Musing's musings

Why our children isn't learning good

(Apologies for the atrocious grammar in the post title: It was deliberately done to make the point.)

It is a regrettable truism in textbook publishing that as Texas goes, so goes the nation. With so many schools needing books, the biggest states like Texas and California have a disproportionate influence on what is, and is not, available from textbook publishers. No publisher wants to come out with a book that school districts in mega-states won't buy, so they tend to tailor their materials to what they know they'll be able to market in the biggest markets they have available to them.

This should be a textbook illustration of why unfettered capitalism is not always a good thing. But of course, such an opinion would be highly unlikely to pass muster with the Texas Education Agency, which recently released a draft of its new standards (PDF link) for the teaching of U.S. history since the Reconstruction. The standards were revised with the advice of what the TEA terms expert reviewers, though I would argue that their definition of that term is considerably looser than most historians would probably be comfortable with. Of the six individuals listed, two are professors of history, two are tied to evangelical ministries and have absolutely no academic background in history whatsoever, one is a lawyer whose academic background is not clear, and one is a professor of education with no discernible training in history.

I don't recognize the name of either of the two historians on the panel, but that is not in and of itself significant, since I'm a Europeanist by trade. According to his bio page at Texas State University, Jesus Francisco de la Teja holds a Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Texas at Austin. How this qualifies him to address U.S. history is not precisely clear to me. Lybeth Hodges' biography page at Texas Woman's University does not explicitly address either her academic background or her research interests, which is somewhat unusual in academic history. It does seem to me that both of the historians on the panel were chosen primarily for having done all of their academic work in Texas, rather than having the academic background to be able to address questions of American history.

Don't even get me started on having two evangelical Christians empaneled as "expert reviewers." Both David Barton and Peter Marshall appear to have an interest in history, but "having an interest" in a subject is not the same thing as having the necessary background and training to be able to evaluate how it is taught--not to mention the fact that the majority of both men's interest in history appears to involve removing from the teaching of history anything of which they personally disapprove (and they disapprove of quite a bit). If it were not such a serious issue, it would be hugely ironic to see, in Mr. Barton's review of the current standards (PDF link), his disgust that so few American high school graduates can, among other things, find Iraq on a map, name even one Cabinet-level agency in the federal government, or state the freedoms protected by the First Amendment. I agree with Mr. Barton that this lack of what I would consider elementary knowledge is appalling--but I would also argue that it is precisely the inclusion of people like Mr. Barton on review committees that explains why so few of our students come out of high school in possession of such elementary knowledge. They are too busy being force-fed blind patriotism and religious dogma in the guise of education to have the time needed to learn and remember things that are truly important.

It is also ironic to see that the draft standards include (p. 13) an expectation that students will be able to "use standard grammar, spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation" (an expectation which Mr. Barton derided as belonging more to language arts than to social studies or history), when, in one of the comments (A47, on page 5), the reviewers or the staffer who put together their recommendations into final form described Chester Nimitz as the "navel [sic] commander in the Pacific theater." (I should also note that, while the note in question says that Nimitz was added to the list of significant military leaders in World War II, his name does not in fact appear on the list of such leaders that students are expected to know about.) And while I agree that Nimitz played a significant role in WWII as CinCPac (and would argue that he was far more significant a military leader than Douglas MacArthur was), I suspect that his being a Texan might also have an impact on why the TEA wants students to learn about him.

It is not too much to ask, I believe--and particularly in an era when we are trying to get back to the idea that before someone can be certified to teach a particular subject, s/he should have to have received some academic training in it--that anyone asked to review educational standards should have to have the relevant academic background to be able to address whatever standards s/he is being asked to evaluate. If we're talking about the standards for teaching history, then we should be asking historians. If we're talking about mathematics, then it should be mathematicians on the panel--and not megachurch ministers, even if they're very good at counting to large numbers. Parents would rightly be outraged to learn that their children were being taught by people who had no real training in the material they were trying to teach. Why should they be satisfied to have "experts" reviewing the curricular standards that their children's teachers will be forced to follow (and which will likely have a disproportionate impact on the kind of textbooks get published for the next five to ten years) who lack such training?

Not to take the wind out of your sails, Republicans...

