(CNSNews.com) - House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the House Republicans’ proposed cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget would hurt biomedical research’s "biblical power to cure."
Pelosi, speaking at a press conference on Capitol Hill celebrating the first anniversary of the health care bill’s passage, said, "There’s a cut in funding for the National Institutes of Health. This is not a healthy thing for our country because that research has answers. You know that every family in America is one telephone call, one diagnosis, one accident away from needing the kind of biomedical research that can cure--really have the biblical power to cure in a very, very special way and so to cut back on that research is wrong."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of Calif. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
The continuing resolution (CR) passed by the GOP-led House cuts $1 billion from the NIH’s FY2011 budget.
Pelosi’s comments came in response to a question from CNSNews.com about a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of the health care law's effect on the workforce over the next decade.
Pelosi at the Mike
ReplyDeleteWith apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer, author of Casey at the Bat
The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Democrats that day:
The House’s freshmen members had put budget cuts in play.
The CR was expiring, and though HR1 was dead,
Pelosi’s shrunken conference was enraged and seeing red.
With senators retiring and the President gone mute,
Joe Biden leading budget talks, McConnell in pursuit,
And unemployment figures tearing ’part her union base,
The former speaker headed to the mike to state her case.
She needed to avoid faux pas that some, like Harry, made
Who wept o’er cowboy poetry and cuts he wished delayed.
So Nancy threw a presser ’cause the media, she knew,
Would treat her ev’ry word as though it was their point of view.
The press all herded in the room at the appointed time,
To hear the former speaker toss them pearls of thought sublime.
“The new CR is horrid; it is not a healthy bill.
I’m thinking of the children, as you know I always will.”
So said our good friend Nancy, or some words to that effect,
And dutifully the media agreed she was correct.
“The NIH is ruined in this bill and there’s no doubt
We’ll see the incidents increase of cancer, bends and gout.”
“Each fam’ly in America is just one call away,
One diagnosis, accident or act of foul play
Of needing NIH, and now a billion dollar trim
To one-and-thirty-billion is, I think, a little grim.”
And then the sly ex-speaker sought the public to assure,
That “NIH has biblical ability to cure.”
Which sure confused the media assembled at her perch,
’Cause none of them had seen in years the inside of a church.
So quick on-line they scurried to start searching the Good Book
In Testaments both New and Old they frantically did look.
In Romans and Galatians, in One Timothy and Luke,
In Proverbs and in Wisdom and in all the Pentateuch,
They searched each verse and chapter and they searched the Psalms in vain.
They searched in Kings and Esther and in vain they searched again.
But Nancy sure had said it, and Pelosi don’t play games,
So they claimed that they found it in the Bible of King James.
And Nancy got her headlines and she made the evening news,
Where sympathetic journalists her every fault excuse.
But out here in the red states where we pray and all the like,
We don’t much pay attention when Pelosi’s at the mike.