Freedom Line Blog

Great piece today by the unfairly fired former IG of the Corporation for National and Community Service, Gerald Walpin, and his former top aide Jack Park, also a longtime former assistant Attorney General in Alabama. Walpin and Park explain why it is a very suspicious thing, and against the public’s interest, that the Obama administration is hobbling Inspectors General throughout many parts of the federal government. This should be a bigger issue than it has been so far. It’s important.

Jim Geraghty at NRO has the story:

A report by Greater New Orleans Inc., an organization of businesses large and small in Southeast Louisiana, lays out how the Obama administration is approving only a fraction of the new permits, significantly less than preceding administrations in both deepwater projects and shallow water projects, that getting approval from Obama’s Department of Interior takes much longer than before he took office, and how Obama’s administration rejects a much higher percentage of proposals for drilling than before he took office….

The three-year average for shallow-water drilling permits had been 14.7 per month; the Obama administration now has that down to 2.3 per month…. The average approval time has increased from an average of 60.6 days in the preceding five years to 109 days in 2011….

I wrote about this general topic last year right here. And here. Meanwhile, as has been reported numerous places elsewhere (I believe I first broke the story four years ago in the Washington Examiner, or at least broke it within the US), Obama has gone out of his way to help promote and subsidize Brazil’s efforts to develop its own oil industry.

This is madness. And it is costing Americans a fortune.

Last week I wrote this column here, arguing that the Common Core education standards are, predictably, being misused by the Obama adminstration in a dangerous way. Key line: “Control of educational content by the national government risks creating a national system of indoctrination, without local recourse to diversity of thought.”  Today at the Weekly Standard comes this report along the same lines. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is trying to repeal her state’s participation in Common Core: “Just as we should not relinquish control of education to the Federal government, neither should we cede it to the consensus of other states,” Haley wrote. “Our children deserve swift action and the passage of a clean resolution that will allow our state to reclaim control of and responsibility for educating South Carolinians.”

It is now a hot topic here in Alabama. I served as MC for a candidates’ forum last night at the University of Mobile, and the hottest dispute involved just this issue, which is the central battle in a state school board race. I was interviewed on it here.

And at Education Week, Rick Hess also blasts Obama’s end run around federal law on this issue:

Prominent Common Core proponents have been telling Duncan’s team, literally for years, that its ham-handed tactics were doing more harm than good. It’s ludicrous for Duncan to pretend otherwise. Race to the Top, the administration’s “ESEA blueprint,” and the waivers all reward the adoption of Common Core, while RTT included $330 million to develop Common Core assessments–funds that, with little concern for the niceties of statutory prohibitions, are helping to develop curricular and instructional “materials.”

Three takeaways: First, given the likelihood that this administration will have five more years to run, but may never reclaim unified control of Congress, there will be increasing temptations for the administration to bypass Congress and rule by fiat. The prospect of an endless series of state’s petitioning to amend their waiver and RTT plans means we’re already closer to this state of affairs than I’d have thought possible a year ago. This is bad for democratic government; for education policy; and for students, teachers, and schools.

Conservatives have every reason to fight back against this administration’s lawless centralization of education.

So much for Barack Obama’s “Reset” foreign policy doctrine.

Presumably, the potential payoff from Obama’s constant prostrate manner, his willingness to meet dictators like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “without preconditions,” his repeated apologetics and public disparagement of allies like Israel would at least be improved perceptions of America abroad.  Four years after introducing that doctrine, however, we’re still awaiting the payoff.  Russia and China continue to obstruct U.S. policy, Israel is more endangered each day and the Iranians dislike us as much as ever.  According to a new Gallup survey, only 8% of Iranian respondents approve “of the job performance of the leadership of the United States,” while 67% disapprove.

This should prompt recalibration within the White House, because its foreign policy weakness is not showing results.  Meanwhile, time is running out to halt Iran’s nuclear ambition.

