Freedom Line Blog

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

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

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.

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.

CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the mainstream media’s treatment of the Obama administration and how important it is that the Fourth Estate begin to hold the administration accountable for its actions and policies.

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.

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.

You’d think the Obama Administration would have been sufficiently chastened by the IRS scandal not to push their luck. You’d have thought wrong. From the New York Times:

LOS ANGELES — In a famously left-leaning Hollywood, where Democratic fund-raisers fill the social calendar, Friends of Abe stands out as a conservative group that bucks the prevailing political winds.

A collection of perhaps 1,500 right-leaning players in the entertainment industry, Friends of Abe keeps a low profile and fiercely protects its membership list, to avoid what it presumes would result in a sort of 21st-century blacklist, albeit on the other side of the partisan spectrum.

Now the Internal Revenue Service is reviewing the group’s activities in connection with its application for tax-exempt status. Last week, federal tax authorities presented the group with a 10-point request for detailed information about its meetings with politicians like Paul D. Ryan, Thaddeus McCotter and Herman Cain, among other matters, according to people briefed on the inquiry.

Here’s the Administration’s problem: One of the reasons they were able to get away with targeting Tea Party groups for so long was because most of the victimized organizations were grassroots affairs without megaphones. But go after Hollywood? The tinseltown conservatives may have spent the past decade content to keep their opinions to themselves—but politically-motivated audits have a way of upsetting that equilibrium (how do you think the story got to the Times, after all?).

The old saying is “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” Ink may be going by the wayside these days, but it’s still ill-advised to throw a haymaker at people with this kind of clout. I suspect the White House will learn that sooner rather than later.

Google likes to promote itself as a green, environmentally conscious company. After all, the company stays busy lobbying for carbon tax and cap-and-trade schemes, encouraging government to shutter coal plants and building solar farms. In reality, however, as I point out in a piece featured today on The Blaze, Google is far from green.

The company’s executives control a fleet of private jets that they use to gallivant to vacation spots around the globe – burning an average of 100,000 gallons of fuel every month. The supposedly environmentally conscious company’s jets have emitted more than 100 million pounds of carbon dioxide over the last four years alone.

What’s worse is that you are helping to fund Google’s green hypocrisy. Google, thanks in part to its hefty campaign donations and cozy relationships with federal lawmakers and the Obama Administration, gets to park its jets in a taxpayer-funded NASA hangar and purchase its jet fuel at below-market prices from NASA and the Department of Defense. Google officials spent an estimated $29 million on jet fuel at the facility, roughly $10 million less than what they would have paid on the open market.

Read the entire story here.

In a disgusting PR stunt intended to sensationalize the government shutdown, the federal government barricaded a small living history farm and museum in McLean, Va., and ordered it closed – even though the historical reenactment site receives no federal resources to operate.

The Claude Moore Colonial Farm uses costumed interpreters and authentic recreations of period clothes, tools and buildings to transport visitors to 1770s Colonial America. At least that’s what the Farm did until Tuesday when the National Park Service ordered law enforcement personnel to remove staff and volunteers from the property and barricaded the facility due to the government shutdown.  The Farm sits on NPS land but is operated entirely with private funds.

In an email to supporters, Anna Eberly, the managing director of the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, called the government’s decision to close the facility “utter crap.”

“In previous budget dramas, the Farm has always been exempted since the NPS provides no staff or resources to operate the Farm,” Eberly wrote. “In all the [46] years I have worked with the National Park Service … I have never worked with a more arrogant, arbitrary and vindictive group representing the NPS.”

Eberly said that Farm administrators pleaded with the NPS to remain open, but “Every appeal our Board of Directors made to the NPS administration was denied.”

In her email, Eberly points out that closing the Farm actually costs the federal government money, while taxpayers would pay nothing if the facility remained open:

We have operated the Farm successfully for 32 years after the NPS cut the Farm from its budget in 1980 and are fully staffed and prepared to open today. But there are barricades at the Pavilions and entrance to the Farm. And if you were to park on the grass and visit on your own, you run the risk of being arrested. Of course, that will cost the NPS staff salaries to police the Farm against intruders while leaving it open will cost them nothing.

“You do have to wonder about the wisdom of an organization that would use staff they don’t have the money to pay to evict visitors from a park site that operates without costing them any money,” she said.

By forcing law enforcement personnel to shutter a historical reenactment site meant to educate children about our nation’s history in order to make the government shutdown seem worse than it actually is, the Obama Administration has sunk to new lows.

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.

John Bolton has a characteristically clear-minded op-ed just out in the Wall Street Journal about Russia’s antagonistic position vis-a-vis our interests in Syria. Quoth the former UN Ambassador:

Since Syria’s civil war began, Mr. Obama has insisted, contrary to fact, that the U.S. and Russia have a common interest in resolving the crisis and stabilizing the Middle East. Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent efforts to secure Russian co-sponsorship of a peace conference, at which Washington will push for Assad’s ouster, reflect Mr. Obama’s illusion.

The objective evidence consistently demonstrates that Russia has no interest whatever in eliminating its only remaining Arab ally. Moscow’s military and financial assistance to Damascus continues undiminished, along with its hold on the Cold War-era Tartus naval base, strategically positioned on Syria’s Mediterranean coast—but now facing only a phantom U.S. Sixth Fleet. Despite the hoopla surrounding the announcement of the proposed peace talks, their starting date, attendees, agenda and prospects all remain uncertain.

Most dramatically, Russia last month reaffirmed its commitment to deliver sophisticated S-300 air-defense missile systems to Assad. Although Israeli leaders have played down the sale’s significance, this combination of advanced radars and missiles, which can defeat any non-stealthy aircraft (and Israel does not now have stealth planes), could change the strategic balance in Syria as well as in Lebanon and Iran—to Israel’s detriment and ours.

These are not, needless to say the actions of a friend.

Scratch the surface a bit and you’ll see the folly not only of the Obama Administration’s Russian “reset” policy, but also of every one of our “peace through vacuous niceties” diplomatic endeavors, whether in the former Soviet Union, China, or the Muslim world.

Our differences are not the product of misunderstandings. All international conflict does not stem from a global game of telephone gone horribly wrong. States and certain non-state actors (such as terrorists) rationally pursue their interests, which are defined both in material terms (economic advantage, balance of power considerations) and ideological ones. If those interests are fundamentally incompatible, no measure of sweet reason will make them otherwise. In the case of Russia, which defines one of its imperatives as checking American power wherever it can, that is precisely the case.

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.

From Fox News:

By law, each April and October, federal agencies are required to release an accounting of proposed regulations that will have an economically significant impact. That didn’t happen in 2012.

Instead, the Obama administration didn’t release its 2012 regulatory agenda until on the Friday before Christmas.

“The fact that this snuck in after the election, during the holiday season when people were otherwise occupied with their families, is not surprising,” said John Malcolm, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

Since the Dec. 21 release, legal experts and analysts have been pouring through the tens of thousands of pages in order to determine their impact. According to an initial estimate by the American Action Forum, which notes that some entries are missing key fiscal data, the cost of implementing the agenda would top $123 billion. Completing the paperwork could require more than 13 million man-hours.

“It’s massive,” former Deputy Attorney General Tom Dupree said. “There’s no way any human being can sit down and read this whole thing from front to back.”

In a society that prizes both limited government and the rule of law, it’s reasonable to expect regulation to be simple, transparent, and cost-conscious. This new wave of dictates fails on all three counts. And what’s most singularly galling about the whole thing is that there is no one to hold directly accountable. No one who crafted any of these rules ever stood for office or received a single vote.

As ever, when it comes to the administrative state, the delegation of power is the abdication of liberty.

As a resident of the Los Angeles area, I’m accustomed to the petty indignities of big government. In a number of local communities, I can’t get a plastic bag from a grocery store and remain on the right side of the law. In the bedroom community of Calabasas (where I used to live), lighting up a cigarette is illegal virtually everywhere. There was even a small uproar earlier this year when it looked like L.A. was green-lighting $1,000 fines for playing football on the beach (of course that was the one that actually got the public incensed).

Traveling in South Florida last week, I encountered a new one: jam-packed parking lots where the only open spaces (and yes, they were virtually always open) were set aside for electric cars. In an instance of federalism working in exactly the opposite fashion it should — bad state and local ideas trickling up to Washington — it looks like the Capitol is about to get a taste of similar medicine. From National Journal:

Both the House and Senate approved plans to install public charging stations for electric vehicles earlier this month, and President Barack Obama signed those laws late last week. But in conversations with more than a dozen relevant Capitol Hill offices, the Alley could only track down one staffer with an electric car.

