Want to do something tangible to express your opposition to the $825 billion Obama/Reid/Pelosi economic (de)stimulus bill besides calling, emailing and writing your congressmen? Americans for Prosperity (AFP) have just put up an online petition drive at NoStimulus.com that should become a rallying point for opponents.
And if, in addition to the stimulus bucks, you also want to know where all those billions of tax dollars being handed over to …. somebody on Wall Street or somewhere in the financial community are actually going, then you need to know about Chasing the Pork wiki and the Bailout Bear blog associated with it.
Besides the actual petition itself, NoStimulus.com includes links to vital information and analyses of the stimulus proposal, as well as a link to a nifty letter generator that goes to all of the news media outlets in your specific area. All you have to do is put in your zip code. There are also links to talking points about the package and other useful material.
Why is AFP doing it? Here’s how they explain it on the NoStimulus.com web site:
“Washington liberals have proposed an $825 billion debt bill and we need your help to stop the runaway government spending.
“President Obama and Congress are using the cover of economic hardship to pursue a permanent increase in the size and scope of government. This is by far the biggest debt package in the country’s history. Every dollar borrowed will have to be paid back with interest.
“The Obama debt package has been proposed at $825 billion, a truly staggering number. The so-called stimulus is loaded up with a wide-ranging agenda that has nothing to do with boosting the economy. The agenda would manipulate and jeopardize the security of our energy supply, give bureaucrats greater power to make health care decisions, and force federal taxpayers to bail out overspending by state governments.
“Even worse, a huge amount of this money will be used to grease the wheels of local special-interest politics, funding thousands of projects of questionable value, projects that were unaffordable during the best economic times and are even less affordable now.
“Most of the political class in Washington is set to go along with this no-stimulus approach, because the dramatic expansion in government power means a dramatic expansion in their power, at our expense.”
That pretty well frames the issue!
Will an online petition drive help? Well, more than 1,000 people signed the petition within its first hour being live on the Internet. That’s just the first hour, folks!
Over at Chasing the Pork and Bailout Bear, the idea originated from a blog post at Cafe Hayek by Russell Roberts. Not sure what a wiki is? Think Wikipedia, which is simply a site that allows anybody to post knowledge, subject to the tender ministrations of a small group of Wikipedians who are committed to accuracy, fairness, etc.
A wiki is potentially a fantastic tool for crowd-sourcing the stimulus and bailout spending because such a site allows legions of people who are geographically distributed all over the place to pool their knowledge, experience, insights and research results in one place convenient to all.
The Right is famously individualistic and independent, and thus sometimes it seems like we aren’t as collectively committed to making the maximum use of new Internet-based tools like Wikis. I doubt that the deficit of online conservative and libertarian activists is either a result of lack of will or desire, or even a real problem. Let’s see how our ranks respond to Chasing the Pork and Bailout Bear.
