Tears in Heaven
This conversation between Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE and Chris Matthews shows what a system losing legitimacy looks like. Welch doesn’t believe the latest upbeat official job statistics because they are at complete variance with his own observations. He didn’t see any unicorns running in the streets whatever the papers said. Matthews retorts by demanding that Welch ‘prove that the Bureau of Labor statics lied’.
A society with ample legitimacy doesn’t ask those questions. The official statistics are almost universally believed. People take what they read in the newspapers to be fact. They follow the orders of law enforcement officers by long habit. They would no more doubt the solemn pronouncements of high officials like the Secretary of State than their own eyes.
Legitimacy means trust.
But a system in crisis must resort to increasing levels of hectoring and coercion to get what used to be given. In this case the administration needs Chris Matthews to try and browbeat Jack Welch into believing the BLS. This is costly per unit effort because individual intimidation costs more than simply announcing the report.
The Chinese called legitimacy the Mandate of Heaven. A ruler could lose it by screwing up. “Severe floods or famines were considered portents and monitions indicating divine disapproval of the recent activities of the ruler … Although the Mandate had no time limitation, it held rulers to a clear standard. Over the passage of time, there would inevitably arise a ruler who would cause Heaven to withdraw its Mandate. As the Mandate of Heaven emphasized the performance of the ruler, the social background of the ruler became less important.”
This was the Chinese version of what Clint Eastwood tried to talk about during his “empty chair” speech at the Republican convention. If the leader doesn’t perform, if he’s an empty chair then fire him. He’s lost the Mandate of Heaven. Or at least the mandate of Clint.
Some people however believe in a Permanent Mandate of Heaven. In that world screwups have no bearing on anything. In Chicago the Democratic Party has come close to the ideal.
In that city the question is never “do you have the Mandate of Heaven”. It is always “who sent you?”.
The Cook County Democratic Organization is one of the most powerful political machines in American history. Historically called the “Chicago Democratic machine”, or simply the “Chicago Machine”, the organization has dominated Chicago politics (and consequently, Illinois politics) since the 1930s. It relies on a tight organizational structure of ward committeemen and precinct captains to elect candidates….
The most famous example of the Chicago machine in action was in the 1960 presidential election. Daley believed John F. Kennedy would be a tremendous help to Democratic candidates on the ticket, and so he used all the machine’s power to turn out the vote for Kennedy. Kennedy won Illinois by only 9,000 votes, yet won Cook County by 450,000 votes, with some Chicago precincts going to Kennedy by over 10 to 1 margins. Illinois’ 27 electoral votes helped give Kennedy the majority he needed.
Today it is pretty widely acknowledged that the Daley’s electoral practices fell short of the Platonic idea.
But as Chris Matthews might put it at the time: prove Daley cheated. ‘Come on Jack, I double-dog dare you to produce independent evidence that John Kennedy didn’t win Cook County by 450,000 votes.’ And so Chicago continues to cling to the Mandate of Heaven. For now.
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In non-conservative quarters – NPR’s Marketplace, just for example – there was scoffing at the conspiracy theories on the unemployment statistics. I’m reading in some quarters of Unemployment Truthers.
I don’t want to allege that people within BLS would cook the books without some damned good evidence besides, “Oh, how convenient!” But while I don’t buy the conspiracy theory, I don’t think it’s ridiculous, for this simple reason: I don’t doubt for a second that the Obama campaign would do this if they thought they could pull it off. I don’t think Axelrod and the like would feel the slightest qualm about asking.
The BLS could actually be telling the truth. Or perhaps they are doing their best and we’re just seeing our old friend statistical imprecision. But in a society where there is confidence in the institutions the question shouldn’t even be raised.
The fact that it is being raised — and by persons with social standing — doesn’t mean the BLS is lying. It just means they are no longer automatically believed.
A lot of important things run on trust. Deterrence. The value of currency. The solvency of banks. The integrity of poll results. That is to mention a few.
There is a lot of effort invested in trust. A company, a bank, a government can spend generations building trust. Thus when an American ambassador says “we are your friend” foreigners believe it. They act differently because they think it’s real. In ordinary life when someone hands you a dollar, you accept it.
What if one day someone said, “I don’t credit this piece of paper”. What then?
Trust built over decades can be wasted in a very short time by a reckless person. Trust is a drug in the hands of a jerk because he spends it heedlessly until there’s none left. This is the biggest and least recognized cost of all. It is far cheaper for an American president to have credibility — then he doesn’t have to send in the Marines — rather than be considered an empty chair, which case he has to send in the Marines every single time to prove he means it.
Matthews:”It must be embarassing for you to do a tweet now…after the power you used to have“. Now that’s a respectful, objective, non-leading way to preface a question.
What I find most compelling in Welsh’s commentary is what he mentions at around 1:30. “We had 873,000 jobs…by a household survey…which is a total estimate….from 50,000 phone calls“.
So: the government phone-surveys 50K households, and finds 873K new jobs have been created in the last few months? That works out to 17.4 jobs per household.
That’s transparently absurd.
In defense of my home state, Illinois …
In the 2010 gubernatorial election the GOP candidate, Brady, won all but three of the state’s 105 counties. Unfortunately one of the three counties won by the Democrat candidate, Quinn, was Cook County. Hence Quinn won with 46.6 percent of the vote (1,721,812 votes) against Brady’s 46.1 percent (1,702,399 votes). It was a squeaker. If there was an electoral college for the gubernatorial vote, Brady would have won.
Bottom line, Illinois is a RED state–apart from Cook County. And this week I read that there are rumblings that even Cook County is skewing in favor of Romney. So, take heart BCers.
FYI, the real power in Illinois is not Rahm and the Chicago Machine; it’s Michael Madigan, the Speaker of the Illinois House (D-Chicago,22nd Congress. District). Madigan rules Illinois politics as though the state is a feudal grand duchy and he’s the duke. Rahm is his bitch and does his bidding.
As a resident of Cook County and a frequent traveler to rural and downstate Illinois, I can attest that most Illinoisans outside Cook hate the Democrats. And an increasing number of Cook County residents, mostly suburban, feel the same way.
The three times I can recall Cook County machine members losing a general election were indeed close to acts of God. In 1994 north side Chicago voters refused to reelect Congressman Dan Rostenkowski because he was under indictment. In 1988 Cook County Sheriff Richard Elrod was defeated by voters fed up with the corruption in his office. Among other problems, one of his part time deputies had been found stuffed in a trunk a car in the long term parking lot at O’Hare after he and another mob hit man had botched a job. In 1972, black voters rebelled and defeated State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan, who had ordered the infamous 1969 raid in which Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was shot and killed in his bed.
Different cultures have different norms for how the Mandate of Heaven is withdrawn. In China, as the Mandate’s withdrawal becomes more apparent, the ruler who has offended Heaven by his conduct [or bad luck] resorts more and more to violent coercion as a desperate way to cling to power. And as his desperate efforts achieve diminishing returns, and eventually negative returns; the opposition matches violence with violence. A common way for a dynasty to end is for the last Emperor to hang himself in his burning palace as the vastly preferable alternative to being captured by the new ruler whose troops are kicking in the gates.
In our culture; peaceful and non-vengeful [legal or physical] electoral succession has been the norm, and the government has traditionally followed Constitutional practice. For the last generation, the Leftist TWANLOC have gutted and ignored the Constitution. And it may well be that win or lose, they will invoke mob violence against their enemies in the wake of November 6.
In such case, the Mandate will evaporate entirely. And they will have opened up a previously unconsidered range of alternatives.
Subotai Bahadur
roughcoat @4
Bottom line, Illinois is a RED state–apart from Cook County.
Y’know, that reminds me of California of all places. You couldn’t have a “blue-er” state that CA, but it’s all because of SF and LA counties. Get outside of the big urban clusters, and things look a lot “redder”.
5. NC Mountain Girl
Illinois is undergoing a fiscal catastrophe thanks to generations of corrupt, incompetent, but absolutist one-party rule by the Democrats. Quinn, the current governer, is driving a car that has already gone off the cliff. Public sector pensions are destroying the state, and Quinn’s response, naturally, is to raise taxes, which much to the glee of Wisconsin and Indiana, is driving business into those states. Just wait til all those pensions go bust, as they inevitably will (and soon). The Tea Party is strong in Illinois and growing stronger. We’re going destroy the Democrat Machine and the GOP RINOs who have been complicit in ruining our state. Just you wait and see.