The phenomenon — whether in Miami, Capitol Hill, or anywhere else in the nation — is always the same: No one’s buying what the government’s selling. A better parking spot, a charging station, and a guest pass to the HOV lanes aren’t enough to convince the average American consumer to sacrifice quality, reliability, and safety.

This, I think, is the most telling part of the NJ piece:

Though few staffers currently drive electric cars, the sponsors of the legislation hope the stations will act as incentive for staffers considering purchasing one. There are only about 55,000 electric vehicles on the road, according to a CBS projection, which falls well short of Obama’s goals to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

Count me skeptical of the incentive argument. The proponents of electric cars think they have a chicken and egg problem on their hands: no one will buy electric cars if there aren’t widespread charging stations, but no one will build the charging stations if there aren’t widespread electric cars. There’s an oft-unacknowledged parallel with the infrastructure, of course: conventional vehicles require gasoline, but you don’t see government having to mandate the creation of your local service station. It turns out that when people actually want a good, the logistics normally sort themselves out.

The problem isn’t that the product creates a chicken and egg dilemma. If we stay with this metaphor, the problem is that the consumer is a vegan. No matter how you present the product, they’re just not interested. When we start realizing this — and applying the principle writ large — we’ll save billions in taxpayer dollars, unravel the green crony capitalism represented by firms like Solyndra, and get our energy economy back on track.

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.

I think we can all agree that this is probably the death rattle of American liberty. From the Washington Examiner:

President Obama’s eco-friendly EPA inked a green partnership deal with high-octane NASCAR Monday to promote recycling and environmentally-friendly products to the sport’s millions of fans.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, NASCAR will encourage fans to buy “sustainable concessions” at races, expand the use of “safer chemical products,” conserve water, reduce waste, promote recycling, push products approved by the EPA that have a small enviro footprint and encourage suppliers to get an “E3 tuneup” aimed at promoting sustainable manufacturing.

Yes, you read that right: NASCAR. Civic religion of the red states. Featuring cars that reach speeds around 200 MPH, with fuel economies as low as two miles per gallon.

We’ve gone ’round the bend, ladies and gentlemen. All we can hope is that someday this will be included in the chronicles of the last, delusional days of the Obama Administration.

If you need another reason to hope for a Republican majority in the U.S. Senate next fall, here you go: a resolution to overturn net neutrality — the Obama Administration’s attempt at a government takeover of the internet — failed today in the upper chamber by a narrow vote of 52-46 (it had previously passed in the House, 240-179).

Of the Republicans who fought the good fight, none put the issue in as sharp relief as Florida freshman Marco Rubio. This a man who gets the bigger picture, as the Daily Caller reports:

“The FCC and the federal government cannot keep pace with the Internet and the technology industries, and the government should not attempt to catch up through regulation or legislation,” said Rubio.

“And that’s an important point. We are asking this government, we are asking this bureaucratic structure which struggles to keep pace with issues we have been facing for the last 20 years, to somehow keep pace with issues and the technology and the innovations that arrive in the Internet world. Not only do I think that is asking too much, I think it’s impossible.” 

Rubio is right on the money, sounding the same cautionary note that CFIF’s Timothy H. Lee has repeatedly emphasized. America has had no more dynamic sector of the economy in the last two decades than the internet, a development that would have been impossible without a relatively light hand from the federal government. If Washington gets in the driver’s seat, we should expect the same results that have characterized government involvement in everything from health care to postal service to education: lower quality at higher prices with less convenience. It’s a Wi-Fi world and we’re handing off the internet to a dial-up government.

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

With the White House now stuck in a defensive crouch because of the state of the economy, many voters have the luxury of forgetting the activist liberal agenda that President Obama brought to the White House in 2009. Most of us remember that Obama’s first-term check list involved massive expansions of government involvement in health care, energy, and finance. But too many of us forget that the other area where he openly sought a broader role for Washington was in education.

Because there is no cumbersome education bill winding its way through Congress, the threat may seem to have ceased. But those who understand the administration’s tactical impulses know that it can always be relied on to pursue through regulation what it can’t get through legislation. That’s the point made by the Hoover Institution’s Bill Evers (former Assistant Secretary of Education in the George W. Bush administration) in this interview with Reason.tv. The Obama Administration’s goal, he says, is to create an American equivalent of the French Ministry of Education:

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the administration’s move to trump the will of the American people and Congress through de facto imposition of the so-called DREAM Act by executive fiat.