Paul Ryan, School Lunch Expert

Yesterday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan (R, WI-1) addressed the faithful and told them of his new platform. He wants to steal school lunches from poor kids.

Mr. Ryan told a story he says he got from Eloise Anderson, but the story was stolen, too.

“She once met a young boy from a poor family. And every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. But he told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch—one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids’. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him.”

“The left is making a big mistake …. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity, they want a life of self determination.”

Mr. Ryan’s policy is neatly summed up by Paul Krugman: “Let Them Eat Dignity.” Oh, and the book the story was swiped from? A portion of sales goes to a campaign that “connects kids in need to effective nutrition programs like school breakfast and summer meals” and opposes Ryan’s cuts to food stamps.

Mr. Ryan knows nothing about lunches for the poor, but he’s an authority on a poor lunch. Nutrition-poor, anyway. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “One of his summer jobs in college was as an Oscar Mayer salesman in Minnesota, peddling turkey bacon and a new line called ‘Lunchables‘ to supermarkets.” He once drove the Wienermobile for Oscar Meyer, and that was his last honest job. He’s peddled his bologna as a DC political hack ever since.

More:

“Paul Ryan accidentally makes the case against means-testing,” Ned Resnikoff, MSNBC

“Paul Ryan’s Soul Food,” Ed Kilgore, Political Animal

“A story too good to check: Paul Ryan and the story of the brown paper bag,” Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Fact Checker

__________________

Short Link: http://wp.me/p6sb6-j09

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Animal Welfare in North Korea

Folks in North Korea might be feeling a bit peckish these days, but they sure do treat their puppies well. Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un is reported to have killed his uncle and fed his body to 120 hungry dogs.

Or maybe not ….

Update:

“North Korean execution by dog story likely came from satire,” James Pearson, Reuters

 “Story about Kim Jong-un’s uncle being fed to dogs originated with satirist,” Jonathan Kaiman, The Guardian

___________________

Short Link: http://wp.me/p6sb6-iqR

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length

 

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

GOP Food Fight: ‘Starve the Poor’

Congressional Republicans want to starve food stamp deadbeats while rewarding hard-working American farmers with a Farm Bill. That’s a noble story, but it has a few holes in it. Most “farmer” recipients of those rewards are Agribiz millionaires, and the ‘help’ they get is ‘insurance’ for artificially high prices and big profits. And those SNAP ‘deadbeats’? Most are elderly, children, or disabled; the rest are the working poor who need help to get adequate nutrition because GOP politicians routinely defeat Living Wage bills.  Further irony: Many of those low-wage workers are in the food industry. These facts don’t alter Republican plans to bring back the Victorian workhouse.

Bible-Quoting GOP Hypocrite

Republican Congressman Stephen Fincher (R, TN-8) wants to cut $4 billion from the SNAP food subsidy program for the poor. He says God wants the poor to go hungry too, and backs that up by quoting 2 Thessalonians 3:10:  “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”

This Tennessee congressman from the Gospel-singing family knows all about taking money you haven’t worked for. He’s one of the largest recipients of USDA farm subsidies in Tennessee history, grabbing $3.48 million in taxpayer cash from 1999 to 2012. The average SNAP recipient in Mr. Fincher’s home state gets $132.20 in food aid a month.

Thanksgiving 2011

As Americans enjoy food and family at Thanksgiving dinner today, many will have an image of a Norman Rockwell painting in mind, an image of domestic warmth and plenty. But that painting was commissioned as a magazine illustration for a 1943 Saturday Evening Post issue based on one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. The painting’s name: “Freedom From Want.” It was paired with an astounding essay by poet and novelist Carlos Bulosan, whose work and life deserve more attention.

FDR’s speech had been delivered two years earlier, while the country, still emerging from the Depression, was burdened with the expense of providing support for allies in a war the U.S. had not yet entered. Today the speech is remembered for the Four Freedoms, but it also recognized that “there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.”

Virginia Is For Meat Lovers

Former Virginia hunters just got a postcard from the Commonwealth’s Department of Game and Inland Fisheries inviting them back to the woods to kill deer. Deer hunting season opens Saturday, and the Old Dominion’s forests, farmlands, highways, and suburban yards are chock-full of whitetails (Odocoileus virginianus). They’re pesky and hungry, but also tasty.

Attention locavores: the average deer yields 50 pounds of organic, free-range red meat. Vegetarian hunters can donate venison to needy meat-eaters at local food banks.

