Today, I’m sacrificing watching the whole Iowa Hawkeyes game to attend the Iowa Tea Party Statewide Convention here in Des Moines. They are currently beating Northwestern 10-0 in the first quarter. Later tonight I’m going to be Leadership for Iowa, an event hosted to the Republican Party of Iowa. There we’ll here from the six remaining gubernatorial candidates, Senator Paul McKinley (R-Chariton) dropped out yesterday, and Governor Tim Pawlenty (R-Minnesota) will be giving the keynote.
I’ll be on “bloggers row” for this event and will hopefully get some face time with some of the gubernatorial candidates. I’ll be posting on both of those events later. The activity today reminds me about vital it is that we speak out about our values and what concerns us as citizens.
Today, Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to force a vote on a health care bill. We need to continue to contact our members of Congress. Governor Sarah Palin posted on this this morning on Facebook:
Like many Americans, I’m very concerned about the efforts underway to rush through the 2,000 page Pelosi health care bill this weekend. Why the rush? That’s a lot of pages to read. Why not give everyone the chance to read it and debate it?
How much will this bill cost us? It’s unclear because the figures coming out of Washington keep changing – and always in the direction of costing more, not less. The latest numbers show it will cost more than a trillion dollars over the decade, but when has a government program ever come in on or under budget?
How will we pay for it? Taxes, of course – and not just on the “rich” (you know, the people who spur the economy by buying goods and running companies that employ people), but also on just about everyone, especially small businesses – the job-creating engine of our economy. One of the points of health care reform was to help small businesses with the cost, but this bill hurts them – and right at a time when so many Americans are out of work and need the jobs that small businesses produce.
What’s in this bill? The “death panel” provision is in it. Medicare cuts are in it. Coverage of illegal immigrants is in it. And federal funding for abortion is in it. I commend the many Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats who are taking a principled stance to fight this.
I had a message for Speaker Pelosi in a speech I gave last night for the Wisconsin Right to Life – “please, please don’t break the ‘transparency promise’ by prohibiting at least a vote of your colleagues on funding abortion-on-demand.” (read the rest)
There’s too much at stake to remain silent.