The Savings Aren’t The Point

This was never about saving money:

Ushered in amid promises that it would save taxpayers money and deter drug users, a Florida law requiring drug tests for people who seek welfare benefits resulted in no direct savings, snared few drug users and had no effect on the number of applications, according to recently released state data.

“Many states are considering following Florida’s example, and the new data from the state shows they shouldn’t,” said Derek Newton, communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, which sued the state last year to stop the testing and recently obtained the documents. “Not only is it unconstitutional and an invasion of privacy, but it doesn’t save money, as was proposed.”

This week, Georgia instituted a nearly identical law, with supporters saying it would foster greater personal responsibility and save money. As in Florida, the law is expected to draw a legal challenge. The Southern Center for Human Rights, based in Atlanta, said it expected to file a lawsuit once the law takes effect in the next several months. A number of other states are considering similar bills.

The Florida civil liberties group sued the state last year, arguing that the law constituted an “unreasonable search” by the government, a violation of the Fourth Amendment. In issuing a temporary injunction in October, Judge Mary S. Scriven of Federal District Court scolded lawmakers and said the law “appears likely to be deemed a constitutional infringement.”

From July through October in Florida — the four months when testing took place before Judge Scriven’s order — 2.6 percent of the state’s cash assistance applicants failed the drug test, or 108 of 4,086, according to the figures from the state obtained by the group. The most common reason was marijuana use. An additional 40 people canceled the tests without taking them.

Because the Florida law requires that applicants who pass the test be reimbursed for the cost, an average of $30, the cost to the state was $118,140. This is more than would have been paid out in benefits to the people who failed the test, Mr. Newton said.

Just to put this in perspective, only 2.6% of the applicants used drugs, while the DOJ estimates that from 8-10.2 percent of the workforce is on drugs. In other words, far from being lazy shiftless drug addicts, they are, as a whole, cleaner than the general workforce. Which may seem odd to you, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. DRUGS COST MONEY. PEOPLE ON GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE DON’T HAVE… MONEY. This is not rocket surgery.

But none of this really matters, because this wasn’t about saving money, it was about shaming people. It was about continuing to stigmatize those who are down on their luck. It was about perpetuating the belief that our safety net is nothing more than a source of drug money for poor people, so people are less inclined to support these programs. And it was about neanderthal politicians catering to the know-nothings who vote Republican. For the cadre of cranky old white people forwarding chain emails and thinking they are clever saying “YOU HAVE TO ADMIT, IT’S TRUE” or the douchebags you went to High School with 30 years ago who just friended you on Facebook and post nonsense like this:

And when you point out this is all nonsense to those people who push that garbage, they’ll get mad at you and call you shrill or deny the facts and point to some anecdote somewhere about someone on welfare who cheated the system- as if that story overcomes the undeniable data you’ve just presented them. Colbert nailed it- the modern right and their followers don’t care about facts, they care about truthiness. They know what they know, and it comes from the gut.

This was never about money. This was about shaming people, humiliating people, making being poor worse than it already was, and giving the soulless goons like the types I mentioned above an opportunity to feel smug and good about themselves at the expense of others.

So I fully expect that every southern state with a Republican legislature will pass a bill like this in the next year or so.

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The Deficit Bullshit Never Ends

Poor helpless Steve King, who can’t vote for less spending, says Mitt needs to make him vote for a Constitutional Amendment to make him vote for less spending:

“I think what it’s going to take is our presidential nominee must call for a mandate to demand that congress pass a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget, out of the House and Senate, to the states for ratification,” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told TPM in the Capitol on Tuesday. “The rest of this isn’t going to get the job done.”

I have different suggestion: Gandalf the White, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore and Katniss Everdeen need to apparate on the Capitol steps and cook up a special potion that all Republican members of the House and Senate will drink to get them to vote for less spending. It’s just as likely to happen as King’s proposal, and it would be more entertaining.

