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10 Biggest Doozies From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week

Who gets the prize for most deranged statement this week? Limbaugh? Palin? Santorum? Or maybe the RNC.

AlterNet / By Janet Allon

 

 

Photo Credit: Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com

December 7, 2013  |  

 

The week that began with talk of the socialist pope, ended with right-wing absurdities about Nelson Mandela. Is nothing sacred?
1. Rush Limbaugh: The pope rips America, causing Obama to orgasm! And then Mandela really showed those American blacks how to do civil rights!
The man who has continually raised the ante on outrageousness brought his A-game this week, starting with comments about Pope Francis and President Obama. “The pope is ripping capitalism, ripping trickledown economics, ripping America. And Obama is having an orgasm,” Limbaugh spewed. “The pope has co-opted Obama.” Because what really gets this president’s motor going is “ripping this country apart.” (Are you listening, Michelle?) Obama demonstrated his ejaculatory pleasure in criticizing America a few days later when he had the audacity to say that “increasing inequality is most pronounced in this country.” The nerve!
Nelson Mandela’s death provided fodder for the right-wing radio ranter to reach new paroxysms of offensiveness and denounce the civil rights movement in America, which of course helped bring about Obama’s presidency. Here’s his case:

“Nelson Mandela actually lived through the indignities, the punishment, the discrimination, the horrors of the South African apartheid system. Came out of it — you realize when he was inaugurated president, he invited as his special guests the white jailers from his Robben Island prison? He literally did forgive everybody.
“Nelson Mandela would not qualify as a civil rights leader in this country with that philosophy. They can’t let it go. It’s become too big a business. They will not let it go. Mandela let it go. It's just — amazing.”

Of course, Mandela went on to decry the ongoing “cancer of racism” in America and elsewhere. He did not think racism had ended (unlike the RNC, it seems: see item #3 below).
(h/t: mediamatters)
2. Sarah Palin: Thomas Jefferson and I agree. Those meanie atheists are trying to abort Christ from Christmas.
Sarah Palin managed to combine those dreaded atheists with abortion, Christ-killing and the dastardly war on Christmas all in one fell swoop in a speech at Liberty University. She was, of course, promoting her new book Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas, and the former not full-term Alaska governor is nothing if not good at self-promotion.
She also revealed a new talent for channeling the founding fathers. She knows exactly what Thomas Jefferson would do if he were alive today: He’d go on Fox News to complain about the war on Christmas. In other words, he’d be Sarah Palin.
That’s because—and this might come as a surprise to those who have read the part of the constitution about separation of church and state—Jefferson and his buds wrote the constitution specifically for religious people. Nonreligious people, in other words, amoral people, are not capable of understanding the constitution, and they are therefore not able to follow its precepts.
Here’s an excerpt from this marvelous bit of oratory:

 “If you lose that foundation, John Adams was implicitly warning us, then we will not follow our constitution, there will be no reason to follow our constitution because it is a moral and religious people who understand that there is something greater than self, we are to live selflessly, and we are to be held accountable by our creator, so that is what our constitution is based on.”

There’s some more rambling after that, but you get the idea.

From there, she jumped back to her favorite topic and the one that promotes her book, saying Jefferson would agree with her that “angry atheists armed with an attorney” had set their sights on destroying the religious themes in Christmas celebrations.

“Why is it they get to claim some offense taken when they see a plastic Jewish family on somebody’s lawn—a nativity scene, that’s basically what it is, right?”
A plastic Jewish family. Is that in the scripture?
(h/t Raw Story)
3. Tin-eared RNC: Racism and sexism have ended.
The national Republicans deftly demonstrated how they can appeal to both women and blacks this week. They started offering lessons to candidates on how not to say offensive things about women, especially when you are running against one, as Todd “legitimate rape” Akin did. Clearly, a steep learning curve there. Emergency reinforcements may be needed.
Over the weekend, the RNC declared that racism has ended in a tweet marking the anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and celebrating Rosa Parks’ famous act of civil disobedience. “Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in ending racism,” they said. Hilarious tweets ensued under hashtag #racismendedwhen, with answers like “when Mr. Drummond adopted Arnold and Willis,” “when Bill Clinton played the sax on Arsenio Hall” and “when the Fresh Prince moved to Bel-Air.”
Realizing their mistake after, well, millions of people ridiculed them, the RNC amended the tweet, “clarified it,” by saying Parks fought to end racism. But, let’s face it, they really think racism has ended. We’ve got a black president and the Supreme Court itself ruled there is no need for a Voting Rights Act anymore. That ought to settle it.
Does anyone still wonder why more than 90 percent of black America votes for anyone but the GOP?
4. Rick Santorum: Obamacare is like apartheid. And I am like Mandela. O’Reilly: Oh, you mean that commie?
Wow. Flabbergasting things happen when you combine two idiots on Fox with the death of a great man.
Here’s Santorum on Mandela:

“He was fighting against some great injustice, and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives—and Obamacare is front and center in that.”

Apartheid and affordable healthcare. Yes, very similar. And that would, of course, make you Mandela-like in fighting this injustice. Amirite? We’ve seen some questionable analogies before, i.e. Obamacare and Katrina, Obamacare and the Fugitive Slave Act, Obamacare and the Nuremberg Laws, but this one might be the biggest doozy of them all. Points for creativity, Rick!
O’Reilly couldn’t top that, so he just kept repeating the one thing he did have to say about Mandela.

“He was a communist, this man. He was a communist, all right? But he was a great man! What he did for his people was stunning!...He was a great man! But he was a communist!”

So, uh, wait? Does that make Santorum a communist?
5. Fox News: Sharia law is here and the proof is that Muslim girls are taking swim classes at the Y.
Head for the hills. Sharia is here and it’s coming after your women. Fox continued its quest to stoke the fires of Islamaphobia when it targeted a seemingly harmless YMCA swim class in St. Paul Minnesota that offers hour-long swim practice once a week for Muslim Somali-American girls between the ages of 5 and 17. The YMCA (that’s “C” for Christian, hello) even makes considerations for the girls’ modesty and religious beliefs. On Fox & Friends, an outraged Heather Nauert said this is just one more piece of evidence that "Sharia law is now changing everything."
Modesty considerations have long kept observant Somali-American Muslim girls from learning even basic swimming skills, which, of course, is the problem that the program is designed to overcome. This pernicious tolerance trend is spreading all over the Midwest, Fox reports. Thankfully, Nauert promised viewers that Fox will keep an eye on it.
We are sure they will.
6. S.C. Sheriff refuses to fly flag at half staff for Mandela.
Another great American with a modicum of power and a desire to use it, Rick Clark, the sheriff of Pickens County, S.C., is taking a bold stand against... ummm... Obama’s tyranny? Sheriff Clark is refusing to lower the flag to half staff in honor of Mandela on December 9, 2013, as the president ordered.
Now, we know what you are thinking, but this has nothing to do with race, Clark swears. It has to do with Amurrica. "Nelson Mandela did great things for his country and was a brave man but he was not an AMERICAN!!!” Clark wrote on his Facebook page. “The flag should be lowered at our Embassy in S. Africa, but not here."
Clark knows full well when it is appropriate to lower that flag. He did it last Friday in honor of a deceased deputy, and on Saturday in honor of Pearl Harbor Day. But then it’s straight back up for Ole Glory. Unless another Amurrican dies.
7. Texas Republican Rep.: Minimum wage, schminimum wage.
Sometimes the best defense is a good offense. So, in a week when low-wage workers went on strike to demand an increase in the minimum wage, and President Obama finally acknowledged that inequality is the defining challenge of our time, Rep. Joe Barton decided to be deeply offensive.
Abolish minimum wage, he told the National Journal. “I think it’s outlived its usefulness,” he said. His view is that it was only useful during the Great Depression.
Raising the minimum wage is bound to be on the list of things not to do in the Republican obstructionist playbook, now that Obama has announced making structural inequality the focus of the rest of his presidency.
Think Progress reports:

“At least 67 Republicans who are still serving in Congress today supported an increase under President George W. Bush, including Alexander and Ryan. Yet House Republicans unanimously voted down an increase in March.”

But while many of them won’t raise it, Barton’s going one better.
Let them eat cake!
8. House Chair of Science Committee Lamar Smith: Climate change, no way; aliens, sure.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who chairs the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, has no use for climate change science, and less use for the efforts to regulate carbon emissions. Setting standards for polluting power plants is partisan politics, he recently argued, blasting the EPA for trying to do so, not science. And the petroleum industry favorite knows from science. He’s using one of the seven days left on the legislative calendar to talk about extraterrestrials in a hearing called, “Astrobiology: Search for Biosignatures in our Solar System and Beyond.”
Well, if there are aliens out there living on some other planet, that could help give people a hint about where to go when the Earth becomes uninhabitable due to global warming, which isn’t happening, of course, no matter what 97 percent of scientists say.
9. California GOP-er: It’s part of Middle Eastern culture to lie.
Rep. Duncan Hunter must have been a cultural anthropology major. He displayed his deep knowledge of Middle Eastern culture in an interview with CSPAN this week when he expressed his opposition to the recent treaty with Iran. They lie, he said, in essence. Not only do they lie, they revere lying. Here’s how he knows. He’s heard about how bargaining goes on over there. "In the Middle Eastern culture it is looked upon with very high regard to get the best deal possible, no matter what it takes, and that includes lying," Hunter said.
His interlocutor gave him the chance to add some nuance to this keen geopolitical observation, and asked if he meant "all Middle Eastern countries are this way."
Yep, he said: "They like to barter there."
In damage control mode later, his communications director clarified that Hunter was talking about Middle Eastern political leaders, not all the people, especially Iranians.
Furthermore, Hunter, who also thinks U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants should be deported and opposes gays in the military, recommends using a nuclear bomb on Iran if necessary.
"I don’t think it’s inevitable but I think if you have to hit Iran, you don’t put boots on the ground, you do it with tactical nuclear devices and you set them back a decade or two or three."
Then you can go back to the bargaining table.
(h/t TPM)
10. GOP Rep: "I wake up every day not thinking about social issues."
Virginia Rep. Scott Rigell is up for re-election next year, and he just wants to clarify what does and what does not keep him up at night. He apparently told Politico: “I wake up every day not thinking about social issues.”
You have to admire his succinctness!

Rand Paul Tells Millions He’s Doing Them a Favor By Cutting Off Unemployment Benefits

Rand Paul Tells Millions He’s Doing Them a Favor By Cutting Off Unemployment Benefits

By: Sarah Jones more from Sarah Jones

Sunday, December, 8th, 2013, 10:58 am

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was on Fox News Sunday to continue his minority outreach to African Americans, by saying we shouldn’t extend unemployment benefits set to expire momentarily because he knows one black businessman who wants tax cuts.
Video:


Paul said, “I do support unemployment benefits for the 26 weeks that they’re paid for, but if you extend it past that you do a disservice to these workers.” His reasoning is that when you “allow people” to be on unemployment for longer, you are causing them to be “perpetually unemployed”. Don’t forget about his one black businessman.
See, it’s not that there are no jobs, it’s that employers don’t like to hire people who have been out of work for very long. Thus, by taking away the “incentive” to stay unemployed, Paul thinks he can solve the unemployment problem. It’s the “firmer hand” theory, also used as an argument for slavery.
There can be no other explanation for Paul’s reasoning other than people want to stay unemployed, otherwise he wouldn’t think that taking away unemployment benefits creates job opportunities. This veers dangerously close to the “lazy urban” narrative that Republicans favor. It is not accurate to suggest that starving will create jobs. So this is not a good plan for jobs or for the unemployed.
Paul said that African American unemployment hasn’t budged under this President, implying that he thinks he can get the African American vote by criticizing this president and blaming him for higher unemployment among African Americans, as if this is a new phenomenon best addressed by letting a white Southern man make decisions for African Americans and this president. Some things just shouldn’t be said by certain people, especially not people who employed a white supremacist. It’s bad optics.
The carrot dangling is far from over. You know what the number once concern is for African Americans, after tax cuts for businesses? School choice, apparently. “My economic stimulus plan would stimulate Detroit. There is no other plan on the table. If my plan would pass I think it’s the only one that would pass. I am also talking about restoring voting rights and school choice.”
Voting rights? His party is the party that came after voting rights nationally and his party is the party that made Detroiters’ votes meaningless under Republican Gov. Rick Snyder. That’s going to be a hard sale.
When asked for alternatives to ObamaCare, Rand criticized ObamaCare and then said he’s for Freedom of Choice. Seriously. The anti-choicer is for Freedom of Choice, which means no plan. It means repeal ObamaCare because the “premiums are higher” – which they aren’t for the majority of people. So that’s his big sell to Detroit: Come and get nothing in order to protect the rich. That’s new for Republicans in Detroit. Detroiters will never see through that (see sarcasm). Clearly Sen. Paul is unaware of the high priority most Americans put on the issue of affordable healthcare. It’s an issue of economic survival for many. Not something they want to toss away into the GOP “freedom” for corporations ring.
Yes, 2016 2016 2016. The Senator is a GOP presidential front runner, and it seems he is already running for President, “the thought has crossed my mind, Chris.” But he’s concerned about the “haters and hacks”. So are we, Senator.
Image: Fox News

Rand Paul Tells Millions He’s Doing Them a Favor By Cutting Off Unemployment Benefits was written by Sarah Jones for PoliticusUSA.

© PoliticusUSA, Sun, Dec 8th, 2013 — All Rights Reserved

Oops: Republican Obamacare Amendment Expanded Abortion Access for GOP Staffers

—By Molly Redden

| Mon Dec. 9, 2013 3:00 AM GMT

"Crap." Pete Marovich/ZUMA

Nearly 9 in 10 health care plans that members of Congress and their staff must choose from include abortion coverage, a fact that has Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and right-wing media outlets raising hell.
But the only reason that congressional staffers have to choose from these plans at all is because a Republican amendment to Obamacare requires it. Thanks to this amendment, congressional staffers, who once had to pay for abortions out of pocket, can now buy insurance that covers abortions.
The bizarre story of how a conservative, anti-abortion Republican ended up expanding abortion access for congressional staff dates back to the initial fight over the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Here's how it happened: The Obamacare exchanges were expressly designed to provide insurance to the uninsured, so congressional staffers—who, like most Americans, already had insurance—were initially excluded. Republicans claimed that this amounted to Democrats "exempting" themselves and their staff from Obamacare, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced an amendment that would force members of Congress and their staff to use the exchanges. Grassley's proposal was intended to embarrass Democrats. But Democrats called Grassley's bluff, and the law passed with his amendment.
But Grassley's measure forced congressional staff out of the Federal Health Benefits Program, which federal law prohibited from offering any abortion coverage. Under the the federal plan, any congressional employee who wanted an abortion had to pay for it out of pocket. Now that they're on the Obamacare exchanges, though, congressional employees will only pay out of pocket for abortion insurance. They'll be able to choose any of the 112 plans available via Washington, DC's health care exchange, only 9 of which do not cover abortion.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Grassley's office did not respond to a request for comment.
Smith claimed to the Associated Press that this means Congress is spending taxpayer dollars on abortions. But as ThinkProgress' Tara Culp-Ressler detailed, the employer contributions congressional staff receive for health care—i.e., federal, taxpayer dollars—will not be used to pay for abortions. The Office of Personnel Management has bent over backward to ensure that when congressional staff purchase health care plans, they'll be paying for any abortion coverage with segregated personal funds.
And the cost of that abortion coverage will likely be much less than that of an actual abortion. A 2013 Guttmacher Institute study using 2009 data found that the average out-of-pocket price women paid for an abortion was $485.
So to recap: Republican fearmongering about an Obamacare exemption for congressional staffers that never existed has earned congressional staffers a big abortion discount.

Molly Redden

Reporter

Molly Redden is a reporter in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She tweets at @mtredden. RSS | Twitter

Cato Institute suggests an ‘overthrow’ of U.S. Government is needed

David PhillipsLas Vegas Democrat Examiner

December 5, 2013

Testifying before a Congressional hearing Tuesday on the President’s Constitutional powers, Michael Cannon the Cato Institute’s Director of Health Policy Studies, suggests that as a last “resort” the U.S. Government should be “overthrown” because President Barack Obama overstepped his executive powers implementing the Affordable Car Act. And Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) who was questioning Mr. Cannon, agreed.

“There is one last thing to which the people can resort if the government does not respect the restrains that the constitution places on the government,” Cannon said. “Abraham Lincoln talked about our right to alter our government or our revolutionary right to overthrow it.”
“That is certainly something that no one wants to contemplate,” he continued. “If the people come to believe that the government is no longer constrained by the laws then they will conclude that neither are they.”

Cannon goes on to say that it's “very dangerous” for the President to “ignore the laws” by imposing an “obligation upon the people”

“That is a very dangerous sort of thing for the president to do, to wantonly ignore the laws,” Cannon concluded, “to try to impose obligation upon people that the legislature did not approve.”

There have been several calls for a revolution to overthrow the U.S. Government because of President Obama and the Affordable Care Act by right wing activists, and they have received some support from Republicans in Congress.
Last month right wing activists held a rally in Washington D.C., promoted by Larry Klayman a far right wing activist, along with Larry Pratt, Bob Barr, Pamela Geller, Alan Keyes, Bradlee Dean, Joseph Farah and Zeeda Andrews. All of these people are right wing activists who say that President Obama is either a Muslim terrorist or worse.
Klayman had suggested that there may be a violent revolution if his Nov. 19 rally failed, he even went as far as issuing a new Declaration of Independence to promote his rally, which did turn out to be a massive failure. During the promotion of the rally, Klayman said that he expected upwards of 1 million people, but only about 100 people showed up.
You can view the C-SPAN2 video clip of Michael Cannon testifying at the Congressional hearing attached to this article above.
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Unarmed Man Charged With Wounding the Bystanders That Were Shot By Police

Unarmed Man Charged With Wounding the Bystanders That Were Shot By Police

by Heavy Mettle 

Back in September an emotionally disturbed man walked out into Times Square traffic causing a disturbance by throwing himself in front of cars. The police responded by trying to shoot him (because of course that is what you do when someone is displaying unbalanced behavior) and instead shot the bystanders on the scene.

Police officers arrived and tried to corral Mr. Broadnax, a 250-pound man. When he reached into his pants pocket, two officers, who, the police said, thought he was pulling a gun, opened fire, missing Mr. Broadnax, but hitting two nearby women. Finally, a police sergeant knocked Mr. Broadnax down with a Taser.

(Because of course any movement by anyone is the pulling of a gun).  Now he is being charge with charging the man with felony assault for the cops' shooting and injuring innocent bystanders.

This is where police decided to open fire on unarmed man

Initially Mr. Broadnax was arrested on misdemeanor charges of menacing, drug possession and resisting arrest. But the Manhattan district attorney’s office persuaded a grand jury to charge Mr. Broadnax with assault, a felony carrying a maximum sentence of 25 years. Specifically, the nine-count indictment unsealed on Wednesday said Mr. Broadnax “recklessly engaged in conduct which created a grave risk of death.” “The defendant is the one that created the situation that injured innocent bystanders,” said an assistant district attorney, Shannon Lucey.

One of the victims of Mr. Broadnax's "assault" has spoken out against the charges.

Mariann Wang, a lawyer representing Sahar Khoshakhlagh, one of the women who was wounded, said the district attorney should be pursuing charges against the two officers who fired their weapons in a crowd, not against Mr. Broadnax. “It’s an incredibly unfortunate use of prosecutorial discretion to be prosecuting a man who didn’t even injure my client,” she said. “It’s the police who injured my client.”

The incident recalled a previous one near the Empire State Building where bystanders were injured:

The incident calls to mind a 2012 case where nine bystanders were injured during a police shooting by police bullets, ricochets and fragments when two officers fired at a man suspected of gunning down a former co-worker outside the Empire State Building, calling in question the police's ability to handle such situations, endangering the lives of bystanders who were in little to no danger before the police showed up. In that incident, officers fired a total of 16 shots outside one of the world's most popular tourist attractions as a large crowd watched. While an investigation later determined the suspect, who was killed in the incident, had 10 bullet holes in him, many nearby were still wounded. The NYPD and Mayor Michael Bloomberg fiercely defended the officers' actions at the time.

As Salon notes, more than half the people shot at by police have mental health problems. The NYPD seems to have no training in dealing with and handling these types of incidents reasonably.

As reported here, an investigation last year by the Portland Press Herald and the Maine Sunday Telegram found that over half of people shot by police in the U.S. suffer from mental illness. The Times Square incident is no exception. As the Times reported, “after his arrest, Mr. Broadnax was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, where he told a detective that ‘he was talking to dead relatives in his head and that he tried throwing himself in front of cars to kill himself.’” Luckily, then, New York’s finest were there to open fire.

We know the police in New York already have free rein to shoot people they think might be criminals or might be pulling guns. Now they have free rein not only on so-called suspected criminals, but unfortunate people who happen to make the mistake of being anywhere near their line of fire. This is a new low in justifying their behavior by the judiciary. Especially considering the daily crime taking place about 50 blocks south of Times Square, on a daily basis.

Originally posted to Heavy Mettle on Fri Dec 06, 2013 at 08:21 AM PST.

Also republished by Police Accountability Group.

Rick Santorum: Nelson Mandela Fought 'Great Injustice,' Just Like Republicans Are Battling Obamacare

The Huffington Post  |  By Paige Lavender
Posted: 12/06/2013 9:53 am EST

During an appearance on Fox News Thursday night, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) discussed the death of Nelson Mandela, saying the former South African president fought "great injustice" just like Republicans who are battling Obamacare.
"Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that. That's the reason he's mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed," Santorum said. "But you're right, I mean, what he was advocating for was not necessarily the right answer, but he was fighting against some great injustice, and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people's lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that."
The statement, pointed out by Slate's Dave Weigel in a tweet Friday morning, came after Fox News host Bill O'Reilly claimed Mandela "was a great man, but he was a communist."
"I would never attack Nelson Mandela," O'Reilly said next.
Watch a clip of Santorum's remarks above.

Post-racist society? In Florida, Confederates try to stop monument to Union soldiers

 Eideard

Post-racist society? In Florida, Confederates try to stop monument to Union soldiers

The Civil War might be long over, but a battle about putting a monument honoring Union soldiers at Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park in Florida is still underway.
The proposal to install a monument at the park — the site of the biggest Civil War battle fought in Florida — was met with opposition on Monday night during a public hearing…
Each year, Olustee hosts a reenactment of a four-hour battle in which Union forces were routed by Confederate troops…

A descendant of someone who died at the Battle of Olustee, Mike Farrell, proposed the new memorial because of his experience serving as an historical exhibitor at the park.
“I always have the visiting public approach me and ask me where the Union monument is on the battlefield, and I often tell them, ‘There isn’t any.’…What I’m talking about is a battlefield monument,” Farrell said.

Republican state Rep. Dennis Baxley…proposed halting the monument from within the state house. “I can do a very simple proposal to the Legislature that we protect all monument sites,” he said.

Racists have grown more practiced in the semantics-based lies they use to answer questions about bigoted proposals. I guess that in itself is recognition of growing understanding among Americans still dull enough to be suckered into rightwing politics. They don’t care to admit publicly how much of their craptastic chicanery is proposed to satisfy racism, justify slavery.
They’re only kidding themselves. The rest of the nation looks and nods – “Yes, these are the village idiots who continue to think they weren’t defeated by the strength of the Union. They believe the South will rise again and Jim Crow laws will be reinstated.”
Illustrating once again how easy it was for Nixon to decide on the Southern Strategy, just how easy it was for Republicans to lock up the bigot vote.

 

GOP Sen: An abortion to save a mother's life is simply a 'matter of convenience'

Robert SobelOrlando Liberal Examiner

July 24, 2013

A Republican state congressman got into a heated argument with a Facebook user over the weekend regarding abortion rights. During the exchange, the congressman claimed that keeping abortion legal to save the mother's life was simply a "matter of convenience."
Brian Nieves, the Republican Missouri Senate Majority Whip, posted a photo of a gun on his Facebook page. Nieves claimed that an unnamed "Modern Day Patriot" gave him the gun and Nieves made negative comments about House Minority Leader, Democrat Nancy Pelosi in the process. Responding to the photo and Nieves was a fellow Facebook user, who ridiculed the Republican congressman for posting the picture and making the comments. Nieves then commented back, asking the Facebook user is he was easily offended by "partial-birth abortions." Think Progress points out that the conversation continued with the Facebook user posting medical reasons for why a late term abortion may be necessary, but Neives fired back with comments that are on par with typical conservative logic.

"Brian Nieves: (Facebook user's name)... This is what you say in support of Partial Birth Abortion?? Here are your words from above: "Common Logistical and Personal Reasons for Partial Birth Abortions
-- Lack or lack of recognition of pregnancy symptoms, particularly by adolescents
-- Inability to afford a first trimester abortion
-- Inability to locate medical assistance during first trimester (due to lack of local medical professionals)
-- Lack of financial resources, emotional support, and/or partner
July 20 at 11:36pm · Like · 2
Brian Nieves (Facebook user's name).... "Life of the Mother?" Your own argument proves it is a matter of convenience! Tell me this - Do you even know what a partial birth abortion really is? No, seriously, do you actually know what it is?? If so, explain to me what a partial birth abortion is."

While a late-term abortion is never on anyone's "to do" list, there are times when the procedure is medically necessary. Both sides of the political fence continue to battle over this issue and the larger issue of abortions rights and a woman's right to choose. The "pro-life" movement and "pro-choice" sector have laid claims to small victories in the past and, at times, the issue has even found its way to the Supreme Court.
At the end of the day, the argument and battle wages on. No one will ever be able to convince the opposing side to believe their side of the argument. The abortion issue isn't one that can be convenient by numbers and statistics, it's a matter of moral and ethical code that can only bring small victories to the table, not one that will win over an entire nation.

Irritating Conservatives: Facts and Common Sense Thoughts Republicans Really Won’t Like

November 30, 2013 

By Allen Clifton 

 

Every once in a while I like to write an article listing a few facts Republicans really won’t like hearing.  For most, debating Republicans is a mind-numbing venture that should only be taken on by those who wish to punish themselves.
For me, I love presenting them with facts to see them try to ramble off whatever talking point they’ve been fed by Fox News and others within the right-wing media.
But it’s not just facts that Republicans seem immune to.  Common sense and logic seem to be two other traits conservatives seem completely devoid of.
So, in no particular order, here’s a few facts and common sense thoughts you can share with Republicans to drive them crazy.
Our Constitution and Health Care
In the late-1700′s, we didn’t have an organized military and required armed citizens to defend our outlying borders on a moments notice until help could arrive from the government.  The average life expectancy was also around 35 years old and a bad cut to the leg often meant amputation.  Could it possibly be that’s why the right to own guns is our Second Amendment but health care is mentioned absolutely no where?
Isn’t it a little asinine to completely base a modern society in 2013 on ideas written hundreds of years ago?  And don’t even give me “the Constitutional Amendment process.”  We will probably never see another Constitutional Amendment passed in our lifetimes.  The process for passing one, with a political environment saturated with big money and lobbyist influence, is simply not conducive to passing any kind of amendment to our Constitution.

Economic Improvement
Moving onto our economy.  We’ve gone from a point where we were losing hundreds of thousands of jobs per month to gaining hundreds of thousands.  In fact, there are some months where the headline, “Economy Only Adds 175k Jobs” is considered bad news because the numbers didn’t beat estimates.
For those who are mathematically challenged, gaining nearly 200,000 jobs as opposed to losing 200,000 jobs is actually a great way to define economic improvement.
If you really believe our economy hasn’t drastically improved under President Obama, you’re simply living in denial.
Oh, and we can still blame Bush for the areas of our economy that are slower to improve.  Cleaning up a mess is always much harder than creating one.  When we’re still having to fix problems caused prior to January 2009, those issues didn’t suddenly become President Obama’s fault simply because Bush’s time in office ran out.
And can you people be honest with yourselves for once?  If a Republican president came into office in 2009 and created nearly 8 million jobs, presided over record stock levels, killed Osama bin Ladin and reduced our year to year deficits by their largest margins since World War II — you’d be calling him a Republican hero.
Religion
I’m a Christian and I love my faith.  If you’re a Christian that’s great too.  Faith and religion can be wonderful things in our lives.  Well, our personal lives.  Keyword being personal.  
Religion is something that’s rarely a good topic to be discussed in public because it’s something that millions of people — many within the same faith, mind you — strongly disagree on.
Which is why a strict separation of church and state is vital for government.  If you want more religion in your life, go to church more often.  Don’t try to force it into our government where it has no place.
The Media
Conservatives are right about one thing: the media is often a joke.  But it’s the conservative media that’s by far the worst.  At least MSNBC openly admits they lean left.  Fox News tries to portray itself as “Fair and Balanced” while being neither.  Then some of your biggest “voices of conservative media” are some of the most reprehensible, paranoid and disgusting people in all of the media.  People like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter.  People with next to no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
I love how facts often suddenly become “liberally biased” simply because they might not support your ideology.  Take climate change, for example.  It’s amazing how not too long ago climate change was pretty much an accepted fact — until some within your party decided that something supported by the vast majority of the global scientific community wasn’t as credible as the “science” done by right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation.
And at least liberals get their news from a variety of sources.  You people only trust Fox News.  Why do you think their ratings are often higher than everyone else?  It isn’t because they’re better, it’s just because conservatives have been brainwashed not to trust anyone else.
Taxes
Whenever I talk about trickle-down economics I rarely get the sense that conservatives actually believe in it.  They do, however, seem to support the popular Republican economic theory because the “dirty America-hating liberals” oppose it.
I think it’s funny how basically every credible economic statistic since trickle-down economics was put into place in this country shows income inequality has never been greater or wider.  The rich are richer than ever before while the poor and middle class continue to fall further and further behind.
The promise of trickle-down economics is that the more the rich have, the better it will be for the rest of us.  Well, over 30 years since trickle-down economics was chosen as the scam to con millions of Americans plan usher in new economic prosperity — we’re still waiting for it to “trickle down.”
Honestly, how much richer do the top 2% need to get before we say, “You know what?  This is a load of crap.”
Then again, Fox News will never say that, so conservative voters will never believe it.

–

I’ll go ahead and cut if off there.  I think I might just make this a series because there are many more areas I would love to have covered, but the article would end up being thousands of words long.
So, maybe a “Part 2″ in the future?  I guess you’ll just have to keep an eye out and see.

Related Posts on Forward Progressives:

• Pope Francis Slams Trickle-Down Economics, Calls Out Republican Economic Policy
• 10 Questions Every Liberal Should Ask Every Republican
• If Republicans Would Just Get Out of the Way, Our Economy Would Be Much Better Off
• Satire Has Become Reality: Rush Limbaugh Attacks Pope Francis for Acting Like a Christian

20 Things the Poor Really Do Everyday That the Rich Never Have to Worry About

Just staying alive is a struggle.

December 5, 2013  |  

 

This post first appeared on Ben Irwin's blog. 

Financial advisor and evangelical Christian Dave Ramsey probably wasn’t expecting this much pushback when he shared a piece contrasting the habits of the rich with those of the poor. In her response on CNN, Rachel Held Evans noted that Ramsey and Corley mistake correlation for causality when they suggest (without actually proving) that these habits are the cause of a person’s financial situation. (Did it never occur to them that it might be the other way around?)

Ramsey fired back, calling the pushback “immature and ignorant.” This from a guy who just made 20 sweeping assertions about 47 million poor people in the US — all based on a survey of 361 individuals.

That’s right. To come up with his 20 habits, Corley talked to just 233 wealthy people and 128 poor people. Ramsey can talk all he wants about Corley’s research passing the “common-sense smell test,” but it doesn’t pass the “research methodology 101” test.

To balance the picture a bit, I wanted to take a fact-based look at 20 things the poor do on a daily basis…

1. Search for affordable housing. 
Especially in urban areas, the waiting list for affordable housing can be a year or more. During that time, poor families either have to make do with substandard or dangerous housing, depend on the hospitality of relatives, or go homeless.
(Source: New York Times)

2. Try to make $133 worth of food last a whole month. 
That’s how much the average food stamp recipient gets each month. Imagine trying to eat well on $4.38 per day. It’s not easy, which is why many impoverished families resort to #3…
(Source: Kaiser Family Foundation)

3. Subsist on poor quality food. 
Not because they want to, but because they can’t afford high-quality, nutritious food. They’re trapped in a food system that subsidizes processed foods, making them artificially cheaper than natural food sources. So the poor are forced to eat bad food — if they’re lucky, that is…
(Sources: Washington Post; Journal of Nutrition, March 2008)

4. Skip a meal.
One in six Americans are food insecure. Which means (among other things) that they’re sometimes forced to go without eating.
(Sources: World Vision, US Department of Agriculture)

5. Work longer and harder than most of us.
While it’s popular to think people are poor because they’re lazy (which seems to be the whole point of Ramsey’s post), the poor actually work longer and harder than the rest of us. More than 80 percent of impoverished children have at least one parent who works; 60 percent have at least one parent who works full-time. Overall, the poor work longer hours than the so-called “job creators.”
(Source: Poverty and Learning, April 2008)

6. Go to bed 3 hours before their first job starts. 
Number 15 on Ramsey and Corley’s list was, “44% of [the] wealthy wake up three hours before work starts vs. 3% of [the] poor.” It may be true that most poor people don’t wake up three hours before work starts. But that could be because they’re more likely to work multiple jobs, in which case job #1 means they’re probably just getting to bed three hours before job #2 starts.
(Source: Poverty and Learning, April 2008)

7. Try to avoid getting beat up by someone they love. 
According to some estimates, half of all homeless women in America ran away to escape domestic violence.
(Source: National Coalition for the Homeless, 2009)

8. Put themselves in harm’s way, only to be kicked to the streets afterward. 
How else do you explain 67,000 63,000 homeless veterans?
(Source: US Department of Veterans Affairs, updated to reflect the most recent data)

9. Pay more than their fair share of taxes. 
Some conservative pundits and politicians like to think the poor don’t pay their fair share, that they are merely “takers.” While it’s true the poor don’t pay as much in federal income tax — usually because they don’t earn enough to qualify — they do pay sales tax, payroll tax, etc. In fact, the bottom 20% of earners pay TWICE as much in taxes (as a share of their income) as do the top 1%.
(Source: Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy, January 2013)

10. Fall further behind. 
Even when poverty is the result of poor decision-making, often it’s someone else’s choices that make the difference. If you experience poverty as a child, you are 3-4 times less likely to graduate high school. If you spend your entire childhood in poverty, you are 5 times less likely to graduate. Which means your future has been all but decided for you.
(Sources: World Vision, Children’s Defense Fund, Annie E. Casey Foundation)

11. Raise kids who will be poor. 
A child’s future earnings are closely correlated to their parents’ earnings. In other words, economic mobility — the idea that you can claw your way out of poverty if you just try hard enough is, more often than not, a myth.
(Sources: OECD, Economic Policy Institute)

12. Vote less. 
And who can blame them? I would be less inclined to vote if I didn’t have easy access to the polls and if I were subjected to draconian voter ID laws that are sold to the public as necessary to suppress nonexistent voter fraud.
(Source: The Center for Voting and Democracy)

13. When they do vote… vote pretty much the same as the rest of us. 
Following their defeat in 2012, conservatives took solace by reasoning that they’d lost to a bunch of “takers,” including the poor, who voted for Democrats because they want free handouts from big government. The reality is a bit more complex. Only a third of low-income voters identify as Democrats, about the same for all Americans, including wealthy voters.
(Sources: NPR, Pew Research Center)

14. Live with chronic pain. 
Those earning less than $12,000 a year are twice as likely to report feeling physical pain on any given day.
(Source: Kaiser Health News)

15. Live shorter lives. 
There is a 10-14 year gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor. In recent years, poor people’s life expectancy has actually declined — in America, the wealthiest nation on the planet.
(Source: Health Affairs, 2012)

16. Use drugs and alcohol pretty much the same as (or less than) everyone else. 
Despite the common picture of inner city crack houses, drug use is pretty evenly spread across income groups. And rich people actually abuse alcohol more than the poor.
(Source: Poverty and Learning, April 2008)

17. Receive less in subsidized benefits than corporations. 
The US government spends around $60 billion on public housing and rental subsidies for low-income families, compared to more than $90 billion on corporate subsidies. Oil companies alone get around $70 billion. And that’s not counting the nearly $60 billion a year in tax breaks corporations enjoy by sheltering profits offshore. Or the $700 billion bailout banks got in 2008.
(Source: Think By Numbers)

18. Get themselves off welfare as soon as possible. 
Despite the odds, the vast majority of beneficiaries leave the welfare rolls within five years. Even in the absence of official welfare-to-work programming, most welfare recipients enroll in some form of vocational training. Why? Because they’re desperate to get off welfare.
(Source: US Department of Health and Human Services)

19. Have about the same number of children as everyone else. 
No, poor people do not have loads of children just so they can stay on welfare.
(Source: US Department of Health and Human Services)

20. Accomplish one single goal: stay alive.  
Poverty in America may not be as dire as poverty in other parts of the world, but many working poor families are nonetheless preoccupied with day-to-day survival. For them, life is not something to be enjoyed so much as endured.

These are the real habits of the poor, those with whom Jesus identifies most closely.

Quote of the Day: The Latest Conservative A**hole To Lecture the Pope

Chez Pazienza on December 06, 2013

“The pope seems to prefer common ownership of the means of production, which is Marxist, or private ownership and government control, which is fascist, or government ownership and government control, which is socialist. All of those failed systems lead to ashes, not wealth… What shall we do about the pope and economics? We should pray for his faith and understanding and for a return to orthodoxy.”
– Fox News regular Andrew Napolitano in an op-ed in today’s Washington Times titled “Pope Francis Should Be Saving Souls, Not Pocketbooks”
I swear, right now there’s little that’s as endlessly entertaining as watching the clowns of the American right — who for so long figured they had the market cornered on Jesus — lose their minds over the new pope. Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the Breitbart team, all either claim to be holier-than-thou servants of the one true God or just assume they can count on keeping those in his thrall safely under their thumbs. And here comes a guy who’s supposedly truly sanctified and infallible, the living embodiment of God on earth, and he’s completely fucking their shit up. He’s leading by example and taking on the responsibility of the papacy in a way that I’ll bet is more Christ-like than any of his predecessors were going back a very long time, and in doing so — by completely obliterating the status quo we’ve come to expect from the church and Christianity — he’s pulling a Jesus-in-Jerusalem on these people, upsetting their money-changing carts in the temple and gracefully challenging their corrupt Pharisees.
And they’re not happy about it.
It was bad a couple of weeks back when Sarah Palin — an idiot wouldn’t know true compassion for her fellow man if it got stuck in her ass like buckshot — concern trolled the pope over statements of his that she felt were a little too “liberal.” But all hell broke loose when the pope delivered that recent encyclical in which he slammed unfettered capitalism (read: greed). Over the past couple of days, you could close your eyes and practically feel the fabric of conservative reality being rent in two. Fox News, Limbaugh, Drudge, that pompous prick Stuart Varney — they’ve all torn into Pope Francis, because he happens to be a guy who loves atheists and gays and, most distressingly, has the nerve to go out at night in street clothes and feed the poor. They’re tearing into the pope for being exactly what Jesus was, word for word, action for action.
But Napolitano’s criticism is special. It’s special because, well, the fucking gall of him. He isn’t just offering, pardon the pun, good faith dissension — he’s lecturing, chastising. And maybe there’s something even more offensive about the fact that he couches his insolence in claims of being not simply a Catholic, but, astonishingly, a better Catholic than the pope. He “prays” that Pope Francis returns to what he’s come to expect from Catholicism and Christianity, the brand that’s embraced and been corrupted by the very greed Francis claims to be at least attempting to move away from.
I can ridicule the pope’s belief system because I disagree with it completely and don’t feel the least bit beholden to it; Napolitano has the balls to imply a position of authority above that of the leader of the church he purports to be a dedicated member of. He can’t even imagine the possibility that, as a man supposedly imbued with knowledge directly from the almighty, Pope Francis might be the right one in this scenario and he may be the guy who’s been doing it wrong all this time. That’s beyond his comprehension. It’s easier to just be an original sinning flesh-and-blood nobody thinking he’s got it all figured out and it’s the pope who’s screwing everything up.
Andrew, you arrogant asshole, you’re getting a lesson in how to truly be holy from a man who supposedly knows a lot more about these things than you. If you subscribe to the Catholic faith, then Pope Francis is the man whose example you have to follow. He’s right and you’re wrong. So it’s time for you to say ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers, then sit down and shut the fuck up.

GOP debunked on food stamps: Everything they say about SNAP is wrong

Forget the nonsense about them breeding dependency. Food stamps increase self-sufficiency, research shows

Paul Rosenberg

 

Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, Rand Paul (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst/Tami Chappell/AP/Ed Reinke)

 

Hilary Hoynes is a University of California at Berkeley economist who wrote a particularly notable paper last year. Instead of increasing dependency, as conservative critics have repeatedly claimed, Hoyen’s paper showed that, for women at least, food stamp use during pregnancy and early childhood has exactly the opposite impact of what conservatives allege: It actually increases economic self-sufficiency when children grow up, in the next generation.
That was just one of two main results reported in “Long Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net,” which Hoynes co-authored with Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond.  As stated in the paper’s abstract, access to food stamps for women leads to “increases in economic self-sufficiency (increases in educational attainment, earnings, and income, and decreases in welfare participation).”  Hoynes and her colleagues took advantage of the fact that food stamp programs were established county-by-county over a period of years, creating a sort of “natural experiment” beginning half a century in the past.
“Hoynes’ work has been timely, innovative and revealing,” said Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which has highlighted Hoynes’ work this year as food stamps and the SNAP program have become a major subject of controversy. “Hoynes and her collaborators have really broadened our understanding of how programs like food stamps not only relieve hardship in the moment but can trigger long-lasting gains in participating children’s later health and education.  The implications of the research are considerable.  In this long view, such assistance is not only helping struggling families to scrape by, it’s a good investment in the next generation of citizens and workers.”
Hoynes herself said, “This work indicates that there are important benefits of the safety net that to date have been ignored. They predict that a more generous safety net can reduce health disparities. More generally, the emerging evidence points to an important role for investments in early life — and those investments generate important returns in terms of better health and economic outcomes in adulthood.”

It’s a startling result in light of the onslaught of conservative claims to the contrary, but it’s somewhat less startling — though still quite illuminating — in light of what’s actually known about the impacts of hunger on childhood development back in the “reality based community,” where population-based studies of hunger impacts date back to the 1970s, when researchers first began reporting on the long-term, adult impacts on children born during and shortly after the so-called Dutch “Hunger Winter,” a period from November 1944 through May 1945, when a large part of the Netherlands was subjected to drastically reduced rations under Nazi occupation.
But to really appreciate the significance of this research, one must also appreciate two other aspects of Hoynes’ recent research, which combine to provide a three-pronged counterattack on the right’s “culture of dependency” narrative. First, she has done previous research establishing short-term benefits — not just for food stamps, but also the for the earned income tax credit — specifically, a reduction in low-birthweight babies, a significant indicator of well-being. This research alone is sufficient to show that safety net programs are achieving the goals of bettering people’s lives, adding more weight to the already well-established statistics on poverty reduction.  Second, she has done research into safety net program utilization over the course of economic recession and recovery, research that shows that the current levels of food stamp and other program use are in line with past history, and not a sign of any alleged “explosion” in a “culture of dependency” under Obama, as the right-wing noise machine would have it.
Thus, Hoynes’ work provides powerful evidence for a three-pronged counterattack against this conservative narrative, which has come to play a dominant role in Republican politics in the post-Bush/Obama/Tea Party era: 1) The safety net works in the short term, producing measurable improvements in newborn health; 2) it works in the long term, improving health for both men and women, and reducing dependency among women in the next generation; and 3) it works currently in much the same manner as it has worked in the past.  The long-term effects findings are clearly the most remarkable, which is why they’re worth looking into more closely.  But it’s the overall combination of evidence — along with the work of others working on other aspects of the safety net — that provides a robust picture of what the real-world safety net actually does to build better lives, pushing back against the onslaught of right-wing lies.
In July, for example, when House Republicans were first threatening massive food stamp cuts, the CBPP released a report, “SNAP Enrollment Remains High Because the Job Market Remains Weak.”  It’s common sense, of course.  As the report stated in its very first sentence, “The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program) historically has been the most responsive federal program after unemployment insurance in assisting families and communities during economic downturns,” so it stands to reason that our notoriously bad job market would keep tens of millions of people on food stamps.  CBPP began its analysis by citing Congressional Budget Office projections that “as the labor market recovers, SNAP costs will decline markedly. CBO projects that by 2019, SNAP costs will fall all of the way back to their mid-1990s level, measured as a share of gross domestic product (GDP).”
But as CBPP continued, they supplemented CBO data with the more detailed research that Hoynes took part in: “In a new piece of research, economists Hilary Hoynes and Marianne Bitler examine the relationship between poverty and fluctuations in economic activity since 1980 and the historical responsiveness of SNAP, UI [unemployment insurance], and other safety net programs over the business cycle. If SNAP had increased more in proportion to the unemployment rate over the past few years than it has historically, that would provide support to critics who claim that SNAP should have come down as the unemployment rate has declined. But that is not what the research shows. Hoynes and Bitler found that ‘[T]he safety net programs receiving the most attention through the Great Recession (Food Stamps and UI) exhibit adjustments very consistent with their behavior during previous historical cycles.’”
That research is vital for deflating claims of an expanding culture of dependency — and thus for holding the line against deeper cuts to SNAP. But it’s the long-term impacts research that holds the promise of informing a proactive, pro-safety net economic populism that can do more than just respond reactively to the Tea Party. And, indeed, CBPP’s president, Robert Greenstein, cited that research in his testimony to the Senate Budget Committee in February this year. Her research has gotten more attention in the last six months or so than it ever has before, Hoynes said — but if it’s to have the kind of impact that it deserves, this should only be the beginning.
What Hoynes and progressives interested in building on her work are up against is almost 20 years in which empirical data has been relentlessly marginalized. In 1995, in his first year as speaker, Newt Gingrich dismantled the Office of Technology Assessment (which had repeatedly dissed Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense), and imposed other internal changes — such as defunding House committee staff — which radically undermined the role of sound information in shaping the nation’s laws. As conservative iconoclast Bruce Bartlett put it, “Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it.”  Although Gingrich quickly burned out as speaker, the fact-free culture he promoted has only grown more virulent since then.
While all this was going on in Washington, Hoynes was producing a body of work about the safety net that no longer seemed to matter to those calling the shots in Congress. “My work, coming from the background and typical approaches of economics, had mostly focused on how … different kinds of programs [welfare versus the earned income tax credit, food stamps vs. cash welfare] lead to differences in employment decisions, poverty outcomes, family structure decisions, how it influences the propensity for kids to be living with 2-parent vs. 1-parent families, you know, these kinds of questions.”  In short, Hoynes was empirically studying the very sorts of outcomes that self-absorbed politicians were busily pontificating about.
About five years ago, Hoynes said, her interests began to shift toward “calculating the benefits of programs, rather than spending a lot of time talking about the costs of programs.”
“I got interested in thinking about how we could measure how these programs  affect well-being of children in the households, or the households more broadly,” Hoynes said. “It came from a broader interest in evaluating potential benefits of the safety net, which … had sort of never been thought about before — the sort of cream on the top, if you will.”  It wasn’t just a new direction for her, she noted, “There really wasn’t a whole lot of work on this.”
There was one exception, however: the child health impacts of Medicaid expansion, covering families higher up the income distribution. Of course it makes sense that expanding health insurance would impact children’s health; that’s the whole point. But Hoynes took things beyond the obvious. “I sort of thought, ‘Well, here are these measures of health and well-being, can we demonstrate that a more cash-based safety net, general redistribution [program] can be quantified in terms of effects on health outcomes?’ So that’s sort of where I was coming from.”
Her research agenda has focused on “the two programs that are the most important programs for low-income families and that is food stamps/SNAP and the earned income tax credit,” she explained. Her first projects looked at impacts on “a very common robust important measure of child health, which is their weight at birth.”
This is where she first used the county-by-county rollout approach. “When food stamps come into your county, we can use the full census of births in America,” she said, “comparing women across counties from one year to the next, using the full census of births from the birth certificate data; we can then look at the weigh of children at birth, their propensity to be a  low-birth weight birth and how this varies when food stamps is available versus not.” This is the short-term food stamp research referred to above. She and her co-authors found a  statistically significant reduction in the risk of low birth weight, which tended to concentrate in high poverty counties.
Her paper on the earned income tax credit used a conceptually similar approach, but instead of using a county-by-county rollout structure for the “natural experiment” design, she used changes in the tax law, which changed the incentives involved during the 1990s “as we reformed welfare and moved away from AFDC/TANF and toward the EITC, as a main way to provide cash assistance to low-income families.”
This is not how Washington understands welfare reform, of course. The decline of AFDC/TANF funding and the expansion of the EITC somehow live in completely separate boxes, and the “success” of welfare reform — primarily defined as the reduced number of recipients — has nothing to do with expansion of the EITC, which has helped keep so many millions afloat.  But what about the real world? How did expanding EITC compare to the rollout of food stamps more than a generation earlier? “Amazingly, we found very similar results,” Hoynes said. “If you provide more assistance through the tax system, using this good variation across a different kind of natural experiment, as it were, we found reductions in low birth rates, more so for  families that you would expect to be affected by the EITC, you know, lower education levels, single woman versus married.
“I would say it’s a very fertile area right now, that people are interested in trying to quantify these longer-term effects. And now, decades have passed, since that time period and the populations that are affected by them are sufficiently mature that we can really dive in and ask some questions that we hadn’t be able to do before.”
With all that data out there, and researchers like Hoynes starting to make sense of it, one has to ask if it isn’t time for a reality-based political movement to start using what they’re learned to shape a better future.
It might seem like a pipe dream now. But it was actually more or less like that before Gingrich “reformed” the House. As late as 1992, authors Fay Lomax Cook  and Edith J. Barrett found strong support for the welfare state and its programs, despite negative views of welfare in their highly detailed survey, Support for the American Welfare State: The Views of Congress and the Public. One key factor in Congress was that Republicans in committee leadership positions, who were much more familiar with how programs worked, showed significantly more support than Republicans as a whole. That was how things were before Gingrich went to work. It’s a good indication of what Speaker Pelosi should have undone when she held power from 2007 to 2011.  The next time Democrats do gain control of the House, they will need to prioritize making it friendly to the likes of Hilary Hoynes and her reality-based colleagues. It’s the only way, ultimately, to make it friendly to all the rest of us as well.

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg. More Paul Rosenberg.