Freedom Line Blog

In recent months, Google has justifiably suffered heavy criticism for selectively acting as internet gatekeeper, deciding what Americans can and cannot view online.  Countless examples exist when the liberal Silicon Valley giant leveraged its  market power to censor along ideological lines, including:  banning the conservative blog The New York Conservative, hosted on Google Blogger, for opining on the trial of terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed;  demoting pro-Brexit/Euroskeptic websites by pushing them down in search results;  excluding Donald Trump from “presidential candidates” search;  and blocking free speech social network Gab from the Google Play Store, alleging violations of the company’s hate speech policy.

The latest revelation of Google’s partisan bias arrived in late July, when the company quietly shifted its Google Play policy to ban apps selling firearms and accessories.  That change went largely unreported, although TechCrunch stated, “Google takes an almost moral position with the addition of a ban of apps that ‘facilitate the sale of explosives, firearms, ammunition, or certain firearms accessories.’”   That maneuver follows an instance in which Apple did something similar last December.

Given the sheer market power of Apple and Google, their ideologically driven policy poses an incredibly damaging peril not only to consumers who utilize firearm-related apps, but also an entire industry – a completely legal one –  selling firearms or firearms accessories.

The inescapable conclusion is that Google seeks to censor viewpoints and entirely legal behavior that it disfavors out of existence.  A full month after Google’s policy was quietly implemented, Steve Urvan, CEO and CTO of GunBroker.com, received an email notification stating that the GunBroker.com app had been suspended and removed from Google Pay due to a “Violation of Dangerous Products policy.”  Google’s questionable decision to ban Gunbroker.com’s app raises an ominous specter about politicized and powerful corporations  attempting to socially engineer from the boardroom.

Google’s behavior joins a wave of social activism that increasingly pervades American companies and weakens Americans’ ability to purchase perfectly legal goods.  In April, Bank of America announced that it would abruptly discontinue banking services to firearms manufacturers that produce legal and popular AR-15-style rifles.  Mere months earlier, Citigroup announced a new U.S. commercial firearms policy precluding the company’s commercial and institutional clients, small business clients and credit card partners from selling any firearm to individuals under the age of 21, (even though the legal age remains 18).  It also refused to serve any business client manufacturing magazines exceeding ten rounds. Citigroup has also held preliminary discussions about potentially monitoring consumers’ gun purchases within their internal payment systems.

These alarming steps highlight an emerging trend of politicized and politically powerful activist businesses targeting perfectly legal behaviors of everyday Americans.  If the leadership of Bank of America, Citigroup and Google want to dictate consumer choices, that’s  certainly within their rights, although perhaps they’d be better off running for official office.  At the very least, they could be more honest with consumers about their shenanigans.

From our friends at American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a vivid illustration of big government’s reverse-Midas touch — notice what all of these things have in common:

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Big Government: Midas in Reverse

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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:  Carol Greenlee, President and Managing Partner for Business Resource Group LLP and daughter of Charles Greenlee, and Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize Winning Author of “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America” – Clemency Review and Pardons for the Groveland Four;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT:  Dr. Michael R. Strain, Director, Economic Policy Studies, John G. Searle Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute – Workers on Welfare;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT:  John Malcolm, Vice President, Institute for Constitutional Government, Director of the Meese Center for Legal & Judicial Studies and Senior Legal Fellow at The Heritage Foundation – Kavanaugh Hearings;

5:15 CDT/6:15 pm EDT:  Leah Byers, Policy Analyst at the Civitas Institute – State Charitable Solicitation Programs and Privacy; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: William J. Conti, Partner at Baker & Hostetler – Mole in the White House, Midterm Elections and Nike/Kaepernick Ad.

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

The funniest response yet to Senator Corey Booker’s (D – New Jersey) self-immolation during this week’s confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh:

Corey Booker: So Brave

Somehow, it has escaped mainstream media attention that public satisfaction with America’s direction has jolted upward by almost 40%, from 26% to 36%, since January 2017:

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Right Track/Wrong Track Improves Dramatically Since January 2017

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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.

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:  Angela Logomasini, Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute – Plastic Straw Ban;

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT:  Jason D. Delisle, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute – Student Loan Programs;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT:  Cleta Mitchell, Partner and Political Law Attorney at Foley & Lardner LLP – Mueller’s Partisan Witch Hunt?;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT:  Tori K. Whiting, Jay Van Andel Trade Economist, Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation: NAFTA;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT:  Diante Johnson, President of the Black Conservative Foundation – Advances President Trump and the GOP have made in the Black Community;

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT:  Robert M. McDowell, Former Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission – Proposed T-Mobile and Sprint Merger; and

5:45 CDT/6:45 pm EDT:  Timothy Lee, CFIF’s Senior Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs – Union Coffers Post SCOTUS Decision.

