The Anti-Family Party
by Robert Reich | July 19, 2021 - 5:52am

— from Robert Reich's Blog

Last Thursday, 39 million American parents began receiving a monthly child allowance ($300 per child under 6, and $250 per child from 6 through 17). It’s the biggest helping hand to American families in more than 85 years.

They need it. Even before the p******c, child poverty had reached post-war records. Even non-poor families were in trouble, burdened with deepening debt and missed payments. Most were living paycheck to paycheck – so if they lost a job, they and their kids could be plunged into poverty. It’s estimated that the new monthly child allowance will cut child poverty by more than half.

But every single Republican in both the House and Senate v**ed against the measure.

After I posted a tweet reminding people of this indisputable fact, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah responded Friday with a perfectly bizarre tweet: “If you’re one of the 39 million households receiving their first Child Tax Credit payment today, don’t forget that every single Democrat v**ed against making it larger.”

Hello? Did we just go through the funhouse mirror?

In point of fact, when the American Rescue Plan was being debated last February, Lee and Senator Marco Rubio did propose slightly larger payments. But here’s the rub: They wanted to restrict them only to “working parents.” Children of the unemployed would be out of luck. Yet those kids are the poorest of the poor. They’re most at risk of being hungry without a roof over their heads.

In a joint press release at the time, Lee and Rubio said they refused to support what they termed “welfare assistance” to jobless parents, warning against undercutting “the responsibility of parents to work to provide for their families.” Then Lee, Rubio, and every other Republican v**ed against the whole shebang – help for working and non-working parents. And now Lee wants to take credit for wanting to make the payments larger to begin with? Talk about both sides of the mouth.

As we move toward the gravitational pull of the midterm e******ns – and polls show how popular the monthly child payments are – I expect other Republicans to make the same whopper of a claim.

But underneath this hypocritical Republican rubbish lie two important questions. The first: will a payment of up to $300 per child every month – totaling up to $3,600 per child per year – invite parents to become couch potatoes?

That seems doubtful. Even a family with three kids under six would receive no more than $10,800 a year. That’s way below what’s needed to pay even subsistence expenses, and still far below what a full-time job at the federal minimum wage would pull in.

But even if the payment caused some parents to work a bit less, it’s far from clear their children are worse off as a result. Maybe they benefit from additional parenting time.

Which only raises a second question: should children be penalized because their parents aren’t working, or are working less than they would without the child payment?

This question has been debated in America for many years – ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt first provided “Aid for Families with Dependent Children” (AFDC) in the Social Security Act of 1935.

It can’t be decided based on facts; it comes down to values. We know, for example, that child poverty soared after Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans ended AFDC in 1996 and substituted a work requirement. Many people – myself included – look back on that decision as a horrible mistake.

But many of its proponents call it a success because it resulted in additional numbers of poor adults getting jobs and thereby setting good examples for their children of personal responsibility. In the view of these proponents, a country where more parents take responsibility to provide for their children is worth the collateral damage of a greater number of impoverished children.

Since the 1990s, the Republican view that public assistance should be limited to families with breadwinners has taken firm hold in America. Only now, with the American Rescue Plan – put into effect during the worst public health crisis in more than a century and one of the fiercest periods of unemployment since World War II – has that view been rejected in favor of a universal family benefit.

It’s too early to know whether this about-face is permanent. The Act’s payments will end a year from now unless Congress passes Biden’s proposed $3.5 trillion addition. Almost every Senate Democrat has signaled a willingness to go along. But here again, not a single Senate Republican has signed on.

Let’s be clear. Mike Lee’s Republican Party – the putative party of “family values” – doesn’t support needy families. It supports a pinched and, in these perilous times, unrealistic view of personal responsibility – children be damned.

According to the Biden administration the real cause of the protests there was because of the C***d issue. How damn stupid can you get with this line of thinking in the first place? Finally they are just now starting to blame C*******m as the real problem. This doesnt even fit the SJW nonsense! Why? Because politically they got their collective butts handed to them thats why!!!!! it is an extreme sad and horrible state of affairs whe the right thing to do is solely on what the internal polling has to say rather than the actual humanitarian crises that is and has been taking place for the last 6 plus decades.
Mike

https://youtu.be/ATiFgO3L9kU

"the (GoF) research was worth the risk it entailed because it enables scientists to make pr********ns that could be useful if and when a p******c occurred.”

And now he plays semantics with what is GoF and what is not. Apparently there was changes that scientists can make to a v***s to make it more virulent that F***i claims is not GoF research.

But make no mistake, US scientists have been doing GoF research on many different bugs for decades now. There is no telling what they have done.

