When we’re talking public bodies, who gets to say, “enough’s enough” and then ban public dialogue at a public meeting?

This being the United States, intuition might tell you that no one does. If it’s a public body and a public meeting, then the public gets to talk. But, for starters, you’d be wrong here in Ohio where the law provides for a right to attend public meetings, but it does not provide for the public to have a right to participate or comment.

Punctuating the (perceived mis)use of a similar power, but in this case in New York, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy have sued the town of Sanford’s board for its September 2012 resolution that bans public comment on fracking:

The resolution said: “It is the determination of this Board that hereafter no further comment will be received during the public participation portion of this or any future meeting regarding natural gas development,” until the state’s environmental review was done.

Not so unreasonable?

Read the rest and start a conversation about it. Should electeds get to ban the public from what they can discuss?

As a public figure she should know better.  We hope that Ms. Terhar will retract the comparison and apologize.  She should make clear that Holocaust comparisons are inappropriate and a terrible distortion of the history of World War II.

Thanks to reporter Matt Bruning’s tweet from this morning’s Ohio Board of Education meeting, you can read precisely what Ms. Terhar had to say – and you will not see the words “Hitler” “Holocaust” “history” or “World War II” in it:

This is incredibly unfortunate – that in a state of 11 million people, and at least 3 million children in public school, the person who is the president of our public government body charged specifically with improving public education in Ohio (I read the ORC on their duties last night), Debe Terhar continues to refuse to see or perhaps just lacks the competency to see how the content of her Facebook posting is the problem, not her “mistake” for sharing it somewhere where the public might see it. Her characterizing the Facebook posting as “hasty” contradicts her prior statements that said she was only trying to get people to be thinking.

This is incredibly bad precedent to set. How on earth will Debe Terhar have the ability now to lead the board to a “healthy consensus” for kids’ best interests, let alone judge with any credibility what far lower level education system people do given that she’s suffered zero consequences?

Although I absolutely do not question the integrity of a number of individual members of the State Board of Education and in fact am grateful for their speaking out and stepping up, I have no faith in the entity’s credibility so long as Debe Terhar is its leader.  This is not what Ohio needs or deserves if it wants to play the game of attracting people here. Education is almost always the first thing many people look at when considering where to live.  Her inability to recognize the wrongness of referencing Hitler as she did, whether the public sees it or not but simply as a matter of what educated people should not do, chills me to the bone and I know it affects many, many people the exact same way.

Scary, scary stuff at the top of education system.

As if we needed any more evidence as to why the Civic Commons wants its users to agree to be “civil” before engaging online, a Columbus Dispatch editorial declared last week, in regard to a social media incident involving the state Board of Education president, “This H-bomb is a dud: Invoking Hitler is unlikely to be a winning political strategy” and a highly regarded expert on online politicking likewise wrote of the same incident, “…dropping the H-bomb pretty much destroys the intellectual credibility of the dropper…”. That H-bomb, and many other words and utterances of name-calling, are the nuclear bomb equivalents of destroying any chance for meaningful, useful dialogue.  And that is the opposite of what the Civic Commons seeks to promote.

Of course, linguistic laziness in unpacking and examining controversial topics isn’t committed solely by people in the poltiical arena. Last year, a food industry CEO apologized for comparing President Obama’s health care reform efforts to fascism because, as he admitted, the word “fascism” has “…so much baggage attached to it.” He went on to say that he thinks we need a new word to describe what he sees as the country, “…no longer hav[ing] free-enterprise capitalism in health care…[because t]he government is directing it.

Read the full post here.

Here are a few thoughts:

1. I work on a daily basis to get public officials to engage with, you know, the public. I don’t want less engagement between those two sets of stakeholders. I’m also an elected official, so I live this as well.

2. Engagement, like democracy, can be dangerous for public officials who do not comprehend that online engagement in particular wants to be public and, like heat seeking the highest points, engagement seeks out public forums.

