Freedom Line Blog

From the recent decision to block construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline to Solyndra-like “green energy” initiatives, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the Obama Administration’s failed energy policies in the week’s Freedom Minute.

The drive to force schoolchildren to eat healthier meals continues unabated, despite overwhelming evidence that serving adult-oriented meals increases kids’ use of junk food.  In today’s San Francisco Chronicle one local school district food advocate (yes, they exist) thinks that new federal rules mandating increased use of red, yellow and green vegetables and protein-rich legumes will result in a generation of kids yearning for spinach.

“Parents can now imagine their children coming home from school with a newfound love for spinach, sweet potatoes and whole-wheat spaghetti,” said Dawn Undurraga, staff nutritionist with Environmental Working Group, which works on public health issues, in a statement. “That’s a positive development that will have a lasting impact as they grow into strong, fit young adults.”

Would that it were so.  As a parent myself, I can vouch for the flights of fancy we sometimes entertain when junior’s decision-making process does not mirror our own.  On occasion I’ve tried to convince myself that maybe if I just eliminate sugar from my son’s diet he won’t want it anymore.  Of course, his taste buds and Grandma intercede and the game is up.  He knows that there’s a much better tasting alternative to the wheat-filled slag Dad is serving.  It is one thing for a parent to be paternalistic, but it’s quite another when public sector food bureaucrats (or “activists”) think they can socially engineer a kid to crave certain food.

Unfortunately for the Berkeley-based Ms. Undurraga, my column on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s failed food experiment points in the opposite direction.  According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times students confronted with mass produced health food are reacting in a way all too familiar:

For many students, L.A. Unified’s trailblazing introduction of healthful school lunches has been a flop. Earlier this year, the district got rid of chocolate and strawberry milk, chicken nuggets, corn dogs, nachos and other food high in fat, sugar and sodium. Instead, district chefs concocted such healthful alternatives as vegetarian curries and tamales, quinoa salads and pad Thai noodles.

There’s just one problem: Many of the meals are being rejected en masse. Participation in the school lunch program has dropped by thousands of students. Principals report massive waste, with unopened milk cartons and uneaten entrees being thrown away. Students are ditching lunch, and some say they’re suffering from headaches, stomach pains and even anemia. At many campuses, an underground market for chips, candy, fast-food burgers and other taboo fare is thriving.  (Emphasis mine)

What?  A black market for comfort food seething right below the pad Thai noodles and quinoa salads?!  Obviously, the next step is to confiscate the hamburgers and punish those responsible.  Perhaps Michelle Obama could be called in to force-feed yummy bowls of spinach until the little ones develop that “newfound love” of greens everyone is so eager to foist upon them.

For the past three years, those of us who eat, sleep and breathe the principles of limited government and free enterprise have been banging our heads against the wall because of the devastating and rampant overreach of executive departments and agencies in the Obama Administration.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)… the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)… the Department of Justice (DOJ)… Enough said.

But perhaps there has been no agency more guilty of abusing its power and imposing its regulatory overreach than the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  After all, it is the FCC that unilaterally – by a 3-2 party-line vote – imposed so-called “Net Neutrality” regulations against a bipartisan majority in Congress, a unanimous federal court of appeals and 2-1 public opinion.  It is the FCC that, despite acknowledging a national spectrum crisis as more and more consumers use smart phones and tablet computers, continually works to block any and all productive efforts to relieve said crisis.

So it was refreshing to read earlier today that AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson is calling out the FCC’s overreach, charging that the Commission is “intent on picking winners and losers rather than letting these markets work.” 

For too long the FCC has interfered with the free market, which has created an unlevel playing field that unfairly props up politically-favored companies less likely to invest their own capital in new job-creating and economy-enhancing infrastructure at the expense of others that will. 

And, that’s precisely why Congress must act, not only to refrain from granting the FCC’s request for additional flexibility on spectrum auction authority, but also to tighten the reins on the FCC in order to prevent it from further skewing the wireless market. 

Instead of permitting the FCC to, by definition, pick “winners and losers” in the wireless marketplace by unfairly limiting and excluding certain companies from participating in spectrum auctions, Congress must pass legislation that that will facilitate the proper and fair functioning of spectrum auctions that are open to all willing buyers. 

That the FCC thinks otherwise, coupled with its recent history of abusive regulatory overreach, should spark a long overdue and serious discussion about clearly defining its proper authority once and for all.

