Working As Intended, Folks

This Easter Sunday, the NY Times has this Jason DeParle story on red states shredding welfare safety nets and the people who keep falling through them.

Faced with flat federal financing and rising need, Arizona is one of 16 states that have cut their welfare caseloads further since the start of the recession — in its case, by half. Even as it turned away the needy, Arizona spent most of its federal welfare dollars on other programs, using permissive rules to plug state budget gaps.

The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.

Esmeralda Murillo, a 21-year-old mother of two, lost her welfare check, landed in a shelter and then returned to a boyfriend whose violent temper had driven her away. “You don’t know who to turn to,” she said.

Maria Thomas, 29, with four daughters, helps friends sell piles of brand-name clothes, taking pains not to ask if they are stolen. “I don’t know where they come from,” she said. “I’m just helping get rid of them.”

To keep her lights on, Rosa Pena, 24, sold the groceries she bought with food stamps and then kept her children fed with school lunches and help from neighbors. Her post-welfare credo is widely shared: “I’ll do what I have to do.”

And as any conservative can tell you, this is working 100% as intended.  If those on welfare turn to crime, then it’s clearly permissible to cut welfare even further to stop coddling these criminals, and then of course pass those savings through tax cuts on to the Almighty Job Creators, who will then certainly create more jobs and uplift these broken souls back into society.  Any time now, those jobs will be just pouring out.  Yep.

Of course without that vital last part, it becomes and endless conveyor belt to transfer wealth to the wealthy and drive the poor into other states (preferably blue ones) where they become somebody else’s problem.  Meanwhile, red states like Arizona get to claim they’ve cut welfare rolls and that the rest of America needs to follow their success.

Meanwhile, the expensive private prison conglomerates designed to incarcerate the increasingly desperate among us costing taxpayers far more per person than the welfare did in the first place is beside the point, that money’s well spent because we’re tough on crime.  Certainly the GOP is licking their chops at the latest iteration of the House GOP budget, turning safety net programs into block grants they can raid for even more tax cuts and wealth transfer.  And if the GOP gets control, guess what’s happening to these programs in the future?

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the top House Republican on budget issues, calls the current welfare program “an unprecedented success.” Mitt Romney, who leads the race for the Republican presidential nomination, has said he would place similar restrictions on “all these federal programs.” One of his rivals, Rick Santorum, calls the welfare law a source of spiritual rejuvenation.

“It didn’t just cut the rolls, but it saved lives,” Mr. Santorum said, giving the poor “something dependency doesn’t give: hope.”

As in “hope God chose you to be rich, because otherwise you’re screwed.”  Happy Easter Hunger Games from the GOP.  Don’t worry, when you die, your suffering will be rewarded in the next life.  Oh wait, it won’t because you were poor and wasted your life so you obviously sinned, so it’s okay if we kick your face in a few more times.

Like I said, working as intended.

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Every time a hippie flaps his wings

Pro-torture Vichy liberal scum Jonathan Alter:

Oh, Ralph. If Ralph Nader hadn’t gotten under Lewis Powell’s skin, we wouldn’t be having these arguments over whether the individual mandate in Obamacare is unconstitutional.

And “stand your ground” laws — like the one at issue in the Trayvon Martin case — wouldn’t stand a chance in the rest of the country.

And free market conservatives would not be unconsciously defying police and doing the bidding of the National Rifle Association.

Yes, like Edward Lorenz’s “butterfly effect” (where the course of a tornado can be traced all the way back to the flapping of a butterfly’s wings thousands of miles away), it’s all connected, and in ways that should make us more conscious of how we associate ourselves with other political insects.

The facile nihilistic idiocy here is beyond anything I’ve seen recently. It doesn’t even rise to the level of Slate-style contrarianism.

Your quote for the day, from Mark Twain:

When I finished Carlyle’s French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently – being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment … and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte! – And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.

