Forget Anthony Weiner's idiotic behaviour! It's not really newsworthy in the overall scheme of things.
What is important and seemingly under the radar of the news media is what Washington is "doing" on a number of levels affecting the vulnerable in the US.
"While the well-deserved departure of Anthony Weiner draws rapt attention in our tabloid nation, the depredations of less colorful but more powerful politicians go unnoticed, so long as no genitalia are involved.
At the moment, for instance, Republican leaders in the House and the Senate are mounting yet another series of assaults on some of the most vulnerable Americans—the poor single mothers who cannot feed their children, and the long-term unemployed who still have no prospect of work nearly two years after the recession supposedly ended.
Hardly anyone other than a lobbyist would normally pay much attention to the machinations of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, but that is where truly indecent behavior is running rampant these days. Members of that subcommittee, who oversee the Women, Infants and Children (or WIC) federal nutrition support program for the poor, recently decreed reductions in its annual funding, just as food prices are rising more rapidly than in many years.
Breaching a long bipartisan commitment to making sure this successful program’s funding will be sufficient to the need, the subcommittee’s Republican majority has decided we can no longer afford to ensure healthy nutrition for every hungry mother and child. (What we can apparently always afford, however, are more and bigger tax cuts for billionaires and petroleum companies.)
By cutting $650 million from WIC, according to the experts at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the subcommittee will deprive hundreds of thousands of indigent women and children of program services, which include healthy foods, nutrition counseling and referrals to health care providers when necessary. The exact number of victims will depend on how fast food prices go up. But there will surely be many more infants and children who must cope with the ill effects of low birth weight and anemia, and all the other ills arising from bad nutrition in this wealthy and verdant nation."
What is important and seemingly under the radar of the news media is what Washington is "doing" on a number of levels affecting the vulnerable in the US.
"While the well-deserved departure of Anthony Weiner draws rapt attention in our tabloid nation, the depredations of less colorful but more powerful politicians go unnoticed, so long as no genitalia are involved.
At the moment, for instance, Republican leaders in the House and the Senate are mounting yet another series of assaults on some of the most vulnerable Americans—the poor single mothers who cannot feed their children, and the long-term unemployed who still have no prospect of work nearly two years after the recession supposedly ended.
Hardly anyone other than a lobbyist would normally pay much attention to the machinations of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, but that is where truly indecent behavior is running rampant these days. Members of that subcommittee, who oversee the Women, Infants and Children (or WIC) federal nutrition support program for the poor, recently decreed reductions in its annual funding, just as food prices are rising more rapidly than in many years.
Breaching a long bipartisan commitment to making sure this successful program’s funding will be sufficient to the need, the subcommittee’s Republican majority has decided we can no longer afford to ensure healthy nutrition for every hungry mother and child. (What we can apparently always afford, however, are more and bigger tax cuts for billionaires and petroleum companies.)
By cutting $650 million from WIC, according to the experts at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the subcommittee will deprive hundreds of thousands of indigent women and children of program services, which include healthy foods, nutrition counseling and referrals to health care providers when necessary. The exact number of victims will depend on how fast food prices go up. But there will surely be many more infants and children who must cope with the ill effects of low birth weight and anemia, and all the other ills arising from bad nutrition in this wealthy and verdant nation."
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