4. I’m in my ninth year of engaging online and I trust its self-correcting nature, for me and for others. It’s why I don’t demonize it. But it requires humility and acceptance as well as confidence to stand up for what you’ve placed online, however you placed it there (including your original words or *just* sharing a photo or quote from another source, which then is open to being scrutinized, for that’s part of what social networking is all about – scrutinizing the networks of people or organizations we view online in order to understand the otherwise one-dimensional representations of themselves that they’ve placed online with their name attached to or affiliated with it) or apologize for it and explain yourself. If you are not prepared to do any of that, then get training before you engage online. If you are not capable of or don’t agree in doing any of that, please do not enter public office. Public office in the 21st century demands people who accept the public part and the public part, in the 21st century, includes the online public.

Now, here’s a little free advice – I won’t charge you what crisis communications folks would: if, like Debe Terhar, you are someone who holds a public position like hers – the nominal and actual leader of Ohio’s State Board of Education – then the threshold for your online conduct is going to be high. It should be high. This is why many state level agencies have communications departments as well as lawyers, and why they should have social media policies and social media bootcamps for all level employees, tailored to what each level of employee needs.

Debe Terhar’s apology to Governor Kasich (though it’s not exactly clear how it was communicated) and others to whom she reportedly sent an email Tuesday evening only covers her failures in knowing about and understanding how being a public official works when you’re in online spaces. Here’s what she reportedly has said (bold is mine):

“Again, I truly regret not using better judgment with the posting on my personal Facebook page,” she said in the e-mail. “The last thing I would ever want to do is embarrass the State Board of Education or compromise the important work we are doing.” She asked board members to contact her directly with any concerns.

Terhar also attached the statement that she’d made earlier to the media, in which she said “I regret the consequences of carelessly sharing that picture and I will be more selective in my use of social media in the future.”

Other news reports include quotes from Ms. Terhar in which she says that by sharing that photo on her Facebook page, she wasn’t intending to compare President Obama and his ideas on gun ownership, gun rights, gun control and the Second Amendment to Adolph Hitler and the (inaccurate) quote in the photo she posted, but rather she wanted to make people think.

And you see, here’s that other thing you have to know when you’re a public official on social media: people certainly are going to think and you cannot control what they’re going to think and you are going to have to accept that and understand your options for how to respond to how people are now thinking about what you say you wanted them to think about, all the while remembering that what you say you wanted people to think about? Yeah – that just doesn’t always happen in a one-dimensional medium and you, the person who posted, and the person in the public position? You have to be prepared for that.

For being thoughtless about the consequences of sharing what she shared (as well as for believing that her page was *private*), I forgive Debe Terhar.

But for Ms. Terhar to suggest that I be so naive as to think that a person who is supposedly qualified to be president of the State Board of Education didn’t know the range of ways in which people might think about the Hitler photo and quote she shared? She should at least step down from being president of the board.

Why? Because as a parent with two kids still in the Ohio public school system, we can do better and we have to do better than having a person at the top of our State Board of Education who either grossly lacks an understanding of our kids’ most common tools of communication and can’t use them properly (and then removes everything she wrote? I’ve run for office and my entire blog is still up), or, as the Anti-Defamation League writes (they’ve asked her to apologize), fails to see the outright inappropriateness in even providing content that suggests a comparison between our president and Hitler:

“Whatever one’s position on the gun control issue, analogies – whether direct or implied — to Hitler and the Holocaust have absolutely no place in the debate over gun control,” said Martin H. Belsky, ADL Cleveland Board Chair, and Nina Sundell, ADL Regional Director.  “While one can disagree with the Obama Administration’s position on gun control, comparisons of his proposals to Hitler’s trivialize the memory of the six million Jews and the millions of other who perished in the Holocaust and are deeply offensive to Holocaust survivors.

“Clearly Ms. Terhar needs an education about the history of the Holocaust,” added Mr. Belsky and Ms. Sundell.  “As a public figure she should know better.  We hope that Ms. Terhar will retract the comparison and apologize.  She should make clear that Holocaust comparisons are inappropriate and a terrible distortion of the history of World War II.”

Frankly, if Ms. Terhar were a police officer and sent something like this around in her email to fellow officers, she’d very possibly be required to attend sensitivity training – something I actually think she should consider.

