Protesters Call Code Red

At yesterday’s Code Red Rally, hosted by Americans for Prosperity, health care reform protesters met in Upper Senate park, in a demonstration which Human Events & National Review’s Jim Geraghty say brought thousands to D.C. I’ve included a couple panoramas of the scene:

After the protest, participants lined up to lobby their Senators to “kill the bill.” The line, which can be seen here, stretched the entire side of the building to the other entrance.

The protest had a decidedly grittier atmosphere than November’s “House Call.” For example, a group of people dressed up as Harry, Nancy, and “Barry” (Obama) to depict these leaders in hell:

In line with Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst calling Obama a “liar” on health care benefits for illegal immigrants, the crowd chanted “liar, liar, liar” and speakers highlighted President Obama’s broken promises on health care reform, including Obama’s famous guarantee that “… if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan.  Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.”

Here are a few of the signs accusing government leaders of “lying.”

The protest wasn’t exclusively focused on the health care bill  (although mostly so) as much it was about government expansion; attendees sported signs protesting cap-and-trade, increasing federal debt, health care, immigration issues, the federal reserve, and others. Instead, the rallying cry was a message of less government and more freedom.

Human Events quotes Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) as saying at the rally, “What our country lacks is our active involvement to return freedom to its rightful owners — to give it back to us again…The health care bill isn’t about health care.  The health care bill is about government control… it’s about limiting the freedom to choose for you and your family.” Today Sen. Coburn “forced” the Senate to hear the text of a 767 page amendment to health care bill, reports Politico. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who sponsored the amendment, withdrew it in the third hour of reading.

Laura Ingraham was criticized by CBS’ Amanda Sterling for her conversion of an anti-Nazi poem into one about health care reform and by The Examiner’s Ryan Witt for her use of Christmas symbols for this “political agenda.”

You can hear (most) of her comments in context here, via thorsmith4906.

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.