Freedom Line Blog

During today’s health care summit at Blair House, Wyoming Republican Senator John Barrasso (an orthopedic surgeon by trade) dropped the jaws of Democrats in attendance by declaring that individuals who only have “catastrophic care” health insurance (which Democrats had been spent all day citing as a moral failure) often make better medical decisions than people with more comprehensive plans. Barasso’s reason was simple — these consumers actually have to consider the cost of their treatments.

Though President Obama and Congressman Henry Waxman were quick to ridicule Barasso, he got to a truth that is at the very root of meaningful health care reform: the system can’t work as long as consumers are being insulated from costs.

Two economic maxims suffice to make the point: (1) “If you’re paying, I’ll have the steak” — There is no incentive to keep your spending under control when someone else is footing the bill (2) “No one washes a rental car” — Ownership is the best motivation for vigilance, because if something goes wrong, you’ll be the one eating the costs. Having someone else shield you from health care expenditures only weakens your incentive to be vigilant in regard to your own well-being

Earlier in the day’s proceedings, Obama and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois rained on the tort reform parade by claiming that the $5 billion a year that could be saved by reforming the malpractice system would be a drop in the $2 trillion health care bucket (as an aside, I’ve always thought this is a bizarre rationale — how can anyone expect to realize large savings if they ignore all the incremental savings that will get them there?). Yet if tort reform was too picayune, why are Democrats ignoring Barrasso’s point, which got to the heart of what drives health care costs through the roof?

The problem with modern health care is that is built on a triangular model. In most cases, one person pays for the care (an employer), one person consumes the care (the patient) and one person provides the care (the doctor). This is a recipe for unhappiness and inflation, because the person who consumes is unaccountable to the person that pays, and the person that provides is unaccountable to the person they provide for (Harvard’s Regina Herzlinger has been invaluable on this point).

The Republican talking point is that health care needs to be reformed in small, incremental chunks. That may be a sound legislative strategy, but it’s not true as a matter of policy. The system needs to be fundamentally reformed and placed on a consumer-driven basis (and yes, conservatives, you can learn from Europe — Switzerland has a pretty good model. If you’re really in the mood for right-wing apostasy take a gander at Whole Foods’ ideas too). Subsidies are always going to be necessary for the indigent, but more far-reaching government control is not the answer. Comprehensive reform that makes health care market-driven is.

If you or someone you know has attended a public and/or secular university in the last few decades, you’ve probably heard about the leftward tilt in the academy.  Some propose an Academic Bill of Rights requiring professors and schools to teach all sides of an issue instead of whatever uniformly diverse viewpoint has been approved by ‘60s radicals masquerading as accreditation agencies.  Others – like Gary North – have a different method for overcoming liberal classroom bias: “digital kneecapping.”

As explained by North in this article, digital kneecapping is a process where a conservative or libertarian college student can use a blog, some subject matter expertise, and a little community organizing to turn the tables on a holier-than-thou professor.

1. Set up a blog site that allows interaction (a forum).

2. Post key questions on the blog. Refer to your confusion. “If he is saying that, then how can we explain this?” Provide the summary of your position. Provide links to supporting data. Do not attack him. Undermine confidence in him.

3. Once you have a few questions posted, hand out a card before class begins. Have the site’s address on the card. Invite others to share their views.

4. Position this blog as a discussion group in which each person helps the others to do better in class. It’s a joint effort to pass the course.

5. If he is forcing mindless regurgitation on exams, ask if others have experienced lower grades for not doing this. Ask what the best way is to give him what he wants, even though what he is saying seems so one-sided. (The phrase one-sided is a killer in academia, where one-sidedness is universally practiced, and is also universally disparaged as not conforming to the search for truth.)

6. If word gets out to the department chairman that he is not playing fair, he has a big problem — not because he is not playing fair, but because he has been caught and is being exposed where the Administration can see this. The Administration worries about alumni, who might quit donating if the media find out. This is kneecapping.

7. He can respond on the forum. He then deals with you as the top gun; it’s your forum, not his. He comes to it on your terms. He has never had to do this with students. He has played the toady with his superiors to get where he is. He has never had to do this with mere students. This puts him on the defensive. It forces him to defend his ideas and his behavior. You cannot believe the pain this inflicts.

8. If he ignores your site, you can slice him up, piece by piece, day by day, after each lecture. This is not kneecapping. This is death by a thousand cuts.

For my part, I’ll take North’s approach over a legally imposed “Academic Bill of Rights” any day.  The spring semester is still young, so get those blogs rolling!

One of my favorite scenes in the movie Broadcast News has a news executive sarcastically telling Holly Hunter’s character that it must be great being the smartest person in the room. On the brink of tears, Hunter confesses the truth: “No; it’s terrible!”

Such is the fate of Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States and occasional scold of congressional Republicans. In case you missed it, President Obama hosted handpicked members of representatives and senators at Blair House today to discuss health care “reform.” After watching the morning session of the seven-hour long affair, Yuval Levin offered this observation about the president’s most recent foray into legislative deliberation.

But he doesn’t seem like the President of the United States—more like a slightly cranky committee chairman or a patronizing professor who thinks that saying something is “a legitimate argument” is a way to avoid having an argument. He is diminished by the circumstances, he’s cranky and prickly when challenged, and he’s got no one to help him. The other Democrats around the table have been worse than unimpressive.

Among other things that could be said, the president doesn’t come across as the kind of guy anyone would want to have a beer with. Coupled with his condescending use of other people’s first names when they would not dare break protocol to call him Barry, the president increasingly looks like what he may very well be: a smarter-than-everyone-else-in-the-room jerk.

Today’s Health Care Summit was conveniently set up to be a clash of Democratic versus Republican ideas, plans, proposals, largely positioning the Republicans as obstructionists.

But the animal in the room was not an elephant, but a skunk.

The fact, now seemingly long since forgotten, is that the U.S. Senate has passed its version of health care reform.  If the House of Representatives simply passes the Senate bill as is, and the President, who crafted his most recent plan largely on the Senate bill, signs it, then the game is over, and the Democrats’ Senate bill becomes law.

But just as Senate Republicans did not have the votes (at the time) to stop the Senate bill, House Republicans do not have the votes to stop the House from enacting the Senate bill.

The obstruction is now and has been House Democrats, who will not accept the Senate bill.

People should just remember that as the attacks on “obstruction” continue.

During today’s White House Health Care Summit, President Obama continues to insist that his plan to reform the nation’s health care system is not a government takeover of health care. 

Countering the president’s claim, the Senate Republican Policy Committee released a list of 159 new boards, bureaucracies and programs created in the Senate-passed bill, which serves as the framework for President Obama’s “new” health care proposal, a summary of which was released earlier this week.

View the entire RPC list here.

As President Obama and certain Members of Congress continue with their health care dog-and-pony show today, a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey is out confirming what should already be obvious to all politicians in Washington:  The health care bills under current consideration are about as popular as Congress itself.

As CNN reports it:

Twenty-five percent of people questioned in the poll say Congress should pass legislation similar to the bills passed by both chambers, with 48 percent saying lawmakers should work on an entirely new bill and a quarter saying Congress should stop all work on health care reform.”

In politics, those numbers amount to near universal opposition.   But we digress.

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

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

The Associated Press reports:

The lone Republican lawmaker to support Democratic health care legislation has seen his fundraising drop by nearly 40 percent since his vote, and he is quickly burning through a dwindling bank account after resorting to a costly national fundraising operation.”

That “lone Republican lawmaker” is Joseph Cao of Louisiana.  Obama won Cao’s district in 2008 with 75% of the vote.

Hey all you so-called “moderate” Dems seeking reelection in November:  Still think it’s a good idea to vote “Yes” on ObamaCare?

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

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

In an op-ed publish today by The Daily Caller, CFIF’s Jeffrey Mazzella and Timothy Lee warn that proposed “Net Neutrality” rules being considered by President Obama’s Federal Communications Commission threaten to stifle Internet innovation and cut off tens of billions of dollars in private investment  in the deployment of high-speed broadband networks. 

Thanks to private investments of $60 billion or more annually by Internet service providers, the World Wide Web has blossomed over the past decade into a tool that most Americans use daily to access news, information and entertainment. We also use it to communicate with family and friends, to share photos with loved ones, and for education and civic participation purposes. The Internet drives increased commerce and promises efficiencies in the healthcare and energy sectors. It motivates new innovation and jobs on a pace that continues to surpass our collective imagination.

All this has been made possible primarily because the Internet has remained largely unregulated. Its growth and development have been gated not by federal bureaucrats, but rather by users’ individual wants, needs and dreams.

But all of that could change if net neutrality regulations are put in place. …

Read the full piece here.

Join the fight to stop the government takeover of the Internet here.

With five Republicans voting for cloture in the Senate– Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Kit Bond, George Voinovich, and (surprise!) Scott Brown — we should expect the Congress to pass its new “jobs bill” this week (in reality, this is like a 100-calorie pack version of the stimulus).

It’s not surprising that some Republicans are feeling the pressure to get behind this legislation. The perennial temptation in times of economic crisis is to get behind anything that seems like it could make a difference. This is not that piece of legislation.

Let’s start with the basics: At $15 billion, this package could be financed with what’s between the cushions of the sofas in the Oval Office. But that’s still $15 billion in new debt that can’t be justified without a commensurate kick to the economy. This package can’t deliver that kick.