Hans von Spakovsky had an eye-opening piece this past week at Pajamas Media about horribly abusive prosecution by the legal thugs in the Obama/Holder Justice Department, led by chief legal thug and mendicant Thomas Perez at the Civil Wrongs, er Civil Rights, Division.  It seems as if DoJ is trying to prosecute entirely peaceful protesters outside abortion clinics, with zero evidence of criminal behavior. Read all about it at the link above. I’ve written numerous times about these lawless goons at DoJ. So has Hans. I repeat: They are a menace to a free society.

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.

The irreplaceable J. Christian Adams has the latest on the growing chances for massive vote fraud in the fall elections, on behalf of Barack Obama, aided and abetted by Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

The Pew Center on the States estimates nearly 2,000,000 dead voters are on the rolls, and 2,800,000 people are registered in more than one state. This is precisely the mess that the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) was designed to prevent….

The Justice Department refuses to enforce Section 8 of the NVRA [which requires that states eliminate the names of dead voters and other ineligibles from the voter rolls]  because, as political appointee Julie Fernandes revealed in a Voting Section meeting in 2009 that I attended, removing dead people from the rolls “doesn’t increase turnout. It stops people from voting.” Seriously….

[D]eliberate decisions have been made to ignore Section 8 of NVRA. Not a single case has been brought to clean up voter rolls during the Obama administration. Ironically, Holder, in his confirmation hearings, criticized the Bush Justice Department for “cherry picking” which voting laws they want to enforce and which they didn’t. Like so much from Eric Holder’s mouth, the statement has been shown to be a devious misdirection. Holder blames his political opponents for conduct in which he engages.

This is serious stuff. These people are ruthless, and amoral. They will do anything they can get away with, in order to seize ever more power. They are a menace to the republic.

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 wish to associate myself with the excellent post by Troy on Barack Obama’s latest bid to kill the DC Opportunity Scholarships. The data is all in favor of the program, and so is common sense. And, most importantly, supporting the program is, as Troy said, the humane thing to do. Don’t believe us? Just try watching this video sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and narrated by Juan Williams, with its highly moving related interviews with children who actually benefit from the program, and then still try to say with a straight face that the move to kill the program is abominable.

This is a great program. It must be saved. And Barack Obama, if he had any shame at all, would and should be ashamed for trying to kill it.

My nominee for quote of the day goes to Texas Governor Rick Perry, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal on the absurdity of the Obama Administration’s “insufficient time” rationalization for rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline and the thousands of domestic jobs it would create:

Hoping to appease environmental radicals, President Obama said no, claiming that he didn’t have time to adequately consider the pipeline.  This despite the fact that the original request was made in September 2008, and Keystone was the subject of dozens of meetings on multiple levels of his own administration, as well as exhaustive environmental impact reviews.  Certainly, three-and-a-half years is more than enough time to make his decision.  His reasoning becomes even more laughable when you put it up against his massive, ill-conceived stimulus bill, which he muscled through Congress and signed within the first month of his presidency.”

J. Christian Adams has an eloquent commentary today on the import of the Obama Administration’s latest effort in its war against traditional Christianity, and on the resistance to it from well-motivated people of all faiths.

One key passage is here:

The real reason the White House was steamrolled is that the Left doesn’t understand what it is up against.  Rachel Maddow, for example, thinks people of faith oppose the Obama mandate because it provides “a convenient partisan cudgel to use against Democrats.”  To Maddow, profound religious conviction couldn’t explain the backlash.  Instead, “partisan cudgels” provide an explanation more familiar to her.

Consider further the always caustic and usually wrong Eric Boehlert of the Soros-funded Media Matters.  Boehlert says the fight with the churches “feels like 1962, we’re arguing over ‘birth control’ in 2012.”  Boehlert doesn’t understand this fight isn’t about birth control, but religious freedom.

Boehlert doesn’t understand that the usual Leftist tactic of mockery and ridicule won’t work on these opponents.  Name calling is nothing compared to what faith communities are willing to endure.

