When Schools Become the Nation's Biggest Soup Kitchens -- Tell The Gadfly that is not the Very Definition of Third-World Shitholery .....

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Apparently Paul Ryan, the fellow whom Esquire's inimitable Charlie Pierce affectionately calls "The Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver from the state of Wisconsin and first runner-up in the most recent vice presidential pageant," was at the CPAC twerkathon today riling up the rubes with some bullshit story he heard third hand,  in an attempt to convince the bobble-head faithful that providing poor American school children with free or reduced cost lunches is not a good use of taxpayer money because that money could be put to oh so much better use by handing it directly over by the bucket load to the vulture capitalist job creator people who you know --- will create us all them goldurn' jobs that we been, and still are, begging for --- or some such bullshit.  And of course, the dumb asses in attendance lapped it all up like a starving wolverine on a decomposed squirrel carcass.

But you know -- it's CPAC -- it's where people, whose world view is already frighteningly skewered and misinformed, go to have that skewering reinforced and to become even more misinformed.

Here's what makes The Gadfly's blood boil though -- the Granny-starving guru Ryan and his ilk love to use thinly veiled code words and xenophobic dog whistles to not-so-slyly imply to their slack-jawed disciples that it's mostly illegitimate urchins of darker toned skin pigment from urban hellholes who are gobbling up the freebie lunches that the hard workin' "real" Americans are paying for with their hard earned tax dollars.

And, as usual, that would be utter bullshit:

First, schools became the country’s biggest soup kitchens, as free and reduced-price lunch programs expanded to include free breakfast, then free snacks and then free backpacks of canned goods sent home for weekends. Now those programs are extending into summer, even though classes stop, in order for children to have a dependable source of food. Some elementary school buildings stay open year-round so cafeterias can serve low-income students. High schools begin summer programs earlier to offer free breakfast.

And late last month came the newest iteration: a school bus retrofitted into a bread truck bouncing along a potholed road near the Blue Ridge Mountains. It parked in a valley of 30 single-wide trailers — some rotting in the sun, others swallowed by weeds and mosquitoes alongside the Nolichucky River. The driver opened his window and listened to the utter silence. “It feels like a ghost town,” he said.

A 5-year-old girl saw the dust trail of the bus and pedaled toward it on a red tricycle. Three teenage boys came barefoot in swimsuits. A young mother walked over from her trailer with an infant daughter in one arm and a lit cigarette in the other. “Any chance there will be leftover food for adults?” she asked.

It was almost 1 p.m. For some, this would be the first meal of the day. For others, the last.

The driver opened the bus door and made the announcement he would repeat at six more trailer parks on this day.

“Lunch is served,” he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-rural-tennessee-a-new-way-to-help-hungry-children-a-bus-turned-bread-truck/2013/07/06/c93c5eec-e292-11e2-aef3-339619eab080_story.html


That is a typical day in rural middle and southern America dear readers.  And if you go to the article and click through the photo essay accompanying the story you will see that there are a whole helluva lot more white kids in those photos than African-American or Latino kids.

The Gadfly does not point this fact out to stir up racial sentiment.  The Gadfly does so in order to inject some balance and reality into the debate that the Paul Ryan's of the world have smugly initiated, and which is premised on their dishonest implication that it is poor minorities who are the vast majority of public welfare recipients in this country, when in fact, that view is unsupported by inconvenient things like facts and evidence.

But to the larger point - Paul Ryan already had his chance to convince America that his Dickensian budget plan was the mostest, the bestest and the goldurn' scrumchiest -- and the American people, via the ballot box in 2012, categorically told him to shove it up Mitt Romney's constricted, vulture capitalist sphincter.

And yet let it never be said that Granny-starving politicians like Paul Ryan are anything but persistent.  Here he is today, thanks to a mainstream media that continues to allow failures like him to keep clambering the Washington DC career ladder upward, no matter how often the voting public knocks them off of it, back in the news and attempting to resuscitate his Granny-starving budget plan in front of the sole group of Americans who think it's just fine and dandy to exploit and disparage poor, hungry school kids (white or minority) for their own narcissistic political agenda.

This is why The Gadfly fights these conservatives dear readers.  Because those poor white kids in the rural hills of Appalachia and the poor inner city kids, white, black or brown, need more Americans to stand up and represent their interests and fight for what is right for them.  The Paul Ryan's and the Tea Party have some very powerful and deep pocketed conservative sugar daddys underwriting their agendas -- they have no shortage of resources to push their economic policy bile in to the arena of public discourse, with a compliant and worthless mainstream media abetting them.  But the poor kids -- no Koch Brothers sugar daddys, no corporate billionaires, no politicians whom they can buy, no -- all they have to represent their interests are We The People.  But if you were to ask The Gadfly, those kids are blessed to have a helluva team like that watching their backs - and it is long past time that we prove it so.



----TFG