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Tonight, We Are All Washington Caps Fans

Remember teabagging scumbag Tim Thomas, the goalie from the Boston Bruins who refused to meet the President when the entire Bruins team went because government has grown out of control? Looks like Caps fans had a greeting for him last night:

That’s excellent. Thanks to JenJen for sending those to me.

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“ScrewTrue the Vote”: Would It Be Wrong to Pray for A Meteorite?

I do not remember hearing about this convention until Dave Weigel’s Slate post today…

John Fund, the reporter and freelance pro-voter-ID speaker, encouraged the morning audience at Herman Cain’s “Solutions Revolution” to mark April 27-28 on their calendars. On that weekend, the Tea Party spinoff group True the Vote will hold its second annual summit on election fraud—or, at least, the threat of election fraud.

The conference will feature some mainstays of the conservative voter integrity circuit. James O’Keefe; former DOJ lawyer/anti-New Black Panther crusader J. Christian Adams; and so on. But the star is Artur Davis, the former Democratic congressman from Alabama who has started irritating his old party by ringing bells about voter fraud…

Also among the promised “and so on“: Hans von Spakovsky and Tom Fitton:

Registering [poor people] to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

Yeah, I know there are many fine individuals living in the Houston area who aren’t professional liars, sociopaths and/or deluded paranoids. So I’ll settle for a weekend outbreak of a particularly virulent norovirus at the Sheraton Houston Brookhollow…

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Hands, Touching Hands

Reaching Out, Touching Me, Touching You… WTF:

Like any state legislature dealing with 8 percent unemployment and thousands of its residents facing disenfranchisement, the Tennessee Senate is targeting the menace of underage hand-holding.

Last week, the Senate passed SB 3310, a bill to update the state’s abstinence-based sex education curriculum to define holding hands and kissing as “gateway sexual activities.” Just one senator voted against the legislation; 28 voted in favor.

So the next time you see a parent walking through a crowd holding their child’s hand, recognize it for what it is- foreplay. Immediately alert the authorities about this predator.

Alternate title- Hand Jive

Tags: Markos Was Off His Rocker When He Called Them the American Taliban ▲

Brain Trust

Apparently the geniuses at the Washington Free Beacon have not figured out the second part of the phrase “Equal Pay for Equal Work.”

It’s honestly painful how god damned stupid these people are.

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The Post-Reality Party

Looks like some Republicans are getting a little pushback for their support of the “very serious” Ryan wealth redistribution plan:

Rep. Dan Benishek’s (R-MI) embrace of the Republican Party’s platform ran into stiff opposition at a town hall meeting in Saulte Sainte Marie, Michigan when at least a dozen constituents, many of them senior citizens, pushed back against Benishek’s claims on Medicare, Social Security, oil subsides and health care reform.

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Benishek also displayed a shocking lack of self-awareness about his level of knowledge of some key facts. “There are no government subsidies for oil,” he told one woman who suggested ending the very real subsidies given to oil corporations to help defray the cost of Medicare. Watch a portion of the town hall:

At one point, the discussion turned to health care reform. Benishek, who served as a medical doctor before he was elected to Congress in 2010, was thrust onto the national stage after his predecessor Bart Stupak cast the deciding vote in favor of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. He told the audience that the United States has the best health care system in the world, before he was literally laughed at by several attendees.

“We have the highest life spans in the world,” argued Benishek. Several women in the audience quickly pointed out that in fact, many countries with universal health care place higher than the United States in terms of life expectancy, including Canada, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. The United States ranks 50th, just behind South Korea and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I don’t believe that’s true,” said Benishek. “How can you not know that, you’re a medical doctor?” one woman replied.

He has no idea what he is talking about, and I was loving watching the granny-brigade call him a liar and laugh at him. He’s just wrong about everything. We don’t have the highest life expectancy, we most certainly have subsidies for oil and gas (and, in fact, Republicans in the Senate just voted down ending them), and my favorite was the claim that oil companies pay 40% of their income to taxes:

Exxon Mobil, the most profitable of the big five oil companies, made $41.1 billion in profits last year. Although Exxon made 35 percent more profits since 2010, its estimated effective tax rate actually dropped. Citizens for Tax Justice reported Exxon paid only 17.6 percent taxes in 2010, lower than the average American, and a Reuters analysis using the same criteria estimates that Exxon will pay only 13 percent in effective taxes for 2011. Exxon paid zero taxes to the federal government in 2009.

