Freedom Line Blog

REALLY important stuff here, about which I have written numerous times, including at this site, regarding the utterly fraudullent gazillion dollar case that corrupt Ecuadoran officials (and apparent corrupt Americans as well) are waging against the U.S.-based Chevron Corp. Of course, Barack Obama is on the wrong side, favoring foreign interests over American ones, as usual.

The Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, WSJ columnist Kimberly Strassel, and others are detailing the abuse of private individuals by the Obama team and its allies, all for the crime of, Lord forbid, supporting conservatives or Republicans. In this case, the middle man the Lefties are using is former WSJ reporter Glenn Simpson, who I once thought was a decent human being but who obviously is pond scum. Meanwhile, Fred Barnes reminds us of just how dishonest and high-handed BH Obama himself is in terms of actually trying to work with others to find consensus.

Ludicrously, Obama also is prone to trying to pretend he’s a tough guy (rather than an emaciated bag of bones) when greeting Republican governors on airport tarmacs. His whole administration, from day one, has been prone to bouts of thuggishness (or attempted thuggishness), as the eminently fair-minded Michael Barone wrote last week again, continuing a theme he has been highlighting since not just the first days of the administration, but even before Obama was elected. Barone’s best line, however, came when he considered Obama as “an American version of Vladimir Putin.” Except that Putin is an effective thug.

This is a great line specifically because Obama and his minions are so pathetically incompetent. As Bobby Jindal said in a speech in Mobile on Thursday night, not only is Obama the most ideologically leftist president since Jimmy Carter, but he also is “the most imcompetent president since Jimmy Carter.”

Nonetheless, even incompetent thuggery is still thuggery. It still makes some innocents into victims. And it is profoundly unAmerican. It is the stuff of authoritarianism, the province of two-bit banana-republic despots.

And if Glenn Simpson wants to put himself in service of such people, well, somebody ought to call some lawyers and see if there are grounds for suing his creepy rear end from here to pauperville.As for Obama, methinks in the long run he’ll get his. Oh yes, he will: Rot does not forever go unpunished.

When it comes to highlighting federal inanity, Holman Jenkins hits a home run with his take in a Wall Street Journal article on the current FCC’s bureaucratic approach to the wireless industry.

As Jenkins describes the situation, “Like food rotting on a dock, only politics and policy prevents spectrum from getting where it’s needed.”

Jenkins goes on to articulate the point by aptly noting that wireless companies are “being starved of spectrum [their] customers would willingly pay for because of an archaic government allocation system in which economic logic does not penetrate.”

So why care?  Primarily because the wireless industry’s massive investment involved in developing spectrum for the public’s use is one of the few unmitigated bright spots in the US economy. Wireless carriers delivered approximately $27 billion in investment in U.S. mobile networks last year alone.  And continued wireless investment holds the potential to revolutionize our nation’s educational system, healthcare and so much more.

In employment terms, a Deloitte study last fall pegged 4G wireless investment as creating between 371,000 and 771,000 new jobs.  That includes the teams that deploy new cell towers, engineers and software developers, among others.

But the government’s dithering threatens to sideline billions in new investment that would otherwise be pumped into the economy and drive these benefits for consumers.

What’s especially ironic about the delays is that Obama’s FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has repeatedly sounded the alarm about the “looming spectrum crisis” that threatens “continued innovation in broadband wireless.”  Similar acknowledgements continually have been made directly from the White House.  Yet, when it comes to spectrum policy, the FCC and the Obama Administration have been driven by politics and ideology instead of sound economics and logic — a mindset that not only exacerbates the spectrum problem, but threatens (if not stops cold) private investment to deal with the problem.

Indeed, when wireless providers seek to overcome government obstacles to spectrum and move to address the crunch on their respective networks, they are met with hostility.  Jenkins points to the two obvious examples:

To meet demand of its customers for more and more bandwidth, AT&T laid out $39 billion for T-Mobile, a retreating, second-rank player, only to have the proposal nixed by Washington after many months of torture.

Verizon has been undergoing months of torture over its proposal to buy, for $3.9 billion, several blocks of spectrum sitting idle in the hands of cable TV companies.

That, coupled with the FCC’s counterproductive obsession with putting use conditions on auctioned spectrum to the point of rendering it less desirable or frankly, economically unfeasible, is only making the spectrum problem worse.

Everyone, including the FCC and the Obama Administration, agrees that the spectrum crunch must be resolved… and fast.  “The solution,” as Jenkins points out, “is to permit any spectrum that’s immediately deployable to be immediately deployed by those who can make use of it.”  And it must be deployed without burdensome government conditions and discriminatory bidder qualifications to ensure its most efficient use.

In other words, the FCC and Obama Administration must set aside politics and ideology, stop trying to pick winners and losers in an effort to shape some utopian vision of perfect competition in an already ultra-competitive market and allocate more spectrum for consumer use… now.

In this week’s “Freedom Minute,” CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the deception and hypocrisy of President Obama’s class warfare.

Reason has a great review of a new book on the Obama economic advisers who tried and failed to spend and regulate the economy into recovery.  But for all the space devoted to those around President Barack Obama, it’s the way he treats them – and wants them to treat him – that is most disturbing:

But Obama was not exactly a man without a team. He was loyal to the cult of policy smarts. He may have even been its high priest. As Scheiber reports, outside analysts reporting to the president were advised to highlight their expert credentials so he would know he wasn’t talking to cranks and dummies. Obama also wanted his inner circle to credit his own abilities: The president, Scheiber writes, “craved intellectual affirmation” and often badgered his lieutenants into acknowledging when his own ideas were perceived to have succeeded. Obama “had a habit of prompting his aides to acknowledge his wisdom and foresight,” Scheiber writes. The president would sometimes wonder aloud, “Whose idea was that?” when he deserved credit.

Whatever is Obama’s conscious motivation for overemphasizing credit and credentials at every turn, this window into his personality reveals a deeply insecure person.

Remember, this is the same man who’s boasted about being a better campaign manager than the one he employs, a better speechwriter than his scribes, and so on.

If this is the way the President wants to play it, why not let him own every decision by his administration?

$787 billion in stimulus spending and no change in the unemployment rate – Whose idea was that?

A federal takeover of the health care industry that raises the deficit while reducing services – Whose idea was that?

Selling thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels so they could be traced to crime scenes – Whose idea was that?

The list could go on and on and on…

It looks like U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) will be fielding many more questions about her use of a questionable link to Native American ancestry to boost her teaching career into the Ivy League.

As mentioned earlier, Warren came under fire recently for listing herself as a Native American in a law school directory for over a decade.  She later removed her name.  Her last employer, Harvard Law School, once considered her Native American.  Warren says she doesn’t know where HLS got that crazy idea.

The Daily Caller suggests an answer:

In 1994, one year before she joined the faculty at Harvard, Warren won the prestigious Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was teaching at the time. Eleven years later, the Minority Equity Committee of the University of Pennsylvania published a report that listed every winner of the award since 1991 and highlighted the names of minority recipients — including Elizabeth Warren’s.

There is growing speculation that Warren leveraged her claimed Native American status to land plum teaching jobs she might not have otherwise received, and then quietly distanced herself from the designation once she reached the pinnacle of her profession.

Now incumbent Republican Senator Scott Brown is calling for her to release law school records and job applications that might show Warren’s systematic use of an unsubstantiated claim to minority status.  (To date, Warren attributes her alleged lineage to family lore and at most a potential 1/32 linkage to Cherokee ancestors.)

The more Warren gets a pass from liberal elites for abusing higher ed’s racial preference subculture to advance her career, the more contemptible the entire artifice of race-based policies becomes.

With spring quickly turning to summer, it’s graduation season throughout the nation. This is a time of year where rubbish masquerading as good advice is rampant, and the same holds true in the Twitterverse, where liberal uber-pundit Ezra Klein offered up this half-baked idea:

Um, Ezra … nothing. There’s a thread in modern liberalism — going all the way back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau — which esteems the callow and untutored as morally superior to the experienced and wise. Unfortunately, since the 1960s, that belief has increasingly come to be shared by society at large.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled on this topic in highfalutin journals and serious publications — much of it worthwhile. But for my (admittedly demotic) tastes, late night comic Craig Ferguson really hit the nail on the head in a monologue a few years ago:

This terrific piece by our friend Kevin Kane of the Pelican Institute in New Orleans is obviously Louisiana-specific, but its arguments could readily apply to every state in the union. It explains, simply and clearly, why states should resist the ObamaCare insurance exchanges. Great stuff.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) explains on the House floor why his bill to cut $1 million from the Department of Justice’s appropriation is justified in light of Attorney General Eric Holder’s refusal to hand over documents related to the Fast and Furious scandal:

“For those watching at home, what would happen to them if they ignored a summons for jury duty? What would happen for them if they ignored a grand jury subpoena? What would happen if a committee of Congress demanded documents [from them] and they summarily refused to cooperate?”

Gowdy said that if any ordinary American citizen obstructed subpoenas the way Holder has, they “would be sanctioned, fined and probably jailed.”

America is a nation of laws, not men.  It reflects well on the House of Representatives that Gowdy’s bill passed by voice vote, indicating it had lots of support.

H/T: The Daily Caller

We’re still early in the 2012 election cycle, but it’s going to be tough to top Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s diversity scandal (which I’m dubbing “Tipigate”) for irony.

As Ashton noted here last week, Warren — who has been liberalism’s “it girl” of the past few years — is in hot water after it emerged that she claimed Cherokee ancestry during her time as a member of the Harvard faculty.

According to a new piece by Alex Pappas in the Daily Caller, not only is the Cherokee connection dubious (the Warren relative in question was referred to as “white” in the census count), the family tree isn’t exactly Native American-friendly:

Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson, citing a genealogist, claimed Tuesday that Massachusetts Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry includes a great-great-great grandfather who helped round up Cherokees in the days leading to the Trail of Tears.

Warren, of course, shouldn’t be held responsible for the vices of her forebears. But consistency would dictate that she thus has no claim on their virtues either.

Big Labor is at it again.  This time in the airline industry.

As you’ve probably heard, US Airways has proposed a merger with American Airlines, and the latter’s labor unions have eagerly pursued contract agreements with their potential new employer.  A benevolent effort meant to expedite the process?  Hardly.  Rather, it is a hasty, thinly-veiled act of desperation.  Instead of allowing American’s bankruptcy restructuring process to run its natural course, and a stronger airline to emerge, American’s unions have acted in a manner that can only serve to muddle and complicate the situation.

Here’s the critical fact to keep in mind: American Airlines reached its current predicament due primarily to its onerous labor costs.  Its industry-high labor costs, representing fully 28% of its revenue, led to bankruptcy.  Now, however, its unions seek to repeat that futile process by pursuing similar deals with US Airways.  It defies history and economic reality to believe that a new merger under similar conditions would create such a magical synergy allowing the new contracts to be sustained for a lasting amount of time.

On top of that, successfully integrating two separate workforces into one can be a logistical nightmare.  After all, US Airways itself has yet to fully integrate the new employees it acquired with its 2005 takeover of America West Airlines.  Pilots from both carriers have engaged in an ongoing dispute over seniority and pay scales, and to this day US Airways and America West essentially operate as two separate entities, with US Airways pilots only flying US Airways planes and vice-versa.  How could repeating that scenario be expected to create sudden synergies or cost savings?  What evidence is there that this union-proposed takeover might play out differently?

Make no mistake – we at CFIF don’t maintain any inherent antipathy toward mergers.  We do, however, recognize the pitfalls and dangers of mergers suspiciously pursued and negotiated by union bosses.  The unfortunate reality is that this appears to be yet another example of Big Labor pursuing its own interests at the expense of the rank-and-file employees it claims to represent.

By way of historical background, the airline industry has changed rapidly over the years due to rising fuel costs and other market forces.  Countless carriers have restructured union contracts or merged with competitors to reduce costs and remain in the market.

American Airlines stands as the lone exception.

American has never merged with another airline, and until this year it had never filed for bankruptcy.  As a result, its unionized employees have enjoyed arguably the best salaries and benefits packages in the industry.  And in an ironic bit of history, US Airways has itself gone through several bankruptcies over the years, and even frozen or terminated pensions and many of the types of benefits they’re apparently ceding to American’s labor unions in hopes of a quick deal.

We live in economically uncertain times, in which the cushy union contracts of old have become outdated and fiscally unsustainable.  The fact that American, once the nation’s model airline, is bankrupt is itself evidence of how challenging it has become to operate in the industry.  Big Labor knows this well.  After all, it represents a significant percentage of the industry workforce.  Sadly, however, it refuses to learn the straightforward lessons of recent history, and instead continues to demand unreasonable contracts that will put the longevity and viability of airlines at risk.  In so doing, shortsighted union leaders place their own survival above that of their members.  They concern themselves primarily with replenishing their coffers and pursuing political victories financed by union dues.

That imprudent approach may benefit the union leadership in the near term.  But in the end, it proves to the detriment of average unionized American Airlines employees, as well as customers due to the reduced long-term viability of a bloated, union-controlled airline.  The alternative is to allow American the opportunity to right the ship and carve out a new, mutually-beneficial agreement with its employees.  Concessions will need to be made by both management and labor, and it will necessary for American Airlines’ bankruptcy proceedings to run its course.

The Big Labor alternative to repeat the unsustainable cycle will merely prolong the misery at the expense of employees and consumers.

We here at CFIF have always cast a jaundiced eye on First Lady Michelle Obama’s nanny state attempts to hector Americans about how they eat. Whether it’s Ashton pointing out that the program consistently fails in public schools because kids don’t actually like the food or my observing that this trend has actually led to black markets in the cafeteria, we’ve primarily focused on the initiative’s shortcomings for America’s children. It turns, out however, that it’s just as robustly failing adults. From Bloomberg:

After vowing to open more than 1,000 stores selling fresh fruit and vegetables in underserved urban neighborhoods, or “food deserts,” grocers have opened a fraction of them, putting in jeopardy Michelle Obama’s effort to improve food choices for low-income Americans.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which said last July it would have 300 food-desert stores nationwide by 2016, has opened 23 and delayed opening some locations after a backlash from activists. Supervalu Inc., which pledged to double to 2,376 its Save-A-Lot stores, has slowed the pace of openings amid declining sales and scarce financing for its licensees. Meanwhile, grocers are opening stores in wealthier urban enclaves.

Food desert locations, by definition, aren’t profitable, according to Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“The whole phrase ‘food desert’ sort of implies the weather created it,” said Lichtenstein. “It’s not the weather — it’s because people don’t have any money.”

Shoppers who live in low-income city neighborhoods “don’t fill up a basket and spend $100, they buy $10,” said Lichtenstein, who wrote “The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business.”

There’s a couple of worthwhile takeaways here. The first is how often politicians and corporations earn praise from press releases and hollow promises. Wal-Mart undoubtedly got more fanfare for announcing the “food desert” stores than it will get scrutiny for failing to build them.

The second is the pervasiveness of the liberal creed that undesirable outcomes must be the product of systemic oppression. Mrs. Obama has long suggested, at least implicitly, that a neglect of urban communities is to blame for the absence of fresh produce in the inner city. It seemingly never occurred to her that the absence of a service in a given market might owe to the fact that there’s not enough demand to make it profitable. The First Lady’s real problem isn’t that corporations aren’t producing what people want; it’s that consumers don’t want what she thinks they should.

That gets to the core of the Obama Administration’s problem. They don’t simply want to change public policy or see corporate practices altered. They want to see human behavior reengineered — whether in the form of the food we eat, the cars we drive, or the doctors we visit. Sooner or later, however, reality will catch up with the White House, as it has in the case of the “food deserts.” No government edict can make straight the crooked timber of humanity.

Ashton is right to explain why it’s significant, and troubling, that the man Occupying the Oval Office has so determinedly avoided press conferences. But it’s more than just his inability to explain unjustifiable regulations. Methinks Barack Obama has disdain for the public itself, disdain for the very idea that he should need to answer anybody for anything, disdain for the very idea that his own power is contingent and limited.

This disdain has shown itself again and again. Middle America, according to Obama, clings to God and guns because we’re bitter. Twice he has said we are lazy. Numerous times he as ignored clear congressional directives. And so on.

I’m still waiting for the sea to stop rising and the Earth to start healing, and for our economy to recover… and for the Greek columns behind Obama to grow even taller of their own accord.

Meditate on this excerpt from an op-ed by former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

“An inclusive party would welcome the party’s most conservative activists right alongside its most liberal activists,” the actor-turned-politician said. “There is room for those whose views, I think, make them sound like cavemen. And there is also room for us in the center, with views the traditionalists probably think make us sound like progressive softies.”

As usual, Schwarzenegger is being too soft on himself.  After promising to “blow up the boxes” in Sacramento and get tough on a legislature full of “girly men,” Schwarzenegger passed seven laughably unbalanced budgets that everyone acknowledged were premised on accounting gimmicks that are illegal in the private sector.  He signed into law AB 32, the global warming regulatory scheme that burdens California’s economy without making a single degree of difference in the global temperature.  He supported a multi-billion dollar bond initiative to fund embryonic stem cell research despite the industry’s pivot toward adult stem cells as an ethically better, more scientifically promising avenue for treatment.

Ignoring the laws of fiscal gravity?  Cursing the sun while your neighbors grow their economies?  Defying science to serve a political ideology?  Who’s the real caveman in all this Mr. Schwarzenegger?

H/T: Catalina Camia at USA Today

By the standard rules of political compromise, Senator Jim DeMint could be forgiven if he decided not to wade into the fight over whether the Export-Import Bank gets reauthorized by Congress. The bank, which subsidizes the business ventures of American corporations overseas, counts Boeing as one of its biggest beneficiaries — and the aerospace giant has a major presence in DeMint’s home state of South Carolina.

As he makes clear in a new op-ed in the Greenville News, however, DeMint doesn’t take stances based on which interests they serve; he takes them based on what principles they represent. From the piece:

When Boeing’s home state labor union ganged up with President Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board to try to sue Boeing for building a new factory in North Charleston, I strongly supported Boeing’s freedom to build factories wherever they pleased.

More recently dust has been kicked over the extension of the Export-Import Bank, a federal program that subsidizes American businesses’ exports. Because Boeing receives Ex-Im subsidies, and because I favor winding down the Ex-Im Bank instead of increasing its budget, some ask if I went from being pro-Boeing to anti-Boeing.

Neither. All I’ve ever been is pro-freedom.

In both cases, my guiding principle is the same: liberty.

Freedom isn’t perfect, but it is fair. And any time government hands out favors, they’ll be unfair to someone.

When Washington picks winners and losers, in the end taxpayers always lose, and Ex-Im is no exception.

Kudos to Senator DeMint for standing on the side of liberty and equality before the law, and for opposing the trends toward rent-seeking and crony capitalism. We could use more like him in Washington.

Veteran White House correspondent Keith Koffler on why presidential press conferences – and Barack Obama’s distaste for them – are an important issue:

Press conferences are extraordinarily important for several reasons. A number of questions are asked on different topics. The pressure of being on national TV forces the president to explain his thinking. The public gets to actually see the president think and understand how he comes to his conclusions, an invaluable public service.

What’s more, the prospect of a press conference forces the White House to think through its own views. Everybody in the West Wing, including the president, has to stop and consider just what they are doing and why. Often the agencies are mined for answers about current policies so that White House aides can prepare the president, giving the West Wing valuable feedback about what’s going on.

My guess for why Obama doesn’t submit himself to rapid-fire questions about the issues of the day: there are no witty phrases to justify regulations and rhetoric that keep millions out of work while adding trillions to the deficit.

Better to just stay quiet.

As a companion piece to my CFIF column this week on the True the Vote summit held last weekend, here is a stats/examples-filled column for the publication affiliated with the impressive University of Mobile. An excerpt:

More numbers: In Texas, a voter must by law identify a permanent address, but in 2008 alone, 6,178 new registrants were accepted without one. Overall in Texas there are 29,345 names on the rolls with no address. In the town of Nacogdoches, 1,665 are registered from one P.O. Box. Statewide, 74,730 names of dead people remain on the rolls. In Florida, 29,935 dead people are still listed. In the largest county in Wisconsin, only 709,854 people are adults eligible to vote, but a stunning 954,008 names are on the registration lists.