Category Archives: Welfare Reform

Queenly Hot Air

Believe It Or Not

So, Saint Ronald Reagan’s infamous “Welfare Queen” has been fingered and her sins catalogued.

You remember her don’t you? During Saint Ron’s first honest-to-gosh presidential run in 1976, he made tons o’hay by railing against a woman who would become known as the Welfare Queen of Chicago. See, flamboyantly white people at the time not only were scared to death of the black penis, they also soiled their pants thinking about the fat, lazy mama raking in gov’t dole checks while she sat around in her house slippers, gorging on potato chips (bought and paid for with our hard-earned tax dollars), while watching soap operas on TV.

Reagan’s target market cared not a whit for poverty, the environment, wars here and there, or whether or not women made 69 cents for every dollar men made. Pish tosh. The paramount concern of the Archie Bunker crowd that Ronnie coveted — hell, their only concern — was whether it would be indolent black women or savage black men who would destroy our holy land first.

Washington Post Clip

Back in the 1950s, a shocking number of pols could feel comfortable saying, in no uncertain terms, that the niggers were coming. By the mid-’70s, that kind of candor was out. Candidates trying reach the then-“Silent Majority,” the one that would shortly morph into the “Moral Majority,” needed code words and misdirection to foist their fear-of-a-black-planet message upon a happily suspecting public.

The future Commander-in-Sleep claimed at a campaign rally in January, 1976, that the forces of good had discovered a woman who’d gamed the feds to a shocking degree. He said:

She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.

You can easily imagine RR’s facial expressions and the shifting tones of his voice as he ran down the laundry list of her sins, ranging from golly-gee, can-you-believe it? to righteous rage. He was, after all an actor. And, even though all politics is theater, The Saint was the first thespian-turned-pol to enthrall audiences on a national scale.

Within weeks of that speech, the Chicago Tribune had dubbed the woman, now revealed to be one Linda Taylor, the “Welfare Queen.” Saint Ronnie never had to say it but his crowds knew this in their hearts: There was nothing unusual about her. In fact, she was the archetype, not the outlier. All those lazy bums collecting welfare are living the life, man! They all know how to squeeze blood out of the system. The Reaganistas wondered in private conversations with each other, Why are blacks like that? Within 20 years, America’s attitudes had been so shaped by Reagan’s vivid imagery that a Democratic president would lead the charge for “welfare reform.” The Welfare Queen was dead.

Or, more accurately, the Welfare Queens. Plural. The millions and millions of them. Driving Cadillacs and eating lobster with their chitterlings, all paid for with food stamps and public aid checks. Why are blacks like that?

Through the years, liberal commentators have speculated that Good Old Ronnie had conjured his Welfare Queen out of whole cloth. Even so respected an observer as Paul Krugman once wrote that Reagan’s literal bête noire was nothing more than a “bogus story.”

Turns out Linda Taylor was not only real but her slurping at the public trough was even more criminal than Ronald Reagan implied. Man, oh man, you might marvel, Reagan was right.

Reagan

Up With (White) People

He was and he wasn’t. Taylor was a cheat, a parasite, and a truly despicable figure. But there was only one Linda Taylor and Reagan knew it. He also knew his audiences wouldn’t care. They craved to believe everybody collecting welfare was a fraud. Men believe, Julius Caesar once noted, that which they wish to be true.

So Linda Taylor did well by herself, financially if not morally. Yet she inadvertently was responsible, in some small part, for the growing numbers of mal- and under-nourished schoolkids, the burgeoning homeless population, and the millions more medically underserved citizens of this great nation in this day than in hers. (Ronald Reagan, natch, was far more responsible.)

Her unique sins became the sins of the whole.

Funny thing is, at precisely the time Taylor was scamming the feds and the State of Illinois, another Chicagoan was engaged in an even more ugly evil.

