More of a rant really

I'm still shaking my head by the hypocrisy and...other stuff...shown by some members of the US and WV senate. The majority in the former couldn't be bothered to come up with a workable COVID relief bill for the last two months or so but is racing to stack the Supreme Court deck before the election. 

Of course, WV senator Shelley Moore Capito is all on board, despite saying this four years ago when President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the court:

“Before a Supreme Court justice is confirmed to a lifetime position on the bench, West Virginians and the American people should have the ability to weigh in at the ballot box this November. My position does not change with the naming of a nominee today.”

This time around, she had this to say:

 “I support the choice to move forward with the confirmation process and will consider President Trump’s nominee on her merits as West Virginians would expect me to do. In these trying and polarized times, it is important to exercise our constitutional authority and move forward with the process.”

Then there's this: 17 Republican members of the WV Senate signed on to a letter sent to the presidents of WVU and Marshall University that among other things expressed outrage over WVU football players putting BLM stickers on their helmets. Oh yeah, and the senators referred to Black Lives Matter as a "domestic terrorist group," basically saying the assertion that Black lives indeed matter amounts to hate speech.

Apparently this tantrum kept the senators too busy to express outrage at the death of over 200,000 Americans to COVID due in part to a botched response from the Trump administration.

Can't wait to see what happens next...

 

Nothing like the real thing

During the worst crisis in American history, President Abraham Lincoln made time regularly to talk with and listen to all varieties of ordinary citizens. He understood that success in leading a democracy required an understanding of public opinion and the only way to get that was unfiltered contact with the public.

That meant spending time with uninvited visitors, singly or in groups and ranging from office seekers to petitioners to ordinary people to cranks. Lincoln called these occasions his "public-opinion baths" and viewed them as critical to his ability to govern.

As he told a Union officer, "I feel, though the tax on my time is heavy, no hours of my day are better employed than those which thus bring me again within the direct contact and atmosphere of our whole people. Men moving only in an official circle are apt to become merely official, not to say arbitrary, in their ideas, and are apter and apter, with each passing day, to forget that they only hold power in a representative capacity."

Lincoln admitted that many of the concerns brought to him were utterly frivolous and others were more or less important, but he believed that "all serve to renew in me a clearer and more vivid image of that great popular assemblage, out of which I sprang, and to which I must return."

It was his way of keeping it real.

Unfortunately in today's political climate it's all too easy for political leaders to insulate themselves from their constituents, just as it's easy for us ordinary citizens to live in media bubbles where we stay in our political comfort zones.

For a democracy to work well, there's no substitute for direct contact. That's the only way that real connections can be made between citizens and their representatives. And it's the only way for representatives to understand the concerns of real people. And there's no more direct way for that to happen than by open and unscripted public meetings.

In this day and age, that may take a little political courage. But that's what leadership is all about.

There's no partisan monopoly on this. In March, after some occasionally tense pressure from citizens, Sen. Joe Manchin held four wide-open events from the eastern panhandle to Huntington. It wasn't always a love feast. He took heat from those who disagreed with some of his votes, but there was also a chance for honest give and take on the issues.

New Jersey Republican Congressman Tom MacArthur recently endured a mostly hostile five hour meeting with constituents, many of whom were angered by his vote to replace the Affordable Care Act with the Trump supported replacement.

Love him or not, at least he had the courage to show up and take it.

These days, you get points for showing up.

Whatever their political views, West Virginians deserve representatives and candidates who have the willingness and courage to show up for face-to-face meetings with those they represent.

Everybody needs a good bath every now and then.

(This appeared as an op-ed in Sunday's Huntington Herald-Dispatch.)

The old, the new

Whatever my political leanings may be, I have a really strong conservative streak--in the old sense of the word conservative, as in respecting the traditions of the past. I tend to value old things that have withstood the tests of time to new innovations.

I suspect more wisdom can be found in places like Greek tragedy, myths and old philosophies than in just about anything on the bestseller list. Science would be the major exception.

I think that's one reason why I like Confucius, whose approach to philosophy has been called (by whom I can't recall) "innovation through transmission."

A saying of his from the Analects that has influenced me is this one:

One who studies the old so as to find the new is worthy to teach others.

This doesn't imply a mindless repetition of old traditions but rather a critical evaluation of them in search of insights that apply to the current situation, a kind of dialogue between past and present. I've always suspected that the best innovators are not people who make up things out of new cloth but rather those who piece together old insights in new ways.

IF ALL GOES ACCORDING TO PLAN, WV Governor Joe Manchin will name the person who will fill the late Robert Byrd's US Senate seat (if not his shoes) today. As soon as that person is sworn in, we can probably expect yet another vote on extending unemployment benefits to the approximately 2 million people who have lost them. Lots of us hope that WV's vote will be the tipping point.

Here are three related items:

FOX NEWS TRASHES UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS. I know that's a shock, but read more about it, including debunking, here.

A DOUBLE IMPACT. To clear the palate, this issue brief from the Economic Policy Institute shows that UI benefits don't just keep jobless workers going but also help create and preserve jobs:

The reasoning is simple. Those who are unemployed are experiencing a major challenge to maintain anything close to their regular standard of living, so any assistance they receive will be spent on necessities, not saved. The spending that results as the unemployed pay their rent, buy groceries, and so on saves and creates jobs throughout the economy.

ASSESSING ARRA. Here's congressional testimony on the Recovery Act and what remains to be done to deal with the impact of the Great Recession.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE CORPORATE SUITES, the Washington Post notes that:

Corporate America is hoarding a massive pile of cash. It just doesn't want to spend it hiring anyone.

Read more here.

CHICKEN HAWKS. The loudest voices on the deficit are opposed to allowing Bush-era tax cuts to expire.

ONE FOR THE ROAD. Here's the Washington Post on the passage of landmark financial reform legislation.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A mote to trouble the mind's eye

The opening scene of Shakespeare's Hamlet does a masterful job of setting the mood. It is midnight on the battlements of Elsinore castle. Bernardo and Marcellus relieve their fellow soldier Francisco.

They are basically grunts, far down the chain of power and command, but they sense something is amiss. Old Hamlet, their king, died under mysterious circumstances. His brother Claudius married the widowed Gertrude and displaced young Hamlet from the succession. There are rumors of war with young Fortinbras of Norway and a military buildup is in progress which "does not divide the Sunday from the week." On top of everything else, a ghost resembling Old Hamlet has been seen in full war gear the last two nights.

Bernardo and Marcellus have invited the scholar Horatio to witness this for himself. Horatio, full of the "modern" learning is skeptical but is convinced when the ghost appears. All agree this is a bad sign, one which reminds Horatio of those said to have occurred at the time of Caesar's assassination:

A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets:
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse:
And even the like precurse of fierce events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen.--

I especially like his courteous if unsuccessful effort to converse with the spirit:

Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,
Speak to me:
If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me:
If thou art privy to thy country's fate,
Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid,
O, speak!
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death...

The spirit remains silent and they resolve to tell young Hamlet of it the next day. It's a scene that has worked to get the audience's--and the reader's--attention for the last 400 years.

JOBS. Here's an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute on the latest trends in the jobs picture.

MINE WARS, PAST AND PRESENT. The Charleston Gazette's Jim Haught had a good column in Sunday's paper reviewing the history of West Virginia's mining conflicts--including the latest battle to get Blair Mountain listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

GRIDLOCK. Here's a discourse on the disfunctionality of the US Senate.

HERE'S A SHOCK. A coal industry-commissioned study of itself found it to be all good all the time. By the way, a belated happy birthday to Ken Ward's uber-blog Coal Tattoo!



GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED