Freedom Line Blog

I wrote about Gadhafi’s end here. It didn’t need to be this way. So many lives could have been saved if Gadhafi… well, if he weren’t Gadhafi, the murderous thug.

If you’re a regular Fox News viewer, you’re probably familiar with Lanny Davis, the longtime Democratic political hand and former Special Counsel to President Clinton. On television, Davis can usually be seen defending Democratic orthodoxy with vigor.  He’s taken a recent turn in print, however, that shows he’s unafraid to gore one of his party’s most sacred cows: opposition to charter schools. From the piece:

The deal is this: The contract, or “charter,” allows the outside entity to operate the school free of the uniform rules applying to curriculum, teaching salaries, hiring and firing and other operating details that are applicable to all public schools; but in return, the charter school must deliver on pre-agreed goals, such as performance measured by standardized tests or graduation rates.

What does this achieve? A lot. First and foremost, it busts monopoly power, where one organization, such as the school district, has a captive group of customers, i.e., public school students, who have no choice but to be subject to the monopoly. And it provides the benefit of competition — students have choices, and if the charter school doesn’t work, they (i.e., their parents) can vote with their feet. And perhaps more importantly, the public school system is no longer a monopoly — they must do better or they will lose more students to charter schools within the public school system.

Imagine that: an institution that has to face consequences for failing its consumers. At at time when the folks over at Occupy Wall Street are casting their lot with the teachers unions that trap children in failing schools, it’s nice to see at least one liberal who realizes that “sticking up for the little guy” means defending the students, not indulging big labor.

Our friends at Human Events confirm the money trail between Leftist billionaire George Soros and the Occupy Wall Street movement attracting communists, socialists and anarchists to its ranks.

The nonprofit organization at the receiving end of Soros’ largesse, Alliance for Global Justice, is managing donations benefiting the communists, socialists, anarchists and hippies now occupying Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan.  As of Oct. 19, OWS had taken in a grand total of $435,000 from all sources, including donations made by individuals online and in person, according to reports.

And how’s this for a business model?

Alliance for Global Justice is a “fiscal sponsor,” which means that it serves as a financial clearinghouse for radical causes that haven’t filed papers to incorporate themselves as nonprofit organizations.  Donors give money to the Alliance and are then able to deduct the donations from their income tax even though the cause they are funding isn’t recognized as tax-exempt by the IRS.  Fiscal sponsors take a percentage of donations as management fees, and then pass on the rest to the cause favored by the donor.

As with all things Soros, the irony here is rich.  A Hungarian who fled Nazism and communism sets up a “shadow party” to move America closer to a state-run tyranny.  A decrier of capitalism’s excesses, he made his name manipulating England’s currency and imperiled a nation through an act verging on financial terrorism.  Now, he’s a billionaire hedge fund manager who props up a nationwide anti-Wall Street protest.

However her presidential campaign turns out, Michele Bachmann deserves continued credit for speaking the truth no matter what the forum.  During question time after a speech in the liberal haven of San Francisco, the conservative firebrand made these distinctions between the “occupy” movement and the Tea Party:

“The tea party picks up its trash after it has a demonstration, so there’s a difference,” the Minnesota congresswoman quipped during a question-and-answer period after her speech to the Commonwealth Club of California.

On a more serious note, the two movements have “two different views of how to solve the problems” our nation faces, she said. Occupy activists believe in “government-directed solutions based on temporary gimmicks,” she said, while tea partyers believe in “permanent solutions driven from the private sector.”

Amen, sister.

H/T: San Jose Mercury-News

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

Hillyer:  Alabama Boosts Borders: The Immigration Controversy
Lee:  While Federal Spending Hit New Record in 2011, Washington, D.C. Became America’s Wealthiest City
Ellis:  Obama’s 5 (Most Recent) Dumb Statements
Senik:  Obama’s “Occupy Wall Street” Problem: He Is the One Percent

Podcast:  Hoover Fellow Outlines United States Policy on Military Intervention
Jester’s Courtroom:  Flying the Turbulent Skies Lands a Lawsuit

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.

