Freedom Line Blog

Conventional wisdom (pardon the pun) holds that presidential election season doesn’t begin in earnest until the conventions conclude.

If that’s the case, Barack Obama begins his job extension tour with a faceplant.

Economists expected our economy to add 135,000 new jobs in August, but today’s unemployment report shows just 96,000.  Not only is that a steep decline from last month’s already-lackluster 141,000 number, it’s significantly below the 200,000 per month we must see to keep pace with population growth and substantively reduce the festering unemployment rate.  Moreover, another 368,000 Americans simply dropped out of the workforce altogether in August, nearly four times the number of new jobs.  Finally, the unemployment rate remained above the 8% level that the Obama Administration promised in January 2009 we would never reach in the first place, establishing a new record 43rd consecutive month.  In fact, it promised that we would be down to approximately 5% by now.

“Four more years?”  Today’s news makes that an increasingly difficult sell.

No president in modern history has been reelected with unemployment above 7.2%, and even that occurred in 1984 when the rate had plummeted in just a few months from over 10%.  Accordingly, today’s unemployment report makes for an ugly hangover for Obama and his fellow Democratic conventioneers as they board their planes for home.

While the mainstream media appears more concerned with Clint Eastwood’s improv skit or Mitt Romney’s income tax returns, gasoline prices reached an all-time Labor Day high this week.  Back in 2008, of course, Barack Obama thundered that high gas prices demonstrated, “Washington’s failure to lead on energy,” with the consequence of, “turning the middle-class squeeze into a devastating vise-grip for millions of Americans.”   Today, in contrast, Obama accuses critics of his energy policy of “playing politics.”  Funny how four years of failed energy policy and Solyndra boondoggles changed his tune.

Now Barry Obama, that clever Irishman (akin to Obrien, Oflaherty and Ogrady; but please, Chris Matthews, don’t call me an ethnicist for pointing out his heritage, because I never said no Irish need apply), is claiming that he just didn’t explain the stimulus package enough back in 2009:  “We didn’t have the luxury of six months to explain exactly what we were doing with the Recovery Act, which was basically a jobs act and making-sure-middle-class-families-didn’t-fall-into-poverty act.”

Really? Methinks I remember all sorts of promises about shovel-ready jobs. And methinks he later acknowledged that the stimulus didn’t work as intended, because there was no such thing as “shovel ready.” (Actually, that last link was when he joked that the jobs weren’t shovel-ready; here is where he said there actually is “no such thing.)

Obama had plenty of time to sell us his shovel full of something, and then when we didn’t buy it, he crammed it down our throats. And it wasn’t really about jobs; it was about cronyism and building the power of big government.

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.

If Barack Obama insists on blaming Republicans in Congress for today’s economic malaise or deficits, then shouldn’t Democrats in Congress be held even more responsible?

Republicans today control just one-half of Congress, whereas Democrats won overwhelming control of both houses of Congress in November 2006.  That was fully two years before the financial crisis and recession (Obama’s all-purpose “mess we inherited” alibi), and our deficit stood at a miniscule $161 billion.

…..more often known as “child abusers,” that is.

Here, in a column special for the Daily Caller, is my report:

Surovell the surrogate is one of six Obama Truth Team members who voted against HB 973, which “imposes a mandatory minimum life sentence for rape, forcible sodomy, or object sexual penetration of a child under the age of 13 when it is alleged in the indictment that the offender was 18 years of age or older at the time of the offense.” This is the same Obama campaign that has spent all week somehow trying, dishonestly, to link opponent Mitt Romney with a stupid rape-related statement by U.S. Rep. Todd Akin. The others are Delegate Jennifer McClellan and State Senators Mamie Locke, John Edwards, Louise Lucas and Adam Ebbin.

Their position was so extreme that it didn’t even come close to a majority within their own party, much less within the whole state legislature. The bill passed 83-12 in the House and 31-8 in the Senate.

Of course, it’s not really fair to tar Obama with the brush of these senseless legislators… is it? No guilt by association, right?

As I wrote:

Then again, maybe this whole game of “gotcha” isn’t fair. Maybe it’s not fair to tag Obama with the idiocy of his surrogates. If not, then it’s even less fair to tag the Romney campaign with some sort of guilt by association with a Senate candidate they have nothing to do with and whose idiotic statement was quickly denounced by both Romney and running mate Paul Ryan.

It could be that all of this is an unfair distraction from issues directly related to the candidates themselves, such as the horrid state of the economy after nearly four years of Obama’s policies. Or the explosion of national debt. Or the rampant misuse of executive orders to grant amnesty and destroy welfare work requirements.

But if campaign associates are fair game — and if liberal columnists across the country are going to used pretzeled logic to breathlessly tie Romney and the whole Republican Party to Todd Akin — then Obama really must answer….

So that was an acknowledgement of the need for fairness. Well, tell that to the Democratic National Committee, which directly ties Romney, Ryan and Akin together on a photo on its website, as a horrible scare tactic and sleazy guilt by association.

Well, again, if that is fair, then it is eminently fair to say Obama doesn’t mind coddling child molesters.

So there.

This is notable.

Last week, we noted the unrestrained praise of Paul Ryan by prominent Democrats like Bill Clinton, Erskine Bowles and Oregon Senator Ron Wyden. Conversely, today brings criticism from Democratic Senator James Webb (Virginia) of the Obama Administration response to two years of Chinese aggression:

Over the past two years Japan and China have openly clashed in the Senkaku Islands, east of Taiwan and west of Okinawa, whose administration is internationally recognized to be under Japanese control. Russia and South Korea have reasserted sovereignty claims against Japan in northern waters. China and Vietnam both claim sovereignty over the Paracel Islands. China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia all claim sovereignty over the Spratly Islands, the site of continuing confrontations between China and the Philippines…

For all practical purposes China has unilaterally decided to annex an area that extends eastward from the East Asian mainland as far as the Philippines, and nearly as far south as the Strait of Malacca. China’s new ‘prefecture’ is nearly twice as large as the combined land masses of Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines. Its ‘legislators’ will directly report to the central government.”

Senator Webb then criticizes our “muted” response in the face of Chinese expansionism:

In truth, American vacillations have for years emboldened China. U.S. policy with respect to sovereignty issues in Asian-Pacific waters has been that we take no sides, that such matters must be settled peacefully among the parties involved. Smaller, weaker countries have repeatedly called for greater international involvement.  China, meanwhile, has insisted that all such issues be resolved bilaterally, which means either never or only under its own terms. Due to China’s growing power in the region, by taking no position Washington has by default become an enabler of China’s ever more aggressive acts.”

The Obama Administration’s behavior comes as no surprise to conservatives, given Obama’s lifelong inclination to vote “present” in the face of tough choices.  The fact that Democrats so openly criticize him, however, must come as troubling news to the spin machine in Chicago.

In the words of the Pew Research Center, “No issue relating to business is more politically divisive than the impact of government regulation.”

According to a new Pew survey, 76% of Republicans believe that government regulation of business tends to do more harm than good, but only 41% of Democrats agree.  That’s an enormous 35% difference, but the poll reveals something even more interesting.  Namely, 58% of independents side with Republicans on that question, not Democrats.  Another interesting point from the survey, according to Pew:

Fully 72% of Americans agree that ‘the strength of this country today is based on the success of American business.’ This opinion has endured, largely unchanged, for the past quarter century.”

That’s bad news for Barack “You Didn’t Build That!” Obama and his class warfare campaign theme.

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.

With a new Gallup poll showing Obama’s unpopularity higher among business owners than any other occupational group, this week we dismantle his desperate “You didn’t build that – somebody else made that happen!” alibis.  Peggy Noonan, in this weekend’s column, believes they’re now his most famous words:

President Obama’s comment – ‘You didn’t build that’ – is the political gift that keeps on giving.  They are now the most famous words he has said in his presidency. And oh, how he wishes they weren’t.”

Now, with this morning’s sour unemployment report, prepare to hear, “I didn’t cause that – somebody else made that happen!” from the White House.  The nation’s unemployment rate rose yet again, to 8.3% from last month’s 8.2%.  That means we’ve now suffered a record 42 consecutive months of unemployment in excess of 8%, a level Obama promised we’d never reach in the first place under his economic plan.  The White House will also attempt to emphasize the 163,000 new jobs created, but keep three things in mind.  First, our economy must add 200,000 jobs each month just to keep up with population growth and substantively reduce the unemployment rate.  Second, nearly as many Americans – 155,000 – dropped out of the labor market altogether, according to this morning’s report.  Third, according to the Labor Department, employment growth has averaged just 151,000 per month in 2012, which is below 2011’s average of 153,000 per month.  Some “recovery.”

Fortunately, there is an alternative.  The early-1980s recession witnessed even worse numbers – higher unemployment, higher inflation and higher interest rates.  But President Reagan’s policy of lower taxes and less regulation slashed unemployment from 10.4% to 6.7% in the three years following the effective date of his tax cuts in January 1983.  In contrast, Obama’s policies of higher spending, higher deficits, higher taxes and more regulation have caused the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

Obama just hopes that enough people fail to notice that he really is making that happen.

Read all about it.

Please forgive me if that headline is too strong. But I’ve always thought so, and now I know. Chait is actually suggesting that racism is driving the negative reaction to Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remark. Give me a break. What a skunk this guy is. The last refuge of a scared, cheap-shot, leftist scoundrel is to yell “Racism” in a clouded, weirder way than ever attempted before. As in:

Mitt Romney’s plan of blatantly lying about President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech is clearly drawing blood. But what makes the attack work so well is not so much the lie itself but the broader subtext of it. …The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a “black dialect.” This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent. From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a “traditional” black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans….The entire key to the rise of the Republican Party from the mid-sixties through the nineties was that white Americans came to see the Democrats as taking money from the hard-working white middle class and giving it to a lazy black underclass. Reactivating that frame is still the most mortal threat to the Democrats and to Obama. …

What a steaming load of diseased dung this is. The time has come to call this “racism” wolf cry what it really is: the Left’s version of McCarthyism. As with the original, the game is to accuse adversaries of something awful, and awfully untrue, purely for political effect, to cause a political wound. (The difference is that at least McCarthy had some small basis for his vilely overstated accusations, as the Venona documents have since shown; this cry of racism, here as in so many of the Left’s uses of it in recent years, has not even a shred of truth to it.)

I associate myself with the remarks of John Nolte at Breitbart, who called Chait’s dung heap “equal parts hilarious, maddening, unAmerican, and just plain pathetic.”

The reason Barack Obama’s outlook is alien to the American tradition is not because he is black; it is because he was mentored by a Communist, raised by leftists, inculcated with foreign values in Indonesia, befriended (and willing befriending of) some of the vilest radicals and terrorists on American soil, studied and emulated the evil Saul Alinksy, and consciously chose (by his own testimony in his crafted, semi-fictionalized “autobiography”) the persona of a man disaffected from and antagonistic to many of the values historically adopted and admired by most Americans.

He says we cling to guns and religion as a way to deal with our own bitterness; he says we didn’t build our own businesses (or the roads and such paid for by taxes on the profits from our own labors); he says Americans have been arrogant and dismissive of Europe and that we are “still struggling” with the legacy of Jim Crow; he runs roughshod repeatedly over religious liberties; and again and again, he shows disdain for the actual workings of the free market that is the means of our prosperity.

I don’t care if it is his “white” half or his “black” half that is demonstrating these attitudes. When the pasty white Ted Kennedy showed some of the same tendencies, we conservatives opposed him just as fiercely. Race has nothing to do with it. But vicious McCarthyism of the Left, such as that exhibited by Chait, will target anybody who exposes hard truths about their own left side of the political debate.

But just as blackness is no reason to attack Barack Obama, so is it also no defense for his supporters to use as a crutch every time he sticks his feet in his mouth. Black feet taste no worse than white feet. But very few feet are tasty dishes — and when both of somebody’s feet are left feet, the likelihood is for stumbles of the sort that cause those feet to end up in one’s mouth.

Well, never let it be said that Obama hasn’t achieved anything other than a record number of golf outings and fundraisers.  He has dismantled LBJ’s “Great Society,” as poverty approaches levels not seen since 1965:

The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.”

We recall Obama promising to cut the deficit in half by the end of his “first term,” to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, to adhere to public campaign finance limits, to not raise taxes on anyone earning under $250,000 “by one dime” and that unemployment would never reach 8% under his “stimulus,” but never this.

Today, Barack Obama courts veterans with a speech in Reno, Nevada to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.  According to one report, Obama seems to think that he can improve on the 44% support he received in 2008 against celebrated veteran John McCain:

The new initiative is the latest effort by Mr. Obama to focus on veterans, a group he addresses frequently in both official White House events and on the campaign trail. In 2008, exit polls showed that 15% of all voters had served in the military, and Mr. Obama won 44% of their votes, an improvement from Democrat John Kerry’s performance in 2004. This year, the Obama campaign believes he may have a better chance with this group, in part because he is running against former Gov. Mitt Romney, who like Mr. Obama never served in the military, unlike his 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain, a war hero.”

According to a new survey, however, this appears to be yet another electoral dud for Obama.  Rasmussen reports that among military veterans, Obama trails Romney 59% to 35%.  Perhaps at some point Obama will recognize the inverse relationship between his support among veterans and the fact that they’re “a group he addresses frequently.”

Regardless, if it’s this bad for Obama now, imagine what might happen when Romney actually starts matching Obama’s campaign spending burn rate.

Troy and I  have been having an interesting discussion of how it is not at all implausible (or, to avoid the double negative, it is definitely plausible) for the presidential election to end in a 269-269 tie, thus throwing the election to the House of Representatives, which only narrowly would be likely to favor Romney. Now comes Eric McPike at Real Clear Politics to lay out a few other scenarios for a tie — in other words, further supporting the theory Troy and I have been touting.

Interestingly, though, two of McPike’s various scenarios would envision one of Nebraska’s Electoral votes to go to Obama again: “But then subtract from the Republican ticket the single electoral vote Obama won in Nebraska due to the anamolous way the Cornhusker State allocates its five electoral votes, and there would be a rare electoral tie that would send the election to the House of Representatives.”

To me, that seems highly unlikely. That vote was surely an anomaly, due to a bizarrely Democratic year. I wonder if anybody has any polling data suggesting that that congressional district would even be close. I doubt it.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that there are so many different ways to reach a tie that it behooves both sides to start dossiers on every House member to figure if any of them might be moved, under certain circumstances, to vote against their party, or to abstain. In the House, the vote is done not by individual member, but by state delegation.  A state like Minnesota, with four Republicans and four Democrats, would presumably vote “present” unless a member didn’t vote for his/her own party’s nominee. By my armchair projections, Romney would probably win the support of about 28 delegations (26 are needed to win) — but several of those delegations would be by one-vote margins, meaning that if my projection is slightly off, or if a Member could be convinced to switch parties or to abstain, the margin would be even smaller.

How could this happen? Well, imagine a 269-269 Electoral College tie, but with Obama building up such large margins in populous states like New York and California that he wins a clear popular-vote margin. Cue the Occupy movement to protest in favor of the House voting to ratify the popular vote rather than by party. Cue the media to overwhelmingly push that same notion. Now look at a few GOP House members who won by only narrow margins, but in districts carried by Obama, where the media message would be that they have a duty to vote with the majority of their constituents. Obviously, all of this could get very dicey indeed.

As it could well get dicey in the other direction if Romney wins the popular vote but the GOP loses more House seats than expected (via lots of people voting just to defeat Obama but then failing to vote in down-ballot races), and Democrats actually find they control a plurality of House delegations (with several tied).

All of which means that both campaigns ought to know darn well what makes each individual Member tick — what motivates each one, what pressures they succumb to. They should start the research now, just in case… because if indeed an Electoral College tie occurs, some Members might be moved to announce their positions quickly, and so both campaigns need to be able to contact all of the possible “swing” votes ASAP.

All of this could make the Bush-Gore fight appear, in retrospect, to have been child’s play.

And that is a very sobering thought.

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.

At National Review Online, Deroy Murdock urges us not to forget all the Mexicans killed as a result of Operation Fast and Furious. The estimate: 300 of them.

If The Obama administration wants to politicize immigration policy in order to gain Hispanic votes, somebody might wonder why the Romney campaign wouldn’t fight back by demanding why the Obamites are apparently so unconcerned or unapologetic about these dead Mexicans — especially when the administration falls all over itself apologizing multiple times to Pakistan for airstrikes gone wrong in that country, where unlike in Mexico) at least we have a decent reason (targeting terrorists) to be operating. The administration compounds the sin by stonewalling multiple legitimate requests for further information on this program gone wrong. One would think Hispanic voters would take offense at all this.

So here’s the deal: Dead Mexicans, killed by American guns deliberately allowed to “walk” by the U.S. government, are no concern of the Obama Administration. But if those same Mexicans come into the United States illegally, the administration will refuse to impose any sanction against them, plus will in many cases provide them with government assistance — all while those who DID come legally are left to wonder why they even bothered doing it all by the book.

So, says the administration: Come here illegally, please. Because if you stay on your side of the border and get in the way of one of our guns, well, you’re just unimportant collateral damage to our effort-gone-wrong to make a case against Second Amendment gun rights. Come, and live well. Stay, and die. It’s your choice, sucka.

This is a surprisingly likely scenario: Give Obama the entire Northeast plus the Rust Belt except for Indiana. Give Romney the entire South, Plains, and inland West except for New Mexico. Give Obama all the Pacific states except for Alaska. Result: a 269-269 Electoral College tie.

The contest would then go to the House, where the House would vote not by member, but state by state. Twenty-six states would be required to win. By my early guestimates, Republicans would be likely to have majorities in between 26 and 28 states, with a few other states with evenly split delegations. This would mean an extremely narrow Romney win, but only after, probably, some major civil unrets led by Occupiers, etcetera.

Now, imagine that Romney does better than I expect with his Rust Belt strategy, and grabs both Ohio and his birth state of Michigan. But imagine that the liberal DC suburbs of Virginia turn out heavily for Obama while Appalachia and the Blue Ridge voters stay home rather than vote for Richie Rich Romney — and that Obama takes that state, plus Colorado, Nevada and Iowa (all of which I originally gave to Romney). Again, the result is 269-269. Again, well within the bounds of possibility.

Which leaves us where? Well, it means that New Hampshire could really be important. If Romney can also pull the Granite State, where he has a vacation home, back to the GOP, it would give him enough breathing room to avoid having the contest go to the House.

Lotsa interesting scenarios, I’d say.

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.