Freedom Line Blog

Last week two different outlets were kind enough to invite me on their news shows. In these interviews, I explained why I think Romney has fallen slightly behind, and how I think he can start to turn it around. First, on the Christian Broadcasting Network, which generously interviewed me for about 3 minutes, 45 seconds, I give my fullest advice, which I can boil down to this: Connect the dots better. Here, my part starts at the 7:59 mark.

Chris Stirewalt’s “Power Play” show on Fox News Online also gave me some air time. The key part of Chris’ introduction of my segment starts at precisely the 10-minute mark, and I myself come on air here at the 10:40 mark.

So I’m not the greatest TV guy, not great with short sound bites — but please watch and see if I got my main points across.

It’s amazing how many different styles, lengths, and messages are part of the new political ad landscape. Here’s an example that goes beyond the usual 30-second or 60-second spot, into a 270-second segment. Fairly impressive stuff. Also worth noting is the strong appearance by former Democratic Congressman Artur Davis. I don’t know why the Romney campaign doesn’t make more use of him.

This phenomenon of new ad approaches, from a purely neutral standpoint, is well worth watching. How well will these new approaches work? I bet some of them work well…..

Since we’ve all formed a little cottage industry around providing unsolicited advice to the Romney campaign, I thought it worthwhile to pass along this recommendation from my friend and Ricochet colleague Ben Domenech, writing in today’s installment of his news digest, The Transom (probably the best daily rundown in the nation).

Ben notes the conventional wisdom that the presidential debates (the first of which takes place a week from today) are likely Romney’s last chance to change the trajectory of the race and devises a helpful bit of jiu-jitsu for Mitt to employ:

Romney’s style as a debater is aggressive and that may serve him well – in debates, the first person to appear thin-skinned usually loses – and he’ll have an opportunity to bring that out in response to Obama’s woe-is-me talk, blaming Bush and the Republican Congress for everything under the sun, saying something along the lines of:

“In the private sector, one of the things I did was invest in companies. I learned a lot about how jobs are created, but I also learned a lot about leadership. One of the things I had to do when we got involved with a company was evaluate its leadership and see if it needed a change. And let me tell you, if I got involved with a company that was losing money and jobs hand over fist and piling up debt like there was no tomorrow, and I found out the CEO had been in the job four years and still spent most of his time blaming his predecessor and his co-workers, I’d fire him and get somebody in there who could get results.”

A response like this, besides being one virtually guaranteed to tick off Obama, makes the whining look petty and small. But it would also do something else, too: workers of all types, but particularly blue-collar workers, resent the idea of the incompetent senior management which survives pain while they bear the brunt of it. Romney should do his utmost to speak for those who demand accountability and turn his negative role as one of the suits into an advantage.

Mitt Romney: corner office hero of the working man? If he employed Ben’s tactic, he just might be able to pull it off.

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 my column last week, I noted how preposterous it was that the Obama Administration continued to bend over backwards to distance itself from the video (falsely) claimed to have ignited the recent round of violence in the Middle East:

Speaking shortly after the attacks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pronounced, “that the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its content and message… to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.”

Let’s assume for a moment that Clinton is right and that the film was made for the express purpose of working global Islam into a lather. Even taking that as a given, should the apology come from the nation of 300 million where one man produced some two-bit agritprop or from the part of the world where thousands took to the streets in violence because of a bit of inert satire tamer (and, remarkably, less coherent) than the average “Saturday Night Live” episode?

Speaking earlier today at the United Nations General Assembly, President Obama prolonged the inanity:

That [violence and intolerance] is what we saw play out the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity. It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well – for as the city outside these walls makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and religion. We are home to Muslims who worship across our country. We not only respect the freedom of religion – we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe. We understand why people take offense to this video because millions of our citizens are among them.

I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. The answer is enshrined in our laws: our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.

Contra the president, this video doesn’t demonstrate “intolerance.” Stupidity? Yes. Bad filmmaking? Yes. Garden variety prejudice? Maybe. But being critical of the beliefs of others, even to the point of gratuitious rabble-rousing, is not the same thing as “intolerance.” The filmmakers were tolerating Islam; they weren’t advocating that anyone be silenced or harmed. By contrast, Islamists who engaged in violence to the point of cold-blooded murder ostensibly because of a YouTube video were the intolerant ones.

The cherry on top of this whole debacle was the President’s statement on the video to the ladies(?) of The View. As reported by the Weekly Standard:

In the age of the Internet, and you know, the way that any knucklehead who says something can post it up and suddenly it travels all around the world, you know, every country has to recognize that, you know, the best way to marginalize that kind of speech is to ignore it.

Not a terrible idea. And you know what’s a great way to begin implementing this strategy? Not devoting paragraphs to this film at the U.N. when we know that it wasn’t the catalyst for the recent blood lust.

John Podhoretz wrote the column I was intending to write. “[T]he release of these tax records,” wrote Podhoretz, “leaves no doubt about one thing: Mitt Romney is an extraordinarily, remarkably, astonishingly generous man. A good man. Maybe even a great man.”

Well, yes.

The media kvetching about Romney’s tax returns is so misplaced as to be sickening. The story isn’t that Romney paid “only” 14.1 percent of his income in taxes. The story is WHY that rate was comparatively low. The measure of a man isn’t how much he pays in taxes; some of us, after all, think that much of the money paid in federal taxes is wasted. If I had a million dollars and a choice of whether to let the feds spend it or to give it to a charity I trust, I would give it to a charity without a second thought. The charity will do more good with it than the feds will. More people will benefit, and the benefits will be more lasting.

For the idiotic media (forgive the redundancy there) to carp about the “low” taxes is for them to buy into the notion that tax-paying is somehow noble while (and this is a really strange but growing sub-belief on the left) that charitable giving is somehow selfish. How twisted! How morally depraved.

For Mitt Romney to have donated so much money to charity is indeed a mark of his great decency as a human being. I welcome the comparisons with the Gores’ and Bidens’ pathetically low amount of giving, and with Bill Clinton trying to claim a tax deduction for the donation of used underwear (yuck!). (Yes, Clinton really did that — or at least Hillary did, with regard to Bill’s used underwear. But this was before anybody might have wanted to test it in a lab….)

Romney, a private man, apparently has been donating huge amounts to charities long, long before he ran for public office. These donations are those of the heart, not of a cynical mind. It’s about time he gets some credit for it.

From Fox News:

Small government and free-market capitalism are about to get put to the test in Honduras, where the government has agreed to let an investment group build an experimental city with no taxes on income, capital gains or sales.

Proponents say the tiny, as-yet unnamed town will become a Central American beacon of job creation and investment, by combining secure property rights with minimal government interference.

“Once we provide a sound legal system within which to do business, the whole job creation machine – the miracle of capitalism – will get going,” Michael Strong,  CEO of the MKG Group, which will build the city and set its laws, told FoxNews.com.

Strong said that the agreement with the Honduran government states that the only tax will be on property.

“Our goal is to be the most economically free entity on Earth,” Strong said.

It’s a fascinating experiment, though we can’t quite call it a novel one — this is, after all, a more extreme version of what Hong Kong does on a larger scale. And therein lies the rub. While there are a few minor shortcomings in the mechanics of this project (there’s already some protectionism in the new city’s labor laws, for instance, with businesses forced to meet quotas for native-born Honduran employees), the bigger concern is that it will be a lonely success.

Hong Kong, for instance, is consistently deemed the freest economy in the world, a trait that has led to it having a higher per capita GDP than the United States. Were this simply an argument on the merits over whether free markets work, the jury would be in. But this is no academic seminar. In less economically free nations, ideology may inform some of the hostility to capitalism, but the bigger issue is that opening up markets takes the power to select winners and losers away from government — a bridge too far for many politicians. Embracing economic freedom in the fashion of the Honduras experiment is laudable. But the hard work is not in allowing capitalism to succeed; it’s in convincing politicians to give it the chance to do so. That’s the biggest accomplishment here.

Last week, in her first debate with U.S. Senator Scott Brown (R-MA), Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren tried to nationalize their contest in terms designed to solidify her support from Bay State environmentalists:

“Senator Brown has been going around the country, talking to people, saying, you’ve got to contribute to his campaign because it may be for the control of the Senate.  And he’s right.  …  What that would mean is if the Republicans take over control of the Senate, Jim Inhofe would become the person who would be in charge of the committee that oversees the Environmental Protection Agency.  He’s a man that has called global warming ‘a hoax.’  In fact, that’s the title of his book.”

