Freedom Line Blog

Apparently trying to contain the damage from last week’s blowup over allegations that the White House used President Clinton as the middleman in an attempt to bribe Rep. Joe Sestak out of the Pennsylvania senate race, the Obama Administration is now leaking that they did something similar in Colorado. From the AP:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration dangled the possibility of a government job for former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff last year in hopes he would forgo a challenge to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, officials said Wednesday, just days after the White House admitted orchestrating a job offer in the Pennsylvania Senate race.

These officials declined to specify the job that was floated or the name of the administration official who approached Romanoff, and said no formal offer was ever made. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not cleared to discuss private conversations.

Romanoff is mounting a primary challenge to Senator Michael Bennet in the Centennial State’s Democratic primary, which won’t be held until August 10. By leaking this information now, the Obama Administration looks to be cynically trying to avoid a repeat of the Sestak controversy as the Colorado race progresses. With two months left and a candidate who has thus far been more tight-lipped than Sestak, the odds are against them. And while this may feed widespread notions of administration corruption, it also has the potential to divide Democrats who resent the White House choosing sides within the Democratic Party. Stay tuned: this could get interesting.

Florida’s most infamous party-switcher is realizing the pain of political divorce.  From an interview with The Hill:

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist says it is “very lonely” running as an independent.

Since he quit his party, Crist says he has discovered that people he thought were friends turned out to be only Republican friends, who dropped Crist after he left the GOP.

Crist has lost so many campaign staffers that his sister is now running his third-party effort.

“When you’re not affiliated with a party, it can be very lonely, particularly initially,” Crist told The Hill in an hourlong phone interview.

He cannot be serious.  For a perpetual campaign machine like Crist who ran for and won statewide office in 2000, 2002, and 2006, to think that his fundraisers, staff, and get-out-the-vote activists supported him because he’s Charlie instead of because, as a Republican, he (supposedly) championed Republican causes, is comical.  If anything, Crist’s constant appeals to Democrats and Independents probably made Florida Republicans wonder why they worked so hard to advance his career.

Now that Crist has shown himself to be motivated by nothing more than his own ambition, his U.S. Senate race is the truest reflection of his political career: emptiness masquerading as conviction.

Last week, CFIF highlighted the rise of female conservatives as a political force.  Last night, voters had their say.  Republican primary voters in Mississippi’s first congressional district deflected Fox News analyst Angela McGlowan’s overtures, handing her a distant third place finish.  McGlowan’s political future will depend on whether she steps up her local presence in Oxford, MS, to build towards another race.

For Susana Martinez, though, the future is now.  After handily beating her male opponent in the GOP primary yesterday, Martinez is poised to be a “game changing” candidate if elected governor of New Mexico later this year.

If you haven’t heard of Martinez, you will.  She’s served thirteen years as the Las Cruces-based District Attorney where she secured reelection twice despite Democrats outnumbering Republicans 3-to1 in her county.  Most impressively for the governor’s race, she has a detailed plan to fix New Mexico’s sputtering economy.  Hmm…tough career prosecutor with a detailed fiscally conservative vision.  Sound familiar?  Thankfully, she’s a lot prettier than New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

If she’s half as forceful, in a few years New Mexico might join New Jersey as two of the friendliest states to business and consumers.

We all know that driving with one foot on the gas and the other  on the brake  just slows you down.  And that dieting by day while binging by night will negate your weight loss efforts.

Similarly, spending billions of taxpayer dollars to “stimulate” the economy and job growth, while simultaneously proposing tax increases that would stymie investments in new jobs, won’t help us get our economy back on track.

Unfortunately, that is just the proposal before the U.S. Congress, in the form of the so-called Baucus/Levin American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act. What’s doubly unfortunate is the rush by some Congressional leaders to hastily pass this legislation without any public debate.

Among the provisions in the bill is a tax increase on “carried interest,” which is the profit from a successful investment. Carried interest earnings are often used to spur further investment, and don’t fairly constitute regular job income because the return on investment isn’t guaranteed like a paycheck is. The proposed increase would take the tax from the current capital gains tax level of 15% (20% in 2011) to a punishing 40%.  Consequently, investment partnerships would not invest as much as they do now.

