True Story

A Brazilian woman (probably illegal) told my wife this true story yesterday. Her son in San Paulo is a minister and, in his flock was a woman strung out on drugs. Like many addicts she owed her dealer money and he was demanding payment ... or else.

The minister told his congregation of this threat and asked for everyone to help save her life. The minister’s eight-year old daughter decided to empty her piggy bank for this woman ... amounting to $8.25 in American. The rest of this church contributed $217. When the minister gave the drug dealer the equivalent of $225.25 ... not all that was owed ... he related the piggy-bank part.

Seeing the little girl’s face, the drug dealer burst into tears ... gave back the money and then some (and I suppose retired from his ill-suited profession.)

Role Reversal

There is a recurring question among the liberal apologists for Trayvon Martin insofar as the George Zimmerman not-guilty verdict in his Florida trial.  It is, “If the roles were reversed and Trayvon were white (/Hispanic?) and George were black, would Zimmerman have been found guilty?”  This, of course, implies that rampant racism still exists (particularly in the South) to the point where it always trumps our justice system.

Of course such a hypothesis is impossible to answer because the smug posers of this query will accept no answer except in the affirmative. However, we do have an convenient analogy to this posit in the O.J. Simpson trial where a black man brutally killed two whites and yet was found not-guilty.  Yes, it wasn’t in the South, but it involved an immense amount of evidence of O.J.’s guilt which was conveniently ignored by a mostly all-black jury … primarily because one of the arresting officers had once used the N-word.

Let us return to the original supposition where we need to do a total role-reversal:  Imagine that white Trayvon Martin has been suspended (and expelled?) from multiple schools for fighting.  He is a regular user of marijuana … possibly other drugs … and is likely a small-time drug dealer.  He has bragged about his gang connections on Facebook … as well as posting personal pornography there.  Whereas, George Zimmerman is a Afro-American A-student and has ambitions of getting into law enforcement (or, to use the media’s pejorative, is a “wannabe cop”).

Zimmerman is licensed to carry and has volunteered for his neighborhood watch after multiple incidents of white punks invading homes there and robbing black residents.  On the fateful night, Trayvon is suspiciously on his way back to his white father’s house there as he has just been suspended from school for 10 days … probably for punching-out a school-bus driver.  You know the rest of the story … white Trayvon Martin is dead and black George Zimmerman is accused of second-degree murder.  President George W. Bush has said that Trayvon Martin looks like he could have been his son.

Would an all-black jury in Florida have found our transformed George Zimmerman guilty of anything? Come-on, get serious. Justice is blind … but it is not brain-dead.

Another Liberal Morphing

When did feeding hungry children morph into providing bail money for a convicted drug dealer?  The answer is ... when liberals are given their leash ... as they have continue to enjoy in our current bleeding-heart society.  Recently in Massachusetts, a drug dealer was re-arrested and made bail by having a compatriot use his food-stamps allocation to bail him out of prison ... see Boston Herald Story. OK, it wasn't actually food stamps, it was the modern-day equivalent ... his EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) card. The EBT card came about because the old food-stamp program was deemed to humiliate those people who paid for their groceries with food stamps.  Soooo ... now indigent people have been given a debit-card like appliance that allows them to swipe it, without embarrassment,  like other shoppers would do with their bank or credit cards.

There, like with most good intentions, is where things have gone awry ... because the administration of this program is lax to say the most ... and the road to hell is now paved with EBT cards.  Since recipients complained that it was sometimes more convenient to pay in cash, EBT recipients (at least in Massachusetts) were allowed to swipe their cards almost anywhere as though they were real debit cards ... such at automatic teller machines (ATMs), gas pumps, liquor stores, casinos, nail salons, tattoo parlors, strip clubs, etc. ... even on luxury sea cruises.  And, in supermarkets, EBT holders are quite often also allowed to buy cigarettes, lottery tickets, and many other non-food items.

The list of abuses goes on and on ... see More Abuse Examples.  Around the country EBT holders have gotten quite clever in converting what is meant for children's hunger relief into hard cash.  At the start of each month, newly-credit-filled EBT cards are often sold to other shoppers at substantial discounts outside of grocery stores.  One enterprising woman even bought cases and cases of soda with her card and then ran the (full) cans through the deposit-return machines just to get the cash.  (It broke the machine.)  Yesterday while listening to Massachusetts state Rep. Shaunna O’Connell (R-Taunton) on local talk radio I heard some even more disturbing facts about how poorly this program is administered in this true-blue state:

- People, here, who have "lost" their EBT cards, can have them replaced with no consequences.  As a result, there are 20,000 EBT cards that are "lost" in Massachusetts each month.
- Here, 85% of all EBT card use is to retrieve cash directly and not to purchase food.  And even most of the use to purchase food involves substantial cash-back requests (eg., buying a pack of gum with an EBT card and getting $49 back in change.)
- There is no restriction in Massachusetts on the use of EBT cards outside of this state ... say in Las Vegas.

In fiscal 2011 the United States spent $75 billion on "food stamps," according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's more than double ... up from $34.6 billion in 2008 (see: CNN Report), George W. Bush's last year in office.  Newt Gingrich has called Obama the "food-stamp President."  Perhaps he better should have called him the EBT-card President.

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