Mccain/Palin?

I hate to break this to you Tom, but the police work during the summer; we work nights, weekends, holidays....we're open 24/7/365. We're inside people's homes every moment of every day, and have insights into society that teachers, social workers (they won't go on home visits without us), psychologists, sociologists, ad nauseum, will never have.

For you to dismiss my 20 years experience when your experience is relegated to a classroom and living in a city is, quite honestly, laughable.

 

That's probably my biggest reason for supporting birth control and abortion. Many of this country's social problems are made far worse by people producing children that they are unable or unwilling to care for properly. For me it isn't a liberal 'choice' issue so much as it's a conservative 'responsibility' issue.

(Despite my being rather conservative on some issues, there's no way that I could ever be considered a member of the religious right. For one thing, I don't believe in God. Their defining issues aren't mine.)

I'm only familiar with Social Security Disability tangentially, by observing some of the people collecting it. But it has struck me how many recipients don't seem to have any visible disability and continue to actively pursue a life of disfunctional behavior.

I spent years working in a metropolitan California county District Attorney's Family Support Division. (Since I left, these offices have been assigned to a new state child-support enforcement agency.)

Whenever an unmarried mother put a dependent child on public assistance, a referral was sent to our office. We would then file a paternity lawsuit and hopefully get a court order naming the gentleman that she specified as the father. (Oftentimes these fathers didn't contest it and willingly stipulated to paternity, but we arranged many blood-tests too.) We would also investigate these individuals' sources of income and try to determine whether it was sufficient to justify filing suit asking for a child-support order.

We received many thousands of these welfare referrals, representing a majority of our county's dependent children welfare cases. So, we were in a good position to observe the lifestyles and finances of the absent parents. I can only describe my own impressions since I didn't do any statistical analyses. (I'm sure that kind of information does exist.)

Some of these cases (a minority, but a noticeable minority) involved illegal aliens. It wasn't uncommon for illegal alien parents to have children in this country. While the mothers weren't eligible for welfare grants themselves, their locally-born children (technically US citizens) were, so illegals got reduced welfare grants. Neither the welfare office or our office ever reported these people to immigration. Mothers would usually deny any knowledge of where the fathers were, but they were usually around, working for cash (money that the mothers weren't reporting). If we ever managed to serve a complaint on these guys, they would typically just dissappear across the border back into Mexico. Even if we got a default order specifying paternity and child-support, collecting any money was usually very difficult. We had a very low success-rate with the illegal aliens.

Turning to legal residents, often-times we would locate an absent parent but were unable to locate his source of income. Some of these guys lived in expensive apartments and drove flashy cars. They lived large. But nothing was happening on their social security numbers and they weren't filing taxes. If we already had a child-support order for them, we would occasionally serve them with an order to show cause, requiring them to appear in court, explain their finances under oath and tell the judge why they shouldn't be held in contempt. They would always say the same things ("my friends are helping me" was a typical one) and unless we could actually document their under-the-table income, there wasn't very much that the judge could do. We didn't have investigators able to follow these guys around all day to see where they went.

In these under-the-table cases, many of these individuals' sources of income weren't entirely legal. That's perhaps the biggest impression that I got from the welfare cases -- the extent to which it's really the 'Aid to Criminal's Dependents' system. A troublingly large number of the fathers in welfare cases were easily located in prisons. Others had outstanding warrants or had arrest records as long as your arm. Mostly we had a mass of people with petty drug involvement.

I remember being told by welfare department officals that most welfare cases involve some fraud. It's just a question of how closely you want to look at them. But just as typically, the fraud is small and marginal and not really worth the system pursuing.

In a small number of cases, the fraud is more egregious. I remember one instance that I discovered myself, a mother whose kids were supposedly on welfare here in California. Unfortunately, the kids were actually back in Manila with relatives, attending an expensive Phillipine private school with their tuition being paid by California taxpayers. Whenever this mother had an appointment with her welfare case worker, she'd just drag along her friend's kids. Something that blatant is the exception, not the rule though. The fraud that we saw was more apt to be small-scale unreported income, or mothers lying about who the fathers of their children were, where they were located and what they were doing.

Political mythology's welfare recipients as society's victims were kind of few and far between from what I saw. These weren't heroic struggling workers unable to make ends meet due to macroeconomic changes in the American economy. There was little of that. It was more often petty criminals, dependents of serious criminals, and assorted substance abusers. It's true though, that we didn't get referrals for the dependent children cases in which the parents were intact married couples who were both on the welfare grant (no paternity or support issues), and it's also true that our county was a reasonably prosperous high-tech place and certainly not the rust-belt with lots of unemployed blue-collar workers.

 

Osama Bin Biden

 

Whoever it was that said that, I wouldn't be so sure of it. Nine of the first sixteen presidents were from the South - Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, and Taylor - and at least two of those - Jefferson and Jackson - were widowers.

 

173 days? When was he first elected?

 

Ay Ted El Travieso!


Abner

 

Well, I must say that this thread on Ms. Palin has been much more civilized than what I have seen over at politicalforum.com. Over there, there were a couple of concurrent threads on Ms. Palin's 17 year old daughter both of which went into the hundreds of posts very quickly. Screaming Jesus, I was absolutely mortified by some of the things that my fellow lefties wrote over there.

 

When Obama announced he was ready to be the President of the United States, he had 143 (173 was my mistake) days of active experience in the Senate (days the Senate was open and in-session where he was present).

Come now, Ted; we all know that lefty liberals are the compassionate, tolerant people to whom diversity is wonderful.

Until you disagree with them.

 

Ah! You mean 173 days of actually being physically in the Senate chamber? That explains it!

Yes! I got so damn disgusted with my fellow lefties over there that I admonished them first by quoting John 8:3-11 (the story where Jesus forgives the woman taken in adultery by telling her accusers that he that is without sin may throw the first stone and then turning to the woman and telling her to go and sin no more), only to be told by one of my fellow lefties that she enjoys throwing stones from glass houses because it makes for a better view. My most recent attempt to admonish my fellow libs over at politicalforum.com was to tell them that monkeys throw their crap while humans do not; Repubs sling mud while Demos should know better. I haven't been back to see if my second admonishment did any good, but my guess is ... it probably didn't.

 

You still haven't apologized for this, or even recognized your error.

 

If you're waiting for me to apologize for expressing my opinion, you have a very long wait ahead of you.

 

No, for being dead wrong, rude, and mean, accusing me of something that I never did, something quite vile, in fact. It has nothing to do with expressing an "opinion."

As for waiting, I shall not. Instead, I shall employ the same privilege you've bestowed upon yourself, and express an opinion for which I have no intention of taking any responsibility for: you're an unqualified, close-minded lunkhead who has absolutely no business mangling the role you've assumed for yourself on this board.

Hope that helps.

 

I haven't been around in a while, but reading this thread today was a hoot. If EVER the pot has called the kettle black it is most certainly here.

Same ole Rich, whine whine whine, throw out insults, whine whine whine again.

Thanks for the laugh this morning...........................

 

Bruce said that your remark sounded misogynist to him. He was describing his own reaction to your words. Are you insisting that he didn't really feel that way?

You've been throwing punches pretty vigorously (and pretty wildly) in this thread, Rich. Your very first post (#5 in the thread) could easily be interpreted as a flame aimed squarely at me. You scathingly denounced the "Republican apologists" who were "twisting" to defend the indefensible. Are you prepared to apologize to me? Of course not.

At that point, I was the only one here who had posted anything about McCain's reasons for choosing Palin and about what their their political implications might be. In subsequent days what I wrote has been borne out and most of the political pundits are saying exactly the same things. I'm not claiming any special brilliance for having said it here first. This isn't rocket-science, Sarah Palin's populist appeal is obvious for all to see. This is a political campaign, after all, it's supposed to be obvious.

It's really kind of fascinating in a Teddy Roosevelt Republican way, moving McCain's campaign right around Obama's from the rich-fat-cat beltway-establishment side to the small-town/suburban middle-American working-people end. That's why picking a silver-spoon guy like Romney wouldn't have been nearly as effective. McCain's clearly hoping to leave Obama boxed in as the trendy candidate of the big-city media elites.

That, btw, is why the "hocky-mom" phrase isn't really misogynist. It's why Sarah Palin proudly uses it herself. It's part of her regular-person appeal. Unlike Barack Obama and Joe Biden, she's telling millions of working women (and men too) "I'm like you". And that's why the Democrats will have to be very careful in how they attack her. They can't seem to be demeaning the very people whose votes they need.

 

Come on gentlemen, let's ligthen up a little.

Abner

 

I appreciate the sentiment, but where was it when Bruce accused me of saying something misogynistic, even though it was not true, not even a bit? Not yours to do, of course, and I appreciate all that you post. But please don't lump me in with him, even with a complimentary term.

When a moderator of this board is free to say what he did, he does not become part of a group of "gentlemen."

As for Bill, I didn't call you out specifically. I called out a type of people, "Republican apologists." I have no idea whether or not any particular individual is a Republican, or even a Republican apologist. That hardly qualifies as a "flame" on you or anyone else.

And for "plscott," I always find it interesting when people condenscend to the one standing up to a bullying comment. I don't call people out. But I do respond. That's why, even though I appreciate his work, I think Bruce is wrong. I didn't say anything about him or Bill, but I have a choice of either letting their comments directed at me slide, or responding. I've chosen the latter.

(If you stand up to it, you're "flaming," If you complain about it, you're "whining." How very convenient.)

 

By the way, if calling Sarah Palin a "hockey mom" is misogynistic, then so is she. It's her term. And so are the droves of delegates at the RNC holding up "hockey mom" signs. Gee, an RNC full of misogynists? Who woulda thunk?

Certainly you aren't suggesting that, Bruce? Certainly you don't still feel you're original comment was accurate and fair, do you? Please don't tell me you still stand by it?

 

There, feel better now? I hope so, because this conversation is going nowhere as I'm not apologizing to you or anyone else for expressing my opinion. Deal with it.

As I said before Rich, it's all in the context. IMO, you used it as a term of derision. My opinion. Get over it already.

 

Bruce:

Kiss off. There. Get over it.