Freedom Line Blog

The old saying goes that “close” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Well, last night’s Wisconsin recall election must have been a really explosive hand grenade, according to the Washington Post. Drudge has been making fun of the Post for sub-heading its story on Gov. Scott Walker’s victory a “close vote.” Well, I went the extra mile and compared this “close” election to the Post’s handling of another one with very similar results.

In reporting on Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, the text of the Post story called it a “Democratic rout.” And what was Obama’s margin over John McCain? It was 7.2 percent. What was Walker’s margin over Tom Barrett last night? A nearly identical 6.8 percent. Yet the first was a “rout,” while the second was a “close vote.”

Hmmmm….. maybe what the Post meant was that last night was “close to being a rout.”

Pity our poor friends in Europe. They just can’t seem to stomach the lesson that the faltering state of the continental monetary union has made all but impossible to ignore. Rather than making a clean break from the common currency, it now appears that the smart set wants to double down. This item, appearing earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, is nothing short of chilling in its implications:

Germany is sending strong signals that it would eventually be willing to lift its objections to ideas such as common euro-zone bonds or mutual support for European banks if other European governments were to agree to transfer further powers to Europe.

If embraced, the move would deepen in fundamental ways Europe’s political and fiscal union and represent one of the boldest steps taken by the bloc since the euro was launched. Germany has never before been willing to discuss the conditions it believes necessary to move toward assuming common risks within the euro zone. Now, although the end may be a long way off, it appears willing to discuss those conditions.

“The more that other member states get involved with this development and are prepared to give up sovereign rights to get European institutions more involved, the more we will be prepared to play an active role in developing things like a banking union,” a German official familiar with the discussions told The Wall Street Journal. “You can’t have one without the other.”

Translation: the Europeans are seriously considering throwing the car in reverse and seeing just how far they can push the speedometer. It’s true that an economic union without a matching political consolidation was always doomed to fail (the practical effect has been Southern Europe living off the North), but the move towards a true United States of Europe brings to mind James Madison’s observation from Federalist #10 about destroying liberty in order to cure the problem of political faction: the cure is worse than the disease.

A continent-wide government will destroy all pretense of national sovereignty throughout Europe, leaving the bureaucrats of Brussels to steer a bold new course that will vanquish the national character of some of the world’s proudest nations, perpetuate a failing economic model, and cede previously democratic powers to unelected technocrats.

Let us pray that Europe doesn’t go down this road. If it does, the burden of Western leadership will fall even more disproportionately on American shoulders than it does already.

Cato expert Mark A. Calabria suggests a simple reform that would make decisions by the Federal Reserve Board more responsive to America’s different regional economies – include at least one board member from each Federal Reserve region.

Congress imposed a “geographic diversity” requirement upon the Fed for good reason. Regions of the country do not move together. Nevada’s 11.7 percent unemployment rate, for example, is significantly above South Dakota’s 4.3 percent. If the Fed lacks a wide range of voices, then its policies are not likely to reflect the economic differences across our country. An interest rate policy that might be appropriate for New York City, and its financial sector, might not be appropriate for industrial Ohio. Just the fact that only one current Fed governor, Janet Yellen from San Francisco, is from west of the Mississippi raises questions as to the legitimacy of Fed decision-making.

Calabria points out that another benefit of diversifying board membership is that doing so follows the law.  The Federal Reserve Act requires that, regarding members of the board, “not more than one of whom shall be selected from any one Federal Reserve district,” so that those making monetary policy decisions “shall have due regard to a fair representation of… geographical divisions of the country.”

Unsurprisingly, this easy to apply standard was recently violated when President Barack Obama nominated and the liberal Senate confirmed new members from Massachusetts and Maryland, even though two current members also hail from those states.  Combine this with the New York Fed’s distinction as the only district with a permanent vote, and there is a regional – and arguably illegal – bias in favor of the Northeast.

Every region of the country should be represented equally when the Fed Governors decide how much money to print and where to peg the interest rate.  To be sure, it would be better if the free market was deciding these issues, but that’s not the reality of the 21st century’s administrative state.  With that in mind, perhaps the cry could be, “No manipulation without representation!”

Those who believe that it’s in the best interest of the nation for Barack Obama’s presidency to terminate next January have been feeling their oats a bit lately. As Jennifer Rubin noted yesterday at the Washington Post’s “Right Turn” blog:

Whatever you think is the cause of the economic doldrums, it has now dawned on the Democrats and the press that Obama could lose this thing.

Quite so. But even if one indulges in the most optimistic projections for November, there’s a danger in getting too comfortable. There could be mischief brewing for the lame duck congressional session following the presidential election. As Conn Carroll reports in the Washington Examiner:

At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Wednesday, [Senator John] Kerry announced that he would not be submitting the United Nations Conventions on the Law of the Sea [LOST] for a vote before the November election. Instead, Kerry intends to hold a series of hearings before the election, building the case for passage, before pushing the treaty in a lame-duck session. This is the exact same game plan Kerry executed to pass the New START treaty during the 2010 lame duck…

…If the Senate approves LOST this December, any country that believes itself harmed by global warming could force the U.S. into binding arbitration, most likely in front of the Annex VII Arbitral Tribunal, LOST’s default dispute resolution forum.

