Freedom Line Blog

Remember the iconic 1978 movie Animal House?  In it, Kevin Bacon plays a tormented fraternity pledge stripped to his tightie-whitie underwear and forced to respond to each swat of the paddle by screaming, “Thank you, sir!  May I have another?”

In Obama’s new America, life apparently imitates Animal House.  Speaking at a partisan fundraiser, Obama once again descended into his petty trash-talking persona, saying that instead of protesting oversized government and tax burdens on April 15, Tea Party protesters should have been saying “thank you” to him.  That’s not a misprint – we should be thanking Obama for our current federal tax system. Here is the video:

obama-mocks-tea-partiers-you-would-think-theyd-be-saying-thank-you

No, Mr. President.  American taxpayers have already been stripped to their proverbial underwear, just like Kevin Bacon’s pledge.  We’re not going to respond with “thank you, sir, may I have another?”  No, we’re going to swat back come November.

Recall the flimsy, grand promises that candidate Barack Obama used to get himself elected in 2008:

We’ve been living beyond our means, and we’re going to have to make some adjustments.  Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.”

Obama made that promise during the third presidential debate in October 2008, well after the onset of the financial crisis that he now uses as an all-purpose alibi.  Accordingly, Obama’s apologists cannot claim that current realities were unforeseen when he made that statement.  Indeed, Obama himself pronounced during that same debate, “I think everybody understands at this point that we are experiencing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”  One wonders whether Obama thought for even a moment about what would happen if he ultimately won and was forced to make good on his “hope and change” promises.

Regardless, the collision between Obama’s frivolous promises and reality continued this week.  The Treasury Department has announced that March 2010 marked a record 18th consecutive month in which the federal government posted a budget deficit.  This despite the fact that federal “bailout” spending has declined, meaning not even that can be scapegoated by the Obama Administration.  March’s $65 billion deficit also exceeded the Congressional Budget Office’s projected $62 billion deficit, and the first half 2010 fiscal year deficit now stands at $717 billion, only slightly below last year’s $781 billion first half deficit.

We’re witnessing “change,” but certainly not of the “hopeful” variety.

Activists who favor so-called “Net Neutrality,” which would actually make the federal government suddenly non-neutral in overregulating the Internet, possess a natural advantage in the battle for public opinion simply because the term “Net Neutrality” sounds so innocuous.  After all, people unfamiliar with the issue might think to themselves, “what could be so bad about ‘neutrality?'”  Consequently, it became very important for Americans to realize the true nature of this toxic agenda currently being advanced by the Obama Administration, his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the political left.

For this reason, the results of a new Rasmussen poll are extremely encouraging.  By a two-to-one margin (53% to 27%), Americans oppose governmental “Net Neutrality” efforts to regulate the Internet in the same way the government seeks to regulate the airwaves via the “Fairness Doctrine.”  Most impressively, this means that public support for “Net Neutrality” has plummeted some 22% since June 2008.  Notably, among those who use the Internet either every day or nearly every day, opposition to “Net Neutrality” rises to 63%.  In other words, those who are most familiar with the Internet and use it most often oppose “Net Neutrality” even more strongly.  They know that “Net Neutrality” advocates’ constant doomsday predictions have been proven nonsense.  Opposition also increases among investors, who realize that “Net Neutrality” would undermine the incentives to continue investment and network expansion, which will be necessary for future Internet growth in America.  That speaks volumes.

The fight isn’t over, despite public opposition and a Court of Appeals decision last week rejecting the FCC’s alleged authority to impose “Net Neutrality.”  Obama’s FCC responded to the Court’s decision in Nancy Pelosi-like fashion, indicating that it will attempt to impose “Net Neutrality” by any means necessary.  Nevertheless, these are encouraging signs in this important battle.

Many Americans unfortunately view elections in too limited a perspective, assuming that mistakes can simply be reversed at the next election cycle.  Today’s announcement by United States Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens that he will retire reminds us that elections can be far more consequential and long-lasting than many voters assume.

Less than halfway into his tenure, Barack Obama will already have nominated almost one-quarter of the Supreme Court.  That is an enormous impact for the most radical President in American history.  Last year, his “empathetic” nominee Sonya Sotomayor saw her most notable ruling, the New Haven firefighter “affirmative action” decision, embarrassingly reversed by the Supreme Court in the midst of her confirmation process.  Yet she was nevertheless confirmed.  The fact that these are lifetime appointments makes this fact all the more alarming.