In our commentary this week entitled “While Federal Spending Hit New Record in 2011, Washington, D.C. Became America’s Wealthiest City”, we highlight the interrelation between federal spending reaching a new record high in 2011 and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area becoming the nation’s wealthiest.   Among other facts, we pointed out that wages of federal employees themselves are over 1/5 higher than comparable private-sector employees, and that federal benefits stand 20%-40% higher than those of private counterparts.

Today, Senators Jeff Sessions and Olympia Snowe sustain our point in their commentary within The Wall Street Journal entitled “An End to Budgetary Trickery.”  Advocating the Honest Budget Act they’ve introduced to end “the most blatant and dishonest” overspending gimmicks, they highlight “Fake Federal Pay Freezes”:

In November 2010, the president promised to institute a ‘two-year pay freeze for all civilian federal workers.’  He explained that ‘getting this deficit under control is going to require broad sacrifice.’  But 70% of civilian federal workers have continued to receive 2%-3% automatic ‘step’ increases just for showing up – costing taxpayers an extra billion dollars every year.  The Honest Budget Act, in keeping with the president’s pledge, would simply make the federal pay freeze real by legislative mandate.”

Senators Sessions and Snowe also seek to end false “emergency” spending, phony “rescissions” and timing shifts in their legislation.  As they summarize, “No more gimmicks, tricks or shell games.”  We agree, and urge you to take a quick moment to contact your two Senators in support of the Honest Budget Act.   Let’s get this done.

Back before G.W. Bush nominated the excellent John Roberts for the Supreme Court, many conservatives had another name at or near the top of their wish-list: Alice Batchelder, judge (now chief judge) on the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. (She was, as I recall, my second choice, with Sam Alito as my top choice. Of course, I have been very happy with John Roberts as well.) Last night at the Heritage Foundation, those assembled could see exactly why she was rated so highly.

The event was Heritage’s annual Joseph Story lecture, named after the brilliant and principled Supreme Court Justice appointed by James Madison. Batchelder effectively created a “debate” of ideas (albeit expressed more than three decades apart) between the Anti-Federalist of the ratifying period named “Brutus” (likely Robert Yates) and Story, as to whether or not the Constitution left too much leeway to judges to assume too much unchecked power. Story, whose own jurisprudence was of what we conservatives now would call “originalist” or “textualist” and who himself never would have overstepped proper bounds, argued that the judiciary overall would not exceed its bounds either. In doing so, he may have been projecting his own virtues onto future justices; what Batchelder argued was that Story was less able a prognosticator than he was a judge. Clearly, she said, Brutus’ warnings proved right — not, mind you, that the Constitution read correctly allows for power-wandering judges, but that its protections against that evil are not strong enough to block judges from straying.

It all made for an interesting situation where the Story lecturer was arguing against Story’s position on a particular issue (although certainly not against his jurisprudence). It was fascinating stuff.

Without ever coming close to overstepping a current judge’s rightful bounds of opining on pending or possibly pending cases, Batchelder provided examples aplenty of how judges have indeed strayed far afield from the Constitution as those like Story understood it. Perhaps most ironic was that the very arguments used by the high court in the Casey abortion decision to justify an expansive conception of jurisprudential authority, namely that it is not the job of the government to “mandate” a “moral code,” runs afoul of the reasons originally given for expanding the Constitution’s “Commerce Clause,” which was that Congress had every rightful authority to prohibit commerce undertaken for “immoral purposes.”

Anyway, I’m getting into the weeds here, which may not be the right forum for doing so. Much more deserves to be written about Judge Batchelder’s wonderful speech later, and we should eagerly await Heritage’s publication of it in text form. I’ll be sure to let readers know when it is available.

CFIF’s Renee Giachino sits in for Quin Hillyer tonight on FM Talk 1065 from Mobile, Alabama. Tune in live here.  

Tonight’s line-up include:

•  8:00 pm (CT):  Tim Lee, CFIF, Jobs and No Jobs — The Obama Administration’s Economically Destructive Agenda
• 8:30 pm (CT):  Troy Senik, Former White House Speechwriter and CFIF Senior Fellow, Tea Party Rallies vs. Occupy Wall Street Protests

Count us surprised here at CFIF that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has any hangups about the current state of the economy. Remember, this is the man who said last year that without him the world would have slumped into a global depression. Apparently, though, the senior senator from Nevada has now realized there is a crisis — too little government spending going towards public employees:

9.1 percent of Americans are currently unemployed, as are 13.4 percent of Senator Reid’s fellow Nevadans. “Just fine”, we suppose, is a relative concept.

Regular readers of the blog know that there is a small gallery of Washington pundits that I simply cannot abide; not because I disagree with their views, but because I despise the predictability of their positions, the ballast of their prose, and the intellectual laziness of their work.

That’s a group that includes Tom Friedman, Joe Klein, and E.J. Dionne, amongst others. But there’s a special place in pundit hell for the professional joiner: the columnist who always has to march in lockstep with Beltway fashion. That’s why it’s so delightful to see the once-respectable Fareed Zakaria get noted in the New Republic’s list of over-rated DC thinkers. The précis is priceless:

Fareed Zakaria is enormously important to an understanding of many things, because he provides a one-stop example of conventional thinking about them all. He is a barometer in a good suit, a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle. He was for the Iraq war when almost everybody was for it, criticized it when almost everybody criticized it, and now is an active member of the ubiquitous “declining American power” chorus. When Obama wanted to trust the Iranians, Zakaria agreed (“They May Not Want the Bomb,” was a story he did for Newsweek); and, when Obama learned different, Zakaria thought differently. There’s something suspicious about a thinker always so perfectly in tune with the moment.

Indeed. Fareed Zakaria is a man who writes Gallup polls in paragraph form. Nice to see the media take notice.

Here in the developed world, Greenpeace’s brand of environmentalism provides a convenient way for sheltered liberals to become saints on the cheap.  But Greenpeace’s impact in the developing world isn’t so cheap.  In fact, it can be deadly.

A new introductory video from “DarkPeace” illustrates that destructive impact in very stark terms.  From sabotage against agricultural production research centers, to pressuring apparel companies like Adidas to stop manufacturing textiles in developing nations, to targeting energy projects, Greenpeace’s tactics have the effect of reducing availability of food in nations like Somalia where starvation is very real.  Its tactics also kill jobs, eliminate avenues to better wages and exacerbate miserable poverty.  Even The New York Times has admitted that Greenpeace’s shadier activities threaten “to completely marginalize” it and “undercut its credibility on other issues.”  Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore agrees:

To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalization than with science or ecology. I remember visiting our Toronto office in 1985 and being surprised at how many of the new recruits were sporting army fatigues and red berets in support of the Sandinistas…  Their propaganda campaign is aimed at promoting an ideology that I believe would be extremely damaging to both civilization and the environment.”

Even here in America, Greenpeace’s activities threaten tens of thousands of potential jobs.  But with groups like “DarkPeace” and people like Dr. Moore exposing them, perhaps not much longer.

One way to think of a presidential campaign is as a nationally followed negotiation.  Each political party provides players who in turn generate ideas for public consumption.  Some proposals change the national consensus (e.g. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts), while others fall flat (Walter Mondale’s “I will raise your taxes” pledge). 

If we look at what leading Republicans have proposed this cycle, it’s an impressive range of serious fiscal ideas.  Paul Ryan has his “Path to Prosperity” budget, Rick Santorum his tax cuts. Mitt Romney has 59 points to get America working, and Herman Cain has “9-9-9”.  Now, Ron Paul says we should cut $1 trillion dollars by eliminating entire federal cabinet departments and going back to 2006 funding levels for those that survive. 

