I'm Sorry, I Misspoke

We all mis-speak at times, stumble over our tongues or have a short circuit between the earphones.

When a politician says something outrageous and then claims "I mis-spoke," shouldn't reporters ask "Well then, what did you mean to say?"

Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern (R), said this week that:

"We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that's tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don't want to study as hard in school?" she asked. "I've taught school, and I saw a lot of people of color who didn't study hard because they said the government would take care of them."

"Kern also said women earn less than men because 'they tend to spend more time at home with their families.'"

Again, everyone misspeaks at times, everyone makes mistakes.

"When I said "all philosophy is a footnote on Plato, I really meant to say 'Socrates.' I'm sorry; I mis-spoke."

So what did Rep. Kern mean to say when she "misspoke?" What reasonable observation could she have intended to say that somehow "mistakenly" came out as that brazenly racist and misogynistic pronouncement?

And is she sorry she said it? Or that people heard her say it?

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BTW: My experience is that there are crazies of all political stripes - we can't condemn any party because it includes some of them.

OTOH, I believe we can and should criticize a party when it refuses to reprimand the crazies in its leadership:

GOP House Speaker Kris Steele said Kern "will not be admonished by the Oklahoma House’s GOP leadership."

Maybe Mr Steele can tell us what reasonable statement could have ended up "mis-spoken" like that.

60 Years Of Job Growth

Conservatives keep telling us that if we follow their polices, we'll see a lot of job growth. And a fiscal conservative friend of mine repeats the claim that tax cuts promote job growth,

"Just look at the unemployment figures during the middle years of the Bush II administration, that proves that tax cuts create jobs."

I was a bit perplexed, since my recollection is that during the Bush II administration, job growth didn't even keep up with growth of the work force. So I poked around.

"Really? What do actual job growth numbers show us?"

The source of statistics which seemed most applicable to my recollection came from the Wall Street Journal's article from January 2009: Bush On Jobs: The Worst Track Record On Record

The chart here is based on the table in that WSJ article, and focuses on the average growth in payroll per year held in office for each president since Truman. Red bars are Republicans, blue bars are Democrats.

The chart sure seems to show that job growth is generally a lot higher during Democratic Party presidencies than during Republican Party presidencies. Comments are welcomed regarding this chart and its implications.

(The president's names might be a bit difficult to read: from left to right they are:

• Bill Clinton
• Jimmy Carter
• Lyndon Johnson
• Ronald Reagan
• Richard Nixon
• John F. Kennedy
• Harry Truman
• Gerald Ford
• George H.W. Bush
• Dwight Eisenhower
• George W. Bush)

I don't know why unemployment was low during the middle years of the Bush admin, when job growth was the worst we've seen since World War II when job growth was the worst we've seen during that same period.

I'm thinking that during those years, many people entering the work force age range just didn't bother to even look for jobs. Unemployment is calculated on surveys and looks at the niumber of people who have sought work during the previous 4 weeks. If youngsters didn't even bother to start looking, then the unemployment calculation would simply exclude them.

Note, I also found statistics reportedly based on statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics which seem to be at odds with the Wall Street Journal's tables. I cannot explain the differences, and decided to go with the WSJ since they could be presumed to portray these sorts of statistics in the light most favorable to conservative views.

Again, it seems to me that the chart above strongly suggests jobs grow more during Democratic Party presidencies than during Republican Party presidencies, but any additional enlightenment is welcome.

Tyranny in the US

Many people today are looking to the Declaration of Independence ("DoI") for guidance and support for their concerns with the way our government works and what it does.

The DoI announced bold principles of liberty. It also provided a list of the many tyrannies the colonists were fighting against (which details the founders said had to be included in the DoI.)

Most of the tyrannies listed involved questions of governance. Two were:

"For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

"For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever."

The Republicans in Michigan are openly engaged in that very tyranny, and it is reported that they are drafting legislation in Wisconsin to do the very same.

Tea Party people: Where are you on these Republican tyrannies?

Another complaint both then and now is taxation. Today, the objection is to paying them.

For our founders, the objection was to "imposing taxes on us without our consent." The rallying cry on this issue was "No taxation without representation."

We have a representative democracy, so that one is simply off the table.

I don't intend to disrespect for Tea Party participants; I believe that many of their concerns are quite real in a way. On the other hand, I believe they have been mislead and misinformed on many of those issues, on the facts involved in those issues, and on effective solutions to those issues. (As noted above, the founders didn't complain about taxes, they complained about no representation, no vote, no power at the ballot box. And history tells us that they threw the tea into Boston harbor because it belonged to a huge corporation which had just been given tax breaks by the government.)

"Take back our government!"

I agree completely. And who has taken control of it?

From 1998 to mid 2010 $28.58 billion was spent lobbying the federal government.

• $23.87 billion (83.5%) was paid by corporations.
• $0.42 billion (1.5%) came from labor unions.
• (The remaining $4.7 billion, 16.,4%, came from sources which are not easily characterized as to goals.)

So who do we need to take our government and country back from?

On Edit: My data came from Open Secrets at the Center for Responsive Politics' site

As indicated, I originally got my data in mid 2010. On checking, the figures through the end of 2010 have changed a bit, and I was just too lazy to recreate the spreadsheet and recalculate -- it looks as if te totals changed bu the basic ratios remain pretty much the same.

It CAN Happen Here - And Is Right Now

As an American, I believe that

"that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

During our history as a nation, periodically at times of unrestrained fear, some people in power have lost sight of those ideals and values.

Sadly, we are entering another periodic paroxysm of fright.

At the start of these Muslim Witch Trials, "Rep." Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee pronounced:

“to back down would be a craven surrender to political correctness.”

No Mr King,* to back down now would be to regain your American ideals and values.

My experience is that it is all too easy to get swept up in turmoil and to lose sight of my core values. We are, after all, human.

Mr King: we are a strong nation - we are at our best when we don't let our fears get control of our actions, individually and collectively.

I pray you will pause for a moment, and take a deep psychic breath, so you can recapture your vision of and appreciation for the greatness of the American people and of our institutions.

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* In this blog entry I have spurned the honorific "Representative" in addressing you because right now you do not represent the Americans or the America I admire and love as a patriot.

I hope that you, Mr. King, might regroup and regain your representation of what is best in America, and repent your representation of the dark, regrettable episodes of fearful behavior.

The Real Real America

The other day, presidential maybe hopeful Mike Huckabee said:

"He [Obama] has a different worldview and I think it is, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings."

As a democracy-loving American, I believe that the people who represent us in government should know who we are. All of us. And not think that "all of us" share the experiences and history of just the 13 percent of us who grew up going to Boy Scout meetings. (See below.)

I believe our leaders, our representatives, have to understand that their own experiences alone do not represent the "real America" and that they have a civic duty, a responsibility, to consciously expand their experience and their understanding of who we all are as a nation if they want to represent the 'real America.'

And I am very concerned that Huckabee believes, that his "worldview" is "most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings."

Also, a few days ago I heard a politician being interviewed on NPR say he wants a return to "the real America." I arrived at my destination just as he said that, I didn't hear his party affiliation or his idea of what the "real America" is or was. (That particular story wasn't one of the fabled NPR driveway moments.)

Some Background

When I was growing up in the 1950s, I was taught that "the real America" was a "melting pot." A rather inartful metaphor, but I understood it to mean that America is made up of a wide variety of different people with different backgrounds.

(Point of fact: the immediate "real America" of my tender youth was predominantly white middle class and our fathers had pretty much all fought in WWII and worked as executives in "the city." And I was a Boy Scout and played Little League baseball, badly, in right field.)

But I had some sort of vague awareness that there was plenty of America which wasn't white and middle class and many folks didn't think "Father Knows Best" was a documentary.

I was in my teens and twenties that my"real America" expanded to include experience with a huge range of non-white non-middle class folks.

What an eye-opener, even for someone with a pretty good imagination and wide taste in reading material.

Some Facts About The Real "Real America"

Mike Huckabee said: "And I have said many times, publicly, that I do think he [Obama] has a different worldview and I think it is, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings."

Being a natural born question-asker, I wondered: "Really?"

So I did some digging into the number of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in the US, and the population of the age groups included in those two organizations.

The age breakdowns for scouting activity don't line up precisely with the census age breakdown, but with some rough and ready extrapolation, I came up with these figures (to match the age range for the Boy Scouts organization):

Boys and girls ages 6-18: 53,093,000

Girls and boys in scouting: 6,926,000

Now, let's assume that the percentage hasn't significantly changed over the years.

Roughly, just 13% of boys and girls are growing up "going to Boy Scout [and Girl Scout] meetings. (If you want to read Huckabee's statement using the principles of strict construction, only 8% of us grow up going to Boy Scout meetings.

