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.

Zero.  That’s the number of net jobs created in America last month according to the Labor Department’s monthly update, and the unemployment rate remained at 9.1%.

We are now more than two years since the recession officially ended in June 2009, and at the stage where the Obama Administration predicted that his trillion-dollar deficit spending “stimulus” would reduce unemployment to approximately 6% after topping out at 8% all the way back in the fall of 2009.  Instead, we suffered a post-war record number of months over 9%, and it continues to fester there.  By way of background, keep in mind that economists generally agree that a minimum of 150,000 to 200,000 jobs must be added to the American economy each month just to keep pace with natural population growth.  Also consider that economists had forecast a rise of somewhere near 100,000 jobs for July.

In contrast, in the same 30-month period following the effective date of President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in January 1983, unemployment plummeted from 10.4% to 7.4%.  We know what economic policies actually work.   What hath the opposite approach wrought?

MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe, a pasty white pale-skinned nothingburger if there ever were one, just doesn’t get it.  Like eleventy-umpteen squadrillion feeble-minded liberals before him, he seems to be so focused on President Barack Obama’s skin color that he thinks nobody else could possibly be motivated by anything other than a reaction to said skin color. The criticism of Obama’s nakedly transparent effort to upstage the Republican debate, said Wolffe, is nothing other than yet another example of how conservatives disrespect Obama just because he happens to be a shade darker — on some days — than John Boehner. Frankly, methinks Wolffe suffers from pigmentation envy. But no matter. As one who has repeatedly fought the good fight against white racists (oh, PLEASE, Mr. Wolffe, pretty please with sugar on top, challenge me on that one), I think I can safely say that the criticism of Obama would be the same even if Obama were a whiter shade of pale than the Procul Harum-inspired Mr. Wolffe himself.

Or has Mr. Wolffe not noticed that conservatives were equally critical of Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Dingy Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Frank Church, George McGovern, and Tom Hayden? Actually, he’s on to us: We know their secrets: Kennedy, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Church, McGovern and Hayden all are secret bearers of Negroid blood, which is why we oppose their politics. How did Wolffe figure out that we had figured out the Kennedy-Pelosi gang’s dark secret?!?

For the record, we are rather less than enamored of Mr. Obama not because he has African blood, but because he is arrogant, rude, self-absorbed, self-referential, condescending, leftist, Alinskyite, dishonest, incompetent, petty, peevish, unaccomplished, demagogic, and radical. He is the single worst president we’ve ever had, including Jimmy Carter and James Buchanan.

Let’s see Mr. Wolffe skip the light fandango and turn cartwheels across the floor about that list of Obama’s non-skin-related defects.

This defines cognitive dissonance.  The Obama Administration continues to scratch its collective head, wondering why its record deficit spending “stimulus” and big government onslaught has failed to create jobs.  Meanwhile, its own Department of Justice sues an iconic American company that creates them.

Just today, AT&T announced that it is relocating thousands of jobs from overseas back to American shores.  But also today, the Obama Department of Justice – you know, the one ultimately behind the disastrous “Operation Fast and Furious” – sued to block the proposed private merger between AT&T and T-Mobile.  Ponder that irony for a moment.  The Obama Administration, which has done so much to interfere with job creation since the recession officially ended all the way back in June 2009, is suing an employer that at this very moment is orchestrating the return of thousands of jobs to the United States.

Perhaps we shouldn’t find this surprising.  After all, the Obama Administration is also in the process of persecuting Boeing, America’s largest exporter, simply for electing to locate a manufacturing plant in South Carolina.  But that doesn’t make its behavior any less despicable or destructive.  If Obama truly wants to prove to the electorate that he seeks economic recovery, he must reverse this policy course within his administration.  Immediately.

Even for Barack Obama’s supporters, this has to be getting old.

Today, responding to a question about an American economy still struggling after almost three years of deficit-driven Obama “stimulation,” he went back to the “Bush Card” with radio host Tom Joyner:

George Bush left us with a $1 trillion deficit, so it’s a lot harder to climb out of this hole when we don’t have a lot of money in the federal coffers.”

There are several problems with President Alibi’s rationalization.  Among other things, (1) the recession officially ended all the way back in June 2009, (2) the money in those “federal coffers” to which he refers actually reached an all-time high under Bush in 2007 (several years after the Bush tax cuts and well into the Iraq and Afghan wars that Obama now scapegoats) and (3) nothing seems to have stopped him so far from spending trillions of dollars that we don’t have.

But forget about those realities for a moment.  On a more basic moral level, what does it say about Obama as a man that this is what he continues to offer the nation to justify his performance and his request for a job extension?

So the acting head of the ATF has been given a parachute. As night follows day, he’ll now take ALL the blame for unspecified “mistakes in implementation” of the Fast/Furious gun-running scandal, after which the administration will announce that all has now been taken care of, nothing more to see here, keep on walking, keep on walking, nothing to look at, everything is peachy-keen and the problem (what problem?) has been fixed……

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.

According to a new poll from Gallup, Americans rate the “Computer Industry” most positively among 25 business and government entities, with the “Internet Industry” close behind.  That’s no surprise – few innovations in human history have transformed our lives as rapidly and profoundly as the tech sector.

But here’s an irony.  The federal government, which constantly interferes with tech sector innovation via such bureaucratic assaults as so-called “Net Neutrality” and interference with the private proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile, is rated least favorably by Americans.  Only 17% of Americans rate the federal government positively, which 63% rate it negatively.  In contrast, the computer industry is rated positively by a 72% to 10% margin, and the Internet industry is rated positively by a 56% to 16% ratio.

Perhaps we’d all be better off if the tech sector began monitoring the federal government, rather than the converse.  It certainly appears that most Americans would agree.

As she has done several times in the past, Jennifer Rubin got to a story before me, to say exactly what I wanted to say, with meticulously documented and explained research backing up her conclusions. In this case, she eviscerates Colin Powell for continuing his cowardly, pass-the-buck, point-the-fingers-elsewhere behavior with regard to the infamous “leak” of the CIA status of Valerie Plame, wife of former Ambassador and loudmouth Joe Wilson. The upshot of his cowardice, and that of his top aide Richard Armitage, was a years-long investigation that wrongly ensnared the honest and loyal Scooter Libby for perjury he did not even commit, along with a deeply dishonest movie that further besmirched Libby’s name.  It also wrongly blamed our entry into the Gulf War on supposed reliance on bad intelligence — intelligence that wasn’t bad and that wasn’t actually the basis of our entry into the war. The truth is that Libby should have been pardoned.

Anyway, Rubin explains:

Recall how all of this played out. Armitage and Powell allowed the entire country and troops in the field to believe a lie, namely that the White House had “outed” Plame. This, aside from the galling display of moral cowardice, also put the president’s reelection in jeopardy since Democrats were all too intent on making this into a huge scandal.

The extent of the dishonesty is quite stunning. In a Cabinet meeting on October 7, 2003, the White House press corps bombarded President George W. Bush with questions about who the leaker was. Bush said he didn’t know, but there would be an investigation to get to the bottom of it. Powell, who had been told by Armitage just days earlier that Armitage was the leaker, sat there next to the president, stone silent. Not very loyal or honest, was it?

Finally, it is worth noting that Libby voluntarily testified and cooperated in every way, sometimes without an attorney even parsing his words. Libby never once acted like a man with anything to hide. Powell and Armitage, however, hid what they knew, and what Armitage did, for two years. Now THAT’s shameful.

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.

Okay, I’m sorry, but comparing those who don’t believe in the utterly unproved, disputed, theoretical idea of major man-caused global warming to Bull Connor-type racists is going way beyond the pale. Oh, wait, can we say “pale” without being accused of being racists? It might be a dark day when we can’t even use wor…. oh, no, did I say “dark”? Is that racist?

This whole, sick, twisted habit of raising the specter of racism at every opportunity is a cheap, tawdry strategem for those who can’t actually argue the facts.

Methinks people who falsely cry “racism” should be put in a “lockbox.”

Oh — and by the way, there is no such thing as major man-caused global warming. So there.

With its tough anti-illegal immigration law headed to the Supreme Court, the State of Arizona is opening up another legal front in its 10^th Amendment tussle with Eric Holder’s Justice Department.  NBC News reports that the issue this time is the Voting Rights Act:

Arizona is challenging the law’s requirement that the state seek Justice Department approval for any changes in how elections are conducted. Many states are subject to the law’s pre-clearance requirement, generally to remedy past restrictions that discouraged minority voting.

“Arizona is still penalized for archaic violations that were corrected with the implementation of bilingual ballots prior to the 1974 elections,” said the state’s Attorney General Tom Horne. He noted that in 1974, Arizona became the second state to elect a Hispanic governor.

In his response, Attorney General Holder showed how tone deaf he is to any claim of federal overreach:

Vowing to fight the challenge, Holder said the provisions challenged in this case, including the pre-clearance requirement, “were reauthorized by Congress in 2006 with overwhelming and bipartisan support. The Justice Department will continue to enforce the Voting Rights Act, including each of the provisions challenged today,” he said.

So, a law is constitutional because Congress reauthorized it with “overwhelming and bipartisan support”?  There isn’t a justice on the Supreme Court who has let that kind of vapid thinking dissuade him or her from overturning a law.

If that’s the best defense Holder can muster, Arizona may have found the perfect foil to (unwittingly) help it downsize the federal government.

Remember when in June 2009 President Barack Obama promised that under his health care reform bill, “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period.  If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.  No one will take it away, no matter what”?

Byron York makes this contradictory observation:

On the one hand, the new law orders the establishment of health care “exchanges” through which anyone can purchase government-subsidized coverage. On the other hand, the law levies fines on employers who fail to offer coverage to their employees — but sets the fine far below the cost of coverage. In 2010, the average employer paid $4,150 to cover a single employee and $9,773 for family coverage. (Both figures are about double what they were in 2000.) The new law sets fines for employers who don’t cover their workers at $2,000.

