Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.

This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” (1976) [...]]]> So much misdirected anger.

Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.

This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” (1976) revisited. It is the Lee Atwater/Roger Ailes revolving door, “Willie Horton” campaign ads from 1988. It is the right blaming hurricane victims in New Orleans’ poor Lower Ninth Ward in 2005 for not leaving town in their SUVs and checking into Shreveport or Dallas hotels until Hurricane Katrina blew herself out. It is conservatives blaming the 2008 financial meltdown on the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. The government, you see, forced private mortgage lenders and Wall Street to fatten themselves on CDOs built from the “liar loans” they invented and sold to shiftless poor people. In the United Kingdom, it is BBC’s 2010 “The Scheme,” a series critics described as “poverty porn,” depicting welfare recipients that London’s tabloid Daily Mail calls “welfare junkies” (Well, what do you know?) and “foul-mouthed, lazy scroungers, cheats, layabouts, drunks, drug addicts” leeching off “the goodwill of taxpayers.”

In 2012, it is Newt Gingrich again calling President Obama “the best food stamp president in American history” at appearances last week in New Hampshire:

“And so I’m prepared if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps,” Gingrich said earlier today in Plymouth, N.H.

Echoing Lee Atwater, Gingrich again denied any tinge of racism in his phrasing. “This is not an attack … It’s not negative, it’s a fact.” But Newt knows his Republican base grinds its teeth to nubs over the thought that a lesser someone, somewhere is getting something for nothing from programs that government thugs force god-fearing conservatives to pay for with money they earned with no help from anyone anywhere since being born in little log cabins that they built themselves.

Which brings us to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program. Food stamps. In 2009, the New York Times reported, “Even in Peoria, Ill. — Everytown, U.S.A. — nearly 40 percent of children receive aid.” In 2009, 94 percent of the program’s budget was spent on benefits. Thirty-two percent of recipients were white, 22 percent were African American, 16 percent Hispanic. Forty-seven percent of recipients were children. Another forty-four percent were nonelderly, working-age adults (ages 18 to 59), and nearly two-thirds of those were women. The rest were 60 years-old or older. SNAP provided food assistance to about 40 million Americans at a cost of $53.6 billion, 1.7 percent of $3.1 trillion in federal expenditures. (FY 2009 budget figures used for consistency among available data sets.)

Just for comparison, the Pentagon had a “base” budget of $515 billion in 2009 to staff and maintain 545,000 facilities at 5,300 sites both in the United States and around the globe (not including tens of billions in GWOT supplementals and other off-budget and “black” budget costs). Thus, it is not easy to determine how much all U.S. security agencies spend on defense annually, nor to separate out how much the Pentagon alone spends just to maintain the offshore portion of our global empire. But drawing on various sources, assumptions, and the fact that one-quarter of U.S. troops are stationed abroad, the Institute for Policy Studies estimated the 2009 costs of our overseas operations (wars included) at $250 billion annually “to maintain troops, equipment, fleets, and bases overseas.”

So, the Pentagon spent almost half of its “base” budget, or (at least) 8 percent of the FY 2009 federal budget to maintain 865 or more military bases scattered among the world’s nearly 200 countries outside the United States. And many of those outposts are in countries most Americans cannot even name or find on a map. Strategic planner Thomas P.M. Barnett (“The Pentagon’s New Map“) calls security America’s greatest export commodity.

Now, if there is something else besides personal weakness conservatives cannot abide, it is deadbeats. So one wonders why they focus so much of their ire on the moral hazard of providing food assistance to American compatriots (mostly children) when they spend five times as much on a wide, multicultural world that sleeps under the very blanket of security they provide, and for which the rest of the world pays nothing.

As I am standing [...]]]> We were sitting in a Waffle House in Staunton, Virginia discussing the state of the nation over breakfast. I had just read an Ed Kilgore column in Salon  about the nationwide Republican war on voting rights, and the conservative debate over whether voting is even a right or not.

As I am standing in line to pay my tab, a African-American man in his forties slides into an occupied booth next to the register and sits opposite an older white man. They share a brief exchange about how his shift went. Two smiling, white waitresses come over to take his order and start a friendly argument over how he likes his toast. He is a regular.

“Toast, not grits?” remarks the older white man.

“It’s Filmore,” smiles one of the waitresses to the cook. “Burn it. He likes it burnt.”

“Dark, not burnt,” Filmore insists.

This is Virginia — the capitol of the Old South. Black man. Restaurant. Sharing a table with a white man. White women competing over who will wait on him.

It occurs to me that the prospect of the very everydayness of such a scene horrified many Virginians and others across America 50 years ago.

Some people need an “other” to fear or they don’t know who they they are themselves. It’s not just generational. It is a personality type. Many of the same types today fear poor people, gays, Muslims and Mexicans.

We are on our way to see the Gettysburg battlefield where two American armies slaughtered each other, where the Army of Northern Virginia lost its war over the right to deny rights to an entire class of “others,” and to hang onto a people’s irrational fear of the future I saw at a northern Virginia Waffle House.

The total cost of the thirty ads was not revealed but the spokesperson of the organization is supposed to be gathering that [...]]]> After the unveiling of Life Always’ ad at 58th and State St. on Chicago’s south side Rev. Stephen Broden, a board member of the organization, and other speakers responded to questions.

The total cost of the thirty ads was not revealed but the spokesperson of the organization is supposed to be gathering that data. A Sun-Times reporter asked Rev. Broden about funding neighborhood groups or clinics themselves instead of spending the money on the billboards.

The video can be difficult to hear due to a lot of community opposition of the ads. They remained vocal throughout the press conference as well as the media’s question and answer session. While the organization does not need local neighborhood input prior to placing an advertisement, Washington Park community members felt they should have reached out to local women’s organizations.

When past billboards went up in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York the organization, Life Always, faced criticism of racism and sexism by targeting minority neighborhoods and women. Atlanta Journal Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker wrote, “It’s both sexist and racist to suggest that black women don’t have the intellectual and emotional firepower to make their own decisions.” The New York ad (covered here) brought charges of racial profiling by the anti-choice organization prior to it being pulled.

In a prepared statement Planned Parenthood of Illinois stated:

Planned Parenthood of Illinois provides care to more than 60,000 men, women, and teens each year. More than ninety percent of our services are preventive, and include: lifesaving cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, contraceptive consultations, and GYN exams. In 2010, we provided 34,770 STI tests, 161,678 family planning visits, 15,440 contraception consultations, 19,572 cervical cancer screenings, and 21,393 clinical breast exams. Sixty percent of our patients live at or below the federal poverty level.

We know that African-American women are disproportionately affected by the current health care system which involves multiple barriers to accessing quality, affordable care. This results in higher rates of sexually transmitted infections, unintended pregnancy and abortion.

Life Always is waging much of its campaign against Planned Parenthood by calling it racist under the guise of founder Margaret Sanger’s eugenic beliefs more than 80 years ago (she died in 1966 respected by black civil rights leaders). Planned Parenthood has countlessly denounced her past comments and upholds her as a pioneer in the reproductive rights movement.

Rev. Broden claimed Life Always’ advertising methods were not racist because the speakers were black. If his reasoning was true then Planned Parenthood would not be racist because they have representatives and leaders who are people of color as well. Furthermore, he claimed it was not a race issue while a few seconds later he claimed it was one.

The topic of reproductive choice is always one fraught with emotions. Both sides of the debate argue passionately, as you can tell with the press conference (both sides). Regardless of one’s opinion there is no denying the money spent on those 30 ads would have been better spent on the neighborhoods they reside in.