Thursday, February 15, 2018

The genius of Trump’s food stamp proposal: You’re not supposed to like being on food stamps

If I was on food stamps, I wouldn’t like this either.

I think that’s the point. If you can’t afford to buy your own food and you need the government to provide it for you, then you get it on the government’s terms. That’s usually what happens when someone else is supplying your needs. Don’t like it? Take every available action to get off food stamps and achieve independence, at which point you can buy whatever you want at the grocery store with your own money that you earned.

Until then, enjoy your Harvest Box:

• Under the USDA America’s Harvest Box proposal, all Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participating households receiving $90 per month or more in benefits will receive a package of nutritious, 100-percent U.S. grown and produced food. Approximately 16.4 million households, or about 81 percent of SNAP households would be impacted by this proposal.

• The amount of food received per household would be scaled to the overall size of the household’s SNAP allotment, ultimately representing about half of their benefits. SNAP participants would receive domestically-sourced and produced food in lieu of a portion of their SNAP benefits.

• USDA would utilize a model similar to that currently used to distribute USDA Foods to other nutrition assistance programs to provide staple, shelf-stable foods (such as shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, ready-eatcereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans, canned meat, poultry or fish, and canned fruits and vegetables) to SNAP households at approximately half the retail cost.

• This proposal creates a new approach to nutrition assistance that combines retail-based SNAP benefits with delivery of USDA America’s Harvest Boxes supporting the President’s leadership on Buy American. This proposal is cost-effective, enhances the integrity of SNAP, and provides for states’ flexibility in administration of the program.

• The remainder of the household’s benefits will still be provided via the current Electronic Benefit Transfer card.

The Department of Agriculture estimates the change would save taxpayers $129 billion over 10 years by switching to defined packages that would presumably have a predictable, consistent cost. I’m guessing it would actually save a lot more than that precisely because people would hate being restricted to the Harvest Boxes, and at least a significant percentage of them would...

In a Tedx Talk at the University of Nevada a couple of weeks ago, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson revealed the origins of the "fake news" narrative that was aggressively pushed by the liberal media and Democrat politicians during the 2016 election, and how it was later flipped by President Donald Trump.

Attkisson pointed out that "fake news" in the form of tabloid journalism and false media narratives has always been around under different names.

But she noticed in 2016, there seemed to be a concerted effort by the MSM to focus America's attention on the idea of "fake news" in conservative media. That looked like a propaganda effort to Attkisson, so she did a little digging and traced the new spin to a little non-profit called "First Draft," which, she said, "appears to be the very first to use 'fake news' in its modern context."

"On September 13, 2016, First Draft announced a partnership to tackle malicious hoaxes and fake news reports," Attkisson explained. "The goal was supposedly to separate wheat from chaff, to prevent unproven conspiracy talk from figuring prominently in internet searches. To relegate today's version of the alien baby stories to a special internet oblivion."

She noted that a month later, then-President Obama chimed in.

"He insisted in a speech that he too thought somebody needed to step in and curate information of this wild, wild West media environment," she said, pointing out that "nobody in the public had been clamoring for any such thing."

Yet suddenly the subject of fake news was dominating headlines all over America as if the media had "received its marching orders," she recounted. "Fake news, they said, was an imminent threat to American democracy."

Attkisson, who has studied the manipulative moneyed interests behind media industry, said, "few themes arise in our environment organically." She noted that she always found it helpful to "follow the money."

"What if the whole fake news campaign was an effort on somebody's part to keep us from seeing or believing certain websites and stories by controversializing them or labeling them as fake news?" Attkisson posited.

Digging deeper, she discovered that Google was one of the big donors behind First Draft's "fake news" messaging. Google's parent company, she pointed out, is owned by Eric Schmidt, who happened to be a huge Hillary Clinton supporter.

Schmidt "offered himself up as a campaign adviser and became a top multi-million donor to it. His company funded First Draft at the start of the election cycle," Attkisson said. "Not surprisingly, Hillary was soon to jump aboard the anti-fake news train and her surrogate David Brock of Media Matters privately told donors that he was the one who told Facebook to join the effort."

Attkisson declared that "the whole thing smacked of the roll-out of a propaganda campaign," she said. Attkisson added, "But something happened that nobody expected. The anti-fake news campaign backfired. Each time advocates cried fake news, Donald Trump called them 'fake news' until he'd co-opted the term so completely that even those who [were] originally promoting it started running from it -- including the Washington Post," which she noted later backed away from...

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

South Africa: Failed State 2.0

Girls With Guns

If Democrats Worked As Hard For Poor Americans...

When You See This: Remember This:

Arrest and death of Otto Warmbier

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Otto Warmbier

Born	Otto Frederick Warmbier December 12, 1994 Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
Died	June 19, 2017 (aged 22) Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Wyoming High School (2013)
Alma mater	University of Virginia
Known for	Arrest and imprisonment in North Korea
Parent(s)	Fred Warmbier, Cindy Warmbier (née Garber)

Otto Frederick Warmbier (December 12, 1994 – June 19, 2017) was an American university student. In 2016, he was arrested and convicted by North Korean authorities for attempted theft, for which he was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. While incarcerated, he fell into a coma and never regained consciousness, dying in June 2017.

Warmbier was an Ohio native and the oldest of three siblings. He was traveling to Hong Kong for a study abroad program when he decided to visit North Korea on a guided tour. While there, he allegedly attempted to steal a propaganda poster, for which he was arrested and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment with hard labor. Approximately one month after his sentencing, Warmbier suffered severe neurological injury from an unknown cause. North Korean authorities did not disclose his medical condition until June 2017, when they announced he had fallen into a coma as a result of botulism and a sleeping pill.

Warmbier was freed in June 2017, still in a comatose state after 17 months in captivity. He was repatriated to the United States, arriving in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 13. He was taken to University of Cincinnati Medical Center for immediate evaluation and treatment, where his U.S. physicians found no evidence of botulism. Nevertheless, a coroner's report was unable to identify the cause of the injury, finding no evidence of physical torture on Warmbier's body. Warmbier never regained consciousness and died on June 19, 2017, six days after his return to the United States. U.S. officials blamed North Korea for his death.