. He insists upon inflicting as much pain as possible for state residents and government employees. And he is doing this so that the Legislature will bend to his will and raise income taxes, launching Minnesota into the stratosphere of high income taxes.

There are certain principles worth fighting for. Preserving a sound economic future for our state is one of those things.

This week, the Ohio Liberty Council filed paperwork to place on a statewide ballot this November a state constitutional amendment to opt-out of ObamaCare’s individual mandate.  The Tea Party group delivered over half-a-million signatures, nearly two-hundred thousand more than needed.

On the Left, an assortment of Democratic and labor union groups claimed 1.3 million signatures in favor of repealing Ohio’s stripping of collective bargaining rights from public employee unions, known locally as Senate Bill 5.

While those who want to opt-out of ObamaCare should also support limiting public unions’ ability to bankrupt taxpayers, getting both results will require educating voters to tick ‘Yes’ for the opt-out, and ‘No’ for the repeal.  That may sound easy, but for anyone who’s tried to engineer an outcome with multiple decisions for a group (i.e. logistics for a high school reunion come to mind), it isn’t nearly as easy as it should be.

So far, momentum appears to favor both the ObamaCare opt-out and repealing the collective bargaining ban.  If those sentiments prevail, Ohioans may spare themselves a federal spending mandate while drowning themselves in a tsunami of local and state union benefits.

Suggested slogan: Ohioans Want Freedom, Not Mandates

If they didn’t actually hold some positions of power, today’s liberal activists and supposed intelligentsia would engender serious pity because of their profound ignorance, lack of logic, and intellectually indefensible sentiments masquerading as principles. The latest case in point is the truly goofy New Republic piece by Ed Kilgore, previously best known for using a book review to posit that just about any backlash against Barack Obama is a sign that racism still reigns in large swaths of America. Now Kilgore analyzes the growing use of the term “constitutional conservatism” as if it not instantly understandable on its face but instead as if it is some sort of radical plot, alien to American democratic traditions. Worse, he avers it is a secret code, a radical-right “dog whistle” that lets right wingers and only right wingers know that what is being proposed is a return to the idyllic 1920s. Of course, in light of Kilgore’s previous meme of “Mommy, look, they’re all racists!!!,” it is no accident that he uses the term “dog whistle,” which is usually used by leftists to describe racist signals that only fellow racists can hear or understand.

Read Kilgore’s whole benighted piece, if you can stomach its intellectual vacuousness. But especially note this incredibly… well, I don’t quite know the word to describe its idiocy, but its incredibly moronic passage:

In their backwards-looking vision, constitutional conservatives like to talk about the inalienable rights conferred by the Founders—not specifically in the Constitution, as a matter of fact, but in the Declaration of Independence, which is frequently and intentionally conflated with the Constitution as the part of the Founders’ design.

What, pray tell, are we to make of this? Could Kilgore possibly be saying that that Declaration of Independence is not “part of the Founders’ design”? Is he actually complaining about ascribing the ideals of the Declaration to the practice of interpreting the Constitution? If anything, the Left has been known in the past for complaining that the Constitution was an unfortunate counter-revolution by moneyed interests upset at the supposed leveling mentality of the Declaration; now Kilgore seems to be complaining that the Declaration’s ideals should not be seen as inherent within the constitutional structure — as if those ideals themselves, and thus the Declaration, somehow pollutes the Constitution with some crazy nonsense about natural rights.

This is ludicrous. Whether or not the Constitution’s framers succeeded in implementing the Declaration’s ideals (conservatives rightly argue that they did), there can be no doubt that when the states ratified the Constitution their debates were all about making sure that their rights were being sufficiently safeguarded. The nationwide ratification struggle was all about natural rights.

Kilgore goes on to write this jaw-dropping sentence:

It’s from the Declaration, for instance, that today’s conservatives derive their belief that “natural rights” (often interpreted to include quasi-absolute property rights or the prerogatives of the traditional family)… were fundamental to the American political experiment and made immutable by their divine origin.

The subtext is clear: Gee, these folks are lunatics to believe in “quasi-absolute property rights,” which derive solely from a misreading of the Declaration, not from the Constitution itself.

Oh, really? Then why does the Constitution specifically say that “no state shall … pass any … law impairing the obligation of contracts?” Why does it restrict the power of eminent domain by requiring “just compensation” and insisting that it only be effectuated for “public use”? Why does the Constitution say that nobody shall be denied of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law?” And why, if the Declaration and the Constitution are not to be conflated, do so many of the same or similar formulations occur in each, the most notable of which is of course the repetition of the “life, liberty, property/pursuit of happiness” language?

The left not only doesn’t understand the Constitution; it seems to not even really know the Constitution, or perhaps not even have actually read it. It certainly does not have a clue about how the Founders themselves clearly thought of the Constitution as the practical means of applying the ideals of the Declaration.

There is nothing radical whatsoever about insisting that the law of the land actually be interpreted to mean what it meant when it was first adopted (recognizing, of course, that the “law of the land” in constitutional terms means the law that came into being when any current constitutional provision was adopted —  obviously meaning that where amendments have been adopted, it is the original meaning of those amendments, not he original meaning of the language they replaced, that is relevant).

Yes, Mr. Kilgore, we believe in constitutional conservatism. It’s not a dog whistle to say so. But to fail to understand its clear and unobjectionable meaning, one would really need to be a cur.

For a state with an overwhelmingly Republican tilt, Utah can produce some political headscratchers. Consider:

Utah’s former governor, Jon Huntsman, is running for president as the most moderate candidate in the GOP field, despite being the former chief executive of the nation’s most Republican state. Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz, a hardcore conservative beloved by the Tea Party, is a former Huntsman staffer, but he’s also likely to challenge incumbent Senator Orrin Hatch next year with the argument that Hatch is too much of a RINO for residents of the Beehive State to send back to Capitol Hill. At the same time, it was announced today that Chaffetz is backing former Massachusetts governor (and one-time Utah resident) Mitt Romney for president, on the grounds that Romney is the most electable candidate in the GOP field.

It’s hard to keep all these machinations straight, but one thing’s for certain: the usually laudable Chaffetz will pay a price with his Tea Party base for coming out early for Romney. Romney’s Massachusetts health care reform was a dry run for Obamacare, right down to the individual mandate that makes tea partiers shutter.

By Chaffetz’s own admission, Romney is a friend. But while that loyalty is laudable, it need not extend to elevating Romney over other presidential contenders this early in the process.

Chaffetz claims Romney’s economic experience makes him the logical choice in 2012. For his sake, he better be right. As Mitt would probably tell him, there’s nothing worse than saddling yourself with an illiquid asset that goes bust.

It’s easy to attribute Obama’s poor approval ratings to generic anti-government sentiment and/or ongoing economic difficulty, citing Congress’s low approval as supporting evidence.  But a recent Rasmussen poll shows something interesting.  Namely, that the most conservative portion of our federal government receives the highest approval ratings from the public.  In fact, the number of respondents stating that the Supreme Court is doing a “good” or “excellent” job (35%) is approximately double the number who rate its performance as poor (18%).

Indeed, by a 31% to 26% margin, respondents believe the Supreme Court is too liberal, not too conservative.  Interesting insight for elected officials, and especially candidates, to ponder.

David Malpass and Stephen Moore have a great column at the Wall Street Journal about investment money flowing out from the United States rather than into the U.S. from abroad:

Americans are taking their investment dollars abroad at a faster pace than foreigners are bringing capital to these shores. In 2010, for example, U.S. investment abroad was $351 billion—$115 billion higher than foreign investment here. Economic recoveries are periods when investment capital usually surges into a country, but since this weakling rebound began in the middle of 2009 the U.S. has lost more than $200 billion in investment capital. That is the equivalent of about two million jobs that don’t exist on these shores and are now located in places like China, Germany and India.

One cause of this bad situation is federal over-spending:

Today, foreigners are financing food stamps and the next bridge to nowhere while Americans are building state-of-the-art production systems abroad. This is the real pernicious “crowding out effect” of the federal government’s borrowing.

But another big cause is high corporate income taxes, which make investment here far less rewarding:

Capital flows to where it is most highly rewarded, and low marginal tax rates on the returns to capital and business income create a gravitational pull on global funds.

Even former President Clinton says so:

“We’ve got an uncompetitive rate. We tax at 35 percent of income, although we only take about 23 percent. So we should cut the rate to 25 percent, or whatever’s competitive, and eliminate a lot of the deductions so that we still get a fair amount, and there’s not so much variance in what the corporations pay.”