Any judgment from that tribunal would be final, unappealable, and immediately enforceable in U.S. federal court. In 1982, a similar arbitration body forced Canada to set hourly caps on their sulfur dioxide emissions, causing industry to spend millions on mitigation efforts. A LOST tribunal could set similar caps on U.S. carbon emissions, triggering trillions in economic damage.

Cap and trade, of course, was Obama’s other major first-term initiative besides Obamacare, but when the politics surrounding the former issue became toxic — and congressional Republicans hit back hard on the cap and trade plan — the administration backed off. But is anyone willing to bet that Obama’s sense of fair play will prevent him from backdooring through the policy in the dying days of his administration?

If so, you’d have to believe that a president who has no compunctions about stripping fundamental religious freedoms through administrative fiat, who’s already busy promising the Russian government that he’ll “have more flexibility” on missile defense when he doesn’t have to face the American electorate again, and who has already flirted with extralegal methods for enacting international carbon reduction would suddenly be stricken by conscience after facing the sting of rejection from the voters.

Those odds don’t look good. Which is why conservatives need to remain on guard until the day Obama departs for Chicago.

Technically, the pricey new ship in the U.S. Navy’s fleet as of 2014 is a destroyer named DDG-1000.  It comes equipped with electromagnetic “railguns,” a “wave-piercing” hull that doesn’t leave a wake, and “advanced sonar and missiles.”

But before you get too excited, the DDG-1000 program might get terminated before too long for two reasons.

The first is that like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the DDG-1000 is threatening to set records with cost overruns.  According to Fox News, at $3.1 billion per ship a DDG-1000 costs about twice as much as current destroyers.  (The total price tag hits $7 billion each “when research and development is added in…”)

The second is perhaps even more problematic.  Chinese Rear Admiral Zhang Zhaozhong issued a warning about the alleged capabilities of the ‘super-stealth’ DDG-1000.  All he would need to overcome the ship’s technological advantages would be to swarm the vessel with several fishing boats laden with explosives.  If one gets through – on a suicide mission, of course – it could literally blow up US taxpayers’ investment.

Nice things cost money, and even the best technology can be laid to waste by comparatively low-tech responses.  Still, public and private watch dog groups need to keep an eye on how the DDG-1000 develops.  We can’t afford not to.

American liberals need to be thinking abut 1975. That was the year that President Gerald Ford denied Russian dissident and staunch anti-communist Alexander Solzhenitsyn an audience at the White House, a snub to all those who defended freedom against the depredations of the Soviet Union throughout the world.

Despite the fact that Ford was a Republican president (albeit an unelected one), the conservative movement (to its credit) disowned him on the issue. By the following year, the indignity that Ford forced upon the author of The Gulag Archipelago was one of the many reasons that conservatives were looking to deny the incumbent president renomination. So why is this germane to liberals? Because of this passage, courtesy of Matthew Kaminski at the Wall Street Journal, which Tim also highlighted in his column last week:

Among this year’s 13 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Mr. Obama posthumously honored Jan Karski. As a member of the Polish underground during World War II, Karski was the first to provide eyewitness evidence of the Nazi extermination of Jews in occupied Europe…

The Poles wanted Lech Walesa to receive the medal on Karski’s behalf, but the White House nixed the choice. Last year, during Mr. Obama’s visit to Poland, the hero of Solidarity refused to attend a large gathering to meet the younger leader. Mr. Walesa felt entitled to a tete-a-tete. Administration officials told Polish journalists that Mr. Walesa’s presence was too “political” for this week’s occasion. Poles read something else into it: Mr. Obama holds grudges.

Lech Walesa was leading the fight for the freedom of  the Polish people back when Barack Obama was still sashaying around his New York apartment in a sarong, scribbling pretentious, adolescent musings to one of his composite girlfriends. Walesa deserved the one-on-one in Poland. And he deserved the stage in the East Room of the White House last week for the Medal of Freedom Ceremony.

As for Barack Obama, he deserves the rebuke of all those who esteem freedom, but especially his fellow liberals. If they can’t bring themselves to have a moment similar to the one conservatives had in 1975 — one in which principle trumps partisanship — they will have revealed their supposed affection for human rights to be little more than election year pablum.

Byron York explains why President Barack Obama is not campaigning on behalf of Tom Barrett, the Democrat running against Republican Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin’s recall election on Tuesday:

The latest poll on the recall battle shows why Obama is staying away. It’s not just that he doesn’t want to appear with a loser. Perhaps just as importantly, there is no advantage for Obama to risk his own popularity by making a high-profile visit to oppose policies that are finding increasing favor with voters.

The new poll, from Marquette University Law School, shows Walker leading Barrett 52 percent to 45 percent. Beyond the horse race, the Marquette pollsters also asked about specific elements of Walker’s reforms. It turns out some of the key elements of those policies — reforms Obama strongly opposed — are now winning the day.

