Freedom Line Blog

At the University of Mobile’s Center for Leadership, I review the record showing that limited government leads to stronger economies. There much more in the column than the following passage, but here’s a taste:

Indeed, historians are hard-pressed to show any time in American history when major domestic-discretionary spending growth actually generated a stronger economy. But when Reagan cut discretionary spending in the 1980s, combined with his tax cuts, the economy did superbly. When the Newt Gingrich Congress passed major spending cuts in 1995-96, the economy again boomed.

In an interview with CFIF, Steve Pociask, President of the American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research, discusses his organization’s new study, “The Monopolization of Forest Certification” and the consequences of “green certification” monopolies on consumer welfare.

Listen to the interview here.

From today’s installment of Ben Domenech’s The Transom:

The Gallup likely voter screen now has Mitt Romney leading President Obama 51-45.  No candidate who’s had a majority in the Gallup LV poll at this point has lost the election. Which means that if Romney does become the first to lose, it will be due to a late-breaking October surprise, or because Obama’s team outworks them on the ground in key swing states.

Buckle your seat belts, folks. The next few weeks are going to get very exciting.

I have a slightly different take on last night’s debate than Quin. Like my colleague, I thought that Romney’s performance was serviceable, though I won’t go so far as to say he ‘won.’ Truth be told, I don’t think either candidate did much to improve their standing with the small slice of the electorate that still remains undecided, as that group tends to prize style over substance and the constant sniping between the two candidates probably left the swing voters cold to the political process as a whole (that tendency also worked at cross-purposes with both campaigns’ efforts to win over female voters, who are notoriously averse to that kind of incivility).

I also saw a missed opportunity last night, but it wasn’t Obamacare (where I think Romney is unavoidably uncomfortable); it was Libya, where he completely botched an opportunity to call Obama out on his administration’s meandering, thumbless response to the attack in Benghazi (damage that was compounded by moderator Candy Crowley inappropriately — and incorrectly — intervening to agree with Obama that he had framed the assault as a terrorist attack from the beginning).

After the first debate, sources inside the Romney campaign made it known that they had encouraged the candidate to speak in a natural tone — as if he were addressing a group of investors — rather than memorizing sound bites and talking points. It worked for Romney as long as the topic was the economy, where he is in his element. But I hope that the team in Boston encourages a little more thoughtful planning as we head towards Monday night’s foreign policy debate.

Romney has never shown a particularly deep interest in — or understanding of — foreign policy, a trait which I’ve noted in the past could be a potential liability (though his instincts are, of course, far preferable to Obama’s). While I think next week’s debate will easily be the least consequential of the three (both because it’s last chronologically, and because foreign policy will not be a central issue of this campaign), Romney still can’t afford to be as lost at sea as he was at the end of last night’s town hall. Time to hit the briefing books.

Robert Stacy McCain: “By highlighting the Libyan issue and adding a new element of controversy, however, Crowley inadvertently ensured that the administration’s failure in Benghazi will be the focus of post-debate news coverage — which is unlikely to improve Obama’s re-election chances.”

Indeed, every news site covering the presidential campaign has at least one entry mentioning the Libya story – none of it favorable to the Obama campaign.

And even though some are prone to think Mitt Romney missed his one great opportunity to skewer President Obama with the Libya debacle, Romney gets another chance.  The next and last debate is focused solely on foreign policy.

Wanna bet Mitt will be ready next time?

I agreed with multiple focus groups last night, and not with the narrow margins pro-Obama in the straight polls, that Romney emerged from the debate last night in a slightly better position than he went in.

In short, he won. He is now in decent shape to eke out a victory.

