Microphone © by liftarn

I will be on the “Talk With Ron Williams” show at 4 p.m. EST today on WCIT-AM. I usually am on Thursdays but a schedule conflict has me on this afternoon.

You can listen on AM 940 in the Lima, Ohio, area or online at http://tho.lu/listen940.

Call in at: +1 419-228-9494 or +1 888-894-3776. You can email questions and comments to talkwithron@wcoil.com.

If you miss it, the show will be archived at Talk With Ron Archives.

Obama Versus Birth Control © by (F)oxymoron

After an outcry from the nation’s Catholics, President Barack Obama modified his unconstitutional attempt to provide free birth control to women. The situation has now gone from bad to worse in a way that has little to do with birth control or religion.

Originally, Obama’s plan was to force religious groups to pay for behavior that violates their core beliefs. That is, he wanted religious organizations to pay for free birth control for their employees.

The revised diktat shifts the cost of contraceptive coverage to insurers when the faith-based employer morally objects.

While Obama’s change might have appeased some Catholics — especially liberal and moderate ones — by essentially giving the church political cover while achieving the same result, the rule is still bad.

A common complaint heard from the libs on this matter is that the Catholic Church’s proscription against birth control is antiquated and should be changed. The church, their illogic goes, should conform to liberal mores.

This goes to the very definition of religion. The church has a set of core beliefs. It preaches those beliefs and people choose to follow or not follow. If the polls are any indication, a majority of Catholics, at least those of the American variety, choose not to follow, at least on this point.

Still, that does not give anyone the right to try to use the force of law to make the church change its beliefs. That is called religious liberty.

I think the ban on birth control by the church is wrong. I also find it wrong, or simply silly (no disrespect intended), that Jews won’t eat cheeseburgers, Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t take blood transfusions, and Mormons choose to wear long underwear on the hottest days of the year.

Yet, it would be wrong for society to tell those faiths they should be eating cheeseburgers, taking blood transfusions and dispensing with the long underwear. It would also be wrong to force them to pay for someone else’s cheeseburgers, blood transfusions and boxers.

However, Obama’s rule has little to do with birth control and everything to do with control.

Obama is, essentially, forcing insurance companies to provide, at no cost to users, birth control. Where in the Constitution does the president think he has the authority to force someone to pay for someone else’s birth control?

Will liberals please explain how, in a free country, it is acceptable for the federal government to put a gun to the head of an insurance CEO and force him or her to provide to the people, without charge, birth control?

This is no different than if Obama forced automakers to give Americans free cars. Or force you to give your television to your neighbor.

We are talking about contraception, not cancer treatment, AIDS medicine or influenza vaccines.

There is no reason people should not pay for their own birth control. Anyone with a job can afford contraception. If they can afford iPods and cellphones, they can afford pills and condoms. That’s the crowd we are talking about because those without health insurance and jobs are unaffected by this rule.

I understand the argument that there is a social burden associated with unwanted pregnancies. But sacrificing our basic principles of religious and personal liberty is not the solution. If the government wants to subsidize birth control, then it should do so directly with a tax. At least then there will be accountability to the voters.

Finally, the Obama diktat is just another example of his economic ignorance. What it does is force all of us, through higher insurance premiums, to pay for contraceptives for a group of women that can afford to buy it themselves if they wanted to. Not only should churches be free of this coercion, we all should be.

What procedures insurers cover should be an economic decision based on market principles, not a political one based on the liberal infatuation with sex. In the end, sex is a voluntary choice and contraception is a discretionary medical expense. Covering birth control is akin to auto insurance covering oil changes.

Do you really want to live in a country where the federal government has the power to order insurance companies to give free oil changes?

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich calls President Barack Obama the “food stamp president.” A study released this month proves the moniker is deserved.

Gingrich bases his claim on the fact that 14.2 million new people have joined the food stamp rolls since Obama took office. The total as of October stood at 46.22 million Americans on government food assistance. If that seems a phenomenal number, that’s because it is. It represents about 15 percent of the American population.

But that is not the whole picture.

The Heritage Foundation on Wednesday released its latest Index of Dependence on Government report. The results were staggering.

America has truly become a welfare state.

The most frightening thing in the new report is that the average American relying on federal government assistance now receives more in benefits than the average American’s disposable personal income. The Index reports Americans who rely on government receive an average $32,748 worth of benefits, surpassing the average American’s disposable personal income of $32,446.

