Freedom Line Blog

Today, Barack Obama courts veterans with a speech in Reno, Nevada to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.  According to one report, Obama seems to think that he can improve on the 44% support he received in 2008 against celebrated veteran John McCain:

The new initiative is the latest effort by Mr. Obama to focus on veterans, a group he addresses frequently in both official White House events and on the campaign trail. In 2008, exit polls showed that 15% of all voters had served in the military, and Mr. Obama won 44% of their votes, an improvement from Democrat John Kerry’s performance in 2004. This year, the Obama campaign believes he may have a better chance with this group, in part because he is running against former Gov. Mitt Romney, who like Mr. Obama never served in the military, unlike his 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain, a war hero.”

According to a new survey, however, this appears to be yet another electoral dud for Obama.  Rasmussen reports that among military veterans, Obama trails Romney 59% to 35%.  Perhaps at some point Obama will recognize the inverse relationship between his support among veterans and the fact that they’re “a group he addresses frequently.”

Regardless, if it’s this bad for Obama now, imagine what might happen when Romney actually starts matching Obama’s campaign spending burn rate.

This Friday, the 2012 Summer Olympics kick off in London (with an opening ceremony that shows Britain will respond to Beijing’s 2008 triumphalism with cultural self-loathing). Will it be a triumph for national pride, sheer athleticism, and the indomitable human spirit? We can certainly hope so. For the city of London itself? Not so much. Matthew Stevenson gets it right over at New Geography:

Why does anyone persist with the Greek mythology that the Olympics are an engine of economic development, sportsmanship, or peace on earth? London is spending $15 billion on the hope that it can sell enough tickets to synchronized swimming, and earn enough from television ads, to cover the costs of the 30,000 rent-a-cops and military personnel being deployed in the spirit of Olympic harmony.

Even though the Games break few economic records, except those for non-performing sovereign debts, governments around the world scramble madly every four years for the right to act as host, as if influence peddling were an Olympic sport.

The original cost estimate, sold to the British public to convince them to get behind the bid for the 2012 Games, was about $4 billion. Those budget forecasts imagined that, after the event, Olympic sites would be recycled for use as schools, homes for the aged, and handicapped parking, even though earlier Olympic cities have found little use for their table tennis stadiums and aquatic centers…

… At the end of three weeks of the London Games, even if the British army has had to shoot off a few of its surface-to-air missiles, TV commentators will pronounce the Games an immortal success, a triumph of Spartan proportions, and an epic not seen since Jason came back with the golden fleece.

Then, in three years, if not sooner, London will get the $15 billion invoice for its fun summer, and all it will have to show for it will be a few used diving boards and, with luck, some new light-rail. In the words of George Best, the great Northern Irish footballer: “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.”

The record of Olympic Games failing to deliver on grandiose economic promises is simply too consistent to be ignored. Much like stateside subsidies of facilities for professional sports teams, the inevitable outcome is a massive redistribution of resources rather than a surge of economic growth.

We wish the London Olympics well. But we also wish the people of London weren’t footing the bill for the rest of the world’s party.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) 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 (CDT)/5:00 pm (EDT):  Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner:  State Voter Rolls;

4:15 (CDT)5:15 (EDT): Jessica Zuckerman, Research Associate at The Heritage Foundation:  Security at the 2012 Olympic Games;

4:30 (CDT)/5:30 pm (EDT): Marc Scribner, Land-Use and Transportation Policy Analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:  TSA and Full-Body Scanners;

5:00 (CDT)/6:00 pm (EDT):  Ted Bromund, Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation:  UN Arms Trade Treaty and the Second Amendment; and

5:30 (CDT)/6:30 pm (EDT):  Pete Sepp, Executive Vice President at the National Taxpayers Union:  Post Office on Brink of Fiscal Disaster.

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.

In an interview with CFIF, National Review deputy managing editor Kevin Williamson discusses his new book, The Dependency Agenda, and the plot by Democrats to earn votes by making more Americans more dependent on the government.

 Listen to the interview here.

In my column this week I explain the threat the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty poses to every Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

So, what’s the Obama Administration’s official position?

On the surface, the State Department has issued a series of “redlines” that claim to protect American Second Amendment rights to individual gun ownership, including the claim that “There will be no restrictions on civilian possession or trade of firearms otherwise permitted by law or protected by the U.S. Constitution.”

There are at least three reasons to suspect the Obama Administration’s motives.

First, the Obama Administration fought tooth-and-nail against interpreting the Second Amendment to guarantee the right of an individual to own a gun.  Only by a 5-4 decision from the United States Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago did the justices uphold the traditional understanding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, and not a collective right to self-defense provided by the government.