To be fair to Senator Inhofe, who, as the Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works is in line to lead the panel if Republicans become the majority, the full title of his book is The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.

The hoax Inhofe describes is the use of Climategate-manipulated science to legitimize massive increases in taxes and regulation.

In its war on coal, the EPA has been at the forefront of the environmentalists’ push to tax and regulate an entire industry out of existence; most specifically by requiring coal operators to adopt expensive and experimental manufacturing techniques that are already making it necessary to lay off workers and close down plants.

By parsing Inhofe’s insight about how global warming alarmists politicize science to justify liberal policies, Warren was trying to substitute Inhofe’s complete rejection of global warming for Brown’s position on the issue.  In fact, Brown thinks global warming/climate change/something is happening.  But like Inhofe, he thinks that getting the job market growing again trumps spending billions of dollars on policies built in part on scientific fraud.

Brown shouldn’t shy away from this issue so long as he frames it correctly.  The environmental activists that Warren was playing to won’t be voting for him anyway.  But the independents that put Brown in office two years ago know that job-killing taxes and regulations don’t make sense; especially in an era of chronic unemployment.

In his column this week Troy noted the “suspicious sign of premeditation” when the American consulate in Libya was invaded by rioters on the 11^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Troy also pointed out other facts undercutting the Obama Administration’s claim that the attacks were a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islamic YouTube video, such as the use of rocket-propelled grenades, knowledge of a safe house, and the release of an al Qaeda video demanding revenge for an assassinated deputy.

Now, even more evidence is forcing the Obama Administration to backtrack its version of the story.

Eli Lake of The Daily Beast is reporting that U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed that some of the participants had staked out the location prior to attacking.  What’s more, an intercepted communiqué “between a Libyan politician whose sympathies are with al Qaeda and the Libyan militia known at the February 17 Brigade – which had been charged with providing local security to the consulate,” reveals that the politician asked a brigade commander to “stand down for a pending attack.”

The growing body of facts make hash out of the Obama Administration’s initial characterization that the assault was simply and only caused by watching a stupid and little known video.  Instead, it seems far more plausible that the weak foreign policy stances of the Obama Administration emboldened the attackers to strike.  The White House’s reflexive crouch only adds to the problem.

“Employer voices are all in opposition to this bill.”

That was Kathy Wylde, President of the Partnership for New York City, on a proposed regulation that would force city employers to offer up to nine days each year of paid sick leave.

Almost all employers already offer sick leave, with Ernst & Young reporting that only 12% of all city employees lack it.  Further illustrating the unnecessary nature of the proposed law, the E&Y study reports that small businesses (defined as those with fewer than 20 employees) already offer an average of 7.7 days of paid sick days per year, with larger businesses already offering 8.7. The study further concludes that the proposed new burden would cost private-sector employers an astounding $789 million annually, with nonprofits and small businesses carrying $189 million of that burden.  Providing another metric, the report calculates that implementing the regulation would cost businesses 48 cents per hour, per employee.  The struggling construction, utility, hospitality and restaurant sectors would be particularly hard-hit by the proposed rule.

Proponents of the entitlement offer their own study, but their report sampled only 1,200 people in comparison to the 414,000 sampled by E&Y.  The analysis concludes, “There is a growing sentiment among employers that paid sick leave is the ‘straw’ that will break their will to continue to grow or even to operate here.”  In an economy and job market that continue to struggle, how does that serve the interests of employers, employees or city residents generally?

Fortunately, Council Speaker Christine Quinn remains strong against the potential job-killing regulation, despite pressure from labor organizations and activists detached from the everyday realities of hiring workers and keeping a business above water.   New York business owners and residents interested in the city’s economic vitality should call Speaker Quinn and tell her, “keep up the good work.”