Vox day has a post up today, “the decline of human capability”. Maybe the media is now as incompetent in propaganda as the rest of the country is in virtually all its other fields.
If Barack Obama can speak “freely” to Dimitri Medvedev about “more flexibility after the election”, then I think they honestly believe there is almost nothing they can’t get away with.
Unless you worked inside the cesspool of Chicago Machine governance, you have no clue what it’s truly like. Quantum politics at its most bizarre. You can observe it, but you can’t explain it.
This is not corruption at a cellular level, as in most corrupt cities or states.
This is corruption at a sub-atomic level. We are fast approaching Quantum Journalism. The Big Bang is the collision and collusion between Quantum Politics and Quantum Journalism, where they meld together and truth becomes the black hole in the center of evil, where the light of truth cannot escape.
As for the jobs report, we must operate from the position of the smell test. How convenient that we produce only 114,000 jobs…which didn’t move the needle an inch in any other month…and it miraculously moved a Richter Scale quake of new “jobs”…just in time to assist the roiling boil of rage against the machine.
It didn’t move it one percentage point…it dropped below the 8.0% dividing line and again, miraculously to the exact starting point of Obama’s tenure. Amazing coincidence.
To do that on only 114,000 jobs is amazing.
But to create 850,000 jobs out of 114,000 created is simply a staggering feat. A loaves and fishes miracle. Mostly fishy.
I suppose if you give enough Iphones to census takers, they will put down anything you tell them to put down. The methodology of the “household” inventory is so suspicious on its face, we don’t need to have Jack Welch tell us it stinks to high heaven. The number is a fraud. They may not have cooked the books AFTER the numbers were brought to them…they could have gone to the Chicago playbook and cooked them BEFORE they were brought back.
It’s a fraud. And we do ourselves not an ounce of good saying anything other than it’s a fraud. Loudly. Repeatedly. Without hesitation.
Many ancient emperors came from the heavens. Goddess Amaterasu, for instance, showed up undocumented in Japan – no measles/mumps/rubella shot – and begat the Imperial House of Hybrids (see also Watcher angels). Using threats and mandates, they paid the local hayseed to raise pretty koi for them. Although subjugating, it was better treatment than the Hebrews experienced under similar conditions.
I think cfbleachers at 11 nailed it. Just shake a box of Machine Fixeroo into the ingredients mix as it is stirred, not after it comes outta the oven.
Re: the Mandate of Heaven, American Thinker had an article about this a couple of days ago, too. It is very apt image.
But…
Is it HEAVEN’S Mandate we’re talking about? I mean, thinking of those human demons (what else can you call them?) who raped–raped, God damn them–and then killed, our ambassador and our other people, and then taking a moment to conjure up from Hell’s shady ‘burbs all of the Obama lying and cheating and smirking and arrogance of the last four years, (and Hillary too, I hafta add–she should be set to some medieval torture for her inexpressible failure) I’m reminded of a line from C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. I don’t have the book any more but the line is about the Macrobes, demons, of course, who are the REAL rulers of Belbury. Maybe it is the narrator who says it, I don’t even remember that, but referring to them, it is said that they destroy their servants when they can no longer make use of them. They “break their tools” I think it said.
The Incredible Crumbling Obumbo Admin is just the kind of real-life Belbury that would have the head of a murderer babbling incoherence to them (ol’ Ayers up in Chicago) and of course Buraq himself is just the kind of chap who woulda been giving that final speech at Belbury’s final banquet, I can’t help but think. Remember him? Jules something or other, a parody of H.G. Wells–talked and talked and talked, and all of it utter BS.
(Mark Studdock would be the segment of the American people who took a chance four years ago on “Belbury” but are now on the verge of coming to their senses. We’ll see.)
An Préachán
How do the guys from Chicago pull this off? Easy. Over twenty thousand of these new jobs were government jobs. The department of labor would have their information. When they do the survey of fifty thousand households they would know who to call, randomly of course. If someone like Mr. Welch objects they can assure him that Mr. Holder will investigate. North Korea? You’re living in it.