...But could you, for once in your miserable hate-filled and fear-driven lives, try arguing a position based on facts and using something bearing at least a casual resemblance to logic?

This health care thing is beyond crazy. I'm not wild about what President Obama is trying to get through Congress--not because I think it goes too far, but rather because I'm quite sure that it doesn't go far enough--like so many other things the president has tried in his first few months in office. But to hear the Republicans talking about it, any change to our manifestly broken and equally manifestly shitty health care system would be a disaster at least an order of magnitude greater than Armageddon. What's more, they're cackling to themselves with barely concealed glee, thinking that this is the president's Waterloo.

This debate may turn out to be a Waterloo moment for somebody. But I doubt it will be President Obama. But before I get to that, let's deconstruct a few things that people really ought to know about this health care thing. First and foremost, our system is not the greatest and bestest one on earth. How do I know that? Well, we could start with the fact that some 50 million people in this country (which prides itself on being the wealthiest in the world, although that is almost certainly not true either) don't even have health insurance, much less access to actual health care. Or we could notice that 28,000 children under the age of one year die in the United States, meaning that our infant mortality rate is higher than Cuba's, among 28 other countries. Or consider that the average life expectancy at birth in the U.S. is roughly 78 years--forty-fifth among 191 nations, and little more than a decade better than the worldwide average of roughly 66 years. Bosnia and Herzegovina does better than we do, as does Puerto Rico, Jordan, Macao, and virtually every country in western Europe except for Denmark, Ireland, and Portugal.

Another bugaboo the Republicans are trying to make hay out of is the spectre of "the government" controlling your access to doctors, controlling your choices, and making medical decisions instead of you. Oooooh, scary! Except, how is that different in any relevant way from the situation most of us are in right now, where our choices, our access to doctors, and our ability to make medical decisions for ourselves are all dependent upon, more or less, blind luck? For those of us lucky enough to have health insurance, it almost always comes with a whole host of restrictions--can only see in-network providers, procedures can't cost more than some set amount, this and that and the other thing aren't covered, and so on and so forth. This fiction that we're all free as birds to choose whatever doctors we want and to get whatever treatments we want is exactly that--fiction. Maybe if you're a member of Congress or fabulously wealthy--but for the average working stiff, not so much. You go where your insurer tells you you can go, and you take what your insurer tells you you can take, and you'll like it. (And chances are pretty good that your insurer will tell you something different next year--at the same time as it tells you that your premiums have just increased by 50%.)

The president is not proposing "socialized medicine"--or anything even close to it. I wish he were proposing something of the kind--because then I'd be considerably more vocal in my support for his health care agenda. I said it during the primaries when he announced this plan, and I'll say it again now: health insurance isn't the same thing as health care. I don't give a shit if people have health insurance. I insist that people have health care. And, frankly, the only system I can see that makes any kind of sense at all is a government-run single-payer model, similar to what you'll find in most of the developed world (including, as the Republicans are eager to point out, places like Canada and the United Kingdom).

Why does single-payer make sense? If for no other reason than something the Republicans are usually in favor of, to wit, economies of scale. When you buy flipping great wodges of something, you usually get quite a price break because you're buying so much. When you're buying prescription drugs for most of the people in America, you should be able to get them at pennies per dose--at least as long as the lobbyists for Big Pharma don't manage to stick a rider on this bill like the one they got inserted into the Medicare reform bill a few years ago--the one that precluded the federal government from doing what Big Pharma certainly does with the companies that supply them with raw materials--negotiate a reduced price on a high-volume contract.

Let me illustrate with some specifics. The State of Illinois sets fringe benefit costs for all of its employees every year. Since I work in grants administration, I have access to those numbers (which are part of the public record, so I'm not revealing any state secrets or violating confidentiality by disclosing this information). For an employee with a spouse (or a domestic partner) and a couple of dependents who wants something like a standard Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan, the state has to pay out roughly $21,000 per year, per employee. The university where I work employs around five thousand people who are eligible for benefits. Let's assume their average insurance cost per employee works out to something like $16,000 per year, since not all employees have dependents, and not all employees choose the most expensive insurance option available. Multiply $16,000 by 5,000 and you get $80 million. Eighty million dollars a year, just for employee health insurance--and that doesn't even take into account things like what the employees themselves contribute toward their benefits, or things like worker's compensation, and other forms of health care costs. If I remember correctly, that $80 million represents about a quarter of the annual operating budget for the university.