Lachlan Markay of the Heritage Foundation excerpts the top five findings of the Justice Department non-partisan Inspector General’s Fast and Furious report:

1)      The report singles out top Department of Justice officials for wrongdoing

2)      The report appears to contradict sworn testimony by Attorney General Eric Holder

3)      The report faults top Justice Department leadership with failing to adequately respond to the murder of an American border patrol agent

4)      The White House refused to disclose any internal communications to the inspector general

5)      The report fails to consider evidence that a top DOJ official knew the department misled Congress

The fallout has been swift.  On the day the report was released Kenneth Melson, the former acting head of ATF – the DOJ bureau in charge of Fast and Furious – retired, while the DOJ’s Jason Weinstein, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, resigned.

So far, Attorney General Eric Holder has escaped culpability for the gun-walking program that originated on his watch.

We’ll see if congressional Republican investigators use the IG’s report to close the books on Fast and Furious, or use the Obama White House’s refusal to cooperate as proof that more sleuthing needs to be done.

Timothy Lee, Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs at CFIF, discusses the increased regulatory uncertainty for the Internet sector and U.S. economy caused by FCC and Obama Administration policies, and American foreign policy in an age of uncertainty in the Middle East.

Listen to the interview here.

The University of Mobile held a “Constitution Day” event this week to celebrate the 225th anniversary of the great document’s signing, with me emceeing an address by and discussion with the superb federal appellate court judge William H. Pryor, in front of university students plus 120 pupils from nearby high schools. It inspired me to write this column. A sample passage:

The United States and its Constitution serve as one big laboratory of republican government. When the Constitution was written, most of the world’s people thought true republics were by their very nature unstable, destined to be short-lived and to lead to either anarchy or tyranny. The men of Philadelphia, and then the American people who put into practice the system the founders designed, proved otherwise. Indeed, we continue to prove that representative democracy works. It can assure freedom, ensure a high degree of justice, and promote societal stability, simultaneously.

It remains for us to make sure that we ourselves in the United States do not let down our guard. Just because our Constitution has worked for so long does not mean, in the words of the title of a famous book on the Constitution, that our government is “a machine that would go of itself.”  The Constitution only provides a framework by which American citizens can protect our liberties; The Constitution does not do the work all by itself.

My column this week explains the logic behind an important new constitutional challenge to ObamaCare by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a non-profit property rights law firm.

In its lawsuit, Sissel v. Department of Health and Human Services, PLF argues that the Supreme Court did ObamaCare no favors when it saved the law from a Commerce Clause challenge by reinterpreting it as a constitutional exercise of Congress’ taxing power.

Instead, PLF argues, the Court merely exposed ObamaCare’s newly found taxing authority as an express violation of the Constitution’s Origination Clause, which requires all new tax bills to originate in the House of Representatives, not in the Senate as ObamaCare did.

Though simple and faithful to the Constitution’s text, PLF’s argument is nonetheless novel because some of the Supreme Court’s precedents indicate the Court will not seriously enforce the Origination Clause’s procedure.

But as liberal legal scholar Jack Balkin says in a blog for The Atlantic, Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative colleagues may be open to rethinking those precedents:

In a previous essay for The Atlantic, I noted that even if a legal argument is currently “off the wall,” it may nevertheless become plausible if enough prominent people get behind it and vouch for it. Support by major political parties is probably the most important factor in quickly moving arguments from “off the wall” to “on the wall.” The challengers’ arguments in NFIB v. Sebelius got as far as they did because the unconstitutionality of Obamacare became virtually the official position of the Republican Party, and Republican politicians and affiliated media pushed the challengers’ claims over and over again. Repeated arguments by conservative politicians, media, and intelligentsia, in turn, probably affected the views of Republican-appointed judges and justices about how seriously to take the arguments.

Members of the media will no doubt ask legal scholars (such as yours truly) whether the PLF’s new constitutional challenge to Obamacare is likely to succeed on the merits. I’ve just given you my answer: not under existing law.

But if reporters have been paying attention to the events of the last two years, they should know that, at least where health care reform is concerned, the considered views of legal scholars are not the most important ones. The real question to ask is whether Republican politicians, right-wing talk radio, and Fox News will get behind the new challenge with the same degree of enthusiasm they had for the first legal assault on Obamacare. If they do, then the mainstream media will no doubt cover the controversy as it did before. If a conservative district court judge takes the arguments seriously, the game is on once more. And then, perhaps, Chief Justice Roberts, given a second chance, will change his mind — again.