Overall, some 67.3 million Americans, or almost 22 percent, rely “on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance once considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, and other civil society institutions,” according to the abstract of the study, which was authored by William Beach and Patrick Tyrrell.

Supporting those 67.3 million Americans costs U.S. taxpayers about $2.5 trillion each year. More than 70 percent of federal spending goes toward these dependency programs.

The problem is compounded by the fact that 49.5 percent of American workers pay no federal income tax.

You don’t need a doctorate in economics to see this trend cannot be sustained.

“The United States has long reached the point at which it must reverse the direction … or face economic and social collapse,” they wrote. “Yet policymakers made little progress … since the 2010 Index of Dependence on Government was published.”

Even liberals have to understand that a soaring national debt and nearly a quarter of Americans depending on government aid is a disaster in the making.

While Obama and his fascist policies have to shoulder much of the blame, we can’t place it all on his shoulders. He just happens to be the skipper of this shipwreck at the moment, though he is accelerating the boat toward the iceberg.

The study found that we expended 15 times more resources toward paying for people dependent on government in 2010 than we did in 1962. The Index of Dependence on Government grew by 8.1 percent in 2010 alone. It has grown 60.7 percent since 2001.

There does not appear to be an end in sight. If anything, the problem is going to get worse.

“Over the next 25 years, more than 77 million boomers will begin collecting Social Security checks, drawing Medicare benefits, and relying on long-term care under Medicaid,” the authors wrote. “No event will financially challenge these important programs over the next two decades more than this shift into retirement of the largest generation in American history.”

Making matters worse is that many, if not most, of these boomers who will be collecting these entitlements are middle-class to upper-class Americans and can afford to support themselves. This is because these federal retirement entitlements are pegged to a person’s age, rather than his or her financial situation.

“Paying for these … entitlements in the coming years will require unprecedented levels of deficit spending,” the authors wrote. “Americans face $45.9 trillion in unfunded obligations (read: new borrowing) over the next 75 years. That is more than $200,000 per American citizen — an unsustainable level of debt that is sure to slow the economy and could force even higher rates of taxation in the future.”

Retirement is not the only area bankrupting our futures. Farm subsidies, college, health care, housing, indeed, nearly every area of human activity is being subsidized by the federal government.

I understand the human desire to help those in need. However, government assistance is not charity. Forcing someone at the point of a gun to support someone else should not make one feel good.

Ultimately, dependence is just another form of government control and tyranny. Fortunately for governments, too many people do not think.

prevention © by brains the head

If there were any doubt as to whether this administration is waging a war on religion, it should have disappeared by now.

The administration has ordered — without congressional input — that most health insurance plans cover preventive services for women including recommended contraceptive services without charging a co-pay, co-insurance or a deductible. That would include sterilization and emergency contraception, colloquially known as the morning after pill.

The federal government — actually just one branch of the federal government — ordering private companies to offer services at a certain price goes beyond the pale of decency in a free society. By itself, such an order would merit strong backlash from the people.

But it gets worse.

The order forces religious entities, ones that might have a moral aversion to birth control, to provide, i.e., pay for, this insurance for their employees.

Or as Green Bay, Wis., Bishop David Ricken said during Mass in St. Francis Xavier Cathedral on Jan. 29: “If we pay for those services for people who work for us, we are in effect saying don’t do it, but then giving the money to pay for it.”

So much for religious liberty.

“The government has entered the sanctuary,” said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the Conference of Catholic Bishops. “The Constitution says you can’t prohibit the free exercise of religion. Those are religious values we have, related to the life issues. And now the government is saying, ‘No, you have to go against your teaching.’”

This rule came a little more than a week after a unanimous Supreme Court decision reaffirming that the Constitution’s First Amendment gives churches a broad right of autonomy.

While it applies to all religions, the rule is really an attack on Catholicism, which has proscribed the use of contraceptives for two millennia. Most Protestant faiths changed their rules on birth control beginning in the 1930s. Most Jewish traditions permit birth control in certain circumstances. The rest of the world’s religions either specifically permit birth control or do not address the issue at all. Even Islam permits birth control.

As a matter of disclosure, I am a lifelong Catholic. That being said, I do not agree with the church’s proscription against contraception. In fact, many polls show that a majority of Catholics disagree, including an American Enterprise Institute poll that placed that number at 78 percent of Catholics.