Now multiply that by all the businesses in the country. It's a standard assumption that salaries and fringe benefits are going to account for around 75% of the cost of operating any business. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S.'s gross domestic product last year was on the order of $14 trillion in current dollars. One-quarter of that amount is still $3.5 trillion. That's roughly twice the Congressional Budget Office estimate of what one of the reform proposals currently floating around Capitol Hill would cost over its first decade. That $3.5 trillion, however, represents costs that businesses are already paying for employee health care premiums--each and every year. Hell, at $150 billion per year, Obama's plan would be cheap at twice the price--and still a huge savings (as in an order of magnitude) over current costs. Imagine what those businesses could do if they could use that 25% of their annual operating expenses as working capital. I think we could put a few more people to work, for starters--and maybe even manage to pay most of them a living wage and give them benefits.

Now, of course, there are rounding errors in my numbers, and factors that I didn't take into account. Still, they are likely to be trivial in comparison to the size of the numbers we're talking about. The basic point is that virtually anything we do to change the fucked-up mess that is the American health care system will represent an improvement. All the Republicans in the world can't change that fact--but that fact won't stop them from trying to make you think that they know what they're talking about.

Don't fall for the lies of the Party of No. And keep the pressure on the president not only to get his health care agenda passed, but to work for the next step in the process, which is actual health care for everyone in America--not just health insurance.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Especially this picture:

This past weekend, Pat Buchanan (the back of whose head you can see at right in the above image) was at a Republican strategery conference (as was the other dude in the picture, who runs a white-supremacist website that I will neither name nor link to for obvious reasons). Among the initiatives proposed at the conference as a way of attracting allegedly disaffected "white working-class Democrats" to their party, they were proposing to encourage Republican support for English-only initiatives in the coming year.

Perhaps before they run around insisting that everyone speak only English in this country, they ought to have to learn it themselves first? Who was it who said "Remove the plank from your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck in your brother's eye"? Oh, yeah. Someone that Buchanan at least (and probably the other guy as well) claims to know very well and whose words he claims to follow.

The fail is truly epic.

(Hat-tip: Think Progress)

Who comes up with this stuff?

Checking over my site stats listing this evening, and I noticed a referral about an hour ago from a Yahoo search with the query "Who did Obama have the gay affair with?" I mean, really. I know there's a tendency in certain quarters to assume that because someone is vehemently anti-gay that they're actually in the closet, but come on. Obama may not be the "fierce advocate" for gay rights that he's continually claiming to be (or that I wish he were), but he's nowhere near as anti-gay as our last president (to use but one example), and I don't recall ever hearing any insinuation that G. Dumbya might have been a bit light in the loafers.

Now if you'll all please excuse me, I need to go find some brain bleach to get that image out of my head.

ARRA: #GOPFail

Pardon me for lapsing into what I understand to be Twitter-speak in the post title. As I was waiting to pay my bill yesterday at lunch, I caught a glimpse of some blowhard on Fixed Noise bloviating about how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, better known as the stimulus package) was "full of waste."

The bloviating blowhard even had a few examples. I couldn't write fast enough to get them down, but I did jot down the total. According to this pundit, there's $5.5 billion in "waste" in the ARRA. Oh, noez! Five and a half billion dollars, down the drain! Wow, that's really wasteful!

I'm sure that's the reaction the Republicans and their bought-and-paid-for propaganda outlet were going for. But let's put those numbers into some context. According to Recovery.gov (where anybody who's interested can go and see exactly how much money is being spent on what, in which places: it even has a handy-dandy link where you can report suspected waste or fraud involving ARRA funds--which I suspect might be where the bloviating blowhard got at least some of his numbers), total ARRA funding amounted to $787 billion. According to my back-of-envelope calculations, that means less than 1 percent of the money invested has been pegged as "waste." By Fixed Noise, so take that with a grain of salt, please. (And if it really turns out to be waste, I have little doubt that the federal government will demand that the money be given back, so they can put it to better use somewhere else. I know for a fact that's what the federal granting agencies are telling people--spend it, and spend it wisely, or we'll make you give it back.)