Now that the Chicago teachers’ strike has come to an end (a mostly unsatisfactory one, as chronicled by my colleague at the Manhattan Institute’s Public Sector Inc., Paul Kersey), the issue will likely fall out of national consciousness by week’s end. But there is one fact from this struggle that will remain with me for the foreseeable future. It was buried deep in the recesses of the Wall Street Journal‘s interview from last weekend with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and it’s an extremely telling statistic about the party that considers itself the vanguard of civil rights:

We’re seven weeks from a presidential election in which Barack Obama needs all the cash and foot soldiers that organized labor can provide. His Super PAC’s chief fundraiser is none other than Rahm Emanuel. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s chief funders remain teachers unions, groups that also accounted for an estimated 20% of delegates at the recent Democratic National Convention. So you can imagine why Chicago’s unionized teachers struck now, gambling that Mr. Emanuel’s killer instinct may be stayed at least for the season.

One out of every five representatives of the Democratic Party on the floor (or at least at the hosted bar) in Charlotte represented institutions whose lust for self-preservation has the practical effect of killing minority achievement and ambition  in school districts throughout America. Their parents, who are overwhelmingly expected to vote for Barack Obama, ought to pause on that fact. The sacrifice of generations of schoolchildren is too high a price to pay for identity politics.

Great advice for Romney, to save his floundering campaign.

You read that right.

The Daily Caller’s Caroline May reports that the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union demanded and won a ban on any public school event that limits participation to mothers and sons or fathers and daughters, such as traditional dances.

The reason: the events perpetuate “blatant gender stereotypes.”

As usual, the school sponsoring the offending dance was caught in a legal vice grip:

Although the federal Title IX anti-discrimination law does provide exemptions for such events, state law does not, but rather explicitly bans “sex discrimination in ‘…any and all school functions and activities,’” Superintendent of the Cranston Public School System Judith A Lundsten explained in an August letter sent to “Partner Organizations” and posted in full at WPRO News in R.I.

Already, one Republican candidate for Rhode Island state senate, Sean Gately, has made this a campaign issue, promising to introduce an amendment to the state law so that it tracks Title IX to allow exceptions for events like father-daughter dances.

If Gately can figure out a way to make the ACLU reimburse the school district for the hours spent in responding to this wasteful drain on public resources, he should run for governor.

Of course, the main problem with the ACLU in this and other instances is more than the waste of public resources.  It’s making a living by using the law to harass the very society the law was meant to serve.

No one who passed Rhode Island’s version of Title IX intended it to outlaw father-daughter dances.  Had the ACLU’s position been a publicly acknowledged purpose of the legislation when it was proposed, the law’s authors would have been laughed out of the chamber.  Whenever this issue gets a hearing in court – and Gately willing, it will – the reviewing court should do exactly the same to the ACLU’s argument.

Enough of the madness.  If people really want to stop making every argument political and thus polarizing, we must start by making less of our disputes a cause of legal action.

Dr. Barbara Bellar is running for State Senate in Illinois. That is a real shame for the Romney camp, which certainly could have used her services in the speechwriting department:

Following Quin’s lead, the Wall Street Journal offers some ideas on how to reframe Mitt Romney’s 47-percent-of-Americans-see-themselves-as-victims-and-will-vote-for-Obama-no-matter-what:

“I want Americans to be less dependent on government not because it costs too much. We will always help Americans who need our help. I want Americans to be independent so they can realize the pride of accomplishment and the dignity of work and contribute their God-given talents to build a better country.

“I think the success of a Presidency should be measured by how many fewer people need food stamps, how many fewer need disability, not how many more people are added to the rolls. I don’t want to take food stamps away from Americans in need. I want fewer Americans to need food stamps.

Sometimes I wonder if President Obama shares that view. He and his economists keep saying that food stamps and unemployment benefits are a form of ‘stimulus.’ Well, we’ve sure had a lot of that kind of stimulus, and all we have to show for it are more people on food stamps and more people on welfare and more people looking for work. I think a real stimulus is a job, and I intend to help Americans create more of them.”

Read the whole editorial here.