Beginning in the mid-1970’s, Detective, and later Violent Crimes Commander, Jon Burge of the Chicago Police Department’s Area 2 headquarters on the South Side, carried out and/or oversaw the systematic torture of hundreds of prisoners to extract phony confessions from them, particularly in high-profile cases. Burge and the boys in the Area 2 HQ basement enjoyed beating, burning, and suffocating suspected lawbreakers, all in the pursuit of quick indictments and ultimate convictions. The reported incidents include the shooting of prisoners’ pets in front of them, snuffing out lit cigarettes on suspects’ skin, tying them to scalding hot radiators, and covering their heads with plastic bags until they passed out. They employed cattle prods, high voltage electroshock devices, and old reliable standbys like telephone books and rubber hoses to inspire their subjects to sing. They enjoyed using something called the “violet wand” which delivered a severe electric shock when pressed against a suspect’s anus or genitals.

Occasionally, the Burge boys used their more “enhanced” methodology on witnesses to crimes as well as suspects. The witnesses, it has been reported, were thus persuaded to testify in a manner that would please the officers.

One suspect, who eventually signed a phony confession that led to the death sentence for shooting a police officer, described a typical torture device used at Area 2 HQ: “It’s black and it’s round and it had a wire sticking out of it and it had a cord on it…. [Burge] took it and he ran it up between my legs, my groin area, just ran it up there very gently… up and down, up and down, you know, right between my legs, up and down like this, real gentle with it, but you can feel it, still feel it.

“Then he jabbed me with the thing and it slammed me… into the grille on the window. Then I fell back down, and I think that’s when I started spitting up the blood and stuff….”

Burge and fellow duly deputized officers of the law differed from Stasi agents or Gestapo officers only in the color of their uniforms.

And, speaking of color, all of the Burge crew’s victims were — you guessed it — black.

After nearly 40 years’ worth of charges and several headline trials, Burge finally was convicted of torture, obstruction of justice, and perjury. He’s now serving a 4½-year sentence at the federal correctional facility near Raleigh, North Carolina.

Chicago Sun-Times Cover

Which is the proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the many, many years dozens of tortured suspects spent in prison, at least 10 death penalty convictions leveled against others (since overturned, thanks to Burge’s convictions), and the nearly $100 million the City of Chicago has had to pay out in punitive damages.

Oddly, few outside the shifting boundaries of Chicago’s black neighborhoods thought to jump to the conclusion that Burge’s team might not be the only Police Department crew using cruel and inhuman methods to frame innocent people. Not even after reports issued by the CPD itself and the United Nations Committee against Torture suggested that Burge et al were not really outliers in the force, but archetypes.

No, nobody among the Silent and Moral majorities wished to believe their friendly men in blue, those who served and protected them, would actually torture prisoners. Why, that kind of stuff only goes on in East Germany and Communist China, for heaven’s sake! Not here in the land of the free and the home of yadda, yadda.

And since they didn’t wish to believe it, as Caesar pointed out, they simply didn’t.

The Pencil Today:

THE QUOTE

“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.” — Robert A. Heinlein

A NOTE TO MY READERS

If I seem a little cynical today (okay, a lot cynical) don’t blame me. I’m only the messenger.

MEET YOUR BOSS

Make no mistake now. There is no longer any argument.

This holy land is not led by a president or a Senate or House. Nor is it run by Democrats or Republicans. Not even the combined forces of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines rival the most powerful entity in the United States today.

Kids Stuff

These Great United States, Inc. are ruled by the investment banking firm and criminal enterprise known as Goldman Sachs.

And that would make the emperor of this nominal democratic republic an unindicted hoodlum by the name of Lloyd Blankfein.

Dear Leader

The capo Blankfein and his underlings yesterday got a huge return on their investments in political bribery and economic blackmail when the Obama Justice Department announced it won’t be pursuing charges against them.

See, Goldman Sachs had been engaged in the selling of subprime mortgage securities for years, earnings ungodly amounts of money. Only Blankfein’s syndicate then went out and bet against the performance of those securities.

In other words, Goldman Sachs sold its clients — including retirement funds, states and municipalities, hospitals, and the like — a pile of shit and then went out and set up a sham insurance safety net protecting itself against the shit smears that would inevitably follow.

The original “Mob” used to have this scam down to an art. A couple of crooked-nosed Charlies would visit a restaurant owner and advise him he needed “insurance” should, god forbid, anything calamitous happen.

Aw, D’at’s Too Bad. Y’See What Can Happen?

The only flaw in the Mob’s plan was its inability to hold off the dogs of justice indefinitely. By and by, some squeaky clean prosecutor would slap the bracelets on the big boys and their underbosses.

But Lloyd Blankfein won’t be a guest of the state any time soon. In fact. the state is now his guest.

This is, after all, his country. Lock, stock, and barrel.

PROBLEM SOLVED

You know how Barack Obama is a socialist? And the Clintons before him?

Real red-underwear-wearing types, right?

At least that’s what the Right would have us believe.

So why is it that the number of people receiving cash assistance from government social welfare programs has fallen a full two-thirds since Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform? And the number of American families who get government subsidies for trivial things like food and heat has fallen by a half?

The answer, if you believe the Right, is they’ve all gone from the lazy poor to the self-sufficient middle class. Because, after all, it was their own fault they were poor.

The great thing about living in these United States is the fact that we don’t need complicated solutions to baffling problems. The answers, my fellow citizens, are simple.

Oops. I mean simplistic.

ANOTHER SIGN OF THE COMING APOCALYPSE

Everybody and anybody who had a hand in making this monstrosity a reality should have the living shit kicked out of them:

This is the brand spankin’ new high school football stadium in Allen, Texas.

You read right: High-freaking-school.

The new home of the Allen Eagles cost $60M. It seats 18,000. It has a 75×45-foot video screen scoreboard.

The story about this crime against humanity in Time magazine’s online newsfeed quotes some little bastard defensive back as saying, “We just have to [be] blessed and humble and not take it for granted.”

Go Eagles!

Yeah. Like the god that doesn’t exist gave it to you in lieu of doing anything about the flooding in India.

Texas, by the way, last year cut $5B from the state public schools budget..

Anyway, the best part of the story is the little teaser in red about halfway down: “MORE: Catastrophic Brian Injuries at All-Time High in High School Football.”

Nothin’ like seeing your boy’s cerebrum concussed into so much gray goo down on the field in a shiny new stadium, is there?

LIFE LESSONS FROM FOOTBALL

Yep. Football’s back.

Remember when Ma & Pa America were all aflutter over teenaged athletes using steroids and human growth hormones to build muscle mass?

The Horror

Heaven forbid our precious scions should risk the devastating side effects of performance enhancing drugs. Like acne.

No. It’s much better for them to suffer permanent disability due to head injuries suffered on the gridiron.

Oh, and thanks to our changing climate (which, I’d bet, plenty o’Texans think is the liberal bunk anyway) more and more high school football players are suffering serious injury and death from practicing in full pads through the August heat.

SCIENCE TAKES ANOTHER HIT

We don’t have cable anymore at Chez Big Mike but if we did, Animal Planet would be on all the time. The Loved One digs critters and I’m partial to two or three species myself.

The bad news is, Animal Planet is slipping and sliding away from real animals this coming season and becoming more about, well, bullshit.

Two of the cable networks big shows will be “Finding Bigfoot” and “Mermaid — The Body Found.”

According to the Washington Post’s TV columnist Lisa de Moraes, critics pounded Animal Planet reps when the network held its pre-season news conference. One asked if AP “had run out of real animals.”

When it comes to TV, though, no one can argue with the numbers. AP’s audiences love shows about creatures that don’t exist.

THE POWER OF MYTH

Great. As if I’m not discouraged enough by the direction in which this nation is headed, this poll comes out:

The site I Fucking Love Science opines: “Well, this is a little bit scary. Come on America, sort it out. You just landed on Mars!”

To borrow a term from the god-fetishists, Amen!

Here’s how I waste my time. How about you? Share your fave sites with us via the comments section. Just type in the name of the site, not the url; we’ll find them. If we like them, we’ll include them — if not, we’ll ignore them.

I Love ChartsLife as seen through charts.

