I have to say one thing for Obama’s announcement of a new immigration policy: it has really smoked out the inhumane and vicious Republicans. There have been so many things said that reveal the core values of the Republican party, but this comment from a Fox News host captures the attitude perfectly.
Co-host Anna Kooiman was specifically outraged that immigrant school children might qualify for the school lunch program.
Many of them are living in poverty,she noted.So, they’re going to be on free or reduced lunch. So, who’s going to be paying for that? You’re going to be paying for that.
Remarkable. There are hungry children right here in our own country. I am just fine with my tax dollars being used to educate and feed people less fortunate than I am, and I think we have an obligation to give everyone equal opportunity, and in particular, that every child ought to have the same basic provisions to live and thrive.
This seems to be something Fox News Republicans simply can’t comprehend.
I’d be happy to, Anna :)
What a nice thing to pay for.
Another aspect of these statements that don’t make sense is that my taxes won’t be going up when these children start receiving help. So even from nothing but a selfish financial point of view, it doesn’t matter to me.
“Those starving children are going to be fed with YOUR MONEY!!”
Some of them may even have a microwave!
What doesn’t smoke out the vicious and inhumane Republicans?
“Yeah, fuck those hungry children, it’s their own fucking fault they are poor and starving!
Now excuse me, i have an appointment to pay for someone to put glitter around my vulva.”
Yes, but think of all those poor, innocent, virginal dollars that might be defiled by being used to pay for food that (ugh) brown people might touch!
Next thing you know, they might be steppin’ up to your wallet! What’ll you do what that happens, hunh?
Dude, you’ve missed the point entirely. The problem is that these children are probably brown. In fact, I’m surprised that she recognises them as children at all. For Fox, I reckon White American = Human, All Other = Animal.
Children need to be starved because their parents chose to prop up the American economy by working for less than a living wage.
They need to understand that because (unlike Anna Kooiman) they weren’t born into a business-owning middle-class family, and even though they are almost certainly working many, many hours, they shouldn’t expect to be able to feed their children.
so·ci·o·path
ˈsōsēōˌpaTH
noun
a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.
Sven @ 9
It’s not the clinical sociopaths I’m worried about. It’s the way that US political and cultural discourse has been twisted so that sociopathic behaviour is normalized, and otherwise ordinary [1] people are willing to treat empathy as somehow repulsive or immoral.
[1] Read that however you like.
Yeah, I mean what have poor hungry immigrants ever done for America? And besides, who wouldn’t want them to be starving and desperate and perhaps wandering around looking for whatever scraps they can find? I mean, those prisons ain’t gonna fill themselves.
Just watch. Someone will use this to advocate against school lunch programs. “We can’t let foreigners take advantage of our kindness. If a few American kids don’t get food, well, that’s the price we’ll have to pay to stop wasteful government spending.”
I’ve been long convinced that those people would really like the days of Dickens back. They could have disappointed me once.
Hey-ho, so much for the war on Chr*stm*s
Remember that Romney said that the problem with the US was that 47% of the population felt entitled to food.
Republicans have clearly felt that some people are not entitled to food for some time, they’re just extending that to include children.
They learned their lessons well from Ronald “Ketchup is a Vegetable” Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher.
Those people are already going to inherit the earth – it’s pretty greedy for them to demand free food in the meantime.
If we fed the poor only through private charity instead of public programs, like Republicans insist should be done, I’m sure that Anna Kooiman would be the first to contribute!
Yeah. I’m so sure.
I note PZ’s appropriate use of Comic Sans for stupid, inane, witless speech.
I’m beginning to think that it’s time to designate another typeface to designate cruel, hate-filled, selfish, deliberately hurtful speech. What she said is beyond stupid — it’s downright cruel. And it’s all the more troubling because she is not an outlier; her way of “thinking” is all to common.
It always strikes me as very sad when people choose to devote their time and (supposed) intellect to hating, dividing, oppressing, marginalizing, excluding, hurting. What a sad, little, mean life. And yes, it is a choice.
I’d much rather have my tax dollars go toward feeding hungry children than toward feeding the war machine.
—
I’ve shared at other times that, though I am an out atheist, I sing in a fine church choir because I love the music and I have many friends there. It’s a very progressive, open and affirming church, but of course, still based on nuttiness. Usually the “children’s sermon” (read: indoctrination) drives me nuts, but yesterday’s was better. Essentially, the message was: Our lives are rich (in all sorts of ways). We have so much. We have opportunity. How can we share with other people? What good things can we do to make people’s lives easier, to be sure that everyone is welcomed, and included, and cared for? How can we make the world better for everyone? And each child was given the opportunity to tell of kind things they had done for other people. I wish Anna Kooiman (who is probably a “Christian”) could have heard that message. Perhaps it might have inspired a moment of shame and revelation.
This schtick is hardly new. The Republican appeal to their white base is a twofer:
1. The Democrats levy excessive taxes on ordinary decent hard-working folks like you.
2. They give your hard-earned money to Those Other Lazy People to buy their votes.
Or as Davis X. Machina put to so well:
“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters, each of who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”
Yet somehow those same people are not bothered by $15 *BILLION* of their tax dollars going toward the Navy’s new aircraft carrier….
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/republicans-unveil-immigration-plan
Yet all of them are against abortion. Once they’re born they stop caring.
I’d rather have my tax dollars go towards filling the empty bellies of children than filling the overflowing back accounts of the 1%.
Bunny, 17
I remember having a discussion with a fundamentalist in one of my poli-sci courses about public assistance. They maintained that public assistance was bad because “it made Christians lazy,” so they don’t donate to charity (which is, of course, how these problems should be addressed). I noted that this sounds less like a problem with welfare programs and more like a problem with Christians. They didn’t have much to say after that.
Conservatives have very weird ideas about what constitutes “family values”.
Most kids on free school lunch programs are American born citizens!!! Many or most of them are white.
1. Near where I used to live, out in the boonies is a nest of fundies, originally Okies who migrated during the dust bowl days. Some of them even speak with a hill accent that I can barely understand.
It’s low in income, high in social problems including the occasional murder or drug overdose. They are very religious. 88% of their kids qualify for free federal school lunches. The county knows they have a problem and provides a heavily subsidized health clinic. I’d guess that half their cash flow is government transfer payments.
And oh yeah, they have a John Birch society chapter and seriously hate the government.
Oops, blockquote fail
We’d have a bunch of dead people including children and babies.
1. The churches are broke!!! They don’t have the money to even keep themselves going these days.
Membership is down and loot intake is down as well. A lot.
2. In fact, they shake down the federal government for as much as they can. That Faith Based Intitative slush fund. It’s $2 billion a year.
Per taxpayers in the U.S. , school lunches cost an average of $35.80, or $1.17 for every million students fed.
(8.7 billion dollars, 243 million tax payers)
http://www.ask.com/government-politics/many-u-s-taxpayers-d77a9265390f4bdb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_School_Lunch_Act
Of the student population, 1.4% are themselves not legal residents. An additional 5.5% have parents who were not legal but were born in the U.S. so they are themselves citizens.
Republicans do as Republicans do: whine and cry and gnash their teeth about how THEY are PAYING for X, Y, and Z, and weeping salty tears about the injustice of it all. They are paying on average anywhere from 50 cents to $2.50. To not have children starving for the high crime of being born to parents who did not have the proper paperwork when they moved to a new country. The fucking horror.
Bonus: Republicans are crying boo-hoo about spending precious dollars on brown people, because of course they are.
Right-wingers are also fully embracing the #ThanksMichelleObama meme, castigating Michelle Obama for trying to make school lunches healthier by just outright assuming that all sub-par quality school lunch is her fault. Because that is right wing logic. School lunches were only bad during the Obama administation. They were known for their high quality throughout the entire rest of recorded history.
https://www.google.com/search?q=35.80*.07&oq=35.80*.07&aqs=chrome..69i57.6309j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=Thanks+Michelle+Obama+right+wingers+school+lunches&start=0
Hypocrisy knows no bounds with a right-winger.
Kris Kobach, the worst State Attorney General (Kansas) in the USA, is rabidly anti-immigrant. You may know him for his actions to restrict the vote, which were so egregious that a court finally slapped him for them, (Kobach still damaged voter rights in Kansas in a big way). But when it comes to hating immigrants, he’s even more off the rails.