As I note in my new weekly column, out today, President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night was littered with risible claims, not the least of which was his defense of the hundreds of billions of dollars poured into the financial and auto industries at the height of the nation’s economic crisis (efforts, in fairness, that began with the Bush Administration). Contrary to the president’s rosy recitations, however, the bailouts were not an unimpeachable success. As the AP reports today:

A government watchdog says U.S. taxpayers are still owed $132.9 billion that companies haven’t repaid from the financial bailout, and some of that will never be recovered.

The bailout launched at the height of the financial crisis in September 2008 will continue to exist for years, says a report issued Thursday by Christy Romero, the acting special inspector general for the $700 billion bailout. Some bailout programs, such as the effort to help homeowners avoid foreclosure by reducing mortgage payments, will last as late as 2017, costing the government an additional $51 billion or so.

This report won’t get much attention, simply because of the fact that a majority of the money has been paid back. That fact, however, reveals what may be the most damning legacy of the bailouts’ gonzo economics: the ability to think of a $133 billion shortfall as a rounding error.

It’s not morning in America. And if the dawn does break on President Obama’s watch, the forecast is for heavy clouds. This graph from today’s Wall Street Journal, comparing economic growth during Reagan and Obama’s first terms, shows why:

Conservatives have been up in arms about ABC’s airing last week of the interview in which Marianne Gingrich said her ex-husband asked her for an open marriage. But their anger is misplaced. The problem wasn’t in airing the interview; the problem was in what ABC left out.

ABC filmed well over an hour of footage with Ms. Gingrich. They aired — what was it, maybe seven minutes of that footage?

The question is, what did the network leave out, and why?

Here’s what I’m told by people familiar with the interview: first, that in much of the rest of the interview she was complimentary towards her former husband, and second, that she was trying to give a full, contextual picture of his character — a context left on the cutting room floor when ABC concentrated only on the sex/adultery/betrayal angle. “They left out the essence of her,” said one of my sources. What they left out is that she, a dedicated conservative, is proud of what she and her husband accomplished together for causes such as balanced budgets and welfare reform.

By leaving out so much, ABC did Ms. Gingrich a disservice, because the “open marriage” segment, by general agreement, made her appear somewhat bitter — whereas, in fuller context, it would have made her look more baffled than bitter. Asked on camera if she resented Callista Gingrich being with Newt when he is rich and running large accounts at Tiffany’s while she, Marianne, endured the long, lean financial years and the vitriol from the Left during his Speakership, Marianne Gingrich reportedly smiled and said, “No, I think I had Newt’s best years.”

None of that came across. Ms. Gingrich deserved better.

Granted, any TV news magazine is going to run only part of its footage. But to take out all context is absurd. Oddly enough, taking out the context ended up helping Newt Gingrich. Because viewers couldn’t see Ms. Gingrich speaking thoughtfully and with decency toward her husband, they couldn’t see just how bad a betrayal it was for her husband to treat her so shabbily. Because they concentrated on the sex, they made the interview seem like it was prurient, and thus like an unseemly attack, rather than like a reasonable examination of Gingrich’s past. It thus engendered sympathy for him … and of course played into his hands by allowing him to attack the establishment media, which is always (and usually justifiably) red meat for conservatives.

Of course Gingrich knew how to take advantage of this. He just followed Bill Clinton’s playbook. Turn the issue away from substance; make the issue about the prurience of the questioner. Express indignation. Raise your voice with just the right amount of anger. Make yourself the victim rather than the perp. Clinton did it to Gingrich during the Lewinsky scandal. When Gingrich personally ordered several last-minute commercials in the 1998 campaign attacking Clinton about Lewinsky — at least one of which clearly aimed at Clinton’s morality rather than, or far more than, at his lying under oath (which at least somewhat puts the lie to Gingrich’s claim on Wednesday that he was only criticizing Clinton’s perjury, not his sexual behavior) — it backfired on Gingrich and Republicans, big-time. Gingrich learned his lesson: A sexual sinner can win politically by playing the victim.

Conservatives also have reason to wonder what else remains in ABC’s vault. ABC has shown that its editing is suspect. Imagine what could happen, though, if Gingrich wins the nomination. One can easily see ABC saying, “Hey, remember that interview with Marianne Gingrich? Well, there was more to it than that. Here’s something else she said!”

Then, again out of context, they find some other snippet from Ms. Gingrich, this time on the substance of her ex-husband’s leadership or his beliefs, and they air it in a way that could do the absolute most damage to him in the general election. One can easily imagine that if 95 percent of the rest of what Ms. Gingrich said was complimentary, an editor still could cull some random 5% and use it in a way the ex-Speaker can’t parry anywhere near so easily. It’s harder to make yourself look good when your leadership qualities or your principles are being directly challenged — especially because, unlike with private, marital conversations, any testimony from Ms. Gingrich about Newt Gingrich’s actions related to public policy can actually be checked out by, yes, what actually happened in the public realm. In other words, if it’s true, then it’s more easily verifiable.

