Freedom Line Blog

All four of the cyber security experts that testified before a House committee yesterday agreed that Americans should not use Healthcare.gov until its security features are enhanced, or in some cases, built.

Three of the four said the website should be shut down until the security problems are fixed; preferably by rebuilding the site from scratch.

While that may sound drastic, an Obama administration official responsible for developing Healthcare.gov says that up to 40 percent of the site isn’t finished yet – including the parts that deliver subsidies to insurance companies on behalf of qualified Obamacare enrollees.

And it’s not like the roughly 60 percent of the website that is completed is running smoothly, as HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius discovered when it crashed while she was demonstrating its (in)effectiveness to the public.

Bombarded as we are with the epic ineptitude of this fiasco, it’s hard to improve on Charles Krauthammer’s sentiments: “…this is a level of incompetence that is indescribable. And it stands to reason. We have a president who never ran anything. He was never a governor. He never ran a hot dog stand in his life and he presumed that his team could remake one-sixth of the American [economy] and this is what happens.”

Brace yourself. There is much more to come.

A. Barton Hinkle, a Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist and Reason magazine contributor, wrote a fascinating and chilling column this week about the Food and Drug Administration expensive and burdensome new menu labeling scheme.

The regulations will “dictate the disclosure of calorie counts for foods sold in restaurants, grocery stores, delis, bakeries, coffee shops, and even gas stations,” according to Hinkle. And those businesses will pay a hefty price to comply with the policy. The federal government figures the rules will “cost more than $1 billion and require more than 14.5 million hours of labor to meet.”

The calorie posting regulations, which are expected to go into effect any day, have been debated for three years. Why? Because it’s confusing as hell to try to figure out how to force business owners to post the calorie count for custom made food orders.

Hinkle writes:

Consider, for example, pizza: The legislative director for Domino’s says ‘there are 34 million pizza combinations. We’ve done the math.’ Listing the calorie content for each possible variation would require a very large sign indeed.

Yet only one Domino’s customer out of 10 visits a Domino’s location. The rest order over the phone or online. So shouldn’t posting the caloric content on the company website suffice? It should, but it will not: The FDA’s proposed standards require actual signs, at every location.

While the regulations are bad news for big companies like Domino’s, at least they can make the calculations once and send those numbers to every location in their chain. It’s the small mom and pop pizza and sub shops, diners and other restaurants that face the worst burden. After all, small businesses don’t have the technology, money or time available to figure out the number of calories contained in a sandwich or a stew with hundreds of possible ingredient combinations.

The goal of these ridiculous federal calorie count regulations (which are actually a tax on businesses’ time and money) is, of course, to encourage people to consume fewer calories.

But menu labelling fails to reduce calorie intake. “Putting calorie labels on menus really has little or no effect on people’s ordering behavior at all,” according to Julie Downs of Carnegie Mellon who co-authored a study published last week in the American Journal of Public Health. “No matter how much calorie information is on the menu list, people still choose the food they like, not what’s supposed to be healthier.”

So, to recap, the government will soon hand down regulations that will be impossible to fully meet, will cost businesses considerable amounts of time and money, and will do nothing at all to benefit Americans.

Perfect. Just what this country needs.

Time’s Swampland blog quotes a health care industry expert to confirm the obvious: “Many people are going to find out that the second part of the promise – that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor – just wasn’t true,” says a former George H.W. Bush Medicare and Medicaid official.

Fundamentally, Obamacare is designed to increase access to health insurance. It does this by increasing its costs and then transferring the extra money to eligible people in the form of insurance subsidies and enlarged Medicaid programs. To compensate, insurance companies will narrow their doctor networks. In many cases this will result in people losing access to the doctor of their choice.

In other words, the logical outcome of President Barack Obama’s law is to show that his promise of keeping one’s doctor is a lie.

Though the Swampland writer says “It’s unclear why the President made the promise about keeping your doctor,” it is abundantly clear that without such a promise Obamacare could not have passed. People were told they could get a flashy new entitlement at no cost to themselves. Now, they are finding out how truly wrong that promise was.

Kristen Bartkiw thought she provided her two children with wholesome, filling meals when she sent them to daycare with lunch boxes filled with roast beef, potatoes, carrots, oranges and milk. The government, however, didn’t agree.

Bartkiw, who lives in rural Manitoba, Canada, was fined $10 for providing her kids with a lunch that was not a “balanced meal according to the Canadian Food Guide.”  Parents packing their children’s lunches are required to include “one milk, one meat, one grain and two fruits/vegitables.” The lunches Bartkiw packed for her children lacked the appropriate grain component.

Under the outrageous Canadian food guidelines, daycare workers were forced to supplement Bartkiw’s children’s lunch with a grain – in this case Ritz Crackers – to comply with the federal regs.

The daycare that was required to fine Bartkiw and force feed her kids a fistful of crackers finally grew so tired of serving as the food police for the Canadian government, that it stopped allowing parents to pack lunches for their children. The childcare provider is now saddled with the extra hassle and expense of cooking a hot lunch for every child in the facility.

It’s one thing to encourage child care workers to keep an eye out for instances in which children are not receiving adequate food or proper care. It’s another thing entirely for the government to command childcare workers to fine and harass loving parents for not packing the exact lunch that bureaucrats want children to have.

Byron York has a potential sneak peak at some of the most devastating political ads in the upcoming 2014 election.

It’s a list of Democratic U.S. Senators parroting President Barack Obama’s promise that “if you like your insurance plan, you can keep it.”

The list comes with names, dates and the exact phrasing from 27 current Democratic Senators, courtesy of Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Among those profiled, three are in tight reelection fights ahead of 2014: Mark Begich (Alaska), Mary Landrieu (Louisiana) and Kay Hagan (North Carolina).

If you live in one of these states, expect to see and hear the following statement as the campaign season heats up:

SEN. MARK BEGICH (D-Alaska): “If you got a doctor now, you got a medical professional you want, you get to keep that. If you have an insurance program or a health care policy you want of ideas, make sure you keep it. That you can keep who you want.” (Sen. Begich, Townhall Event, 7/27/09)

SEN. MARY LANDRIEU (D-La.): “If you like the insurance that you have, you’ll be able to keep it.” (MSNBC’s Hardball, 12/16/09)

SEN. KAY HAGAN (D-N.C.): ‘People who have insurance they’re happy with can keep it’ “We need to support the private insurance industry so that people who have insurance they’re happy with can keep it while also providing a backstop option for people without access to affordable coverage.” (“Republicans Vent As Other Compromise Plans Get Aired,” National Journal’s Congress Daily, 6/18/09)

Add Education Secretary Arne Duncan as the latest Obama administration official to suffer from foot-in-mouth disease.

Late last week the face of the controversial Common Core curriculum standards tried to dismiss opposition in terms of race, class and gender. Categorizing opponents as “white suburban moms,” Duncan said bad performance on new standardized tests is the culprit.

“All of a sudden, their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought… and that’s pretty scary,” Duncan told a group of superintendents.

It’s pretty clear from his statements that Secretary Duncan doesn’t have a clue how deep and wide Common Core’s problems run.

Even though all but four states have adopted the Common Core State Standards – which seek to nationalize math and language arts curriculum from kindergarten to 12th grade – grassroots opposition is bipartisan and fierce.

“Catholic scholars say the standards aren’t rigorous enough. Early childhood experts say they demand too much. Liberals complain the Common Core opens the door to excessive testing. Conservatives complain it opens the door to federal influence in local schools. Teachers don’t like the new textbooks. Parent’s don’t like the new homework,” reports Politico.

Those in Washington, D.C. who live to dictate rules to the rest of the country should take notice. It sounds like the Tea Party’s ranks may be getting reinforcements just in time for the next election.

