On the Fox News’ Hannity program last night, a panel was assembled to talk about food stamps. Using a story about a 29-year-old California surfer who is abusing the food stamp program while dining of lobsters, Sean Hannity asked his panel to respond to the lifestyle of the surfer.
‘Vice’ co-founder Gavin McInnes took issue with the premise of Hannity’s question and immediately suggested that white people are not the ones abusing the food stamp program. His conclusion? The abuse is happening because of “black Dominicans” in New York who are using food stamps as a “fat pill.”
During a panel discussion, Hannity asked his guests to respond to a 29-year-old California surfer who had allegedly been using the food stamp program instead of getting a job.
“This guy doesn’t personify the problem,” McInnes opined. “You see a middle-class white surfer kid. Here in New York, Dominicans go to the grocery store with their food stamps and the barrels that they ship back to the Dominican Republic are available at the grocery store.”
“But it’s more palatable to use this surfer than it is to use people who represent the problem here,” he said.
After another guest stated that “obesity is a big problem” when it comes to the food stamps, and the ease of “access to in these stores that accept food stamps,” McInnes shot back, “yeah, the sheer volume of it. It’s just a fat pill.”
‘Dick’… Cheney was true to name and self last night when he did a telephone interview on Fox’s Hannity Show. Asked about the news that the Obama administration is considering cutting the military, Cheney responded with the usual racist stereotypes, typical of… well… racists.
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is proposing cuts to the military to meet the Pentagon’s budgeted needs. The plan would reduce the military from its all time high of 570,000 to a more feasible number, between 450,000 to 490,000.
Cheney called the plan “absolutely dangerous” and went on to say that it “does enormous long-term damage to our military.”
He then dropped this piece of racist stereotypical nugget.
“He’d much rather spend the money on food stamps than he would on a strong military or support for our troops.”
You know, the first black president and all. Despite the fact that southern whites make up a larger population of food stamp recipients than blacks, the racists would still use this argument when they have nothing else to say and when they know that their base is looking for their daily dose of hate.
And today, in your daily dose of political hypocrisy, allow me to introduce the epitome of hypocrisy itself.
These political leaders all votes to literally take food out of the mouths of their own constituents, while at the same time extending their hands for more personal handouts from the federal government.
In 1986, when Muhammad Ali Jr. was 14 years old, his father, the greatest boxer alive, picked up the teen for a visit.
“We got in the car, and I said I needed to stop for something to eat,” Ali Jr. recalls. “By the time I came back out, he was gone.”
Ali Jr. called his father’s new wife, Lonnie, and said, “Daddy left me up here. I don’t know why he left me.” She said she’d tell him as soon as he arrived home.
“He turned the car around and came back to pick me up,” Ali Jr. says. “I said, ‘Daddy, why did you leave me?’ He said, ‘I kind of forgot you were in the car.’ ”
Ali Jr. remembers it sadly, the moment when his dad’s Parkinson’s became apparent.
“That was the first time I actually realized something was wrong with him,” he said.
Now 41, nearly destitute and living in the dangerous Chicago neighborhood of West Englewood, Ali Jr. fears his father has now forgotten him for good — and the boxing great’s wife, Lonnie, is keeping him from even saying a proper goodbye.
“If I saw my father right now, I’d say I love you, I miss you, and I want you to see your grandkids,” says Muhammad Jr., who lives in a two-bedroom hovel he shares with his wife, Shaakira, and two children, Ameera, 6, and Shakera, 5.
“I wished before my dad got really sick, I could have had that father-son relationship, but that’s impossible now. I wish I could have made up for lost time. But it doesn’t break my heart anymore. It’s been broken so many times I’m used to it by now.”
Muhammad Jr. was born in 1972 in Philadelphia to Ali, then 30, and actress Belinda Boyd, who was 17. Muhammad Jr. can’t remember ever enjoying a family meal together. Mostly, his grandparents raised him, as his father was busy boxing and his mom was acting in films.
He grew up with three sisters — Maryum and twins Jamillah and Rasheda — but when they were infants, Ali began an affair with Veronica Porsche, who became his second wife in 1977.
The kids still saw their dad, and Junior fondly remembers those days as an extended family.
“My father used to do magic tricks. He’d have a handkerchief that he’d make into a cane; he’d then make it disappear. His card tricks were really good. He was such a comical person. My father liked to wear masks and scare people. He liked to have people on the edge of their seats.
“We used to go to Pennsylvania where he had a training camp, and he’d do tricks on stage. We all went. It was all the family, including my stepsisters Leila and Hana. We’d get on the Bluebird Winnebago bus and go up to see him,” Muhammad Jr. says.
“We stayed in log cabins, ride horses, watch him train, jump ropes and eat all the time as a family. He had a great cook.
“But I never went to any boxing matches apart from one when he fought Leon Spinks, and I just remember he kept on smiling even though he was getting hit a lot.
“He never wanted me to be a fighter. He said, ‘Don’t get into it if you don’t know what you’re doing, as it’s dangerous.’
“I used to see him all the time when I was a child. He made sure he was there, would get all the siblings together, and never kept us a secret from each other. I was proud of my daddy. Fame and fortune meant nothing, I just saw him as my daddy.”
But being Muhammad Ali Jr. had its pitfalls. Although his dad was conquering the world for a third time in 1978, his son was battling on the playground.
“You may think having Muhammad Ali as your dad is great, but I had problems. People wanted to pick fights. School was hell. They wanted to see if I was like my father. I’d get bullied all the time. Girls would only get with me because of my father, not because of me. Nothing was as it seemed. I didn’t know who really loved me. People just used me so they could get a glimpse of my dad. Some people didn’t like it that my dad was black or didn’t go to war. We had to fight all his battles.
“It meant my grandparents sheltered me a lot. Dad didn’t know, as he wasn’t around every day. I felt in some ways like I never had a childhood.
“I’d say my father was good and bad. The reason I say that is because my father never really spent time with me. Whenever we had time, he spent it with his daughters rather than me. Even in the only picture I have of all the family together, they’re all wrapped close, and I’m far out to the left. I felt like the outcast. I still do,” Muhammad Jr. sobs.
Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) on Wednesday introduced legislation to require food stamp recipients to produce a valid photo ID every time they purchase food with their Electronic Benefits Transfer card. Under the Food Stamp Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act, anyone caught using someone else’s EBT card illegally would be banned from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“Using a photo ID is standard in many day-to-day transactions, and most of those are not exclusively paid for by the taxpayer dollars,” Vitter said in a press release Wednesday. “Food stamps have more than doubled in cost since 2008 and continue to grow in an unsustainable way.”
Vitter’s bill comes after an October system glitch that temporarily disabled the spending limit on EBT debit cards, leading some recipients to take advantage by exceeding their normally allotted cap.
“A photo ID would not have stopped people from taking advantage of the system failure that day,” The Times-Picayune reported. “But Vitter said requiring photo IDs would make it harder for someone to use a stolen or fraudulently obtained [EBT card].”
National advocacy groups for low-income Americans criticized Vitter’s proposal as ineffective and harmful to struggling beneficiaries.
“Many poor people do not have photo IDs, and it costs money they do not have to get them,” Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, told The Times-Picayune on Wednesday. “Senator Vitter’s proposal will be especially tough on elderly and poor people who do not have the documents needed to get their photo ID, and who will struggle even to get to the necessary offices. They will wind up going without food.”
This is just amazing. Sad, but truly amazing… and not in a good way.
Two children, 2-year old Catareon Dunn and 3-year old Ladareon Dunn, were left home alone shortly before a fire broke out. Watch this video and listen to the aunt of the kids explain that she has no regrets in leaving the two them home alone.
Then she tops it all off with this statement:
I don’t know if the boys set the house on fire or somebody threw something in there to set it on fire. I really need to get in there to see if my purse burned up. I had my Food Stamp Card and everything in there.
Mr. Shaich agreed to try to get by on the average amount allocated to individuals in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as part of a hunger awareness campaign in which a number of corporate executives and politicians are taking part – September is Hunger Action Month — and to bring attention to a Congressional proposal to cut funding for the program.
Spending just $31.50 per week on food has turned out to be a lot harder than Mr. Shaich thought.
“I’ve been eating a lot of carbs and drinking a lot of water,” says Mr. Shaich, who started his SNAP diet last Thursday. “I drive by these restaurants I go to all the time and I can’t go in. I can’t even go into a Panera.”
“We’ve been involved in hunger issues for a long time and I realized I don’t really know what it’s about. One in six Americans didn’t know where their next meal was coming from at some point in the last week and I wanted to understand at a very personal level what that feels like,” he says.
In an effort to help provide an answer to the hunger problem, Panera has opened five Panera Cares Community Cafes across the country where people can pay whatever they can afford for a meal.
For breakfast this morning, Mr. Shaich had dry cereal and water and made chickpea soup for both lunch and dinner. “The only veggies I’ve had are the canned tomatoes in my soup,” he says. “It’s very hard to eat well. Money really provides choices.”
Democrats failed on Wednesday to block Republican attempts to cut billions of dollars in food assistance to poor American families, having earlier denounced the plans as an “abomination” and “immoral”.
The Republicans included the $16bn cut to the food stamp programme over the next decade as part of a five-year farm bill debated in the House of Representatives agricultural committee. Democrats submitted an amendment to prevent the cuts but lost in a vote after a heated debate in which some members of Congress said more than 2 million people would lose food assistance under the programme formally called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (Snap).
“You need to think of that child out there that’s going to go hungry,” said Democratic congressman David Scott. “This right here is the meanest cut of all. It’s un-American. Twenty percent of my home state of Georgia is on Snap. Can you imagine what a $16bn cut will do?”
The Republican move appears to be intended in part to highlight Republican disparagement of Barack Obama as the “food stamp president” because record numbers of Americans now claim the benefit, doubling the cost of the programme since 2008 to $80bn a year. More than 46 million Americans receive food stamps, nearly half of them children.
The agricultural committee chairman, Frank Lucas, justified the cuts in part by claiming that the system had been manipulated by some US states so the federal government provided food to households not entitled to assistance.
We all know that there are some systems that are set up against the poor that benefit the rich. A good example of this is the following story. A mother of two is sent to jail for lying on her food-stamp application, while bankers largely responsible for our economic downfall and cheating the middle class out of trillions, got bailed out and huge bonuses.
Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps.
Apparently in this country you become ineligible to eat if you have a record of criminal drug offenses. States have the option of opting out of that federal ban, but Mississippi is not one of those states. Since McLemore had four drug convictions in her past, she was ineligible to receive food stamps, so she lied about her past in order to feed her two children.
The total “cost” of her fraud was $4,367. She has paid the money back. But paying the money back was not enough for federal Judge Henry Wingate.
Wingate had the option of sentencing McLemore according to federal guidelines, which would have left her with a term of two months to eight months, followed by probation. Not good enough! Wingate was so outraged by McLemore’s fraud that he decided to serve her up the deluxe vacation, using another federal statute that permitted him to give her up to five years.
He ultimately gave her three years, saying, “The defendant’s criminal record is simply abominable …. She has been the beneficiary of government generosity in state court.”
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