Freedom Line Blog

Today’s jobs report from the Labor Department shows that unemployment has now exceeded 8% for 35 consecutive months, the most since the federal government began keeping records.

The reason that 8% number is important is that the Obama Administration promised in January 2009 that unemployment would not exceed it under his $1 trillion spending “stimulus.”  They also projected that unemployment would peak in October of that year, and be down to approximately 6% today.  Instead, the jobless rate ascended past 10%, and has never come in below 8% since.  Moreover, the incremental decrease from November’s 8.7% rate was due to a decline in the size of the nation’s workforce.  Further, the 200,000 jobs added is barely sufficient to tread water with population growth.

By this point in our cyclical recovery, employment growth should be much stronger, and unemployment much lower.  To compare alternative economic strategies, Ronald Regan dealt with even higher unemployment than has Obama (not to mention far higher inflation and interest rates back then).  But Reagan’s tax-cutting and smaller-government policies slashed unemployment from 10.4% on the effective date of his tax cuts to 7.0% in the same 35-month span Obama has had.  The answer to the Obama jobs freeze is clear.  It’s simply up to the American electorate to demand it.

In an interview with CFIF, Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote and King Street Patriots, discusses citizen-led efforts to restore truth and honesty to our elections, secure a fair playing field for candidates and defend the integrity of the 2012 elections.

Listen to the interview here.

In a case that should make conservatives stand up and take notice, and that merits (and later will receive from me) far more ink (or cyber ink) than this blog entry can provide, yet another liberal media organ, with yet another series of tendentious stories, is doing the work of the organized political left and the Democratic Party (but I repeat myself) by trying to rescue Wisconsin unions from duly passed laws reining in their abuses.

It’s a complicated story, but the semi-short version is this: In an absurd and perhaps unconstitutional attempt at strangling free political speech, organs of the Left brought ethics charges  in 2008 against newly elected Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who had just defeated liberal hack Louis Butler in a hard-fought race. They had the temerity to accuse Gableman of lying about Butler during the campaign, and wanted an organ of the state to adjudge what was and wasn’t acceptable political speech — First Amendment be damned.

The charges failed, eventually, on a 3-3 vote at the state Supreme Court.

Later, last year, Gableman joined a narrow high court majority  ruling in favor of the constitutionality of the controversial new Wisconsin laws reining in the unions. The Left wants that ruling vacated — so they are going after Gableman again.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel suddenly is all hot to report that Gableman’s lawyer during the ethics trial back then worked on a contingency fee basis — in other words, that Gableman didn’t pay the lawyer out of his own pocket. Worse, Gableman later ruled in a number of cases in which the lawyer’s firm was of counsel, including some 4-3 decisions — and ruled in favor of the client of that firm.

Egads! Scandal! The way the Journal-Sentinel-House-Organ-of-Democrats has been playing the story in multiple articles, Gableman accepted a free “gift” in the form of the contingency fee agreement (the firm was never paid because the 3-3 tie vote on the ethics charge meant that Gableman didn’t actually “win” the case, and therefore the attorneys couldn’t collect). When Gableman then was faced with other cases involving the firm that had provided him a “gift,” he therefore was supposedly required to recuse himself.  Or so the paper’s biased coverage overwhelmingly suggests. And of course, it just so happens that one of those cases was the union case, which, by this logic, should be re-opened because of Gableman’s ghastly ethics.

What a nice, neat little package.

And what a crock of, uh, you know, rhymes with mitt.

To make its case, the Journal-Sentinal (pretending to be objective) turned for supposed legal-ethics expertise to Stephen Gillers, “a New York University Law School professor who specializes in legal ethics.” Never mind that Gillers is the same hack that the Left and establishment journalists (again, I repeat myself) trot out any time they need a “expert” to bash conservative legal ethics — because, of course, Gillers always somehow seems to come down in favor of whatever position benefits the political aims of liberals. How convenient.

But here’s the real kicker: How is it that a contingency fee arrangement is suddenly a “gift”? I thought the left, always in hock to the plaintiffs’ bar, loved contingency fee arrangements! That’s what gets the jackpots that are used to fund a huge part of the Left’s political apparatus. Is every plaintiff represented through a contingency-fee arrangement getting a “gift”? Of course not. As Viet Dinh, Gableman’s NEW lawyer, wrote in a letter to the editor that the Journal-Sentinel has conveniently refused to publish (although it did selectively quote from the letter in a “news” story), “Justice Gableman has the same fundamental right to representation as any other individual, and there is nothing improper or unethical about acquiring legal representation through a contingency fee agreement…. The inaccuracies are so persistent, and their pattern against Justice Gableman so consistent, that one unfortunately must consider editorial and journalistic bias.”

WAIT: There’s more. This is rich. It now turns out that a clearly left-leaning Judge in Wisconsin, the Hon. John Siefert, sued the Wisconsin Judicial Commission over a different issue in 2008. And guess what: Siefert did so under a contingency fee arrangement!! One waits with bated breath to see if the Journal-Sentinel will now run a series of “news” articles asking if Siefert improperly took a “gift.”

One will probably wait forever, and one’s breath will remain bated.

The Manhattan Institute is honoring Rhode Island Treasurer Gina Raimondo for doing the seemingly impossible – reforming a Democratic state’s public pension system so that it starts to realize savings within years, not decades.  (The key is changing the contribution and pay-out systems for everyone, not just new hires and non-vested employees.)

But beyond dollars and cents, Raimondo made an appeal that should convince people whether it’s made by her or Paul Ryan.

Without real reform, Rhode Island’s annual pension costs would soar by hundreds of millions of dollars a year — a large figure in a state of one million residents. Raimondo emphasized that the ever-rising demands of the pension system would mean less money available for education and municipal services, and a deterioration in the effectiveness of government.

The emphasis is mine, but it is one Raimondo shares.  Government must do (some) important things and in certain areas it can even do nice things, but it cannot afford to do anything if a policy item starts to eat up the entire budget.

Skim through this week’s commentary pieces here at CFIF, and you’ll notice that all of us at the Center are incensed by President Obama’s recess appointments to the NLRB and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau yesterday, all of which seemed to clearly overstep the president’s constitutional authority.

According to the invaluable James Pethokoukis, however, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Writing at the American Enterprise Institute’s Enterprise Blog, Pethokoukis notes that there’s an ominous implication from yesterday’s appointments — that the president could use a similar tactic to appoint a new head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. He writes:

And why is that important? The Federal Housing Finance Agency is the regulator and conservator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And the FHFA currently has an acting director, Edward DeMarco. If Obama replaces him with a “housing advocate” via the same recess appointment process, here’s what might happen next, according to [the Washington Research Group’s Jaret] Seiberg:

“That could lead to a mass refinancing program for agency-backed mortgages that would go well beyond the existing HARP program. That could hurt agency MBS pricing and result in higher financing costs going forward. Yet it also could be a big boost for the economy and housing going into the election.”

Indeed, my sources tell me the Obama administration has been eager to implement just such a plan, but needs to have its own man heading the FHFA to make it happen.

There are more grisly details in Pethokoukis’s original post. The upshot? President Obama — without approval from Congress — could commit taxpayers to a quarter-trillion dollars of spending in order to bail out imprudent homeowners in an election year. Essentially, we’d all be financing the president’s reelection campaign. And, in a tight race, the resulting bribe stimulus might just do the trick.

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.

Quin is effusive below about Rick Santorum’s win last night in Iowa (yes, technically he lost by by eight votes, but that’s a win given the context). There’s good reason to celebrate. Santorum’s late surge in Iowa was truly remarkable and his speech last night was probably the best given by any candidate in the last year. This is Santorum operating at the peak of his powers. Unfortunately for him, the peak of his powers won’t be enough to carry him to the nomination. Here’s why:

— Iowa is a unique electoral atmosphere and one that is particularly well-suited to a candidate like Santorum. It has a surplus of social conservatives (particularly evangelicals) for whom Santorum’s emphasis on faith and family was dispositive — as it was for Mike Huckabee in 2008. The demographic makeup of the next few key primary states won’t be nearly as kind to him.

— Santorum’s timing in Iowa was impeccable. He surged in the closing days of the race, when there were no debates left and when media coverage (and, more importantly, media consumption) was at something of a standstill because of the holidays. Thus, Santorum has undergone far less vetting than anyone else in the race. When that process begins — which was probably about twelve hours ago — it will expose some of his intrinsic difficulties, such as his history with the K Street Project and his long history of big government conservatism.

— Santorum was able to campaign in Iowa like he was running for governor, visiting all 99 counties and hosting nearly 400 town halls over the course of the last year. He did it on a shoestring budget, too, traveling in a pickup truck with one staffer and shopping at Target. While one of Iowa’s great virtues is that it allows for exactly this kind of retail politicking, that window has now closed. Santorum did a year’s worth of work in Iowa. He’ll only have a week or two for each of the upcoming races.

No doubt, Santorum will be a far bigger figure than many pundits (myself included) imagined in coming weeks. His Iowa win, however, has all the hallmarks of an anomaly rather than the beginning of a trend. And that fact — combined with the inability of conservatives to rally around any one candidate — will have Mitt Romney smiling all the way to the GOP Convention in Tampa.

Quin brings up a fun topic about imagining possible vice presidential nominees, but it’s too early to speculate on who a current candidate should choose because it’s too early to know what each candidate needs in a VP selection.

Ordinarily, Veeps compensate for some perceived deficiency in the top of the ticket.  As a former Defense Secretary and congressman, Dick Cheney was the old Washington pro who could help Texas Governor George W. Bush avoid rookie mistakes.  Ronald Reagan picked the elder George Bush to placate the GOP establishment and unite the party’s money with its grassroots.  Bush later picked Dan Quayle to create a bridge to a younger generation.  Robert Dole and John McCain were grizzled senators who needed a jolt of enthusiasm to energize their campaigns – enter Jack Kemp and Sarah Palin.  In each case, the presidential nominee chose someone who clearly compensated for a perceived deficiency in his electoral popularity.  (Of course, you can judge how well these picks worked out by consulting the relevant year’s election returns.)

Tellingly, none of these Republican presidential nominees except George W. Bush picked a vice president as a surrogate for foreign policy.

So far, campaign 2012 has centered on jobs and the economy, as well it should.  Historically high unemployment and a liberal administration promising more taxes and spending cries out for an articulate defender of limited government and broad-based economic growth.  But domestic politics are only half the equation.  As every President learns, foreign policy is the real distinctive of the job.  It’s very likely that within the next month or two a major foreign policy crisis will remind GOP voters that they need a nominee who gets the free market and understands America’s need to maintain its place in the world as the only remaining superpower.

There are two Republican debates scheduled in New Hampshire before the state’s primary next Tuesday.  At least one should be devoted to foreign policy.  Conservatives – and the country – deserve to know who’s strong on foreign policy, and who needs to compensate with a strong vice presidential pick.

Seriously, we could all be debating this topic within another month. Put on your thinking caps, because there are all sorts of different approaches to how to make a ticket work…..

Over the weekend, Nick Cohen in the UK Guardian provided halting testimony to just how macabre the  abuse of human rights by the Assad regime in Syria has become. From the piece:

To grasp the scale of the barbarism, listen to Hamza Fakher, a pro-democracy activist, who is one of the most reliable sources on the crimes the regime’s news blackout hides. “The repression is so severe that detainees are stacked alive and kicking in shipping containers and disposed off in the middle of the sea,” he told me. “It is so bad that they’ve invented a new way of torture in Aleppo where they heat a metal plate and force a detainee to stand on it until he confesses; imagine all the melting flesh reaching the bone before the detainee falls on the plate. It is so bad that all demonstrators have opted for armed resistance. They know it is about survival now, not about freedom any more. This needs to be highlighted: Syrians are fighting for their lives now, not for freedom.”

Looking back on 2011, remember that the Obama Administration pressured Hosni Mubarak to step down in Egypt despite the fact that it was clear that the upshot would damage American national security interests. We also intervened in Libya despite the fact that our interests there were peripheral at best. Now comes Syria: an ally of Iran, a sponsor of terrorism, and, as this article attests, an utterly wicked regime. Rarely is the confluence of our strategic interests and our moral interests so unambiguous. Let us hope that the administration doesn’t miss this opportunity, as it did in Iran in 2009.

IF — and it is a big “if” — if Rick Santorum actually wins Iowa, or finishes in such a strong second that he is closer to first than the third-place finisher is to him, THEN he also will finish in the top three, and maybe top two, in New Hampshire, and will challenge very seriously for the win in South Carolina and may well pull it out. If he wins South Carolina, he will win the nomination. If he comes in a strong second in South Carolina, he will be almost even-money to win the nomination.

Any questions?

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.