Hungry? Eat Your Damned Cake!

Marie Antoinette would have loved these assholes.

While everyone was running around screaming either "Partisan Hack!" or "Happy Fitzmas", the House Agriculture Committee was doing the work of the devil.

And, as a result of a strict party line vote, up to 300,000 people are now one step closer to starvation in the "greatest nation in the World", in line to lose the one bone that the federal government throws the working poor, much of the time: Food Stamps.


Adding insult to injury, it is the fact that this for those families *is* often the only bone they get to help their survival that was used to justify cutting them off - because they make "too much money." I guess our nation's post-Katrina love affair with the poor has now officially ended.

Did I mention that the icing on the cake was that this happened just HOURS after the USDA reported that we'd set a new record for American hunger in 2004:

38.2 million Americans experienced food insecurity. According to the USDA report, which is linked here, this figure is up 2,000,000 people from 2003.

Today's amoral 25-20 vote (did I mention it was along party lines - Republicans I hope you burn in hell) also affects eligibility for school based meals (breakfasts and lunches.) As a former beneficiary of the school lunch program myself as a child, I can tell you what that means: worse performance in school by at risk youth, because they're hungry and cannot concentrate. Because their parents have no money for either hot lunches or even to make a home lunch, much of the time.

That ought to really help performance on those No Child Left Behind tests....

Those sneaky SOB's. They *knew* that there was no political will for this cut, which they tried but failed to shove down our throats a week ago. They knew it would never happen if anyone who cared about hunger and poverty was actually looking. So they deliberately waited for the *one* day that they knew that the media and progressives would be looking in the other direction, all out waiting to celebrate a made-up holiday called Fitzmas.

And our Democratic politicians, including on the Ag Committee, who supposedly are above such excess actually did not seem to care enough to warn folks about what was coming. They certainly appear to have let themselves be snookered.

Oh well, if by some miracle Libby is not pardoned and actually does time, he will at least get three squares a day.