Hewitt Blog

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput came to his archdiocese last year after many years in Denver, years which included the Columbine massacre.  He had been scheduled to join me yesterday to discuss America's Roman Catholics and religious freedom generally and the HHS regulations specifically, which we did, but we began and ended our long conversation talking about the massacre in Newton and how to minister to those who grieve in its aftermath.

The transcript is here.

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The 2.3% tax on the sale of medical devices is set to start on January 1 and is among the most ruinous of all of the raft of new taxes knitted into Obamacare as it is quickly destroying jobs in the United States as well as crippling a vibrant export industry.  

18 Democratic senators have urged the tax be delayed but it ought to be repealed and as negotiations continue between the president and the Speaker, this is a concession the president ought to make and the Speaker ought to gain.

I spoke about the tax on medical devices with Thomas Loarie, Executive Chairman of Mercator MedSystems on Friday's show.  The full transcript is here.  Read the whole thing to get a glimpse of the spite with which the tax was conceived and its devastating impact on an industry of relatively small but growing companies.  Rarely has a tax been so poorly thought out and so counter-productive in its consequences.

Yeasr ago I interviewed Rabbi Harold Kushner for a PBS series.  We talked about the loss of his son and his rightly famous book When Bad Things Happen To Good People.  At one point he summarized everything he had learned about helping those who have suffered staggering loss and enormous grief: "Show up and shut up."

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One of the leading voices among America's Roman Catholics is that of Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput.  He will join me on today's program to discsuss the Church's ongoing battle against the HHS regulations and the general orientation of Catholics towards an expanding, increasingly intrusive government.  Chaput's 2008 book, Render Unto Caesar remains a must-read among all people who want to understand the real "separation of church and state."

Also on today's program, and in addition to Friday regulars economist Brian Wesbury and Congressman John Campbell, I will be joined by medical technology entrepreneur Tom Loarie to discuss the ruinous Obamacare tax on medical devices and by Lela Gilbert, a journalist who has spent most of the past six years living and working in Israel and who has written the new book: Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel Through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner.

And finally, if you are a pastor or para-church leader, you and a spouse or a friend are welcome to a free screening of Les Miz on Tuesday night in Irvine, California.  Sign up by clicking here and filling out your church affiliation info.

The country's economy is headed towards a crack-up and Egypt is about to topple into a very long period of Islamist rule as Syria disintegrates into bloody civil war with an al Qaeda-influenced-or-even-dominated government as its probable end game, and President Obama is doing...nothing.

The president has refused to put forward a plan around which negotiations over spending cuts and entitlement reforms can begin.  

The president has not spoken out against much less stopped President Morsi of Egypt from in essence imposing a coup-by-snap-referendum on the most important Arab state in the world, thus making the loss of Egypt the legacy of his and Secretary Clinton's tenure.

As Mark Steyn said on my show yesterday, the U.S. has assumed "observer" status to the world. (The transcript is here.)

"[T]here have never been changes rocketing through the Arab world on this scale that have had nothing to do with the great powers beyond the region," Steyn noted, "whether one is talking about Turkey, Britain, France, or more recently, America and the Soviet Union."

"The rest of the world is irrelevant to this," Steyn added. "This is basically a hard core shift in which the most backward and militant form of Islam is taking control in one nation after another."  

A hard-core shift about which the president is silent.  If any other country in the world proposed to change its constitution into a majoritarian, anti-minority document via a snap election, the U.S. could be expected to weigh in, but the president's lassitude on all things Islamic is bound up in the fact that he wagered everything on his ability to deliver a new relationship with the Muslim world and that new relationship is an utter disaster and the Arab spring has become a deep Arab winter, thus leading the president to do everything he can to avoid talking about it.  On one level, the gridlock in D.C. is providing cover for the collapse of Egyptian freedom, so the president has a huge incentive to let it continue.

Ditto the cover it provides for the Syrian slaughter where the president has neither been successful in removing Assad nor in helping to create a responsible alternative government.  The current chaos and its looming consequences are his, just as Rawanda was Bill Clinton's.

The president was allowed to sleep walk through the election by an adoring media, and now the most basic questions about his plans are directed not at the president, but at the Speaker. No wonder, then, that the public is catching on, but the reality of his falling numbers and the 2014 electoral crack-up will be little consolation to the unemployed here and the anti-Islamists and Copts of Egypt or the people of Syria much less Israel.

A month after his re-election and the president cannot be bothered to do his job but instead wages a political campaign against his enemies on the Hill.  Remarkable.

For the barest bit of good news, read my interview with outgoing GOP Senate Whip Jon Kyl.  Perhaps Harry Reid isn't going to be allowed to blow up the Senate rules.  Watch that space, and watch the president sleepwalk through his second inauguration and a second term, trusting whether this great nation can indeed survive and even thrive with an autopilot presidency.

Oh, and one cheer for the states that didn't fall for the carnival barker trick of a state health insurance exchange.  Only 15 states welcomed the nightmare of an exchange.  Of course my California is one of them, guaranteeing more state costs and more complexity to a system that is already crumbling before our eyes.

As discussed on the show today if you are a pastor or a para-church leader in or near Orange County, Californmia and would like to attend a free preview of Les Mis , sign up here.

Today's program mixes some Christmas fun into a dreadful political season.

I often recommend non-fiction books and interview lots of authors of such works.  But outside of thrillers --Vince Flynn, Daniel Silva, etc-- and the occasional mystery writer like C.J. Box, I steer clear of novelists because it is hard to discuss a novel without giving away too much of the story.  My on air pals like these three have long practice with me and we know how to avoid that cliff.

But I will give it a whirl today with a new guest, Douglas Brunt, about his Ghosts of Manhattan because the protrait the book draws of Wall Street finance is troubling but very entertaining, and the key question is whether it survived the crash.

My new Townhall.com column is here, and notes the (sad) resemblance between the House GOP and Cleveland sports franchises.

Lee Habeeb, writing at NationalReview.com: 

Is this a call to abandon our political efforts? No. But to win any long-term political battle, we need to more profoundly engage the culture. Christians are the majority in this country, but we often act like outsiders. We keep to ourselves, and spend too little time marketing our message and our works to the outside world.

Read the whole thing.