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. CST to 6:00 p.m. CST (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EST) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CST/5:00 pm EST:  Peter Ferrara, Carleson Center for Public Policy Senior Fellow – Global Warming and Obamacare are Costing Americans Jobs and Liberties;

4:30 CST/5:30 EST:  Jennifer Gratz, Co-Founder of the XIV Foundation and Equal Protection Advocates – Race Preferences in College Admissions;

5:00 CST/6:00 pm EST:  Aloysius Hogan, Senior Fellow at Competitive Enterprise Institute – Right to Work Amendment; and

5:30 CST/6:30 pm EST:  Timothy Lee, CFIF Senior Vice President – America’s Copyright Protections.

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

It’s rare that we get anything other than green inanity in federal energy policy these days, which is why this news is so welcome. From Ben German at The Hill:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is cutting the amount of ethanol and other biofuels that must be blended into the nation’s fuel supply, a victory for oil companies that call the federal ethanol mandate unworkable.

On Friday, the EPA proposed draft 2014 blending volumes under the federal Renewable Fuel Standard that are lower than the 2013 requirements, and far less than called for in a 2007 law that expanded the mandate.

The EPA is proposing to require 15.21 billion gallons in 2014, down from 16.55 billion gallons in 2013, marking the first time the agency has lowered the target from the prior year.

A senior administration official said the Obama administration is firmly supportive of biofuels, but said  “market, infrastructure and other constraints” warrant paring back the mandate.

If you’re wondering when the hell the Obama Administration actually started worrying about the real-life effects of their policies, the answer is: when it put them at cross-purposes with a well-financed lobby. As the Wall Street Journal notes:

The EPA says it is trying to fix a problem known as the “blend wall,” which occurs when the annual requirement mandated by Congress exceeds the amount of ethanol that can be mixed into conventional blends of gasoline.

Oil companies and refiners have been warning of the blend wall for several years. If the EPA had stuck to Congress’s original target, refiners said they would have hit the blend wall in 2014 for the first time.

Which, of course, the ethanol lobby is using as an argument that this whole thing is one big gift from the government to “big oil.” That’s pretty rich coming from an industry that wouldn’t exist at any substantial scale without political collusion.

What’s the difference between ethanol and gasoline? You don’t need to pass laws to create a market for gasoline. The oil industry isn’t looking for special favors in this case; it’s looking from relief from a government-imposed drag on its business. The ethanol folks, meanwhile, are the ones trying to use state power to force people into buying their product. Which one sounds more corrupt to you?

As Drew noted earlier this week, ethanol is one big disaster. It doesn’t work in terms of economics, it doesn’t work in terms of energy, and it doesn’t work in terms of the environment. In a perfect world, we would’ve been able to abolish its mandate outright. In this flawed one, seeing it reduced at any level is a welcome change of pace.

In an interview with CFIF, Michael Brickman, National Policy Director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, discusses Common Core, the national education curriculum adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia, and the impact of Common Core on American competitiveness.

Listen to the interview here.

On the White House’s official Twitter page, President Obama bragged that under his administration, “We set new fuel standards that will double the distance our cars and trucks go on a gallon of gas.”

Ignore for a moment that the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency slapped the burdensome regulations on car makers 15 months ago, so the Tweet is obviously a pathetic diversionary tactic to shift the public’s attention away from the recent Obamacare debacle that has further tarnished Obama’s presidency.

Let’s focus instead on the reality that stricter fuel standards kill thousands of people a year.

Since the simplest way to improve a vehicle’s mileage is to reduce its weight, fuel efficiency standards turn cars into “small, underpowered death traps,” according to the National Center for Policy Analysis.

While Obama’s ridiculous miles per gallon regulations won’t fully take effect for another dozen years, previous fuel standard policies are responsible for many of the deaths we see today.

In 1999, USA Today calculated that the reduction in the size and weight of passenger vehicles necessitated by fuel efficiency standards had resulted in more than 46,000 deaths. There have been thousands more Americans killed unnecessarily in the years since that report.

