Freedom Line Blog

Unemployment remained unchanged at 9.1% last month, and has now exceeded 8% for 32 consecutive months since February 2009.  That’s the longest stretch since the federal government began issuing monthly reports in 1948.

And there’s a reason why that 8% benchmark is important.  When Obama passed his nearly $1 trillion “stimulus” bill that same month, his administration projected that unemployment would never exceed 8%, and be all the way down to approximately 6% today.  Instead, unemployment quickly climbed to 10.1%, and has remained above 9% for all but two months in that record 32-month span.  Moreover, the economy only added a lackluster 100,000 jobs for September, far below the estimated 200,000 necessary each month to reduce the rate by just 1% over the course of a year.  Compounding that depressing figure, keep in mind that approximately 45,000 of the jobs that were added came as a result of Verizon employees returning to work after striking in August.

It is helpful to compare the real-world results of Obama’s economic agenda with Ronald Reagan’s.  In the same 32-month stretch following the effective date of Reagan’s tax cuts, unemployment plummeted from 10.4% to 7.1%.  The comparison speaks for itself, yet now Obama demands that the country pass more of the same – his new “mini-stimulus.”  Mr. Obama, it’s time to return to what demonstrably works, not continue what demonstrably doesn’t.

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 a remarkable new interview with an NBC affiliate, Barack Obama smirks and lectures that Americans have “gotten a little soft.”  Take particular note of his expression as he utters those words.

According to Obama, you see, it’s never a problem with himself or his policies.  It’s that he somehow didn’t explain himself often enough to the rest of you ungrateful rubes – never mind that he has done little else in his presidency than give cliche-saturated speeches or golf.  Or now, that you people have “gotten a little soft” for his tastes.

From maligning Americans who supposedly “cling” to their guns, xenophobia and religion, then later to ambivalence toward American Exceptionalism and now this, Barack Obama just oozes adoration for this country, doesn’t he?

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino points to the mounting scandals – Solyndra, Fast and Furious, Lightsquared – hitting the White House to refute claims that the Obama Administration has been “scandal free.”

So how many times must Barack Obama be wrong – flatly, indisputably, wholly, precisely wrong – before he withdraws from American political life out of pure shame?

Today provided another example.  In selling ObamaCare, his cornerstone “achievement,” to the American people, Obama promised on March 8, 2010 that his bill “reduces most people’s premiums.”  So what is actually happened in just the first year since he made that assurance?  The Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust report that health insurance premiums rose 9% this year.  Employers’ average yearly premium for families climbed from $13,770 last year to $15,073 this year, and from $5,049 to $5,429 for individuals.

Perhaps this explains why Obama’s Justice Department curiously didn’t seek to delay United States Supreme Court review of ObamaCare this week – maybe even Obama suddenly wants it overturned as quickly as possible.

According to a new Gallup poll, a majority of Americans now blame President Obama for the current state of the U.S. economy.  By a 53% to 47% margin, surveyed adults say that Obama shares a “great deal/moderate amount” of blame, while they also believe that George W. Bush continues to share blame by a 69% to 30% margin.  But notice something interesting.  For all the talk of hyper-partisanship from Republicans, the primary reason Bush’s numbers look worse is that Republican survey respondents split 50% to 50% on whether Bush shares some blame.  Democrats, in contrast, were far less willing to admit that their guy Obama shares blame, disagreeing by a 75% to 25% margin.  Independents by a 60% to 40% margin say that Obama shares some blame.

Here’s another noteworthy fact.  For all of Obama’s talk that he and his wasteful trillions of “stimulus” spending saved our economy from “the next Great Depression,” government economic figures show that we actually began our cyclical recovery before Bush had left office.  That’s a point that must be highlighted to voters as we approach a pivotal 2012 election in which Americans must choose between two governmental philosophies.  But in the meantime, at least most of us now recognize Obama’s role in our continuing economic struggles.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino analyzes President Obama’s “jobs plan,” which he outlined last week before a joint session of Congress.  While the plan has been advertised by the president as a bold new approach to job creation, Giachino says the details reveal that it is nothing more than “a new version of the same old song.”

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.

Today, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against challenges of ObamaCare by Virginia and Liberty University.

