Apple, one of America’s good eggs, a shining star of innovation and enterprise, is currently getting cooked by Congress. Senators allege that the company, though it has followed the law, hasn’t paid enough taxes. And though they likely turn to their iPads when bored during the moments when they are not speaking at drawn-out hearings, they have summoned Apple’s CEO from the Silicon Valley to the imperial city for a talking-to.

The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, who has extensively studied and reported on the collusion of Big Government and Big Business, writes that Apple has not sought special favors, it spends no money on lobbying, and doesn’t contribute to campaigns much (if at all). Apple is just churning out profit and … they are ignoring Washington! Sure they pay their taxes, but they have nothing to say to Congress. They don’t even try to talk to congressmen. But Congress is important! Carney notes back in the days when the feds were going after Microsoft that Republican Senator Orrin Hatch made it clear that ”If you want to get involved in business, you should get involved in politics.”

Carney rights:

“The grilling of Apple is best understood as a shakedown by politicians upset with Apple for not playing the Washington game that yields contributions, power, and personal wealth for congressmen and their aides.”

There’s a pattern developing: The federal government is showing increasing hostility to any entity that shows independence from government, whether its churches, businesses, Tea Party nonprofits, or the media. If you think about all the different businesses and organizations under attack, it is starting to look staggering.

Here’s the rest of his column (1 page).

As William J. Federer frequently points out in his daily American Minute email, America’s Founders and for many years its presidents and state governors would, on serious occasions, calls for days of “prayer and fasting.” Presidents no longer do this:  Even when they call for a day of prayer, they leave out the fasting part.

But for many years, American leaders saw the wisdom and benefits of these days of fasting–in control the soul, in focusing the people on prayer for some special, urgent need, and in uniting the nation to God, especially a God who has suffered. Just before the Battle of Lexington, John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, issued this declaration:

“In circumstances dark as these, it becomes us, as men and Christians, to reflect that, whilst every prudent measure should be taken to ward off the impending judgments … the 11th of May next be set apart as a Day of Public Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer … to confess the sins … to implore the Forgiveness of all our Transgression.”

This Friday, Charles Chaput, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, is bringing the tradition of fasting in a response to a grave evil back to the city where Independence was declared, and from which many declarations of “days of fasting” were issued by the Founders. He has called for this Friday to be a day of penance, prayer, and fasting in his archdiocese in the wake of the revelations of the baby-slaughtering of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell and others who kill the most innocent among us in abortion facilities nationwide. Friday is also the World Day of Prayer for China–a place where Christians are persecuted and another good reason to pray and fast!

Here’s information on Archbishop Chaput’s day of prayer and fasting in Philadelphia (1/2 page).

And here’s William Federer on the American public tradition of days of fasting (1 page).

You could also send checks with notation “Friess LeftRight Match” to NCF, 11625 Rainwater Drive, Suite 500, Alpharetta, GA 30009.

The first three channels selected are:

• Convoy of Hope (had people on the ground 12 hours after the tornado hit);

• Salvation Army (top guy and his wife received combined salary of $50,000) perhaps the largest relief organization in the world operating in 125 countries; and thirdly,

• Southern Baptists Disaster Relief (I was very impressed with their behind the scenes efforts I witnessed in the Katrina aftermath).

You may designate your entire donation go to only one effort. We will identify smaller trusted local entities after our arrival in Moore today. I am typing this in flight.

The newly launched LeftRightLeftRightForwardMarch! initiative endorses this effort. The LRLRFM tag line is “Together We’ll Get There!”  It pairs Americans of disparate political perspectives to serve others and reduces the culture of divisiveness introduced by recent elections.

                                           

The LeftRightLeftRightForwardMarch! initiative just endorsed the Washington, DC, “Step Forward for Orphans March” to promote international adoptions which declined 60% in the last five years. Conservative talk show host, Laura Ingraham, and Democratic US Senator Mary Landrieu, founding co-chair of the 141 member Congressional Coalition on Adoption linked arms to help kids “STUCK” in orphanages to join loving families who are eager to adopt. (The documentary STUCK, at http://buy.stuckdocumentary.com/, won two out of three recent film festivals.

Your generosity demonstrates that we as private citizens can solve many of our nations problems as we dedicate ourselves to the ideals and dreams of America that our Founding Fathers  risked so much to give us. We now stand on their and the intervening eight generations’ shoulders to maintain the freedoms for which they sacrificed so much. 

When he was diagnosed with a kind of cancer at age 14 that was sure to kill him, Zach Sobiech decided he was not going to wallow but that he was going to live with complete joy. Four years later, in his last months, not wanting leave anything behind, he wrong a song, “Clouds,” the video of which was quickly passed all over the internet.

“My Last Days,” a documentary made by the website Soul Pancake, set to “Clouds” tells the story of his face in the face of suffering. It’s full of his family and friends, and Zach, laughing and clapping and dancing, even amid the tears. That’s the way to live life: Keep going, keep laughing, keep living as long as you got life, come what may. His mom says: “I think that’s actually one of the blessings of cancer is that you kind of come out of denial [about what life is]. And so in doing that, things are better. That life is richer, everything means more, beauty is more beautiful. He’s a beautiful person, and I’m so happy to have been Zach Sobiech’s mom.”