My suspicion is that Paul’s plan will get the most criticism because it is the most radical.  But might it also be the most helpful in a sense, since it probably represents the least government that any major Republican will put his or her name to this year?  And if that’s the case, then isn’t Paul doing the electorate a favor by clearly articulating what the most radical version of reform would look like so voters can weigh the differences fully? 

If Quin, Tim, or Troy has anything to add, I’d like to read it.  Is Ron Paul’s plan bold, crazy, or something in between?

Once upon a time, candidate Obama promised to participate in the federal campaign finance program in a sop to free speech restrictionists.  Of course, he reneged as soon as he could, claiming that since the system is “broken” it was his right to collect as much money as he could  from willing donors.

Fast-forward to today, and it looks like President Obama has long forgotten his former aversion to privately financed campaigns:

[The President] can also raise large contributions for the Democratic National Committee — topping out at $30,800 per donor rather than the $5,000 limit on contributions to candidates — that are helping finance the party’s broader efforts to help Democrats up and down the ballot. During the last three months, the committee has already transferred funds totaling more than $1.3 million to Democratic organizations in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the party’s filings.

I don’t begrudge any candidate for choosing a free(r) market approach to campaign finance.  What’s galling in Obama’s case, though, is that once again we have an example of how brazenly opportunistic he is when it comes to basic principles.  Whether it’s promising people they can keep their health insurance after Obamacare or campaigning as a post-partisan then saying Republicans want folks to drink dirty water, the man seems incapable of keeping his word. 

The joke on some politicians is a truth applied to the president: you know he’s lying when his lips are moving.

I’ve posted before on the difficulty that Texas Congressman Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy presents: while Paul is utterly at sea on foreign policy issues and too philosophically pure to countenance the type of compromise that real political progress requires, his libertarian beliefs also make him one of the best candidates in the Republican race on economic issues. Thankfully, Paul has no hope of being the nominee, but let’s hope that his “Restore America” economic plan, unveiled earlier today, has an influence on the GOP field. This is solid stuff, as the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire blog reports:

Mr. Paul does get specific when he calls for a 10% reduction in the federal work force, while pledging to limit his presidential salary to $39,336, which his campaign says is “approximately equal to the median personal income of the American worker.”  The current pay rate for commander in chief is $400,000 a year.

The Paul plan would also lower the corporate tax rate to 15% from 35%, though it is silent on personal income tax rates, which Mr. Paul would like to abolish. The congressman would end taxes on personal savings and extend “all Bush tax cuts…”

While promising to cut $1 trillion in spending during his first year, Mr. Paul would eliminate the Departments of Education, Commerce, Energy, Interior and Housing and Urban Development…

Mr. Paul would also push for the repeal of the new health-care law, last year’s Wall Street regulations law and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the 2002 corporate governance law passed in response to a number of corporate scandals, including Enron.

What’s most remarkable is that Paul — long considered an ideological outlier — is now in line with the majority of the Republican establishment (the movement was on their end, not his). With the exception of his call to abolish the federal income tax and a few of his cabinet department eliminations, these are all priorities that a Republican congress could support coming from a GOP president. That man won’t be Ron Paul … but let’s hope he’s read his plan.

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):  Daniel DiSalvo, Senior Fellow at Manhattan Institute’s Center for State and Local Leadership – “Government Unions and the Bankrupting of America”;

4:30 (CDT)/5:30 pm (EDT):  Rich Trzupek, Chemist, Consultant and Writer – “How the EPA’s Green Tyranny is Stifling America”;

5:00 (CDT)/6:00 pm (EDT):  Chief George Dodge – Importance of Recognizing Veterans’ Day and the Panzacola Indian’s in Pensacola; and

5:30 (CDT)/6:30 pm (EDT):  Troy Senik, CFIF Fellow – “Occupy Wall Street” vs. Tea Partiers, and Bush “Torture” Memos vs. Obama Awlaki Memos.

