Freedom Line Blog

John Fund nails liberal Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren for being a consistent fraud.  In the last week her bid to unseat Scott Brown has taken two steps backward with the revelation that although she listed herself as a Native American for over a decade as a law professor, she – at most – is only 1/32 Cherokee; and even that connection is in dispute.

The incident confirms Warren as a practitioner of the liberal art of claiming multiple diversity status; in her case as a woman and a Native American.

Just as revealing is her decision year after year to pay Massachusetts’ lower state income tax rather than a voluntary higher rate as she insists wealthy people like her should do.

Fund’s conclusion:

Warren is free to believe that she has Native American ancestry, just as she is free to keep as much of her money as she is legally entitled to. But her choices in filling out forms are instructive. In checking the boxes claiming Native American status for so many years and in not checking the box to pay a higher state income-tax rate, she has revealed more than we need to know to brand her as yet another sanctimonious liberal who wants to have it all ways.

If Warren’s misfires keep up, Scott Brown will once again benefit from running against an unusually self-destructive liberal.

The story of Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese dissident who took safe haven at the U.S. embassy in Beijing last week, should have been a cause for American pride. Chen, who has been an outspoken critic of the forcible sterilizations and abortions that accompany China’s one-child policy has served time in prison and, more recently, house arrest for daring to challenge the communist regime’s barbarism. By providing him refuge, the U.S. was fulfilling its traditional role as a defender of freedom throughout the world. Until yesterday, that is.

On Wednesday, Chen left the American embassy amidst coos of delight from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Here’s how Politico reported Clinton’s reaction:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her support for a deal with China that allowed activist Chen Guangcheng to leave the American embassy in Beijing without fear of arrest.

“I am pleased that we were able to facilitate Chen Guangcheng’s stay and departure from the U.S. embassy in a way that reflected his choices and our values,” Clinton said in a statement. “I was glad to have the chance to speak with him today and to congratulate him on being reunited with his wife and children.”

With apologies to the secretary, this hardly looks like a triumph of “his choices and our values.” Here’s the Associated Press report shortly after Chen’s release:

On Wednesday, after six days holed up inside the American embassy, he emerged and was taken to a nearby hospital. U.S. officials said they had extracted from the Chinese government a promise that Chen would reunite with his family and be allowed to start a new life in a university town.

Hours later, however, a shaken Chen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his hospital room that U.S. officials told him the Chinese authorities would have sent his family back to his home province if he remained inside the embassy. He added that, at one point, the U.S. officials told him his wife would have been beaten to death.

“I think we’d like to rest in a place outside of China,” Chen said, appealing again for help from U.S. officials. “Help my family and me leave safely.”

If this is true, it represents nothing short of a moral stain on the State Department. This should come as no surprise, however. I noted over three years ago at RealClearWorld that this sort of amoral policy stance towards China looked to be a hallmark of the Obama/Clinton foreign policy:

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Beijing in February [2009], she told her Chinese hosts that “Our pressing on [human rights] issues can’t interfere on the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis.” Translation: don’t think about standing in front of a tank anytime soon. While America’s economic dependence on China is undeniable given the profligate spending that we have indulged thanks to Beijing’s line of credit, voicing that reality out loud is destined to crush the spirit of the friends of liberty in the Far East. How many Tibetan monks will be able to take inspiration from the Declaration of Independence if they think it truthfully reads “all men are created equal … but some hold hundreds of billions of dollars in American treasury bonds”?

Of course, these days the Dalai Lama visits the White House (when he’s invited at all) through the back door, next to the trash heaps. That’s a not-so-subtle metaphor for what Cheng Guancheng is experiencing at our hands now. All involved from the American side should be ashamed.

No, I’m not suggesting Romney atone for his past sin of strapping his family dog to his car on vacations by making a canine his running mate.  (Though most veeps at campaign time are called attack dogs.)

Rather, I’m reacting to an intriguing interview between Juan Williams and Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID), a Tea Party congressman from the Class of 2010 who also happens to be Mormon and from Puerto Rico.

He opposes the DREAM Act, but is a staunch advocate for reforming the cumbersome legal immigration process.  As Williams says, Labrador “has been involved in trying to block virtually every one of President Obama’s major legislative initiatives.”  He also “openly mused” about supporting a Tea Party challenger to Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) when it looked like Boehner might cave-in to President Obama’s demands to avert a government shutdown last summer.

As for how Labrador would advise Romney to reach out to Hispanic voters after a bruising primary season:

“I would tell, Romney, as I would tell anybody, is that we need to start talking about being a party of inclusion, we need to start talking about how we’re a, a party for legal immigration, that we actually want to reform the system so people can actually come to the United States in a legal, safe way.”

Sounds like a reasonable pitch to me.