The gun control groups pushing the ATT side with the Obama Administration in seeing the right to self-defense as a collective rather than as an individual right.  After fighting a losing battle for years in Congress, gun controllers opted in 2001 to make their cause global and found willing partners in dictatorial regimes like Syria, Iran and Russia looking for any way to disarm dissident groups while preserving their right to buy and sell guns for national security (i.e. repressing dissidents).

Second, the Fast and Furious scandal where federal agents allowed 2,000 guns to “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels – without the Mexican government’s knowledge – raises a serious question about the Obama Administration’s credibility on gun rights.  Already, one Department of Justice official has been caught in an email speculating how to use F&F as evidence to argue for stronger gun control laws.  Common sense says he wasn’t the only one.

Finally, there’s the Obama Administration’s presence at the ATT convention.

During the George W. Bush years the United States refused to participate in any discussions about an international arms treaty for fear it would lead to a step-by-step move to gut Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

In 2009, the Obama Administration reversed course and announced its support for the ATT.  That buy-in caused negotiations at the UN to accelerate, culminating in the month-long convention in New York this month.

Observers of the ATT convention expect the treaty’s final text to be filled with vague assertions and unattainable aspirations.  But as I point out in my column, the very existence of the ATT poses a serious long-term threat to Americans’ Second Amendment rights because future interpretations of its text can be molded to fit the gun controllers’ policy outcomes.

I suspect the Obama Administration knows this, and is aiding and abetting that very outcome by participating in the negotiations.

The newest item available in the gift shop at Mitt Romney’s campaign website:

As my colleague Mollie Hemingway notes at Ricochet, indignation at the president’s remarks seems to be taking root with a swath of the American people much broader than the conservative base. One can only hope that trend will lead to this t-shirt someday being featured in the wing of the Obama Presidential Library describing what went wrong in 2012.

Following on Troy’s post earlier, it looks like the Israel-Palestine peace process is still DOA.

Two weeks ago, foreign policy expert Ted R. Bromund of the Heritage Foundation blogged about a controversial decision by the United Nations to allow Palestine a seat at the table during the ongoing Arms Trade Treaty (more on that in my column this week).  The move was brokered by Egypt’s new government, and had the unfortunate – and no doubt intended – effect of belittling the Vatican in the process.

Here’s Bromund’s take:

With much shuffling of place cards, all the national delegations moved over two places, and—accompanied by huge knot of delegates and much picture taking—the delegations from the Holy See and Palestine moved from the back of the room (where, as observers of different types, they normally sit behind the alphabetically arranged national member-state dlegations) to the front, ahead of the A-nations like Afghanistan and Albania.

…

…the outlines of the deal became clear: Both the Holy See and the Palestinians had gotten better seats, but neither of them was going to be recognized as full conference participants. The difference was that the Palestinians had evidently agreed to keep quiet and treat this as a victory, whereas the Holy See had not.

Its delegate made an angry speech, arguing that it had expected to participate as a full member in the conference, that it was not being allowed to do so, that this was an “egregious” failure that had seriously damaged its intention to become a state party to the ATT, and that it demanded to be a full participant in future conferences, where its participation as a mere observer at the ATT conference would not be a precedent.

…

Placing the Holy See and the Palestinians on the same level at the conference is a coup for the Palestinians.  Currently the UN recognizes the Holy See is a “non-member state” observer, while the Palestinians are an observer “entity.” The critical difference is that the Holy See is a recognized sovereign state even though it is not a UN member state, while the Palestinians are not. The Palestinians have hinted that, should their bid for full UN member state status fail, they would seek non-member state observer status. While this change would be mostly symbolic in terms of the privileges the Palestinians enjoy in Turtle Bay, it would undeniably represent General Assembly recognition of their claims of statehood and make it far easier for the Palestinians to gain membership in the UN specialized agencies.

For its part, the U.S. delegation chose not to walk out of the conference so it could retain maximum leverage over what promises to be a very bad treaty for citizens oppressed by dictatorial governments around the world.

Still, success at the United Nations depends on playing the long game; inching towards a resolution with half-measures like symbolically getting a seat at the table, even when it’s a seat that can’t vote.

With their symbolic move to the head of the table, right now, the Palestinians are winning.