Now let's jump into the Wayback Machine, shall we? Set the dial to 2005, when an inspector general's report found a total of $9 billion of U.S. funds unaccounted for under the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. A year later, and another report claimed that as much as $50 billion had been handed out with little or no oversight to various private contractors in Iraq. A year after that, it emerged that our government had flown in nearly $12 billion in cash to Iraq, and could hardly be bothered to keep track of what it then did with those 363 tons of money. (That's how much 281 million greenbacks weigh: almost 400 tons.) Where were the Republicans while all this was happening? Sending college interns, if memory serves, over to Iraq to help hand out that $12 billion--of course making sure that it always went to worthy causes and individuals, naturally.

So the take-home message from the GOP seems to be that anything under $10 billion is "waste," while anything over that amount is "business as usual"--at least as long as it's a Republican in charge of handing it out. As ever, the GOP's rhetoric rings hollow. But I just love it when they make it so easy to fact-check them.

Wingnuttery: The gift that keeps on giving

So I was digging around on Thomas this morning (the Library of Congress's interface where anybody with an internet connection can go to look up what's been going on in the legislative branch), trying to find some summary or, better still, the actual legislative language, of the congressional budget estimates for 2010. I was going through the Congressional Record's daily digest pages for the House of Representatives when I stumbled upon this lovely tidbit:

By Mrs. BACHMANN (for herself, Mr. HENSARLING, Mr. PRICE of Georgia, Mr. SHADEGG, Mr. KIRK, Ms. FOXX, Mr. PITTS, Mr. BARTLETT, Mr. MCCLINTOCK, Mr. GINGREY of Georgia, Mr. WAMP, Ms. FALLIN, Mr. FLEMING, Mrs. BLACKBURN, Mr. BROUN of Georgia, Mr. AKIN, Mr. ISSA, Mr. KING of Iowa, Mr. BURTON of Indiana, Mr. GOHMERT, Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania, Mr. LAMBORN, Mr. PAUL, Mr. CULBERSON, Mrs. BIGGERT, Mr. BROWN of South Carolina, Mr. JONES, Mr. POSEY, Mr. ROE of Tennessee, and Mr. CONAWAY):

H.J. Res. 41. A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to prohibit the President from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States; to the Committee on the Judiciary.

This, after I lay in bed this morning listening to way too much Republican whining, whinging, and hand-wringing about the budget--this is what our Republican "friends" (to use the appropriate legislative phrase) think it's important for Congress to be spending time on? Making sure we don't inadvertently join the Euro zone?

Never mind that the euro has been outperforming the dollar for most of the ten years since it was first introduced--or that the euro zone, considered as an entity unto itself, is the second largest economy in the world. And never mind that, as is apparent to virtually anyone with a brain over the age of about seven years, the U.S. economy (along with those of most of the rest of the world) is hanging, Wile. E. Coyote-like, in the air after running itself off a cliff. While we're waiting to see if its forward momentum will be enough to carry it more or less safely to the other side of the chasm and back on to safe ground, and while the president and the Democratic majority in Congress are working together to get us out of the tremendous messes left for us by the previous (Republican) administration, all the Republicans in Congress seem to have on offer is a lot of hyper-partisan (and scathingly, blindingly, typically short-sighted and forgetful) carping--and this piece of crap.

To quote Dr. Johnson, that the Republican party is still functioning is much like a dog walking on its hind legs: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." If they keep this kind of crap up, I think we can reasonably and confidently predict that they will very shortly fall over and be unable to get up again.

In which, yet again, I prove to be anomalous

Via Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com, I came across the Center for American Progress's new interactive quiz. Nate's analysis found that there wasn't really much of a pattern in the answers given by conservatives and progressives/liberals--which is somewhat odd, given that the two groups are normally conceived of as being, if not exactly mirror images of one another, at least at opposite ends of the spectrum from one another. It would seem, however, that there's a bigger mushy middle than we had imagined.

