On rereading this article, I’m even more annoyed by how they are trying to contrast this guy with the “undeserving” poor.

And yet they don’t want to subsidize day care, either.

If you dig just a little bit into any conservative rhetoric surrounding home and children and women’s roles, you’ll find a profound desire to enslave women. Their actual, stated objection to subsidizing child care is that it will destabilize American marriages. Yes, subsidizing child care will allow women with small children to go out and get their own jobs, and we can’t *have* that because then they wouldn’t be totally economically dependent on the father of the kids! And if they’re not totally economically dependent on a man, how can you expect them to want to have anything to do with one? It’s not as if women are capable of actually *loving* men; after all, men are cads who only want one thing from women, and women are gold-digging bitches who only give men sex because they want the men’s money. How dare anyone attempt to prevent men from being able to economically dominate women? HOW WILL MEN EVER GET LAID, THEN?

Sometimes I feel so, so sorry for conservatives. Imagine living in a world where men and women are constantly at war, where men dominating women is a *good* thing and necessary because neither men nor women can possibly actually love the other and so if men couldn’t completely control women the human race would die out. They must have such miserably unhappy marriages.

Then I remember that they’re trying to impose the roles and beliefs that cause those miserably unhappy marriages on the rest of us, and then I don’t feel sorry for them anymore.

I cannot comprehend how anyone could have thought it was a good idea to force women on welfare into “workfare” without taking the money that was theoretically saved and investing it into expanding child care. Did it never occur to *anyone* that the reason many of these women already didn’t have jobs was that they had small children at home? (Oh, but I forgot, welfare is an incentive to have more kids because you get more money per child! Never mind that children cost more money than welfare ever provided.) This is why 50% of Congress needs to be female, and of that 50%, 30% at least should be mothers (i’ve got nothing against the childfree, but they often have the same blind spot about children that most men with or without children do, because for them as with most men, children are invariably primarily Someone Else’s Problem. I’d also like to require that the majority of men in Congress have working wives, so that they don’t fall into the “someone is at home to do all this stuff” trap as well, but how could we possibly enforce that?)

Well, I got my food stamps, but what I wonder is how “unemployed” people like me factor into the statistics for how many unemployed receive food stamps and/or any welfare benefits. It really gives the left and right politicos a talking point to quote statistics with false factoid based percentages built on a discrepancy like this. To call a homemaker unemployed is laughable, but apparently, ‘women’s work’ isn’t work at all.

Sigh, and to think all these years I’ve actually been doing nothing except being unemployed. Which, as everyone knows, involves watching daytime talk shows, eating bon-bons, gossiping with my girlfriends, and plotting ways to further abuse “the system”.

It’s not like each person who’s “abusing the system” only knows one person, though. The one person I know of who’s “abusing the system” is at least 20 different other people’s “abusing the system” story. It drives most of my family absolutely nuts that she can just “get away with it” like she was personally stealing food off their tables. It drives me nuts that they can get all weepy over fetuses and then turn around and refuse to see a problem with the idea of letting this woman’s kids go hungry because their mother is negligent and/or suffering from an undiagnosed mental disorder.

Sorta like how we privatize all business successes through grand bonuses, but then… when it comes to losses, we socialize those through bailouts.

It’s a *marvelous* gravy train for industry. Not so much for, you know, people.

Sure, people don’t like change, but as more and more people lose their insurance and can’t pay for something to replace it—I think they’ll come around cuz it’s gonna be all about “them.”

He just looked surprised, like he had never considered that.

Made me furious. (Well, not as furious as the whole meeting!)