As many others have noted, the president’s “compromise” announced Friday is no compromise at all. It’s still an authoritarian violation of religious freedom. And it still is part of a larger war by the administration, one which, fortunately, it has been losing, as in the 9-0 shellacking the Supreme Court gave to Obama in the Hosanna-Tabor case.

This president has no regard for freedom, and none for traditional Christian or Jewish faith. He is dangerous. It’s a good thing, as Adams points out, that faith and freedom are not so easily cowed.

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.

Today’s Department of Labor report that unemployment declined slightly from 8.5% to 8.3% in January will surely be celebrated and trumpeted by the Obama Administration.  Which only serves to illustrate the terrible quality of his economic performance in office.

First of all, today’s announcement means that unemployment has now exceeded 8% for 36 consecutive months, three entire years.  That’s an all-time record since recordkeeping began.  Second, that new record is not somehow a reflection of the fact that the most recent recession was “the worst since the Great Depression,” as Obama and his apologists constantly claim.  Unemployment actually reached a higher peak in the early 1980s recession, but quickly plummeted from 10.8% to 6.7% following implementation of Reagan’s tax cuts.  In contrast, unemployment has increased under Obama from 7.8% to over 10% and three straight years over 8%.  Moreover, inflation and interest rates were far higher in the early 1980s recession, and monetary policy was much tighter, meaning that conditions were less hospitable for economic improvement.  Third, for all of the deficit spending the Obama Administration heaped upon American taxpayers, it promised that unemployment under its agenda would be down to around 6% by now.

Instead, we’re barely treading water and mediocre news is characterized as wonderful.  This is the Age of Obama.

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 the recent decision to block construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline to Solyndra-like “green energy” initiatives, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the Obama Administration’s failed energy policies in the week’s Freedom Minute.

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.

During tonight’s State of the Union speech, Barack Obama will trot out his usual energy platitudes, Solyndra now excepted.

Regardless of Obama’s rhetoric, however, the real-world facts speak perfectly clearly.  Since the final week of 2008, according to the Thomson Reuters Datastream, the price per barrel of crude oil has increased an astounding 161%.  That year, Obama famously suggested that his election would mark the date on which Earth began to heal, the seas stopped rising and magic unicorns began delivering free In ‘n’ Out burgers to those of us on the east coast.  Instead, we’ve seen deficits rising, unemployment rising and oil prices rising.  As they say in Latin, “res ipsa loquitur” – “the fact speaks for itself.”   Namely, that Obama’s grandiosity and his actual performance maintain an inverse relationship.

Increasingly desperate, Newt Gingrich has hurled a spaghetti bowl of slurs against Mitt Romney in the hope that something will stick.  Curiously, one strand includes the following quote to a South Carolina audience:  “Why would you want to nominate the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Obama?”

That illogic, however, could have just as easily been used against Ronald Reagan in 1980 by his own Republican opponents.  After all, Reagan lost the 1976 Republican nomination race to Gerald Ford, who obviously went on to lose to Carter.  “Why,” they might have asked, “would you want to nominate the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Jimmy Carter?”  At this point, Newt’s attacks resemble a food fight more than principled defense of his own candidacy.

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 agree wholeheartedly with both Ashton and Troy that Romney does a poor job defending/advocating democratic capitalism and that Troy’s approach to what Romney should say is a good one. I also agree with Ashton that Romney, alas, is always going to have a tough time making that sort of case, because experientially and temperamentally (and maybe philosophically) he isn’t prone to that sort of approach. He really is easy to demonize (from the left)as a corporate raider, which makes him much more vulnerable to such charges in a general election campaign where the opponent has $800 million and is playing for a different set of voters than he is vulnerable to the charge in a GOP contest where the attack is rightly seen as perhaps scurrilous, and at least rhetorical overkill. Gingrich and Perry right now are doing Obama’s work for him — and it will make Romney all the more vulnerable in the fall.

Yes, if Romney tried language like Troy’s, it would help. But only so much. The sad reality is that he’s the perfect foil for Obama, both as plutocrat and as yet another Republican dynastic legatee. If he gets the nomination, he will be a weak general-election candidate because of it.