From I Love Charts

XKCD — “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

SkepchickWomen scientists look at the world and the universe.

IndexedAll the answers in graph form, on index cards.

I Fucking Love ScienceA Facebook community of science geeks.

Present and CorrectFun, compelling, gorgeous and/or scary graphic designs and visual creations throughout the years and from all over the world.

Flip Flop Fly BallBaseball as seen through infographics, haikus, song lyrics, and other odd communications devices.

Mental FlossFacts.

Caps Off PleaseComics & fun.

SodaplayCreate your own models or play with other people’s models.

Eat Sleep DrawAn endless stream of artwork submitted by an endless stream of people.

Big ThinkTapping the brains of notable intellectuals for their opinions, predictions, and diagnoses.

The Daily PuppySo shoot me.

Tiny, From The Daily Puppy

Electron Pencil event listings: Music, art, movies, lectures, parties, receptions, games, benefits, plays, meetings, fairs, conspiracies, rituals, etc.

The Venue Fine Art & GiftsOpening reception: “Articulture” by Marco Zehrung; 6-8pm

Lake Monroe, Paynetown SRANational S’mores Day celebration, recipe competition and other activities; 6-10pm

Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural CenterWorkshop: Depression and Buddhism, presented by Ani Choekye; 6:30pm

◗ IU Fine Arts Theater — Ryder Film Series: “Kumaré: The True Story of a False Prophet”; 7pm

Muddy Boots Cafe, Nashville — Mizfitz; 7-9pm

◗ IU CinemaFilm: “To Rome with Love”; 7pm

Bloomington SpeedwaySprint cars, UMP super stocks, UMP modifieds; 7pm

◗ IU Woodburn Hall Theater — Ryder Film Series: “The Pigeoneers”; 8pm

Cafe DjangoSad Sam Blues Jam; 8-10pm

The Comedy AtticTim Wilson; 8 & 10:30pm

◗ IU Fine Arts Theater — Ryder Film Series: “Polisse”; 8:30pm

Bear’s PlaceChris Wilson & Planet Earth, Charlie & the Groove Factory; 9pm

The Bluebird The Revivalists, Three Story Hill; 9pm

Max’s PlacePhoenix Down; 9pm

Muddy Boots Cafe, Nashville — Amanda Webb; 9:30pm

Max’s PlaceHead Bread; 10:30pm

Ongoing:

◗ Ivy Tech Waldron CenterExhibits:

  • “40 Years of Artists from Pygmalion’s”; through September 1st

◗ IU Art MuseumExhibits:

  • Qiao Xiaoguang, “Urban Landscape: A Selection of Papercuts” ; through August 12th
  • “A Tribute to William Zimmerman,” wildlife artist; through September 9th
  • Willi Baumeister, “Baumeister in Print”; through September 9th
  • Annibale and Agostino Carracci, “The Bolognese School”; through September 16th
  • “Contemporary Explorations: Paintings by Contemporary Native American Artists”; through October 14th
  • David Hockney, “New Acquisitions”; through October 21st
  • Utagawa Kuniyoshi, “Paragons of Filial Piety”; through fall semester 2012
  • Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Weston, & Harry Callahan, “Intimate Models: Photographs of Husbands, Wives, and Lovers”; through December 31st
  • “French Printmaking in the Seventeenth Century”; through December 31st

◗ IU SoFA Grunwald GalleryExhibits:

  • Coming — Media Life; August 24th through September 15th
  • Coming — Axe of Vengeance: Ghanaian Film Posters and Film Viewing Culture; August 24th through September 15th

◗ IU Kinsey Institute Gallery“Ephemeral Ink: Selections of Tattoo Art from the Kinsey Institute Collection”; through September 21st

◗ IU Lilly LibraryExhibit, “Translating the Canon: Building Special Collections in the 21st Century”; through September 1st

◗ IU Mathers Museum of World CulturesClosed for semester break, reopens Tuesday, August 21st

Monroe County History CenterPhoto exhibit, “Bloomington: Then and Now” by Bloomington Fading; through October 27th

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