That said, I think he and his campaign have committed serious political malpractice by not repeatedly and effectively attacking Obama on ObamaCare, either in the debates or in commercials or in TV interviews. It should be especially easy to blast the dozen-plus taxes on the middle class within ObamaCare (including the quasi-tax of the individual mandate, which remains deeply unpopular) — and not just easy but downright simple to blast him on the medical device tax, to which I keep referring in multiple posts and columns here and elsewhere. Of the many, many, many, many opportunities and issues the Romney campaign has left lying on the table, unused, this is the one with the least complications, the most levels of upside, and the least (meaning zero) downside.

Again, I do think Romney has won both debates. I do think he has a slightly better chance now than Obama does to win this election (my last “forced count” had him at 272 electoral votes to 266 for Obama, but that changes every other day). I think his campaign overall is far sharper than it was a month ago.

But Lord Almighty, how can he fail to take advantage of such a big Obama weakness?

Repeat after me: “ObamaCare puts a major punitive tax on pacemakers, asthma inhalers, insulin pumps, and prosthetic limbs like those that make such a difference to our wounded warriors. Even former Democratic Senator Evan Bayh has written that the tax already is costing hundreds of jobs, not to mention all of the negative health effects on people the tax will hurt. Where’s the compassion in that?”

Come to think of it, maybe the wounded warrior aspect of this will give Romney an opening in the “foreign policy” debate……

Remember Darden Restaurants? As I blogged last year, they’re the parent company of Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and LongHorn Steakhouse that decided to codify Michelle Obama’s recommendations about nutrition in the menus of their franchises. But their latest change in corporate policy has far more ominous implications for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. From the Orlando Sentinel:

In an experiment apparently aimed at keeping down the cost of health-care reform, Orlando-based Darden Restaurants has stopped offering full-time schedules to many hourly workers in at least a few Olive Gardens, Red Lobsters and LongHorn Steakhouses.

Darden said the test is taking place in “a select number” of restaurants in four markets, including Central Florida, but would not give details. The company said there has been no decision made about expanding it.

In an emailed statement, Darden said staffing changes are “just one of the many things we are evaluating to help us address the cost implications health care reform will have on our business. There are still many unanswered questions regarding the health care regulations and we simply do not have enough information to make any decisions at this time.”

Analysts say many other companies, including the White Castle hamburger chain, are considering employing fewer full-timers because of key features of the Affordable Care Act scheduled to go into effect in 2014. Under that law, large companies must provide affordable health insurance to employees working an average of at least 30 hours per week.

If they do not, the companies can face fines of up to $3,000 for each employee who then turns to an exchange — an online marketplace— for insurance.

So in the course of a year, the Obama Administration has cost me my Olive Garden breadsticks and Darden employees a sizable chunk of their livelihood. I’ll be honest: the first one verges on an impeachable offense in my book. But the second one is inexcusable. It’s underemployment by legislative fiat.

So remember this fact when you hear Barack Obama tout himself as a champion of the middle class in tonight’s debate: the Darden example is representative — working Americans without healthcare and with smaller paychecks.

The Heritage Foundation tees up five issues that so far haven’t been mentioned in the Romney-Obama or Ryan-Biden matchups:

1)      Welfare Reform

2)      Trade

3)      Medicaid

4)      Federal Spending and Debt

5)      American-Produced Energy

Each of these is not only critical to American prosperity, but also conveniently is attached to a disastrous policy decision by the Obama Administration.

This summer Obama’s HHS gutted the work requirement for receiving welfare checks that was the hallmark of the mid-1990’s reform.

The President and his fellow liberals in Congress held hostage free trade agreements negotiated by the Bush Administration as a favor to labor unions, and in the process damaged our international standing.

Obamacare is scheduled to hit Medicaid doctors with a 19 percent pay cut starting in 2014.

This is the fourth consecutive year of $1 trillion budget deficits presided over by President Obama, and there is no indication the incumbent will do anything differently if reelected.

As for domestic energy production, Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline angered not only consumers paying high gasoline prices, but also the unionized labor that stood to benefit from short- and long-term job creation.

Mitt Romney should look for ways to insert these failures of leadership into his answers during tonight’s townhall debate with Barack Obama.  People need to be reminded that the President’s kneejerk liberalism is bankrupting the country.