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

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 ‘Occupy’ protests that have been springing up around the nation aren’t particularly well-defined. As best I can tell, there’s a visceral aversion to capitalism, accompanied by an endless array of non sequitur liberal causes (one protester’s sign at Occupy Los Angeles read “end heterosexism”).  In truth, however, this seems to be first and foremost an aesthetic movement aimed at recapturing the grimy romance of the halcyon years of protest in the Vietnam era. As such, it defines itself primarily by its opposition to institutional power, capaciously defined.

That’s why it’s so ironic that the movement now has the backing of one of the most powerful — and malign — special interests in the nation. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The California Teachers Association jumped on the Occupy Wall Street bandwagon Thursday, throwing the weight of 325,000 state teachers behind the movement for “tax fairness and against corporate greed.”

About that last bit: the CTA, which is one of the most nation’s destructive teachers unions, knows a thing or two about big money. It’s spent over $210 million in the course of the last decade to influence California state government — more than “big oil”, “big tobacco”, and “big pharma” combined. The results? Defeats for school voucher propositions, teacher accountability measures, and paycheck protection for educators. Not to mention that California — formerly a national leader in the classroom — now ranks among the bottom five American states in most education metrics.

Corruption, nest-feathering, and sticking it to the little guy. Sound familiar, Occupy protesters? Don’t look know, but you just got in bed with The Man.

Aside from being unconstitutional, Obamacare is also financially unsustainable.  Of course, everyone except the White House and their drones at HHS acknowledged this when the law passed.  Now, fiscal reality has forced the Obama Administration to scrap a program that was supposed to provide half of the fallacious budget savings from passing Obamacare.  Per Phillip Klein of the DC Examiner:

As Obamacare’s critics noted at the time, Democrats’ deficit reduction claims were based on a series of accounting gimmicks. One of the most obvious was the inclusion of the Community Living Assistance and Support Services Act, a program that was slated to collect five years of premiums before paying out any benefits. Though it was unsustainable over time, on paper it produced surpluses during the Congressional Budget Office’s 10-year budget window.

At the time of final passage, the CBO found that the health care law would reduce deficits by $143 billion, and $70 billion of that was attributable to the CLASS program.

Earlier, I noted a new HHS report recomending against implementing the program. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has now sent a letter to Congress conceding that there’s no path forward.

Republicans are still rightly moving to formally repeal the CLASS Act from federal law.  Let’s hope they keep pressing for a complete elimination.

Perhaps a head nod to Hot Shots fans will lessen the depressing (but by no means surprising) analysis from the Sacramento Bee’s Alan Autry on the dismal failure of Jerry Brown’s resurrected governorship:

The governor has signed nearly 745 bills, most aimed at yet more micromanagement of every aspect of our lives from Sacramento or at satisfying the interests of the organizations that funded his election. The Los Angeles Times said, “When the dust settled on Gov. Brown’s first legislative session in nearly three decades, no group had won more than organized labor.”

There you have it, the product of Brown’s first year in office: signing off on campaign payoff obligations, more Sacramento micromanagement, vetoing of bipartisan common sense reforms to increase government efficiency and effectiveness, procrastinating on regulatory reforms to help job creation, and signing a gut-and-amend bill that will ensure even more partisan gridlock – this from the man who ran on breaking the “morass of poisonous partisanship.”

The canary is dead and the coalmine is collapsing.  If you run a business and you have an option outside of California – take it.

The hits just keep on coming at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry.  The governor of Texas is in increasingly hot water as he tries to parry away charges that he’s soft on illegal immigration and insider tax breaks for friendly corporations.

In Texas, Tea Party activists are demanding that Perry sign an executive order or call a special session of the state legislature to pass an Arizona-style law authorizing state police to check a person’s immigration status.  On the business front, Perry’s use of a governor-controlled “emerging technology fund” is drawing criticism for producing more misses than hits for taxpayers told that tax holidays for some would create jobs for many others.

Perry can’t run away from his record.  He can, however, enhance it with better defenses of it.

We’ll see if he’s up to the challenge.