For several reasons, however, today’s ruling should be taken with a Jimmy Buffet-sized shaker of salt.  First, the ruling itself did not address the substantive merits or the primary Constitutional claim that ObamaCare exceeds the authority permitted by the interstate commerce clause.  Instead, the judges ruled that neither Virginia nor Liberty possessed procedural “standing,” the ability to demonstrate harm that has occurred or may imminently occur.  That is very different than a ruling that ObamaCare itself passes Constitutional muster, and at any rate is subject to change down the road as ObamaCare’s provisions are more fully implemented.  Second, two of the judges who ruled today were appointed by Barack Obama himself, and the other by Bill Clinton.  In the Fourth Circuit as a whole, however, there is an even split with seven judges appointed by Republican presidents and seven appointed by Democrats.  So the ideological makeup at an en banc hearing will be very different.  Third, the question of standing is not one within the unique expertise or authority of these three particular judges.  Quite the contrary, standing is an issue within the authority of every court in every case, because it is a requisite to move forward with any lawsuit in the first instance.  Accordingly, today’s particular ruling is at odds with not only the lower court’s standing determination, but that of the Eleventh Circuit in its recent ruling overturning ObamaCare.  Fourth, this particular panel’s decision wasn’t a surprise, as its line of questioning in May focused on the issue of standing, rather than the merits of ObamaCare.

In other words, the immediate overarching theme is that today’s ruling is not a game-changer, and certainly not a significant “W” for ObamaCare as it continues its inevitable course toward the United States Supreme Court.  Whether through the Supreme Court or through the next Congress, ObamaCare will be defeated.

No, not Joe McCarthy. Andrew McCarthy. In an absolute tour de force at the New Criterion magazine, McCarthy — the prosecutor who put the parking lot bombers of the World Trade Center (1993) in jail — outlines the manifold abuses of law of Barack Obama and his Justice Department consiglieres, especially Attorney General Eric Holder. In doing so, he broadens and deepens and updates a piece I did last fall for The American Spectator — but with an extra dose of authoritativeness I could not match.

Writes McCarthy:

In flagrant violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, the Department of Justice now practices racial discrimination in enforcing, and in choosing not to enforce, the federal civil rights statutes. These laws, enacted to safeguard our basic liberties, are not invoked when the victims are white and the lawbreakers are black. The most brazen example of this noxious policy—but far from the only one—is the Department of Justice’s astounding decision to drop a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party even though Justice had already won the case.

As McCarthy explains, for Obama and his Alinskyite allies,

Lawfulness and lawlessness, thuggishness and regular politics—we’re not to divine any moral or ethical differences. They are just different “approaches” to empowerment. They only “seem” to be “divergent.” It may be important to maintain the veneer of respect for legal processes, but it is just as legitimate to stretch or break the rules whenever necessary to achieve the desired outcome—social justice being a higher form of legitimacy than society’s rule of law. Separatism, menacing, and civil disobedience: none of these is beyond the pale; they are simply choices on the hard power menu Obama “bridges” with soft power (i.e., the system’s mundane legal and political processes).

Again, read the whole thing.  Great stuff. Scary, but oh-so-important for us to understand what we’re facing in the Oval Office.

Zero.  That’s the number of net jobs created in America last month according to the Labor Department’s monthly update, and the unemployment rate remained at 9.1%.

We are now more than two years since the recession officially ended in June 2009, and at the stage where the Obama Administration predicted that his trillion-dollar deficit spending “stimulus” would reduce unemployment to approximately 6% after topping out at 8% all the way back in the fall of 2009.  Instead, we suffered a post-war record number of months over 9%, and it continues to fester there.  By way of background, keep in mind that economists generally agree that a minimum of 150,000 to 200,000 jobs must be added to the American economy each month just to keep pace with natural population growth.  Also consider that economists had forecast a rise of somewhere near 100,000 jobs for July.

In contrast, in the same 30-month period following the effective date of President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in January 1983, unemployment plummeted from 10.4% to 7.4%.  We know what economic policies actually work.   What hath the opposite approach wrought?

MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe, a pasty white pale-skinned nothingburger if there ever were one, just doesn’t get it.  Like eleventy-umpteen squadrillion feeble-minded liberals before him, he seems to be so focused on President Barack Obama’s skin color that he thinks nobody else could possibly be motivated by anything other than a reaction to said skin color. The criticism of Obama’s nakedly transparent effort to upstage the Republican debate, said Wolffe, is nothing other than yet another example of how conservatives disrespect Obama just because he happens to be a shade darker — on some days — than John Boehner. Frankly, methinks Wolffe suffers from pigmentation envy. But no matter. As one who has repeatedly fought the good fight against white racists (oh, PLEASE, Mr. Wolffe, pretty please with sugar on top, challenge me on that one), I think I can safely say that the criticism of Obama would be the same even if Obama were a whiter shade of pale than the Procul Harum-inspired Mr. Wolffe himself.

Or has Mr. Wolffe not noticed that conservatives were equally critical of Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Dingy Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Frank Church, George McGovern, and Tom Hayden? Actually, he’s on to us: We know their secrets: Kennedy, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Church, McGovern and Hayden all are secret bearers of Negroid blood, which is why we oppose their politics. How did Wolffe figure out that we had figured out the Kennedy-Pelosi gang’s dark secret?!?

For the record, we are rather less than enamored of Mr. Obama not because he has African blood, but because he is arrogant, rude, self-absorbed, self-referential, condescending, leftist, Alinskyite, dishonest, incompetent, petty, peevish, unaccomplished, demagogic, and radical. He is the single worst president we’ve ever had, including Jimmy Carter and James Buchanan.

Let’s see Mr. Wolffe skip the light fandango and turn cartwheels across the floor about that list of Obama’s non-skin-related defects.

This defines cognitive dissonance.  The Obama Administration continues to scratch its collective head, wondering why its record deficit spending “stimulus” and big government onslaught has failed to create jobs.  Meanwhile, its own Department of Justice sues an iconic American company that creates them.

Just today, AT&T announced that it is relocating thousands of jobs from overseas back to American shores.  But also today, the Obama Department of Justice – you know, the one ultimately behind the disastrous “Operation Fast and Furious” – sued to block the proposed private merger between AT&T and T-Mobile.  Ponder that irony for a moment.  The Obama Administration, which has done so much to interfere with job creation since the recession officially ended all the way back in June 2009, is suing an employer that at this very moment is orchestrating the return of thousands of jobs to the United States.

Perhaps we shouldn’t find this surprising.  After all, the Obama Administration is also in the process of persecuting Boeing, America’s largest exporter, simply for electing to locate a manufacturing plant in South Carolina.  But that doesn’t make its behavior any less despicable or destructive.  If Obama truly wants to prove to the electorate that he seeks economic recovery, he must reverse this policy course within his administration.  Immediately.

Even for Barack Obama’s supporters, this has to be getting old.

Today, responding to a question about an American economy still struggling after almost three years of deficit-driven Obama “stimulation,” he went back to the “Bush Card” with radio host Tom Joyner:

George Bush left us with a $1 trillion deficit, so it’s a lot harder to climb out of this hole when we don’t have a lot of money in the federal coffers.”

There are several problems with President Alibi’s rationalization.  Among other things, (1) the recession officially ended all the way back in June 2009, (2) the money in those “federal coffers” to which he refers actually reached an all-time high under Bush in 2007 (several years after the Bush tax cuts and well into the Iraq and Afghan wars that Obama now scapegoats) and (3) nothing seems to have stopped him so far from spending trillions of dollars that we don’t have.

But forget about those realities for a moment.  On a more basic moral level, what does it say about Obama as a man that this is what he continues to offer the nation to justify his performance and his request for a job extension?

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.

Peter Kirsanow catches Barack Obama calling himself irresponsible and unpatriotic.  Heh, heh.

Of course, it really galls me when the left yells and screams about conservatives accusing them of being unpatriotic, even when we’ve done no such thing, while they actually use that very word to describe us again and again. Oh, well…. Let them be hoist by their own petard.

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.

So almost three years after Barack Obama was elected President, he promises to unveil a “specific jobs plan” next month.  Very gracious of you, Mr. President.  Apparently, one of his brilliant ideas is to create an entirely new bureaucracy within the federal government, a “Department of Jobs.” Never mind that we already have a Labor Department, a Commerce Department, and so on.

But here’s something for Obama to ponder.  As noted today in The Wall Street Journal, “Over the past five years, Texas has added more net new jobs than all other states combined.”  Naturally, Team Obama and the desperate political left are already attempting to discredit Texas’s economic success.  But the facts, unsurprisingly, refute their claims.  For instance, for all of the attempts to mislabel those new jobs as low-wage, the Bureau of Labor Statistics “pegs the median hourly wage in Texas at $15.14, 93% of the national average, and wages have increased at a good clip:  in fact, the 10th fastest state in 2010 at 3.4%.”  Keep in mind the lower cost of living in Texas, where those wages therefore go further.

So as Obama ponders a “Department of Jobs” during his extended Martha’s Vineyard vacation while the economy stumbles, perhaps he will experience an epiphany.  Namely, that he should do at the federal level what Texas has done at the state level – bring legal reform, reduce taxes and allow the private sector to flourish.