Seeing the reaction of Matthews, et al is a good reminder for all of us: if you don’t equip yourself with a variety of input and sources, only talk to like-minded folks, then you set yourself up for this [seemingly] bewildering event. It can’t be! Everybody knows that’s impossible!
Somebody cheated! It could NOT have been fair or our side would’ve wiped them out.
Except they didn’t of course.
Contrary opinions don’t changes well-founded opinions of one’s own but they do let you know there’s more out there than the ”obvious”, ”self-evident” truth. Lacking that is when the unexpected really hurts because it was obviously impossible.
I went snorkling this afternoon to my old digs at Open Salon – and it appears from the comments appended to the only ‘front page’ chosen OS blogger who wanted to address the debate is along the lines of ‘Romney Lied!’
Observe the dissonance unfold – broken now and again by a couple of apparently sane contributors. (I was once one of the relatively sane OSers, until I just got tired.)
http://open.salon.com/blog/chauncey_devega/2012/10/04/that_was_no_rope-a-dope_obama_got_his_butt_kicked_by_romney
Promoting cynicism sand distrust isn’t a bug to a revolutionary Gramscian. It is a feature. They want the wheels t off.
@16. Ok, I went and looked. You know I felt cleaner after I fell in the pig farm cesspond.
Of course the labor numbers are absurd. We just ran the fourth budget deficit in excess of 1.2 trillion dollars. If unemployment had declined the 20%+ Obama’s acolytes claim the deficit would be south of 1 trillion. If the economy truly was recovering there would be a decline of people on food assistance when in fact it goes up every month. There is no recovery right now and in all likely we are back in recession. Remember they claim growth at only 1.3 % but that is based on an inflation rate of under 2%. No one believes that number. It’s more like 3-4% and that puts us at negative growth.
W: “The official statistics are almost universally believed. People take what they read in the newspapers to be fact.”
Other than loving God, one’s family and fellow man, and working creatively and diligently in one’s occupation, the highest goal of every man should be to simply observe, comprehend and accept self-evident truth. It appears that the highest (or should I say the lowest) goal of totalitarian government is to either lie to the people, conceal the truth, or prod the people to accept both the truth and the lie simultaneously [Insanity]… with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Totalitarian government expects its subjects to be molded into a state of controlled insanity.
“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident… I tell you Winston that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else; not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.” George Orwell – 1984
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously [the lie and the truth], and accepting both of them [Insanity]… with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth… Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is; in general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion; the more intelligent the less sane… If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality… If human equality is to be forever averted; if the “high,” as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently; then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity… Even the names of the four ministries by which we are governed exhibits a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts; the ministry of peace concerns its self with war; the ministry of truth with lies; the ministry of love with torture: and the ministry of plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink; for it is only by reconciling contradictions [doublethink] that power can be retained indefinitely.” George Orwell – 1984
Thing is, they can lie all they want about job statistics, but people who are out of work, or who have friends out of work, still know what’s going on. If we were all analyitical robots, perhaps cooked books would work, but we’re not. When evaluating the economic situation, the average voter frankly doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about statistics, they care about their job, their family member’s jobs, their neighbor’s jobs. It’s like Reagan’s joke, receission is when your neighbor looses his job, depression is when you lose your. And recovery is when
CarterObama loses his…The BLS can BS all it wants, but people out of work and people who’s wages have been stagnant (amid rapid inflation) aren’t going to be fooled. Something’s still rotten in Burbank. It’s not just that the official reports are no longer trusted – the entire system is no longer trusted. Too many pillars of society have been discovered to be on the take, on the make, running a scam.
Now it’s in God we trust, all other’s pay cash. And God better have some ID on him too…
In a similar vein, Andrew Klavan has written a marvelous take-down of Mr. Wonderful for The City Journal – “Fantasy Candidacy, Imaginary Man.” http://www.city-journal.org/comments/index.php?story=8542&#comments
The unemployment propaganda just reveals that, after their momentary lapse into truthful reporting right after the debate, the “journalists” shook it off and plunged into battle anew (Fox News didn’t question it either), using the weapon the liars in the Obama Administration had so thoughtfully provided them.
In other words, the “Ministry of Truth” is still going at it, hammer and tongs, wholly unrepentant.
I expect the fight to get even uglier. Please, folks, if you aren’t already: send money, volunteer, do whatever you can to help. Let’s get behind our ball-carrier and PUSH!
RE labor statistics: they just compared apples and oranges.
All along, we’ve been told the Oranges Percentage.
Now that Hussein needs a big boost, the BLS releases the Apples Percentage! and mirabile dictu, it’s Exactly what Hussein needs for his campaign!
Just like their “jobs created and [New Category!] ‘saved’” bunkum. “SAVED.” And the Unjournalists didn’t say a blasted thing about this whole new imaginary category.
Just like their lies in not reporting — just stuffing down the Memory Hole — the workers who’ve given up looking for jobs altogether. Of course, if any Repub were President and pulling this crap, they’d be screaming to have his head on a pike, holding conspicuous charity galas in Lost Angeles, and making propaganda movies about the Lost Workers ad nauseum.
It’s all bulls***. And so brazen it’s breathtaking.
@3 cellec
What I find most compelling in Welsh’s commentary is what he mentions at around 1:30. “We had 873,000 jobs…by a household survey…which is a total estimate….from 50,000 phone calls“.
So: the government phone-surveys 50K households, and finds 873K new jobs have been created in the last few months? That works out to 17.4 jobs per household.
That’s transparently absurd.
No, it’s not, and no, it doesn’t work out to 17.4 jobs per household. 50K households is large enough to estimate the unemployment rate within 1/10 of a percentage point or so, 95 percent of the time. Presidential election polls typically sample something between a few hundred and 1,700 voters; 1700 is large enough (probably more than large enough) to estimate how all voters would answer, if they were polled, within 3 percentage points, 95 percent of the time. Far from being absurd, these claims are mathematically provable, so long as the sample is randomly selected. There are only so many ways to pick 1,700 voters at random and not come within 3 percentage points of the right answer. This is statistics.
The macro-structure of current econometric data do not support the BLS job numbers. We’ve had practically unlimited QE, and now supposedly a large uptick in hiring, and yet the price of oil is crashing, with no new supply coming online.
Something doesn’t add up here.
Look. We all know about “discouraged” workers. Just how do they survive?
Well, schoolteachers and Union thugs have huge annuities they can draw down. The really poor just take welfare and work off the books. Lazy twenty-somethings stay in college, taking courses in belly-button lint gazeology.
None of these things help grow GDP one iota, because they produce nothing at all. They are all simply mechanisms for further borrowing from the Fed, which has no assets, yet is generating mew money by simply asserting that it is there. China doesn’t even want our debt anymore. They’re Communists, just not stupid communists, like ours.
Richard, you have it exactly right. Even Gold is only worth anything because we all agree it is so. There have been times in history where a few seeds of wheat upon the ground were fought for with knives, while piles of gold lay scattered about. That’s inflation, baby!
Gold is just the same as any other medium of exchange. So is the Dollar. We have all gone along with government inflating our dollars so it can repay with cheaper dollars down the road for many, many years, all the while softening the blow to themselves through automatic wage increases.
So they make more, their union buddies make more, and the slack comes out of every non-union worker and small businessman, who always have less, while always being extorted at ever higher rates, while people who actually saved for their own retirements become more destitute with each passing day, as their hard-earned dollars from 1960 are now hardly worth the paper they are printed upon. In 1960, they could have paid their real estate taxes with a $100 bill. Today, they probably send many thousands to their county. Did their money appreciate that much? Don’t believe it.
Ostupid must be very simple, indeed. He thinks that there is no limit to what the government can print or inflate. He is another idiot who doesn’t understand that NOTHING in the real world is a linear equation, He just thinks it is because he couldn’t pass Algebra, so he never discovered parabolas or especially, hyperbolas!
Trust. In each other and in our leaders, They’re allowed to tinker at the edges, but without trust, Louis’ head went into the basket, just like everyone else’s.
“Far from being absurd, these claims are mathematically provable, so long as the sample is randomly selected.”