Highway deaths have been spiking recently. There was a 5.3% increase in deaths on America’s roads last year alone. That’s not surprising since, in 2011, another significant increase in minimum miles per gallon for passenger cars was put in place. As drivers upgrade to newer car models, they are unwittingly putting themselves in lighter, more dangerous cars.

Judging by the White House’s tweet, it’s apparent that the President is proud to force Americans into even smaller, lighter cars. He seems disturbingly at ease with the thousands of American deaths his decision will cause.

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

Senik:  Obama’s Rhetorical Skill Now His Biggest Liability
Hillyer:  Mr. Obama’s Utter Destructiveness
Ellis:  Obama Admin Caves to Union Pressure, Proposes Tax Exemption

Video:  The Buck Stops Nowhere
Podcast:  Battle Continues in Education over Common Core
Jester’s Courtroom:  Take Me Out to the…Courtroom

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.

From the IRS targeting of conservatives to Benghazi to now ObamaCare, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses how there is no real accountability in the Obama Administration.

Watch this week’s Freedom Minute below.

If you’re thinking about using Healthcare.gov to shop for an Obamacare-approved insurance plan – wait.

The personal information you enter to create an account may be unprotected from hackers.

That is the startling reality uncovered in testimony given by one of Healthcare.gov’s top IT officials to House investigators. Apparently, a memo documenting several “open high findings” – including the website’s vulnerability to identity thieves – was kept away from the person responsible for green-lighting its launch.

As the plot thickens, Avik Roy asks several pertinent questions: “First: Did Tony Trenkle intentionally conceal this critical information about high security risks from Henry Chao, or was it an accident? Second: Would Chao have recommended that the exchange go forward if he had been aware of high findings? Third: Did Marilyn Tavenner—the head of CMS—know about these issues when she issued the final go-ahead authorization? Fourth: Now that this information is public, why is the Obama administration encouraging people to enter their sensitive personal data into the non-secure healthcare.gov website?” (Emphasis added)

Why indeed?

Could it be that there is such a rush to spike Healthcare.gov’s enrollment numbers that Obama administration officials are willing to overlook the potential risk to millions of Americans’ private information?

It brings a whole new ominous meaning to the warning buyer beware.

Fox News says Democrats in Congress gave the Obama White House an ultimatum today: Fix the Obamacare-caused insurance policy cancellations by Friday, or we’ll vote for Republican measures that do.

Ordinarily, I would welcome bipartisan fervor allied against the Obama administration, but the 48 hour deadline has me holding my applause. No good policy or law can result from a two-day cram session overseen by panic-stricken political appointees. We’re much more likely to see a hastily written executive order rather than a carefully targeted proposal.

Because of that, it’s very likely that whatever the Obama White House produces on Friday will – over time – cause more problems than it fixes.

As to the Republican proposals that seek to reinstate canceled insurance plans, I’m not sure that’s a sound strategy either. Republicans didn’t vote for Obamacare, so they have zero responsibility for helping President Barack Obama keep his fallacious promise to let people keep their insurance policies if they want to.

People are losing their insurance plans because Obamacare changes the insurance market. If Republicans want to keep pre-Obamacare insurance plans, they should insist on returning to a pre-Obamacare insurance market. Thus, as ever, the simplest Obamacare ‘fix’ is also the most effective: Complete repeal.

Anything else runs the risk of further distorting an already overregulated part of the health care sector.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is pulling the plug on the Senate Gang of Eight’s immigration bill.

“We’ve made it clear that we’re going to move on a common sense, step-by-step approach in terms of how we deal with immigration,” said Boehner, according to the Washington Times. “The idea that we’re going to take up a 1,300-page bill that no one had ever read, which is what the Senate did, is not going to happen in the House. And frankly, I’ll make clear we had no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill.”

That last line about having “no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill” might come as a surprise to those who remember the viability of that option prior to freshman Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR) unleashing a public and private remonstrance against it.

I’m sure there were a lot of factors that went into Boehner’s decision to put the kibosh on the Senate’s version of immigration; not least of which is politics. Immigration reform splits the GOP to the advantage of Democrats. Focusing on all of Obamacare’s failures unites Republicans ahead of the critical 2014 midterm elections.