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.

Good news and bad news about the movie Atlas Shrugged II. The bad news first.  Samantha Mathis is, alas, nowhere near as good a Dagny Taggart as Taylor Schilling was in part one of the movie saga. Mathis tries hard, but she just doesn’t come off as tough enough, as angular enough, as enough of a force of nature, as Dagny needs to be. Schilling, in the first flick, got it pretty darn well, although she wasn’t perfect. Jason Beghe is okay in the new one as Hank Rearden, although not quite as good as the very, very good Grant Bowler in the first one. And so on down the line, with all the actors in the second not quite living up to (or badly failing to live up to in a few cases) what were surprisingly decent performances in the first, and with the plot not moving anywhere near as insistently or smartly as the plot in the first. (One note: While the actor playing the evil Wesley Mouch in the second doesn’t quite fit the book’s version of Mouch the way the first actor did, he DOES add a useful dimension: Take away the gray, and he has looks remarkably similar to Tom Perez, the dishonesty and ill-motivated head of the civil rights division in the corrupt Obama/Holder Justice Department. He also is believable a bad, bad dude. It’s sort of creepy.)

Matter of fact, in rewatching the first one the night before I watched part II, I found it remarkably effective.

But, on to Part II: As in the first flick, part II does a superb job of attacking statism. So much of what it portrays, with remarkable faithfulness to Ayn Rand’s novel, is frighteningly similar to things we see these days from Obama Land. It is easy to imagine a “State Science Institute” under Obama with outsized and illicit power. It is easy to see Obama’s team pushing various pieces of legislation outlawing forms of economic competition, freezing wages and prices and even job status, and doing all sorts of other things the bad guys do in Atlas Shrugged II. So much of the rhetoric from the statists in the fictional account is so similar to the rhetoric from statists in real life in the United States that one cannot help but see the slope down into tyranny as a very real possibility.

I don’t think a lot of Americans will see the movie, but anybody who does see it who isn’t already convinced of the evils of statism should come away from the movie with a newfound appreciation for liberty. And while the movie isn’t a thrill a minute, it does definitely hold one’s interest and does definitely provide decent entertainment value. Indeed, my wife and I both found it more entertaining, more worth seeing, than the vast majority of what Hollywood turns out these days.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I am no Randian. I do not come anywhere near her in terms of faith: I am a devout Christian; she is an atheist. I utterly reject her rejection of philanthropy, compassion, etcetera. I do not worship the dollar, or even make a fetish of it. I find a great deal of her philosophy to border on being monstrous. And I utterly reject her idea of people of talent going “on strike” in order to let the world collapse and then pick up the pieces.

In short, I do not agree with many of Rand’s prescriptions. But I DO agree, wholeheartedly, with many of her diagnoses of statist ills, dangers, and evils. Her version of a dystopia is far too close to today’s emerging realities to be comfortable. Her warnings are well worth hearing, even if she then prescribes snake oil rather than the best, most effective medicine.

All of which is a diversion from the main point of this post: First, please do go rent part one of Atlas Shrugged, the movie. Then go to the theater to see Atlas Shrugged II, and bring a “swing voter” friend or two.

All of you will enjoy it, and your friends might be swayed in the direction of freedom.

Der Spiegel today carries a chilling profile of General Mohammad Ali Jafari, Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, that includes this provocative piece of intelligence:

… [Amongst Iranian hardliners] Jafari, 55, is seen being particularly unyielding. In 2009, for example, he declared that Iran would fire missiles at Israel’s nuclear research center in Dimona if the Israelis attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities — knowing full well that such an attack would result in several thousand deaths on both sides.

Now Jafari and his supporters are allegedly preparing new potential horrors. Western intelligence agencies have acquired a plan marked “top secret” and code-named “Murky Water.” Together with Ali Fadawi, an admiral in the Pasdaran, Jafari is thought to have proposed a senseless act of sabotage: to intentionally cause an environmental catastrophe in the Strait of Hormuz.

