Kicking the poor

If only the truth made a dent.

Myth: ”People on welfare are lazy and sit at home collecting it while the rest of us work to support them.”
Fact: The welfare reform law that was signed by President Clinton in 1996 largely turned control over welfare benefits to the states, but the federal government provides some of the funding for state welfare programs through a program called Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF). TANF grants to states require that all welfare recipients must find work within two years of first receiving benefits. This includes single parents, who are required to work at least 30 hours per week. Two parent families are required to work 35 to 50 hours per week. Failure to obtain work could result in loss of benefits. It is also worth noting that thanks to the pay offerings of companies such as Walmart, many who work at low wage jobs qualify for public assistance, even though they work full time.
Now I can’t speak to the issue of whether welfare recipients want to work, but the law gives them no choice; within two years they have to find work or face losing benefits. This fact about welfare was what Mitt Romney brought up during the campaign when he claimed that President Obama was going to get rid of the work requirements for welfare, which was a lie. Several governors, including the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada, requested a waiver of the work requirement for various reasons.
Myth: ”I see these guys all the time, hanging out and drinking, and doing drugs, collecting welfare instead of working.”
Fact: The able bodied single male with no dependent children who collects welfare in the United States pretty much does not exist, since the primary goal of most welfare programs is to provide temporary support for children and families. Single males can receive certain benefits, such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) if they are disabled.
Myth: “Most welfare recipients are minorities.”
Fact: While I am not sure why this should even be a concern, other than because of racism, percentage-wise roughly the same number of whites are on welfare as blacks. (38.8% of welfare recipients are white, 39.8% are black) The percentages of Hispanics and Asians on welfare are much lower (15.7% Hispanic, 2.4% Asian. So much for the right wing claim that “illegals” come to the U.S. and collect welfare benefits.)
 

 Then there is the enduring myth of red state "rugged individualism" and "self-reliance." No matter how many times this one gets blown out of the water, somehow it never dies. The fact of the matter is that the more enlightened blue states have been carrying the deadbeat red staters for a long time.

The United States just had an election, if anything was decided it should be that the hateful and often blatantly racist "conservatives" do not speak for the country. For all the money behind rmoney and his band of thieves, there simply are not enough Americans willing to spit on the poor, crush foreigners, and rip the Union apart. Only repeated rebukes and defeats will ever bring them to heel enough to stop causing so much trouble. I can only hope that the future has an America made of people who may disagree but can do it without threatening violence and secession any time they do not get their way. The alternative is just too dire to contemplate.

The last gasp of voter suppression

Gerrymandering: The Final Frontier of a dying ideology.

As American as apple pie, slavery, and Indian Removal. Partisan control of redrawing the district lines after each census is the ugly stepchild of direct representation. Redistricting was included in the constitution after the bitter imperial experience left the colonies only "virtually" represented in the British Parliament that made decisions affecting the empire. The idea was also to avoid the "rotten borough" syndrome in England where members of parliament were often elected by a handful of voters and had much greater power than MPs of urban areas. So, our system solved some old problems but created a new one. Leaving the power to reapportion seats in the House of Representatives in the hands of partisan legislators has led to the saying that "politicians choose their voters, rather than voters choosing their leaders."



Ironically, it was first used (and named) by rising politicians of the Democratic-Republican party like Elbridge Gerry to marginalize the aristocratic Federalists. This famous picture proports to show DR-favored areas as a salamander enveloping the older Federalist strongholds of Massachusetts. This was a driver in the Hartford Convention that destroyed the first two party system in America.

Today, according to ThinkProgress, gerrymandering has managed to preserve the bankrupt ideology of "conservatism" in spite of the will of the people. Federalism, the delegation of governmental powers to units smaller than the sovereign state, has meant in practice that oftentimes when Progressive leaders take over in Washington, regressive leaders sneak into state capitols during midterm elections. I will not try and make the case that Democratic politicians do not take advantage when in power to gerrymander, but republicans go out of their way to be obnoxious about it. For example, after the 2000 census Texas finished redistricting in a way that conformed to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 but somehow state republicans managed to redo it after taking control in the 2002 midterms to dilute Democratic areas and capture 5 extra seats. The districts they drew made the salamander above look quaint by comparison.

The other option for apportioning legislative seats is to do it proportionally, but of course that would probably require voting a slate of party candidates instead of individuals and so often you hear voters say they vote the man (or woman) and not the party.

But, according to Mother Jones:

Most Americans voted for Democratic representation in the House. The votes are still being counted, but as of now it looks as if Democrats have a slight edge in the popular vote for House seats, 49 percent-48.2 percent, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. Still, as the Post's Aaron Blake notes, the 233-195 seat majority the GOP will likely end up with represents the GOP's "second-biggest House majority in 60 years and their third-biggest since the Great Depression."So how did Republicans keep their House majority despite more Americans voting for the other party—something that has only happened three times in the last hundred years, according to political analyst Richard Winger? Because they drew the lines. (Emphasis mine)
 

So, if your ideas suck and the majority knows having you in power will harm them; just abuse your power and take over anyway. Who's gonna stop you? The United States is stuck, again, with a group of lunatics running the asylum.

Where are my royalties?

Hallyon forwarded this picture to me, apparently I am in the hooch business.

I'll be expecting a check any day now fellas. I am available for endorsements lol.

Funny thing is though, I'm actually not much of a drinker. A beer now and then, on the rare occasions I imbibe the hard stuff it is usually bourbon. But I guess beggars can't be choosers.

It is almost like a cyber-thriller

Chalk it up under "I want to believe."



The cyber-"hackivist" group Anonymous claimed to have prevented carl rove (deliberate) from stealing votes in Ohio and thus the election. This has to be one of those "known unknowns" that ronald dumsfeld used to talk about when he allowed chaos to erupt all over Iraq. Thankfully, and despite the utter lack of interest by official Democratic Party organs, we the people may have been spared another campaign of known unknowns in Iran by Anonymous.



Of course, we will probably never know and the professional boo-hooers at Salon say the story does not add up.

Now, as an historian, someone trained to use evidence but also to read between the lines to discover hidden meanings, I am not sure how much weight to assign to Anonymous' claims. As a Liberal and someone who values sometimes abstract concepts like the rule of law and public responsibility, even civic virtue, I want to believe that there is now a force that can obstruct the children of darkness like rove & co. from stealing. First they stole elections, then they stole from the public treasury, they stole the lives of our soldiers, and finally they stole the future from the American people with all of their crimes.

Reading between the lines, has anyone ever seen rove go off-script the way he did after fox called Ohio for the president?

It is clear that turd blossom is an evil man, a pure sociopath for whom power is it's own end and the harm he causes to others is completely meaningless to him. In other words the perfect operator to destroy the delicate republican institutions of America and bring dictatorship. But are we the people simply sheep to be shorn and slaughtered as these wolves see fit? For years it has been apparent that the republican party, with its brownshirted teabaggers and conscienceless billionaire backers, are the snake in the fable about the old woman and the snake. "They" are going to do these evil things, grab power for it's own sake. However, after taking power they use it to cynically destroy everything good and extract all the wealth possible. Even the idea that a mysterious force is standing up for the hapless children of light nourishes the hope that all is not lost. So I am willing to take the chance in believing that Anonymous is really out there, watching.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out

They are not backing down

As if to test whether the election solved anything, a friend of mine posted this on his fb page.

[G]o and punch a member of the tea party in the face and see how fast they rely on a social service such as the police department. morons.
 

And, right on cue, a few teabaggers rose to bite the stinkbait.

I think you might be missing the point lol. P.S. many tea partiers carry guns, juss sayin
I support the tea party n i dare somebody to punch me in the face, i dont call the police  
By crybaby liberals who call on them for petty reasons
 i should have stated that i am a proud independant who has no problem with fair taxation with representation and i think our "bipartisan" government is a joke wasting our money, and i paid $72,000 in federal taxes last yr, in case anyone was wondering
 

This is just an excerpt from the conversation, responses from two different angry white guys. The point is, that this attitude is not going away. Dying out maybe, slowly, but these guys look to be in their thirties. The last one always gets me, it means he had at least $144,000 take home. I served my country, did well in school and did not gross half the amount he claims to have paid in taxes in my best year. Poor baby. Is it simply a measure of victimization among the tea-bag crowd? I paid all this money in taxes and got nothing in return. Except a strong military that ensures the state's sovereignty to maintain my freedom, courts that guarantee my property rights and contracts, police that make my neighborhood safe, my garbage and mail picked up without fail, and social insurance for old age, etc. You know, because government magic makes all these things possible and taxes are simply a penalty for success.

It would have been great if the rejection of mitt romney's doomsday plan had led to an easing of tensions between Americans, but electoral defeat so far has not dampened the anger on the right in any appreciable way. Politics will still be taboo for real people to talk about face to face. Is it possible to be a conservative and not be angry, loud, violent, obnoxious, arrogant, and ideologically rigid?

So what is the answer? Let them stew. We on the non-right wing side, the reality-based community if you will, spend far too much time worrying about "them." Why bother? They are irrelevant, and rather unpleasant to talk to or even be around. The real world won, we have no reason to apologize to dead-enders like the ones above. They are wrong about everything, why let them lie to us anymore? Let them lie to each other, and let us get on with the work of marginalizing them and repairing all the damage the selfishness has caused.

Sure, they'll keep provoking. And where they still have power, they will use it to harm others. But the tide might finally be turning.

Glass Jaw Rove

First he bites the hand that feeds, live on fox news. Now he commits the ultimate projection by asserting, with zero evidence or even anything like a coherent argument, that the President won by suppressing the vote. Huh? No karl, it is your team that goes to great lengths in order to keep people from voting, and it stinks worse than week-old rainbow trout.

This rotund, snivelling pile of monkey turds has finally blown his reputation for competence and proficiency in the dark arts of demogaugery and political manipulation. For years liberals cowered under threat of his supposed omnipotence, from destroying John McCain in the primaries and somehow molding crown prince w from a frat-boy drunken moron into something that could be packaged for plundering the presidency, to destroying Joseph Wilson and his wife, then crushing Dan Rather with the faked copies of bush's nasty girl records. Now, rove is once and for all revealed to be a whiny little mary who can play bully with $300 million of right-wing pirate booty and run some of the most dishonest ad campaigns ever seen in this country.

If anyone in America deserved a comeuppence more than rove, no one immediately springs to mind. We may finally be nearing the end of the long, dark night of fascist domination in America.

DJ at it again

Actual quote from my nemesis' facebook page:

It's interesting BTW... I hear over and over and over and over how much people "Hate" negative political ads. Now, I'm in a pretty good spot to judge this, as I had to listen to all of those ads, from all sides, when I put them into the system.

Well, lets compare the tone of Romney's ads to Obama's ads this time around. Romney tried mostly positiveity. Obama went with demonizing. So how'd that work out?

Just like the exit polls story from yesterday: the American voters seem either confused, hypocritical, or just plain stupid, as their actions just don't seem to relate to their words.
 

See? If you disagree, you are stupid. Let's see, "pretty good spot" to endure the ads, Yes. "Judge" them, No. You would have to have a shred of objectivity to judge anything.

I will leave it to you, gentle readers, to judge this assertion.

"In Spite Of"

Scrap "Hope and Change" the real slogan of the Obama administration should be "in spite of." In spite of everything, natural and man made obstacles and especially the quasi-terrorist behavior of the so-called "loyal opposition," This president has not been destroyed and neither has the republic. In spite of unprecedented hatred and the most shameless rhetoric, actions, and even violence President Obama has persevered. In spite of all the money, voter suppression, and outright sabotage Barack Obama is still president and has a renewed mandate to fight back. Time will tell if the Democratic Party has finally realized that cooperation, bipartisanship, reaching across the aisle is not only futile but harmful. It was infuriating to watch them bend over backwards during the health care debate, starting from the republican position on reform and caving right each time the party of selfish greed and divine right of business rule bit the outstretched hand. We, the non-right wing, only had one chance to get something good accomplished and basically wasted it. For all the good things in the Affordable Care Act, the core of the law was to leave private insurance companies in charge with no real plan to contain costs, i.e. greed, that is central to for-profit health insurance.