However, religion is not, nor should it be, run by opinion polls. The church leaders who set policy have consistently opposed birth control. I respect that.

Because the church’s official teaching is anti-contraceptive, the First Amendment requires the government to recognize and respect that belief.

The Supreme Court will strike down any law that restricts religious liberty unless there is a compelling governmental interest, the law is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest and it is the least restrictive way to achieve the governmental goal.

This rule does not pass muster.

The government’s goal is to provide greater access to contraception.

Or, as Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, “This rule will provide women with greater access to contraception by requiring coverage and by prohibiting cost sharing.”

Ideally, the federal government should have absolutely no interest in contraception. I fail to see how that is a federal interest.

Even if one believes the federal government has an interest in birth control, providing greater access is certainly not a compelling interest, especially given that contraceptives are easily available and not prohibitively expensive.

Nor will this rule achieve that goal. Forcing Catholic institutions to offer health coverage for contraceptives at best might result in a marginal increase in availability.

This rule was simply not necessary. It addresses a nonissue. There is not a pressing need to provide coverage for contraception for employees of Catholic institutions. There are other options for those who want such coverage. They can simply work elsewhere. They can also choose to purchase private insurance.

Finally, the rule will likely cause more problems than it solves. Catholic hospitals and charities provide a valuable service to their communities. Many poor people would not have access to health care if not for Catholic hospitals. Most of the Catholic hospitals with which I have dealt will subsidize the cost of the health care or offer it free.

St. Rita’s Medical Center here in Lima offers free care for any person who earns up to twice the federal poverty guidelines. That means a family of four earning less than $44,100 a year can receive free care. It also offers substantial discounts for those who earn more than that.

However, these organizations will now have to decide whether to violate their core beliefs or no longer offer health insurance to employees. They might also decide to close their doors. None of these options seem worth the marginal increase in access to birth control for a small number of Americans.

The biggest problem, though, is the attack on the Constitution by President Barack Obama and the militant liberal secularists in his administration. If left unchallenged, the damage to religious liberty in this country will be irreversible.

If this is allowed to stand, the administration will likely attack medical conscience clauses, which permit health care providers to opt out of providing services that violate their religions beliefs. It is easy to see a future rule forcing Catholic hospitals to actually perform sterilizations and abortions if Obama gets his way this time.

This rule should be shot down by the courts. Also, a Senate bill has also been introduced to repeal the rule. However, Obama should see the error of his ways and avoid such a costly battle.

He should remember there are 25 Catholics in the Senate and 134 in the House of Representatives, including House Speaker John Boehner. They sit on both sides of the aisle. Vice President Joseph Biden is also Catholic.

More importantly, about 25 percent of the American electorate is Catholic and this is an election year.

Now that is an argument that even Obama can understand.

Microphone © by liftarn

I will be on the “Talk With Ron Williams” show at 4 p.m. EST today on WCIT-AM as I am every Thursday.

You can listen on AM 940 in the Lima, Ohio, area or online at http://tho.lu/listen940.

Call in at: +1 419-228-9494 or +1 888-894-3776. You can email questions and comments to talkwithron@wcoil.com.

If you miss it, the show will be archived at Talk With Ron Archives.

In the Jan. 22 edition of New York Magazine, journalist Joe Hagan said this year’s campaign will ”be the most negative in the history of American politics.”

While his piece was great reading, his statement may just be hyperbole. I love it when journalists talk about things being the “most,” “worst,” “best,” etc., without any real justification. It is just pure hyperbole without research. What he meant to say is that it will be the most negative in recent memory or recent history. And even that might be questionable.

One good example of a truly negative campaign was the 1800 election between John Adams, a Federalist, and Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican (the party was founded by Jefferson and was commonly known at the time as simply Republican). It was so contention and caused a sea change in American politics that it is often referred to as the Revolution of 1800. It also, because of a tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, also a Democratic-Republican who was supposed to be running for vice president, was sent to the House of Representatives to decide the winner. That resulted in a change in how elections were held.

This video from Reason uses the candidates’ own words to give just a sampling of how nasty the candidates were. The only difference is that we have television today, which allows the nastiness to move at the speed of light.

However, it is all just politics. We shouldn’t be too concerned as the nastiness does serve a purpose, especially given that we can no longer trust the national press corps to give us real coverage.

As Reason.TV says:

Have this year’s negative political ads really “taken dirty to a whole new level, as CNN’s Anderson Cooper frets? Is a “return to civility…a relic of a bygone era,” as President Barack Obama laments?

Er, not exactly.

If anonymous political speech, the other widely decried villain of this political season, helped found the United States, attack ads are as American as apple pie. If you fancy yourself a patriot or a history buff, you will most certainly approve this message, which is taken from statements made by, for, and against the nation’s founders.

Approximately 1.45 minutes. Written and produced by Meredith Bragg. Voiced by Caleb Brown, Michael C. Moynihan, and Austin Bragg.

Check out “The Positives of Negative Campaigning,” why “Attack Ads Are Good For You.” and Reason’s 2006 list of the “Top 10 Dirtiest Political Campaigns” in U.S. history.

For links to those stories and historical sources of the statements made in the video go to
http://reason.tv/video/show/the-negative-campaign-of-1800

How would Sen. Barack Obama view President Barack Obama’s administration? Find out by watching this debate.

The 39th anniversary has passed marking the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). I am referring, of course, to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave women a right to commit murder under the rubric of a “right to privacy.”

Conservatives challenge this rule by arguing there is no right to privacy in our Constitution.

This is wrong. There clearly is a fundamental right to privacy. Things such as the Fourth Amendment, the right to be free from unreasonable searches, requires a right to privacy or it makes no sense. The right can also be discerned in what lawyers call the “penumbras” of the First, Third, Fifth and Ninth Amendments.

While the court has not always used the phrase “right to privacy,” it has recognized the right since the founding of the Republic. In 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis said “the right most valued by civilized men” is “the right to be left alone.”

So it is easy to see that there is a zone of privacy around our bodies and homes that the government may not casually breach.

Still, the right to privacy does not give one the right to kill, as liberals argue.

A person’s right to privacy allows one the right to choose with whom to have sex. It gives one the right to use contraceptives. It even gives one the right to marry whom one wishes regardless of race or (someday) sex.

However, once one makes those private decisions and becomes pregnant, she no longer has the right to kill that baby simply because she finds it inconvenient. Even in cases of rape (no one ever said life was fair).

John Stuart Mill, in his essay “On Liberty,” wrote: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercise over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”

This is known as the Harm Principle. No one has the right to cause harm to another. It is at the core of my classical liberal philosophy. Under this principle, the only legitimate function of government is to protect people from harm from others. (That, by the way, does not include protecting them from harming themselves.)

And what greater harm can a mother do to an unborn child than kill him or her?

When the Supreme Court ruled that a woman’s right to privacy allows her to kill an unborn child, it violated the Harm Principle. Egregiously.

The pro-abortion crowd will argue that because I am a man, I should not be allowed to have an opinion on abortion, unless, of course, I support the mass murder of 50 million babies in the last 39 years. That’s akin to saying I can’t criticize the president unless I have been the president.

They also will argue the baby is not a human and therefore not worthy of protection. Mankind has often put forth that argument to rationalize mass murder. Hitler said the Jews and other Eastern Europeans were not humans. A rose by any other name?

In reality, a fetus is just at a different stage of human development, no different than babies, children or adults. Almost all species go through different stages of life. It is telling that 38 states have homicide laws that include an unborn fetus in the definition of a person.

Most abortions in this country are performed after the sixth week of pregnancy. The baby develops a detectable heartbeat around the fourth week.

How can someone claim a baby with a heartbeat is not a person just because it can’t survive on its own? Babies cannot survive without adult care. Many adults are also unable to care for themselves. Should we kill them too?

See the nonsense one has to adopt in order to accept the proposition that a woman can kill a child and claim a privacy right to that act?

It’s time to end the bloodshed and put an end to the idea that the right to privacy is an affirmative defense to murder. A healthy society does not allow the wholesale killing of one segment of its population.

Radio Free Strawberry © by cogdogblog

In case you missed it, below is the audio from Thursday’s “Talk With Ron Williams” radio show.

Guest host Kurt Neeper and I talked mostly about presidential politics and other national issues.

Enjoy.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Microphone © by liftarn

I will be on the “Talk With Ron Williams” show at 4 p.m. today on WCIT-AM as I am every Thursday.

You can listen on AM 940 in the Lima, Ohio, area or online at http://tho.lu/listen940.

Call in at: +1 419-228-9494 or +1 888-894-3776. You can email questions and comments to talkwithron@wcoil.com.

If you miss it, the show will be archived at Talk With Ron Archives.