Freedom Line Blog

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.

The release of the four-month-old video of Mitt Romney saying some monumentally stupid and insensitive things (note the plural) drives home this point: This candidate needs help. He doesn’t “get it,” his campaign folks don’t get it, and his own strongest supporters probably don’t get it either. He needs outsiders to come in and slap him upside the head (figuratively speaking). He did bring in an outsider in the superb Pete Wehner, but then jettisoned Wehner’s big speech draft without so much as a nod toward the idea that ANYbody else has actual ideas worth actually talking about.

I could name about a dozen people who could help set Romney on the right track. For what it’s worth, I (egotistically) volunteer myself. I have some good experience on this front, and what Romney needs is somebody who isn’t in awe of him and certainly who won’t toady to him.

Of course, that’ll never happen. But what should happen is that they should call in SOMEbody to shake things up. Otherwise, the Romney campaign will continue to represent the unbearable lightness of being — and it will lose.

This is why we do what we do, and why CFIF’s mission is important.

Today, in conjunction with the Hispanic Leadership Fund, CFIF secured a critical victory on behalf of the First Amendment rights to free speech and free association.  In a unanimous decision that arrived just four days following oral argument on the issue, a notably quick turnaround time when rulings typically arrive months later, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed, vacated and remanded a recent lower court decision infringing upon the right of the people to engage in protected speech and associate in privacy.  The case was initiated by Representative Chris Van Hollen (D – Maryland), who apparently never internalized the First Amendment’s explicit provision that, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Vindicating the Supreme Court’s Citizens United and Wisconsin Right to Life decisions, the Court of Appeals noted the muddled nature of campaign finance regulations generally:

After reviewing the record with care, we conclude that the District Court erred in holding that Congress spoke plainly when it enacted 2 U.S.C. § 434(f), thus foreclosing any regulatory construction of the statute by the FEC.  The statute is anything but clear, especially when viewed in the light of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), and FEC v. Wis. Right to Life, Inc. (“WRTL II”), 551 U.S. 449 (2007).”

This constitutes an enormous and welcome win for the freedoms of speech and association, one that all who value the First Amendment can celebrate.

From CNS News:

Six months after declaring that all churches in the Arabian peninsula should be destroyed, Saudi Arabia’s top cleric called at the weekend for a global ban on insults targeting all religious “prophets and messengers,” a category that, from a Muslim perspective, includes Jesus Christ.

Saturday’s demand by Saudi grand mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh came on the same day that another of Sunni Islam’s most prominent figures, Egypt’s Al-Azhar University grand imam Ahmed el-Tayyeb, made a similar appeal.

Lest we think this is a phenomenon isolated to the Middle East, let us remember that there is no idiotic attempt to suppress liberty abroad that won’t find a sympathetic ear in our own State Department. Under the Obama Administration, Foggy Bottom has gone out of its way to accommodate the Islamic world’s fervor for anti-blasphemy laws by acceding to sympathetic UN resolutions. This may seem like nothing more than superficial bridge-building, but we know the course these impulses can take in the West, as embodied by the growing trend of aggrieved Muslims attempting to use liberal sensitivity to “hate speech” as a way to exact punishment on their critics from the judicial system.

The islamists’ tactics give the lie to their ideology. On one hand, they want us to believe that they represent a powerful, ascendant culture. On the other, their attempts to forcibly silence their critics betrays a deep and pervasive insecurity.

Great societies disprove their detractors. Weak ones send them to the stocks.

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):  Jason Richwine, Ph.D., Senior Policy Analyst at Heritage Foundation – Chicago Teachers Strike;

4:30 (CDT)/5:30 pm (EDT):  Michelle Minton, Fellow in Consumer Policy Studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute –  NYC’s Sugary Drink Ban;

5:00 (CDT)/6:00 pm (EDT): Greg Brown, Santa Rosa County Property Appraiser –  Trim Notices and Proposed Constitutional Amendments in Florida; and

5:30 (CDT)/6:30 pm (EDT):  Timothy Lee, Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs at CFIF – Libya and Domestic Political Developments.

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

Is this what our Internet sector and economy need?  More uncertainty from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Obama Administration?  The tech sector remains a positive outlier in terms of job creation, innovation, new networks and private investment, but regulatory misdirection threatens all of that.

The latest affront involves usage-based pricing for Internet service.  In order to facilitate Internet growth and accommodate ever-increasing consumer demand, service providers must be granted flexibility to at least explore alternative pricing models.  The outdated, flat-rate, all-you-can-eat model increasingly threatens service quality, as a small number of Internet users sap capacity through data-heavy applications like videogames and online video.  To illustrate, viewing a single streamed high-definition film consumes approximately four gigabytes of data.  Utilities aren’t forced to charge a flat rate regardless of electricity use, so why should Internet service providers be straightjacketed in that way?  It’s not fair, and it’s not effective.