Then there's me. I've always thought of myself as being liberal, but not ultra-ultra anything. The CAP quiz has a possible score of 400, out of which I scored 350. According to them, that makes me "extremely progressive." The average (by which they mean "mean") score for all Americans is 209.5. The average score for Catholics is 210.8; for people with a post-graduate education, 227.0; for progressives, 237.6; for Democrats, 237.7; for liberals, 242.3; for 2008 Obama voters, 244.0; and for liberal Democrats, 247.1. I'm a hundred points more liberal than liberals, Obama voters, and liberal Democrats. I'm almost a hundred and fifty points more liberal than the average Catholic, and around a hundred and thirty points more liberal than the average person with a postgraduate degree.

By contrast, the average score for conservative Republicans is 160.6; for Republicans, 168.4; for 2008 McCain voters, 169.0; for conservatives, 177.9; for Baptists, 196.4; for whites, 203.7; for men, 204.3. I find it interesting that apparently the average McCain voter is a little more conservative than generic conservatives, and a little less conservative than self-described conservative Republicans. I'm also intrigued to note that Republicans seem to be out-conservativing their traditional base (white men)--which does not bode well for them making any kind of a real comeback anytime soon, since if you ask Republicans what they need to do to get back into power, they say it's to be more conservative, more ideologically pure rigid, and less open to compromise (which I'm not sure it's possible to be).

I'll be interested to see what else Nate has in store after chewing on these numbers a bit more.

I'd call it cognitive dissonance, except...

...In order for there to be cognitive dissonance there has to be actual, you know, cognition, and that seems in very short supply among Republicans lately.

It appears that some of the bloviating blockheads at Fixed Noise are doing that most Republican of things, making an "enemies list." Not surprisingly, lib'ruls and the sites they frequent are pretty high thereon:

BERNIE GOLDBERG: Number three is the Daily Kos. And they are very significant in this current media world in which we live. They have one of, if not the biggest left wing political web sites. They are rabidly anti-conservative. Yet, its founder Markous Moulitsas has so much clout that not only does he get on the most mainstream of shows, Meet the Press, to talk politics but the Democrats who are running for President of the United States went there and made speeches to the Daily Kos convention. That’s how afraid they are of offending the Daily Kos.

BILL O'REILLY: And it’s about as hateful as you can possibly...You can’t get a more hateful web site than them.

GOLDBERG: They started this rumor that Sarah Palin’s child with Down Syndrome may not have been her child, but the daughter’s. It’s just terrible, terrible stuff.

My, oh, my, where to start?

Let's hit the Wayback Machine and set it to, um, last week. Remember all those Republican "leaders" kowtowing before the Great and Powerful Rushbo? Funny how it seems to have escaped the notice of the Republican media machine.

I can't speak for Daily Kos, but I think "anti-conservative" is an accurate description of the prevailing philosophy there. And perhaps some folks there are hard on conservatives once in a while. But Goldberg's frothing at the mouth would look considerably less foolish if he and his fellow conservatives hadn't been spending most of the last decade pissing all over every liberal they could find an excuse to mention, and making scads of money from their followers doing it. Anybody else remember these conservative blockbusters yawners?

• Michael Savage, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder
• Ann Coulter, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)
• Michael Savage, The Enemy Within: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on our Churches, Schools, and Military
• Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism
• Ann Coulter, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
• Sean Hannity, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism
• Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism
• Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror

Those are just the "best of" selections that struck me as I perused a few "people who bought this also purchased..." links at Amazon.com. And while I wouldn't soil my hands with any of the preceding titles, and tend to doubt that any reasonable human being, considering them objectively, would be able to find in them even a shred of a cogent or coherent argument, that didn't stop them from raking in the bucks. Three of those eight books made it to the top of the New York Times best seller list at least once: Coulter's Godless, Goldberg's Liberal Fascism and Hannity's Deliver us From Evil. Neither should we forget that Coulter, Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and dozens of other conservative, um, pundits, routinely call for liberals to be killed, stripped of their civil rights, exiled, tortured, imprisoned, and the like.

And if O'Reilly is convinced that Daily Kos is the most hateful website out there on the intertubes, perhaps he should spend a little time dredging his way through the hate-filled sewer that is Little Green Footballs, or the Free Republic before he makes such an absurd claim. Threats of violence get very short shrift at Daily Kos. They're a staple in trade at most of the conservative websites out there--and instead of being castigated, they're regularly applauded.

