Bloggers Get Budget Briefing

At the weekly bloggers meeting held at the Heritage Foundation, Patients United Now unveiled a new video ad featuring Shona Holmes, a Canadian Citizen who was diagnosed with a brain tumor and told she would have to wait six months to obtain the necessary surgery to remove the tumor in her home country. Holmes opted to have the surgery done in the United States and claims that the decision saved her life. This video ad can be viewed on the organization’s website, www.PatientsUnitedNow.com.

“This is crunch time on stopping the Washington take-over of heath care.” Says Phil Kerpen of Patients United Now, a project of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. “This is something that will be seen as a permanent entitlement and run into trillions of dollars.”

To help keep score of the trillion-dollar federal budgets that seem to grow more zeros by the day, the Heritage Foundation has released their “2009 Federal Revenue and Spending Book of Charts.” This booklet contains a series of 40 charts on federal spending, taxes, debt and deficits, and entitlements. The charts outline the increases in federal spending that are projected to occur during the Obama administration.

Nicola Moore of the Heritage Foundation described the new material as “blogger-friendly.” Bloggers will be able to “save it and embed that image directly on [their] blog,” Moore said. Moore added that this year, there is a new interactive feature with a flash graphic version of one of the charts. Moore also welcomes input from those who have new ideas for charts and other suggestions. The contents of the book can be found online at www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook.

Brittany Fortier is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.