GOP House To Cut Aid For Pregnant Women, Children While Spending $17 Billion More On Defense

By Marie Diamond 

Today, the Republican-controlled House will begin another onslaught on programs designed to help low-income and middle class families. The GOP quite literally wants to take food from the mouths of children, cutting$47 billion — or 10 percent — from domestic programs, to pay for more defense spending. In negotiations to reach a debt ceiling compromise, Republicans have declared defense cuts “off the table,” even though Pentagon spending is notoriously bloated and Secretary of Defense Gates and other top generals have admitted spending should be curtailed:

But the GOP-dominated chamber will soon resume its budget-slashing ways as it kicks off debate Tuesday on a food and farm spending bill that cuts aid for low-income pregnant women and their children and slashes a key overseas food aid program by about one-third below this year’s funding.

At the same time, the Appropriations Committee is set to approve a $649 billion measure that slightly boosts the Pentagon’s operating budget [...]

Once money is added for programs like defense, veterans and homeland security, spending on domestic programs like food aid for the poor, education, health care and housing subsidies falls to levels where lawmakers are going to find it difficult. After a $17 billion increase for the Pentagon is factored in, domestic agencies and foreign aid programs would absorb cuts of $47 billion that would translate into cuts averaging about 10 percent.

Essential programs on the chopping block include the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and Commodity Supplemental Food programs, which both help low-income people get nutritional food. Hundreds of thousands of people will be cut from the programs if House Republicans get their way. WIC “provides healthy foods like milk, eggs and infant formula to about 9 million poor mothers and pregnant women and their children,” and would absorb a $868 million cut under the GOP bill, which falls $1.3 billion short of what’s needed to adequately fund the program with food prices on the rise.

The GOP measure also calls for cuts to food safety programs, a childhood obesity initiative backed by First Lady Michele Obama, and food aid for senior citizens:

The bill also cuts a program that delivers food to low-income senior citizens 23 percent below current levels. The popular Food for Peace program, which uses taxpayer dollars to buy U.S. commodities and ships them to deprived areas in Africa and elsewhere across the globe, would absorb a $457 million cut of almost one-third. The White House says that would translate into 1.1 million fewer people getting U.S. food aid.

Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) spoke out against the GOP’s callousness, saying, “Tightening our belts is one thing. But people who depend on supplemental food programs, like WIC, or food stamps, or school lunches, have belts that are already cinched.”

Yesterday, the White House blasted the proposed deep cuts to food programs, saying it would leave children and mothers hungry, but stopped short of threatening a veto.

Motor City Liberal Comment: The  Republican controlled house have passed about 1 billion anti-abortion bills yet these pro-life Republican freaks are trying to slash programs to help women to raise these kids they want them to have.  That's like saying I don't want you to drown but here's a life boat with holes in it.

The increasingly lame defenses of James O'Keefe

by Simon Maloy

I'd wager there aren't many people right now who would count themselves among James O'Keefe's supporters -- at least, far fewer than there were before he was arrested for entering Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office under false pretenses with the purpose of committing a felony. But what friends he does have left are doing their damndest to exonerate him in the court of public opinion. The problem is they clearly don't have a whole lot to work with.

Andrew Breitbart -- O'Keefe's patron and mentor -- got the ball rolling with the absurdly concocted smear that the U.S. attorney's office and the Justice Department conspired with the media to "frame" O'Keefe while he sat in a jail cell (a theory that O'Keefe himself did much to undermine). Breitbart's evidence for this allegation has been, well, nonexistent, though he would like to think that U.S. attorney Jim Letten's recusal from the case shows that he's on the right track. Unfortunately for him, Letten recused himself the day after the arrests were made -- days before Breitbart's conspiracy theory took shape.

And then there's Hannah Giles, O'Keefe's partner in the undercover ACORN "pimp" videos, who posted a missive on BigGovernment.com this morning lauding her colleague's actions in New Orleans for "strip[ping] away the MSM's mask of neutrality, revealing the bias below." Giles also informed us what she's learned from the whole situation: "the MSM is the primary force of the Democratic Party. If the MSM is lying to you, guess who else is? Someone has to feed them stories. Time and time again the MSM has been caught in a self-created web of lies, and the vast majority of these reports do one thing, and that is mask the true, ugly face of liberalism."

You can try and recast O'Keefe's arrest as some sort of heroic exposé of the mainstream media's alleged bias, but here's the thing -- there are great sectors of the right-wing new media that devote every waking moment to "exposing" the "bias" of the media, and they do so without getting arrested. She's praising him for risking jail time in order to achieve something the bias sleuths at NewsBusters claim to do (ineptly, I might add) every day. That's not "citizen journalism," that's stupidity.

Giles also accuses Landrieu's office of "vastly exaggerat[ing] the situation" and writes that "Landrieu's overreaction to O'Keefe's video project ought make [sic] the public wonder what the heck is actually going on in the office." According to Giles, the "overreaction" and "exaggeration" Landrieu is alleged to have engaged in was a statement from the senator reading: "This is a very unusual situation and somewhat unsettling for me and my staff. The individuals responsible have been charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purposes of committing a felony. I am as interested as everyone else about their motives and purpose, which I hope will become clear as the investigation moves forward."

So the senator is unsettled and curious as to why four men were arrested in her office, and accurately stated the charges filed against the alleged perpetrators. This counts as an "exaggerated" "overreaction"?

Anyway, Giles wrapped things up with a swipe at conservative blogger Michelle Malkin for, in Giles' words, "call[ing] for an example to be made out of [O'Keefe], and instructing other young journalists to not follow in his footsteps." There's not much that Michelle Malkin and I agree on, but we're on the same page when it comes to not teaching kids to get arrested in the name of political activism posing as journalism.