Our collective task in the upcoming months is to ensure that:  (1) the dangerous judicial philosophy of Obama’s nominee is fairly and thoroughly illuminated, (2) that we stand up for the principles of individual freedom and Constitutional fidelity just as strongly as we stood against ObamaCare in nearly stopping it despite overwhelming Democrat majorities, and (3) that Americans’ eyes are opened to the way in which Obama seeks to alter America for decades into the future.  This important battle now begins.

Congressman Bart Stupak (D – Michigan), whose “I voted against the bill before I voted for it” sellout proved pivotal in foisting ObamaCare upon America, now announces he will not run for reelection this November.

So tell us, Congressman – was it all worth it?  You initially took a principled stand against ObamaCare, but then sold out your own cause on the basis of a promise from Barack Obama to issue an executive order, which doesn’t carry the force of Congressional law.  This is the same Barack Obama who promised during his campaign to abide by public campaign finance limitations, then changed his mind when that became politically inconvenient.  The same Barack Obama who opposed Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposal because it imposed an individual mandate, but whose ultimate bill included that same individual mandate.

Now, even Politico comments that “without Stupak on the ballot, the seat becomes an immediate pickup opportunity for Republicans.”  In other words, even Nancy Pelosi now knows how it feels to be blindsided by Bart Stupak.

How will we halt the growth of big government when a majority of citizens contribute less than they receive in benefits from the state?

As Congressman Paul Ryan (R – Wisconsin) and others note, when that “tipping point” is reached, it will incentivize voters to perpetually increase government spending and taxes, since “the rich” are the only ones paying for the largess.  Unfortunately, we continue to approach that dangerous point in America.  According to the Tax Policy Center, an astonishing 47% of Americans owed the federal government no income taxes in 2009.  In other words, almost half of Americans are immune from actually paying income tax for the benefits everyone enjoys, such as national defense, education, police, fire and highways.  Moreover, despite absurd claims that “the rich don’t pay their fair share,” the top 10% of income earners pay almost 75% of the nation’s income taxes.  In contrast, the bottom 40% of income earners actually profit from the federal income tax, because they receive more dollars in tax credits than they otherwise owe.

Those on the left welcome this phenomenon, because it encourages voters to further enlarge the nanny state (as in, Nanny Pelosi state?).  And why not?  The suckers who actually work hard and increase their incomes will have to pay for it all, anyway.

For months, Barack Obama has promised to turn his focus toward job creation, but instead obsessed over destructive agenda items like ObamaCare and alienating our international allies like Israel and Britain.  Meanwhile, unemployment festers at approximately 10% despite Obama’s promises over a year ago that it would not exceed 7.8% under his borrow-and-spend “stimulus” program.

So what is the Obama Administration doing now to address American jobs?

Encourage more legal action against employers.

Obama’s Labor Department Secretary Hilda Solis announced last week its “We Can Help!” program, which encourages employees to pursue legal claims against their employers.  This program promises “the use of Spanish/English bilingual public service announcements — featuring activist Dolores Huerta and actors Jimmy Smits and Esai Morales” in order to “address such topics as rights in the workplace and how to file a complaint with the Wage and Hour Division.”

Yes, just the thing to reduce burdens on strapped employers and encourage job creation – more litigation and bureaucratic persecution of private businesses.  Never mind that swarms of ambulance-chasing litigators stand ready to wrench nuisance dollars from employers via litigation – the Obama Administration seems to believe that the pressing issue in our employment picture is not enough employer prosecution.  This program will merely divert employers’ resources toward litigating these cases, taking even more money away from the job creation that our economy needs so desperately.

After a bloody Civil War that split the nation and killed 620,000, America sought to settle the divisive issue of race once and for all by amending the Constitution to explicitly guarantee “equal protection of the laws.”  Despite that straightforward text, liberals during the past four decades have fomented the Orwellian idea that race-based unequal protection under the law somehow constitutes equal protection under the law.

In a brief filed this month with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Fisher v. University of Texas, the Obama Administration has unsurprisingly opted for the latter, supporting continuation of a racist admission system instead of equal rights.  Currently, the university literally flags each applicant’s file based upon his or her race, in order to undertake what it deceptively labels a “holistic” evaluation process.  In other words, admissions officers assess candidates’ skin color in order to reach whatever racial result they sanctimoniously deem appropriate.

A closely-divided United States Supreme Court sanctioned this discriminatory procedure in one of its more curious decisions of the past decade.  In the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, the Court ruled that universities could consider race as a “plus” factor to achieve what it called a “critical mass” of racial diversity.  Preposterously, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that “we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”  Well, that statement was made approximately 25 years after the Supreme Court condoned the same “holistic” race-based process in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, but somehow 25 more years were necessary.  Moreover, seven years have passed since O’Connor made that statement, yet the issue remains just as divisive despite the election of an African-American President, of all things.

What has changed since that date, however, is that Justice O’Connor has been replaced by Justice Samuel Alito.  Accordingly, a majority may now exist to declare that “equal protection of the laws” means what it says, and fulfill Justice John Roberts’s wise declaration that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Imagine a new federal regulatory commission including lifetime appointees to investigate officials for alleged violation of “international human rights treaties,” including those  “related to the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina or to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”

It’s not merely farce.  It’s proposed federal legislation supported by approximately 50 activist organizations to remake the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which was established in 1957 to combat illegal and unconstitutional discrimination within the U.S.  This proposed new commission, the brainchild of former Civil Rights Commission chair Mary Frances Berry and organizations calling themselves the “Campaign for a New Domestic Human Rights Agenda,” would also be empowered to “monitor U.S. compliance with international treaty obligations.”  Most ominously, though, this leftist boondoggle would “recommend new legislation and ‘encourage adoption’ of conventions to which the U.S. is not currently a party.”

It’s not bad enough that Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is attempting a backdoor implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and global warming agenda?  It’s not enough that so-called gun “control” activists seek to impose United Nations-style infringements upon our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms?  It’s not bad enough that the Obama Administration and its leftist cheerleaders advocated prosecution of Bush Administration officials who assisted our war against terrorism?

Not according to the left, apparently, in its continuing onslaught to control every minute aspect of our lives and eliminate whatever degree of American sovereignty and exceptionalism remains after Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid exhaust themselves.

Welcome to the ObamaCare hangover, America.

In his weekly Main Street column entitled “The Tax Police and the Health Care Mandate,” Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn points out a malignant paradox within ObamaCare.  Namely, that ObmaCare’s infamous individual mandate (which compels uninsured Americans to suddenly purchase insurance under penalty of prosecution) will have one of two consequences.  It will either (1) penalize poorer Americans who fail – or find themselves unable – to purchase insurance by unleashing a horde of IRS enforcers upon them;  or, alternatively, (2) remain lightly enforced in order to avoid punishing the poor, thereby escalating our collective taxpayer cost into the stratosphere.

The rationale behind the individual mandate, of course, is that many of ObamaCare’s provisions, such as forcing insurers to cover people with preexisting conditions, would make its total cost unaffordable unless healthier and younger uninsured Americans were required to buy coverage.  McGurn notes that Obama was against this individual mandate before he was for it, opposing it during the 2008 Democrat primaries against Hillary Clinton, but unsurprisingly inserting it into ObamaCare’s provisions later on.  Nevertheless, enforcing the individual mandate will require new legions of IRS agents to target Americans who refuse to either purchase insurance or pay the federal tax penalty.

Which creates the paradox.  Those who consider themselves too poor to buy insurance today may still feel that way even when ObamaCare’s mandate is imposed, in which case they’ll find themselves the targets of the IRS.  If, however, federal bureaucrats in their famed mercy refrain from enforcing ObamaCare’s individual mandate in order to avoid persecuting poorer Americans (just as they do not penalize failure to return census forms), the total cost of ObamaCare will far exceed what its proponents promised us while they shoved it up our…  noses.

Nancy Pelosi was right about one thing, though.  We’re sure finding out a lot about ObamaCare now that it’s passed.

The blunt-force trauma of cold, hard reality hitting Barack Obama’s vacuous “Hope and Change” artifice continues.

Sixty years after Winston Churchill proclaimed a “special relationship” with the United States, and approximately one year after Obama shamefully returned a White House bust of Churchill to Britain, members of the United Kingdom’s parliament returned Obama’s insult and declared an end to that designation.  Britain’s Commons Foreign Affairs Committee decided that the term “no longer accurately characterised the modern relationshiop between the two countries and should be dropped,” and held that the British/American alliance was now “just one of a series of relationships.”

Naturally, the committee sprinkled a gratuitous anti-Bush remark onto its pronouncement, saying that the term “special relationship” was “now more likely to be defined by what was seen as Britain’s support for President George Bush over the Iraq War.”   This ludicrous fig leaf, however, fails to explain why the committee made this determination over one year after Bush’s departure and Obama’s arrival, when a magical new era of international goodwill and harmony was supposed to descend over the world.

Despairing over the passage of Obamacare? Beginning to fret that you sound like those liberals who are constanly promising to emigrate if a Republican wins the White House? Fear not, my friends, the health care bill contains an escape hatch for those of you who’d like to avoid the European Med-State to come. But you better be able to grow a beard.