Yes, there were some disturbing allegations made about Trig Palin at Daily Kos: by a tiny fraction of the community there. They were universally decried by the rest of the community; a fact which Goldberg conveniently omits to mention. Apparently he was unaware of the smear campaign (widely believed, and probably with some justice, to have been promoted by the Bush campaign) directed against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary when, among other accusations, it was alleged that McCain was the father of an illegitimate black child. Then there was the time when Rush Limbaugh (the Face and Voice of the Republican Party, according to all of its leaders) compared a teen-aged Chelsea Clinton to a dog.

In short, the take-home message seems to be that Republicans can do anything to anyone and no one dares to take offense. But let anyone do anything even remotely critical of Republicans, and it's the end of the world as we know it, a sign of the moral decay of American society, and imputable as guilt to absolutely every liberal on the planet and anybody who has ever even thought about voting for a Democrat. As for being put on the conservacons' enemies list, I'd say that was more of a badge of honor than something to be ashamed of. Or, to quote the immortal Molly Ivins, apropos of the Limboob, it's "...an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle."

I'd like to make a few suggestions...

...for additions to the "For Dummies" series of books. We can start with The Constitution for Republicans, since it does not appear that many of them have ever actually read it--or if they have, they've failed to retain any of the salient points. As evidence, I present the following, from the peroration to Rush Limbaugh's closing plenary address to the Conservative Political Action Public Asshattery Convention, last Saturday in Washington, D.C., in which he was attempting to argue that President Obama's policies represent a "bastardization" of the Constitution:

We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. [Applause] We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life. [Applause] Liberty, Freedom. [Applause] And the pursuit of happiness. [Applause]

For the purposes of comparison, I herewith present the actual Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Sorry, Rush, but of the words you thought were in there, only "Liberty" actually appears--and not in the context you wanted. What you were looking for was the Declaration of Independence, which, of course, you also got wrong. Here's the pertinent passage in the original:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

"Freedom" is not in there, guys. But note that "Government" is. Ooops. The Limboob, and all the boobettes who stood and mindlessly cheered his pompous pontifications at CPAC should all have to go back and retake high-school civics. Oh, and the leaders of the Republican Party might want to rethink all that groveling at his feet they're doing, lest they embarrass themselves even further than they already have.

Small wonder

Future historians of American politics in the early twenty-first century who are hunting for the causes of the utter collapse of the Republican Party need look no farther, I think, than that party's colossal (and growing) disconnect from reality, as evidenced by the California assemblyman I heard on NPR yesterday morning. I was getting ready for work at the time, so I was unable to hear all of his remarks clearly, but the gist of them was that since businesses throughout the private sector were having to lay off thousands and thousands of workers, how dare the state of California not offer to lay off even one in the face of a $42 billion budget deficit?

Excuse me? Perhaps I was wrong, but I was under the impression that we wanted people to keep their jobs. The point isn't just to spread the misery around so it affects everyone more or less equally; the point is to keep as many people working as possible, and to put as many of them who are now out of work back into jobs, so that they will then be able to spend some of their wages to support the rest of the economy, thereby putting even more people back to work and enabling more people to keep their jobs. A rising tide floats all boats, whereas an ebbing tide leaves all boats stranded in the muck at the bottom of the harbor, going nowhere. I may not be clairvoyant, but I think I can safely state that I'm on firm ground in believing that most normal and rational people think the latter example is something to be avoided, not hoped for.

But you'd never be able to tell that from the present-day Republican Party. What's important to them, it seems, isn't jobs--unless it's their own, that is. What's important is that the Republican Party hews to its ideological line firmly, come hell or high water, and never mind the consequences. In fairness to them, I will say that I think they've been very effective at that particular strategy--though I can't say that I believe it's done them all that much good or that it will enable them to perform any better in next year's elections than it did in those we had last year. But then again, silly me, I actually thought the point of having an election was to be the party that won the most seats in it. Apparently the Republicans are working from a different playbook, given that they've lost positions in both of the last two election cycles--and that those losses are largely attributable to their dogged unwillingness (or inability) to interact constructively with reality.