Again, Marianne Gingrich — by all accounts I have ever heard, a very nice lady — deserved better from ABC. So did the voters of this country.

Reading the text of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels’ Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address gives us a bittersweet reminder of what might have been had he run for President this year.  Here are some phrases I hope the eventual nominee incorporates into his campaign – and governing – rhetoric:

“In three short years, an unprecedented explosion of spending, with borrowed money, has added trillions to an already unaffordable national debt. And yet, the President has put us on a course to make it radically worse in the years ahead. The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy; it borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.

“The extremism that stifles the development of homegrown energy, or cancels a perfectly safe pipeline that would employ tens of thousands, or jacks up consumer utility bills for no improvement in either human health or world temperature, is a pro-poverty policy. It must be replaced by a passionate pro-growth approach that breaks all ties and calls all close ones in favor of private sector jobs that restore opportunity for all and generate the public revenues to pay our bills.

“The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing. Listening to them much longer will mean that these proud programs implode, and take the American economy with them. It will mean that coming generations are denied the jobs they need in their youth and the protection they deserve in their later years.

“We will advance our positive suggestions with confidence, because we know that Americans are still a people born to liberty. There is nothing wrong with the state of our Union that the American people, addressed as free-born, mature citizens, cannot set right. Republicans in 2012 welcome all our countrymen to a program of renewal that rebuilds the dream for all, and makes our ‘city on a hill’ shine once again.”

If Republicans win the White House this year I hope there’s an important place in the Administration for Mitch Daniels.

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.

During tonight’s State of the Union speech, Barack Obama will trot out his usual energy platitudes, Solyndra now excepted.

Regardless of Obama’s rhetoric, however, the real-world facts speak perfectly clearly.  Since the final week of 2008, according to the Thomson Reuters Datastream, the price per barrel of crude oil has increased an astounding 161%.  That year, Obama famously suggested that his election would mark the date on which Earth began to heal, the seas stopped rising and magic unicorns began delivering free In ‘n’ Out burgers to those of us on the east coast.  Instead, we’ve seen deficits rising, unemployment rising and oil prices rising.  As they say in Latin, “res ipsa loquitur” – “the fact speaks for itself.”   Namely, that Obama’s grandiosity and his actual performance maintain an inverse relationship.

Writing today in Politico, Reagan biographer (and now Newt Gingrich chronicler) Craig Shirley gets to the very heart of the difficulty Mitt Romney faces in trying to persuade a Republican electorate desperate for an epochal shift in a party that they (rightly) perceive to have been insufficiently inattentive to limited government:

The former Bain Capital chief is the elitist heir to Rockefeller and the malapropistic heir to Ford and George H. W. Bush. Watching Ford speak extemporaneously was like watching a drunk cross an icy parking lot — and the same can be said for the exuberantly monosyllabic man from Massachusetts…

No one goes around calling themselves a Nixon Republican or a Ford Republican or a Bush Republican. But plenty now proudly call themselves Goldwater Republicans and Reagan Republicans.

One need not share Shirley’s enthusiasm for Gingrich to recognize the sagacity of his diagnosis of Romney. It’s not that conservatives don’t want a manager. It’s just that they want so much more. At this moment in our history — when all sense of principled restrictions on the power of the federal government seem to be eroding — they want someone to draw a line in the sand. Convincing conservative voters that he’s the man for that job is probably beyond Mitt Romney’s ability. To remain a serious candidate, however, he’ll at least have to convince them that he’s not a closet sympathist for their ideological adversaries within the party.

At The American Spectator, I defend Newt Gingrich from scurrilous leftist charges that he is appealing to racist sentiments. Yet even though it is already a long post (please do read it), there is more to be said.

It is this: Have you ever noticed how seldom it is that conservatives ever actually say anything connecting food stamps or welfare with blacks — but how often it is that any time liberals hear those words, they immediately think that it is blacks who are being referred to?

At best, this is liberal paternalism in action. Worse, it could be the same thing that motivates racial preferences and other, similar liberal nostrums: namely, the assumption by the left that black Americans can’t be expected to be successes unless government helps them. It is an assumption that seems only to be applied to black people. It is a flat-out wrong assumption. But it almost always comes from the left, not the right.

In reality, there is no racial component to food stamps. It is shameful to think there is. The shame should be borne by those who do: namely, American liberals.

A funny thing happens when you overlay two of President Barack Obama’s recent energy proclamations onto a 2008 electoral map: You find out just how political is his decision to kill the Keystone XL pipeline and embrace natural gas from the Marcellus Shale formation.

Here’s a map of the Keystone XL project.  And this is a map of the 2008 presidential election.  Note that the path of Keystone XL runs from Canada directly south through six states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.  All of these states voted for John McCain in 2008.  (Incidentally, not even a sideline to Obama’s Illinois during the pipeline’s initial phase could placate the anti-fossil fuel President.)

Now look at this map of the Marcellus Shale natural gas formation that the Obama White House now says would be a great place to start drilling for America’s energy future.  It touches vast swaths of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, with a large portion covering West Virginia.  Obama won New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in 2008, and will need to do so again in 2012 to stay in the Oval Office.

As I said in my column last week, expect to hear Obama make the pitch that natural gas from Marcellus Shale is the new way forward as a way to placate blue collar energy workers in states he needs to maintain – and in the case of West Virginia, possibly pick up.  (Reports are coming in that the President will devote a significant portion of his State of the Union Address to promoting domestic natural gas production.)

It’ll be a tough sale.  Obama’s EPA is trying to regulate the West Virginia coal industry out of existence, while working class voters are rightfully suspicious of a President who promises everything from expanded offshore drilling to solar powered miracles (Solyndra, anyone?), only to be exposed as a fraud.  Natural gas may be the next big thing, but it won’t mean anything to a coal worker out of work because his industry went out of business thanks to Obama’s latest round of picking winners and losers.

The big question is: Will the GOP be able to turn Obama’s politicization of America’s energy future into an articulate appeal for an all-of-the-above approach?

Believe it or not, that’s the remarkable reality we’ll be facing when Barack Obama takes to the podium to deliver his State of the Union address tomorrow night: nearly three years wherein the federal government — the largest distributor of funds on the planet — has operated without a budget. That’s a failure that deserves widespread public attention. Happily, the GOP — which usually can be counted on to bobble these kinds of communications opportunities — is doing a serviceable job of highlighting this ignominious milestone:

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CST to 6:00 p.m. CST (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EST) 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 (CST)/5:00 pm (EST):  Megan Brown, Partner, Wiley Rein LLP — United States Supreme Court’s October 2011 Term and Hosanna-Tabor case on First Amendment rights of religious groups;

4:30 (CST)/5:30 pm (EST):  Margaret Hoover, Fox News contributor and author — South Carolina and Florida primaries, and American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives can save the Republican Party;

5:00 (CST)/6:00 pm (EST):  Ashton Ellis, Contributing Editor at CFIF — Keystone Pipeline Debacle;  and

5:30 (CST)/6:30 pm (EST):  Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author — Economic policy, and How Obama’s Gender Policies Undermine America.

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

James Bowman’s review today, at the American Spectator, of Iron Lady, the Meryl Streep movie about Margaret Thatcher, is right on target. He complains that the movie lingers (and lingers and lingers and lingers) over an almost entirely fictional account of Lady Thatcher in her dotage (yes, she has a form of dementia now, but the film invents its manifestations from thin air), while showing very little of her actual career in public life. Indeed, the entire period from the Falklands War to the end of the Cold War (nine years) is disposed of via a montage that lasts all of about 45 seconds, or maybe a minute. We see plenty of flashbacks of her showing her iron, but very, very little that indicate what she is showing her iron about. As Bowman writes, the producers have made “a political movie from which the politics has been extracted as a taxidermist draws out the brain of an animal he is stuffing through its nose. If there were any politics in it, they would have had to pick a side and portray Margaret Thatcher as essentially right or essentially wrong, so offending a significant portion of their potential audience who are, more than 30 years later, still passionately committed to one view or the other.

But this is foolish. They still could have avoided taking sides while portraying a lot more of the events of her career from a basically neutral standpoint. This isn’t journalism, of course, but even today there are good journalists who show that an even-handed neutrality in reporting can avoid betraying any bias while still portraying events in an interesting, dramatic (but not dramatized), even gripping manner. If print journalists can do this, it should be even easier for film-makers to do so.

For instance, a film-maker need evince no position on Thatcher’s philosophy in order to have Streep-as-Thatcher recreate the famous phone call in which Thatcher told the elder Bush to not “go wobbly” against Saddam Hussein. One need not agree with Thatcher’s support of Ronald Reagan’s hard line in the Cold War to show her making a speech in support of deploying mid-range missiles in Europe. And so on. Plenteous drama is achievable without necessarily taking sides. But the film-makers do none of this. As a result, they take the remarkable life of an indomitable lady and turn it into a series of brief flashbacks supporting the story of an almost pathetically confused old dame. Again, go back and read Bowman’s review. Good stuff.