Don’t confuse yourself. The sample does not “prove” the jobs were created.
Jack should have repsonded to Miss Mathews thusly:
When was the last time the Obama administration issued a jobs report that wasn’t quitely revised downward later?
They didn’t just lie in this new un-employment report… they lied in every report.
28.visitor: “…they lied in every report.”
It will be after the First Tuesday in November when it will be found out that a simple clerical mistake, a misplaced decimal point in a spreadsheet if you will, was the only error in the report. But, it wasn’t 873,000 jobs, it was 87,300 jobs, and thus the “Jobless Greater than 8% for XX Months in a row” record will be broken, or actually, unbroken, but it won’t matter, as the Lightmaker will have been retained for another 4 years.
Once the citizenry loses trust in their governance, Katy bar the door. In other countries one must bribe the officials to do their job. Inspectors expect paper money folded into applications, installers magically “Find” that extra part that has caused delay your work when they are encouraged to search a little more by your largesse. Your car will remain unstolen if you pay a watcher. Your business may not burn down, or may get decent response from the fire department if contributions are made to the “Right” people. Police officers may or may not respond, or “lose” your paperwork…
Once you lose trust, all trust is suspect, and only a fool will trust any more. You will not have ‘legal recourse’ against the developer who wants your property without having a fistful of dollars to stuff into someone’s pocket.
THAT is the result of the ‘inshallah’ and ‘manana’ societies. Whatever.
tom
When doing course-work for my PhD circa 1973/74 my professor in political philosophy noted that: “Strangely, although in my day (he would have been an undergrad in the 30s) there was much discussion about what constituted a legitimate government, today there is almost no interest in the subject, at least as it applies to “free-world” Western governments..”
My take on his statement at the time (which still stands) is that WWII provided a soul-searing unifying experience which papered-over much of the ideological differences that everyone was too emotionally exhausted to examine seriously by providing a mutually shared experience–an “era of good feeling”–that emphasized commonalities. It has taken over half a century since the 60s when those mutual bonds began to dissolve for the process to play out as the WW II generation is fast on the way to dying out, and their children ( the pre-boomer “war-babies”–the smallest but also the best educated [by SAT scores]–generational cohort of any) who mainly came to share their beliefs and are also now easing from the public scene into retirement and out of the few levers of power they did enjoy. We are now witnessing first-hand what a return to the political state-of-nature looks like in which the opposing parties now share hardly ANY commonalities (a dissolved Venn Diagram, if you will) and no longer regard the change of control of government as a non life-threatening event (in terms of economic, financial, regulatory and cultural dominance.)
@27. Andy Krause
“Far from being absurd, these claims are mathematically provable, so long as the sample is randomly selected.”
Don’t confuse yourself. The sample does not “prove” the jobs were created.
I didn’t say they did. I said the claims I had made were mathematically provable, those being: that a sample size of 50,000 households suffices to estimate the unemployment rate within about 1/10 of 1 percentage point of its true value, 95 percent of the time; that a sample size of 1,700 voters in a presidential election poll suffices to estimate how the whole population would answer, if the whole population were to be polled, within 3 percentage points, 95 percent of the time. I said this in reply to cellec’s msg 3, where he had called it “transparently absurd” to claim that 873,000 jobs could be inferred by interviewing 50,000 households, since it results in 17.4 jobs per household.
So don’t confuse yourself.
Try to understand something: I like this blog, but it pains me when people here emphatically make preposterous claims, such as cellec’s, and it makes me doubt the claims that are made in fields I know little about. I’d like to think I was learning something, not reading a bunch of bombastic garbage. I know that’s unrealistic – almost all blogs have bombastic garbage in their comment threads – but still I think it’s worthwhile to oppose it whenever possible.
The labor stats are impressive, impossible according to Welch. And what will we do with the head of the polling group that created 850K jobs from thin air, when we win? Clearly the results were politically motivated. Will those people still retain their jobs?
I think R&R should announce soon that the (R)s have been working diligently behind the scenes for months, creating the legislation necessary to start fixing our problems. The legislation would be enacted on Jan. 21, 2013, given sufficient majorities.
Any(R)s that haven’t been working on it should be fired too.