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.

Somehow, with each passing day, Barack Obama appears less presidential while Mitt Romney appears more so.

Today provided perhaps the most stark illustration yet, as Obama publicly lost his temper and descended into argument with a reporter.  While announcing his unilateral decision to effectively impose “Dream Act” immunity to illegal immigrants via executive order, a reporter pressed Obama on whether he was favoring foreign citizens over American citizens when it came to jobs.  Scowling and angrily pointing his finger, Obama engaged in a back-and-forth hostile argument, interrupting himself multiple times to stutter, “Not while I’m speaking,” and “I didn’t ask for an argument, I’m answering your question.”

The spectacle can be seen here.

Perhaps Obama should simply stop speaking to the press on Fridays – recall last week’s “the private sector is doing fine” gaffe.

Remember when Obama  solemnly and repeatedly promised that “if you like your insurance plan, your doctor, or both, you will be able to keep them?”

If not, don’t beat yourself up.  He has broken so many promises that no reasonable person can keep tally.

But score another casualty to ObamaCare specifically.  According to The Wall Street Journal, college students should expect their plans to become more expensive or disappear altogether:

“Some colleges are dropping student-health plans for the coming academic year and others are telling students to expect sharp premium increases because of a provision in the federal health law requiring plans to beef up coverage.  The demise of low-cost, low-benefit health plans for students is a consequence of the 2010 health care overhaul.  The law is intended to expand coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans, but it is also eliminating some insurance options.”

Moreover, that consequence will likely be widespread:

“The new rules are likely to affect a broad swath of American colleges.  Some 60% of schools’ plans had coverage of $50,000 or less for specific conditions, and almost all of the rest have some sort of payout caps that they will have to do away with by 2014, the GAO study found.”

And the Obama Administration’s response?  They apparently couldn’t care a whole lot less.  “The Obama Administration,” the report notes, “argues that the most limited benefit plans colleges previously offered hardly counted as coverage at all.”

Yeah, that should motivate the youth vote for Obama just like those vapid, naive days of 2008.

Economists projected that the U.S. economy would add 160,000 new jobs last month.  Instead, the Labor Department announced today that we only added 69,000.

Additionally, the unemployment rate increased to 8.2% in May from 8.1% in April.  That makes 40 consecutive months above 8%, a new record.  Keep in mind that the Obama Administration claimed we wouldn’t reach 8% in the first place if his failed “stimulus” spending bill passed back in early 2009.

This announcement also arrives one day after the Commerce Department announced that the American economy grew only 1.9% in the first quarter of 2012, short of its initial 2.2% estimate.

More broadly, the economy must add 200,000 jobs each month just to keep pace with population growth and materially reduce the unemployment rate, and today’s report follows a disappointing 115,000 number in April.  The Obama Administration claims that the last recession was “the worst since the Great Depression,” but that’s false.  The early-1980s recession was substantially worse – higher unemployment, higher inflation and higher interest rates.  President Reagan’s policy of lower taxes and less regulation, however, rapidly reduced unemployment from 10.4% to 6.7% in the three years following the effective date of his tax cuts in January 1983.  In contrast, Obama’s policies of higher spending, higher deficits, higher taxes and more regulation have caused the worst cyclical recovery since the Great Depression.

This study should put to rest the idea that the Obama administration actually has helped to boost domestic supplies of energy (not that anyone really believed it anyway. See here.

It continues the sorry tale I wrote about at this site a year ago, here.

REALLY important stuff here, about which I have written numerous times, including at this site, regarding the utterly fraudullent gazillion dollar case that corrupt Ecuadoran officials (and apparent corrupt Americans as well) are waging against the U.S.-based Chevron Corp. Of course, Barack Obama is on the wrong side, favoring foreign interests over American ones, as usual.

In this week’s “Freedom Minute,” CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the deception and hypocrisy of President Obama’s class warfare.

For a record 39th consecutive month, unemployment has exceeded the 8% level that the Obama Administration said we’d never reach in the first place under his government spending “stimulus.”

Compounding that misery, the nation added only 115,000 jobs last month according to this morning’s monthly Labor Department report.  That’s far fewer than the consensus prediction of 163,000 new jobs, which itself is far below the 200,000 needed each month to keep pace with population growth and substantively reduce the unemployment rate.  The Obama Administration claims that the last recession was “the worst since the Great Depression,” but that’s false.  The early-1980s recession conquered by Ronald Reagan’s economic policies was substantially worse – higher unemployment, higher inflation and higher interest rates.  Under Reagan, however, unemployment plummeted from 10.4% to 6.7% in the three years following the effective date of his tax cuts in January 1983.  Obama, in contrast, didn’t face “the worst recession since the Great Depression,” but his agenda of massive spending, regulation and deficits has given us the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

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.

In an interview with CFIF, Lance Izumi, senior fellow and director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute, discusses his Encounter Broadside, “Obama’s Education Takeover,” and how President Obama is leading a massive federal power grab that is disempowering local communities and parents by centralizing education policy in Washington.

Listen to the interview here.

Ironically, the Obama Administration projected when he entered office that unemployment wouldn’t exceed 8% after his massive spending “stimulus.”  Instead, the rate has exceeded 8% for 38 consecutive months, the most since the federal government began keeping records.  Over three long years.  Of course, Obama can at least claim something on which he has proved reliable.

Today, the Labor Department announced that only 120,000 new jobs were created last month, well below expectations of over 200,000.  That number is insufficient to reduce unemployment by even a single percentage point over a year, and the only reason the rate fell from 8.3% in February to a still-miserable 8.2% in March was that more people gave up and abandoned the workforce altogether.  Under Obama, we have witnessed record spending, record deficits, record regulation and record hostility toward private employers.  So what does he have to show for that?  As detailed this week by The Wall Street Journal, the worst economic recovery in history.  Those straightforward facts speak for themselves.

CFIF Senior Fellow Quin Hillyer discusses how the Obama Administration’s anti-oil industry policies and practices are driving up gas prices and threatening American energy companies. 

Listen to the interview 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.

Back in January, attorney Robert Smith wrote a great piece at The American Spectator explaining the importance of Sackett v. EPA, in which the federal agency told landowners they didn’t even have the right to gain access to federal courts to challenge EPA’s administrative ruling that the Sacketts’ property was a “wetland” (which it manifestly is not). Today, the Supreme Court came down like a ton of bricks on the EPA and its Obama overlords. It didn’t just rule in favor of the landowners (thus sending the case back to lower courts to be heard on the merits); it did so without dissent. As in the Hosanna-Tabor case implicating religious liberty, even the four liberal justices ruled against the administration.

This is important. It means that property rights still matter, despite the manifold attempted deprivations thereof by the Obama administration.

Thank goodness.

Unlike Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich doesn’t do much to alter his basic speech from event to event — but, judging from the comments all around me, he still manages to hold the interest of, or even entertain, his audience.

Speaking last night at an antique car museum in the heart of the (white) blue-collar area of Mobile, AL, Gingrich used the backdrop to make the obvious point that gasoline sure was a lot cheaper back when those cars were on the road. He then moved into what already is becoming a familiar, but instructive, litany of Barack Obama’s transgressions against reasonable energy policies — including Gingrich’s favorite new target, namely Obama’s recent embrace of yet another new form of bio-fuel:

“I don’t think [the museum owner] has a single algae car!”

Gingrich told a humorous story about when oil shortages in the late 1970s briefly created rationing systems in which drivers could buy gasoline only on certain days, depending on whether their license plates ended with an odd number or an even one. He said his friend  (and mine) David Bossie, now president of Citizens United, remembers being 13 years old and having his father send him out each morning with a screwdriver to switch the license plates back and forth between the family’s two cars, depending on which one needed gas.

Gingrich said conservatives and liberals naturally react differently to “laws so dumb that fathers enlist 13-year-old sons to break them” (that’s actually a very close paraphrase; I didn’t get the exact words of the quote). Conservatives, Gingrich said, would naturally want to get rid of such a dumb regulation. Liberals, he said, would insist we need to hire some license-plate police.

Gingrich moved on from energy to foreign affairs long enough to say that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta “should resign tonight” if Panetta really believed that a U.S. administration need more “permission” from foreign powers than from the U.S. Congress when deciding whether to use American force.

He blasted Barack Obama for having, in the same fortnight, apologized to Afghanis for mistaken Koran burnings even after Afghanis killed innocent U.S. troops — in other words, showing outsized deference to radical Islam — at the same time he was moving ahead with violations of religious liberties (especially of Christians) within the United States via his mandate on insurance coverage of abortifacients. He accused the administration of being “disrespectful and bigoted… about [against] Christianity…. We are tired of you denigrating our culture, our religion, our beliefs.”

Back to energy, Gingrich went on at great length (as Santorum had earlier in the day in Mobile) about the vast new energy supplies found in North Dakota — and he noted that Barack Obama in his recent press conference spent lots of words denigrating “drilling” as a solution for energy problems, only to shortly thereafter  claim credit for great new supplies of natural gas. But, asked Gingrich rhetorically, how does Obama think the new gas was found?

The answer, of course, is drilling — in areas that would never even have been explored had Obama succeeded in an attempt he made as a senator in 1987 to end the U.S. Geological Survey’s task of keeping and developing an inventory of fossil fuel potential. “This is a case study,” said Gingrich, “in cognitive dissonance.” (AND, whispered my wife, “cognitive dissidence too!”)

Finally, Gingrich moved onto the political outlook for his presidential campaign. He belittled Mitt Romney’s sales pitch about the importance of a businessman’s managerial ability in the Oval Office. “You don’t need a manger in the White House,” said Gingrich. “You need a visionary leader…. As it says in Proverbs, “without vision, the people perish.”

Upon taking office in 2009, the Obama Administration projected that its unprecedented government spending “stimulus” would prevent unemployment from exceeding 8%, which would occur all the way back in October 2009 and be down to approximately 6% today.

Instead, with today’s announcement from the Labor Department, unemployment held steady at 8.3% last month.  That makes 37 consecutive months above the 8% mark the Obama Administration said we wouldn’t exceed at all, the most since the federal government began keeping records.  Moreover, the number of new jobs added is barely enough to tread water, despite Obama Administration celebrations to the contrary.  Whereas unemployment quickly plummeted from 10.8% to 6.7% following implementation of Reagan’s tax cuts, it has increased under Obama from 7.8% to over 10% and three straight years over 8%.

In an interview with CFIF, Phil Kerpen, Vice President for Policy at Americans for Prosperity, discusses his latest book, Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him, about how the Obama Administration is disregarding the restraints on federal power to impose the president’s agenda.

Listen to the interview here.

Last month, we recalled Barack Obama’s false promise in February 2009 “to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office.”  Instead, the nation’s deficit went from $455 billion in 2008 to $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010, $1.3 trillion in 2011, and now another projected $1.3 trillion for 2012.   Today, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just announced that the February 2012 deficit of $229 billion is the single largest monthly budget deficit in American history.

A $229 billion deficit would probably be close enough to make good on Obama’s promise to cut the $455 billion 2008 deficit in half as he approaches the end of his “first” term.  Except that it turned out to be for one month, not one year.