Republicans really are embracing the idea of creating their own reality. It’s truly a bizarre spectacle, when the citizenry is so much more informed than their elected officials.

And because my mind works in strange ways, all I could think about during that video clip was the following:

I have issues.

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Red-Baiting

Have you no sense of decency Of course he doesn’t:

As many as 80 House Democrats are communists, according to Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.).

West warned constituents at a Tuesday town hall event that he’s “heard” that dozens of his Democratic colleagues in the House are members of the Communist Party, the Palm Beach Post reported. West didn’t elaborate beyond that, however, and didn’t offer up any names at the time. There are currently 190 House Democrats.

West spokeswoman Angela Melvin later defended West’s comments—and clarified to whom West was referring.

“The Congressman was referring to the 76 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The Communist Party has publicly referred to the Progressive Caucus as its allies. The Progressive Caucus speaks for itself. These individuals certainly aren’t proponents of free markets or individual economic freedom,” Melvin said in a statement to The Huffington Post.

I think the best part of this is just how ineffective it will be. Other than some codgers at the VFW and the tricorner hat crowd in the teahadist movement, the fear of communism isn’t part of the current zeitgeist. The wall fell a couple decades ago, and it’s been a long time since anyone has seen a duck and cover video in school. Worrying about Islamic terrorists in our midst might still have a little cachet, but really, communists? Communism lost. Everyone knows that. Instead of calling the Dems communists, he might as well be screaming “THE REDCOATS ARE COMING! THE REDCOATS ARE COMING!”

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Faith Based Budgeting

These guys never fail to amuse me:

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), whose budget plan recently passed the House in a party-line vote, says his faith contributed in shaping the proposal, which he says is consistent with Catholic teachings.

“A person’s faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private,” Ryan said in an interview released on Tuesday by the Christian Broadcasting Network. “So to me, using my Catholic faith, we call it the social magisterium, which is how do you apply the doctrine of your teaching into your everyday life as a lay person?”

The budget, which cuts about $5 trillion more than the president’s 2013 proposal and would create a “premium support” option for future Medicare recipients, sets up an election-year contrast with Democrats on spending and the debt.

So, according to Ryan, we’ve got a budget that is equal parts Ayn Rand and Jesus, with, ho doubt, some Hayek and Burke thrown in. Fabulous. Nothing could go wrong here, amirite? Except there are some people who would disagree that this budget adheres to the religious principles Ryan thinks it does:

The bishops voiced support for moves to strengthen programs that help the poor and vulnerable, such as Pell Grants and improved workforce training and development. They also opposed moves negatively impacting poor families such as increasing the minimum rent that can be charged to families receiving housing assistance and a proposal to eliminate funding for the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. The bishops also made the case for protecting programs that help the poor internationally.

“As pastors, we see every day the human consequences of budget choices. Our Catholic community defends the unborn, feeds the hungry, shelters the homeless, educates the young, and cares for the sick, both at home and abroad. We help poor families rise above crushing poverty, resettle refugees fleeing conflict and persecution, and reach out to communities devastated by wars, natural disasters and famines,” the bishops wrote. “The moral measure of this budget debate is not which party wins or which powerful interests prevail, but rather how those who are jobless, hungry, homeless or poor are treated. Their voices are too often missing in these debates, but they have the most compelling moral claim on our consciences and our common resources.”

But, as we all know, the wingnuts only listen to the men in funny hats when it comes to their fetus fetish and any and all panty-sniffing/contraceptives ventures. When it comes to war, the death penalty, and taking care of the poor and the less fortunate, well screw all that. What the hell did Jesus know about Welfare, anyway?

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Democracy, Wingnut Style

Don’t you dare call them fascists or authoritarians, though.