The big hooks for Republicans are going to be the exemption from payroll taxes for new employees through the rest of the year and the $1,000 tax credit for new employees who are retained for a year. These provisions will have positive economic effects, but they will be very subtle. Because this bill only aims to jumpstart the employment side of the market without addressing broader economic conditions, it will make it slightly cheaper to hire new employees, but won’t create enough economic activity to justify employers adding many new hires to their payrolls. As with the similar plan that was tried during the Carter years, this most likely means that the majority of the benefits will go to hires that would have been made with or without the package. Given the limited time horizon of the bill, we should also expect its net effects to be similar to “Cash for Clunkers” — that is, just moving up hiring decisions instead of changing the fundamentals behind them.

The other provisions are no more impressive. This package will subsidize further borrowing by local and state governments, which only continues the sugar-high spending that simply can’t be sustained even in the best of economic times. And while infrastructure spending is certainly a legitimate function of government, it’s hard to sell as a strategy for increasing employment. After all, the mark of good infrastructure development — quick, efficient construction — is fundamentally at odds with the idea of creating jobs that are meant to endure for the long-term.

This certainly isn’t the worst piece of legislation to come out of the Age of Obama, but it also isn’t much more than a placebo. Until Washington begins to focus on shrinking the size of government, however, we shouldn’t expect the prescription to change much.

Not so many if the White House is involved.

The White House has named Rashad Hussain, a White House lawyer, to be envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference (which requires no Senate confirmation).

But Hussain said in 2004 that Sami al-Arian, the notorious Florida college professor, was the victim of “politically motivated persecutions,” even though al-Arian subsequently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to aid a terrorist group.

The White House claimed the comments weren’t made by Hussain, but by al-Arian’s daughter, as did the publication that had originally reported the comments as Hussain’s but later strangely edited them out.

Finally, Hussain himself admitted the comments, which he described as “ill conceived or not well formulated,” (sometimes referred to as the “I was mistaken when I said Hitler wasn’t all bad” defense).

Okay, teeny tiny cover-up aborted as it was heating up.  But here’s the real question:  President Obama was editor of Harvard’s law review and Hussain an editor of Yale’s.  Were both too busy at those prestigious positions to take their respective law schools’ ethics courses?

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

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Ben Smith of politico.com reported yesterday that “the embattled liberal group ACORN is in the process of dissolving its national structure, with state and local chapters splitting off from the underfunded, controversial national group, an official close to the group confirmed….

“‘Consistent with what the internal recommendations have been, each of the states are developing plans for reconstitution independence and self-sufficiency,’ said the official, citing ACORN’s ‘diminished resources, damage to the brand, unprecedented attacks.’”

To this unsurprising development, we can only add that, to corrupt an old adage, manure by any other name smells the same.  Weren’t those local offices that James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles exposed in their undercover videos?

In the President’s shiny new once-over-lightly-with-a-higher-price-tag health care proposal (too vaguely written, it seems, for the CBO to score the economic impact), parts of it are implemented all the way to 2018, when the excise tax on expensive health care plans kicks in (and kicks anyone who has one in the groin). 

Many people who believe they don’t have one of those “Cadillac” plans now are likely to find that they do have one by 2018.

Also in the proposal, the fines for those incorrigible scoff-laws who stubbornly refuse to yield to the so-called “individual mandate” start small and progressively increase by year.

Call that slo-mo government, which has the distinct and not-to-be-overlooked advantage that all who impose it will likely have gone on to greater or lesser rewards by the time the populace actually catches on.

As David Brooks points out in his column this morning, “The odds are high that the excise tax will never actually happen.”  But that excise tax (along with other tricks in the bill) is what allows the whole house of cards to be nominally (and nominally only if you are deceiver or deceived) “deficit neutral.”  We thus face punitive taxation or fiscal disaster.

In a different slo-mo government development, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has informed some unruly coal-state Senators (all Democrats) that they shouldn’t get all worried about that EPA plan to regulate greenhouse gases.  It will now be “phased in” beginning in 2011, so as not to upset the fragile economy. 

Hit the buzz saw with your overreaching, did you, lady?  By 2011, the science on which the EPA determinations are being made will be so discredited that the EPA will have to cop an insanity defense.

There are good and rational reasons for phased-in government projects (such as you don’t build the bridge until you’ve got the road to it, even if it’s going nowhere), but the two aforementioned are not among those.  They are examples of government folly, the former predicted, the latter now being acknowledged.

In the meantime, where are the fast forward projects to get us out of our economic mess?  You know, some stuff the people actually want the government to do.

Following up on Brother Ellis’s earlier CPAC post, the most notable fallout from the weekend confab may have been Mike Huckabee’s criticism of the conference for being “too libertarian.” Let’s call this what it is: a fig leaf.

