Freedom Line Blog

Over the weekend, Alexandra Petri had a fun little opinion piece over at the Washington Post about “Mitt Romney’s First-World Problems.” It’s an entertaining meditation on why Romney’s life — which is something approaching the American ideal — doesn’t make for a great campaign season narrative. The most effective passage, however has nothing to do with Romney:

Some professions make peculiar demands. The ideal life for a president is full of bootstrap-pulling and high drama. It runs something like this: You were born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free, raised in the woods so’s you knew every tree, and were offered the choice to kill a bear but did not take it when you were only 3. You spent the next 15 years studying and working in your all-American town and somehow wound up at an institution of higher learning that was prestigious — but not offputtingly prestigious. Then you became a war veteran. Next you governed a state whose priorities aligned exactly with those of your party, and during this time you created tens of thousands of jobs. Also, you are capable of stringing together a sentence without looking excruciatingly pained.

That described Rick Perry until the last clause.

That is brutal — and totally correct. It’s a reminder of how different this election season could have been if Rick Perry had come loaded for bear. And it’s also a helpful lesson for voters: even the most enticing biography won’t save a candidate whose performance on the stump leaves voters unable to picture him in the Oval Office. Thus does Rick Perry take his seat alongside Fred Thompson and Wesley Clark in the “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time” club.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CST to 6:00 p.m. CST (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EST) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 (CST)/5:00 pm (EST):  Diane Furchtgott-Roth, Senior Fellow at Manhattan Institute:  How Obama’s Gender Policies Undermine America;

4:30 (CST)/5:30 pm (EST):  Vincent Vernuccio, Labor Policy Counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:  Indiana’s Enactment of Right to Work;

5:00 (CST)/6:00 pm (EST):  Dr. Paul Broun (R-Georgia):  Budget or Bust Legislation;  and

5:30 (CST)/6:30 pm (EST):  James Pinkerton, co-chair of RATE (Reforming America’s Taxes Equitably) Coalition, Corporate Tax Reform.

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

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.

As The Weekly Standard reports, polls now show Rick Santorum has a chance to do very well indeed in three different contest on Tuesday. If he does, it should become a two-man race between him and Romney. If he doesn’t, Romney is home free, I believe.
But there’s the deal: Rasmussen now has Santorum as the only Republican running who beats Obama head to head. It just goes to show that, over time, Santorum wears well with voters.

The question is, why have so many conservative leaders been so unwilling to rally around him? Why haven’t more of them endorsed him? (That said, in the past week some brave souls have started what Santorum must hope will turn into a stampede: Michelle Malkin, Tom Tancredo, Jane Norton, Bob Schaffer, David Limbaugh, Phyllis Schafly, Pat Boone.)

If they don’t like Romney, and they get stuck with him, they have only themselves to blame.

This week’s edition of the Liberty Update, CFIF’s weekly e-newsletter, is out. Below is a summary of its contents:

Hillyer:  Reagan 101
Ellis:  Direct-Pay Medicine: A Free Market Approach to Healthcare Reform
Lee:  Obama, Three Years Ago This Week: “If I Don’t Have This Turned Around in Three Years…”
Senik:  The “Republican Establishment” Rides Again
Release:  Conservative Leaders Call On President, Congress To Pass Corporate Tax Reform

Podcast:  The Consequences of Pres. Obama’s Refusal to Approve Keystone XL Pipeline
Jester’s Courtroom:  Lawyers Win Big in iLawsuit

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 by e-mail, sign up here.

Today’s Department of Labor report that unemployment declined slightly from 8.5% to 8.3% in January will surely be celebrated and trumpeted by the Obama Administration.  Which only serves to illustrate the terrible quality of his economic performance in office.

First of all, today’s announcement means that unemployment has now exceeded 8% for 36 consecutive months, three entire years.  That’s an all-time record since recordkeeping began.  Second, that new record is not somehow a reflection of the fact that the most recent recession was “the worst since the Great Depression,” as Obama and his apologists constantly claim.  Unemployment actually reached a higher peak in the early 1980s recession, but quickly plummeted from 10.8% to 6.7% following implementation of Reagan’s tax cuts.  In contrast, unemployment has increased under Obama from 7.8% to over 10% and three straight years over 8%.  Moreover, inflation and interest rates were far higher in the early 1980s recession, and monetary policy was much tighter, meaning that conditions were less hospitable for economic improvement.  Third, for all of the deficit spending the Obama Administration heaped upon American taxpayers, it promised that unemployment under its agenda would be down to around 6% by now.

Instead, we’re barely treading water and mediocre news is characterized as wonderful.  This is the Age of Obama.

CFIF Contributing Editor Ashton Ellis discusses how President Obama’s decision to block the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline will cost Americans roughly 20,000 new jobs and 700,000 barrels of oil a day, and how the decision ultimately could benefit China at the expense of the U.S.

Listen to the interview here.

In the ongoing battle over Congressional legislation to target foreign rogue websites, opponents falsely characterize the battle as one pitting sinister liberal “Big Hollywood” against underdog champions of Internet freedom.

That characterization was always false, but too many conservatives and libertarians unfortunately fell for it.  The truth is that hundreds of businesses and employers, from the NFL to EA Sports to Ford Motor to 1-800-Contacts to Burberry supported the bill.  Why?  Because their property, employees and innovations actually suffer from the menace of online piracy.  Meanwhile, groups like Google have no property right at stake from online piracy.  Indeed, they benefit from uninterrupted rogue website traffic.  So no wonder they opposed anti-piracy legislation.