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FaceOff

I wonder if Zuckerberg knew his social media site would become a platform for whiny wingnuts, he would do it all over again:

In today’s disappointing speech, the President made a series of claims that are simply false.

The President’s attacks began with an admission that his assumptions reflect White House spin, not our budget’s substance: “I want to go through what it would mean for our country if these cuts were to be spread out evenly.” Of course, the assumption that our budget makes these kinds of indiscriminate cuts is false. The House Budget Committee made dozens of specific assumptions to justify our numbers, and we made these assumptions public in the hundreds of pages of text we posted in plain view on the House Budget Committee’s website. It’s not a “secret plan” to “never tell us where the knife may fall” – it is a specific plan to cut waste, eliminate programs that don’t work, end crony politics, and carefully prioritize hardworking taxpayers’ money in precisely the way leaders of the President’s party have refused to do for over three years. In a related vein, does this new standard allow for analyses of the President’s budget to go through what it would mean for the country if the President’s $2 trillion tax increase were to be spread out evenly?

Instead of using numbers from the actual House-passed budget, the President’s claims relied on false assumptions created out of thin air by the White House.

The reason Ryan and Palin use facebook to spew their bullshit is that there is no accountability. They delete every comment that challenges them, and there are no reporters there to call them liars (like that would happen anyway- Remember when the Klondike cougar freaked out when asked which newspapers she reads? That’s as close as we get to grilling these guys).

At any rate, Ezra does the heavy lifting, and guess what- Ryan is lying.

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Not Getting It At All

Rich “starbursts” Lowry opens up a can of silly in the National Review with a piece titled “The Murders That Don’t Count: In America, the lives of young black people are cheap, unless they happen to fit the right agenda.” Already groaning? Don’t stop now. It gets worse:

Delric Miller IV died in a hail of bullets a month ago. When someone fired 37 AK-47 rounds into his Detroit home at 4:30 a.m., he was mortally wounded while dozing on the couch. He was nine months old. No one made the multicolored teething ring he got for Christmas or his toy hammer into a national symbol of random violence.

Last year, Charinez Jefferson, 17, was shot and killed on a Chicago street. “She begged the shooter not to shoot her because she was pregnant,” a pastor explained. The alleged assailant, Timothy Jones, 18, shot her in the head, chest and back after seeing her walking with a rival gang member. New York Times columnist Charles Blow did not write a column about Jefferson’s killing as a symbol of the perils of being a young black woman in America.

Last June, a stray bullet from a confrontation on a Brighton Beach, N.Y., boardwalk killed 16-year-old Tysha Jones as she sat on a bench. A 19-year-old man, out for revenge after an earlier scuffle on the boardwalk, was charged in the shooting. Tysha’s heartbroken mother was not featured on all the national TV shows.

In January, 12-year-old Kade’jah Davis was shot and killed when, allegedly, 19-year-old Joshua Brown showed up at her Detroit house to demand the return of a cellphone from Davis’ mother. When Brown didn’t get the phone, he fired shots through the front door. No one held high-profile street protests to denounce gunplay over such trifles.

You have to work to be this obtuse. In each and every case listed above, the police and authorities have arrested and charged the murderer, or are working nonstop to discover who the murderers are and track them down and prosecute them.

That’s one reason why the Trayvon Martin case is different. We know precisely who killed him, yet he walks free and clear. That is why the outrage is so loud. Trayvon Martin was killed for the crime of walking while black, the cops did nothing to investigate his death and appear to be actively impeding any investigation, they basically gave his killer a pat on the back before sending him on his way, and then they slapped a John Doe tag on his corpse and threw him into the morgue’s lost and found pile.

Yes, each and everyone of the murders that halfwit Lowry mentioned is awful. Yes, black on black crime is awful. But in each case above, the victim’s family are receiving some semblance of justice.

And that is all anyone wants for Trayvon Martin. Justice.

Lowry just can’t be that stupid.

