i’ve been exceptionally productive this week, and it ain’t even friday yet.
i’ve successfully navigated multiple beaureacratic quagmires, got the
kid to do his school work with minimal teenage angsty face, cleaned
house and made plans for future financial improvements (maybe).
don’t be shy peeps, what do you need a hell yeah for? big or small, i
think we could all use a hell yeah right about now.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

I wrote once about how Simon Schama called OBama a victorian in the
modern world. as i look around at the cuts to social programs and the
focus on national debt before citizen welfare i think that it’s not
just our pres who is victorian, but the entire political class that is
stuck in 1800’s ideas of bootstraps and sacrifice for the underclass
while the upperclass thrives. we are watching them create a modern
potato famine through the calls for austerity. like ireland, we have
more than enough resources, but the wealthy must make their giant
profits to pay their debts before us peasants are considered. i wonder
how long it will be before we start dying lie the irish did, gaunt
with mouths stained green from trying to eat the grass when all the
food was sent to england.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

wall street had its highest level of compensation last year, 125
billion dollars. and the market is all gangbuster bullish again. BP is
scewing over everyone who needs and deserves compensation from their
disaster. and the fed thinks that raising food prices ain’t no big
thing for us little people.
meanwhile, states are avoiding bankruptcy by scewing over poor people,
disabled people, people trying to educate themselves or their kids.
there’s riots in puerto rico over tuition hikes that no one’s talking
about. no one’s even talking about foreclosures anymore, though they
are expected to keep rising.
and the politicians can’t seem to get their noses brown enough in the
backsides of the crooks who really run the country.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

washington state is now going to CUT TANF cash benefits by 15% for
everyone in order to balance the budget.
funny, during all those years of surplus no one ever suggested raising
the benefit amounts to keep up with inflation. The benefit has been
the same for at least the last 15 year. it didn’t get raised during
the gogo 90s or during the real estate bubble. but it’s the first
thing to cut during bad times. and all this from a democratic governor
in a ‘progressive’ blue state. it’s okay washingtonians, the poor will
baile your asses out, we always do.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

Just about every account I’ve read of the reasons behind the protests
from Tunisia to Jordan involve people being righteously pissed about
the rising costs of food and fuel. (I also read that Berneke’s
quantative easing was a huge reason for the rise in commodities prices
and at least Egypt’s food price spike). I’m not surprised. hungry
people, or even people who are scared of being hungry, suddenly have a
lot less tolerance for the excesses of the upper class. it’s why ‘Let
them eat cake’ is one of the few things we thin we know about the
french revolution persists.
what does that mean for us ‘MEricans? we’ve still got aways to go
before the hunger pangs reach past the bottom 20%, but it’s coming. it
might even come faster if claire mckaskill’s craptastic budget bill
passes and kills any possibility of the government being able to do
anything other than pay the salaries of the douchebags in the tacky
blue suits.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

Another post about eye candy

Mads Mikkelsen- the hottest man in Denmark

Ming Tsai- chef I’d like to…….have dinner with.

Alex Lanipekun and Richard Armitage in MI-5, a show whose name really ought to be changed to “hot dudes that do Englishy spy stuff and make RQ wobbly kneed”

So peeps- who are you drooling over at the moment?

I love you for these 4 reasons.
1. you are hoooot. really freakin hot. especially since you got rid of
the long bangs douchebag hair.
2. you regularly cook with you mom, which is adorable.
3. you just spent 3 minutes of your show explaining why you don’t burn
garlic. this is my biggest cooking show pet peeve. if people learned
to cook from cooking shows then all garlic would be bitter grossness,
except for you.
4. you caught yourself calling all of your audience ‘guys’ and
corrected by adding ‘and gals’. you didn’t erase all us lady types
into defualt maleness or infantilize us by using ‘girls’. it’s a small
step towards equality and it just cemented my adoration.
sincerely,
rq

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

One of the tv preachers populating my non-cable television this
morning (1 news show, pbs doing cartoons, a fishing show, 2 paid
programs and 8 fucking tv preachers) has decreed that bed bugs are an
obvious sign of the apocalypse.

Dies this mean that we need to smear lamb’s blood on our apartment
doors until the rapture so we can gaurantee ourselves pest free sleep?
Are bed bugs repelled by the act of kneeling bedside to say prayers?
have the beds of therighteous been sparred or must they suffer with us
heathens untill paradise beckons?

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

but what the would die for. i keep thinking about the difference
between the murdering douchenozzle in Arizona and the protests in
Tunisia and EGypt, protests started by people so frustrated by
government corruption that the literally became the spark that ignites
revolution by lighting themselves on fire. It should make us all feel
a wee bit better about the violent rhetoric of the right. we know that
when they turn that rhetoric into action they lose legitimacy. they
aren’t willing to sacrifice themselves for a better world, but they
are willing to sacrifice others. becuase of that, we know their
measure and it is too small to matter in the grand scheme.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

Every day, I check the child support enforcement website to see if maybe, just maybe, a payment has been made. I am like one of those button pushing monkeys who only get food occasionally instead of consistently. I push the button way more often than is needed in the hopes that today is the day. But alas. It rarely is. I got child support for about 8 weeks in the fall. That was the first time I’d seen any money since 2008. And in 2008 I got child support for about 6 months, which was the first time I’d seen any money since 2005. You get the picture.

When I logged in today I was greeted with a happy little message. “As of May 1, 2011, parents receiving TANF pass throughs will no longer receive them due to state budget constraints”.

For those of you who don’t know what this means, lemme explain. TANF (the portion of welfare that provides actual money instead of food stamps or medicaid) isn’t free. Thanks to Bill Clinton and Welfare reform, TANF grants are supposed to be paid for by child support. If you aren’t getting child support, but you are getting TANF, then you accrue a debt against the past due child support that gets paid to the state. If you are receiving TANF, as an incentive to get you to help track down non-paying parents, TANF will “pass through” a little of the child support money if you also start receiving child support. Not much, like $50 a month. But an extra $50 when your TANF grant is only $440 is a huge help.

In order to balance the budget, they are taking away $50 a month from poor parents and their kids. $50 that is supposed to pay for the health and welfare of those kids is instead going to pay for the state. I should also explain that Washington is one of those lovely, super-regressive all sales tax states, so poor people, even those on Welfare, are already paying a higher percentage of their income to fix the state’s woes.

There is a whole shitload of talk about the kind of burden we are leaving our children, but I don’t hear those same asshats talking about the kind of sacrifice we are making our children perform today.