Enter FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who just four months ago explicitly praised pricing flexibility and experimentation in the name of fairness and efficiency:

Business model innovation is very important particularly in new areas like broadband.  There was a point of view that said a couple of years ago that really there was only one permissible pricing model for broadband, and I didn’t agree with that and the Commission didn’t agree with that.  And we said that business model experimentation and usage-based pricing could be a healthy and beneficial part of the ecosystem that could help drive efficiency in networks, increase consumer choice and competition and increase fairness, because it can we said result in lower prices for people who consume less broadband.  So experimentation in this area with those goals in mind is something that’s completely appropriate.”

Other voices on the political left actually concurred, including Tim Wu, the man who coined the deceptive term “Net Neutrality.”

Speaking to a different audience last week, however, Genachowski appeared to reverse himself.  “Anything that depresses broadband usage,” Genachowski claimed, “is something that we need to be really concerned about.”  He added, “We should all be concerned with anything that is incompatible with the psychology of abundance.”

A “psychology of abundance?”  Easy to say when you’re not the once providing that so-called “abundance.”  Perhaps Genachowski is unfamiliar with the timeless economic adage, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”  Or perhaps he simply says whatever he thinks his present audience wants to hear.

Regardless, Genachowski’s latest comments only add regulatory uncertainty to an atmosphere that already faces too much of it.

In the half-dozen or so years since immigration reform has once again become a major issue, we’ve too often fallen into a false dichotomy between being restrictionist to the point of halting legal immigration on the one hand or throwing open the floodgates to all comers — legal or otherwise — on the other.

Lost in that oversimplification, however, are prudential considerations about what kind of immigrants we should be welcoming. If we’re looking to encourage traditional American virtues, Asian immigrants provide a hopeful example. From Joel Kotkin, writing at the New Geography:

Asia has become the nation’s largest source of newcomers, accounting for some 36% of all immigrants in 2010. Asian immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants tend to be better educated: half of all Asians over 25 have a college degree, almost twice the national average. They earn higher incomes, and, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, are more likely to abide by “traditional” values, with a stronger commitment to family, parenting and marriage than other Americans, and a greater emphasis on education.

“Most Asian immigrants bring with them a healthy respect and aspiration for the American way of life, so I don’t think any immigration alarmists need to be anxious,” notes Thomas Tseng, founding principal at New American Dimensions, a Los Angeles-based marketing firm. “With a large influx of them, you will get a lot of their kids in the school system who are told that getting an education is the surest way for them to succeed in life, a great deal of entrepreneurial energy and new businesses in a region, and most certainly the local restaurant scene will improve.”

Culinary considerations aside, Kotkin and Tseng make an important point. Indeed, why would we consider for a moment admitting immigrants who don’t have a “a healthy respect and aspiration for the American way of life.”?

My point is not to cheerlead for racial preferences that advantage Asian immigrants. In fact, the very idea is reprehensible. The beauty of American citizenship is that it is predicated on principles which are held to be equally accessible to all.

But as our liberal friends so often forget, access is distinct from entitlement. American citizenship should be earned and a dedication to the country’s animating principles — hard work, education, civic and familial virtue — is as good a place as any to start.

We need not say that American needs more Asian immigrants. We may simply say that America needs more immigrants — of any background — who share their values.

Ashton, citing Troy earlier, writes that foreign policy definitely matters in an election. I agree with both of them. That is one reason I thought Jon Kyl should be on the short list for Veep, and why I insisted, against all common wisdom, that Rick Santorum should also be considered. Romney definitely could use somebody with acknowledged “chops” on foreign and defense matters right now. (I hasten to add that I remain THRILLED that Ryan is the running mate; I think he is absolutely terrific, but just for other reasons.)

But here is where I am going to suggest that Romney throw a real long ball. I have been thinking of this all year, no matter who the nominee was; indeed, I have thought of it in past presidential cycles too, but never decided it would be a useful game changer… until now.

I think Romney should choose, and publicly name, who his Secretary of State will be. I don’t think this has ever been done before, pre-election, so it would attract a ton of attention — and, since obviously Romney would choose whomever he chooses with an eye both on competence and on the political advantages the person would offer (in terms not of electoral votes or anything crass like that, but in terms of demonstrating good executive judgment on Romney’s part for making such a wise choice), the attention would almost all be of the positive sort.

Romney could then, in effect, outsource almost all statements on foreign affairs to the Sec. State-designee, who surely could run rings around the Obamites every time he/she goes on the air as a Romney surrogate.

At least a half dozen names suggest themselves as people who would be immediately accepted across the spectrum as a designee of substance and gravitas. (The only disadvantage of this is that Romney would politically be precluded from naming somebody who is a lightning rod for controversy, such as John Bolton, whereas a Bolton choice in the usual way, after the election, would still be possible.)

The one name, by the way, I would put at the top of the list is the same one I started this post with; Jon Kyl. Few people in Washington, and almost nobody on the right, are afforded such universal respect as Kyl is. And he could really pound home the issue of missile defense (probably bolstering the Polish-American ethnic vote in the Rust Belt while he was at it), on which he is extremely well versed, and explain why our abandonment of Poland and other Eastern European nations on this issue was such a horrible mistake. And Kyl sort of bridges the divide on the right between what some wrongly call the “Neo-cons” and those who are more isolationist: Kyl is not really identifiable in any one camp, other than being clearly “Reaganite.”

Regardless of who the choice would be, it would look good for Romney: bold, innovative, and presidentially decisive and confident, willing to let the public judge his choice before the election and giving a sense of his leadership style.

It’s worth serious consideration.

A month ago Troy’s column asked “Will Foreign Policy Still Matter in the Presidential Election?”  At the time, Mitt Romney had just picked Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate, and all eyes were on domestic issues like the economy and entitlement reform.

But as ever, Troy saw the big picture by reminding us that, “If recent years have taught us anything, it’s that the issues on which a presidential election are fought can be poor predictors of the ones that dominate the subsequent presidency.”

The 9/11 attacks remain the paradigmatic example.

Now, with Islamist attacks on American diplomatic outposts spreading beyond Libya and Egypt to Yemen, Sudan, and Tunisia, American foreign policy – and each presidential candidate’s view of it – is getting a workout.

It’s about time.

Bloomberg shows that for all the Democrats’ talk about a Republican war on women, it’s the self-proclaimed ‘party of women’ that must explain how unless its gubernatorial candidate in New Hampshire wins in November, Democrats will have no female governor anywhere in the United States.

Meanwhile, Republicans have New Mexico’s Susana Martinez, Arizona’s Jan Brewer, Oklahoma’s Mary Fallin, and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley.

Here’s another example of conservative reality beating liberal rhetoric.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the erosion of states’ rights, highlighting recent instances of Executive Branch attempts to expand federal power at the expense of state sovereignty.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell made a very public peace with Rand Paul and Kentucky’s Tea Party movement by hiring Jesse Benton to head his reelection campaign in 2014.

Previously, Benton steered Rand Paul into Kentucky’s other U.S. Senate seat by defeating an establishment candidate handpicked by McConnell.  This cycle Benton ran Ron Paul’s presidential campaign.

With $6 million already in the bank for an election two years away, McConnell’s hiring of Benton likely shuts the door to the kind of Tea Party conservative primary challenge faced by other long-serving Republicans.

At the University of Mobile’s Center for Leadership, I reflect on 9/11 and its lessons.

I wrote the piece and handed it in just before news came about the uprisings in northern Africa. As it turned out, these sentences were apropos:

Worse, some of our national leaders seem to misunderstand, to this day, what 9/11 was all about. These leaders still push forward some sort of moral semi-equivalency, in which they quickly zip through boilerplate language about how America was wronged on that day but then start listing all the ways we need to be more “sensitive” to the concerns of the rest of the world – concerns as expressed by world leaders who were not fairly elected by their own people, who do not allow their people the basic freedoms or human dignity that Americans take for granted, and who have never done a single thing to earn any level of sympathy, empathy, or respect.

This, of course, is a false equivalency. Our nation is better than other nations, because we do guarantee freedom and limit the powers of the government and of individual leaders within that government.

I just saw CNN run a clip of John Kerry castigating Mitt Romney for Romney’s criticism of the Obama administration re the statement from the embassy in Cairo. Kerry, blowing enough hot air to power his own windsurfing excursion, called Romney “irresponsible” and “reckless,” among other harsh adjectives. He said Romney spoke without knowing what he was talking about, and that Romney was way out of line.

Kerry isn’t the one to talk. May I remind him of a little incident where he said he knew fellow American soldiers, apparently in large numbers, who “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country”?

That statement from Kerry was a vicious, vile, reckless, irresponsible, damnable lie. It should have disqualified him forever not just from public life, but from all polite company forevermore.

Meanwhile, Romney was right: The embassy statement was craven and pathetic, and it was fully in line with longstanding messages, also craven and pathetic, coming from the Obama administration since Day One — and even largely consonant with the tenor of statements TODAY from Hillary Clinton, who again spent the entire opening of her statement wasting time blasting a stupid online movie rather than dismissing it in one quick sentence and then moving on to what still, even after that segment of her statement, was an inadequately worded bit of advocacy of American rights, interests, and goodness.

