The Dixiecrat Solution

So the shutdown’s over; at least temporarily.  Ted Cruz might do it all again.

In the meantime, I can’t think of anything better to post, so I’ll post this Paul Krugman op-ed on the shutdown, with an interesting solution:

So you have this neighbor who has been making your life hell. First he tied you up with a spurious lawsuit; you’re both suffering from huge legal bills. Then he threatened bodily harm to your family. Now, however, he says he’s willing to compromise: He’ll call off the lawsuit, which is to his advantage as well as yours. But in return you must give him your car. Oh, and he’ll stop threatening your family — but only for a week, after which the threats will resume.

Not much of an offer, is it? But here’s the kicker: Your neighbor’s relatives, who have been egging him on, are furious that he didn’t also demand that you kill your dog.

And now you understand the current state of budget negotiations.

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Where Credit is Due

Women’s Equality Day is already over in New York City.  That’s half a shame, because it’s the most under-appreciated holiday in America.  The schools should have had today off like they will next Monday for Labor Day.  And some day in October for Columbus Day.

The fact that we close post offices, libraries, and schools for this guy who invoked a genocide while “discovering” America while I don’t remember a no-school day honoring a woman shows something about this country’s values.  Saying Columbus discovered America is a white-supremacist statement that does not respect Native Americans and is frankly out of date.

But that’s not the point.  I’m sure that designating Women’s Equality Day a national holiday would be destroyed in Congress, where anti-choice Republicans would say “we’re done.”  We’re not.

And Christopher Columbus is certainly done, but nobody worried about that when they gave him a holiday.

Believe me, this would make a big impact.  Children would learn about women’s rights in school leading up to the holiday the way they learn about MLK (great holiday) and Christopher Columbus today.  At first, they’d talk about sufferage and equal pay for equal work; as children got older they could possibly move into more sensitive issues, like sexual assault awareness and prevention.

Doesn’t that sound like a better use of your taxpayer money than teaching kids Christopher Columbus was great?

In the spirit of the mood, I will blog this great editorial by Gail Collins of the New York Times, entitled “Where Credit is Due”  It is one of the best op-eds I’ve read recently and touches on every aspect of this issue from workplace equality to who buys the towels:

A few months ago, a saleswoman at Macy’s tried to wheedle me into renewing my expired store credit card by offering a deep discount on the towels I was buying. So I dug it out of my wallet, where it was nestled between an expired press pass to the Texas State Capitol and an expired library card from Manchester, N.H., and happily handed it over.

She looked at it, puzzled. “But this isn’t your name,” she said.

The card said Daniel Collins. That’s my husband, who I believe has never been to Macy’s, or bought a towel, in his entire life.

I flashed back to a moment when I was living in Connecticut. I have no idea what year it was, except that it is very possible Richard Nixon was still president. I was in the Macy’s in New Haven when a woman with a clipboard came up to me and asked me if I wanted to apply for a credit card.

“Absolutely,” I said instantly.

She took up her pen. “What’s your husband’s name?” she asked.

I wish I could tell you that I made a speech about equal rights and headed for the door, but I just let her fill out my application. This was an era when women still needed a male co-signer to get credit. In some places, you needed a husband or father to even get a library card.

Anyway, I was proud of being newly married and dumb about the women’s movement. I worked as a reporter in the Connecticut State Capitol, where the male legislators and male lobbyists and male reporters met in a place called the Hawaiian Room to drink. When a female journalist demanded that she be admitted, too, the media was barred completely. The guys in the press room blamed it all on the one woman, who, I am sorry to say, was not me. My only reaction was to wonder why anyone would want to go to the Hawaiian Room, which was in the attic, with steam pipes along the ceiling festooned with limp plastic leis.

I’m telling you all this because on Monday we will celebrate Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the 19th Amendment and women’s right to vote. That was in 1920, and there’s no longer anyone around who can tell us what that felt like to be disenfranchised because of your sex. But there are plenty of people who recall the time when women couldn’t get credit in their own name.

Next year, if we’re in the mood, we can celebrate the 40th anniversary of the day that Kathryn Kirschbaum, then the mayor of Davenport, Iowa, was told she could not have a Bank of America card without her husband’s signature.

