Freedom Line Blog

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino comments on President Obama’s 10-day holiday in the posh New England retreat of Martha’s Vineyard as the nation’s economy reels and everyday Americans are forced to tighten their family budgets.

President Obama has fallen to a new low in public approval as measured by Gallup, with only 39% approval and 54% disapproval.  Even more troubling for Obama and his supporters, no President has won reelection with ratings this low at this point in their tenure.

According to Gallup, President Truman’s approval/disapproval stood at 55%/29% at approximately this stage, President Eisenhower possessed a positive 71%/16% ratio, President Nixon’s approval outweighed his disapproval by a 49%/38% margin, President Reagan remained barely underwater with a 43%/46% ratio, President Clinton possessed a 46%/43% positive edge and President George W. Bush held a positive margin of 59%/37%.  All of these Presidents won reelection, and it should be added that President Reagan, unlike President Obama, was on a steadily upward approval trajectory that had him enjoying a 53%/37% approval surplus just three months later in November 1983.  The nation’s economy was accelerating throughout 1983 following the arrival of his tax cuts that January, whereas our current economy continues to stagnate.  Additionally, although President Kennedy was assassinated before he could face reelection, he enjoyed a 56%/29% approval edge at this point, and his Vice President Lyndon Johnson won in 1964.

In terms of Presidents who did not win reelection, President Ford actually enjoyed a 45%/37% approval balance, whereas President Carter found himself in a negative 30%/55% hole, while President George H. W. Bush still maintained his post-Gulf War approval rating of 74%/19%.

So while Obama can state that he isn’t as bad as Carter, he cannot point to a single instance in which a President with his current Gallup approval/disapproval margin won reelection.

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 a rare moment of candor yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney admitted, “the White House doesn’t create jobs.”  That’s a refreshing contrast from Obama’s previous “jobs saved or created” nonsense, but he can certainly say that again.

Today, the Labor Department reported that unemployment remained essentially unchanged last month at 9.1%, with only 117,000 new jobs created.  Keep in mind that the economy needs approximately 125,000 new jobs per month just to keep the unemployment rate steady, and 200,000 per month to reduce the rate by a single percentage point over an entire year.  In other words, the economy continues to create far too few jobs to significantly reduce the unemployment rate.

Also keep in mind that Obama promised in February 2009 that if we passed his “stimulus,” unemployment would top out at 8% back in the fall of 2009, and be down to around 6% by now.  Instead, we have witnessed a post-war record number of consecutive months at or above 9% unemployment.  Over the same 30-month period that have passed since Obama’s “stimulus” promise, Ronald Reagan’s policies reduced unemployment from 10.4% to 7.1%.

The White House may not create jobs, Mr. Carney, but history shows that its policies can foster growth or, in your case, wreak havoc.

In this week’s “Freedom Minute,” CFIF’s Renee Giachino explains why President Obama’s “balanced approach” of tax increases and spending cuts for fixing the nation’s fiscal woes is far from balanced in terms of its effects on the American people and U.S. economy.

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.

As House and Senate negotiators scramble to fashion a deal that can garner 60 votes in the Senate, 216 or 217 votes in the House, and President Alinsky’s signature (I still smell a last-minute torpedo job from The One), three keys should guide the Republican leaders. First, defense spending should be significantly protected. Second, absolutely no tax hikes should be part of the “trigger” mechanism for the second round of savings, and the Senators and House members appointed by GOP leaders to the commission should also be known anti-taxers who have signed the ATR pledge. Third, and this is of utmost importance: In order to reassure conservatives, the domestic discretionary spending cuts should be even more front-loaded than the Boehner plan was. The revised Boehner plan cut $22 billion in the first year; the new one OUGHT to cut at least $25 billion, and it should accordingly cut more in the second year than Boehner’s revised plan did.

Frankly, we should not care much what the caps are in years nine and ten; but history shows that spending caps actually tend to work in the first two or three years at least — and that if savings are achieved for more than one year, the “baseline” for future spending tends to drop and stay dropped for another two or three years — so the first two or three years are crucial.

Frankly, as long as these three conditions are met, I think Reaganite conservatives will have won, on behalf of the public, a reasonably decent victory.

Barack Obama and liberals fraudulently claim that their massive spending binge “prevented another Great Depression.”

It’s more accurate to say that their spending and regulatory onslaught stifled our natural cyclical recovery and heaped more debt upon the American people.

Today’s economic growth report card from the Commerce Department provided the latest evidence of that reality, as if any additional clarity was necessary.  For the second quarter of 2011 (April through June), American gross domestic product (GDP) only grew 1.3%.  That fell substantially below the expected 1.8% rate, which itself constitutes sluggish growth.  Moreover, first quarter GDP was revised shockingly downward to 0.4% from its initial 1.9% estimate.  That is simply pathetic and unacceptable.

In comparison, the American economy jolted to life after Ronald Reagan’s very different response to the early 1980s recession (which was actually worse than the most recent recession, despite liberals’ persistent claims to the contrary).  According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, in the eight quarters since Obama’s wasteful “stimulus” in 2009, we’ve witnessed growth rates of 1.7%, 3.8%, 3.9%, 3.8%, 2.5%, 2.3%, 0.4% and now 1.9%.  That’s an average of just 2.5%.  But in the eight quarters following the effective date of the Reagan tax cuts, GDP exploded at rates of 5.1%, 9.3%, 8.1%, 8.5%, 8.0%, 7.1%, 3.9% and 3.3%.  That’s an average of 6.7%.

Today’s depressing report simply shows once again that lower taxes and less government create prosperity, while bigger government and more spending create stagnation.

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.

As I have written and argued repeatedly for months, President Obama wants a crisis. He plans to use a crisis to seize even more power for himself and for the government. Now he is a significant step closer to his goal. Despite his finger-pointing con-job in his nasty press conference this afternoon, Obama is the one who deliberately torpedoed the budget talks. He is the one who has yet to put an actual plan on the table. He is the one who refused to even let GOP negotiators talk. He is the one who insisted through most of the year that no other provisions be attached to the hike in the debt limit — that the debt limit hike should be “clean” rather than include even a single cost saving. Now, as Speaker John Boehner just said, and as so many others have said in less vivid language, “dealing with the president is like negotiating with a bowl of Jello.” He just won’t stay still. And he’s doing it on purpose. He’s doing it because he doesn’t want a deal. He wants a crisis. This is a very dangerous game he’s playing, but he’s playing to win. And if he wins, we all lose — we lose financially, and we lose at least some of our freedom. Mark my words. This is what Obama’s game is. To try to win it, he has been fibbing, faking, and fulminating. Once he wins it, he will do far worse.

The Heritage Foundation has a helpful list of the Obama Administration’s many anniversaries this month:

The Obama Administration has seen its fair share of milestones this month. Yesterday marked the first anniversary of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Protection Act, Obamacare is just over one year old, it has been more than 800 days since the Democrat-controlled Senate passed a budget, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau opened its doors on Thursday–the first new federal agency in nearly a decade. You’ll notice that no one is celebrating any of them.

Liberals are aghast that regulating the economic activity of millions of people is going so slow, while business owners and the unemployed are living in constant fear of growth-killing rules.

Happy Anniversaries, Mr. President!  Your laws are destroying America.

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.

Responding to this morning’s terrible unemployment report, President Obama mused, “We still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do.”

No, Mr. President.  That’s precisely what the nation fears.  We’ve already allowed you to go too far and do too much, but you’re apparently not getting the clue.

For the month of June, unemployment unexpectedly rose to 9.2% and added a negligible 18,000 jobs, far below the 150,000 that economists had expected.  That means the unemployment rate has risen from 7.8% when Obama signed his massive government spending “stimulus” to 9.2% over two years later.  Keep in mind that his administration promised at the time that the “stimulus” would cap unemployment at 8% in the fall of 2009, and be down to around 6.5% by now.  Instead, it rose all the way to 10.2% and has remained above 8% for a post-war record 29 consecutive months.

Ignoring that, Obama and liberal pundits like Ezra Klein appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” claimed that what we need is even more of the same.  At what point do they finally get the signal?

In an interview with CFIF, John Yoo, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and former Justice Department official, discusses President Obama’s authority under the War Powers Act and the U.S. Constitution, particularly with regard to American involvement in Libya.

Listen to the interview here.

Throughout the Obama Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has imposed innumerable costly regulations that threaten American jobs and impede economic recovery.  During Obama’s Twitter “townhall” earlier this week, a good question would have been, “Why does your administration continue to impose a regulatory agenda that squeezes small businesses, which create most new jobs in America?”  Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, that question did not come up.  Regardless, it’s a sad state of affairs when administrative agencies, the most hyperactive part of our federal government, do so much to recklessly increase the cost of business and to reduce economic momentum.

Now, the scientific methods the EPA employs to reach its conclusions on a wide array of new federal regulations have been called into question by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).  In a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Senators David Vitter (R – Louisiana) and James Inhofe (R – Oklahoma) from the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works cited scientific deficiencies identified by the NAS within the EPA’s assessment of alleged formaldehyde risks.  Accordingly, the Senators demanded an immediate answer on whether the fundamental scientific problems raised by the NAS warrant reconsideration of all EPA risk assessments that use the same methods.  That includes the EPA’s ongoing revision of its National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ozone, scheduled for release later this month.

As most Americans are beginning to realize, some fresh element of sanity is needed within the federal regulatory process to ensure that government regulations are based solely on sound science, and that American jobs and growth do not continue to be gratuitously sacrificed at the altar of the Obama Administration’s reckless partisan agenda.

The letter from Senators Vitter and Inhofe to EPA Administrator Jackson can be read in full by clicking here.

It is beyond outrageous that, at the last minute, the Obama administration is trying to stop the execution of a brutal rapist-murderer in Texas today, completely ignoring the precedent in an earlier case (Medellin) — on the grounds that the poor abused rapist/murderer wasn’t told he could contact the Mexican embassy (he was a Mexican national) before proceedings against him began.

Having looked at this, I tend to agree that the failure here to contact the embassy was a harmless error and that, unlike in countries that use summary executions and have no other procedural safeguards, this guy has had PLENTY of opportunity to have his arguments heard. I see no legal reason to halt the execution and no moral reason to pass the proposed law that would block such executions while federal courts review the cases. (In short, the legislation would give foreign nationals GREATER rights to escape scot-free than the already significant protections in law for American citizens.)

Methinks the Obama administration should worry less about protecting Mexican killers and should worry more about having given weapons to other Mexican killers who used the weapons to murder American border personnel.