Day: April 20, 2012

Drug Testing Welfare Recipients Shows One Group Was Right — the Welfare Recipients

Trish
welfare
Yes sir, I WILL need you to pee in the cup.

What do you do when the facts don’t support your actions, which were based on extremist rhetoric and false notions? If you’re Gov. Rick Scott (GOP/Tea – Fla.) you simply change the mission.

The results are in, and drug testing of welfare recipients as a means to deny them assistance costs more than it saves and fails to shrink the welfare rolls. On the plus side, it shows that drug use is lower among welfare recipients than in the general population.

The idea that people on public assistance are lazy, fatcat, dishonest, drug using cheaters of the system who eat steak and drive Cadillacs is so deeply held on the right that it can’t be shaken — no matter how much the facts pee all over it.

The facts have Gov. Scott and the Florida legislators who introduced the bill — which is being challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) even as it is under consideration in 25 other states — pivoting. They say their idea wasn’t so much to save taxpayer dollars, which is precisely what they claimed at the time, but to cut illegal drug use and…um…give me a second here…what sounds good? Something about children? Maybe?

“It’s not about money, it’s about the drug issue,” said Rep. Jimmie Smith, R-Lecanto, who sponsored the legislation. “It’s about using every tool we have in the toolbox to fight drugs.”

Jackie Schutz, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office, said the governor agreed: The drug welfare law is about protecting children and getting parents back to work.

So along with saving taxpayers money, fighting drugs, protecting children, and getting parents back to work, that brings the total number of things the new law isn’t accomplishing to four.

[…]

Fired Secret Service Supervisor Runs Afoul of Sarah Palin

Buck Banks

I was really checking her out, if you know what i mean?

— David Chaney, one of the Secret Service supervisors ousted from the agency this week for their involvement in the Colombia prostitution scandal, who “made light of his official protective work on his Facebook page, joking about a picture of himself standing watch behind Sarah Palin,” the Washington Post reports.

Palin responded on Fox News in her usual witty manner: “Well check this out, bodyguard — you’re fired. And I hope his wife sends him to the doghouse. As long as he’s not eating the dog, along with his former boss.”

Does Romney’s Teavangelical Base Know He Has Hired an Openly Gay Spokesman?

Jon Ponder

Richard Grenell
Richard Grenell
They do now, via Andrew Sullivan:

Romney’s National Security Spokesman Is Openly Gay … A fact that doesn’t make it into the Washington Post. But I’m in no way outing [Richard Grenell]. He has lived with his partner, Matt Lashey, for the past nine years, and is a frequent advocate for Republicans and gays. Which is why this pick is interesting. For Romney to have an openly gay spokesman is a real outreach to gay Republicans, a subtle signal to moderates, and the Santorum faction’s reaction will be worth noting.

Actually, the chance that Santorum’s faction will ever be exposed to the unpleasant fact that Romney has appointed an openly gay man to a high-profile position is less than zilch. Sully, who often writes about epistimic closure, may have been momentarily deluded when he wrote that last bit.

The Republicans base will not learn about it by reading (once openly gay, now closeted) Matt Drudge’s right-wing news aggregator website, and they won’t hear about in the GOP propaganda dumps on Fox News or hate radio — and teavangelicals would never expose their beautiful low-info minds to Sullivan’s posts on the The Daily Beast, even though he is a conservative Catholic, albeit one who is also openly gay.

[…]