The great thing about Equality Day is that it works in two ways. We can mull both how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. The one thought feeds the other. The idea of having 50 women in the U.S. Senate, or 250 female C.E.O.’s in the Fortune 500 seems less far-reaching if you contemplate the fact that in the 1960s, a spokesman for NASA said “talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach.” Now, one of the two American astronauts on the International Space Station is a woman, and that is so routine that we’re not even aware of her name. (It’s Karen Nyberg.)

Monday is also the anniversary of the 1970 women’s march for equality in New York, which almost no one expected to be a very big deal. The New York Police Department had only given the marchers permission to use one lane of Fifth Avenue. “Then more people came and more people came and we spilled over, and we took over the entire avenue,” recalled Robin Morgan, the feminist author and activist. “And that was the moment your heart really sang. People were hanging out windows. I kept yelling: ‘Join us!’ ” And some of them, Morgan said, did just that.

Parades are great. For a long time, the drive for suffrage was seen as a depressing slog of petition-gathering by middle-class clubwomen. Then the parades started, and the movement belonged to everyone.

“We did not eat our little lunches in lobster palaces, but out in the street in front of lobster palaces. We stand for plain living and high thinking, that’s it,” a marcher told The New York Times during the equality parade in 1912.

That comment does seem a tad reverse-snobby, but the mixture of socialites and factory workers, marching for one cause, sent a message. It also sounds as though it was a lot of fun. After the march ended, a woman The Times identified as “Miss Annie S. Peck, the mountain climber,” stood on a chair, “waved a Joan of Arc flag, and told her audience that this was the banner that she had planted 21,000 feet above the sea on one of the highest peaks of the Andes.”

There don’t seem to be a lot of parades planned for Monday, which is probably all for the best. Once a parade becomes an annual institution, it becomes less about a political point and more about the afterparties. But we are going to have one heck of a time in 2020.

I’m gonna try to be there in 2020.  I think I’ll be able to make it.

I certainly hope so.

Tackling the Roots of Rape

I’ve recently written a couple posts (here and here) on rape culture and sexism in America.  I’m going to add to the mix a Frank Bruni NYT op-ed on this matter from last Tuesday:

Tackling the Roots of Rape

By Frank Bruni

Steubenville. The Naval Academy. Vanderbilt University. The stories of young men sexually assaulting young women seem never to stop, despite all the education we’ve had and all the progress we’ve supposedly made, and there are times when I find myself darkly wondering if there’s some ineradicable predatory streak in the male subset of our species.

Wrong, Chris Kilmartin told me. It’s not DNA we’re up against; it’s movies, manners and a set of mores, magnified in the worlds of the military and sports, that assign different roles and different worth to men and women. Fix that culture and we can keep women a whole lot safer.

I reached out to Kilmartin, a psychology professor and the author of the textbook “The Masculine Self,” after learning that the military is repeatedly reaching out to him. Right now he’s in Colorado, at the Air Force Academy, which imported him for a year to teach in the behavioral sciences department and advise the school on preventing sexual violence.

He previously worked on a Naval Academy curriculum with that aim, and helped to write a training film for the Army. At a time of heightened concern about rape and related crimes in the armed services, he’s being welcomed as someone with insights into the problem.

Its deepest roots, he said, are the cult of hyper-masculinity, which tells boys that aggression is natural and sexual conquest enviable, and a set of laws and language that cast women as inferior, pliable, even disposable.

“We start boys off at a very early age,” Kilmartin told me during a recent phone conversation. “When the worst thing we say to a boy in sports is that he throws ‘like a girl,’ we teach boys to disrespect the feminine and disrespect women. That’s the cultural undercurrent of rape.”

Boys see women objectified in popular entertainment and tossed around like rag dolls in pornography. They encounter fewer women than men in positions of leadership. They hear politicians advocate for legislation like the Virginia anti-abortion bill that would have required women who wanted to end pregnancies to submit to an invasive vaginal ultrasound.

“Before you make a reproductive choice, you are going to be required to have somebody penetrate you with an object,” he said. “That’s very paternalistic: we know what’s right. You’re not in control of your own body.”

He noted that discussions of domestic violence more often included the question of why a battered woman stayed than the question of why a battering man struck, as if the striking was to be expected. Men will be brute men, just as boys will be lusty boys.

If Kilmartin’s observations can read at times like humorless chunks of a politically correct tome, that’s not how he actually comes across. He’s loose, funny. In fact he’s got a sideline hobby as a stand-up comic. No joke.

And he’s got a trove of less wonky riffs. He mentions the University of Iowa, which for decades has painted the locker room used by opponents pink to put them “in a passive mood” with a “sissy color,” in the words of a former head football coach, Hayden Fry.

He mentions the bizarre use of the term “sex scandals” for such incidents as Tailhook decades ago and the recent accusations that Bob Filner, the mayor of San Diego, groped women around him, among other offenses. “They’re violence scandals,” he said. “If I hit you over the head with a frying pan, I don’t call that cooking.”

The armed services are a special challenge, because they’re all about aggression, summoning and cultivating Attila the Hun and then asking him to play Sir Walter Raleigh as well.

But Kilmartin said that that’s a resolvable tension, if men are conditioned to show the same self-control toward women that they do, successfully, in following myriad military regulations; if they’re encouraged to call out sexist behavior; and if, above all, commanders monitor their own conduct, never signaling that women are second-class citizens.

The integration of women into combat duties will help, bolstering women’s standing and altering a climate of inequality, Kilmartin said.

But he and the rest of us are taking on fortified traditions and calcified mind-sets, and that’s evident in the enrollment in the two classes of Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Men and Masculinity that he began teaching on Friday. Although female cadets are about 20 percent of the Air Force Academy, they’re more than half of the students who signed up for Kilmartin’s course, he said.

He said that one of them, during the very first session, recounted that someone at flight school over the summer had told her that women shouldn’t fly planes.

“Oh, so do you fly a plane with your penis?” Kilmartin asked the class.

One of the male cadets responded: “Sounds like you’re issuing a challenge, sir.”

 

If you don’t think Citizens United Effects you, think Again

Welcome, my friends, to the era of unlimited campaign finance.  Thank-you, SCOTUS!  For the past few years, Exxon Mobile can give unlimited amounts to campaigns that trash the environment, while Mother Earth is stuck doing bake sales: anything to compete.

If that doesn’t alarm you, consider the recent piece on The Daily Show regarding holding Wall Street accountable for the financial crisis.  I don’t think this embeds, so watch it here.

Considering the troubled state congress is in, reform is unlikely.  And as this critical New York Times piece shows, there is little chance at reform.  This should be on top of the “most e-mailed” list.

Let me highlight:

“Freshmen are pushed and pushed and pushed to raise money — it’s how they are judged by the leadership and the political establishment in Washington,” said Mr. Miller, who added that he felt the same pressure when he joined the Financial Services Committee in 2003 as a freshman. “It’s only natural that it has got to be on your mind that a vote one way or other is going to affect the ability to raise money.”

After the elections in November, Democratic Party leaders gave a PowerPoint presentation urging their freshman members to spend as much as four hours a day making fund-raising calls while in Washington, and an additional hour of “strategic outreach” holding breakfasts or “meet and greets” with possible financial supporters. That adds up to more time than these first-term lawmakers were advised to spend on Congressional business.

That’s.  Just.  Wrong.

There’s also a Huffington Post article from January on this issue.  Just look at these schedules:

So in terms of time, the donors are just as important as you, the constituent.  Right?

Wrong:

Congressional hearings and fundraising duties often conflict, and members of Congress have little difficulty deciding between the two — occasionally even raising money from the industry covered by the hearings they skip. It is considered poor form in Congress — borderline self-indulgent — for a freshman to sit at length in congressional hearings when the time could instead be spent raising money. Even members in safe districts are expected to keep up the torrid fundraising pace, so that they can contribute to vulnerable colleagues.

Wait?  What?  How is it self-indulgent to raise money during your committee hearings.  YOU WERE ELECTED TO GO TO THESE HEARINGS BY YOUR CONSTITUENTS FOR YOUR CONSTITUENTS.  IT’S YOUR JOB TO GO TO THESE HEARINGS FOR GOD’S SAKES.If a doctor sees patients, it’s not “borderline self-indulgent.”  He’s paid big bucks to do it.  A member of congress is paid big bucks to go to his committee hearing.  Not going is the self-indulgent thing.

I’m sorry.  That’s just wrong.

Still, there’s more:

Working a schedule like that as a freshman teaches a member of Congress about the institution’s priorities. “It really does affect how members of Congress behave if the most important thing they think about is fundraising,” Miller said. “You end up being nice to people that probably somebody needs to be questioning skeptically. It’s a fairly disturbing suggested schedule. You won’t ask tough questions in hearings that might displease potential contributors, won’t support amendments that might anger them, will tend to vote the way contributors want you to vote.”

Fundraising should not be more important than constituents.  Lobbying groups did not vote representatives in: the people did.

On the other hand, your Democratic congressman might be in office only because of people like your neighbor, who votes for whoever has better TV ads:

But without the DCCC pushing members to raise cash, Grijalva himself may have suffered. In 2010, a Tea Party candidate came from nowhere and almost knocked off the cash-strapped incumbent. The DCCC stepped into spend nearly $200,000 on the campaign, likely helping keep him in his office.

Citizens United is just one rock in this avalanche.  What we really need is an overhaul of campaign finance.  Sure, it’s one thing to travel around your district shaking hand: that’s necessary.  It’s another if candidates need money for $500,000 prime-time TV.

Sadly, with the current state of Congress, we can’t expect reform anytime soon.

We are all Slaves of Faux News

Program note: Was there a political cover up surrounding the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans? Erin Burnett anchors a CNN special investigation: “The Truth About Benghazi,” Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET.

I’m not kidding.  That’s really from CNN.  Look it up.

I received news of this coming program from a conservative I follow on Twitter.  Of course, he’s excited.  Finally, the “liberal media” is hooking onto what Faux has been all along.    Even I was worried.  I wondered if Fox was really right.

Then I remembered that CNN is not as liberal as conservatives like to think.  Like here, where they spend a minute and a half giving idiotic teabaggers free publicity:

It’s not like they spend the rest of the day giving liberal protestors free publicity.  As a matter of fact, while conservatives complain about the negative press the msm gives their politicians, it’s different for their protestors.  Neutral for the right, virtually non-existent for the left.  I’m no fan of CNN; I prefer the New York Times.

Of all the major news networks, Faux is by far the most powerful.   Benghazi and the IRS, the love-children of Faux are major stories today.  Who hasn’t heard of them, The NYT, which is not a major network, but still, stands contrast.  Did you ever heard that WalMart uses bribes in Mexico? That was a front page story.  CNN barely peeped.  And that is just one example.

CNN covers a lot of the stories Faux does, just because they cover it.  As a result, liberals feel we have to refute Faux, but we spend too much time doing it.  In the end, the only refuting Faux has to do is their “liberal bias” crap.  If the media really had a liberal bias, wouldn’t they be exposing stories like the one about WalMart, or giving publicity to climate protestors?

In the end, the rest of the media is just a slave of Faux News.

40 Votes & Going on Vacation

Congratulations!!! You’ve just won four free drinks!!!

Okay.  Not really.  But I wish I could give you forty drinks as a consolation prize.  Yesterday, Congress voted to repeal Obamacare FOR THE FORTIETH TIME.  In a previous post, I mentioned the $1.45 million cost of each Obamacare vote.   So if each punch on one of those cards represented the cost of one vote, we’ll have spent a grand total of fifty-eight million dollars!

Exciting, eh?

In related news, the government  might shut down if Congress can’t agree on next year’s appropriations bill.  If you live in a liberal district, you’re asking “Is Rep. (Name) going to do anything?”  “Is (s)he on the phone with congressional conservatives hammering out a deal to save my job?”  “Is (s)he requesting a deal on Obamacare?”   “Is (s)he going to be able to save my job?”

The answer to the two in the middle, and probably also the two on the outside, is “no.”

Sorry.  Because now I know you’d like your four free drinks.

Your representative  is currently leaving Washington and the terrible reality of a government shutdown for a five-week vacation.

DISCLAIMER: I did not make that and do not own copyright. Don’t act like I did (if you want it taken down, feel free to request it via comment and I’ll do it).

But it’s not going to look exactly like the picture at left either.

You see, these outrageously long five weeks are what is called a “district work period.”  Your member of congress will be returning home to your district for the majority of the five weeks.  Ideally, this will allow for five weeks for your member of congress to march in parades, hold town hall meetings, visit a few businesses, and shake hands with constituents like you at county fairs.

I’m all for meeting constituents, but five weeks at a time during a budget crisis, please, isn’t that what election years are for?

Add to that the fact that the above description is only “ideally.”  Practically, “district work period” is GOP code language for “15-months-till-election district-wide propaganda tour.”

This year, the GOP has put together lots of resources so that in no time starting this Monday, your GOP member of Congress will be off on their August “Fighting Washington for You” tour.

By the way: information for congressional staff regarding planning events for the tour can be found in this handy pdf.  Take my word for it: it’s a fascinating read.

The pdf begins with a sample editorial to be customized to the rep/district and submitted to local papers at the beginning of the month.  If the grammar is off, sorry, I could only fix so much of it before I got sick of fixing grammar.  If you’d like the correct version, here’s the goddamned link.

“Fighting Washington for You”

As we conclude another busy legislative session in Washington, I look forward to working hard at home for the month of August.  Each day I am grateful for the opportunity to represent you in our nation’s capital because Washington is broken and needs to be fixed. It spends too much, borrows too much, and takes too much. It targets people for what they believe and punishes them for their political ideologies. It chokes out jobs with more red tape, blocks new energy resources, and makes our health care crisis worse. Washington is out of control.But every day I serve in Congress, I work to fight Washington. I’m fighting Washington to spur economic growth and create more jobs. I’m fighting Washington to hold government accountable to taxpayers. I’m working to dismantle ObamaCare and make America energy independent. I’m working to cut wasteful spending, expand educational opportunities, and rein in red tape. I’m fighting Washington for you.As I make plans for my time at home these several weeks, I want hear from you about how we can work together to fghtWashington to stop government abuse and make sure government is making your life easier – not standing in the way. That’s why I will be traveling throughout the district in August on my “Fighting Washington for You” tour. This tour is an opportunity to have conversations about House Republicans’ alternative plan to Washington Democrat’s overreaching, out-of-control government. It’s about our plan for economic growth and jobs.If you come to one of the events, you won’t hear another boring speech or more inside-the-beltway rhetoric. This tour isn’t about me. This effort is all about you.I want to hear how decisions from Washington are affecting you. Are you still struggling to find a job in our stagnant economy? Have you had to put of school because student loan rates just doubled? Are you worried about your hours getting cut at workbecause of new health care regulations? Are you concerned about an abusive government taking away the rights of hardworking taxpayers? I will be travelling from one end of the district to the other, stopping at many different places – colleges, hospitals, senior centers,main streets, factories, and farms. I hope we have the opportunity to see each other.Fighting Washington isn’t about creating more partisan gridlock, heated rhetoric, or Republicans versus Democrats. It’s about fixing an out-of-control government for the moms and dads struggling to support their families, the recent college graduateslooking for jobs, the seniors relying on their benefts, the most vulnerable in our communities, the veterans who served Americaand the brave men and women who protect us right now.For more information about my “Fighting Washington for You” your, please visit my website for a schedule and updates along the way. I look forward to seeing you, talking with you, and continue to fight for you.

Sounds like one of those letters you get when a company lets you down that begins with “Dear Valued Customer,” and you know that deep down, they don’t give a damn.   All that editorial is is useless rhetoric.  Which will be my only comment.  If you want more, read this op-ed piece.

It’s getting late and I’m lazy, so I’ll let Timonthy Egan finish the story:

Here’s a sample suggestion, from Page 28, of how to stage a phony public meeting with business owners:

“Confirm the theme(s) prior to the event and make sure the participants will be 100 percent on message. (Note: while they do not have to be Republicans, they need to be able to discuss the negative effects of Obamacare on their employees.)”

