The new and improved Kirsten Gillibrand

By Michael J.W. Stickings

What a difference a few years can make.

Back in 2009, when then-New York Gov. David Paterson named then-Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to fill Hillary's vacated spot in the Senate, I said it was "a horrible, horrible pick": 

Earlier, I suggested that Gillibrand, who represents a pro-Bush district, is "almost a Republican." Almost? I'd say she pretty much is, what with a 100% approval rating from the NRA, support for the Iraq War, and, as she herself put it, "one of the most conservative" voting records in the state, including voting for the FISA bill that included telecom immunity and to lift the ban on the possession of semi-automatic weapons in D.C. Her father was close to former Republican Governor George Pataki. She even once interned for former Senator Al D'Amato, a conservative and hyper-partisan Republican.

Was that wrong? No. But has Senator Gillibrand emerged as something altogether different? Yes.

The fact is, Gillibrand represented a fairly conservative district in upstate New York. (Obama won it decisively in 2008 and 2012, but Bush won it by fairly large margins in 2000 and 2004.) And so her views very much lined up with what she had to do to succeed there. That's not to say she was lying about herself. While she was strong on civil liberties and a proponent of same-sex marriage (and gays in the military), there is no doubt that she was genuinely a conservative Democrat, and that's why many of us were concerned when she was appointed to the Senate.

But give her credit. She's adapted to her role as New York's junior senator and broadened her views, or at least her positions, to reflect a significantly more progressive outlook.

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Food stamps and the invisible poor

By Richard K. Barry 

Steve Benen at Maddowblog made a point yesterday that is so obviously true it made me shake my head:

In recent weeks, it's been remarkably easy to find so-called "victims" of the Affordable Care Act on various news shows, each telling their story about how they're going to lose their old, awful coverage plan. These horror stories generally don't stand up well to scrutiny – we're talking about folks who are getting a subsidized insurance upgrade – but they've nevertheless become an easy, popular story for those eager to blast "Obamacare."

I can't help but notice, though, that actual victims of food-stamp cuts aren't exactly blanketing the national airwaves. Arthur Delaney reported on Friday about food-bank directors worrying aloud about the consequences of shrinking benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). 

According to USA Today:

Food stamp benefits will be cut to more than 47 million Americans starting Friday as a temporary boost to the federal program comes to an end without a new budget from a deadlocked Congress to replace it.

Under the program, known formally as the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program, or SNAP, a family of four that gets $668 per month in benefits will find that amount cut by $36.

Those who need food stamps and are suffering from program cuts are largely, Benen ads, invisible to the Beltway media preoccupied with a temporarily dysfunctional website.

Some people count and others don't. That's just the way it is, as the media fabricates one crisis and ignores another.

America's imaginary lavish social welfare safety net that exists only in Republican minds

By Marc McDonald 

In America, we hate the poor. We really, really hate the poor. We are indoctrinated from birth to hate the poor. Jesus may have said, "Blessed are you who are poor." But America has no time for that Jesus. Our motto is "Screw the poor."

The Century Foundation

As a result, America has never been big on social welfare programs for the poor. Even during the peak years of U.S. social program spending (during LBJ's "Great Society" years), America had a skimpy social safety net, compared to other industrialized nations.

Compared to generous European social safety nets, America these days more closely resembles the likes of Mexico than a modern First World industrialized nation. Jobless benefits, for example, are far more meager and stingy in the U.S. than they are in Europe. In fact, for one reason or another, millions of Americans don't even ever qualify for jobless benefits. (I know: I was one of them. Years ago, I applied for jobless benefits and was turned down.)

The other pillar of the U.S. social safety net, food stamps, is also very meager. I recall recently playing around with the food stamp eligibility program on a Texas state government Web site. I was curious as to exactly how low one's income had to be in order to qualify. I kept plugging in lower and lower income numbers and kept getting a response page that said, "You earn too much to qualify for food stamps." Eventually, I concluded the Web site must be broken. It was only later that I discovered, much to my amazement, that the Web site was in fact working just fine and the Third World-like wages I'd plugged into the search form were indeed considered too high to qualify for aid.

In short, in America these days, if you're poor, you are screwed.

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The farm bill and Big Government Conservatism

By Frank Moraes 

A lot of people wonder what a liberal like Dean Baker means when he writes a book like The End of Loser Liberalism. He means a lot, of course, and you should read it because that link provides the book in various electronic formats that are free. But mostly what he means is that the whole paradigm that we have of liberals being for big government and conservatives being for small government is just dead wrong. I write about this a lot myself, but I'm not sure that I didn't originally get the idea from him. The fact is that conservatives are just for a different kind of big government. Most of the time, it is even bigger than the government liberals want. What's more, it is infinitely more pernicious. My favorite example is that liberals want to spend money on libraries. No one ever lost their liberty because of public libraries. Yes, I know: conservatives think that taxation is theft, but that doesn't stop them from taxing for whatever it is they want. And the things they want to tax for really are associated with the loss of liberty: armies, spying, vaginal probes.

Yesterday, we had as clear an example of this divide as we will ever have. The farm bill is normally a very popular thing. Rural representatives like it because it gives money and price supports to farmers; urban representatives like it because it gives food (mostly in the form of food stamps or SNAP) to poor people. But when the House tried to pass a farm bill last month, it failed. Democrats didn't like it because it made savage cuts to SNAP. The most conservative Republicans didn't like it because it didn't cut SNAP enough. So in order to get a farm bill passed, the House Republicans split the farm bill in half: part for farms and part for SNAP. And they passed the "farm only" bill and said they would get to the "SNAP only" bill later.

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Get your own damn breadline

By Richard K. Barry

In a piece yesterday at Daily Kos on potential cuts to Food Stamp programs, this photo was posted with the caption "The U.S. Congress Sees Nothing Wrong With This Picture." Well, they may not, but I do. It's a picture of the Yonge Street Mission in Toronto, which started its work helping the needy in 1896. Toronto, as you may know, is not in the United States, and while Canada has its own problems with poverty, I don't expect the U.S. Congress to be all that worried about them.

(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)