We're fine over here in the wake of the Snowpocalypse. School was canceled yesterday and today, but folks are finally starting to dig out, and we'll be back to normal tomorrow.
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Utah State Rep. wants to ban gay families from participation in all public programs.
Republicans drop "forcible rape" language from their new anti-abortion bill.
Republican presidential candidates graphed on basis of their sanity and their Mormonism.
Meanwhile, Ed Kilgore measures Jon Huntsman's 2012 chances, and finds them severely wanting. He's like Romney, but even easier to call a conservative apostate.
An interview with Dos Equis' World's Most Interesting Man.
Behavioral economists, poor people, and the broken social safety net.
Max Boot chides his fellow right-wingers for pretending there's a viable alternative to ElBaradei.
I'm not sure about the TAPPED piece claiming that conservatives must not know any poor people, because their assessment of them seems so blatantly wrong.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I know conservatives who have people in their extended families on public assistance, and they will tell you that these relatives are lazy, shiftless, unambitious, etc. Their assessment of the social safety net is based on the poor people they know being the Undeserving Poor. (The Deserving Poor are those who, given so much as a student loan, can bootstrap up out of poverty.)
Second, a trained home health aide generally isn't the type of person conservatives have in mind when they talk about a culture of poverty. They're thinking of multiple generations who are high school dropouts without vocational training, who have spent practically their entire lives relying on the government to feed and shelter them. I don't know how many people of that type actually exist in the real world -- they may be only slightly less mythical than Reagan's Cadillac-driving welfare queens -- but it's what's meant by a culture of poverty. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, families headed by single mothers and how black people were actually better off before both AFDC and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 get pulled into it too.