Recently I received a bulk email from my congressman, Rush Holt (D – New Jersey – 12). Mr. Holt sends these out occasionally as a way of keeping his constituents up-to-date on his job performance. Reporting on what a good job he is doing is very important to him. It’s so important to him that he also does this in-person. Once I went to one of his town hall meetings. The meeting was scheduled for only an hour and one-half. He arrived 15 minutes late and then announced that he would field questions because he was very concerned with his constituents opinions. But, before doing so he spent forty-five minutes giving us a report on what he was doing for us in Congress. He did not extend the duration of the meeting.
Perhaps I don’t need to say this, but I will anyway. The Q&A period was fairly short.
Maybe that’s the way he prefers his constituent meetings?
U.S. Representative Rush Holt
Don’t get me wrong. Members of Congress reporting on their performance is important. Of course, their report is only their own word, and I suppose we must believe them. But when Mr. Holt sends me emails like the one I mentioned above, I must doubt the veracity of anything he says. Here is why.
These are the first three paragraphs of Mr. Holt’s email message:
Together with Ranking Democrat Ed Markey and the staff of the House Committee on Natural Resources, I have worked for more than a year to gather and analyze data about safety and environmental violations committed by oil and gas companies. Our report, “Drilling Dysfunction: How the Failure to Oversee Drilling on Public Lands Endangers Health and the Environment,” has just been released, and its findings are alarming.
The report finds that from 1998 to 2011, more than two thousand violations were handed out by the U.S. Department of Interior to oil and gas companies drilling on taxpayer-owned lands. More than 500 of these violations were classified as “major” by committee staff, including 293 violations related to non-functional blowout preventers and 113 citations for deficiencies in casing and cementing programs.
Yet the enforcement of safety rules was erratic and inconsistent, and all told, the Interior Department collected only $273,875 in fines. That’s roughly equal to a single minute’s worth of oil company profits – the equivalent of levying a 10-cent fine against someone who earns $50,000 a year.
If these assertions are actually true, then Mr. Holt make some good points. But if you’re regular reader of this blog, you know that I like to dig deeper into the real meaning of the words that are put before our eyes. And it’s the results of that deeper digging that influences our judgement of what is or is not true.
The first paragraph is misleading.
In the first paragraph Mr. Holt states that he, Mr. Markey, and “the staff of the House Committee on Natural Resources” just released the report, “Drilling Dysfunction . . . ” When the words
Continue reading Rush Holt: Drilling Dysfunction? How About Meaning Dysfunction?