As I’ve chronicled on Freedom Line before (here and here), the Amish and Old Order Mennonites have long pushed for an exemption from the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, as their religious beliefs forbid it. Well, they got it. And some are speculating that Muslims may be the next in line for an opt-out.

What would happen, one wonders, if millions of conservative Americans started declaring themselves Amish when the Obama Administration’s insurance company-underwritten collection agency came knocking?

Perhaps nothing symbolizes our nation’s sad state of political affairs than the fact that government-town Washington, D.C. thrives relative to other major American cities.

As noted by a recent Wall Street Journal report, home prices in the D.C. area rose 2% in 2009, compared to a 3% decline in 20 areas covered by the S&P/Case-Shiller Index.  The capital’s unemployment rate stands at 6.9% compared to 9.7% nationally, and restaurants have added workers in D.C. while other metropolitan areas bleed such jobs.  The reason?  Federal government employment in the area increased by over 20,000, whereas approximately 100,000 private-sector jobs were lost there.  Not only has our bloated federal government increased its employment rolls even as the rest of our society cuts back, but $78.5 billion in federal contract work and the flurry of bureaucratic activity brings domestic and foreign visitors to town.

Americans everywhere have had to trim their budgets and expectations during the downturn, but not the expanding federal government.  What sad, albeit fitting, symbolism.

American liberals love to praise supposedly superior European governance and culture, oblivious to the irony that they nevertheless continue to live in the United States.  This phenomenon became particularly visible during the ObamaCare ordeal, as liberals claimed that we must somehow join the rest of the “industrialized world” in providing unsustainable government-controlled healthcare.

Well, here’s a dose of sobering reality.  As noted on a front page story in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled “Europe’s Choice:  Growth or Safety Net,” Europe has stagnated economically for the past two decades compared to the United States.  Worse, this has occurred even as Europe continued its failure to carry their own weight with respectable defense expenditures.  From 1990 to 1999, Europe’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew 2.0%, compared to 3.3% for the U.S.  From 2000 to 2008, Europe only grew 1.7%, whereas the U.S. grew 2.2%.

Yet we’re supposed to emulate their example?  Can’t liberals just move there instead?

Barack Obama simply cannot seem to muster the same anger toward America’s sworn enemies that he heaps upon our most loyal allies.

According to The Wall Street Journal’s David Luhnow, Obama said yesterday that he was “deeply disturbed” by Cuba’s latest human rights atrocities, including the starvation death of political prisoner Orlando Zapata.  In contrast, Obama was reportedly “livid” toward Israel following its decision to merely construct apartments in its own capital city.

The good news is that Israeli Prime Minister stood up to Obama’s backwardness during his speech this week to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), saying “Jerusalem is not a ‘settlement’ – it is our capital.” Nevertheless, how embarrassing and frankly pathetic that America’s President cannot exceed the “deeply disturbed” level on his anger meter for the death of a Cuban political prisoner, but erupts volcanically when our only true friend in the Middle East simply allows apartment construction in its own capital.

After a wasted year in office during which he could have concentrated on revitalizing American employment, Barack Obama presides over a smoldering rubble that was once his electoral mandate.

Yet he and his administration label this radioactive ObamaCare ordeal a “victory?”

Obama began his self-destructive crusade last year possessing the strongest Democrat majorities in decades, but finished it with a string of jarring defeats in Virginia, New Jersey and then Massachusetts.  He entered office riding a crest of popularity and goodwill, but then saw his approval drop worse than any elected President in the history of scientific polling.  His wasted year ignited the Tea Party movement, and propelled Republicans to enormous leads on the generic ballot as November elections approach.

For such a supposedly effective leader, he could only manage to win a razor-thin victory despite enormous Democrat Congressional majorities.

And for what?  Over 90% of Americans already possessed insurance when Obama went on his hyper-partisan warpath, 90% of whom were satisfied or very satisfied with their care.  Even under the rosiest projections, ObamaCare will add only 5% to that number of insured.  Meanwhile, another $1 trillion will be piled atop the rotting federal budgetary heap, Americans will literally be compelled by law to purchase insurance that bureaucrats deem appropriate, unemployment festers at a 10% rate fully one year after Obama’s “stimulus” and Democrats may lose one or both houses of Congress.

Any more divisive, costly “victories” like this, and the term “Pyrrhic victory” will soon be renamed “Obama victory.”

Proponents of ObamaCare make the intellectually sloppy claim that health insurance is a “right.”

Simultaneously, however, they insert an individual mandate requiring American citizens to purchase that “right” as a necessary component of the bill.  A mandate enforced by none other than the IRS, and which is potentially unconstitutional, oh by the way.