And what if I have a child with cancer, and the insurance company plans to dump him if Republicans stop Obamacare in its tracks? Can I attend? Or what if I’m counting on buying into the new health care exchanges in my state, saving hundreds of dollars on my insurance bill?

The kit has an answer: planting supporters, with prescreened softball questions, will ensure that such things never get asked. More important, this tactic will assure that any meeting with the dreaded public will go “in the direction that is most beneficial to the member,” as the blueprint states.

I thought this wasn’t about you.

I’ll be following GOPers as they embark on these tours; considering all they have in their packets (there’s more: if your GOP member of Congress follows through, expect your local media to spend a great deal of time on it and several op-eds, including a few co-written with fellow constituents who agree with Faux News), I’m anticipating entertainment.  And lots of speeches of bullcrap.

You can find your representative by going to:

[Last name goes here]-dot-house-dot-gov

Just remember that as an unhappy liberal constituent, you are unlikely to have your voice heard.  The GOP is trying to avoid making the mistakes the democrats did in 2009 and is advising members to “Prepare a few questions in advance in case the conversation slowly starts.”  Or, I assume, if a thirty-nine-year-old cancer patient who would have reached his lifetime insurance coverage cap if it weren’t for Obamacare tries to hijack the conversation.

If you’re one of the lucky ones without a GOP congressman, for your enjoyment I have links to:

• John Boehner
• Eric Cantor
• Michele Bachmann
• Paul Ryan
• And my favorite GOPer to hate: Darrell Issa

If there’s any other stupid Republican the world needs to worry about, comment and I’ll add them in the morning.

Top Seven Reasons why we Need to Stay out of Syria

I’m no foreign policy expert, but I have a duty; as America is on the brink of WAR.  Be sure to contact Obama regarding this issue:

• 7: It’s religious: The war in Syria is as much religious as it is political. Shiites are fighting mostly with Assad; and the country’s Sunni majority is fighting with the Opposition.  The government should not be involved in such a display of religious affiliation; in fact it is somewhat unconstitutional.
• 6: No one in America likes it: Only eleven percent of the public supports intervention.  Should we really be sending Americans to die  and spending all this money for a war only eleven percent of the public supports?  No.
• It Would Further Strain our Relationship with Russia: It already has been straining our relationship with Russia, in addition to Snowden’s escape to the airport terminal.  Let’s not make Putin angry, okay?
• 4: It’s the Sequester, Baby.  Due to the federal budget deficit, we’ve had to cut spending on lots of different programs that could have helped many Americans.  Although the war would create jobs, it would strain our coffers and drag us deeper into debt.    Obama’s not been spending much, but with a war; all of that will change.  Why should we destroy things overseas when we could be rebuilding bridges and solving other problems here at home?
• 3: We did this ten years ago in Iraq.  Look what happened: Seriously.  The only thing that’s motivating Obama is faulty intelligence, which motivated Bush in Iraq.  Except, for reason number two, this time, it’s a lot worse.   A New York Times article said that a conflict in Syria will last us a really long time.  Do we really want to invest all this time?
• 2: We’ll be helping Al Qaeda: Obama has been warning us about this.  However, he’s not heeding his own warning.  Prominent members of the Syrian opposition are members of Al Qaeda.  Ronald Reagan aided Al Qaeda members in the 80’s.  Look what they did to our buildings less than twenty years later.  This will be bring us full circle; maybe to another 9/11 and Afghanistan.  It will also bring us to reason 1:
• 1: American Imperialism has failed for over a century.  Stop trying it.   They say the dumbest people are the ones who trying something again when it doesn’t work.  This has been America’s foreign policy for over a century now.  Our imperialism led to WWI, which in turn led to the Holocaust and WWII, which in turn led to the Cold War.  The Cold War led to our relationship with North Korea.  Whenever America chooses war and violence, in the end we fail miserably.   Probably the greatest thing  for American foreign policy was when JFK peacefully ended the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Because peace won over war then, we avoided a possible nuclear holocaust; and all the other effects of a war with the USSR.  I can’t wait for the day when this country’s leaders decide that wasting government money on “democracy” in the Middle East is the biggest waste of government money, as well as human capital, in this era.

