Is Ted Cruz The Guy? (& more) Today at 12 p.m. PT (3 p.m. ET)

Showcasing their tremendous powers of evasion, the Senate has voted 79-19 for cloture on the continuing resolution (CR). As I type this, the Senate is voting to remove the language in the House CR that defunded Obamacare. So today’s show will unfortunately not be a victory celebration, although ultimate victory is still possible, depending on what the House does in the coming days (and, possibly, weeks).

What I would like to do today is celebrate the fact that we have a politician in the U.S. Senate who is willing to stand up against socialized medicine, in a principled way. And the bonus: he read several passages from Ayn Rand’s work in the process of doing so.

See Program Notes, below, for all the stories and clips we plan to showcase/discuss.

Join in on the discussion live, either by phone or in the chatroom!

The show can be accessed here.

To access the show’s page at BlogTalk Radio, which will allow you to check out a past episode or to subscribe via iTunes and other services, use this link.

To access the iTunes store page for “Don’t Let It Go…Unheard,” where you can find past episodes, subscribe, and leave ratings and reviews (pretty please!), use this link.

Finally, if you would like to support the podcast financially, please donate using your Pay Pal account or Credit Card here.

Program Notes

Tom Cruise: “I’m the guy!”

Senate votes, ends debate on continuing resolution defunding Obamacare

Cruz’s statement on today’s cloture vote

Ted Cruz recommending and reading from Atlas Shrugged on the Senate Floor HT: Krastio Atanassov on Twitter

Later in the morning, Cruz reading from both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged HT Robert Nasir

Podhoretz: Who else does Ted Cruz’s triumph help?

Rand Paul: Why must the American people suffer when even so many Democrats don’t want Obamacare? HT: Rob Abiera

Daniel Henninger: Let Obamacare Collapse

Common Core: A Scheme to Rewrite Education

Glenn Beck: Did Bill Gates admit the real purpose of Common Core?

Defunders vs. Goliath & More, Today at 12 p.m. PT (3 p.m. ET)

Is the fight to defund Obamacare a waste of time? Bad strategy? Wrong? We’ll discuss this and more on today’s show. See Program Notes, below, for all the stories we plan to discuss.

Join in on the discussion live, either by phone or in the chatroom!

The show can be accessed here.

To access the show’s page at BlogTalk Radio, which will allow you to check out a past episode or to subscribe via iTunes and other services, use this link.

To access the iTunes store page for “Don’t Let It Go…Unheard,” where you can find past episodes, subscribe, and leave ratings and reviews (pretty please!), use this link.

Finally, if you would like to support the podcast financially, please donate using your Pay Pal account or Credit Card here.

Program Notes

Vodkapundit

Apple.com

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

House Passes Spending Bill to Defund Obamacare

Comments on the Bill’s Passage from Boehner and Obama

Press Conference with Senators Ted Cruz & Mike Lee, plus House Republicans who support defunding (Cruz pledge starts 15:44)

The Five Hosts Battle Over GOP’s ‘Defund Obamacare’ Strategy (6:48 for Gutfeld’s take)

Andrew McCarthy: Defund Obamacare!

Obamacare will Question Your Sex Life

Apple’s Fingerprint ID May Mean You Can’t Take the Fifth

Typical American Family Makes Less Than it Did in 1989

Awesomeness: Rick Santelli vs. Ben Bernanke (Esp. starting 2:16)

Apple.com

The End Game of “Consumer Protection” is the Obliteration of Privacy and Freedom

This week we’ve seen two news stories that demonstrate the true end of regulation — government initiation of force on citizens who have not violated anyone’s rights — in the name of “consumer protection.”

On Friday’s show we discussed the recently released story about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s plan to monitor 80% of all credit card transactions. I made the obvious point (also made by politicians quoted in the article) that, given the fact that so many of us now use credit cards for virtually all our purchases — many of an extremely personal nature — that this will give the Federal Government access to a tremendous amount of personal information about us. And all this information can be (and likely will be) combined with all the other information the government already gathers about us — all of it gathered without warrant. No probable cause, no particularized suspicion. The result will be Bentham’s panopticon, except that we’re not prisoners who have been convicted of violating anyone’s rights.

This is outrageous, but even those of us who are the most outraged about government’s invasion of privacy are probably somewhat numb by now, given all the recent revelations about the activity of the NSA. And to those who approve of the NSA’s collection of “metadata” in order to protect us from “terrorism,” I ask: how could you possibly oppose the collection of such data in order to protect us from the greedy credit card companies, merchants, (fill in “evil” business of the week here)? Seriously, I’d like to know.

If the planned data-collection activities of the CFPB are not enough to convince you that a government that regulates businesses in the name of “consumer protection” is ultimately up to no good, we are now learning that the Consumer Product Safety Commission is attempting to destroy the entire notion of limited liability behind the existence of corporations (and therefore modern free markets). As reported by the Wall Street Journal recently, the Commission not only put the company that made Buckyballs out of business (using methods that, even according to the Commission’s own rules and procedures, were questionable), it is also attempting to make Craig Zucker, the company’s CEO, personally liable for the $57 million it would cost to perform the recall, should the product ultimately be deemed “defective.” If the Commission succeeds, it will be going beyond prior legal precedent, allowing for a corporate officer to be held criminally responsible for the corporation’s criminal activity. In the case of Buckyballs, as the WSJ notes, there was no criminal activity, just a product that a federal bureaucrat thinks we need to be “protected” from, because we might be too stupid to read the directions and use it properly. Besides, the Commission has said, Buckyballs “are not necessary to consumers.”

The Commission cannot be allowed to succeed in its persecution of Zucker. Entrepreneurs should be free to decide how much of their money and assets to put at risk in order to develop and sell a particular product or service (and of course all of us should be free to decide whether to patronize their businesses, accordingly). This freedom to choose the terms on which one will deal with others is the foundation of corporations and our free market system.