With most media attention focused on the thrust and parry of the presidential race, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 13-day trip abroad garnered precious little media attention. That’s a shame, because an important message came out of the Secretary’s stop in Israel. It just wasn’t the one she intended. As Seth Mandel notes at Commentary‘s “Contentions” blog:

According to an Israeli official who was briefed on the content of the meetings, Clinton told the different Israeli officials that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad are the best partners the Israelis ever had, adding that “it is unclear who will come after them.”

If Abbas and Fayyad–who resolutely refuse to even meet with Israeli leaders face to face–are the best Palestinian “peace partners” Israel has ever had, it is clear the peace process has gone practically nowhere since it began.

Mandel is precisely right. Peace in the Middle East is such a talisman to American presidents that they often stop thinking about the quality of any potential deal, looking solely for the achievement. That’s easy to do when you’re thinking of it as nothing more than a wing in your presidential library, but harder when you’re considering the lives of the people on the ground.

We may be waiting beyond our lifetimes for meaningful peace in the Middle East. But that’s a far preferable outcome to an agreement reached in haste that condemns the region to increased strife in coming years.

In a typically insightful column, Byron York says there are at least five reasons why Mitt Romney’s campaign seems to be flailing.  Two jumped out at me:

Romney’s business history and taxes are two issues left unresolved from the primary campaign.  During the primaries, Republicans didn’t want to hear fellow Republicans criticizing Romney’s record at Bain Capital.  Some characterized attacks on Romney’s Bain history as attacks on capitalism itself.  Democrats and many independents don’t feel the same way, and Obama and his SuperPAC allies are relentlessly slamming Romney’s business history both nationally and in key states around the country.

…

Newt Gingrich complained loudly — some called it whining — when Romney first hit him with a negative ad barrage in Iowa.  Then, when Romney attacked on a far bigger scale in Florida, Gingrich reacted badly again.  Privately, the Romney campaign, which at times seemed to delight at kicking the hell out of a Republican opponent, had no respect for Gingrich’s tendency to complain when attacked.  Just take it and hit back harder — that was the way they saw it.  Now, however, Romney is complaining about Obama’s attacks.  Romney is far more self-controlled than Gingrich, but the effect is the same; he’s whining about the other guy treating him badly.  It’s the same thing that happened in the primary campaign, only with Romney on the hurting end.

The good news for Romney is that these are correctable problems.

There is an excellent defense to the “vulture capitalism” charge the Obama Administration is recycling from the GOP primaries – Troy wrote it back in January.

As for hitting back, one of the factors York mentioned but I didn’t excerpt was that GOP SuperPACs aren’t landing as many punches on Obama as Democratic SuperPACs are landing on Romney.  The latter is drowning in negative ads in swing states.

Of course, legally, SuperPACs can’t coordinate with presidential campaigns.  But York’s reporting implies that those running GOP SuperPACs aren’t sure how hard to hit Obama and on what issues.  My guess is that Romney doesn’t know himself, and is communicating that with his defensive rhetoric.

Of course, that’s not how the Obama campaign operates.  Like Romney in the primaries, they’re in the general to win.

Unsurprisingly, the Democratic SuperPACs aren’t suffering from the confusion plaguing Romney and his SuperPACs; probably because they know President Obama will “just take (whatever Romney throws)” and want his supporters them to “hit back harder.”

Like I said above, these are correctable problems, if Romney is willing to make the changes necessary to sharpen his rhetoric and toughen up his persona.

So far, that’s a BIG if…

This is a big win for those who don’t want to see the United Nations’ grow in both power and resources. From the Daily Caller:

With 34 Republican senators now opposing a United Nations effort to regulate international waters, the Law of the Sea treaty effectively has no way forward in the U.S. Senate.

Republican Sens. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Rob Portman of Ohio, Mike Johanns of Nebraska and Johnny Isakson of Georgia joined 30 other GOP members in agreeing to vote against the U.N. treaty.

For guidance as to why this was the right decision, one need look no further than an op-ed penned by former Attorney General Edwin Meese earlier this year in the Los Angeles Times:

President Reagan so strongly opposed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that he didn’t just not sign the treaty. He very publicly refused to sign it. He also dismissed the State Department staff that helped negotiate it. And in case anyone didn’t get the message, he sent special envoy Donald Rumsfeld on a globe-trotting mission to explain his opposition and urge other nations to follow suit.

…

In a 1978 radio address titled “Ocean Mining,” he asserted that “no nat[ional] interest of ours could justify handing sovereign control of two-thirds of the Earth’s surface over to the Third World.” He added: “No one has ruled out the idea of a [Law of the Sea] treaty — one which makes sense — but after long years of fruitless negotiating, it became apparent that the underdeveloped nations who now control the General Assembly were looking for a free ride at our expense, again.”

This was exactly what was at stake here. Passage of the Law of the Sea Treaty would have given United Nations bureaucrats a veto over American deep-sea mining efforts, redistributed royalties from American energy development to other nations, and even created the potential for back-door international carbon regulation through the treaty’s requirements for mandatory dispute resolution.

Senate Republicans did the responsible thing — they won one for the Gipper.

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.

2012  may be remembered as the year that Barack Obama dropped the mask. Based on his remarks at a campaign stop in Roanoke, Virginia on Friday, the president has no interest in making his peace with America’s entrepreneurs. In fact, his remarks there should make their blood run cold:

We’ve heard this rap before. It sounds suspiciously like Elizabeth Warren’s pep talk to a room full of agitated Boston liberals. But, if anything, Obama’s remarks are actually worse. Warren didn’t go so far as to denigrate hard work and intelligence, which the president seems to consider middling factors when it comes to being successful in life (note to the president: I’d absolutely love to meet these armies of workaholic geniuses who wouldn’t be succeeding without the federal government).

The asininity per square inch of this speech is pretty daunting, but here are a few corrective notes:

• Notice the examples Obama uses — teachers, firefighters, and infrastructure. These are all (by relatively expansive definitions, anyway) public goods. If there were a caucus of conservatives out there advocating boarding up schools, abolishing fire departments, and moving to a system of rope bridges, the president would have a point, but these are generally uncontroversial examples of public expenditures. Moreover, they’re not areas that are primarily financed by the federal government. Left unsaid is why taxes should increase to fund green-energy boondoggles like Solyndra, PR efforts for the stimulus package, or six-figure salaries for the Interior Department’s Twitter monkey.

• The constant liberal assertion that the economic growth of the 1990s — coming on the heels of Bill Clinton’s tax increases — shows that taxes don’t effect the broader economy confuses correlation with causation and ignores the effects of NAFTA, the IT revolution, welfare reform, etc. In truth, the 90s likely boomed less than they would have without Clinton’s tax hikes, something that the work of Obama’s own economic advisers suggests.

• Liberals love to trot out the example of the internet as government innovation that works, but it’s worth noting that the internet wasn’t designed with commercial purposes in mind, but rather as a communications tool for the military. And, in fact, many of the lingering inefficiencies of the internet stem from its government paternity, and a whole host of the improvements that have been made to it owe to market forces.

In my column last week, I outlined how ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion is a way to sneak in socialized medicine by making it cheaper to accept government health insurance instead of paying for it (directly) oneself.

But the Medicaid expansion is only half of ObamaCare’s formula for moving most of America onto a federally-run health system.

The other half is made up of the so-called state-based health insurance exchanges that are subsidized (and regulated) by the federal government.  With the individual mandate in place, people that fail to qualify for Medicaid will most likely be forced into the exchanges.  (ObamaCare purposefully makes it cheaper for employers to pay a fine rather than cover employees.)

Writing in the New York Times on Saturday, Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, explains how to make the best of the very bad possibility that President Barack Obama is reelected and ObamaCare continues to be implemented, albeit with the inevitable cost overruns.

There is one way this might work: by limiting the subsidies for insurance. Note that the law itself mandates cuts if those subsidies exceed a certain percentage of gross domestic product by 2018. Most likely, the reform could not stop there, because the insurance cost burden for many Americans would feel intolerably high without the subsidies.

The next step, therefore, would lower costs by limiting the mandate to covering catastrophic conditions. Yet a further step would remove the mandate for noncatastrophic coverage, thus giving people more control over how much they want to spend on health care versus other priorities.

We would then have government-subsidized and mandated catastrophic insurance, and a freer market for other health care expenditures. We might even return to a health savings account approach on the noncatastrophic side.

That’s far from a perfect outcome, but it’s probably the most positive path that can be achieved.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

A bit late, I post this tremendous account by Christian Adams of the almost criminally incompetent (and ideologically nuts) Justice Department behavior in a key trial over Texas’ voter-ID law. Amazing stuff.

One tiny excerpt:

But the testimony got even more ridiculous.  San Antonio teenager Victoria Rodriguez travelled the whole way to Washington, D.C., for the clown show.  She testified that she did not have photo ID, even though she had the birth certificate to get a free one.  Her excuse?  She couldn’t find the time. Neither could her parents be bothered to drive her to get the ID.  One wonders if Victoria Rodriguez ever leaves the house, or when she does, if she has other priorities besides voting.  I’d suspect so.

One also wonders why DOJ lawyers decided to put her on the stand.

This travesty, this abomination, is typical of the Obama-Holder (in)Justice Department. For shame.

The Heritage Foundation picked up on a little noticed administrative policy change announced yesterday by the Department of Health and Human Services that removes the work requirements in the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation.

Here’s how Heritage characterizes the Obama HHS’s new policy:

[On Thursday, July 13, 2012] the Obama Administration issued a new directive stating that the traditional TANF work requirements can be waived or overridden by a legal device called the section 1115 waiver authority under the Social Security law (42 U.S.C. 1315).

Section 1115 states that “the Secretary may waive compliance with any of the requirements” of specified parts of various laws. But this is not an open-ended authority: Any provision of law that can be waived under section 1115 must be listed in section 1115 itself. The work provisions of the TANF program are contained in section 407 (entitled, appropriately, “mandatory work requirements”). Critically, this section, as well as most other TANF requirements, are deliberately not listed in section 1115; they are not waiveable.

In establishing TANF, Congress deliberately exempted or shielded nearly all of the TANF program from the section 1115 waiver authority. They did not want the law to be rewritten at the whim of Health and Human Services (HHS) bureaucrats. Of the roughly 35 sections of the TANF law, only one is listed as waiveable under section 1115. This is section 402.

Section 402 describes state plans—reports that state governments must file to HHS describing the actions they will undertake to comply with the many requirements established in the other sections of the TANF law. The authority to waive section 402 provides the option to waive state reporting requirements only, not to overturn the core requirements of the TANF program contained in the other sections of the TANF law.

The new Obama dictate asserts that because the work requirements, established in section 407, are mentioned as an item that state governments must report about in section 402, all the work requirements can be waived. This removes the core of the TANF program; TANF becomes a blank slate that HHS bureaucrats and liberal state bureaucrats can rewrite at will.

This newly created waiver authority builds on the unprecedented work of the Education Department waiving No Child Left Behind requirements, and HHS’s previous ObamaCare waivers.

It also reaffirms the Obama Administration’s commitment to its “We Can’t Wait” vision of governance, which says that if Congress won’t cooperate in passing liberal policies, then the President and his bureaucratic administrators will rewrite the law without them.

The administrative state remains constitutionally suspect because the Supreme Court has never explained how bureaucracies that exercise quasi-judicial, executive and legislative powers align with the separation-of-powers principle enshrined in our Constitution.  (Hint: They don’t.)

But because the Supreme Court has chosen to allow an unconstitutional barnacle to be grafted onto our ship of state, we now have liberal policy wonks passing, enforcing, and adjudicating laws through waiver requirements that are completely beyond the reach of democratic accountability.  (Sound familiar?)

The Obama Administration’s use of waivers to replace existing law with its own policies is bringing us to a tipping point.  If taken to its logical conclusion, Congress need not pass another law so long as the Executive can waive-and-replace its contents at will.

Like so many other issues this election cycle, Mitt Romney and others need to stress the importance of the Obama Administration’s lawless disregard for our constitutional system.  Administrative fiat cannot be accepted as a valid substitute for legislative deliberation.  If it is, then America will in every sense be a nation of men and not laws.

When one tries too hard to be popular, the result is usually less popularity.  That appears no less true when it comes to the Supreme Court.

Last week, we highlighted how public approval of the Supreme Court instantly plummeted following last month’s ObamaCare decision.  One week prior to the Court’s decision, twice as many people – 36% to 17% – believed that the Court was doing a “good” or “excellent” job as opposed to a “poor” job.  In the immediate aftermath of that decision, almost as many said that the Court was doing a “poor” job as a “good” or “excellent” job.  Additionally, over twice as many Americans – 56% to 27% – now believe that the justices pursue political agendas as opposed to maintaining impartiality.

As reported by The Hill, a poll this week confirms that backlash:

Negative opinions of the Supreme Court jumped in the wake of its ruling on the constitutionality of the 2010 health care law, according to a new Pew Research Center poll released on Thursday that shows the percentage who have an unfavorable opinion of the Court is higher than at any point since Pew began tracking it in 1985.”

And that’s not just among Republicans.  According to the poll, disapproval among independents increased while approval remained unchanged.  That’s not good news for Barack Obama, and it certainly doesn’t reflect well on Chief Justice John Roberts’s apparent attempt to sacrifice judicial prudence at the altar of popularity.

In an interview with CFIF, Peter Ferrara, Carleson Center for Public Policy Senior Fellow, discusses the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act and how to repeal and replace ObamaCare.

Listen to the interview here.