Whatever the weight given to individual factors, it’s good to see House Republicans opting for unity over division. On both issues, the conservative perspective wins.

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.

Congratulations, Coloradans! You now have the dumbest, most offensive pro-Obamacare website in the United States.

ProgressNow Colorado, a wacky progressive advocacy outfit, and Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, an organization hell-bent on shoving socialist-style healthcare down the throats of Americans, have combined to propagandize Obamacare through a website called DoYouGotInsurance.com.

That’s right. “Do you got insurance.”

As in, “Dan, does you be cray cray? Is you really gonna jump outta your ride when you be drivin’ on the Interstate? Do you got insurance?”

It was already apparent that the loons behind the site lack a comprehension of basic math by the fact that they believe government-run health insurance is a reasonable idea. They were kind enough to dispel us of any notion that they paid attention in third grade English when they bastardized the language in the name of their website.

If the name and purpose of the website aren’t bad enough, the site patronizes the same young adults it is aimed at attracting to Obamacare. It features more than 20 condescending ads that portray young people as sexually promiscuous, ramen noodle devouring, careless yahoos who do keg stands and pound shots of alcohol. Several of the ads even feature a lifesize cardboard cutout of hunky actor Ryan Gosling (apparently without his consent) to promote taxpayer-subsidized birth control. (According to the dopes behind the website, young women lose all willpower and turn into sluts when a hot guy is around,)

If you want to see the offensive ads, click here.

You could almost hear environmentalists’ jaws hit the floor this morning when they opened their newspapers and took to their phones and computers for their morning news. In a fierce 4,150-word exposé, the Associated Press dispelled any notion that ethanol is the wonder cure for what ails the environment.

The AP points out that the explosion in corn farming as a result of government ethanol mandates have damaged land, polluted drinking water from fertilizer runoff, and killed aquatic life in rivers and lakes.

To top it all off, the article notes that, “The government’s predictions of the benefits have proven so inaccurate that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases.”

At best, according to the article, ethanol is only 16% better than gasoline when it came to carbon dioxide emissions. And that small 16% benefit comes at a tremendous cost to the environment:

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.

Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa.

The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America’s demand for it.

‘They’re raping the land,’ said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon pharmacy.

All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president’s push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things.

The AP’s stunning article should send a strong message to Washington about the failure of federal ethanol policies.

About 17,500 newspapers and websites are currently featuring the piece, according to a web search.

Liberalism’s word police are at it again.

Student government representatives at UCLA and UC Berkeley voted recently to ban use of the term “illegal immigrant” in on-campus “academic writing, or in communications between faculty, students and staff,” reports the University Herald.

The reasons given for the prohibition allege that saying the word ‘illegal’ is ‘racially charged’ and ‘dehumanizing’ to the people it describes. Better, the students argue, to use labels like ‘undocumented immigrants,’ ‘immigrants without papers,’ and ‘immigrants seeking status.’

This line of argument is consistent with the old trope that “no person is illegal.” Which, of course, misses the point and confuses the issue. The term illegal immigrant does not refer to a person’s humanity, but rather to his or her legal status.

Because Congress has the power under Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution “To establish a uniform rule of naturalization,” it has the power to determine what qualifies as legal immigration. Foreign nationals who violate Congress’ uniform rules are, by definition and common sense, illegal immigrants. The reason illegal immigrants are “undocumented” and “without papers” is because they are “seeking [legal] status” without wanting to undergo the legal process.

No serious person disputes this. What the UC students really mean to convey with their vote is that the very idea of distinguishing between legal and illegal immigration is itself racially charged and dehumanizing. Having rejected the idea that American citizenship requires accepting certain fundamental beliefs, these enlightened collegians would extend the blessings of liberty without requiring a reciprocal commitment to respect the laws and mores of the community that make these blessings possible.

In other words: All of the benefits, none of the responsibilities.

Sounds like sophomoric reasoning to me…