So when it takes effect in 2014, the law will give employers a choice: Continue to offer increasingly expensive health coverage, or pay a relatively small fine, save a lot of money, and let employees buy their own subsidized coverage on the exchange. The incentive seems pretty clear.

So too does the bold-faced lie Obama told (yet again) in the health care reform debate.  Whichever GOP candidate gets nominated for president should make this issue one of the main talking points of the general election.

Republican control of the House of Representatives may have stifled the Obama Administration’s grand statist designs in Congress, but the White House continues to push costly, job-killing regulation through the rulemaking power of the administrative state. Because new regulations enjoy nowhere near the media scrutiny of new legislation, however, the public often remains unaware of their role as silent predators on America’s economy. That’s why credit is due to House Speaker John Boehner for calling Obama to account for this economic poison. From Politico:

In a letter that will be sent to President Barack Obama on Friday, House Speaker John Boehner charges that planned regulations have jumped nearly 15 percent over the past year and he calls on the administration to calculate and publicize their economic impact.

“This year, the administration’s current regulatory agenda identifies 219 planned new regulations that have estimated annual costs in excess of $100 million each. That’s almost a 15 percent increase over last year and appears to contradict public suggestions by the administration this week that the regulatory burden on American job creators is being scaled back,” Boehner wrote.

“I was startled to learn that the EPA estimates that at least one of its proposed rules will cost our economy as much as $90 billion per year. The administration has not disclosed how many of the other 218 planned rules will cost more than $1 billion, nor identified these rules,” he noted.

If Obama is serious about “pivoting to jobs” (a promise we seem to hear on a quarterly basis), there’s no way he can ignore the costs of federal regulations, which are de facto tax increases. According to the Small Business Administration, the annual cost of federal regulation alone amounts to $1.75 trillion dollars. That’s nearly 12 percent of America’s GDP gone every year because of the Washington bureaucracy.

A failure to repeal many of these draconian monstrosities is economic malpractice. But a failure to simply reveal their costs is a dereliction of duty.

Conservatives have a serious problem today. They tend to circle the wagons around people for the wrong reasons, namely because candidates seem “one of us,” culturally speaking, even if the candidates aren’t very impressive or very accomplished. I could name a few Senate candidates from recent years, but won’t. But it really is absurd to think that just because the “establishment” attacks somebody, that the person is therefore worth going to the mat for. It is just not true that the adversary of my adversary is my friend. In truth, the adversary of my adversary can be friend, foe, or something on a wide spectrum in between. An attack by the known adversary on somebody who merely seems to share one’s cultural characteristics is not a good reason to make the attacked person into a hero. It’s illogical to do so.

Hence, I really like Jonah Goldberg’s column today — not because I have any idea yet whether Rick Perry is a great choice for president, but because the attacks against him do not define him, or at least should not. What matters is record, character, philosophy, and competence. Anyway, read Jonah’s piece by clicking this link. Good stuff.

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

Hillyer:  Holder Justice: No Conservatives Need Apply
Ellis:  School Testing Scandals Require New Era of Accountability
Senik:  Green Jobs, Red Ink: The Economic Folly of Obama’s Enviro-Meddling
Lee:  Verizon and Wisconsin: Big Losses for Big Labor, Victories for Everyone Else

Freedom Minute Video:  Big Labor Takes a Holiday … from Reality
Podcast:  ObamaCare One Step Closer to Supreme Court
Jester’s Courtroom:  Coffee, Tea or 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.

You’ve heard of “flash mobs,” the growing phenomenon of thugs descending upon, assaulting and robbing convenience stores or vulnerable people on the street? Well, “flash elections” are Big Labor’s economic version of flash mobs.

Flash elections, or “ambush elections,” reference a proposed rule that would shorten the election window in union organizing campaigns to as little as 10 days.  Big Labor, which we noted this week elevates its own political power over American jobs and employee welfare, loves the ambush election proposal and is currently pushing it within Barack Obama’s  rogue National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).  Ambush elections are dangerous for many reasons, including the fact that they would drastically limit employers’ free speech window and ability to present both sides of the story to employees.  In contrast, union bosses would have many months to present their skewed arguments to employees without even allowing employers to become aware that a union organizing campaign was underway.  Moreover, ambush elections are a toxic “solution” in search of a problem, considering that the current median election time is 38 days, and 95% of elections already occur within two months, hardly an eternity.

Accordingly, CFIF is proud to announce that it has joined the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and 275 other employers and associations in petitioning the NLRB to withdraw this destructive proposal.  Big Labor and the Obama NLRB have already killed enough jobs.  We simply cannot afford to lose even more due to their ideological shenanigans.

In an interview with CFIF, Anna Rittgers, senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, discusses the recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which struck down as unconstitutional the individual mandate in the 2010 Affordable Care Act.  Rittgers also discusses the anticipated next step for the case as it makes its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Listen to the interview here.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses how everyday American workers are being used as political pawns to advance the job-killing agenda of big labor unions.  

If the real purpose of presidential debates was to clarify the views of the candidates, then the next GOP forum would be Mitt Romney debating himself. From a report by Justin Sink in The Hill: