Town​Hall​.com has launched a petition to eliminate taxpayer subsidies to NPR. They call it the “Defund NPR” petition, but that title suggests that everyone, not just Congress, should stop funding NPR. That may appeal to many of the petition’s signers, but the petition’s text only calls for an end to government funding. “Liberate NPR” would be a better title.

It would appear that I am the Liar of the Year.

The fact-checking journalists at Poli​ti​Fact​.com gave their 2010 Lie of the Year award to the notion that ObamaCare is “a government takeover of health care,” and in 2009 gave the same award to Sarah Palin’s “death panels” claim. But as I explain in my latest column for Kaiser Health News, the fact-checkers left out a few facts. Read the column to find out what PolitiFact missed. Here’s my conclusion:

From my vantage point, the evidence shows that ObamaCare is a government takeover of health care, and Sarah Palin’s “death panels” claim was essentially true. If that makes me Liar of the Year, so be it.

But another way to look at it is this: PolitiFact has now misappropriated this award for two years in a row. Not only is each of these “lies” factually true, but — and this is more important — the people who made those statements believe them to be true, which means they fall short of the dictionary definition of a lie: “An assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive.” There is simply no factual basis — and no excuse — for calling them lies.

PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year award has proven as conducive to civil discourse as Rep. Joe Wilson’s, R- S.C., dyspeptic “You lie!” outburst during one of President Obama’s previous addresses to Congress. Rather than continue to poison the well by dispensing another award this year, PolitiFact should just let it lie.

PolitiFact should also revisit its evaluations of those two claims.

Alex Pareene of Salon makes some fair points in his posting, “Tea Partiers don’t actually care about ‘liberty.’ ” It’s disappointing to hear that New Mexico Tea Partiers booed Gary Johnson’s support for legalizing marijuana. And it’s true that a new poll shows Tea Partiers pretty strongly against marriage equality. But the poll does show them just a smidgen more supportive than either conservatives or Republicans. And other polls (click “Social Issues” on the left) have shown somewhat more support among self-identified Tea Party supporters, or a clear division between libertarian-minded and culturally conservative Tea Partiers. In general, Tea Party activists — organizers and people who attend events — seem somewhat more libertarian than people who simply tell pollsters they consider themselves to be members or supporters of the Tea Party movement.

Tea Party groups have declined invitations to criticize federal court rulings on gay marriage. They have studiously avoided taking positions on social issues, even when social conservatives stomp their feet and demand that the Tea Party start talking about abortion and gay marriage.

I have said before that “The tea party is not a libertarian movement, but (at this point at least) it is a libertarian force in American politics. It’s organizing Americans to come out in the streets, confront politicians, and vote on the issues of spending, deficits, debt, the size and scope of government, and the constitutional limits on government. That’s a good thing. And if many of the tea partiers do hold socially conservative views (not all of them do), then it’s a good thing for the American political system and for American freedom to keep them focused on shrinking the size and cost of the federal government.” That still seems a valid point: Whatever views individual Tea Partiers may hold on an array of issues, as the Tea Party they are organized to constrain taxes, spending, deficits, debt, and the size of government, and that’s a libertarian direction.

Pareene seems simply wrong when he triumphantly ends his post with this supposedly damning quotation from Cato:

(A post from the Cato Institute makes its cheerful willingness to abandon the non-economic planks of its platform explicit: “Candidates and representatives hoping to appeal to the Tea Party, we argue, need to focus on a unifying economic agenda that takes into account this strong libertarian undercurrent.”)

Just read the quotation. My colleague David Kirby is saying that Republicans should avoid divisive social issues — presumably meaning abortion, gay marriage, and projects like the Terri Schiavo intervention — lest they lose the support of libertarian-leaning Tea Party activists. That is, he’s urging the Republican Party to abandon its non-libertarian agenda in order to unify a broad coalition of conservatives, libertarians, and independents. Pareene seems to have misread it.

During his campaign for the presidency, then-Senator Barack Obama (D‑Ill.) said he would post the bills Congress sent him online for five days before signing them. It was a basic transparency promise that would help prevent rushed legislation containing parochial amendments, unexamined earmarks, and errors. This and other promises brought hails of applause.

It was his first broken promise. President Obama signed the “Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009″ into law the day after it reached him.

I’ve tracked the promise on this blog, and in my November post noted President Obama’s improvement in 2010 over what can only be characterized as a lousy start. In the first year of his term, 2009, the president received 124 bills from Congress and signed a dismal 6 of them—only 4.8%.

On January 20, we reached the mid-point of President Obama’s term, and his mid-term Sunlight Before Signing stats can be announced. With a strong showing on the flurry of bills passed at the end of the 111th Congress, the president’s Sunlight Before Signing percentage has inched just above 50%.

Of 381 bills that should have been posted on White​house​.gov after President Obama received them, 192 were actually posted. That’s 50.393% if you like going beyond the decimal.

Here’s a summary table, showing year-by-year the bills presented, the one emergency bill not subject to posting, and bills properly posted. After the jump, you can see bill-by-bill how the president did with Sunlight Before Signing.

Sunlight Before Signing, Bill-by-Bill

(Parentheses indicate a separate White​house​.gov page with a link to Thomas legislative database)

* Page now gone, but it was either directly observed, evidence of it appears in White​house​.gov search, or White House says it existed.

[Brackets indicate a link from White​house​.gov to Thomas legislative database]

† Bill was posted for five days after final passage, though not formal presentment. Counted as “Yes.”

‡ Link to final version of bill on impossible-to-find page.

E! Emergency legislation not subject to five-day posting. Counted as “Yes” in simplifying graphs and tables.

As Caleb noted earlier, today marks the one-year anniversary of Citizens United, a case I first thought “just” concerned some weird regulation of pay-per-view movies, but turned out to be about asserted government power to ban political speech — including books and TV commercials — simply because the speaker was not one individual but a group (in corporate or or other associational form). See also this op-ed by ACLU lawyer Joel Gora.

Roger similarly noted the continuing discussion in Congress and elsewhere about the public financing of elections. As it turns out, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to such a system, specifically Arizona’s Clean Elections Act. Brought by our friends at the Institute for Justice and the Goldwater Institute and supported by our brief at the cert petition stage, this lawsuit challenges a law that aimed to “clean up” state politics by creating a system for publicly funding campaigns.

Participation in the public funding is not mandatory, however, and those who do not participate are subject to rules that match their “excess” private funds with disbursals to their opponent from the public fund. That is, if a privately funded candidate spends more than her publicly funded opponent, then the publicly funded candidate receives public “matching funds.”

Whatever the motivations behind the Clean Elections Act, the effects have been to significantly chill political speech: privately funded candidates changed their spending — and thus their speaking — as a result of the matching funds provisions. In elections, where there is no effective speech without spending money, matching funds provisions such as those at issue here diminish the quality and quantity of political speech.

In 2008, however, the Supreme Court struck down a similar part of the federal McCain-Feingold law in which individually wealthy candidates were penalized for spending their own money by triggering increased contribution limits for their opponents (Davis v. FEC, in which Cato also filed a brief). Even this modest opportunity for opponents to raise more money was found to be an unconstitutional burden on political speech.

Cato’s latest brief thus asks the following question: Whether Arizona may give a publicly funded candidate extra money because a privately funded opponent or his supporters have, in the state’s judgment, spoken too much. We highlight Davis and numerous other cases that point to a clear answer: if the mere possibility of your opponent getting more money is unconstitutional, then the guarantee that your opponent will get more money is even more so. Allowing the government to abridge political speech in this fashion not only diminishes the quality of political debate, but ignores the fundamental principle upon which the First Amendment is premised: that the government cannot be trusted to regulate political speech for the public benefit. Moreover, the state cannot condition the exercise of the right to speak on the promotion of a viewpoint contrary to the speaker’s.

The case is McComish v. Bennett, consolidated with Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett. The Court will hear it March 28, with a decision expected by the end of June.

The 1798 “Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seaman” is getting attention in the Washington Post and Forbes. The stories suggest that this act in the early republic was a precedent for socialized federal medicine today.

I offered this brief description of the law as part of a timeline on the evolution of the federal Department of Health and Human Services over at www​.down​siz​ing​gov​ern​ment​.org:

1798: Congress passes the Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen. It provides health services to members of the merchant marine and funds a loose network of hospitals through the Marine Hospital Fund. The MHF is plagued by cost overruns, administrative mismanagement, and rationing of care. Some leaders oppose the new federal subsidies as an abuse of state sovereignty.

My timeline entry has footnotes to sources for those statements.

On the politics of this, note that John Adams, who signed the bill into law as president, was on the “big government” end of the Founders, and his big-government approach in office in the 1790s–like signing the Alien and Sedition Acts–led to the ouster of the Federalists by Thomas Jefferson in 1800. (Nonetheless, Adams was, of couse, a hero of the Revolution and a truly great man).

The Supreme Court majority in Citizens United asserted plainly that the federal government’s powers are few and defined in the realm of political speech. The decision has since been cast as one that does little more than give “corporations and unions the freedom to spend as much as they like to support or attack candidates.” Of course, the stakes were far higher. As the government’s attorney asserted during the initial oral argument, the Federal Election Commission retained the authority to ban the sale of certain books (e‑books included) in the weeks leading up to an election, a fact opponents of Citizens United rarely mention.

Shortly after that oral argument, Austin Bragg and I made a short video with Steve Simpson of the Institute for Justice, Allison Hayward of George Mason University School of Law (and now of the Center for Competitive Politics) and John Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute.