Free Republic

I'm a big fan of Jerry Pournelle's The CoDominium science fiction series. In it, as Wikipedia explains: The United States of the CoDominium Era is a welfare state divided into two classes: Citizens and Taxpayers. "Citizens" are welfare dependents who are required to live in walled sections of cities called "Welfare Islands." People are given whatever they need, including the drugs like Borloi to keep them pacified. There are no limits to how long they can stay on welfare, except that they must live in a Welfare Island. Although people are free to gain an education and work or become...

The theme that most seemed to rouse the enthusiasm of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte was that we are all responsible for one another — and that Republicans don't want to help the poor, the sick and the helpless. All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts. Yet the notion that people who prefer economic decisions to be made by individuals in the market are not as compassionate as people who prefer those decisions to be made collectively by politicians is seldom...

Last Thursday night in Charlotte, the death of the American dream was on full display. While adoring throngs cheered President Barack Obama’s hackneyed bloviating, Barack Obama gained points in the polls. Whether those points last or not – whether Obama wins or not – the fact is this: America is now a nation balanced on the razor’s edge between the self-reliant and the self-declared victims. The 2012 presidential campaign was supposed to be a referendum on two major questions about Obama. First, has he done a good job? Second, what will he do if given four more years? And Thursday...

Here's an odd side effect of South Florida's foreclosure crisis: Some immense homes with pools and three-car garages in gated communities are being rented out to unlikely tenants — poor people paying with Section 8 aid. Among the properties are homes with up to 4,500 square feet of space in private communities with guardhouses and regal names such as "Monarch Lakes" and "Bellagio at Vizcaya." Some of the owners are teetering on foreclosure and gambling they can earn enough money from the federal housing vouchers to stave off the banks. Others bought the properties cheap in foreclosure auctions and want...

Chafing under the GOP’s repeated barbs about the pitiful state of the economy, President Obama attempted to seize control of the narrative. “If there’s one thing I can say with certainty at this point in the campaign it’s that there is no question that Americans are absolutely better off than they were four years ago,” Obama insisted. “I know many may find this hard to believe. Maybe they’ve had a family member who’s been out of work or a neighbor who’s lost his house. But let me point out that these kinds of anecdotal stories are based on very small...

"Please don't feed the animals." That phrase makes sense when talking about bears and deer, turkeys and elk in the Great Smoky Mountains. It's quite another matter when discussing whether to give food to human beings who need help because circumstances have left them wanting for one the most basic of aspects of life. That is unless you are David Fowler, president of the Family Action Council of Tennessee — ironic, that name. Fowler, a former Tennessee state legislator, posted on his personal Facebook page recently that the National Park Service's "stated reason for the policy is because the animals...

h/t facebook

The Obama administration’s efforts at extending executive authority were dealt a setback on Tuesday. The bipartisan Government Accountability Office flagged the administration’s end run around Congress in its July memo announcing changes to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) act, aka “welfare reform.” The GAO said that the White House needs to give Congress the chance to block its plan that permits states to tweak the work requirements that needy families must satisfy in order to receive government assistance under the program. The official word came in the form of a letter to lawmakers from GAO’s general counsel, Lynn...

The Obama administration circumvented federal law in announcing it would waive the work requirements in welfare, a GAO review found, saying that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should have submitted the new policy to Congress for review. At issue is whether the policy falls under the purview of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) that requires all administrative changes of policy or regulation be submitted to Congress for review and possible disapproval. ... HHS must formally submit the letter to Congress and the Comptroller General before it can legally issue the waivers to the requirement that a certain...

'I wouldn't do all this nonsense  if the government gave us more money' Hopenchange + Don King = this? There's clearly something wrong with 82-y.o. klepto/Angelino Doris Thompson: first off, she's got a 20-page criminal record dating back to the Eisenhower era, primarily due to the fact that nothing else seems to interest her nearly as much as stealing money. Alas -since she's not particularly clever- Thompson displays a consistent propensity to get caught. She also seems to be missing the guilt chromosome, and mistakenly believes -like so many other losers these days- that the world owes her a living. The...

CONCORD, N.C. — Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell warned Democrats today that the Republican attack alleging that President Barack Obama gutted the welfare work requirement is taking hold. "It’s starting to resonate," he told the Maryland delegation at a breakfast. "It’s starting to affect blue-collar white voters.” Rendell predicted that pushing back on the widely criticized attack will be a central component of the last Democratic president's speech. "I think the man that will push back on it will be the man that pushed for it and signed it — President Bill Clinton," Rendell said, "but he can't do it...

The middle class in America is being systematically destroyed. Once upon a time the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. The rest of the globe looked at us in envy and wondered what we were doing right. But now everything seems to be going wrong for the middle class. Millions of our jobs have been shipped out of the country and competition for the remaining jobs is keeping wages at depressed levels. Meanwhile, the cost of living just keeps going up and up and middle class budgets are being stretched...

FOOD STAMP USE CLIMBS TO RECORD 46.7 MILLION

Mitt Romney, hoping to draw a sharp contrast on welfare, is citing a disputed charge that President Barack Obama is giving recipients a free ride, and he can point to his own record of pushing for tighter rules. Romney, Massachusetts governor from 2003 to 2007, fought to require single parents with children as young as a year old to work to get welfare benefits if they could obtain state-subsidized child care. He opposed efforts to allow time spent in job training or education programs to count toward the state's 20-hour weekly work requirement for welfare recipients, and pushed for a...

SYDNEY — The world's richest woman, Australian mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, urged those "jealous" of the wealthy to "spend less time drinking" in a piece the government described as "insulting" on Thursday. Rinehart, whose family iron ore prospecting fortune of Aus$29.2 billion (US$30.1 billion) also makes her Australia's wealthiest person, hit out at those who she said were envious of the rich. "There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire," she wrote in an industry magazine column. "If you're jealous of those with more money, don't just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself -- spend...

About 300 former cash grant recipients and community organizers blocked traffic briefly as they marched through downtown Harrisburg on Wednesday demanding restoration of the state’s general assistance program. Four of the demonstrators were arrested for disorderly conduct when they sprawled across Second Street in front of the Governor’s Residence at the end of a “funeral” for the program, which was complete with mock ... The cash grant program, which provided supplemental benefits of up to $200 per month to more than 60,000 poor people statewide, was ended this month as part of cost-cutting moves by the Legislature and Gov. Tom...

The Romney campaign criticizes the Obama administration for gutting welfare reform, and the Democratic chorus sings the familiar refrain: “Racist!” Leading the choir is tingly countertenor Chris Matthews of MSNBC: “When you start talking about work requirements,” he thundered at Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, “you know what game you’re playing, and everybody knows what game you’re playing: It’s a race card.” This judgment was immediately confirmed by Thomas Edsall of the New York Times and Timothy Noah of The New Republic, among others. There is racial politics at work here, and, as usual, it is a Democratic initiative....

For the first time, the country ended a major entitlement, saving money for taxpayers while helping those in need. I observed this success firsthand when I hired nine women formerly on welfare to work in my office. President Obama seems determined to reverse this success. His administration recently issued a new directive giving the secretary of Health and Human Services the power to waive federal welfare-work requirements. The president has no authority to do so, because we were very clear in the legislation that work rules were not a requirement that could be waived. Prior to the 1996 reform, work...

Guys, I have to let you in on a little secret: the election is already over. No, I haven’t got crazy (yet) and realize that election day is more than two months away. However, after watching the last six weeks of this trainwreck of a campaign, it is impossible to believe that Romney has any chance to win. He doesn’t, and Obama will be reelected. We can make such bold predictions by reviewing a few pieces of evidence. Romney’s campaign: These guys don’t have a clue, do they? Like most members of the observing public, I assumed that the Romney...

A very large segment of the population has figured out that it can use voting as a tool to get more money and benefits from the government, and that is a very dangerous thing. Once upon a time, the free market was the one that distributed nearly all the wealth in our system. But now the federal government has become a giant deluded "Santa Claus" that distributes goodies to the American people far beyond its actual capacity to do so. In fact, we are borrowing trillions of dollars that we do not have so that our politicians can continue to...