After a dissapointing seventh place finish in CPAC’s presidential straw poll, Huckabee is looking for a way to write off the legitimacy of the whole endeavor (let’s not deny, however, that Ron Paul’s victory in the poll does look a bit … well, eccentric). But CPAC organizers are quick to point out that when Huckabee declined their offer to speak this year, he attributed it to a scheduling conflict, not any ideological differences. Thus, claiming that he stayed away from the festivities because they were a little too fervent for liberty rings hollow.

Huckabee has two positive traits to offer conservatives: a winning, optimistic personality and a consistent social conservatism (part of what puts him at odds with some libertarians).  What he doesn’t have, however, is damning enough to remove him from serious consideration as a future presidential nominee. Huckabee is a practitioner of the baser kind of economic “populism” — no one who calls the Club for Growth “the Club for Greed” has the dictional authority to be taken seriously as either a conservative or a theologian. He has also proved himself to be functionally illiterate on matters of foreign policy.

Huckabee, like every Republican candidate for the past three decades, claims to have been baptized in the River Reagan. But Ronaldus Magnus famously said “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” Indeed, I don’t know how one indicts the GOP heresies of the past decade without faulting the party for losing touch with its libertarian roots. Huckabee is a terrific guy; but I think it’s time for the movement to acknowledge that he might be a Democrat if only that party was a little less secular.

In an interview with the editorial board of the Arizona Republic, embattled Senator John McCain said that he was “misled by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.  McCain said the pair assured him that the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program would focus on what was seen as the cause of the financial crisis, the housing meltdown.”

That’s what we thought, too, Senator.  But we weren’t in the room.

Time and again – in polls, in protests, in an avalanche of personal, direct pleas, in the Massachusetts Senate election of Scott Brown – the American people have told President Obama to focus administration and congressional activities on jobs and the economy and to start over on “health care reform.”

Time and again, he has refused.  Today, he defiantly raised the stakes, not only presenting a new version of the old versions (with a few pretzel twists) but raising the costs by billions.

In doing so, the President who came into office preaching that dialog could resolve the animosities of the world looks like nothing so much as the current government of Iran.

For those of you looking for more information about groups that connect and fund fiscally responsible congressional candidates, be sure to check out the Independence Caucus and The Freshman 50 PAC.  I-Caucus was the driving force behind defeating an incumbent Republican congressman with a fiscally conservative primary opponent, while The Freshman 50 is aiming to elect fifty new members of Congress to stop deficit spending.  Both groups are unaffiliated with any political party.  This election cycle, independents are not only the most important voters – they’re also becoming the most important grassroots organizers.

H/T: Jed Babbin at Human Events

In April 2009, Senator Arlen Specter (D – Pennsylvania) announced that he was leaving the Republican Party and hitching his political fortunes to Barack Obama, just as Obama began his decline toward political radioactivity.

Obama’s approval has since plummeted worse than any elected President in the history of scientific polling, and Specter became the equivalent of someone abandoning a lifeboat to climb aboard the Titanic just before it hit the iceberg. Yesterday, however, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger did Specter one better, moving him down to second place on the list of most foolish Republicans to join Team Obama.

In an appearance on ABC’s This Week, the Governor who has presided over California’s decline to basket-case status heaped endless praise upon Obama, applauded Obama’s failed “stimulus” bill and missed no opportunity to attack his own Republican Party.  In fact, Schwarzenegger failed to substantively defend his own party (whose political fortunes are skyrocketing) even a single time even while Democrat Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell sat beside him and launched his own litany of predictable anti-Republican attacks.

Among other things, Schwarzenegger – we’re not making this up – offered the following advice for an Obama Administration whose policies and tactics have turned American voters decisively against it in just one year:  “I think the key thing for the Obama Administration is just to keep staying on track.”  The same track that brought it to this point, Governor?

Schwarzenegger also advised fellow Republicans that their primary concern should be to ask themselves, “how do we support the President, how do we support him,” and attacked them for criticizing the Obama-Pelosi-Reid “stimulus.”  He continued by labeling his own GOP “the party of ‘no,'” and added “the Tea Party is not going to go anywhere.”

Earth to Schwarzenegger:  the Tea Party already has “gone somewhere.”

So the man who is quite possibly the most failed governor in America advises Obama to stay the course that has brought him political ruin, labels his own Republican Party “the party of no,” proclaims that the Tea Party that has transformed American politics at the grassroots level “is not going to go anywhere” and claims that the smart course is for Republicans to ask not what they can do for their country, but what they can do to “support the President.”

Great timing, Governor Schwarzenegger.   Got any hot tips on Enron stock while you’re at it?