The goal of the plan seems to be that of contaminating the strait so as to temporarily close the important shipping route for international oil tankers, thereby “punishing” the Arab countries that are hostile to Iran and forcing the West to join Iran in a large-scale cleanup operation — one that might require the temporary suspension of sanctions against Tehran.

I don’t know which is the more disturbing thought: that a senior official in the Iranian military would be willing to consider such gratuitous environmental destruction — or that it might be the only thing that gets the left interested in the evils of the Iranian regime.

John Fund says that the White House blame-shifting for the Libya fiasco is causing a rift inside the Administration:

Obama officials may have made a key mistake when, in their panic, they attempted to lay blame for the Libyan fiasco solely on others. White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that responsibility for Libya lay with the State Department, not the White House. Ed Klein, a former New York Times editor who has authored recent biographies of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, says his sources tell him that Bill Clinton is already pulling together an informal legal team to create a defense in case Obama officials continue to point the finger in Hillary’s direction.

“If she is left with this stain on her reputation, it could seriously damage her chances for election” as president in 2016, Klein told the Daily Caller.

So, after four years as a loyal Secretary of State, THIS is how Hillary Clinton gets rewarded by the man who beat her in the 2008 Democratic primaries?

Bill must be fuming.  Barack should beware a Bubba-eruption.

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):  Ryan Wiggins, Field Director for American Majority Action’s Pensacola Liberty Headquarters:  Engaging Citizens in the Political Process;

4:30 (CDT)/5:30 pm (EDT):  Stephen Pociask, President, American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research:  Cost of Going Green and LEED;

5:00 (CDT)/6:00 pm (EDT):  Bay Buchanan, Political Strategist, Pundit and Author:  Election 2012;  and

5:30 (CDT)/6:30 pm (EDT):  Timothy Lee, CFIF:  TalktoYourPilot.com and SCOTUS Affirmative Action Case.

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

You can’t make this stuff up. You just can’t.

The Fox affiliate in D.C. reports that Carlos Slim, a Mexican telecom billionaire and at $70 billion the world’s richest man, is adding to his net worth by owning a controlling stake in a company that specializes in making $10 off of every “Obamaphone” it distributes to eligible Americans.

But although Slim himself is said to have donated to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, it’s the mogul’s American-based surrogate, Frederick “F.J.” Pollack, who seems to be greasing the skids.  Per Fox:

Pollak has donated at least $156,500 to Democratic candidates and committees this cycle, including at least $50,000 to the Obama campaign. His wife, Abigail, is a campaign bundler for Obama and has raised more than $632,000 for the president this cycle, and more than $1.5 million since 2007. She has personally contributed more than $200,000 to Democratic candidates and committees since 2008.

The Pollaks hosted Obama at their Miami Beach home in June for a $40,000-per-plate fundraising dinner, and hosted a similar event with Michelle Obama in July 2008. The couple personally donated a combined $66,200 to Obama’s re-election effort that year.

With 3.8 million customers receiving Obamaphones at $10 a pop, the Pollacks are getting several times their money’s worth for Slim in campaign donations.

Deroy Murdock has an absolutely devastating column detailing the depth of the Obama administration’s irresponsibility and dishonesty leading up to and following the murder of four Americans in Libya last month. You just have to read this whole piece.

Great two paragraphs:

[Former security officer Eric Nordstrom ultimately concluded that “we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident. And the question that we would ask is again, ‘How thin does the ice need to get until someone falls through?’”

These inconvenient truths would have obviated Team Obama’s “bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda is comatose” reelection theme. Thus, the same government that apparently leaks secrets to make the president look tough evidently oozed falsehoods to keep him from looking weak.

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.

“I think the vice president very well knows that sometimes the words don’t come out of your mouth the right way.”

True and well delivered.  The crowd loved it too.