In spite of record filibusters and every delaying tactic known to man exuberantly employed by terrorists and the transfer of responsibility for every rotten economic development by the terrorist media, things are on the mend. In spite of holding the very government they took an oath to serve hostage to cut the already miserly amount of social spending and forcing a credit downgrade, investors are still eager to buy government debt. In spite of being wrong on everything, republicans double down on their radical agenda again and again.

Is it ironic that tea bag whacko candidates just could not help flapping their cockwashers about rape in this campaign season? For some reason the recent past just disappeared down the memory hole about how republicans enabled speculators and too-big-to-jail wall st. bankers to con, scam, and steal so much of the wealth of the American people. Rape is obviously not the right metaphor for the greedhead bankster ripoff leading up to the completely man made crash. But what happened, millions losing their jobs and homes through fraud, deception, and "market forces" beyond the average American's control was a violation that left the victim humiliated and blamed by so many self-righteous assholes. I will have to leave it to my colleague the lotus to judge, but is "you bought too big a house and have only yourself to blame" different in kind or only degree to "she was asking for it?" Especially when so many of the criminals simply walked away from the crime to strike again?

In spite of the magnitude of their crimes, teabaggers continue to get away with it. All of it.

Return of the Kraken

I wish I could say that I was hard at work on campaigns of some sort or another, or conducting ground-breaking academic research for a book. But I just experienced the worst form of writer's block lately. I'd start posts and get utterly depressed, giving up on it. There felt like there was nothing interesting I could say that had not already been said many times by others.

Now it really is time to crawl out of the hole and get back to work. Thomas Frank put it best by quoting some scum of the earth lobbyist in The Wrecking Crew "You think all this [influence-peddling, racketeering, corruption, rent-seeking, and legalized bribery] is gonna go away if Obama gets in?" Meant in the most shameless, arrogant way possible. In other words, a change in administrations is not going to shake away the vice-grip of organized money currently locked on the throat of our democracy.

As if that was the only problem.

We came very close to going right back down the rabbit hole and put the thieves right back in power to do their dirty business. Again.

There is a sizable portion of mouth-breathing white people who would be thrilled at this prospect.

Here's a serious question. Why are there droves of people with utterly no understanding of economics, macro or micro, who feel entitled to shout their gut ideas about the state of the American economy? At the water cooler, in a restaurant, on social media (especially facebook and twitter, as though having a print forum gives their superficial blathering some hightened significance) self-important lightweights force their two cents in your face. If you are lucky it is some dumb-ass anectdote about how "nobody helped them when they were down on their luck," but mostly it is the same ideological drivel spooned out nightly by hacks in the right-wing nutosphere and regurgitated on cue for the nearest victim.

They memorize the lines so well and deliver them with such precision that even lighter-weight toadies eat it up. The subtle subtext is always that if that black guy would just let "all his friends" (you know, the welfare queens and illegal aliens that scammed their way into mcmansions during the housing bubble) fail and go back to the ghetto or third world hole they came from then the responsible white guys "like me" could fix his mess. "Spending our way out." I saw a guy seriously claim today that President Obama has spent more money than the last three presidents combined. And of course, the stock market (the same one that boomed after Obama took office after crashing twice during bush hell) tanked today because the "job creators" are shaking in their boots over the prospect of paying a teeny-tiny bit more in taxes.

So yes, looking out at a swirling cesspool of stupidity day after day forced me into hibernation. But now it's time to get back to work. If I can't teach them, I have to shame them into keeping quiet and stop spreading the stupid.