 

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Foodie Fists

The logo for the Vegan soup kitchen movement “Food Not Bombs” is remarkably similar to symbols for British chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution crusade and Mark Bittman’s old New York Times blog. Coincidence?

Logo-napping is small stuff to the veggie volunteers who run the “Food Not Bombs” soup kitchen. They will stoop at nothing, even feeding the hungry homeless within slurping distance of a sacred national shrine, Walt Disney World in Orlando. For free, until vigilant Orlando officials and courts stopped such sacrilege. The FNB conspiracy is spreading to other cities. We blame Al-Qaeda.

Blogs With Bite

Blogs with Bite is an occasional omnivorous sampling of food blogs and sites we find particularly tasty. Follow the trail of bread crumbs back to earlier editions, starting here.

Today’s serving of Blogs with Bite:

Kalofagas.ca— “Greek Food and Beyond,” from Toronto. Recipes, food, more.”Kalofagas” is Greek for “gourmet.”

MR Bloch Salt Archive —  Everything there is to know about sodium chloride (NaCl), common salt, table salt, halite.  Archaeology, history, geology, production, physiology, paleogeography, paleoclimatology, religion, economics, etymology, monomania.

Beer-a-Day — Daily beer feature of the Hop Talk blog.

gas•tron•o•my — Recipes and restaurant reviews from across the country and globe. Book reviews, photos, food fun. Includes the Hanoi Top 10 and Saigon top 10  foods.

Catholic Cuisine —  “Recipes for Celebrating the Feasts and Seasons of the Liturgical Year.” Recipes, prayers and blessings, monastic cuisine, divine mercy cupcakes, and more.

Photograzing — Food photos from Serious Eats to stimulate the appetite.

The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra — Two tasty videos: an introduction to the acoustics of vegetables and a second helping that is beyond words.

Bacon Unwrapped —  Salty, slick, and smokin’ blog by Heather Lauer, whose bacon book will be out soon. For some crisp images, add a rasher of It’s All About the Bacon, a highly-visual appreciation of a certain cured pork product.

Blogs With Bite

Blogs with Bite is our occasional omnivorous sampling of food blogs and websites we find particularly tasty (the first two courses are here and here).

Happy New Year. 2009 will be tough but not indigestible. As the year starts, food writer Mark Bittman is a migrant worker, laboring at bookstores and public radio stations across the country, following the harvest behind his new book Food Matters. We will discuss the book here soon, but readers may sample fresh first-crop reviews and interviews from B&N, Eats.com, Epicurious, Salon, and Time. Not all at once — don’t spoil your appetite. Hunger is the best pickle. [Full disclosure: Mark’s a boyhood chum.]

This month’s menu of Blogs with Bite:

CarryOnCurry.com — Virginian Shashi Bellamkonda combines two loves, food and social media, on this good-looking, well-edited blog featuring worldwide reviews and food notes from Shasi B. and selected contributors. Food fanciers with tunnel vision should use the right-hand “Labels” navigation feature, but the discussions of social media are tasty in their own right, quite non-techie and pragmatic.

Mastering the art of the all-you-can-eat buffet — A gut-busting look at an American institution by the remarkable blog 1000 Awesome Things (this post is Thing #864). 1000 AT is not a culinary weblog but you may ingest entertaining entries on chicken wing wisdom, soup-slurping, bakery air, the milk-to-cereal ratio, and more.

Palin Opposed Divestment to Protest Darfur

Return with us now to the thrilling Vice Presidential Debate of October 2, 2008, when Republican Governor Sarah Palin spoke of Darfur:

America is in a position to help. What I’ve done in my position to help, as the governor of a state that’s pretty rich in natural resources, we have a $40 billion investment fund, a savings fund called the Alaska Permanent Fund.

When I and others in the legislature found out we had some millions of dollars in Sudan, we called for divestment through legislation of those dollars to make sure we weren’t doing anything that would be seen as condoning the activities there in Darfur. That legislation hasn’t passed yet but it needs to because all of us, as individuals, and as humanitarians and as elected officials should do all we can to end those atrocities in that region of the world.

Very inspiring.

Just one thing: Governor Palin’s administration opposed legislation mandating divestment of Sudan-related stocks in the Alaska Permanent Fund last year, and only reversed this position sometime in March or April, too late in the session for the bill to pass.

The Governor does mention that the bill wasn’t passed; she neglects to mention that her administration’s initial opposition and late-breaking reversal put the divestment bill on a Bridge to Nowhere. 

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.