He wrote the anti-immigrant laws for Arizona and Alabama, he sued other states for giving in-state college tuition to non-citizens. He’s all for using the National Guard to police the border between Mexico and the USA, and he has been instrumental in getting Gov. Rick Perry of Texas to use the Guard in that way. He is super mad at President Obama’s “imperial executive amnesty.” Kobach is a lawyer, so you’d think that he would know the definition of “amnesty.”
Because he’s a lawyer, Kobach is now planning to sue President Obama.
Ah, yes, there it is. The “illegal aliens” will feed at the trough filled by hardworking Americans. Same argument Anna Kooiman made, with the added insult of comparing immigrants to animals.
Kobach also filed motions to keep undocumented immigrants from renting apartments in Pennsylvania. He helped Mitt Romney come up with his offensive immigration policy.
Kobach is currently very busy interviewing ICE agents so he can find suitable plaintiffs for his lawsuit. He also wants the whole state of Texas to be a plaintiff.
I thought that various dunderheads on the right would immediately look for ways to NOT comply with Obama’s executive order. So it begins.
Its about time that the History/Discovery/Animal Planet network stepped up with a new show – “Finding Compassionate Conservatives”. I know the odds are much higher for finding ghosts, aliens & bigfoot but still…
Good find.
GOP strategy. It is better to let 98.6 American kids starve, than feed 1.4 undocumented alien kids.
It is all very xian. I’m sure jesus is so proud of what his torture murder accomplished.
The quality of rightwing arguments against President Obama’s executive action on immigration ranges from low to nasty-and-low. Still, the quality goes down, down, down even further whenever the religious rightwing jumps into the fray.
Right Wing Watch link.
To such “conservatives,” Ebenezer Scrooge was a hero before he was visited by the 3 spirits.
Raven @32
Kris Kobach has an answer for this. He says that kind of argument is “emotional” and that’s enough reason to dismiss it. Kobach also says that Republicans are compassionate about American tax payers, and American workers, so don’t accuse them of not being compassionate.
Yeah, he’s that twisted. The dude has education up the wazoo (Harvard, Oxford, etc.) and he still thinks like that. It’s an us-against-them attitude that ignores economic facts, (let alone “emotional” factors), and is extremely narrow-minded. Kobach is using his education to prop up a form of intellectual laziness and prejudice.
Lots of right-wingers are repeating Kobach’s argument, so expect more “compassionate about American tax payers” blather.
I don’t know whether Anna Kooiman was expressing her own true feelings, and it doesn’t really matter. She is doing her job and following the Koch/Ailes gameplan. Get white people all worked up about people even less well off than they are, and they won’t realize that nearly all the wealth our economy generates is being vacuumed up by a handful of billionaires.
Lynna:
I almost hope they do. It is almost trivial to reveal what that truly translates into:
“I care more about money than people”.
Though actually, that’s basically been the Republican Party platform for decades and many people still haven’t quite parsed that meaning yet, so who knows.
Paraphrasing from Bloom County (back in the day):
Bombs or beans?
I vote for beans.
–
Well he is right. I do get emotional (whatever that means) when I see poor children starving to death in a wealthy country with a food surplus.
That argument that we should just let them all starve to save a few bucks has another flaw. It isn’t cost effective!!!
Humans don’t starve to death quietly. They will kill for food if they have to. You end up spending a lot of money on police, prisons, and soldiers to keep the rioting and food stealing down to manageable levels and the proletariat in line. Police states aren’t cheap.
raven @39, good point. Kobach and cohorts are making an argument against emotional reactions to starving children, while simultaneously ignoring the economic facts.
No, it is not cost-effective to starve children.
No, it is not cost-effective to deny them an education.
No, it is not cost-effective to deport their mothers and fathers.
Not cost-effective to deny undocumented immigrants a driver’s license.
Etc.
Of course the real problem with those starving children isn’t just that they’re poor, they’re also BROWN. As we all know if they were rich and white children and they were going hungry Anna Kooiman would be all over herself about how unjust and awful it was. Thank goodness Rich, White children rarely go hungry or need nutritional assistance, as Anna Kooiman would tell you it’s such a bother to care about your fellow human beings.
It’s kind of funny watching FOX and the right-wing pundits express all this outrage while the GOP actually does nothing. The party has to say things that will satisfy the bigoted yahoos that vote for them, but they can’t really restrict immigation because the corporations and billionaires that really own the party need all that cheap labor. How long will it be before the GOP masses realize they are being conned? Maybe quite a while. They didn’t seem to notice that during Bush II the only conservative action that happened was a tax cut for the rich.
Someone PLEASE remind these “Christians” of Matthew 25. Specifically, what happens to the people “who have not done it unto the least of these.”
Raven @39
But, Raven, the tax money spent to prop up teh Police State/Prison-Industrial-Complex goes to The Right Kind of People! How can that be a bad thing?!
Prison guards and soldiers have families to feed too, you know. How can you be so cruel?!
PS:
I’m shocked, shocked to find that stated RWA/Rethuglican goals (variations on “cost effective”) do not line up with reality (the actual, predictable outcomes of their policies)!
(If only some minion of this Cafe Americain would hand me my winnings now!)
Um, html tag un-failed…
PS:
I’m shocked, shocked to find that stated RWA/Rethuglican goals (variations on “cost effective”) do not line up with reality (the actual, predictable outcomes of their policies)!
(If only some minion of this Cafe Americain would hand me my winnings now!)
I try to avoid discussing immigration with supposed Christians, because they always start whining about their tax dollars being used to support other people. I just start quoting bible verses at them, because Jesus had a lot to say about the wickedness of the rich. It also pleases me to hoist them by their own petards. All those years spent memorizing the babble weren’t completely worthless.
It probably doesn’t change their minds, but they do tend to stop spouting horrific racist opinions.
Raven
Of course it isn’t. If it was cost effective, conservatives wouldn’t be in favor of it.
By now I passionately HATE the very idea of charity. I’m not talking about chucking in a few bucks on somebody’s kickstarter or crowdfunding Skepticon. No, I’m talking about voluntarily agreeing to generously finance somebody’s basic needs *puke*
Charity is all about giving those with some economic power more political power to decide whose needs get met.
It is also all about making economically privileged people feel good. Ever heard about that horrible Christmas in a shoebox? It’s the poster child of make people feel good and prosletizing “charity”: People buy presents (at western world retail prizes), correctly gendered and very christian (no Harry Potter, that’s witchcraft!) and then they’re asked to donate a small sum of money to ship that shit. So you have huge spendings of small gifts, huge logistics, senseless shipping of stuff around the globe when you could probably buy more stuff with bulk buying power when you just take the shipping money (and buy it in that very place, boost their economy!), but their business model is basically selling privileged people good feelings.
And last but not least the whole charity shit tricks the middle classes into paying even more while allowing the super-rich and corporations pay even less taxes (in Germany smokers pay more taxes on cigarettes than the big corporations on their gains)
@43 Azuma Hazuki
At this point, I think it’s safe to say that they know about those particular bible verses. They just don’t care.
It takes a special kind of evil disregard for human suffering to look at starving children, see programmes in place to feed them, and say “but who’s going to pay for that? It better not be my tax dollars, mister…”
This isn’t merely standard issue Faux News stupidity and ignorance, but something far worse – this is a person happy to see children starve in the name of her ideology, and in particular in the name of the two gods she worships; the invisible hand of the free market and yahweh (in that order).
Republicans may all claim to be monotheists, but only a fool believes them.
“Many of them are hungry,” she noted. “So, they’re going to be fed loaves and fish. So, who’s going to be paying for those loaves and fish?”
If we give the illegal brown people crappy sloppy joes and rubbery fries, next thing you know they’ll be buying lobsters and caviar with their food stamps!!!!
I like the claim that it is an emotional argument to talk about the “suffering of the poor” instead of focusing on I am not sure what because the banging on the resentment (an emotion) of the people is so loudly and continuously that I have not heard the rational part clearly yet.
The reactionary argument is entirely emotional for all of their advocated policies. It is all about fear, resentment all wrapped up in a veneer of faith (an emotion). Not just faith in god that is just a start because it is not all those who support faith in god that are righteous, Martin Luther King was not accepted by the reactionary mind. It is also blind faith in the required ideology, it is faith in authority only when it is one of them. It is faith in the way they “think” the world works never once trying to answer the hard questions about what it is and how does it really work.
They want a world that does not change from the world they imagine exists, reality as it is is not considered because of faith.
they live in fear and suspicion of all they do not understand and blame anyone else when what they believe to be real does not match what they see is happening.