As Zach showed the showed the world, joy in the face of suffering is not just a way to get by: It’s essential to our lives. We’re going to have tough times, often when we least expect them. Look at what just happened in Oklahoma, or look at any hospital in your town. But everything that’s bad that comes our way, we need to turn to good, as hard as it is. Zach Sobiech gave the world that message in his last months. Rest in peace—or, as the band Delta Rae sings, “dance in the graveyards,” (3:40) Zach.

Because, as Zach says, death is not the end. Sure, it’s tough for us to comprehend, but if can spread joy down here, what will come will be so much greater. And just because we can’t see those who have passed on, doesn’t mean they are not, like a “great cloud of witnesses,” still in our midst, guiding us to God, to joy.

Watch “My Last Days” here (22 minutes).

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us” – Hebrews 12:1

Many are saying that President Obama is as bad as, or worse than, Richard Nixon, in light of revelations that his Internal Revenue Service for more than two years targeted Tea Party groups, preventing a single one from achieving tax exempt status during a period that began in the pivotal election year of 2010.

Bill Kristol writes at the Weekly Standard that President Obama should not be compared to President Nixon, because, for all of Nixon’s faults, he was no absent leader. He strove, in his way, to tackle head on the problems the country face–something for which, Kristol says, Obama is not known.

Here’s the piece (1/2 page).

Lynn and Foster Friess are donating $1 million to victims of the Moore, Oklahoma, tornado that killed dozens and flattened a community–and they are encouraging others to match this amount. Everyone is encouraged to give, but in particular, in spirit with the LeftRightLeftRightForwardMarch! initiative’s goal of unifying Americans wherever possible, it could be a healing act if a prominent Democrat also agreed to give $1 million. In the tradition of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton joining forces to support Katrina relief, this could be an excellent opportunity to heal not only the physical wounds in Moore but also the political and emotional wounds that so often divide us.

Have an idea for a coalition to help out the victims of the Oklahoma tornado? You can submit them here.

Here’s the story from CNN (1 page).

I learned a lot from my prior travels to sites of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, to Katrina, and to the Haiti earthquake about how a lot of money that doesn’t get where the donor would like it to get and huge salaries are taken out by the folks delivering the donations. Our research should be done within a day or so.

Just to alert you in case you are thinking of sending money, this might be an opportunity to have it doubled and be more effective in its delivery.

God bless as we all share in the prayers for our fellow Americans in Moore.

Seat of Power

The Internal Revenue Service will have a huge role in implementing, executing, and overseeing Obamacare. If you don’t buy health insurance, it is the IRS that will come after you. But now it’s been revealed that the IRS was used as an arm of the Obama reelection campaign, by whom we do not yet know, to prevent opposition groups from obtaining tax-exempt status.

How can an organization that has so targeted the Tea Party be entrusted with so much control of the nation’s health care, as the government moves to control that enormous sector of the American economy?

This is a question more and more people are asking, as this story in Politico acknowledges(1 page).

This is the place for narratives--not news articles!

The press loves to construct narratives. For one, they are inherently storytellers, and a narrative is more interesting to both writer and reader than a simple regurgitation of facts. But the best storytelling should probably be kept in the realm of fiction. Otherwise, facts get in the way of narratives. In fact, it’s pretty hard to write a narrative when you’re in the news business: By its nature, the story is not yet over and, until the facts have been unearthed, no one knows how it will end or what turns the story will take! What’s more–no one will ever know the motives of the prime movers of events. So I agree with Mark Hemingway’s plea to the press: Focus on finding stuff out. It’s simple. 

Here’s what Hemingway has to say, at the Weekly Standard:

“With three different scandals threatening to consume the White House last week—the Benghazi cover-up, the Justice Department’s seizure of the phone records of dozens of Associated Press reporters, and the revelation of an anti-Tea Party inquisition by the Internal Revenue Service—CNBC’s John Harwood offered his journalistic peers some advice on Twitter: ‘Those of us in political-media world should just shut up about ‘narratives’ and focus on what’s true.’ CBS anchor Scott Pelley joined in: ‘We are getting big stories wrong, over and over again.’”

Read it all here (1 page).

Our Founders–who fought to throw off the yoke of abusive power–knew full well that fallible human beings, if given too much power, will end up abusing it at the expense of the rights of the people. This is why they created a defined, limited government, with many checks and balances. They put their faith in God and in the people–never in government.

As James Madison wrote in The Federalist: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

But today, we’ve entrusted ever increasing power to people who are cloaked under the seemingly angelic mantle of government. Some have been crying out against this, warning of the negative consequences to our freedom when government gets too big, uncontrollable even.

And now, look at what we have: A revelation–three years late!–that the Internal Revenue Service tried to suffocate the Tea Party during the 2010 election, and the news that two months ago the Justice Department seized a whole bunch of Associated Press phone records, because, as the Attorney General said, that was more humane that putting reporters in prison for doing their job! At last, more and more people, previously in love with all things government, are starting to realize that perhaps the breaks need to be applied.

Thomas Jefferson warned against putting too much trust in government: “Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.”

John Dickerson at Slate writes that President Obama’s administration and its abuses of power are making a better argument for conservatism than Mitt Romney did–because the President is concretely showing to us what happens when we place too much trust in government. Government abuses that trust! In a particularly biting line, that might cause many to wake up, Dickerson writes:

“It must get confusing in the IT department at the Associated Press: Are you talking about the hackers who hacked our Twitter account or the Justice Department hackers who hacked our phones?”

Read his piece here (1 page).