It is one issue to discuss racially motivated violence, and the many relevant questions raised thereby. That is not the purpose of this blog post, even though elsewhere I have been heavily covering a similar incident in Mobile. Instead, this is to express absolute bumfuzzlement at the atrocious journalistic ethics at the Norfolk Virginia-Pilot, which buried for two weeks the story of two of their own reporters getting beaten up by a huge mob in what appears to have been a random, racially motivated attack.

This defies belief. Forget, for a moment, that these are its own reporters. No matter who the victims were, this was news. Here was the question the columnist wrote, rhetorically, in explaining her paper’s lack of coverage: “In this case, editors hesitated to assign a story about their own employees. Would it seem like the paper treated its employees differently from other crime victims?”

Huh? Would editors really not cover such a story if they knew about it, if the victims were anybody other than their own employees? That’s even a worse admission, or claim, than to say they didn’t want to over-cover their own employees. How can any editor worth a bleeping bleepity bleep possibly fail to cover a story of a beating like this one? By any measure, any standard, and all common sense, this is news.

Once again, “journalistic ethics” in this country appears to be a massive oxymoron.

News should not be spiked. This was an example of spiked news. For shame.

Last weekend, liberal MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow and Republican political consultant Alex Castellanos got into a dustup on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press” over pay disparities between men and women in the workplace.

Maddow, working from the first principle of modern American liberalism, assumed that the absence of pure equality is de facto proof of systemic oppression. Here’s part of the exchange (note the utter failure of NBC host David Gregory to moderate impartially):

Since Castellanos didn’t get much a chance to get a word in, allow me to augment his remarks with the observations of Thomas Sowell, writing in his book, “Economic Facts and Fallacies”:

The empirical fact that most male-female economic differences are accounted for by factors other than employer discrimination does not mean that there have been no instances of discrimination, including egregious instances. But anecdotes about those egregious instances cannot explain the general pattern of male-female economic differences and their changes over time. Those changes are continuing. While in the period from 2000 to 2005 most women were still holding jobs making less than the weekly median wages, women were also 1.7 million out of 1.9 million new workers earning above the median wages.

…

Given the numerous factors that impact the incomes and employment of women differently from the way they impact the incomes and employment of men, it can hardly be surprising that there have been substantial income differences between the sexes. Nor can all these differences be assumed to be negative on net balance for women — that is, taking other factors into account besides income. For example, the wives of affluent and wealthy men tend to work less and therefore to earn less. But the wife of a rich man is not poor, no matter how low her income might be.

Had Ms. Maddow hoped to have a real conversation about the causation of pay disparities, there was a rich body of research available to her. She didn’t of course. That wouldn’t make for nearly as good television.

The last time that I used that headline on the blog was a year ago tomorrow. Follow that link and you’ll see that I don’t use it lightly.

But, even though it’s about a decade overdue, you can’t help but smile at the news that came out of Lower Manhattan yesterday. From the New York Daily News:

A steel beam labeled “1271 ft” was secured to One World Trade Center on Monday, making it the tallest building in the city — and demoting the Empire State Building to No. 2.

Applause broke out as the unfinished Ground Zero tower became the king of the New York skyline, eclipsing King Kong’s perch.

The so-called Freedom Tower will eventually be 1,776 feet.

I think Ashton’s blog post yesterday, suggesting that we replace Obamacare with a too-little-hyped proposal from GW Bush, was very much on target. I would add, however, that there are other things that could be added to Bushcare that would make the proposal even better. First, there’s the old stand-by proposal, no less important for being old, to allow health insurance purchases across state lines. Second would be to adopt other proposals mentioned in the Bush plan, which Bush supported but that weren’t technically part of the plan, such as medical liability reform and allowance of Association Health Plans. Third would be a version of Paul Ryan’s proposal to block-grant Medicaid to the states — but with a twist: The original grant amount should exceed the current amounts going to the states, but then save money over the ten-year time frame (as in the Ryan plan) by capping the amount with smaller adjustments than current health-cost inflation. The idea would be to achieve the savings in the years beyond year ten, while really giving states the chance to make expensive up-front investments that many state-level reforms would require. and that would both save money and improve health-care delivery for poor people in the long run.

The model for this would come from an experience Louisiana had in the 1990s, when the feeds (rightly) closed a loophole Louisiana was exploiting, but the closure of which would have bankrupted the state if the closure was implementing immediately. The then 25-year-old director of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, one Bobby Jindal, showed fed officials a way the law could allow added payments in the first two years in exchange for lesser inflation adjustments later, all for a net even total expenditure — but in a way that let the state buy time to implement a series of reforms Jindal was pushing.

It worked.

Anyway, with those additions, I completely agree with every word of Ashton’s post.