Kerry, Clinton, and Obama know absolutely nothing about promoting American interests or about defending our people or our rights.

Christian Schneider  writing in City Journal shows the vivid cost/benefit contrast between members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and their public charter school counterparts.  CTU members average $76,000 in annual salary before benefits, while public charter school teachers make $49,000.

Charter school teachers are a bargain.  A study by the Illinois Policy Institute cited by Schneider indicates that nine of Chicago’s top ten performing schools are open-enrollment, non-selective charter high schools.

Faced with this kind of competition, CTU members did what any self-respecting public employee union would do when offered a sixteen percent pay raise in exchange for linking employment to student test results – they went on strike.

Change is coming to all levels of the education industry.  Groups like CTU need to adapt to the new reality of pay-for-performance or risk expulsion from the system.

Good video.

Charlie Cook is right on target this morning in criticizing the messaging and tactics of Mitt Romney’s campaign.

Only in the last few days has the Romney campaign begun buying any time in swing states on local cable systems, something the Obama team has been doing for months. While one campaign has been looking for every nookand cranny to reach votersand has been doing so for some time, the other didn’t bother until after the conventions. Go figure.

The Romney campaign made the extraordinary decision to not try seriously to connecttheir candidate with voters on a personal level untiltheir convention. As dubious as that decision was, they were rewarded by having a convention shortened by a day due to a hurricane, then compounded the error of waiting until the convention by putting much of what was most needed to be seen in the 8and 9 p.m. hours, when the only viewers would be C-SPAN fans. Wow! The biographical filmand the testimonials of people whose lives had been touched by Romney were powerful, necessary,and largely unseen. Instead, the Romney campaign treated them to the Clint Eastwood debacleand a serviceable speech by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida that should have been made earlier, not chewing up precious broadcast airtime.

Meanwhile, I have a column out today at The American Spectator that predicts a narrow win for Barack The One Obama. But it’s close enough that Romney could turn things around — if he starts running a smarter campaign:

Now, how can Romney pull off the victory anyway? By mobilizing discrete groups of voters who might be unexcited or might wish a pox on both parties, but who will be motivated to turn out (rather than stay home, or go hunting, or whatever)and vote for a candidate who shows commitment to a particular issue stance.

Taking a page from Newt Gingrich’s playbook, Romney could easily identify such issues where a clear majority of voters agree with conservatives.

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.

Charles C. Johnson of the Daily Caller unearthed a scathing review of U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s book that was published before Harvard Law School hired her in 1995:

In 1991, Rutgers Professor Phillip Schuchman reviewed Warren’s co-authored 1989 book “As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America” in the pages of the Rutgers Law Review, a publication Warren once edited. Schuchman found “serious errors” which result in “grossly mistaken functions and comparisons.

Warren and her co-authors had drawn improper conclusions from “even their flawed findings,” and “made their raw data unavailable” to check, he wrote. “In my opinion, the authors have engaged in repeated instances of scientific misconduct.”

The work “contains so much exaggeration, so many questionable ploys, and so many incorrect statements that it would be well to check the accuracy of their raw data, as old as it is,” Schuchman added.

Further reporting by Johnson indicates the reason for HLS’ willful oversight – an affirmative action policy that placed a premium on hiring female and minority faculty members.

For months now Warren’s Senate candidacy has been plagued by her use of alleged Cherokee ancestry to get academic jobs she might otherwise have failed to get.

Just last week, Warren told the Democratic National Convention, “We celebrate success.  We just don’t want the game to be rigged.”

At least not after she’s won.

Late last week, for the University of Mobile’s Center for Leadership, I tried to delve a bit more deeply into current controversies about media “fact checkers.” It’s not just the media, but society in general, that seems to have an increasing problem understanding even what constitutes a “fact” in the first place.

A taste:

Second, a statement can be inaccurate without being a “lie.”…. Situation two: President George W. Bush was inaccurate when he said Saddam Hussein still had an active program of “weapons of mass destruction” when the United States began its liberation of Iraq – but he didn’t lie. A lie by definition involves deliberate intent to deceive; but every single bit of evidence shows that Bush and every other major political figure of both parties believed Saddam was hiding numerous WMDs. (As a matter of fact, Iraq still did possess WMDs, but only in small amounts.)  It is a fact that Saddam once had many such weapons, that he tried to manufacture and/or acquire more of them, that he had used them in the past, that he even fooled his own senior Iraqi military officials into believing he still had them, and that he never showed proof that he had disposed of them. If Bush believed Saddam still had WMD, then he wasn’t lying. Period. He was just mistaken.