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.”
I don’t speak Pelosi so I have no idea what she is saying. Can anyone translate this for us?
Since some people already think that Jesus should be budget director, maybe Pelosi is merely laying the groundwork to make him director of the NIH.
March 11th, 2011 | 2:00 pm
I think it comes from the figure of speech “of biblical proportions” which means really big and dramatic, a la parting the Red Sea or Noah’s flood. She shortens it to “biblical,” meaning “really big.” It’s just sloppy language, it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual Bible.
March 11th, 2011 | 2:19 pm
Good Lord, could we at least get leaders who can speak in coherent English sentences? Please?
March 11th, 2011 | 2:48 pm
It’s a curious argument as well. We shouldn’t cut due to loss of cures. Should we add? Not addressed. How much is enough? No one really knows. I’d prefer a real argument to the suggestion that if you cut that part you might condemn sick people to die. But…it’s politics. I guess it’s not supposed to make sense or else someone might hold Rep. Pelosi to her words.
March 11th, 2011 | 3:10 pm
Well, the answer to “what should we do if we just don’t have the money” is always, “Cut that other thing instead.” And then you ask the person who benefits from or like “that other thing,” and you get the same answer.
March 11th, 2011 | 3:39 pm
It seemed to me like she suddenly thought of a way to throw in some religion: “NIH helps find cures. Wait, curing happens in the bible. That means it’s a biblical power!” = NIH’s biblical power to cure.
March 11th, 2011 | 5:02 pm
Of course, if Jesus did come down and began healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and showing the path to salvation there would be little work for the NIH, HHS, HEW, and the other assorted alphabet soup organizations that make up our federal government.
March 11th, 2011 | 7:08 pm
I’ve never see a politician so laughably uncomfortable when playing for the religion vote. She always does a double take when talking like that, like she can’t believe she has to kowtow to plebes even rhetorically.
March 11th, 2011 | 9:57 pm
Nih does find cures. Cut it and the quest for knowledge and medical advances is cut.
NIH, in a way big pharma can’t and won’t, does the initial research that drives a huge segment of our economy in pharmaceuticals. This has consequences. Return on investment in this tiny segment of the budget has been enormous, in a way that private industry hasn’t touched.
Every choice has consequences. Grover Norquist’s dream world of a shrunken government includes an end to the institute that succeeded in showing the world how to stop perinatal HIV transmission, how to save incredibly ill neonates, and how to limit brain injury at birth.
NIH research dollars gave the world an attempt to alter fetal anomalies, with (finally) success in reducing the brain injury and damage associated with spina bifida.
All choices come with consequences.
What has been the choices instead? Iraqi and Afghani wars?
March 12th, 2011 | 5:38 pm
Dan,
I’m sure NIH does good work but so do many others, including our soldiers, sailors, and Marines.
The fact is the money isn’t there. Not only that, we are several trillion in the hole. You do know that with the first 800 billion dollar stimulus bill, we spent more than all the years we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan combined? How do we recover? We can’t do it by pretending someone else has to do it.
March 12th, 2011 | 10:31 pm
Actually, it is difficult to discuss the value of soldiers in these wars, particularly if one considers the wars unjust in initiation or failing in justice in practice.
Choices have consequences. Conservatives make choices for war. Against research programs that impact the health and welfare of infants. It is clear.
This debt is the desired outcome of Republican strong man Grover Norquist. The role of spending the government into impotence is undiscussed, too.
Cutting spending has implications that imoacts lives. When the melodramatics of “death panels” came into play, conservatives played big “boo-hoo” sessions about someone daring to suggest these health care acts need to exist on a budget.
Today, if one has multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, or mitochondrial disease, conservatives are now saying that figuring out better therapies or life-saving cures are too expensive.
Just say it: sorry, these wars are more important to us than your health and future. They always were. In fact, we never liked sponsoring research for this anyway.
March 13th, 2011 | 12:18 am
Also, the stimulus plan has both social and economic ROI that has been realized in the short term and more for the long term. The wars of convenience have neither of these possibilities.
March 13th, 2011 | 5:02 pm
Pelosi at the Mike
With 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.
thebardofmurdock.blogspot.com
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact