Chris Christie finds friends and a few foes in Cherry Hill on second day of campaign bus tour (via NJ.com)
View full sizeFrances Micklow/The Star-Ledger CHERRY HILL — All they wanted was to have breakfast. While Cathy Fox and Dawn Gillespie sat quietly at a booth in Ponzio’s Diner, right behind them a crush of fans and press surrounded Gov. Chris Christie…
The whack jobs in the House of Representatives (helped along by some asshole corporate Democrats) today voted to roll back Dodd-Frank.
Now, let me reassure you that it’s not going anywhere in the Senate, and Obama has already said he would veto it. But imagine the sheer arrogance, the audacity of these people, five years after a crash from which we are far from recovered, that they would try to put the perps back in charge.
They really are traitors to this nation.
It’s not as new as the media seems to think, but I suppose it’s better late than never. When I went to the bank yesterday, the teller told me 50 percent of the people in her church rely on the food pantry.
I want to tell you that if you read this blog and you’re hungry, tell me. We will get you some food.
In the 22 years that Swami Durga Das has managed New York’s River Fund Food Pantry, he has never seen hunger like this. Each Saturday, hundreds of hungry people descend on the pantry’s headquarters, an unassuming house on a residential block. The first people arrive around 2 am, forming a line that will wrap around the block before Das even opens his doors.
“Each week there’s new people,” Das told MSNBC.com. “The numbers have just skyrocketed.”
The new clients are diverse—working people, seniors, single mothers—but many of them share something in common: they represent the millions of Americans who fell victim to food insecurity when the Great Recession hit in 2009, but didn’t benefit from the economic recovery.
People walk in from Fulton Street and register their information in the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger office.
And the worst may be yet to come.Food activists expect a “Hunger Cliff” on November 1, when automatic cuts to food stamp benefits will send a deluge of new hungry people to places like the River Fund Food Pantry, which are already strained.
“I thought we were busy now; I don’t know what it will be like then, because all of those people getting cut will definitely be accessing a pantry,” said Das. “It definitely will be a catastrophe.”
Those cuts were never supposed to be catastrophic; instead they were intended to gradually wind food stamp spending back down to normal levels, after boosting them in response to the 2008 financial collapse.
In the aftermath of that collapse, as employment stagnated and poverty increased, food stamp use exploded: From a little over 26 million users in 2007 to almost 47 million in 2012, an increase of 77%. At the same time, the average benefits per person rose from $96.18 to $133.41.
The 2009 stimulus bill raised the cap on food stamp benefits and pumped an additional $45.2 billion into the program over the next several years. But as provisions of the law expire, the program is scheduled to receive a $5 billion cut over the next year alone. Those cuts will reduce monthly benefits for every single food stamp recipient in the country; a family of four will receive $36 less per month, on average.
Billions more in cuts are scheduled to occur in the following two years, despite the fact that food insecurity in America has not even begun to return to pre-recession levels.
“I believe we have a hunger crisis,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, who sits on a House committee responsible for the food stamp program. “When 50 million people in the richest country on the planet are hungry, that’s a crisis.”
I have a favorite T-shirt that says, “I’m not angry, I’m from Philly.” I bought it because people always seem to think I’m being hostile when I’m just a little more, um, direct than most people. (If I ever do go ballistic, you’ll know.) My neighbors across the bridge in New Jersey are just as good at going after someone who needs a good smackdown, and here’s a fine example from yesterday’s hearing on the tech problems with the Obamacare website, when Rep. Bill Pascrell gets pissed off at all the Republicans playing their tiny violins. Via Mediaite:
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) rose from his seat on Tuesday during a congressional hearing into the Affordable Care Act’s problematic roll-out. He accused his Republican colleagues in the House of dishonestly seeking to identify the problems with the ACA because they would prefer to see it repealed entirely.
Pascrell began by insisting that, even though Democrats opposed Medicare Part D in the Bush Era, they worked to make sure that the program was a success.
He became animated as he said that Democrats put aside their opposition to Bush in order to make a policy objective work for the good of the American public. “And how many of you stood up to do that?” Pascrell said, exploding out of his chair. “None. Zero.”
“What are you going to do about the approximately 17 million children with preexisting conditions who can no longer be denied health insurance coverage?” Pascrell asked his Republican colleagues. “We want to go back and want to say you are no longer covered any longer. Are you going to tell the parents of those kids?”
Pascrell blew up at Rep. Tim Griffin (R-AR)* who insisted that the GOP has put forward a number of proposals to ensure that low-income people in need of care receive it.
“Are you really serious?” Pascrell shot back. “After what we’ve gone through and what we’ve gone through in the last three and a half years?”
“We’ve gone through 44 votes, 48 votes now of you trying to dismantle the legislation,” he concluded. “You call that cooperation?”
He really wanted to say, “Are you fucking kidding me?” but he knew he was on C-SPAN.
I would be happy if a Democratic congress member did this every single day. Maybe the NJ Democratic delegation can teach them.
You can send Frank some fan mail here.
*A wingnut who’s leaving Congress after just two terms, allegedly to spend more time “with my family.”
Chris Christie’s using all the same budget tricks he attacked Jon Corzine for. Ha, ha!
Can’t have anything approaching a productive conversation with Republicans about Obamacare.
GOP: We hate this.
ME: Single payer.
GOP: Look at all these problems.
ME: Fix them!
GOP: Look at all these moochers, leeching off productive taxpayers!
ME: Ironic much?
It does seem like the Grand Bargain has been abandoned, at least for now. We’ll see:
Even Obama’s proposed grand bargain leaves tax rates in place, and raises revenue by reducing tax deductions. The plausible small deal would probably entail something even smaller — a user fee here or there, perhaps a couple of high-profile tax loopholes. As I pointed out, it’s notable that Cole and Obama have not only moved toward each other’s position on revenue but crossed over, with Obama seeming to demand even less revenue than Cole is now offering.
Obama’s budget offers $200 billion in mandatory budget savings that are not major safety-net programs. It’s all completely boring stuff, that doesn’t touch major cornerstones of the New Deal, but adds up: cuts to farm subsidies, cuts to retirement benefits for federal workers, aviation fees, higher contributions for unemployment insurance, selling off under-utilized federal property — I’d go on, but you’re probably already half asleep. This is the tedious guts of the likely agreement that will take shape.
As I wrote, plenty could go wrong. A conceptual agreement between the main negotiators is only the first step. Then we get to the conservative freak-out. Failure remains a highly plausible outcome, but, if you look closely enough, the signs of a desire on both sides to make a deal are there.
Democrat on track for historic win as New York mayor (via AFP)
Democratic Party candidate Bill de Blasio is on track to win a historic victory as mayor of New York next week, according to a new poll published Monday. The New York Times/Siena College poll predicted de Blasio was certain to win the November 5 election…
And thus the appeal will make its way to the Supreme Court, just like the Repugs wanted:
New abortion restrictions passed by the Texas Legislature are unconstitutional and will not take effect as scheduled on Tuesday, a federal judge has ruled. District Judge Lee Yeakel wrote Monday that the regulations violated the rights of abortion doctors to do what they think is best for their patients and would unreasonably restrict a woman’s access to abortion clinics.
Lawyers for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers brought the lawsuit, arguing that a requirement that doctors have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion clinic would force the closure of a third of the clinics in Texas. They also complained that requiring doctors to follow the Food and Drug Administration’s original label for an abortion-inducing drug would deny women the benefit of recent advances in medical science. The Texas attorney general’s office argued that the law protects women and the life of the fetus.
And pretty much nails it. He also says he hasn’t ruled out running for president:
Sanders tells me the trip’s purpose is, in part, to identify potential candidates who could benefit from a small influx of cash next election cycle—“whether it’s independents, whether it’s third-party people or progressive Democrats…folks who have the courage to stand up to big money interests and represent working families.” The Senator’s political action committee, Progressive Voters of America, has raised about $300,000 over the last three election cycles for left-leaning Democrats in Congress. So far, the overwhelmingly majority of those candidates have been at the federal level, but Sanders is open to finding state-level candidates worthy of financial backing. After trouncing his 2012 Republican challenger 71 percent to 25 percent, it seems an opportune time for Sanders to lend his growing national clout to fellow economic populists.
By all accounts, the audiences were friendly—progressive, multiracial, and already supportive of Sanders’ agenda. They included people like Antonia Shields, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers’ Local 530 in Birmingham, who appreciate the Senator’s efforts to prevent cuts to the Postal Service. And Claire Stanton, a library assistant at the Birmingham Public Library who “tend[s] to think that a lot of the Democratic Senators are too centrist.” And Walter Simons, a part-time construction worker and artist in Birmingham who says he’s a socialist and came out because “there’s not a lot of socialists who get elected.”
But Sanders ultimately has his eyes set on winning over a decidedly less supportive sector of the population that has increasingly turned to Republicans in recent elections: the white working-class. In each of the four states that Sanders visited—Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina—President Obama received less than 20 percent of the white vote in 2012.
“All over this country, but maybe most noticeably right here in the South, you have white working class people voting against their own best interests,” he told the crowd at the CWA hall in Atlanta. “This country is facing some enormous problems, and we can’t address those problems for working people if the South keeps sending us members of the House and Senate who are continually voting against the interests of a vast majority of the American people.”
Continue reading “Bernie Sanders does a tour of the South”
