Americans for Prosperity will be hosting a conference call with Rep. Michele Bachmann and RedState.com’s Erick Erickson tonight (November 4th) at 8pm EST to discuss tomorrow’s Congressional House Call Day.

Please feel free to pass this information along to any fellow activists who might be interested in joining. We appreciate any help you can provide in promoting this important effort, and hope that you’ll be able to join us this evening.

Conference Call Phone #: 1-866-393-5827

(please let the operator know that you are joining the Americans for Prosperity call)

Congressional House Call Day:

As the health care debate has drawn on, we've heard from our contacts on Capitol Hill that calls and visits to the members’ D.C. and district offices are making a big impact. Americans for Prosperity is joining with Representative Michele Bachmann and many others to drive citizen activists to pay a visit to their member of Congress tomorrow, November 5th, at noon.

We need your help to promote this effort and make it successful. We would appreciate any help you can provide by e-mailing your list, posting on your Web site, or doing anything else that you can to spread the word.

Here are the details:

When: Thursday, Nov. 5, Noon

What: Congressional "House Calls" to House and Senate district offices (or join Rep. Bachmann on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in D.C.)

What to do: Gather with friends outside the district office at noon; ask to speak with a staff member. Explain your concerns about the health care proposals under consideration and deliver your letters, stories, petitions, etc. 

What to bring: Bring your sign, your personal story of why you don't want a Washington takeover of health care, and a hand-written letter for your member of Congress. Patients First, a project of AFP, will have an "Rx for Real Reform" prescription available for download from our Web sites, www.JoinPatientsFirst.com and . Also, bring your camera and send us at mailbag@afp-mail.com your pictures -- we'd love to post them

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress tried to re-brand the wildly unpopular and conspicuous “public option” as the softer sounding “consumer option.” The unfortunate part is that the consumer option is neither for the consumer, nor will it eventually be option.

The most recent bill, which Pelosi proclaimed would cost less than $900 billion, has been scored by the CBO as actually costing more than $1.2 trillion. The scheme attempts to pay for the bill by punishing consumers through taxing the premium plans purchased separately by individuals, or taken in lieu of pay increases by many unionized employees.

David Harsanyi, in an opinion piece, stated that “through the pages of the House bill, you will notice the word “regulation” appears 181 times. “Tax” is there 214 times. “Fees,” 103 times. As we all know, nothing says "affordability" like higher taxes and fees.”

But what about the option? With the government taxing private health plans and offering heavily subsidized insurance to families making up to $96,000 a year, private industry will be unable to compete. Couple that with a “health choices commissioner” dictating what rates insurers may charge, private insurance companies will fold one by one. Before long the “consumer option” will be a centrally run single-payer apparatus, and the only choice for many Americans.

The Speaker’s bill would more appropriately be titled, “Not an option.”

Comments? Write to tkorson@afphq.org

Phil Kerpen
November 3, 2009

With the country focused on today’s elections and the ongoing circus-like attempt of Washington to take over our health care, Sen. Barbara Boxer is trying to pull a fast one on cap-and-trade, forcing her outrageous Boxer-Kerry energy ration and tax scheme through the Senate Environment and Public Workers (EPW) Committee this week, while the country is focused on health care. She thinks the American people won’t notice that she is trying to quietly jump-the-gun on legislation that could amount to the biggest tax increase in American history without even waiting for the EPA to run its models and release its official (and almost certainly unrealistically low) estimate of the cost of the bill and its effect on emissions.

Just as we saw the Senate Finance Committee vote out a health care bill that hadn’t even be written, we now see the Senate EPW committee set to pass a bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without knowing any estimate of how it would actually affect emissions or what it would cost. Flying blind seems to be the new business-as-usual in Washington.

It’s a dishonest move in the first place to hide the biggest tax increase in U.S. history inside what’s supposed to be an environmental bill, but we know from internal Treasury documents that the Obama administration is counting on hundreds of billions of dollars a year in so-called “climate revenues” to pay for its big government spending programs.

We also know that Sen. Boxer intends to use a lot of that revenue in corrupt political logrolling to buy the votes she needs to pass the bill. We know because she told us, back on June 6th, when she said:

“There's so much revenue that comes in from a cap-and-trade system that you can really go to a person in a congressional district and get enough votes there by saying, 'What do you need? What do you want? You can really help them.”

No wonder she’s trying to force this hodge-podge of special interest provisions through her committee even though the official analysis by the EPA of what's in the bill and how much is costs hasn't even been done yet!

Kudos to Senate EPW Republicans led by Senator James Inhofe. They are boycotting Barbara Boxer’s ridiculous flying-blind attempt to slam through her outrageous cap-and-trade bill before lawmakers and the public have any really sense of what it would do and cost.

The public has a right to know the economic impact of a bill that would reorder the entire US economy through government control and rationing of energy. If Boxer insists on conducting a sham, partisan mark-up of her bill in the face of the very reasonable request from EPW Republicans to wait until the EPA has run its models, we can be certain the product will be an extreme far-left bill that will place out economic future at enormous risk.

Any senator who votes for Boxer’s bill before it has been fully analyzed by the EPA can only be supporting the bill for the wrong reasons, because its actual effectiveness at reducing emissions—and at what cost—remain completely unknown. Sen. Boxer seems convinced that voters are incapable of paying attention to both health care and energy taxes at the same time. If she continues to recklessly discard Senate rules and traditions to force this costly special-interest bill on the American public, she and her colleagues are likely to learn otherwise about a year from now.

Phil Kerpen is director of policy for Americans for Prosperity.

Listen to his two-minute KerpenCast on this subject here.

Click here to take action on this issue!

Persistence and innovation seems to be paying off for the Ford Motor Company.

After the dramatic rescue of the financial industry last year, the auto industry descended on Washington to lobby for their own bailout. Through a series of contentious and dramatic hearings on Capitol Hill, the Chairmen of the largest American car companies placed their survival in the hands of the government. Hat in hand, they explained how poor decisions, enormous pension obligations, and foreign competition were driving their companies into bankruptcy. This of course was nothing new for Detroit. For the past three decades a predictable cycle of status-quo engineering and union demands have lead to second, and third, and forth chances to become self-sufficient.

By the end of the negotiations, the government agreed to “rescue” Chrysler and General Motors- providing the financing and regulatory tools to avoid bankruptcy. By doing so, the government became invested in their success and decided to use this new authority to control the business itself. Government Motors was born. This part of the story would have sounded more like breaking news from Venezuela only two years ago, not the United States.

Yet out of this incredible series of events, a new success story is unfolding. Yesterday Ford announced a third-quarter profit of nearly $1 billion which it attributed to cutting costs and focusing on innovation. What makes this news all the more impressive is that Ford was the only one of the big three auto companies that refused the government bailout. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “Ford’s success in North America stemmed in part from the troubles of its two Detroit rivals, General Motors Co. and Chrysler LLC, which were reorganized in bankruptcy court as well as the law of supply and demand. Ford’s ability to decline government aid boosted its image with many American consumers, and its market share increased in the third quarter.”

Even with the government-sponsored “cash for clunkers” program, Ford was able to ramp up its production and provide dealers with ample inventory. GM and Chrysler with tighter inventories were not able to get much out of the program at all. Ford’s CEO noted that they would have been profitable even without the program, as he stated on NBC Nightly News last night, “We have been increasing our share in this down market every month for the last 10 months, and increased--actually increasing our production. So we're on a pretty steady trajectory of growth now.”

The company that was born out of innovation seems to be finding its roots.

Write to tdoheny@afphq.org