Those policies include:

• 75% of voters in favor of “requiring public employees to contribute to their own pensions and pay more for health insurance.”

• 55% of voters in favor of “limiting collective bargaining for most public employees.”

• 54% of voters thinking Wisconsin is better off in the long run because of the changes in state government

With these numbers and 52% of voters preferring him, Scott Walker appears likely to keep his job.  If Wisconsin voters start to apply the same poll questions to Obama’s failed economic policies – forty months of 8% unemployment, doubling the national debt in just one term in office – they’ll come to the opposite conclusion about the President.

No wonder he doesn’t want to be seen in Wisconsin.

The Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) this week joined a coalition of leading free market organizations opposing the federal Black Box Mandate, a provision included in the Senate version of the Highway Bill (SEC. 31406 of S. 1813) that would require all passenger motor vehicles in the United States, beginning with model year 2015, to be fitted with event data recorders (EDRs) that would collect all driving habits of consumers. 

The provision, which is currently being contemplated in a House-Senate conference committee on the Highway Bill, threatens to violate the privacy rights of consumers and burdens manufactures and small businesses with yet another costly, misguided and unnecessary federal mandate.

CFIF is encouraging all of our supporters and activists to visit the coalition website and sign the pledge to their Members of Congress and President Obama “to oppose any federal action to mandate the use of black box data recorders in personal vehicles.”  The pledge goes on to state that the Black Box Mandate:

1. Is an infringement on personal privacy and freedoms. 
2. Would be a slippery slope for Government to track citizen’s transportation habits and location. 
3. Is both an unnecessary expansion of government police power and an undue mandate on consumers and business.

Visit http://www.blackboxmandate.org to sign the pledge now.

From the Wall Street Journal today:

Mr. Holder’s racial incitement strategy. If Mr. Obama is going to win those swing states again, he needs another burst of minority turnout. If hope won’t get them to vote for Mr. Obama again, then how about fear?…. The courts will eventually expose much of this as meritless, but it’s a shame the media won’t call Mr. Holder on this strategy before the election. Imagine the uproar if a Republican AG pursued a similar strategy. It’s worse than a shame that America’s first black Attorney General is using his considerable power to inflame racial antagonism.

On a subject near and dear to my heart, protecting the country from massive vote fraud of the sort actively encouraged by the Obamites in and out of government, columnist Thomas Sowell lays it on the line:

When a white man with no identification can go to a voting site, impersonate a black man who lives in that district, and get his ballot offered to him, then it is far too easy to commit voter fraud.

Does not Attorney General Eric Holder understand that? Of course he understands it! The man is not stupid, despite his other failings.

Holder’s pooh-poohing of voter fraud dangers, and hyping the “threat” of denying minorities “access” to the voting booth, are completely consistent with his drive to (1) maximize the number of votes by black Democrats and (2) spread as much fear as possible among minorities that they are under siege, and that the Democrats are their only protection and salvation.

It is a political protection racket, with payoffs in votes.

Sowell also promotes the single most important book released in the past year:

The book is titled “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” It names names, dates and places around the country where the Department of Justice stopped its own attorneys from pursuing cases of voter fraud and intimidation, when it was blacks who were accused of these crimes.

If Mr. Adams is lying, he has taken a huge risk in citing individuals by name and quoting them directly. Yet, despite the fact that most of those he accuses are lawyers, apparently no one has sued him. Moreover, Adams has also testified under oath before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, on the racial double standard at the Department of Justice, when it comes to voting rights.

Not a single word of Adams’ book has come close to having been refuted. Everybody should read it. It will make you fear for our republic — unless we stop the deliberate lawlessness of Eric Holder’s [In]Justice Department.

Economists projected that the U.S. economy would add 160,000 new jobs last month.  Instead, the Labor Department announced today that we only added 69,000.

Additionally, the unemployment rate increased to 8.2% in May from 8.1% in April.  That makes 40 consecutive months above 8%, a new record.  Keep in mind that the Obama Administration claimed we wouldn’t reach 8% in the first place if his failed “stimulus” spending bill passed back in early 2009.

This announcement also arrives one day after the Commerce Department announced that the American economy grew only 1.9% in the first quarter of 2012, short of its initial 2.2% estimate.

More broadly, the economy must add 200,000 jobs each month just to keep pace with population growth and materially reduce the unemployment rate, and today’s report follows a disappointing 115,000 number in April.  The Obama Administration claims that the last recession was “the worst since the Great Depression,” but that’s false.  The early-1980s recession was substantially worse – higher unemployment, higher inflation and higher interest rates.  President Reagan’s policy of lower taxes and less regulation, however, rapidly reduced unemployment from 10.4% to 6.7% in the three years following the effective date of his tax cuts in January 1983.  In contrast, Obama’s policies of higher spending, higher deficits, higher taxes and more regulation have caused the worst cyclical recovery since the Great Depression.