Bringing people together and encouraging citizen responsibility

The American’s United for Life action arm has launched a petition to stop the Freedom of Choice Act which President Elect Obama has promised to sign into law a soon as possible.

Here is Obama’s statements regarding the FOCA

Here is a statement on the FOCA from the Westchester Institute

FOCA would call into question virtually every abortion-related state and federal law currently in force. It would immediately supersede every federal law, such as the partial-birth abortion ban, restrictions on federal funding of abortion through Medicaid, and the ban on abortions in military hospitals. On the authority of FOCA, state laws protecting the lives of unborn children and their mothers could be immediately unenforceable. All the modest and reasonable state laws of the past 35 years (which have also been successful in reducing abortions) would fall to legal challenges based on FOCA. These include the following laws: protecting parental rights to be involved in an abortion decision, ensuring informed consent, regulating abortion clinic “safety,” protecting the conscience rights of doctors, nurses and hospitals to not be involved in abortion, and protecting women from non-physician abortionists among others. Significantly, taxpayers could also be forced to fund abortions for the uninsured.*

Read the full article *emphasis mine

Here is what you can do to help (taken from the Fight FOCA website).

Fight FOCA

The Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) endangers women and silences the voices of everyday Americans. Read about it and sign the petition against it at FightFOCA.com

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1. Respond to news/rumors about yourself

Waaay back in Feb Seth heard about someone with a twitter account in his name and posted this response.

Which leads to this post. I don’t use Twitter. It’s not really me. I also don’t actively use FaceBook, and I’m not adding any friends, though I still have an account for the day when I no doubt will. I also don’t use Flickr or MySpace or Meebo.

He responded right away, personally, he cleared the air. Then he goes on to explain his reasons for not using twitter.

My reasoning is simple, and it has two parts. First, I don’t want to use a tool unless I’m going to use it really well. Doing any of these things halfway is worse than not at all. People don’t want a mediocre interaction. Second, I don’t want to add a layer of staff between me and the tools I use and the people I interact with.

Lesson: if you decide to use a new online tool, really use it. You can’t do it all so choose where you want to talk with people.

2. Like most rumors they tend to crop up over and over. Scobleizer on twitter propagated the rumor again and within minutes there was a response on Seth’s blog.

Seth’s Response

[This post is cynical. You've been warned.]

If you think that’s a friend of yours on twitter, don’t be so sure.
[...]
Online, rely on direct, personal interactions to be sure you’re seeing what you think you’re seeing. Trust, but verify.

If someone else is talking about you, join the conversation, join it right away, be real and use it as a lead in to teach something of value. Oh and motrin’s response isn’t something to copy (also a Godin hat tip).

So to all you politicians out there (and anyone else for that matter) people are talking - are you talking back?

p.s. in case you missed it I’m a fan of Seth Godin and I recommend reading all his books (especially Tribes)

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In his latest YouTube video Rep. Scott Boyd argues for the House to pass legislation quickly to keep physicians in the Commonwealth.

Props to Representative Boyd for using YouTube, check out and subscribe to his channel here. Now all he needs is a blog to show his latest videos on. Judging by the view count he isn’t getting a lot of traffic to his “official” website.

I moved to Rep. Boyd’s district almost a year ago and so far I’m a fan. He’s a common sense guy with a good head on his shoulders and I’m glad to have him as my representative in the 43rd district.

P.S. Rep. Boyd also has a flickr account and is on facebook but it doesn’t look like he uses the facebook account.

Remember it’s not the tools that matter it’s how you use them.

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This is one of those rubber meets the road issues for conservatives in Pennsylvania. I live in Lancaster county and most of the people I’ve talked to about the smoking ban (who don’t smoke) say that they like the smoke free environment but they aren’t sure if the government banning smoking is such a good idea. As a result there hasn’t been much a public outcry over the intrusion of government into private business.

Take a serious look at the smoking ban and though you may enjoy it, do you think it was the proper thing for our government to mandate.

Check out this short video on smoking bans, hat tip to the Policy Blog.

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