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Chris Bag O’ Matzohs

So with all the “will he or won’t he” speculation about Marco Rubio being the Marquis de Mittens Liason To The 99% or something this week, I wondered what our old friend Chris Christie is doing in the meantime when all the attention is on Marco here.  Don’t feel too bad for Christie though.  Turns out he’s heading to Jerusalem for Holy Week on somebody else’s dime.

In a trip billed as a “Jersey to Jerusalem Trade Mission”, Gov. Chris Christie will travel to Israel during Holy Week to expand business opportunities, experience the culture and meet with world leaders. He will also spend time in Jordan with King Abdullah II.

A delegation of business and religious leaders will join Christie, his family and staff, the administration announced this afternoon. The Republican governor will be in Israel from Sunday through Thursday and Jordan until Easter Sunday.

“I think it’s important for me to continue to get a greater awareness of the world around me as a leader and someone who now has a bit of a national voice,” Christie said in an interview in Washington in late February. “I think it’s important for me to continue to open up my mind and my experience to things that are outside of the state of New Jersey.”

Good general advice for anyone, I would think.  Worked for Dubya, after all.  Heck, the same group that inflicted him and Mittens on Israel is picking up the tab for Christie here, the Republican Jewish Coalition.  He may not be the flavor of the month, but he’s still on the fast track to be the face of compassionate austerity for the party.  Who knows.

So no, the GOP hasn’t kicked Chris off a cliff or anything.  They’re still investing plenty in him so he’ll plague us later.  Oy vey.

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Bring On the Asteroid

Todd Palin’s Alleged Prostitute Releases “Tell All” book.

Boys Will Be Boys: Media, Morality and the Cover-up of the Todd Palin Shailey Tripp Sex Scandal is the true story of how Shailey Tripp (Wait, what?), a young single mother of two special needs children became sexually involved with Todd Palin, husband of former Alaska Governor and 2008 GOP Vice-Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin.

This book explains the many factors that culminated in Shailey becoming not only the mistress of ” Alaska’s First Dude” but also a prostitute working for him which ultimately resulted in Shailey being arrested in March of 2010.

The end is officially fucking nigh.

I mean it.  We, the human race, deserve to die a fiery, pulverized death if so much as one tree is killed for this abomination.

Also too, open thread.

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The Action Is Affirmative

It was so worth watching the last half-hour of the MHP show this morning for this discussion on affirmative action, and especially for Elon James White taking Reasonoid emperor Matt Welch’s lunch money, buying a milkshake with it, then then drinking it all up in front of him.

Elon also had a nice exchange with Nona Willis Aronowitz from GOOD Magazine on this too, and he was having none of the Glibertarian nonsense at. All.

I’m loving this show more and more.

Open thread, also too.

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Gun for hire

Since noon on February 16, Megan McArdle has written six posts, four of them questioning the authenticity of the (Koch-connected) Heartland memos and/or attacking the leaker personally, and one attacking the Democratic party for focusing on David Koch. Her husband works for the Koch-funded Reason magazine where he was recently a Koch fellow.

At what point does this start to bother McArdle’s colleagues—Fallows, Coates, etc.—and online buddies—Yglesais, Drum, etc.? Is this whole thing an even bigger circle jerk than I imagined?

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Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not

Steve M. on what conservatives really want:

First of all, ask yourself why fifteen-year-olds say “Fuck you” at the dinner table to their parents. That’s easy: they do it because they know they’re stuck living with these people; the only way to make that bearable is to needle their parents by saying whatever pisses them off the most. Well, that’s how right-wing pseudo-intellectuals feel about us liberals and moderates—they have to live in the same country with us, and they hate it, so they become God-botherers and moralists because they think nothing could possibly annoy us more. I really believe that’s one of the primary reasons they do this—do you believe Brooks and Murray and Ross Douthat and William Bennett really have a deep, abiding love for God and a profound level of spirituality? I certainly don’t. Jimmy Carter really loves God—not these self-satisfied clowns. It’s all just a bird-flip disguised as a moral philosophy.

I think that’s some of it but some of it is I’m-a-special-snowflake. You’ll notice that a lot of media-world right-wingers like to call themselves “libertarians” (Murray, for example), as in you can’t call me a conservative because I support gay marriage/smoke dope/believe in legalized contraception. Megan McArdle takes it to an extreme, vegetarian who hates vegetarians, “libertarian” who’s uncomfortable with reproductive rights, economics blogger who can’t add numbers. You can’t pigeonhole her! That’s exciting. Today’s Kaplan has a classic example—an arty critic/poet/artist who’s really a tough factory worker and hates imaginary worker-hating liberals. Modulo his desire to be ruled by a strong Chinese leader, Tom Friedman’s positions are almost entirely standard Obot-fare, but he’s also a pimp for third parties.

It goes on and on. No one (excluding many of us here of course) wants to be a standard liberal, even if they support Democratic policies on every issue. You are all different. Yes, we are all different.

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There are no big secrets, you can’t believe what you read

In a few months, establishment media will cease all serious criticism of Mitt Romney. He will be seen as a serious, resolute, Burkean moderate and anyone who disagrees will be cast as a highly partisan liberal. So let’s enjoy this while we can:

The most consistent note in Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign is attacking his rivals for their ideological inconsistency. It’s a nervy strategy for a candidate whose own greatest vulnerability is the sense, especially among conservatives, that he has serially reconsidered his positions for political advantage on issues from abortion to gay rights to immigration.

[....]

In 2004, Republican strategist Karl Rove made famous the tactic of attacking an opponent’s greatest strength by directly assaulting Democrat John Kerry’s credentials on national security. Romney seems to be taking that idea one step further by attacking his opponents on a front that is perceived to be his own greatest weakness. Or maybe Romney is just validating the old belief that the best defense is a good offense.

Greg Sargent asks the obvious question:

Fun thought experiment: Imagine the wall-to-wall media mockery that John Kerry or Al Gore would have endured if they’d tried even a fraction of the shenanigans Romney has resorted to so far.

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Suck on this, Tommy

A pretty awesome put-down of Friedman’s relentless pimping for Americans Elect by Harold Meyerson:

If Mitt Romney manages to squeak through with the GOP nomination, there won’t be much political space that Americans Elect could occupy: Wall Street will already have a candidate of its own. But if Santorum is the GOP nominee, Americans Elect could offer an alternative for moderate Republicans and sundry independents.

This is why it took Americans Elect’s champions about a nanosecond after Santorum’s surge began to start promoting a candidate. The group’s foremost advocate, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, penned a column on Sunday introducing his readers to David Walker, the U.S. comptroller general from 1998 to 2008, and for two years thereafter the head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, an organization established by the billionaire co-founder of the Blackstone Group to preach the gospel of cutting Social Security, Medicare and other government spending.

In his column, Friedman acknowledged that he wasn’t sure that a Walker presidential candidacy would positively affect the outcome of the election, but he stated that he’d “pay good money” to see such a candidate raising his points in the presidential debates. (Those who remember Friedman’s columns on the eve of the Iraq War, expressing doubts about the Bush administration’s ability to wage that war but supporting it nonetheless because it might just make things better, may see a pattern here.)

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Civility sells, but who’s buying

Fuck this:

Peter Gleick violated a principle rule of the global-warming debate: Climate scientists must be better than their opponents.

[...]

Taking the high road is not easy or fun. But Gleick and the rest of us who favor decarbonizing the world economy have to be, and should want to be, the adults in the debate. Gleick’s confession and apology Monday are more than climate scientists ever got from deniers for the overblown “Climategate” e-mail scandal. But it would have been far better if he hadn’t needed to provide either.

Why? They won’t get credit for being “better” even if they are. Politifact will rate the deniers’ claims as mostly true, Tom Friedman and Fred Hiatt will tell us the truth is in the middle, that Extremist Scientists are as bad as flat-earthers, etc. etc.

What’s the point of civiling while American burns? What does it accomplish?

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The very serious Glenn Beck

I’ve come around to thinking that the Global War On Birth Control is a bad issue for the right. It’s amazing how much establishment media is flogging the winger perspective on it, though. Kaplan today:

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Next You’ll Tell Me The Sun Is Hot And Made Of Fusion

The National Journal’s latest poll on the federal safety net finds the shocking news that the more money you make, the less you believe America needs as much federal spending on the poor, but not all of the responses were of the Allow Them To Consume Sweet Baked Comestibles variety, either.

The survey found a generally receptive audience, especially among whites, for intensifying arguments from Romney and other GOP leaders that too many Americans now rely on benefits from government programs. The Census Bureau recently reported that nearly 49 percent of American households contained at least one person receiving benefits from a government program as of late 2010.

In the poll, 53 percent of those surveyed said they were most concerned that “the government taxes workers too much to fund programs for people who could get by without help,” while only 38 percent said their principal concern was that “federal programs … don’t provide enough of a safety net for people who need help to get by.”

That question produced a moderately sized racial split: 56 percent of whites, compared with 44 percent of nonwhites, said they were most concerned about government taxing workers too much. Republicans, young people, independents, and those earning more than $75,000 annually also tilted most sharply toward concern about excessive taxation, rather than an inadequate safety net. White independents, by nearly 2-to-1, worried more about taxes than holes in the safety net.

That’s the bad news.  There is actually some good news.

But on other fronts, those polled leaned more toward positions held by Democrats. Another question noted that since the recession began, the number of Americans receiving federal benefits like food stamps and housing vouchers has significantly increased. Asked why those rolls have swelled, a 54 percent majority said it was because “high unemployment has left more people in need of government assistance.” Just 41 percent agreed that “government is providing benefits for too many people who don’t actually need them.”

This question generated a much wider racial split. While 45 percent of whites said these programs are growing because government is dispensing too many benefits, just 33 percent of minorities agreed; more than three-fifths of nonwhites said the programs are growing mostly because of high unemployment. On this question, a narrow majority of independents blamed the economy, not overly generous government policies, for the growing caseloads.

As important, the survey found Americans unconvinced that safety-net programs represent a major source of the deficit problem. When asked to identify the biggest reason the federal government faces large deficits for the coming years, just 3 percent of those surveyed said it was because of “too much government spending on programs for the elderly”; only 14 percent said the principal reason was “too much government spending on programs for poor people.” Those explanations were dwarfed by the 24 percent who attributed the deficits primarily to excessive defense spending, and the 46 percent plurality who said their principal cause was that “wealthy Americans don’t pay enough in taxes.”  While minorities were more likely than whites to pin the blame on the wealthy avoiding taxes, even 43 percent of whites agreed.

So Americans may believe that too many people are on programs, but they also know the reason why these programs are straining the country’s budget are the Bush tax cuts.  That message is getting through to people too, which is why allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on the wealthy is a no-brainer for the President and the Dems, on top of being popular policy, it’s going to be economically necessary to do to ever get the budget under control.  They might even actually do it, too.  If we make them, that is.

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Testing America’s Patience

Please tell me again how Mittens is going to pivot to being the Sensible Centrist Leader We Need™ just as soon as he’s the nominee.  Please.  I need a good laugh on Valentine’s Day.

Georgia’s controversial plan to mandate drug testing for all welfare recipients and other beneficiaries of government assistance got a big endorsement on Friday from Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney.

On a local NBC affiliate in Georgia, Romney said that he supported the measure:

Jeff Hullinger: [Lawmakers] have bantered about the proposition that welfare recipients should be drug tested. How do you feel about that?

Mitt Romney: Well my own view is, it’s a great idea. People who are receiving welfare benefits, government benefits, we should make sure they’re not using those benefits to pay for drugs. I think it’s an excellent idea.

And in fact, the very “moderate” Marquis de Mittens has been a champion of keeping the “welfare criminals” in their place for a good two decades now, despite the fact that both GOP governors Rick “Here’s Your New Local Government I Appointed” Snyder in Michigan and Rick “My Wife Owns The Medical Testing Company Stock, Not Me” Scott in Florida are getting their asses kicked over this in the polls, not to mention getting slapped down by the courts.

I’m with Steve M. on this one:

Many of us assume, like Soros, that the Republicans know they’re destroying the economy through legislative intransigence. I’m not so sure. I think a lot of them by now have actually drunk the Rand/Laffer Kool-Aid and think tax cuts will unleash economic nirvana. I think some sincerely believe that if budget cuts hurt ordinary people, screw ‘em—they should sink or swim in a Randian world. And then there’s Romney, who is just, well, pliable.

He’ll do whatever his masters tell him to, and that includes burning the safety net down and the middle-class with it.  There’s not going to be any pivot to the center, no matter what they tell you.  Mitt’s gone full Tea Party nutjob.  He processes the data he’s given, nothing more.  They all have gone over the cliff.  Mitt is just the smiling plastic face on the label.

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It takes a nation of whiners to hold them back

I may never understand the alchemy with which the invisible hand of the free-market transmutates mooching, looting professors into Moon-mining, job-creating Galtian geniuses:

Phil “nation of whiners” Gramm is retiring as Vice Chairman of the Investment Bank at UBS. Perhaps no single person is more responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 and more representative of all that is loathsome about the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington.

Interesting that the firm’s press release announcing his retirement doesn’t attach “former” to his former title of Senator. He was perhaps so instrumental to UBS in that former role that he kept the title at the firm.

Like Newt, Gramm was an obscure professor who became a principled, centrist Congressional leader and later a high-profile presidential primary flame-out. Both left Congress under reasonably disgraceful conditions and were soon rewarded with millions of hard-earned dollars by our meritocracy. When you hit the bricks, new whips, money ain’t a thing.

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House Of Pain

Foreclosuregate rattles on, and it looks like the banks are going to lose their pound of flesh, in this case, $25-$26 billion over three years, in order to get off the hook for roughly 100 times that in real damage to the economy.

The final details of the pact were still being negotiated Wednesday night, including how many states would participate and when the formal announcement would be made in Washington. The two biggest holdouts, California and New York, now plan to sign on, according to the officials with knowledge of the matter who did not want to be identified because the negotiations were not completed.

The deal grew out of an investigation into mortgage servicing by all 50 state attorneys general that was introduced in the fall of 2010 amid an uproar over revelations that banks evicted people with false or incomplete documentation. In the 14 months since then, the scope of the accord has broadened from an examination of foreclosure abuses to a broad effort to lift the housing market out of its biggest slump since the Great Depression. Four million Americans have been foreclosed upon since the beginning of 2007, and the huge overhang of abandoned homes has swamped many regions, like California, Florida and Arizona.

In New York State, more than 46,000 borrowers will receive some form of benefit, with an estimated 21,000 expected to see what they owe reduced through a principal reduction, according to estimates by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The five mortgage servicers in the settlement — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial — have largely set aside reserves for the expected cost of the accord and investors are likely to cheer its announcement because it removes one more legal worry for the industry, analysts said.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a panacea for the housing industry but it is good for the banks to get this behind them,” said Jason Goldberg, an analyst with Barclays.

Of course it is.  And yes, about a million underwater homeowners will get some relief.  But ten million will not, and the housing depression will remain for another 3-5 more years at the minimum.  There’s still hope that the robosigning outfits like MERS are going to still face legal action, but for the most part, the banks are getting away with murder, the housing depression is going nowhere, and the bulk of homeowners won’t see a dime from this settlement.

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