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

Obama apologists desperately claim that the current economic acceleration is somehow attributable to him, never mind that the acceleration began as soon as the Trump Administration began reversing Obama policies by cutting taxes and reducing regulation.  In The Wall Street Journal today, two Arizona State University professors – Nobel laureate Edward Prescott and Lee Ohanian – debunk that claim in a commentary entitled “The Good Times Can Roll On.” As an ASU alumnus, it offers particular pleasure to recommend their entire piece for reading and passing along to others who may need it:

It’s clear the recovery ended in 2014 because the two hallmarks of recovery –  investment’s share of gross domestic product and labor input relative to the adult population – stopped increasing.  This left a large gap between actual output and the output level that would have occurred had the economy recovered to its prerecession growth path.  According to our calculations, the U.S. cumulatively lost about $18 trillion in income and output between 2007 and 2016.  Everything suggested this shortfall would persist or even grow.

Yet economic performance began to improve beginning in the first quarter of 2017.  Real GDP growth accelerated to about 2.7% between the end of 2016 and the second quarter of 2018, up from about 2% between 2014 and the end of 2016.”

Oh, and as football season approaches, go Sun Devils.

Democrats in the House of Representatives – led by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) – are pushing to reinstate Obama-era, big-government Title II regulations on the internet through a legislative procedure known as a Congressional Review Act (CRA). Now they are pressuring some Republicans to help them get to the 218 signatures needed to force a vote on the CRA.

The Pelosi-Doyle CRA is not about sound internet policy; it is a politically motived, partisan effort to restore a stifling “Mother-May-I” regulatory framework on the internet that has already proven to slow private investment in internet network infrastructure and cost well-paying jobs.

Call your representative in Congress now.  Tell her/him to not become Pelosi’s next puppet on internet regulation.  Ask her/him to oppose the Pelosi-Doyle CRA.

Make no mistake, Title II regulation is NOT “net neutrality.” Indeed, there is widespread agreement and support – Republicans, Democrats and stakeholders alike – for the core principles of “net neutrality.”

But instead of working on commonsense, bipartisan legislation that will truly protect those principles while at the same time enabling the internet to thrive, Pelosi, Doyle and others want to politicize the issue and are pushing for the internet to be regulated like a public utility under a bureaucratic framework that was crafted way back in the 1930s, well before the internet was ever invented.

Adding insult to injury, the Pelosi-Doyle CRA gives a free pass to big tech companies, like Facebook and others, for how they treat consumer privacy and data online – what most consumers really care about when using the internet.

Unfortunately, Pelosi and Doyle have managed to convince one Republican congressman thus far – Representative Mike Coffman (R – Colorado) – to sign their discharge petition and support the CRA.  And right now, they’re using Coffman’s support to pressure other Republicans to join their effort.

Call your representative in Congress now.  Tell her/him to not become Pelosi’s next puppet on internet regulation.  Ask her/him to oppose the Pelosi-Doyle CRA.

Congress has a golden opportunity to come together on commonsense legislation that holds all internet companies to the same standards and preserves the core principles of “net neutrality” without the hyper-regulatory approach of the CRA and Title II.

The Pelosi-Doyle CRA must be rejected. Please call your representative in Congress now.

Here’s what a steady diet of deregulation and tax cuts have done in terms of job creation expectations from even the notoriously wet-blanket Congressional Budget Office:

Deregulation + Tax Cuts = Jobs Boost

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.

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: Thomas Jipping, Deputy Director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and Senior Legal Fellow: What Kind of Justice Will Judge Brett Kavanaugh Be?;

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT: John Shu, Attorney and Legal Commentator: The Senate’s Unprecedented Obstruction;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT: Tim Wyrosdick, Santa Rosa County School District Superintendent: Start of a New School Year;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT: Matthew Hennessey, Associate Editorial Features Editor at The Wall Street Journal: “Zero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millenials”;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: Sally C. Pipes, President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute: Single Payer;

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: Pete Sepp, National Taxpayers Union President: Republican Tax Reform 2.0; and

5:45 CDT/6:45 pm EDT: Ryan Mauro, Clarion Project’s Shillman Fellow and National Security Analyst: Radical Compound Found in New Mexico.

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

Courtesy of James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute, a splendid visual refutation of budding socialist superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic candidate for Congress in New York, who recently and bizarrely said that the “upper middle class doesn’t exist anymore in America.”  Well:

Sorry, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez: Upper Middle Class Growing, Not Shrinking

A helpful image of the day, comparing private investment during the final two years of the Obama Administration to the immediate aftermath of the November 2016 election, and even more the tax cuts enacted one year later:

The Trump Administration is contemplating a move to improve the way the federal government taxes capital gains by indexing rates for inflation, which amounts to a de facto tax cut.

It’s a no-brainer in terms of fairness and efficiency, as illustrated by the fact that even leftist economist and former Clinton Administration adviser Alan Blinder acknowledges the need for it today in The Wall Street Journal:

Why index gains?  Suppose you own a stock for many years, during which time overall prices have doubled because of inflation.  Over the holding period, the value of your stock has also doubled.  When you sell, the proceeds have precisely the same purchasing power as the original purchase.   There’s no gain, no loss.  But under current tax law, you owe taxes on the phantom ‘gain.’   Worse, if your stock went up by less than the cumulative inflation, you’ll still get taxed despite your loss.  This is unfair and dysfunctional.”

We’ll admit that it’s amusing to see a man who played the role of cheerleader for Barack Obama, who openly circumvented the Constitution and legislative process using his “pen and phone” to enact policy, demand that Trump refrain from making the change and instead allow Congress to act.  Nevertheless, we’ll gladly celebrate his support for the underlying need for change.

Inexplicably, U.S. economic growth has surged in the first and second quarters of both 2017 and 2018 after a deregulatory and tax-cutting presidential administration replaced a hyper-regulatory and tax-raising one:

Inexplicable Economic Bump

From our friends at American Enterprise Institute, predictions from people like Barack Obama on the U.S. manufacturing sector’s demise were greatly exaggerated.  As one can see from the image below, the sharp upward trajectory since Donald Trump’s election has taken American manufacturing output to a record high:

U.S. Manufacturing Reaches New High

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: Rachel del Guidice, Reporter for The Daily Signal: Trump/Putin and Haley/UN;

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT: Cleta Mitchell, Parker and Political Law Attorney at Foley & Lardner: IRS and Schedule B Disclosure;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT: Phil Kerpen, President of American Commitment: Soda Tax;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT: Bryan Riley, Director of National Taxpayer’s Union’s Free Trade Initiative: Tariffs and NAFTA;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: Roslyn Layton, Visiting Scholar with American Enterprise Institute: Net Neutrality, CRA and Privacy Concerns; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: William J. Conti, Partner with Baker & Hostetler: Judge Kavanaugh and Midterm Elections.

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

From withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord to his administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Trump is obviously destroying the planet:

Trump Is Destroying the Planet

ALEXANDRIA, VA – In welcome news, the U.S. Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) announced yesterday evening that the IRS will finally cease requiring certain nonprofit organizations to file “Schedule B” forms that list sensitive personal information like the names, addresses and other identifying information about private citizens who donate to those organizations.

In response, Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) President Jeffrey Mazzella issued the following statement:

“As many Americans are all too aware, recent years have witnessed an increase in assaults against our First Amendment freedoms of speech and association.  In some cases, the IRS has collected and leaked private information on contributors to 501(c) nonprofit organizations contained in mandatory Schedule B forms that by law were to remain confidential.  And across America, hyper-partisan government state-level officials have demanded Schedule B forms and confidential donor information contained therein as part of their campaign to harass organizations and donors with whom they disagree politically.

“With this announcement, the IRS and Treasury are acting on the acknowledgment that Schedule B information is irrelevant to its handling of tax filings, and serves no substantive purpose. In this era of persecution of private citizens for their political beliefs, together with the IRS’s admission that it can’t guarantee the confidentiality of the information contained on the Schedule B, this decision is welcome news.

“We at CFIF applaud the Trump Administration Treasury Department and IRS for their leadership and doing the right thing by eliminating the Schedule B form filing requirement for many nonprofit 501(c) organizations.”

CFIF has spearheaded the broad conservative and libertarian coalition to eliminate the Schedule B from filing requirement, including, among other efforts, coordinating a letter to President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin earlier this year signed by more than 60 influential organizations and individuals urging executive action to accomplish that end.

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