But wait a moment.  How is it that one can label something a “right,” and then turn around and mandate its purchase under penalty of imprisonment and IRS persecution?  Does the Second Amendment’s individual right to keep and bear arms require that the federal government mandate firearms purchase by citizens who don’t possess them?  Does the First Amendment right to free speech require that the federal government mandate the purchase printing presses?

It’s dishonest, and it’s cognitively vapid.

The ongoing, excruciating, resource-draining attempt by Democrats to foist ObamaCare upon an unwilling American public (what ever happened to their promise to “focus on jobs” in 2010, anyway?) by any means necessary, legal or illegal, will obviously cause deafening reverberations in November’s Congressional elections.  With each passing day, scientific polling suggests that a Republican takeover is more and more likely.

In a brilliant commentary in today’s Wall Street Journal, however, Michael Solon points out that ObamaCare’s impact may be even more dramatic than Congressional midterms, or even the 1994 Congressional elections that vaulted Republicans to majorities in both houses for the first time since the 1950s.  This is because not only are Nancy Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s majorities in jeopardy, but so are Democrat seats in governors’ mansions and state legislatures, which control Congressional district realignment following the 2010 census.  As stated by Solon:

Of all the political consequences that could flow from the national healthcare effort in 2010, the potential of the fall elections to shift 2011 redistricting to the Republicans’ advantage may be the most important.  That puts the long-term viability of the president’s healthcare reform in serious jeopardy, no matter the outcome of the 2012 elections.  While the election of 1994 did signal a political realignment, none of that alignment translated into the much more permanent benefit that redistricting could provide in 2010 if the GOP takes over state legislatures across the country…  As Democratic legislators consider their choices, many are missing the impact of an electoral wipeout in 2010 on the redistricting of Congressional seats as well as those in the state legislatures.  The electoral advantage gained from 2011 redistricting would extend the short-term pain of 2010 at least through the redistricting of 2021.”

The late Thomas “Tip” O’Neil once said that “all politics is local.” But the Democrats’ suicide mission in trying to pass ObamaCare may turn O’Neil’s observation on its head and prove that not only are local politics sometimes national, but also enduring.

Didn’t Barack Obama promise to magically bring an era of post-partisanship and moral relativism after eight years of supposed moral chauvinism under President Bush?

Apparently, that promise was every bit as ephemeral as his promises to scour the federal budget “line-by-line,” to televise healthcare negotiations on C-Span, to close Gitmo and to abide by public campaign finance rules.  Welcome to the era of Obama as moral arbiter.  Speaking in Strongsville, Ohio to promote ObamaCare for the 6,294th time yesterday, Obama made a statement that would have triggered hysterical shrieks from leftists had President Bush said the same thing:

As long as I hold this office, I intend to provide that leadership.  I don’t know about the politics.  But I know what’s right.”

Never mind that the American public is so broadly and steadfastly opposed to ObamaCare that he managed to get a Republican elected to the Senate…  from Massachusetts.  Never mind that despite possessing overwhelming – albeit temporary, in all likelihood – Democrat majorities in both the House and Senate, he’s had to resort to unconstitutional non-vote “vote” proposals to pass his takeover scheme.

No, Obama “knows what’s right,” so just shut up and bend over, America.

The Obama Administration continues its bizarre behavior in selecting targets for its wrath.

For reasons unknown, the Administration has ostentatiously and histrionically escalated its condemnation of Israel, our most loyal Middle East ally.  Why?  Merely because Israel announced preliminary approval (the fourth stage of a seven-stage bureaucratic planning process) to build housing units within its own municipal boundaries in Jerusalem.  Meanwhile, as The Wall Street Journal reminds us, the Obama Administration continues to treat such anti-American rogues as Libya, Iran, Venezuela and Syria with kid gloves.

Then yesterday, chief White House heavy David Axelrod characterized our First Amendment free speech and petition rights as “a threat to our democracy.” The First Amendment explicitly states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech … or of the right of the people … to petition the Government for redress of grievances.”  Despite those protections, federal laws like McCain/Feingold literally prohibited, under penalty of imprisonment, political speech within 30 and 60 days of an election.  Fortunately, the United States Supreme Court struck a blow for First Amendment rights in January by overturning some of those restrictions in Citizens United v. FEC.

The Founding Fathers would not have taken kindly to McCain/Feingold’s unconstitutional restrictions on free speech and the right to petition Congress.  To them, abridgment of free speech was a threat to democracy.  In contrast, that towering intellectual and philosophical sage David Axelrod considers free speech itself “a threat to our democracy.”