Even some Senate Democrats recognize the folly in discouraging job-creating investments with this sort of tax increase. Four Democrats—Patty Murray (WA), Mark Warner (VA), Bob Casey (PA), and Jeanne Shaheen (NH)—along with Scott Brown (R-MA) have said that taxing venture firms at higher rates would merely hurt job creation and “could not occur at a worse time.”

There are additional reasons the carried-interest tax hike is a bad idea:

• While President Obama has admitted that small businesses are responsible for 70 percent of the nation’s net new jobs in the last decade, this legislation would translate to an $11.2 billion tax increase on some of those same small businesses.   How can this be an engine of job creation?

• The tax hike would also discourage investment and take away money used to start, grow and rescue companies.

• Under such high tax rates, the United States would be at a severe global disadvantage in terms of attracting investment.  The winners would be countries such as India, China, and the U.K., with carried interest tax rates of 0%, 10% and 18%, respectively.  Why drive jobs and businesses to overseas competitors?

Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) and Representative Sander Levin (D-MI) just introduced their ill-advised legislation on May 20, yet they are driving for quick passage.  This rush only serves to deprive everyday constituents of the ability to weigh in with their elected representatives on the legislation.

Is it any wonder that with such stealth legislating, millions of Americans are losing their confidence and trust in Congress’s ability to boost the economy?

As the Center for Individual Freedom sees it, this is another case of government “help” we can’t afford.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

You may not know his name (though you’ve seen it here at CFIF before), but you probably know his work. O’Keefe is the 25-year old renegade conservative filmaker whose undercover exposes of groups like Planned Parenthood and ACORN have revealed institutional corruption on the left.

Well, he’s back. And this time his target is the U.S. Census Bureau. Are the results as damning this time? Judge for yourself:

Few events could better illustrate the moral and intellectual decadence of the “international community.”  To wit, a collective global yawn greets North Korea after sinking a South Korean naval ship and killing 46, while feigned outrage greets Israeli commandos’ self-defense against an attacking militant mob.

Let’s recap:  A flotilla of 800 militants, which The Wall Street Journal aptly notes “falsely billed itself as a ‘humanitarian’ mission – organized by a radical Turkish group with close ties to Hamas, the terrorist group that illegally seized pwer in Gaza in 2007,” belligerently steams toward Gaza.  Gaza, of course, stands subject to a mutual blockade by both Egypt and Israel to prevent importation of weapons.  That blockade already allows passage of food, medical supplies and other legitimately “humanitarian” materials, meaning that there would be no need for any truly humanitarian shipment to challenge it.  The Israeli Navy repeatedly warns the flotilla that it must either turn back or submit to inspection for weapons.  After repeated advisories, the Israelis announce that they will have no choice but to board the vessels, just as any nation would do with a convoy approaching its shores.  Israeli commandos then repel from helicopters to the ships, at which point a violent mob attacks them with clubs, knives and the commandos’ own weapons.  One Israeli is even beaten and hurled overboard.

And all of this is caught on video.

Threatened with potentially deadly force against their soldiers, the Israeli Defense Forces then respond in self-defense, ultimately killing nine attackers.

Predictably, the “international community” – composed predominantly by dictators, kleptocrats, anti-American and anti-Semitic thugs – expresses its outrage, and the United Nations Security Council convenes an “emergency meeting” to consider condemning Israel.

It’s all something to remember the next time one hears appeals to the United Nations or international consensus by Barack Obama or other fatuous leaders.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

Fresh off revelations over his involvement in Sestak-gate, former president Bill Clinton pounded the podium yesterday in support of a fellow member of the Democratic Party’s endangered species: moderates.  Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) is facing a tough run-off against the sitting Lt. Governor who is allied with a vast leftwing conspiracy to make an example out of the on again, off again liberal.

And Bill Clinton doesn’t like it.