GOP Fact-Twisting: At Work

Just thought I’d show you this tweet by an outraged conservative:

https://twitter.com/_Midtowngirl/status/357318282170208257

In reality, this is the screenshot of the actual article:

The full article is here.  

That’s how conservatives twist facts.

Hunger Games, USA

NYT op-ed by Paul Krugman.  So good, I had to blog it:

Something terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We’ve gone beyond bad economic doctrine. We’ve even gone beyond selfishness and special interests. At this point we’re talking about a state of mind that takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable.

The occasion for these observations is, as you may have guessed, the monstrous farm bill the House passed last week.

For decades, farm bills have had two major pieces. One piece offers subsidies to farmers; the other offers nutritional aid to Americans in distress, mainly in the form of food stamps (these days officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP).

Long ago, when subsidies helped many poor farmers, you could defend the whole package as a form of support for those in need. Over the years, however, the two pieces diverged. Farm subsidies became a fraud-ridden program that mainly benefits corporations and wealthy individuals. Meanwhile food stamps became a crucial part of the social safety net.

So House Republicans voted to maintain farm subsidies — at a higher level than either the Senate or the White House proposed — while completely eliminating food stamps from the bill.

To fully appreciate what just went down, listen to the rhetoric conservatives often use to justify eliminating safety-net programs. It goes something like this: “You’re personally free to help the poor. But the government has no right to take people’s money” — frequently, at this point, they add the words “at the point of a gun” — “and force them to give it to the poor.”

It is, however, apparently perfectly O.K. to take people’s money at the point of a gun and force them to give it to agribusinesses and the wealthy.

Now, some enemies of food stamps don’t quote libertarian philosophy; they quote the Bible instead. Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, for example, cited the New Testament: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” Sure enough, it turns out that Mr. Fincher has personally received millions in farm subsidies.

Given this awesome double standard — I don’t think the word “hypocrisy” does it justice — it seems almost anti-climactic to talk about facts and figures. But I guess we must.

So: Food stamp usage has indeed soared in recent years, with the percentage of the population receiving stamps rising from 8.7 in 2007 to 15.2 in the most recent data. There is, however, no mystery here. SNAP is supposed to help families in distress, and lately a lot of families have been in distress.

In fact, SNAP usage tends to track broad measures of unemployment, like U6, which includes the underemployed and workers who have temporarily given up active job search. And U6 more than doubled in the crisis, from about 8 percent before the Great Recession to 17 percent in early 2010. It’s true that broad unemployment has since declined slightly, while food stamp numbers have continued to rise — but there’s normally some lag in the relationship, and it’s probably also true that some families have been forced to take food stamps by sharp cuts in unemployment benefits.

What about the theory, common on the right, that it’s the other way around — that we have so much unemployment thanks to government programs that, in effect, pay people not to work? (Soup kitchens caused the Great Depression!) The basic answer is, you have to be kidding. Do you really believe that Americans are living lives of leisure on $134 a month, the average SNAP benefit?

Still, let’s pretend to take this seriously. If employment is down because government aid is inducing people to stay home, reducing the labor force, then the law of supply and demand should apply: withdrawing all those workers should be causing labor shortages and rising wages, especially among the low-paid workers most likely to receive aid. In reality, of course, wages are stagnant or declining — and that’s especially true for the groups that benefit most from food stamps.

So what’s going on here? Is it just racism? No doubt the old racist canards — like Ronald Reagan’s image of the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy a T-bone steak — still have some traction. But these days almost half of food stamp recipients are non-Hispanic whites; in Tennessee, home of the Bible-quoting Mr. Fincher, the number is 63 percent. So it’s not all about race.

What is it about, then? Somehow, one of our nation’s two great parties has become infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness, a contempt for what CNBC’s Rick Santelli, in the famous rant that launched the Tea Party, called “losers.” If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s a terrible thing to behold.