Governor Mitt Romney was the original author of forced state insurance health policies in Nastychusetts. He was a poor choice for the Republican Party to advance as a p**********l candidate.

Once again, we are witnessing "death by bureaucrat" pushing socialized medicine under a N**i-nanny state, the public clueless as to who is tucked into the Deep State plotting DNA testing, forced a******ns, sterilizations, the extermination of the weak, chronically ill, elderly (Medicare gang of 15) and ('just give grandma the pain pill'), even doctor assisted suicide and euthanasia by government proxy in Oregon, where it is cheaper to k**l us than cure us. Just look at this new article by Judicial Watch:

VERDICT: July 2021, Volume 27, Issue 7; www.judicialwatch.org
Uncovered: "Judicial Watch Obtains Additional Records of FDA Purchases of Fetal Tissue"
Agency wanted 'fresh, shipped on wet ice' fetal organs for 'humanized mice' project
"These fetal organ trafficking documents shock the conscience and show potentially illegal use of tax-dollars to purchase organs of the unborn-k**led through a******n...."

To think of all our Liberal dingbat Democrats clamoring for this Sozialist "free" hi-tech cannibalism healthcare scares the liven bejesus out of me as a Senior Citizen.

Why don't these Socialists recognize that Darwin's theory of evolution is obsolete? Evolution's random mutations are not "random" when mammals exercise choice of one's mate. "What's love got to do with it?" advancing a being with the capacity to recognize his Creator?

It Begins: The Demonization Of The Unv****d
Part 3

There is one letter in the collection from Janneken Muntsdorg, written from prison to her one-month-old daughter, also named Janneken. The mother bore her child in prison and the girl was taken from her. Knowing she would never see her daughter again, she wrote a letter for her to read one day. Part of it goes thus:

The true love of God and wisdom of the Father strengthen you in virtue, my dearest child; …and strengthen and confirm your understanding in His t***h […] for if we were to continue in the world, we would have had no trouble. For when we were one with the world and practiced idolatry, and loved all manner of unrighteousness, we could live at peace with the world; but when we desired to fear God and to shun such improper ways…then they did not leave us in peace; then our blood was sought; then we had to be a prey to everyone, and become a spectacle to all the world. They seek here to murder and burn us; we are placed at posts and stakes, and our flesh is given as food to the worms.”

Words too drastic? I think not.

I recite these words if only to wake people up from their sleep! If only to remind us that many have gone before who suffered and died for the freedoms we enjoy. The freedoms to read and write, to worship and pray and speak as we choose. Not just for Christians, but for everyone. Everyone. The freedoms to agree and disagree. Even to believe outrageous “conspiracy” theories.

The internet has created a crisis even greater than the invention of the printing press. In those days, the information of the texts was limited to biblical knowledge. As time went on, that information grew. Now, a seemingly infinite wealth of information is at our fingertips. We are being told that information is dangerous. That we need to put it into the hands of the powerful once again. We must trust them as the doorkeepers between our minds and the mysteries of the universe.

Just as the reformers stood up for their rights to interpret texts on their own, so we must stand up for our rights to do the same.

Perhaps the day will come when the individual will submit to the will of the State and we will be more machine than we are flesh and blood. I know men like Elon Musk dream of this. He says we need these changes if we want to explore the universe, to travel to other planets. We need to evolve. I would love nothing more than to explore other planets. Perhaps losing our humanity little by little is the price we must pay for that “advancement.” If science fiction is any indication—and I tend to believe science fiction sometimes more than actual science—this is probably inevitable.

But that day is not today. For now, we must fight for the right to hold onto our freedoms. Oh, we can have intellectual discussions about how we aren’t really “free” and all of that, but I do know the difference between freedom and bondage.

I walked through Dachau as a child. I stood at the Berlin Wall and crossed the barrier from the land of the free into the land of the oppressed. From one step to the next, I passed from light into darkness. I was fortunate. I was allowed to pass back again, horribly aware of all the yearning souls I was leaving behind.

Don’t let the lies lull you to sleep. Don’t let cynicism overcome you.

I have faith that there will always be at least one Scrubb and one Jill in every school. Those who refuse to fit in. Those who still see the mystery beyond the wall.

Those who find the way out of darkness and into light.

I started with Salmon Rushdie and I will end with him. I saw him once at a party at a club, back in the 90s. He was a very ugly man, but he was with a very beautiful woman. I wondered about him. He looked so insignificant, yet what power his words had! So much power that they were dangerous to the regime in Iran and a price was put on his head. Yet there he sat, enjoying his life.

In those heretical Satanic Verses, he wrote:

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damn-fool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”

We may be smashed to bits. Still, let’s be the ones who change the world.

End of Part 3