The problem, in short, is that nobody has any incentive to invest those dollars, or to lend them for investment, here in the United States. Eliminate the corporate income tax and, immediately, every American corporation becomes more profitable by as much as a third. All the pensioners who own stock in those companies get richer — immediately. All the workers with company stock-share plans get richer. Prices will drop as companies can make more money, net, even with lower prices. Companies also would save billions of dollars spent in tax-form preparation, and in time spent figuring out tax-avoidance schemes. The economy will get more efficient when tax considerations no longer distort decision-making.

Real interest rates will drop due to market forces (rather than through panicky fiats from the Federal Reserve Board). And, wonder of wonders, companies that have been moving operations overseas will now reverse course and race back within our shores — bringing hundreds of thousands of jobs with them. All of those complaints about “outsourcing” will end, virtually overnight.

That’s why this is one “pro-corporate” reform that also is overwhelmingly pro-labor. The Congressional Budget Office has noted that “domestic labor bears slightly more than 70 percent of the burden of the corporate income tax.”

At last measurement, the corporate income tax was taking in $195 billion per year. I argue that a large chunk of that would be recovered, even without the dynamic growth effects of the tax cuts, via near-immediate growth in dividends and capital gains and therefore in the taxes on those dividends and capital gains. I further argue that, under any reasonably dynamic analysis, especially one which takes into account the tremendous growth in tax revenues after prior cuts in taxes on investments, the economy won’t actually lose any money at all — but the whole economy will be stronger, jobs will be more plentiful, and even the ethics of Washington will be improved:

Indeed, it is all the mucking around in the weeds of the tax code and in the pig trough of spending earmarks that leads otherwise well-meaning congressmen to become favor-dispensers rather than statesmen. Without a corporate income tax to fool with constantly, a huge chunk of the grounds for favor-dispensation will be taken away.

So, again, eliminate the federal corporate income tax entirely. Doing so would go a long way toward completely ending the recession.

The family of slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is urging federal officials to accept “responsibility” but not be criminally prosecuted for a horribly bad program to sell guns to drug dealers.  Terry’s cousin, Robert Heyer, tells The Hill that the family doesn’t want government agents (or their Washington superiors) to be indicted for crimes, just for them to take responsibility for being (criminally) stupid.

While it’s a noble sentiment for the Terry family to train its attention on the drug dealers who killed their son and cousin, killing Terry with guns intentionally sold to those drug dealers was a decision deliberately made by ATF officials.  Therefore, it’s arguable that members of the Obama Administration were criminally negligent.

As if to underscore the impossibility of separating responsibility for this fiasco from its criminal consequences, The Hill’s interview with Heyer concludes with a paragraph stating that (in theory) Project Gunrunner worked as planned:

One of the main ways agents would be able to partially track a gun’s path under the operation was if it was found at the scene of a crime and officials were able to trace it back to the original federally authorized purchase, as was the case with the guns found at Terry’s murder scene. It remains unclear whether the guns found at the scene that were linked to the operation were actually used to kill Terry.

Here’s betting that Attorney General Eric Holder and his subordinates responsible for ATF’s policies won’t be using this as a defense.

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

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

About all I have to say today, I said in this column at The American Spectator:

As much as the American book-buying public has shown deep interest in the superstars of the nation’s founding period, too little attention has been paid to some of the other legislative workhorses and statesmen of the period, and too few lessons thus learned from their examples. As we celebrate Independence Day on Monday, we should move beyond the famous Jefferson-Adams-Franklin troika, in order to marvel at the great decades of public service of the two other members of the committee charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence.

Those two were Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert R. Livingston of New York — and they were no mere window-dressing on the committee, much less in public life…. what’s instructive is that the disparate backgrounds of the other two, Sherman and Livingston, demonstrate the wonderful meritocracy and social mobility that existed, even then, in the bustling New World…. [Looking at the scope of their careers,] they give the lie to the now-fashionable notion that there is something inherently wrong or suspicious about holding public office for many years. Long service is not necessarily corrupting. Conversely, being new to the political scene is not necessarily a virtue.

Again, read all about it here. Happy Independence Day!