“The House Just Wants to Snack”

Since I was too lazy to actually write an angry blog post on the House Farm Bill, I’ll just leave you with Gail Collins’s op-ed on the House farm bill entitled, “The House just wants to Snack.”

And, now, the Tasty Bites theory of government.

You may have heard that the House of Representatives passed a farm bill this week. Or possibly not. I have found that many Americans can go for a very long time without mentioning the farm bill. But we are going to talk about it today, and it will be absolutely fascinating.

For decades, Congress has merged food stamps — which help poor people pay for their groceries — with agricultural subsidies in one big, messy, bipartisan farm bill that made everybody happy. Well, not euphoric. There was definitely that messy factor. But it did merge the interests/needs of urban and rural lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans.

Lately, the House has begun chopping up big, complicated bills into what Speaker John Boehner once described as “bite-sized chunks that members can digest.” No more legislative sausage-making. No more bipartisan trading. The House was going to stick to clean, simple ideas, more along the lines of Liver Snaps.

So the farm bill got divided. The two parts were not equally tidy. As Ron Nixon reported in The Times, the rate of error and fraud in the agricultural crop insurance program is significantly higher than in the food stamp program. Also, the agriculture part has a lot of eyebrow-raising provisions, like the $147 million a year in reparations we send to Brazil to make up for the fact that it won a World Trade Organization complaint about the market-distorting effects of our cotton subsidies.

And while food stamps go to poor people, most of the farm aid goes to wealthy corporations.

So House Republicans passed the farm part and left food stamps hanging.

Say what?

Tea Party conservatives have an all-purpose disdain for anything that smacks of redistribution of wealth, and food stamps are a prime target. “The role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity, is to take care of each other. But not for Washington to steal money from those in the country and give to others in the country,” said Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee during a speech in Memphis.

So the food stamp program was the total opposite of a Tasty Bite to House Republicans. More like that Scottish thing with sheep stomach and oatmeal. But the agriculture part was billed as delicious restraint. They rallied behind the just-farm-stuff bill in a party line 216-to-208 vote.

“This is a victory for farmers and conservatives who desired desperately needed reforms to these programs,” said Representative Eric Cantor, the majority leader.

The House bill actually spent more money on subsidies for farmers than the bipartisan Senate version the Republicans scorned. It also dropped the Senate’s limit on aid to farmers with incomes of more than $750,000 a year. And while it mimicked the Senate in dropping most of the much-derided direct payments to farmers, the House gave cotton farmers a two-year extension.

Let’s take a special look at cotton, which is a particularly good example of the tendency of agricultural benefits to flow uphill. “Some of these guys — and they’re all guys — are getting more than $1 million in support. The bottom 80 percent are getting $5,000 on average,” said Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group.

Faber’s organization, which keeps careful track of these things, says direct payments to cotton farmers since 1995 have totaled $3.8 billion. That does not count the annual $147 million the United States has been sending to Brazil in hush money.

Crop insurance gets bigger under the new plan. Here’s how: You, the taxpayer, fork over the majority of the cost of the farmers’ policy premiums. (Up to 80 percent in the case of cotton.) Also, you spend about $1.3 billion a year to compensate the insurance agents for the fact that they have to sell coverage to any eligible farmer, whatever his prospects for success. Plus, if yields actually do drop, you have to compensate the insurance companies for part of the cost of claims.

Is this beginning to sound a little like Obamacare? No! No way! The House Republicans hatehatehate Obamacare! They vote to repeal it as often as they change their socks! Because Obamacare will, you know, distort the natural operation of the markets.

The larding of benefits to farmers didn’t come up during the House debate. It was all about food stamps, and Democrats asking to know why their colleagues wanted to cut aid to hungry children and old people. During an Agriculture Committee meeting on the bill, Representative Juan Vargas of California quoted Jesus’ lesson that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

That raised Representative Fincher’s hackles. “Man, I really got bent out of shape,” he told that Memphis audience, proudly reporting that he countered with Thessalonians: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

By now, you must be wondering why I keep bringing up this guy. Fincher is a farmer who has, over the years, received $3.5 million in federal agricultural subsidies, much of it for — yes! — cotton.