Playing on both local pride and a wariness of outside influence, he suggested voters would be mere pawns for an agenda of party purification if they opposed Lincoln.

“If you want to be used that way, have at it,’ he said to about 200 Democrats at Philander Smith College, speaking without notes for 20 minutes

With a detailed recitation of Lincoln’s work on behalf of Arkansas down to the jobs she saved at a manufacturer in Ft. Smith, Clinton exhorted voters to not direct their discontent at her.

Good luck with that.  Of all the endangered political species this election cycle, none seems as likely for a population reduction than “moderate” Democrats.  Liberals, like conservatives, like politicians who take a consistent ideological stand for issues.  Too often being a “moderate” is just code for policymaking as situational ethics.  If Clinton fails to push Lincoln over the 50% mark, he’ll be on the hook for letting down yet another female senator seeking federal office (his wife Hillary being the other).  With Obama 0-for-3 in hotly contested races, that means Democrats running for reelection in 2010 will have to look to someone other than the two most recent Democratic presidents to gin up enough support to get a win on Election Day.

Is Jimmy Carter available?

H/T: Politico

Former Bush advisor Peter Wehner pens one of the more helpful analyses of the Obama White House today for Politics Daily:

We can hope that Obama, an intelligent man, learns from the errors of his ways. But the great danger in all of this is that in the face of his troubles Obama and his aides become increasingly defensive, display a greater sense of entitlement and even a touch of paranoia. When arrogant men lose control of events it can easily lead to feelings of isolation, to striking out at critics, to bullying opponents, and to straying across lines that should not be crossed.

And so the president needs to surround himself with people who can tamp down on the uglier impulses within his administration, who are willing to tell Obama that the lore created by him, Axelrod, Plouffe, and Gibbs during the campaign has given way to reality, that cockiness is not the same as wisdom, and that spin is no substitute for substantive achievements. And Obama needs someone who has standing in his life to tell him that the presidency is a revered institution that should not be treated as if it were a ward in Chicago.

The last line is the most telling because it goes to the nub of the problem facing every president: you go with what you know.  For top level politics, that means once you assume high office the learning is over; all you have time for is applying your principles and experiences to the situation of the moment.  For Obama, that means two things: rallying the troops for an us-vs.-them campaign, and treating every political decision as though being president is the same as being the mayor of Chicago – which is to say, a distributor of political patronage.

The criminal silliness of the Sestak Scandal can only be understood in the context of brash, Illinois-style horse trading.  That it happened isn’t much of a surprise.  That it happened without much subtlety and discretion is – to me – much more troubling.  Like Obama’s naïve approach to America’s enemies and his self-indulgent speeches, this is yet another example of his immaturity.

Regardless of one’s political preference, no patriotic American welcomes economic misfortune.  With this week’s news, however, one wonders whether we’re witnessing the onset of “Obama Malaise.”

Yesterday, the Commerce Department revised its already-sluggish initial 3.2% first quarter gross domestic product (GDP) estimate downward to 3.0%.  Additionally, the Commerce Department reported that corporate profits slowed to 5.5% in the first quarter of 2010, down from the 8% growth rate of the 2009 fourth quarter.

These numbers are disturbing because our economic recovery should be much stronger at this point, and gaining steam rather than slowing.  Coming out of the 1981-1982 recession, the last downturn comparable to the 2008-2009 recession, the U.S. logged remarkable GDP quarterly growth rates of 5.1%, 9.3%, 8.1% and 8.5% for 1983.  America’s torrid Reagan Recovery continued into 1984, with 8.0% and 7.1% growth rates in the first two quarters.  That constituted impressive growth, on the heels of Reagan’s tax-cutting and deregulatory platform.

In contrast, we’ve now witnessed GDP growth rates of 2.2%, 5.6% and now a deceleration to 3.0%.  Obama and Democrats take joy in claiming credit for our natural cyclical recovery, but what they should instead be doing is explaining why their policies are tossing a wet blanket over what should be stronger growth.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

That’s the point made by Daniel Henninger in today’s Wall Street Journal.

