01/20/10 – Shawn Haugh – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
I've got something important to talk about.
It's not so much foreign policy, but I know it's important to Angela and it's important to me and maybe to some of you guys.
And this subject is our old friend Michael Baden-Ark.
The guest is Sean Ha.
And Angela, you do the introduction here.
All right, Sean is from Free and Equal, Free and Equal Elections Foundation.
Sean is a long-time activist and he and I work together, the Libertarian Party.
He's going to be talking today a little bit about Hearts of Liberty.
And this is really important because it's a website established to help pay Michael Baden-Ark's medical bills.
Sean, are you there with us?
I am.
Thanks for joining us on the show today.
Oh, it's a pleasure.
All right.
So Michael Baden-Ark, of course, was the libertarian candidate for president in 2004 and has a lot of friends and acquaintances throughout the libertarian movement in the country.
And as many of us know, he had a heart attack.
How many weeks ago?
Four or five weeks ago now?
Something like that?
A little over four weeks ago.
A little over four weeks ago.
And now I actually have not been able to talk to Rick McGinnis.
I tried to get a hold of him.
I wanted to find out some details of actually how much better he's doing.
The first news was that he was pretty out of it there in the hospital.
Can you tell us what progress he's had there, Sean?
Yeah, I've had the chance to speak with him a couple times this week, including yesterday.
And he sounds pretty good for somebody who had a mass heart attack four weeks ago and was in an induced coma for two weeks.
He sounds weak, but his spirits are good.
And every time I hear from him, he sounds a little bit better every time.
So he's on the way to recovery.
It'll take a while for him to recover.
He's out of the hospital now.
He's at his parents' home in Indiana, resting up and seeing doctors for a lot of follow-up visits and tests.
And to my knowledge, there's no real prognosis on how long it'll take.
But he seems to be well on his way to resting up and getting back to full strength and getting back on the road to liberty again.
Well, that's great to hear.
I guess the fear with a heart attack like that, lack of blood to the brain, and like you said, the coma that he was in there for a while, I was kind of scared that maybe he would have lost some brain function, not ever be able to get back to 100% or some kind of nightmare like that.
But you're saying that no indications of that at all, huh?
Correct.
He sounds pretty good.
He certainly has his wits about him in speaking to them.
Hey, well, first off, I'd like to do a little bit of an issue, issue a challenge here, and I don't say too many personal things, but Brian Doherty and I are in for 100 bucks, and we'd like to challenge anyone who can hear us right now to do the same.
This is really important.
Michael's one of us, and he's really made some huge sacrifices for the movement.
So whatever you got, whether it's a dollar, a hundred, or more, please, folks, give in.
Sean, tell us a little bit more about Hearts of Liberty.
Well, at heartsofliberty.org, Eric Nordstrom came to us with the idea of putting together a fundraiser to raise money for his medical bills.
You're exactly right, Angela.
Michael has always gone out there for a cause, always put himself on the road, sacrificed pretty much everything of himself, and never worries about the paycheck, never really worries about making money off of this.
So when he approached us with this idea, Eric, we thought, wow, this is fantastic.
This is a way for us to show what kind of mutual aid could take place if government intervention or mandated health insurance in the libertarian society that Michael keeps preaching about.
And I'm very gratified.
I'm looking at the website right now.
We just passed $5,000, and we really only officially launched it last night.
Really?
Yeah.
Wow, that's great.
So we'll be free and equal for all.
It was very easy for us to put together the website, and since we're a 501c3 nonprofit, donations to this fund are tax deductible.
We'll be keeping separate accounting of everything, and that's going to be completely transparent.
We're going to make sure that 100% of this money goes to pay off Michael's medical bill.
All right, now say the name of the website three times.
It's heartsofliberty.org.
Heartsofliberty.org.
Heartsofliberty.org.
All right, good.
So that means that people with a Facebook account can help try to make this viral.
There's a lot of libertarian and Ron Paul-ian type community online.
If they're going to sit around and cheer for some evil Republican in Massachusetts, they can go ahead and kick down a couple of bucks for a hero in Indiana.
Well, that's exactly right, and it's just really gratifying to see it's already a few dozen people that have kicked in, and that number to me is just as important as the amount of money, too.
It's the number of people who, you know, we've had donations anywhere from $5 to $1,000.
So like I said, it's nice to be a part of something to help show what, you know, to put our principles into action.
All right, now listen, too.
There are a lot of people who don't know who Michael Bednarik is, so why don't you two talk about Michael Bednarik and why you like him so much for a minute here?
Well, I can tell you I first met Michael in 2003 when he started running for president.
He came to the Libertarian Party of North Carolina State Convention, and we all just fell in love with him here.
He's just an incredibly sweet and giving individual, and he's got that nice combination of being really humble but at the same time being very sure of himself.
He just has a real affecting and charming personality for anybody who's met him.
And like I said, ever since 2003, he's really dedicated himself to spreading the word of liberty, teaching people about the Constitution, and he's had a wonderful opportunity to travel all over this country and meet and help a whole lot of different people.
Well, my history with Michael goes way back.
We were in Austin together back in the day, and back then he was an objectivist and a whole lot of fun.
My best Michael story is, of course, when he finally told me he really wanted to run for president, and I took a good look at his shirt, and he really was partial to those shirts that had American flags all over them.
One was almost blinding and confusing, and I said, Michael, you can do this.
But first, we're going to Dillard's in Austin, and we're going to get you some clothes.
And he and I drove in his Trans Am, which had no legal license plate on it, totally unregistered, because back in those days, that's how you kind of kicked it.
Screw the driver's license.
And we drove to the mall, and we're looking at shirts and ties and trying to really kind of waspify him, trying to make him look like he could compete with George Bush on any stage.
So we did that, and I remember a woman was asking what we were shopping for, and Michael just turned and says, I'm running for president.
Totally straight face.
And when I knew he could do that to a total stranger without any explanation whatsoever, he was ready.
He was totally ready.
So my turn.
So I talked to Michael virtually every single day that he was running for president.
I was his foreign policy advisor, and I would call and tell him about the horror going on in Iraq and keep him up to date on all that.
And I agree with both of you that he really is a decent and genuinely honest guy.
He's a peacenik to the nth degree, which is the most important quality a political type person can have for sure.
And he's not just some kind of, well, you know, it's like that Rothbard piece about how I'll take a radical minarchist over conservative anarchist any day, because what I want is a hatred for injustice out of my libertarians.
And that's what Michael Baden-Ark has.
And he really is serious about it.
He's not some, you know, kind of going through the motions.
As Sean was saying earlier, he's not making a dollar.
What he's doing is just trying to get people to realize natural rights theory and then the rest of the consequences from there, you know, and he really does mean it.
And he deserves a hand.
You know, what sucks about people is we only get one heart.
And so if the damn thing malfunctions, then what, you know, and if you don't have any money, then what?
And so for people who care about liberty, people who care about Michael Baden-Ark, tell them the name of the website one more time, Sean.
It's at hearts of liberty.org.
All right.
Anything else you have to say?
Well, if you want to read a little bit more about the story, we have press release on it posted at free and equal.org and also at liberty for all.net.
And people can feel free to take that or take anything off of the hearts of liberty.org website and pass it around, forward it everywhere, because I expect that the way that this is going to work is through what I hate this term, but what they call viral marketing, where people just, you know, take the news and forward it.
It's nice to see it being forwarded all over Facebook.
Just get the word out to people who've never been touched by Michael in some way or another, and I'm sure that people will come out and help, and we can get these bills paid.
All right, everybody, that's Sean Haw from, say it again?
Free and equal.org.
Free and equal.org.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Really appreciate it.
Well, thank you.
All right, tell this anti-war radio.
We'll be right back.