On Saturday, Oct 31, 2009, Jim Marshall held a community meeting. I attended this meeting and here is my perception of the events.
Tifton Mayor Jamie Cater opened the meeting and went over some rules, of which there were three. If you had a question you had to raise your hand; if a question was asked on a subject, please do not repeat that subject material; only one question per person.
During the first few minutes of the event, Jim discussed the purpose of this meeting. Originally, there were several health care town halls scheduled in September. During and after the first town hall meeting in Tifton, Jim received strong feedback that it was poorly communicated and few heard about it. Jim then described, how in a rush, his team implemented a change to their communication technique and utilized e-mail to let the next area know their event was scheduled. It turned out many of his e-mails to inform the people ended up in junk mail and went unnoticed. Again, he received strong feedback for failure to communicate the event.
Now, still in a rush to get the word out, Jim and his team decided to mail out flyers to everyone for the next meeting. It turns out the post office in Albany let the flyers sit on the docks for several days. This caused the flyers to arrive at people’s homes at the time of the event and several days later. Once again Jim and his team had a time crunch and decided to use the airwaves to communicate their last event in Macon. This, along with a lot of public interest in Macon, made a difference and there was an overwhelming crowd.
A little later during the meeting, Jim spent a few minutes describing how he was pleased with this community meeting. He compared it to the time of our founding fathers and how they would all sit in a half circle room debating the concerns of the time. This is far from the truth of what Saturday’s meeting entailed, because a debate is when you have questions, answers and rebuttals. What occurred Saturday was far from debate. It allowed for a question, then Jim gave his answer and that was that.
Now, Jim was gracious enough to let me ask a question, even though at the beginning of the conference he made a false statement, on which I challenged him. He said if I had a question I had to raise my hand, but a question was not my intent. I wanted to challenge him on the statement. However, I let this go because it was the right thing to do for everyone else.
My question was basically this: “Jim, when you started your meeting, you gave a great example of government in a hurry to do something. In your example, it was simply to inform the public of a Town Hall meeting. Yet, several failed attempts were made and here we are saying we have to sign the health care bill ASAP, which does not go into effect until 2013. Well, some of the new taxes start immediately after the bill becomes law. What are you going to do to ensure this is not rushed?”
Jim’s response was basically this bill is a conglomerate of small bills, which different people put together already and they already know what’s in them, so waiting is not necessary. Then he went off to the next person.
Now, here is where a debate would have helped shed light on his and others’ bad philosophy. If a follow-up question was possible, here is what I would have asked. “To date, there are still legal challenges to the first amendment, which is one line long and you are going to tell me that a bill which is 1,990 pages long is understood and could not have large back doors or errors in the intent in it?”
There was a lot more to the meeting, 30 more good questions, covering things such as auditing the Fed, Cap and Trade, corruption in government, czars and Communists in the government having access to top secret material, his vote on TARP, Fairness Doctrine and several other subjects. At best case, Jim's responses were his stance and worse case, a vague reply covering multiple sides of the issue and not a debate by any means. There were also many comments which went unchallenged. Another example I wrote down, was his statement, “We are not going Socialistic,” which was stated a few minutes after we discussed the federal takeover of banks, the auto industry, pay czars, health care and just before we discussed net neutrality, all of which has the government controlling industry and financial markets.
For all those out there that were not able to make the meeting, one message was clear. Jim said too many times to count, that he will vote “no” on the “health care bill” and always added “as it is now.” So depending on how you determine what it is you can rest assured of Jim voting ----?
One last fact some of you might be able to relate with and may help put things into a better perspective. I left my phone number with Jim's Macon office, prior to the release of the original health care town halls, because they stated he did not know if he was going to do any. They said they were keeping a list and would call to inform others and myself if any town halls were scheduled for the break session. I never received a call. I did find out about the meeting from friends, after two phone calls to the Macon office and one no answer to the Dublin office, on Sept. 17, two days before the original Tifton town hall. On the second phone call to the Macon office, I was able to confirm it.
Jeff Korson
Alapaha