Byron York reports that the implementation of Wisconsin’s controversial ban on collective bargaining by public employee unions is already freeing one state school district from financial hardship.  Among the benefits of the change in policy:

• Swapping a $400,000 deficit for a $1.5 million surplus thanks to increasing teachers’ health insurance cost of coverage from 10 percent to 12.6 percent, which is “still well below rates in much of the private sector”

• Being able to shop around for health insurance coverage instead of being forced under collectively bargained contracts only to purchase coverage from a union-operated provider – the demanded premium levels have already dropped to “match the lowest bidder”

• Changing work rules like upping a teacher’s hours of instruction from five out of seven periods to six, thus allowing the district to reduce student-to-teacher ratios and provide more one-on-one tutoring with troubled students

Wisconsin’s Democratic Party and its liberal lobbyists may still consider the ban on collective bargaining a “disaster,” but it’s clearly a win for parents, students, and administrators.

Well, isn’t this a hoot?  Ever since the spotted owl was listed as an endangered species in 1990, the federal government has gone out of its way to limit timber companies from diminishing its wooded living spaces.  But while the Feds were concentrating on keeping dreaded homo sapiens at bay, another creature swooped in threatening to kill-off spotted owls: barred owls.

It turns out that barred owls are bigger and meaner than their spotted cousins.  According to Reuters, barred owls “have made steady gains in displacing spotted owls, which are being disrupted during nesting and are losing out in the competition for mice and other food.”

Some questions come to mind.  Who’s protecting the mice these owls are hunting mercilessly?  Surely, the mouse “and other food” constituencies are being impacted negatively by the increase in predator supply.

Also, isn’t the barred owl vs. spotted owl contest really a matter of survival of the fittest?  If human societies always evolve toward higher, better, more progressive outcomes, why not members of the animal kingdom?

Maybe this bird-on-bird fight has another dimension that liberals don’t want to contemplate.  Perhaps the spotted owls got fat and happy with government removing competition for resources.  As it nested quietly, maybe the species forgot how to fight for food.

There’s one other point to make: The barred owls are from the East Coast.  They only began settling in the spotted owl’s Pacific Northwest territory in the 1970’s.  In only a few decades, the barred owls have multiplied faster and staked out more territory than the native spotted owls.  If the Feds let nature and demography continue there will be no spotted owls left in a few years.

Partisans for the spotted owl want the Feds to take “decisive action” against the barred owl to save the spotted owl’s way of life.  The Feds are contemplating doing just that, even though it probably means capturing and killing owls who are just trying to scratch out an existence.  The real problem here seems to be letting a situation get out of control through either ignorance or incompetence.  Now, there are no good options for getting the genie back in the bottle.

Much like mice, food for thought.

Remember the wasteful duplicate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Figher that just wouldn’t die?

Or, more accurately, that appropriators refused to let die?

Pratt & Whitney won the contract to produce the F-35 engine fair and square.  But forces in Congress continued to promote a wasteful alternative version developed by General Electric/Rolls-Royce.  The Pentagon doesn’t want the duplicate engine.  The Senate voted it down.  The House voted it down.  The Bush White House sought to stop it.  Even the infamously spendthrift Obama White House has sought to stop it.

Most recently, General Electric/Rolls-Royce claimed to offer to “self-fund” development of the duplicate engine for the next few years.  The problem is that “self-funding” is a scheme to eventually place American taxpayers on the hook at a later date.  That is the conclusion of none other than Ashton Carter, Defense Department Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.  Responding to an inquiry from Senator Joe Lieberman, Carter confirmed that allowing the duplicate engine to continue would eventually mean government funding:

Regarding ‘self-funding,’ as you know, the Department estimates that developing the F136 engine and preparing it for completion would cost $480 million in Fiscal Year 2012 and would take six years and $2.9 billion to complete.  Unless this full expense is covered by the F136 contractor, the ‘self-funded’ effort would simply be a means to reestablish government funding for development of the F136 at a later date.  Furthermore, in order to ensure that the engine was truly self-funded by the contractor, Section 252 would need to state that any and all costs associated with the further development of the F136 engine and preparation for competition would be unrecoverable directly or indirectly in any present (via overhead charges) or future contract with the US Government.  This would extend the prohibition against the Government paying for the support or use of the Government’s property to the contractor’s costs for developing the F136 engine and preparing it for completion.

The Department appreciates your support for the JSF program and your interest in ensuring its success.  It is our firm view that Sections 215 and 252 would significantly impede this objective.”

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will help ensure American air superiority into the future, but it is also the largest acquisition program in Defense Department history.  We simply cannot afford to let the wasteful duplicate engine proposal to continue jeopardizing the program’s vitality and cost-efficiency.