Note to Mr Huckabee: "No, not only didn't President Obama not grow up in Kenya, but most of us didn't grow up going to Boy Scout meetings."

My Experience and Analysis

Frankly, I think this obscure factual inaccuracy is more telling, perhaps, than your knowledge failure about President Obama.

In my experience, each of us tends to assume that everyone has had the same experiences and shares the same understandings and values. (Honest people tends to assume everyone else is honest, liars tend to assume everyone else is a liar.)

Some of my biggest mistakes in life have resulted from acting from that sort of misunderstanding.

In my opinion, until you and your fellow conservatives really meet the "real America," your projections of your life experiences will continue to not be representative of the American people as a whole.

It's a wonderful nation out here, in the real "real America."

I hope you'll join us. Not just in the Boy Scout meetings, not just in the Baptist churches, but in:

• the coffee shops,
• in the employee break rooms of the big box stores,
• behind the fast food counters,
• in the senior centers and "rest homes,"
• in the unemployment lines (right now there are about 14.5 million Americans in that group, compared to about 7 million Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts),
• on the manufacturing product lines,
• in the classrooms of the cities as well as the small towns (about 79% of us live in urban areas),
• in the Mosques and synagogues and churches of the many different Christian denominations,

And in the many other types of places "real Americans" congregate.

Come get to know us and then, maybe, you'll be qualified to represent us.

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Sources:

For population, I used the 2009 figures at http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0007.pdf

For the boy scouts and girl scouts, I used the numbers given on their wikipedia pages.

Urban population data: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census/cps2k.htm

Letter To My Ohio Rep

If you feel like sending an email to your representative* please feel free to copy and/or amend:

QUOTE

Dear Representative _____

As a constituent of yours, I urge you to vote against the House counterpart of SB 5.

First - those bills combine a large number of different legislative initiatives, which the Republican Party promised us in last fall's "Pledge to America" it would not do.

"Advance Legislative Issues One at a Time

"We will end the practice of packaging unpopular bills with “must-pass” legislation to circumvent the will of the American people. Instead, we will advance major legislation one issue at a time."

(Pledge To America, pdf version, page 33)

I urge you and the other Republicans in the Ohio House of Representatives honor that simple and important promise to the American people and the people of Ohio.

Second, as a Christian I accept the teaching of so many denominations and religious groups which support collective bargaining. They include:

National Council of Churches

Northern Baptist Convention

Catholic Church —LEO XII

United Methodist Church

Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.

The Episcopal Church

United Lutheran Church In America

The Disciples of Christ

The United Church of Christ

Church of the Brethren

Central Conference of American Rabbis

See: http://www.awppw.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8&Itemid=7

Third, squashing unions is not the answer to our state's fiscal problems.

If we are going to act fiscally responsibly, we need to encourage and develop good paying jobs with benefits, not eliminate them where ever and when ever possible.

I believe that fiscal responsibility requires us to not only look only at expenses, but also makes the hard but responsible decision to reject repeated reductions of revenues through tax cuts.

Please remember, Ronald Reagan raised taxes several times - calling them "revenue enhancements" - when fiscal responsibility required additional revenue.

I believe that true "Reagan Republicans" put fiscal responsibility ahead of popular yet irresponsible repeated tax cuts.

Fourth, please remember that this is a very important issue, and in the next election, the people of Ohio will remember who voted for ending public sector collective bargaining and who supported the working people of Ohio.

Both political parties are capable of misunderstanding the "mandate" they receive in elections.

I believe that, this time, the Republicans have badly miscalculated the values and views of the people of Ohio and the people around the nation.

Please ask yourself which is more important to you: party loyalty or representation of the will of the people.

Respectfully,

Name

Address

======

* Find your Ohio representative

Standing Up to Bullies

It seems to me that, while President Obama's drive for bi-partisanship and moderation is laudable, he has become nothing more than the skinny kid being taunted in the congressional schoolyard as the bullies run him ragged playing keep-away. And without his leadership, the democrats in Congress are rudderless.

Each of his "moderate" responses simply encourages the bullies to ever more extreme demands, and until Obama learns that there are times a leader has to actually lead, to take a position and stand by it, learns to stand up to the bullies, the lurching to rightwing extremism will only accelerate.

The time is long past for President Obama to stand up to extremism. He no longer looks statesman-like or presidential - he looks weak and ineffective.

The "accomplishments" of the first two years? Passage of bills which are gravely compromised or embodiments of Republican policies and goals is not accomplishment, it is surrender.