Download audio here Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets , Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Michael Duncan to discuss Indiana’s battle between Dick Lugar and Richard Mourdock, how the Tea Party has organized in 2012, and what impact a larger coalition for liberty in the U.S. Senate may have. We’re brought to you as always by Stephen Clouse and Associates . If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show. Related Links: Dick Lugar: A Washington insider on his way out? Operation Counterweight Comes To Indiana Lugar’s Love Affair with Government Health Care U.S. Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock on Coffee and Markets FreedomWorks for America Michael Duncan at FreedomWorks Follow Brad on Twitter Follow Ben on Twitter Follow Michael on Twitter Subscribe to The Transom The hosts and guests of Coffee and Markets speak only for ourselves, not any clients or employers.
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Richard Mourdock Could Score Huge Win for Tea Party in Indiana
Chen Guangcheng currently unavailable for comment. Statement by the President on World Press Freedom Day On this World Press Freedom Day, the United States honors the role of a free press in creating sustainable democracies and prosperous societies. We pay special tribute to those journalists who have sacrificed their lives, freedom or personal well-being in
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Statement by the President on World Press Freedom Day
Tuesday I awakened to hear my wife walking around the house at about eight in the morning. This is extremely early for her and I mean EXTREMELY. I asked her what the matter was and she said, as expected, that it was G., a very close family member who is suffering from a serious mental illness. This is someone who was always problematic, but has now gotten what his doctors describe as a paranoid psychosis of the schizophrenic variety. This is a matter of his suspecting that his food is poisoned, that his meds are poisoned, that snipers are setting up perches to kill him near his home, that cars filled with assassins are circling him in his car. He is really, really sick. God bless Big Pharma. They have drugs that could straighten him out but he won’t take them, and the reason that my wife is up so early is that she’s getting called by another family member about how oddly G. is acting. Genuinely scary stuff. Threatening stuff. We made a flurry of calls to the doctors who attend G., but while they are eager to help they can do nothing if G. never shows up for his appointments. So, my wife and I are frantic. I swam for a long time, then worked on some bills, then took my wife out for lunch at our golf club, Morningside. There was only one other person at lunch, a distinguished-looking older woman. She shared with us that she had just lost her husband of forty years. What a blow that is. How does a mate go on living after that? I don’t even have any idea. It must be harrowing. Back at home, I had a blizzard of texts from a dear friend in New York who is having a wild fight with her husband, or maybe it’s her ex-husband, about their children. She called for me to help her get a hotel room in Manhattan so she could go there and cry all night. This woman is in her late 30s and has no credit card. How is that possible? Anyway, I arranged it, and off she went to cry. Then more calls from a family member about G not showing up for doctors’ appointments, and then time for a long nap in my guest room, where I feel fairly protected. It’s the shadiest room in the house and neat as a pin. I slept for two hours and then went outside to say farewell to a crew who had been putting in a new, incredibly pricey air conditioning unit in a wing of the house. “Are you sure it works?” I asked them. “Oh, yes, it works great,” they said and it seemed to be keeping my bedroom cool. I lay down and in half an hour, the darned thing simply stopped working altogether. Many calls to the a/c man later, he showed up and said the problem had been some small part and I never needed that whole unit after all. Of course, he has to charge me for it anyway. Meanwhile, the unit is still not working. Then, a call from a lawyer in a case in which I am a plaintiff, or The Plaintiff. We have a ruling against us on an issue so insane that only a trial lawyer could have thought of it. I can easily appeal, but I am sick of the whole thing. Litigation is a pure nightmare. I really feel sad for people who do it for a living. Painful. More texts about G., more texts from the friend in New York whose husband or ex-husband is mistreating her, and new texts from a woman whom I help to hide from her anxieties, and then a text from a woman I met at an airport in Miami ten years ago who saw me on TV and wants to marry me. She wants me to take her away from her fears about money. Ha! Little does she know. Alex and I took the dogs for a walk. Above us, jet planes crossed the sky high above the oleander and the palm trees. “I wish we could ride away on a contrail,” my wife said. My life is filled with other people’s problems. Russ Ferguson said that about me and it’s true. I need yet another nap and I need to change my focus. Fifty years ago this summer, my pal, Marvin Goldberg, put the car radio in his little blue Triumph sports car on a local Virginia station that played “folk songs.” The station was WAVA. “There’s this really great singer they play a lot,” he said. “Name’s Bob Dylan.” As we sped through the Fairfax, Virginia night, on the then empty Dulles Access Highway, sure enough, the next song to come up was Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” an anti-love song that lit my brains on fire. Dylan’s raspy voice said that he was not going to be totally devoted, that he was no one’s love slave, that he was his own man. And he was angry that the question even came up. From then on, he was my hero. It wasn’t because he was the voice of my generation — anti-segregation, anti-war, questioning, mocking. It was that for the first time I had ever heard, a popular musician expressed the most basic of human emotions — anger, poetically and unsparingly. His song about the wrongful death of a poor black hotel worker, Hattie Carroll, because she was hit with a cane by a wealthy landowner’s son at a Baltimore hotel society gathering, has many of its facts wrong… but the emotions of outrage he expresses at what whites could do to blacks in my home state of Maryland fifty years ago were searingly on target. He was not content to be a folk singer. He became an electric guitarist and rock star with the best rock song of all time, “Like a rolling stone.” I still don’t know what it means, but then I don’t know what a sunset means either and I love them both. For more than fifty years, Bob Dylan has been giving us songs of genius that no one else even touches. This little boy from the Mesabi Range in Minnesota has come to be — to many of us — the greatest poet — by far — of the postwar era. Now, he is getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama. He deserves it. No singer that I am aware of ever hit the notes of what life really is, what humans really are, better than Dylan. I have spent more hours listening to him than to all other human beings on the planet put together and it will never be enough. Well done, Mr. President. Well done, Bob. I have not spoken to Marvin in forty years. I don’t know why. By the way, Mr. President, I caught your speech about Afghanistan tonight. It is EXACTLY the same as Nixon’s speeches about Vietnamizing the Vietnam war some forty years ago. I suspect it will work out about as well. Can Mr. Obama really be that ignorant of history and reality? Yes, he can.
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Bad Day in Rancho Mirage
There is a certain kind of inside-the-beltway conservative (you know the type) who emerges from his cocoon from time to time with the good news that all is well in America. “We’re a center-right country,” he tells us. “It can’t happen here.” The guarantee of individual liberty expressed in the Declaration of Independence, central to which is our tradition of religious liberty, is enshrined in the Constitution. We might debate the extent of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause, but unlike the French we never had an anti-clerical party that bashes churches. In the guerres franco-françaises , from 1789 on, one took sides with either the Church or the Republic, but never both. Admirably, my conservative thinks well of his country—but he should get out more often. If “it” means a sharp turn to the left, that certainly has happened in the last three years. As for religion, the HHS mandates, which would force religious believers to violate their conscience by offering contraceptive and abortifacient drugs to their employees, are really about anti-clericalism. The Administration seeks to justify the mandates as a means of serving women’s health, but no one really believes that. Pregnancy isn’t an illness, and drugs that prevent or terminate a pregnancy don’t make people healthy. Even apart from that, the dollars in question are so trivial that no one is hard done by if she has to buy the pills herself. The cost of the “free” prescription is about $100 a year at Walmart, the price for a movie and dinner for two at Red Lobster. People on the left complain that, by opposing the contraception mandate, the Church is denying women contraceptives, but that’s only true if I am denied a dinner at Red Lobster because I have to pay for it out of my pocket. People who believe that also believe, with Big Brother, that Freedom equals Slavery. So all that is a subterfuge behind what is really going on, which is picking a fight with the Church. For the Administration, that’s a winner, for three reasons. First, anything that distracts attention from important issues is a godsend, and resurrecting the culture wars does just that. The economy is in the tank, Iran is about to get nuclear weapons, and what does the mainstream media want to talk about? A $100 a year prescription! Second, keeping the focus on religion gives Democrats an opportunity to beat up on Republicans. Democrats poll-tested the question last summer, and came away thinking that, by taking on the Church, they’d win more votes among women and the radical left than they’d lose among Catholics. That’s even more so if Santorum wins the Republican nomination, which explains the timing of the announcement. Here is noted philosopher Bill Press on Santorum and his religion: “It’s perfectly acceptable for Rick Santorum to hold and preach those beliefs about sexuality, no matter how medieval. But he’s running for president of the United States, not for pope.” With his finger on the pulse of American voters, Press goes on to predict a 50-state landslide for Obama over the issue. The Sisters for Life have protested that the new rule tramples on their right to practice their religion. Each of us will be required by law to obtain health insurance, or face fines. Since this HHS mandate will require every insurer to include abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and artificial contraception, we will not be able to obtain any coverage that is free from those “services,” and we will be forced to pay for them directly. Since we are neither employers, nor employees, of any religious institution, we cannot even take advantage of the “religious exemption” contained in the new regulations or the “compromise.” The Sisters describe themselves as a “contemplative/active religious community,” which means that they’re almost as other-worldly as my inside-the-beltway conservative. What they haven’t realized is that limiting their religious freedom is the very point of the bill. Their mistake is the one James Bond made in Goldfinger . Agent 007 is strapped down on the table, unable to move, as the death ray creeps slowly toward him. “Do you expect me to talk?” he asks. And Goldfinger smiles. “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!” Now, no one wants the good sisters to die. All the Administration wants is to convert them to the church of Saint Nancy Pelosi. They’ve been a great annoyance. They go on marches and the like. Of course the press never notices them, but still they’re an oppositionist movement. And for all their talk of “rights,” these are the same people who would deny the rights of loving homosexual partners to adopt children. After taking some flack on this, Obama came out with an “accommodation,” an accounting gimmick in which insurance companies are required to provide the drugs “for free,” a tactic that stripped away many of the rule’s critics, the Washington Post , left-wing Catholics, libertarians. If the prior rule was offensive, however, the “accommodation” is even more so because, without relaxing the requirement, it insults one’s intelligence. Only the deeply stupid and economically illiterate would believe that insurers will offer a costly service without passing on the cost to their insureds. The accommodation slaps the Sisters for Life in the face and then, compounding the humiliation, tells them to pretend that the slap never happened. It’s also amusing that an Administration which complains of the financial burden of having to pay for the prescription out of one’s pocket tells us, out of the other side of its mouth, that the cost is so trivial that the insurer will do it at no charge. If that were the case, why was Nancy Pelosi, barking madness apart, so worked up about this? There’s a third reason why the issue is a winning one for liberals. The Church is one of those inconvenient institutions interposed between the president and the people. When one has direct knowledge of the good, as the liberal does, and a president with whom one agrees, intermediary institutions simply get in the way. If they articulate a different political or moral vision, they’re Bill Press’s medieval church. If they provide social services, schools, hospitals, adoption agencies, they are doing what government should be doing, and often with a dangerously illiberal agenda. And it’s not just the Church. There’s also the Supreme Court, whose Citizens United decision Obama regularly takes on, remarkably to their faces in his 2010 State of the Union speech. Then too there’s Congress, which sadly has been given the power, under the Constitution, to oppose the will of the president. “What’s frustrating people,” Obama said, “is that I haven’t been able to force Congress to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008.” (Those darn Founders! Maybe I’ll recess appoint my entire cabinet next time around.) Then there are charitable organizations, which Obama wants to shrink by limiting charitable deductions. Who needs them, when government should be doing it all? There also are families, who shockingly send their children to school with turkey sandwiches and not the Chicken McNuggets approved by the Department of Education. Finally, there are the states and American federalism. Libertarians have properly complained that a government which can force people to buy health insurance (without invoking the taxing power) can require people to eat broccoli. Or possibly arugula, were it up to Michelle Obama. What seems not to have been noticed is that Obamacare is also an issue about federalism, or would have been so but for the expansive view courts take of the Commerce Clause (“the feds always win”). For libertarians, it’s always about Man vs. the State. For statists too, it’s the same line-up, only this time the state always wins. Conservatives view it differently, as we see a need for intermediary institutions between man and the state. They give people the meaningful diversity that comes with a range of choices, and the information about how to live and how we should be governed that Washington cannot alone provide. That is why anti-clericalism is so dangerous. It does more than trample on individual rights. It also attacks an institution which permits its members to flourish in solidarity with each other, and which, merely by existing, defends their freedom. When every other barrier to oppression is removed, in a Poland or a China, what remains are churches faithful to their mission. Our modern liberal is an imperialist, you see. He would treat everyone equally, and to ensure equality would refuse to recognize any intermediary institution. “To the Jews as Frenchmen, everything,” said Napoleon. “To the Jews as Jews, nothing.” For what are the Sisters for Life, after all, except a number of female citizens, and a small number at that? To them as Catholics, nothing; to them as citoyennes , the state offers Ortho Tri-Cyclen!
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Liberal Imperialism
Americans have finished paying their taxes, according to Tax Freedom Day, which fell on April 17. But some of them should be paying a lot more, says President Barack Obama.