I would argue that the Reform wave building in the land is not antigovernment, but pro-government. When people call themselves Americans, Californians, New Yorkers, Illinoisans, Texans or, yes, New Jerseyans, they aren’t just talking about a place name, but a fought-for legal entity with a grand political history. Anger at Albany, Sacramento, Springfield, Trenton and Washington, D.C., isn’t antigovernment. It’s rightful rage at years of misgovernance.

I think Henninger’s argument is the best description of the anger roiling supporters and critics of the Obama Administration’s handling of the Gulf Oil Spill.  It may very be that there are limited options for “plugging the hole,” but the fact remains that people expect leaders to show they know how to prioritize problems, and work towards a solution.  Even James Carville is apoplectic at Obama’s seeming inability to do either during this crisis.

For the president who promised competence, we’re getting an awful lot of failing grades in Leadership 101.

Since the Obama Administration and newly minted Senate candidate Joe Sestak (D-PA) won’t discuss Sestak’s February allegation that a White House official offered him a job not to primary party-switching Arlen Specter, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is looking into the matter.  As CFIF readers remember, Issa’s interest is not desired by most people in public life.  The conservative foil to liberal Investigator-in-Chief Henry Waxman (D-CA), Issa is now comparing the Obama-Sestak offer to the Watergate fiasco.

That may be going a bit far, but the facts – and the stonewalling – are at least as important to uncover as the Valerie Plame Affair.  In that case, the Vice President’s Chief of Staff was convicted of four felonies for lying to federal agents and obstructing their investigation.  Notice any similarities with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ refusal to comment, and the White House declining to appoint an independent investigator?

It sounds old to keep comparing how the media would be covering Obama’s actions if done by Bush, but the contrasts are still striking.  This is now the second time potentially illegal negotiations over a United States Senate seat have been linked to Obama’s White House.  The first instance cost Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich his job and may yet lead to a prison sentence.  Now, another round of Chicago-style deal making may imperil Joe Sestak’s senate campaign.  At some point, you’d think lower level Democrats would start reconsidering their allegiance to a president who clearly favors backroom deals to open electoral processes.

One of the pillars of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign was that America had become too didactic toward the rest of the world, particularly toward the more anti-American elements of Europe.  A kinder, gentler Obama would be the ointment to soothe all international discord, they promised.

But the Obama Administration has proven even more didactic than the Bush Administration.  The primary difference is that Obama bows to antagonists like Russia and the Palestinians, while disrespecting friends like Israel.

Now, Obama is even reneging on his “reset” stance toward Europe and self-righteously instructing them on how to pilot their economies.  Consider this opening paragraph from today’s Wall Street Journal front-page article entitled “U.S. Chides Europe’s Crisis Response:”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner landed in Europe and reasserted a traditional American role of dispenser of financial advice to the world, telling European governments to get their fiscal houses in order.”

That’s pretty amusing stuff from an administration that quadrupled America’s deficit in its very first year.  What’s worse, his administration is insisting on more of the very policies that caused Europe’s economic and budgetary maladies.  Greece’s welfare spending required a $1 trillion bailout, and Portugal, Spain and England may not be far behind. Despite this self-evident reality, the Obama Administration instructs them to pursue more of the same.  According to the report, Geithner admonished European leaders “to keep pumping stimulus into their economies.”

This prompts the question of whether there exists any remaining tether whatsoever between the Obama Administration and reality.  The euro has plummeted following Greece’s bailout, and even the American Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below 10,000 yesterday on fears that the contagion will spread.

A word of advice to Europe:  reconsider your love affair with Obama before he steers you toward even greater catastrophe.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

More from America’s best governor:

In an absolutely chilling piece at RealClearPolitics today, Dr. Hal Scherz examines an Obama nominee who otherwise may have escaped public scrutiny: Dr. Donald Berwick, who’s been tapped by 44 to run the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The picture that emerges is of an individual who makes even the most wall-eyed health care fears seem credible. Here’s Scherz, quoting Berwick in the first and third paragraphs:

“Any healthcare funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition redistributional”.

Indeed, lest there be any doubt about the range of Dr Berwick’s schemes for “redistribution” – code for transferring power to the government — he makes clear how grand his vision for statist health care.

“There needs to be global budget caps on total healthcare spending for designated populations (ie-rationing)” Dr. Berwick says. “The simplest way to reach these goals is with a single payer system.”

The whole thing has to be read to be believed, but Scherz wraps it up with a nice injection of humanity:

But if Dr Berwick leaves little doubt who is going to be in charge of the redistribution, global caps, and the single payer systems, he shows with his use of words like “politically accountable” or “democratic”, the sort of verbal tic that betrays his own understanding. He seeks not broad-based, bottom-up decision-making but top-own edicts from elite panels of enlightened and, of course, “global” thinkers like himself that preempt decisions now made by doctors and their patients.

And that is what those of us who are practicing physicians find so troubling about Dr. Berwick’s nomination. We see him as a White House Rose Garden, photo-op doctor with a borrowed white coat; an academic who runs a $58 million institute, who analyzes numbers and reports and theories about populations but is now totally out of touch with his former peers and the patients that they treat every day. And this is the sobering point– Dr Berwick will not be there with us at the patient’s bedside looking them in the eye and telling them that the life saving treatment that they need is not approved because they don’t fit into the right demographic.

This was Barack Obama’s official campaign website on September 9, 2008:

Today, we learned that Washington has run up a record budget deficit of $407 billion this year…  Obama will bring real change by cutting taxes for middle-class families and small businesses, paying for all his proposals to reduce the deficit, and will put America on a path towards fiscal responsibility and a stronger economy.”

Pretty bold stuff.  Reasonable minds knew then that an Obama victory would only exacerbate the nation’s deficit, even if the fawning mainstream media was refusing to press him on tough questions.  But even skeptics didn’t foresee just how bad and how rapidly he would do so.  Today, we received sobering news that the national debt surpassed the $13 trillion mark overnight.  That’s now $42,000 per American citizen, and $118,000 per American taxpayer.

And that $407 billion deficit that Obama cavalierly promised to reduce in September 2008?  He’s now raised it from $400 billion to $1.4 trillion.

That’s the type of change for which only America’s enemies could have hoped.

It’s become a bit of a cliché in the Obama Administration to blame George W. Bush for…well, just about everything wrong with the country.  Job numbers are down because of the previous administration’s mismanagement of the economy.  The deficit is exploding because Bush & Co. started two allegedly needless wars.  Even the Gulf Oil Spill catastrophe is being laid at the feet of alleged coziness between Bush Era regulators and BP management.  If nothing else, the Obama White House knows how to trace problems occurring on its watch to other people.

Will it do the same with success?  According to Gallup polls of foreign nations, America is most popular in Sub-Saharan Africa.  The fact that President Obama’s ancestry touches the region doesn’t explain fully the reason.

So you might be asking yourself, “why Africa?”

It’s a good question, one our friends over at Gallup have given some consideration in past surveys. Since 2008, Sub-Saharan Africa may be the one region of the world where the United States has reaped the highest benefits of what has been termed “The Obama Effect.” Being of Kenyan descent, Obama enjoys high approval ratings throughout much of Africa. More substantively, 5 out of the 7 listed nations have been targeted in the president’s $3.5 billion Feed the Future initiative.

And let’s not give the 44th president all of the credit. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, invested American aid and resources into Africa at a record pace. President Bush’s PEPFAR program was a groundbreaking policy endeavor, and while Bush’s domestic approval numbers were low upon leaving office, U.S. approval throughout much of Africa remained rather strong.

As with much of his social spending, the most recent President Bush doesn’t get the credit he deserves for the good – and goodwill – many of his initiatives achieved.  Still, it must give W some sort of quiet pride to know that America’s popularity in Africa can be traced directly to his policy decisions.

H/T: RealClearWorld