So what photo did I share on Facebook when I wanted to get people thinking about these issues? This one:

Before Ms. Terhar says or does another thing related to our kids’ education, she needs to say and do something, to and with the public, all of us, about this incident beyond addressing her lack of judgement about sharing on Facebook and her intention to get people thinking about the Second Amendment and history (as if we’re not doing that anyway and without such provocation). And there are some very good suggestions in this post about what those words and actions might be.

Many political candidates don’t just have a fear of commitment. They have a fear of engagement. But with 2013 being a local government election year, voters should pull no punches in putting the question about committing to public engagement to the people who want their votes. Contrary to the immortal words of the ultimate Meatloaf song, we can’t just sleep on it. We want to know: what’s it gonna be, yes or no?

So often, we clamor to know how a candidate will vote on an issue he or she hasn’t yet faced. We provide hypothetical circumstances that we want them to imagine are real. Sure, plenty of politicians pick and choose issues about which they will shake their fist and blurt out a reliable yes or no (consider how few elected folks waffled on the Affordable Care Act; most knew what they wanted, the issue was whether they’d vote for what came before them). But mostly, we’ve come to accept as routine a refusal to comply with such a demand. It’s truly rare to see courage rear it’s head and and expose itself through the voice of a political wannabe as he or she, instead, silently calculates the local vote count that can be earned by resisting commitment.

Now, with the fear of engagement, there is hope. At least, I have hope.

Read about why I have hope here and add you thoughts in the accompanying conversation.

Nine. I love that answer.

I swish my hair too much, but I also never get seated in the last spot – see, Michael Heaton’s hair doesn’t have to swish at all – well, you know, Michael – the hair that’s there?

What might the United States political world look like in 2016? The predictions began to roll in even before 2012 votes were counted, with Vice President Joe Biden being one of the first to tease about being a candidate — for something — in that year.

My first thought is, just how long is four years anyway? In four years, my second of three children will be starting college and my youngest will be a high school freshman. My own re-election for City Council, should I choose to run again, is next year — and for me, that’s a nine-month birthing event as it is since, with kids, a full-time job, being on Council now and still doing writing and speaking. In case President Obama’s win didn’t demonstrate this axiom enough, planning a campaign out in excrutiating detail is mandatory if you also want to plan on winning.

Only 1458 days left until Election Day 2016! Go read the full post here and get ready!

How can you follow along? Several ways:

1. On Twitter, search on the #nprmeetup hashtag

2. Follow me on Twitter – @jillmz

3. Check out the Twitter list, https://twitter.com/JuanSaaa/npr-election-night

Now, if you really want to dig in, the Civic Commons backchannel live-chat with my colleagues Dan Moulthrop, Jason Russell and probably a few others will be the place to be. You can follow that action here. If you haven’t had civic engagement courtesy of a Civic Commons backchannel conversation, you will not want to miss it there tomorrow night.

At NPR, we’re going to have a chance to meet Ken Rudin, the Political Junkie, if anyone has any questions, and Andy Carvin, NPR’s senior social media strategist, really is a rock star in his own right for many reasons but perhaps he’s best known for his coverage of the political and civil movements in North Africa and across the Middle East.

Women currently hold 73 House seats and 17 Senate seats and make up 17 percent of the US Congress. In this election, there are a record 163 women nominees for House and 18 for Senate. The 2012 Project’s campaign to hit “20 Percent in 2012″ requires women to hit 87 House seats and 20 Senate seats after Election Day.

To make the most educated guess, consult the 2012 Election Tracker. Predict how many women you think will win on Nov. 6th and be eligible to win fabulous prizes!!!

First prize: $250 Gift Card

Second prize: a Nespresso coffee machine from Nestlé

Third prize: Swag Bag from Lifetime Television

Contest deadline is Friday, November 2nd at 5:00 p.m. EST.

If you are into fantasy football, this might be for you. It is not as easy as it looks. You might also check out Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight for an assist. Not sure if I’ll give it a try – need sometime to brew over it. What does your gut say – can we break the record?