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The Base Got the Message

If you are wondering why the Republican base is screaming about science and mocking global warming and thinks Jesus rode a dinosaur, it is because that is what the GOP elites want them to believe:

This is not because conservatives are a bunch of undereducated yahoos. In fact, quite the opposite:

Conservatives with high school degrees, bachelor’s degrees, and graduate degrees all experienced greater distrust in science over time….In addition…conservatives with college degrees decline more quickly than those with only a high school degree []. These results are quite profound, because they imply that conservative discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated conservatives.

In other words, this decline in trust in science has been led by the most educated, most engaged segment of conservatism. Conservative elites have led the anti-science charge and the rank-and-file has followed.

Just another arrow in the quiver for the next time you hear a “reasonable” Republican lament the behavior of the party. None of this was an accident.

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Those Weren’t Firecrackers You Heard

It was the entire staff of the Onion shooting themselves in despair:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) will deliver an address on foreign policy Thursday afternoon at the headquarters of Jelly Belly Candy Company in Fairfield, Calif.

The choice of venue is an homage to Ronald Reagan, whose fondness for the candies was well known. Reagan, who famously kept a jar of the candies on his desk in the Oval Office, regularly received Jelly Belly shipments during his tenure as California governor and even sent the first jelly beans into space on the 1983 Challenger shuttle.

According to Santorum spokesman Matt Beynon, the 7 p.m. Eastern address will focus on “a Reaganesque foreign policy.”

How can the Onion possibly keep up with these clowns?

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Here’s An Idea- Stop Financing the Elections of Nihilists and Crazy People

File this under cry me a river:

Big business groups like the Chamber of Commerce spent millions of dollars in 2010 to elect Republican candidates running for the House. The return on investment has not always met expectations.

Even though money for major road and bridge projects is set to run out this weekend, House Republican leaders have struggled all week to round up the votes from recalcitrant conservatives simply to extend it for 90 or even 60 days. A longer-term transportation bill that contractors and the chamber say is vital to the recovery of the construction industry appears hopelessly stalled over costs.

At the same time, House conservatives are pressing to allow the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which has financed business exports since the Depression, to run out of lending authority within weeks. The bank faces the very real possibility of shutting its doors completely by the end of May, when its legal authorization expires.

And a host of routine business tax breaks — from wind energy subsidies to research and development tax credits — cannot be passed because of Republican insistence that they be paid for with spending cuts.

Business groups that worked hard to install a Republican majority in the House equated Republican control with a business-friendly environment. But the majority is first and foremost a conservative political force, and on key issues, its ideology is not always aligned with commercial interests that helped finance election victories.

Some of what the teahadists want to kill is simply insane:

With its charter set to expire in May, the bank is the target of conservative groups. They are making the case to Republicans that the bank, created in 1934 to finance sales to the Soviet Union, has no place in a free-market system. Club for Growth is holding it up as the next Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, crowding out private lending and offering dangerous loans that ultimately could be left in the laps of the taxpayer.

“Those groups are just wrong, period,” said Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers and a generous personal contributor to Republican candidates.

The bank is financed with a small percentage of each loan it makes to foreign buyers of American exports, producing $3.4 billion in profits for the federal government over the last five years.

Drew Greenblatt, president and owner of Marlin Steel Wire Products, in Baltimore, said he recently got a rush order for wire baskets from a firm in Singapore, assuming he could finance the sale. He went to the Export-Import Bank and paid a one-half-percent fee on the loan. The bank guaranteed 95 percent of the loan. He kept the plant working through the weekend and completed the sale.

“Think about all the winners in this transaction,” he said. “Ex-Im got half a point. Baltimore City steelworkers got extra hours. I got extra profits to meet payroll, and hopefully I got a client who will reorder from me.”

If anything, the anger over the stalled transportation bill is even more acute, business lobbyists say. The Senate, in a bipartisan vote, has passed a surface transportation bill that would keep money flowing for two years. The House, however, appears stuck.

They don’t even want to pay for roads. Think about that. They don’t even want to pay for roads.

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