Today, just days before the Super Bowl, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency announced a major bust of 307 rogue websites selling millions of dollars’-worth of counterfeit merchandise:

Special agents this week seized a total of 307 websites and snatched up 42,692 items of phony Super Bowl-related memorabilia along with other counterfeit items for a total take of more than $4.8 million – up from $3.72 million last year.  Sixteen of the sites the agency shut down during this operation known as Fake Sweep, were illegally streaming live sporting telecasts over the Internet, including NFL games.  Two hundred ninety-one website domain names were illegally selling and distributing counterfeit merchandise, ICE stated.”

And the bust wasn’t limited to counterfeit NFL merchandise:

During this operation, an additional 22,570 items of counterfeit merchandise and clothing representing other sports leagues, including Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association and National Hockey League were seized by law enforcement. In total, this operation netted 65,262 counterfeit items worth $6.4 million, ICE stated.”

This is a critical example to keep in mind as the battle against foreign rogue websites moves forward.  That sort of illegal activity is already subject to seizure if it occurs within the U.S., but foreign sites remain largely beyond American law.  Piracy apologists want to make this look like anti-piracy legislation is just some sort of Big Hollywood handout, but this bust illustrates the falsity of that claim.

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.

On the heels of telling CNN this morning that he’s “not concerned about the very poor,” Politico provides a handy list of Mitt Romney’s growing number of devastating pronouncements this primary season:

1. “Corporations are people, my friend.” — Aug. 11, 2011, to a heckler at the Iowa State Fair.

2. “I like being able to fire people.” – Jan. 9, 2012, while speaking about holding insurance service providers accountable.

3. “I should tell my story. I’m also unemployed.” — June 16, 2011, after listening to a group of unemployed Floridians talk about their difficulties find a job.

4. “I know what it’s like to worry whether you’re going to get fired. There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.” – Jan. 8, 2012, speaking at a rally about sharing the anxiety of workers worried about losing their jobs.

5. “Rick, I’ll tell you what — ten thousand bucks? Ten thousand dollar bet?” — Dec. 10, 2011, to Rick Perry during a presidential debate trying to settle a dispute about health insurance.

If Romney wins the GOP presidential nomination, expect to see these statements (and probably others!) run ad nauseum by Barack Obama’s campaign team.

Over at RealClearMarkets, the American Enterprise Institute’s Kenneth Green has a wonderful take-down of California’s delusional alternative energy mandate, which would “require that 15.4 percent of all vehicles sold by 2025 must be electric cars, plug-in hybrid cars, or (currently non-existent) fuel cell cars.” Green notes that this is the second time the Golden State has gone down this road, after a similar mandate — imposed back in 1990 — had to be scrapped due to its total infeasibility.

As you may recall, it used to be fashionable amongst conspiracy-minded greens to posit that the electric car had been undermined by some nefarious cabal of big oil, the auto industry, and hydrogen fuel cell advocates. They even made a film about it: 2006’s “Who Killed the Electric Car?”, which included the contributions of such noted experts in transportation economics as Martin Sheen, Mel Gibson, and Phyllis Diller. As Green points out, however, the electric car and its alternative fuel cousins have never taken the market by storm for a much simpler reason — they’re just not economically viable:

The GM Volt sells for a non-competitive $40,000, and is barely selling despite federal tax subsidies up to $7,500, and some state subsidies that further sweeten the pot. Plug-in hybrid technology is more expensive to manufacture, more expensive to repair, more expensive to insure, and, after 22 years, they still have overheating and fire problems.

As Robert Bryce points out in his book Power Hungry, electric cars are the “Next Big Thing. And they always will be.” Bryce observes that EV-boosters have been flogging electric cars since 1911, when the New York Times declared that “the electric car “has long been recognized as the ideal solution” because it “is cleaner and quieter” and “much more economical.”

Scan the hard data on any alternative energy source being promoted as a panacea and you’ll find much the same thing: Too little performance for too much money and too little convenience. And that’s the real tragedy of mandates like California’s or federal handouts to firms like Solyndra. The reality is that we probably will shift away from our reliance on conventional sources of energy like coal and oil in the future. But in order to do so, alternative energy sources will have to be scalable, affordable, and efficient. Providing subsidies for those technologies before they reach that point only delays their viability by reducing the financial incentive to get a better product to market.

The upshot? Reliable green energy may indeed be on the horizon for California. But if it does arrive, it will be because of the efforts of businessmen, not bureaucrats.

Ashton’s column today on direct-pay medicine is superb. Combine it with an expansion of the health savings accounts that Rick Santorum fought for during a 12-year span and helped authorize in 2003, and with allowing sales of health insurance across state lines, and with competition throughout Medicare rather than just in Part D, and with block grants to states for Medicaid so the states themselves will have freedom and incentive to promote market competition and efficiencies…. and, pretty soon, we would be well on our way to a thriving, multi-layered, market-based health-care financing system in which people would have all sorts of viable options. (Other ideas for free-market approaches for health care as a whole also abound.) It’s a shame President GW Bush never made such things a priority while he had House and Senate majorities. If somehow the American people (or the Supreme Court, in effect) can force the repeal of Obamacare, we’ll finally have the chance to put such ideas into play. As Ashton wrote, “there is a need for reform that opens up the healthcare industry to a lower-cost, transparent pricing system.”

Hear, hear!