Congresswoman Mimi Walters

I wasted an hour this morning at the South Orange County Economic Coalition. The Laguna Beach resident who is our representative, Mimi Walters was the speaker. I was a little surprised that Scott Voigts was not there, nor were any other members of the Lake Forest council. Of course, Robinson and Hamilton never do show up at these functions. The only people from Lake Forest (that I recognized) there were other than me was Peter Herzog and Bob Holtzclaw.

Paul Simonds, who signed one of the anti-recall flyers supporting Hamilton chairs the meetings, and did his usual job of lobbing softball questions to Ms. Walters.

She talked about, in her prepared remarks, family issues, such as paid leave and a “work flex” schedule. The latter would be interesting in California, since California law will not allow firms to have employees work four ten hour days (instead of five 8 hour days) unless the firm pays overtime for the extra two hours each day. It could be that law has changed, but that is what it was ten years ago.

Walters also made a couple of startling comments. She said it has only been the last couple of years that the United States has become aware of North Korea’s “advanced” ICBM program. That is odd since a lot of us familiar with the issue knew about it in the nineties. She also commented that cyber security is a new threat. Again, those of us with a background in this were aware of this in the eighties, although we called electro-magnetic vulnerabilities then.

She was lobbed the question about Charlottesville, and gave the stock answer, those darned members of KKK and Neo-Nazis cannot be tolerated. Like so many others, she courageously failed to mention those folks, not on the right, that destroyed private property in Berkley and Ferguson. Guess that was just a progressive program of removing urban blight.

There were a lot of other topics skimmed over, but no need to go into detail here. She did tend to talk down to the audience, even telling us there were 435 members in the House. Perhaps one of the scariest things she said was that we need to have the government get involved in self-driving cars, because it is a program she strongly believes in and only the government can managed it. She apparently never heard Reagan’s comment about the scariest phrase in America was: “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you!”