This insight, courtesy of Warren Meyer writing in Forbes, tells you everything you need to know about why the Obama Administration’s decision to block the Keystone XL Pipeline is misbegotten:

Some would argue that [the pipeline’s] opponents aren’t anti-energy, they just want to shift energy use from fossil fuels to “green” energy like wind and solar.  This is either disingenuous or unbelievably naive. The Keystone XL pipeline would have single-handedly carried more energy to the United States than the sum of all the green energy projects funded by the Obama Administration. And it would have done so entirely with private  funds rather than the Administrations increasingly ill-fated and ham-handed attempts at venture capitalism with taxpayer funds. The fact of the matter is that, for the foreseeable future, opposing fossil fuels is equivalent to opposing energy use.

That, my friends, is the nub of the issue. Liberal environmentalists — those same individuals that sneeringly deride their opponents as “anti-science” — can’t come to grips with the empirical reality: there are conventional energy sources that work and “alternative energy” sources that are viable only in the more fevered recesses of their imaginations. The greens can deny that reality all they want, but they won’t be able to deny the subsequent consequences: higher energy prices and lower economic well-being. That’s a very high price to pay for a sense of moral superiority.

Mickey Edwards, former chairman, American Conservative Union:
“To describe Gingrich as ‘volatile’ is like describing Picasso as somebody who liked to draw.”

“[T]here are those who fear for the country if he were ever to become president.”

Wow, tough stuff. Surprised it didn’t get more play when it came out a month ago….

In what Fox News calls “the first big break in what has been a unified front in the [Eric Holder’s Justice Department’s] defense of itself in the [Fast and Furious] gun-running scandal,” the number two DOJ official in Arizona is claiming through his lawyer that Holder & Co. are making him the fall guy.

“Department of Justice officials have reported to the Committee that my client relayed inaccurate information to the Department upon which it relied in preparing its initial response to Congress. If, as you claim, Department officials have blamed my client, they have blamed him unfairly,” the letter to Issa says.

Read the entire article here.

This week’s edition of the Liberty Update, CFIF’s weekly e-newsletter, is out. Below is a summary of its contents:

Senik:  Will the Tea Party End in 2012?
Ellis:  Obama Plays Politics with America’s Energy Future
Hillyer:  The Next President’s Agenda

Podcast:  The Truth About Rogue Websites Legislation
Jester’s Courtroom:  Man Convicted of DUI Sues Victim’s Family

Editorial Cartoons:  Latest Cartoons of Michael Ramirez
Quiz:  Question of the Week
Notable Quotes:  Quotes of the Week

If you are not already signed up to receive CFIF’s Liberty Update by e-mail, sign up here.

From BusinessWeek:

President Barack Obama’s rejection of TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline permit exposed a split in a core Democratic constituency and handed Republicans a new line of election-year attack.

Unions representing construction workers condemned the move while labor groups including the United Steel Workers, the United Auto Workers and the Service Employees International Union joined with environmental advocates in saying they support Obama’s decision. It also triggered swift criticism from congressional Republicans and the party’s presidential candidates.

Expect Republicans to run ads targeting blue collar workers in Rust Belt swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio where ties to manufacturing jobs run deep.  When Obama ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008 he consistently lost the white working class vote for stances like picking sky-is-falling environmentalists over John and Jane hardhat.

Dissatisfaction among traditionally Democratic blue collar voters toward Obama has been building for months due to political decisions that – as discussed in my column this week – kill unionized jobs in coal and oil, but interestingly not natural gas.  Obama’s turn away from blue collar voters has been met with a renewed emphasis on ginning up votes among other core Democratic constituencies like recent college graduates (hello, Occupiers!) and other gentry liberals.

But the strategy of maximizing votes in liberal enclaves like college towns and deep blue coastal states that Obama would win anyway doesn’t quite add up for one simple reason: the Electoral College – not the popular vote – elects the President.  Even if Obama gets a larger share of liberals in blue states like California he still nets only 54 electoral votes.  But if he fails to connect with everyday Democrats in swing states in Ohio and Pennsylvania that see their President willfully killing jobs they’d otherwise have, he’ll move entire states into the Republican column.

This kind of divide-and-conquer strategy looks like a recipe for defeat.  Then again, from my perspective, I couldn’t ask for a better campaign strategy.  (Unless, of course, this scenario occurs.)