Freedom Line Blog

Two weeks ago on the local news in Mobile (the great WKRG), I explained some of the numbers behind the budget. Watch here. What I said then still applies. I noted that if Barack Obama only went a little way back towards an apples-to-apples domestic discretionary spending equivalence with what that Scrooge (NOT!) Bill Clinton thought was acceptable, we would be more than $250 billion (over ten years) closer to an agreement, before doing any of a number of other cost-saving measures.

Anyway, the clip is just about 150 seconds long.

I’ll have more to say on this subject soon; for now, suffice it to say that it is Obama, not Boehner, who is being entirely unreasonable (and irresponsible) in these negotiations.

For more than four years I have been convinced that Barack Obama was not just an arm’s-length devotee of radical activist Saul Alinsky, but a by-the-letter disciple of Alinsky’s. For almost as long, I have believed it is possible that Obama is a firm adherent of the Cloward-Piven strategy of deliberately causing government to spend more than it possibly can bear, in order to cause such a crisis in society that, rather counter-intuitively, only the government is left as an institution strong enough to step in, thus giving government vast new powers to create a Leftist version of Utopia — which of course is actually a dystopia.

For both Alinsky and Cloward-Piven (as for Obamite Rahm Emanuel), a crisis is not only not something to be avoided, but is actually something very much to be desired — and, further, something to be striven for, as long as the blame for getting there can be pawned off on someone else.

Hence we come to the so-called Fiscal Cliff. Does anybody really think Obama fears the consequences of not getting a deal?

It would be foolish to think he does so fear them. As the Wall Street Journal reported the other day (as discussed by Ashton in a post a couple of days ago), Obama threatened Speaker John Boehner that if Boehner didn’t fold, Obama would simply use a special speech plus the State of the Union address to blame Boehner and Republicans. Obama’s not playing for a better short-term outcome for the American people; he is playing for near-total anihilation of his political opponents, en route to long-term political power for himself and his allies.

A crisis combined with a cynical, hardball blame game is exactly what he wants.

The political right seems unable to communicate in a way effective enough to push the blame right back where it belongs, which is on Obama’s shoulders. This could be a very rough ride.

President Obama bargains in bad faith. Or, rather, he doesn’t bargain at all, but pretends to do so — so, technically, I guess his pretensions to bargaining are the proof of bad faith.

I cannot name a single important instance in which President Obama actually gave any substantive ground to Republicans, on anything. There wasn’t a single concession to anybody right of center in ObamaCare. There was no concession in the “debt limit” negotiations, but instead merely a postponement of the situation until he hoped political circumstances would be more favorable. And now, in these “Fiscal Cliff” talks occurring now, every time John Boehner makes an offer, Obama actually moves in the other direction.

Back in the last talks 18 months ago, Obama reportedly originally asked for $800 billion in new revenues. Then he demanded $1.2 trillion, but said it could all be accomplished without higher rates. Now he demands $1.6 trillion, and says he won’t even come to the table unless rates are raised (not just loopholes and deductions limited) on exactly those he always has targeted, those couples making over $200 annually. Plus, rather than limiting spending, he is demanding more “stimulus” largesse and an unlimited, automatic extension of the debt limit.

So, even with Boeher now offering higher rates for those actually making $1 million or more a year — a HUGE concession for Republicans — Obama has rejected that out of hand, and did so within an hour or so.

This man has no interest in keeping the government solvent. Just the opposite: He obviously wants it to spend, spend, spend, and grow, grow, grow, no matter what. He’s playing a long-term game, for total federal-government control, no matter what the short-term damage he does.

One can easily be forgiven, based on this record, for thinking he really is trying to enact the Cloward-Piven strategy of causing economic collapse so bad that the only institution left with any power is the central government, which then can reformulate the entire system under its own, all-powerful auspices. Hence, also, Obama’s assault on the intermediary institutions of society, including faith-affiliated social services.

Whatever his real goals — whether Cloward-Piven, or something else — there is not a single shred of evidence to suggest he has any intention at all of getting the problems of deficit and debt under control. And there is no evidence that he is even searching for common ground. Obama’s behavior certainly approaches the sinister; it is like nothing this country has ever seen before. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” said his fish-mailing thug aide Rahm Emanuel — and, by extension, never fail to try to foment a crisis, as long as you think you can blame the other side for it.

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 IRS has finalized rules for the medical device tax that goes into effect in just a few short weeks. Need a pacemaker? Pay a tax. Develop a life-saving device for a very small segment of the population, so there can be achieved no economies of scale? Tough toenails: The device tax on gross sales means you can’t afford to produce the devices — which means the would-be patients will die.

As I wrote here (I hereby acknowledge a mistake: prosthetic limbs are not covered by the tax), “what could be an easier campaign issue?” Yet, in perhaps the biggest example of campaign malpractice from an idiotic campaign guilty of many gross examples of malpractice, the Romney campaign never even tried to make a major issue of the device tax. Every time I think about it, I clench my teeth and want to start throwing heavy objects across the room. Failure to use issues like this has relegated this nation I  love to four more years of the most dangerous president in U.S. history. Mitt Romney and his top aides should slink away in shame.

But I digress. One way or another, people in both chambers in Congress ought to get serious and, no matter what else they do, repeal this dreadful tax. Lives depend on it.

Another day of congressional testimony for Susan Rice comes with more indications the Ambassador to the United Nations will not become the next Secretary of State.

But do pity Ms. Rice, at least a smidge.  With the finger-pointing circus around the Benghazi, Libya fiasco, it’s hard to keep the story straight on what exactly happened and who was responsible for hiding that information from the American people.

To clarify things, The Blaze website (quoting Buzzfeed) lists at least five official versions of the truth from the Obama Administration:

1. References were removed to not tip off al-Qaeda and were substituted with “extremists,” according to David Petraeus.
2. The links to al-Qaeda were too “tenuous” to make public by the Directorate of National Intelligence because the source wasn’t trusted.
3. “The talking points were debated and edited by a collective of experts from around the intelligence community,” not just DNI, according to a DNI spokesman.
4. The CIA told Senators McCain, Graham, and Ayotte the FBI removed references to al-Qaeda from the talking points “to prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation.”
5. The CIA later called Senators McCain, Graham, and Ayotte back, saying they had misspoken to them and that they – not the FBI – had edited the talking points.

On the bright side for Ambassador Rice, so far none of the misrepresentations have implicated her or her office as the source of the misinformation.  At most (so far), we’ve got diplomatic (Rice and Hillary Clinton) personnel parroting information from the intelligence community whose job it is to resource diplomats.

As I understand it, it’s the DNI, CIA, etc.’s job to gather, interpret, and communicate information so that the diplomatic arm of the federal government can use it.  Sure, more and better questions seemingly should have been asked by Clinton and Rice, but ultimate responsibility for knowing and articulating what happened in Benghazi rests somewhere in the alphabet soup of the intelligence community.  Those lines of responsibility won’t change if Rice replaces Clinton at State.

Cold comfort, though, since it looks like scuttling Rice’s nomination will be the only chance the Administration’s critics get to actualize their displeasure.  Welcome to Washington.

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.

Polls show great public approval for Barack Obama’s “handling” of Superstorm Sandy. I see nothing other than a president doing his job… plus a little posturing. Now, how do I know it’s posturing? Because his supposedly grave concern now is belied by his past actions when responding to disasters.

When Nashville suffered horrific flooding in 2010, where was Obama? Nowhere to be found. He certainly didn’t visit, and didn’t do much to urge the rest of the country to come to Nashville’s aid.

Where was Obama when Hurricane Isaac devastated several parishes in Louisiana?  Unfortunately, making racial issues out of hurricane response is a favorite pastime of the President’s…and despite his earlier standard of the imperative of “waiving the Stafford Act,” he still refuses to waive the Stafford Act for Isaac victims.

When the BP oil spill happened, even James Carville blasted Obama’s apparent lack of interest or energy in responding, and Obama was quickly at loggerheads with Gov. Bobby Jindal, and he proceeded to defy even Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu by putting a moratorium and then still slow-walking permits on new Gulf drilling — in defiance of a federal judge’s order, so egregiously that the Obama administration was found officially in contempt of court.

Of course, in a disaster in large part of the administration’s own making (a sin of omission of course, not commission — by repeatedly declining requests for more security), Obama or someone on his team refused to send assistance to the consulate in Benghazi, Libya even as a terrorist firefight continued there for seven hours while Americans were in danger, and then his team falsely blamed the attack on a video and otherwise tried to pretend it was anything but an Al Qaeda or terrorist effort, and continues to stonewall/engage in a horrific cover-up about what truly happened.

All of these failures in disaster response contrast with Mitt Romney’s record of immediately taking charge to find (successfully) the lost/kidnapped child of an associate — and to rescue people whose watercraft sank on Lake Winnepesaukee, and otherwise to respond forcefully and or thoughtfully and from the heart to numerous other personal tragedies suffered by both friends and strangers.

So, excuse me for being cynical about Obama’s “great” response to Sandy. When an election is on and his momentum is slowed, he does well for the cameras. Otherwise, he just can’t be bothered.

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.

You can’t make this stuff up. You just can’t.

This is not, not, not a prediction, but rather an analysis of where I think the presidential race stands right now. In other words, if the election were held today, this is how I see it.

Right now, I have Obama/Biden getting 237 electoral votes, and Romney/Ryan getting 235, with 66 electoral votes in states I consider true toss-ups. Wow. Could not be closer.

Now, some may fault me for this part of it, but I have Florida leaning Romney rather than toss-up. I’ve always thought Romney would win Florida. On the flip side, I still have Pennsylvania and Michigan leaning Obama, even though I really do think Romney has a shot at nabbing one of them. But his shot at them is no better than Obama’s shot at Florida. Still, in the states where I do have debatable leaners, Romney’s chances for surprises in his favor have 36 electoral votes, vs. Obama’s chances at just 29. So in the iffy leaners, Romney’s chances for growth are greater.

Now, among other leaners, I still think Romney has outside chances of surprising in Oregon, New Mexico, and Connecticut, all of which I place now in Obama’s hands. On the other side, the pro-Romney leaners that are at least long-shot options for Obama are just two: Missouri and Montana. Romney’s pick-up chances in this category are 18 electoral votes, Obama’s just 13. Again, slight advantage Romney.

Now, of the 66 EV toss-up states, here is the breakdown:

Virginia, 13 EV: All along I have thought Obama would pull out Virginia, but things are looking far better for Romney there than I had anticipated. I continue to make this a true, dead-even toss-up. Not even a tiny advantage to either side.

Ohio, 18 EV: If somebody had me in a head-lock and forced me to say how this would go, I’d say Obama, by the slimmest of margins.

New Hampshire, 4 EV: Same headlock, different result. My gut says Romney takes it.

Wisconsin, 10 EV: My head says absolute toss-up, my gut says Romney.

Colorado, 9 EV: I really think Romney will take this one, but I had it as toss-up just to be on the safe side.

Nevada 6 EV: I think Obama will take this one, but the “safe side” analysis applies.

Iowa, 6 EV: Head says true toss-up; stubborn polls say probably Obama; gut strongly says Romney. Put it with VA in the true toss-up category.

Result, of the ones I have labeled toss-ups, if I were to go on a limb, I’d give 24 EV to Obama (Ohio and Nevada), 23 EV to Romney (Colorado, New Hampshire, Wisconsin), and 19 still absolutely unsure (Iowa and Virgina).

So, to do all the math and allocate all the leaners and even the leaners-rated-tossups the way I have done (noting that Romney has slightly more “surprise” chances among leaners than Obama does), we come out to 261 Obama, 258 Romney, with Iowa and Virginia outstanding. Iowa alone would put neither over the top. Virginia would win it for either one. So, if the election were held today, I’d say that whoever wins Virginia will win it all.

But it’s tighter than two peas in a pod inside one of those freezer bags where the air has been completely siphoned out.

I had a big story today at the Daily Caller about how Barack Obama first was directly told that the Bush administration was releasing federal money to Louisiana post-Katrina and letting LA use that same federal money as the Stafford Act “match” for the rest of the federal recovery money — in other words, that the locals actually put up not one red cent — but declared himself unsatisfied even with that. THEN he, Obama, voted AGAINST a bill that provided Katrina recovery funds while waiving the Stafford Act. Then, in the now-infamous Hampton University speech, he blasted Bush for not waiving funds that Bush already had de facto waived and that the Senate then had waived while Obama had voted against the bill providing the waiver.

NOW, with Obama as president, he has REFUSED to waive the Stafford Act for LA victims of Hurricane Isaac.

One’s head spins at the multiple hypocrisies.

But now I would like to hash out some details. It is true, as Media Matters has reported, that Obama had voted for an alternative version of the Katrina relief bill that also waived the Stafford Act “match” requirements. The overall bill provided not just Katrina relief but also provided for better military support related to the war in Iraq. Obama voted for a bill that did all that while requring a specific timeline for troop withdrawal for Iraq, and issued a statement saying he had voted against the bill that actually did pass because it provided for no such timeline. But this is not a good excuse; in fact it raises serious questions about his judgment.
Why?

Because Obama’s desired timeline requirement would have been imposed just as the famously successful “Surge” in Iraq was going on and in a key phase. The timeline would have undermined the Surge. And Obama’s holier-than-thou intransigence wasn’t popular even among the anti-war crowd in his own party in the Senate: The bill that passed without a timeline did so by an 80-14 vote, including overwhelming support among Democrats.

Among those liberal Democrats who voted for the bill waiving the Stafford Act, despite its lack of an Iraq timeline, were Joe Biden, Richard Durbin of Obama’s home state of Illinois, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and West Point graduate Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a military procurement expert who had voted against authorizing military activities in Iraq in the first place.

By the time of the vote, of course, Obama was running for president. He was obviously playing up his timeline thing as a sop to the liberal base of his party for presidential primary purposes; while most Democrats, as we have seen, obviously thought it irresponsible to vote against the bill that actually passed just in order to make a point — an ill-timed, indeed dangerously timed point — about wanting to pull the troops home.

In short, Obama’s explanation doesn’t mitigate against the charge of hypocrisy; it just adds irresponsibility on top of the hypocrisy.

Michael Barone has a superb column about the serial law-breaking by Barack Obama:

Campaigns aren’t allowed to accept donations from foreigners. But it looks like the Obama campaign has made it easier for them to slip money in. How much foreign money has come into the Obama campaign? Schweizer and Boyer say there’s no way to know.

The campaign, as my former boss pollster Peter Hart likes to say, always reflects the candidate. A campaign willing to skirt the law or abet violations of it reflects a candidate who, as president, has been doing the same thing.

Examples abound….

Barack Obama was a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. But he seems to take the attitude familiar to me, as an alumnus of Yale Law School, that the law is simply a bunch of words which people who are clever with words can manipulate to get any result they want.

In public speeches he has defended such policies by shouting, “We can’t wait!” The results are good, or at least politically convenient, so why be held back by a few words written on paper?

The Constitution was written by men who had a different idea…..

This column has a devastating compendium of examples. More amazingly, much of Obama’s law-breaking has been to implement policies that are or should be unpopular. There’s no good reason for Mitt Romney not to “call him out” on them.

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.

Before Barack Obama, America had never seen a trillion-dollar deficit.  Under Obama, we have now endured four in a row.

Today, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced that the deficit for fiscal 2012 totaled $1.1 trillion, after trillion-plus deficits for 2009 (which Obama falsely attributes to Bush), 2010 and 2011.  Keep in mind that Obama originally promised that the deficit would be down to $557 billion this year, in addition to his infamous promise to “cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term.”   Moreover, the expiration date on his all-purpose alibi of the last recession has long since passed, since that recession ended over three years ago in June 2009.

Obama and his media apologists will naturally trumpet this morning’s lackluster jobs report, yet today’s deficit announcement by the CBO provides a broader perspective on his utter, unprecedented failure as president.

In light of yesterday’s release of a video of a race-baiting Barack Obama seemingly at odds with the image of a “post-racial” president that has been so carefully constructed, it is worth again looking at more evidence that there is a “real Obama” that most of the public just doesn’t know. A few weeks back, the Washington Examiner did a lengthy series on the subject, well worth a read. Read through the ten-part series to find how he earned big money defending a slumlord AGAINST poor people who the slumlord turned out of housing in below-zero temperatures … and about how Obama in the state Senate and as president made a habit of funneling government money to cronies of his, who in turn rained down campaign cash on “The One.” And much, much more. Great stuff.

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.