I see little hope for them reason did not get them there reason wont get them out.
uncle frogy
@42, Mike Mason. Not only did Republicans do nothing but fulminate, they also actually went, quite promptly, on vacation. Days in session in November were the 12th to the 21st, minus the weekend of course, eight days total (or really only 7.5 days because most of them leave early on the last day0. After that, they were exhausted and went home.
With the world practically coming to an end thanks to the dictator Obama, you would think they would stay in session to address emergencies.
They are scheduled to be in session for seven days in December. A new congress supposedly begins on January 3, but much folderol will occupy that day, so I don’t think we can count it as a work day.
The House of Congress has one favorite activity, trying to drown President Obama in hate. That takes what little time they have. Mostly, they don’t come to work. They don’t even show up in the office.
@PZ
There is a reason my go-to litmus test question for libertarians is: Which is worse? 1- Millions of hungry Americans, aka the status quo? Or 2- a very small progressive income tax in order to fund a program like food stamps, even if it has 90% losses to corruption, waste, “lazy bums”, etc.?
Anyone who gives the wrong answer is a miserable human being, and many, many people give the wrong answer.
Had a FB “friend” post a meme with that picture of condescending Willy Wonka saying something like “They are taking away veteran’s benefits to pay for illegal alien’s welfare…no wonder they don’t want them to have guns”.
1. How many right wing talking points can you fit into one shitty meme?
2. Is this what a lot of people are thinking? That makes me terribly sad.
3. Literally none of that is accurate in any way but facts don’t penetrate for these people so what could I even say to them?
^ “them having guns” being the veterans, of course. No idiot right winger cares about immigrant’s rights when they can’t even call them HUMANS.
@moarscienceplz #36
This. The rich are fostering a war among the poor. This is pure divide and conquer.
@Funny Diva #44
A police state it’s not a desirable side-effect. It’s one of the main goals.
It protects the rich against insurrections.
..and they are about to test the current viability of it with Ferguson.
I’ve never seen an incident like this receive more national attention and media hype in my lifetime. “Officials” and police departments around the country are literally prepping for war on their own citizenry.
looks bad for anyone who wanted to see positive change arise from what happened in Ferguson. Nobody at the “Official” level is even talking about the issues that lead to the segregation in cities like Ferguson all across the US. It’s all about keeping control and keeping the protestors from damaging property. That’s it.
part of me thinks the best response would indeed be to damage some property. like burning down governor Nixon’s mansion. part of me thinks that pulling a giant silent treatment, where NOBODY AT ALL shows up to protest might make an even bigger statement.
“You’re kids’ classes are getting much bigger, the teachers distracted. The schools doesn’t have the resources to deal with this. You’re kids are getting shafted.”
The schools are getting shafted by Republican cutting taxes and reducing spending on them. That is why they don’t have the resources to deal with it and why classes are getting much bigger and teachers are getting paid less. The Republicans are shafting your kids by refusing to properly fund public schools.
Well, exactly as I said in the last thread, these xenophobes haven’t given a good reason why only SOME American citizens get to benefit from taxes while others shouldn’t. I myself had government paid school lunches as a kid. If they were consistent, they would have demanded I go hungry too. Oh! But I wasn’t REALLY hungry, I had a Super Nintendo! Do you know how many lunches one of those could have paid for? …. Not even enough for one school year? You say that maybe a little entertainment here and there beyond basic sustenance makes life a little more bearable instead of constant depressing drudgery?
There’s something so bizarrely comedic about people sitting in expensive suits and dresses in air conditioned state-of-the-art studios and loudly and emotionally picking on people who are struggling through the basics of life. It’s like a backwards parody of all that is kind and charitable about our nature. I wish there was some fundamental law of physics which prevented stuff like this from happening.
Of course the Rethuglicans don’t want poor kids to get free lunches or paid-for educations. If they went to school and learned something, they might grow up to become economically successful, and then, horror of horrors, they’d have to pay taxes!
I know the thread has moved beyond this, but Ijust wanted to highlight from Lynna @35:
Notice: If you are not a taxpayer or worker, American or otherwise, Republicans don’t care about you. (But of course, we all knew that.)
Pisses me the hell off.