We need more court Jesters

I haven't always been able to laugh at myself or find humor in what critics have had to say about my beliefs and ideas.  But the older I get the more I appreciate humor as an important measure of a movement's maturity.  A person or organization who can't take the heat of humor is insecure.  I believe he or they secretly or no so secretly are worried that once one or two people start laughing, more will join, then more and more until the whole world is laughing.  And rather than fight humor with humor or with boring facts, such insecure people and organizations fight the messenger.  Even worse, they don't listen to the message with or without humor.

One sees this a lot at demonstrations where many of the signs are spot on ... and funny.  But the target finds that offensive and reacts by attacking the sign holder.

The most recent example was comedian Stephen Colbert's testimony  before congress in defense  of migrant farm workers and in criticism of our contry's treatment of such workers.  Because he used humor in his testimony he (and the congresional committee chair) have been criticized as "mocking congress" and "wasting taxpayers' time".  Funny, but when buffoons masquarading as congressmen or -women give testimony they're just doing their job.  Why didn't a single Republican on the committee ask Mr. Colbert what was so funny about migrant labor?  Or if he really thought that a day in the fields made him as much an expert as sitting in the committee room for days on end did for them?

Tea Party poll

I suspect the Tea Party started out trying to relate to the Boston Tea Party of the American Revolutionary War which was a protest against taxation without representation.  But it has ended up more like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland in which everyone was a little crazier than the next person.

Many of us have been curious as to who they are and what they believe.  With the Democrats and Republicans we can at least look at the party platforms that are revised and approved at the national conventions every four years but with the Tea Party it seems to be who can get the biggest audience and make the biggest headlines.  Their platform is they have no platform.

So CBS News and the New York Times set out to solve this mystery by interviewing several hundred people.  Of course no one has officially registered as a member of the Tea Party so they had to define a class of people as "Tea Party supporters".  And what a class it is!  Their responses to the poll seem to indicate that they prefer getting their answers from Fox News rather than thinking things through.  An example is blaming Obama for the current economic depression but saying the reason they don't like Obama is that they just don't like him.  Likewise their main complaint seems to be the growth of the Federal Government but they think very highly of Bush during whose administration the government grew by leaps and bounds.  They blame congress and indeed all politicians for inconsistencies yet can't seem to see their own.

I'm not going to rehash the whole poll.  It would make a wonderful homework assignment for a critical thinking class. But I did want to make it easy for you to find the poll and the CBS article on it.

CBS article  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002529-503544.html?tag=stack
Who They Are: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/poll_tea_party_who_they_are_041410.pdf?tag=contentMain;contentBody
What They Think:  http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/poll_tea_party_041410.pdf?tag=contentMain;contentBody

Execution statistics - who's winning?

You have to be careful about statistics.  They can be true and yet very, very misleading at the same time.  For example, it is true that China executes between 400 and 500 people a year (1).  With a popultaion of 1,345,000,000 (1.3 billion) (2) that is 1 execution per 3 million people.  For comparison the great state of Texas executes approximately 21 people per year(4) and has a population of 24 million(3).  So Texas has 1 execution per 1 million people - 3 times the rate of China.  The rest of the USA executes about the same number as Texas and has a population of 300 million so that is 40 executions of 1 per 7.5 million. 

In summary, for every 15 million population:

USA executes 2 people per year

China executes 5 people per year

Texas executes 15 people per year

Hooray for Texas!!

China 471, USA 42

(1) http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_exe-crime-executions

China 1360,000,000  USA 308,000,000

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

 Texas   population  24,000,000

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population

Executions  21

(4) http://www.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/death-penalty-facts/executions-by-year/page.do?id=1011591

Healthcare Reform

Which, of course, should be called Healthcare INSURANCE Reform since it has much more to do with insurance than health care.  I wanted to publish at least a small entry on this topic simply because for better or worse it is liable to be the coming decade's BIG THING.  It will be blamed for or credited with all the good and bad things that come out of Washington for some time.  Every politician elected or defeated is likely to blame or credit the Reform Act.  Long after it's influence can possibly be shown, it will go on affecting our lives.

Now if we could just get the news media to talk about something else.

Put the pedals to the metal

Again I feel the urge to climb  up on my soapbox.  This was caused by an editorial cartoon implying that adequately regulating banking would involved throwing bankers  to hungry dinosaurs.

Assuming newscasters and commentators represent the American people (which of course they don't) one gets the impression from news media that the banking industry is to blame for much of our current economic troubles.  And the solution is to replace the leaders of the banking industry and increase the regulation.

Now Credit Unions are not banks and I'm not a banker.  But Credit Unions operate under many of the same type of regulations and business practices of banks and I have served on the board to two credit unions for over 20 years combined, 4 of those years as president of the board.  So I think I know something about banking.

Banking has been one of the most regulated industries.  They had strict guidelines about what percentage of their assets could be loaned to what type of clientele, how much profit they could make, how their credit card interest and payments had to be structured, how many bad loans they could make.  It was all regulated.  But foreign banks were getting more of the business because of less regulation.  So we loosened the regulations and let banks get creative.  It worked - more credit was available to more people but at the cost of increased risk exposure.

Now we're demanding greater responsibility (read "more and harsher regulations") and more credit (read less regulations or more liberal regulations).  This is like driving down the road with one foot on the gas pedal and one foot on the brake.  Brand new drivers sometimes do this with the result that the car jerks and  pitches, often throwing around passengers and packages.

So, too, we can expect a bumpy ride until we have a fully functioning banking system back in place and we let the experts once again recommend and run their banks.

Trust me, just trust me

It's soapbox time again.

In my opinion one of the silliest threats to come out of the healthcare reform activity of the past few months was the recent warning by Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, that Democrats would pay a price at the polls in November.  According to the New York Times  Mr. McConnell said, “If the Democrats jam an expansive bill through Congress, it will be the issue in every single election in America this fall.”

Does anyone, anyone truly believe that this whole healthcare reform issue WON'T be an issue in every single election this fall?  Does anyone believe that if the Democrats drop their whole effort, the Republicans will say, "Okay, we won't field any candidates this fall and we won't try our hardest to unseat every Democrat we can and we won't use the very THOUGHT of Democrats passing a partisan bill to influence the electorate.”  Poppycock!  It doesn't matter what the Democrats do at this point and it didn't matter what they did for the past year.  The Republican goal is to regain control of congress. Period.  

What will be interesting to see is if any Democrats see through this empty threat.