At Rancho Grande Supermarket in San Pablo, a package of 18 corn tortillas recently cost $7.80.While there's no excuse for gouging by these grocers, the more fundamental problem is the system of vouchers itself. Providing food aid by voucher is designed to make sure that families obtain needed food support. WIC administrators can't give cash to recipients --- because they could spend the money on alcohol, drugs, or anything else --- but they could distribute generic debit cards that don't identify the families as WIC recipients. Here's another program in which bureaucratic control can't get things just right.
Taxpayers footed the bill for the pricy tortillas, which were bought in early April with a government voucher from the California Women, Infants and Children program, a federally financed nutrition program that is administered by the state.
Despite its name, Rancho Grande Supermarket is a small grocery store located in a strip mall on San Pablo Avenue. Less than a mile away at FoodMaxx, a megastore where WIC vouchers are also accepted, the same tortillas are sold for $1.44.
The California WIC program, which provides staple foods like milk, dried beans and peanut butter to 1.48 million low-income Californians, is the largest in the country. But it is being hit hard by runaway food costs, driven by high prices at small stores, costing the program tens of millions of dollars a year. Under pressure from the United States Department of Agriculture, which oversees the program, California is scrambling to bring food costs down.
“No one should be using these programs to reap obscene profits off of the backs of mothers and young children,” said the Rev. Douglas Greenaway, president and chief executive of the National WIC Association, a nonprofit group.
In recent years, California WIC has seen a flood of small stores seeking to join the program, and it has welcomed many of them. Those stores, some of which have been increasing their prices and aggressively marketing to WIC shoppers, can receive higher reimbursements from California WIC than bigger stores do.
In February 2012, California stores with just one or two cash registers were reimbursed for WIC foods at prices that were 50 percent higher than prices paid to other vendors for comparable foods, according to the U.S.D.A. That is twice as high as the difference in prices paid to stores with one or two registers in fiscal year 2008-9.
While prices are going up in small stores, more WIC vouchers are being redeemed at them. Between October 2009 and September 2011, food costs to the WIC programs in other Western states went down a combined average of more than 7 percent. In California’s WIC program, they increased more than 4 percent.
“When food costs go up, it reduces the pool of food resources available to serve mothers and young children,” said Mr. Greenaway. The California WIC program currently spends about $94 million a month on food, according to the California Department of Public Health.
It is not the first time the program has struggled to contain escalating costs. In 2004, the proliferation of so-called WIC-only stores, catering to WIC shoppers, inspired Congress to impose new regulations on those stores, which curbed the problem.
MALKIN: The thing that has changed phenomenally between 2008 and 2012 is that we don't have to rely on Barack and Michelle Obama and their Alinsky- ites story-tellers in the mainstream media and all of their operatives to set the tone and the storyline for this election. That is what underscores all of the victory that we've seen over the last four years on the right. Conservatives online are not accepting these fables that have been shoved down our throat, the idea that Obama has brought us out of the light when he's plunged us deeper into the sinkhole of debt.
Somehow Obama has opened up Washington, D.C. to make it as transparent and open as possible when they've done all of these deals and subverted the rule of law behind closed doors. That somehow Obama is more likeable than any Republican and he is a nice guy -- I hate hearing this from Mitt Romney. He's got to get this talking point out of his mouth. Barack Obama is not a nice guy. He has dealed brutally with the right, with people like Paul Ryan and brave Republicans who have been calling him to the carpet on all of the disgusting culture of corruption that has rained and that is the darkness that we have to get out of in November.
Francois Hollande beat right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in France's first round of the presidential race, according to early estimates from several polling institutes.
Both candidates qualified for the second round on May 6, with Mr Hollande taking 28 to 29 per cent of the vote and Mr Sarkozy 25 to 26, according to unofficial estimates from multiple sources.More at Astute Bloggers, "AU REVOIR, SARKOZY! AND AU REVOIR FRANCE!"
Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen came third with between 17 and 20 pe rcent, beating far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon, who scored between 10.5 and 13 per cent, according to the estimates.
France in 2012 is an old nation that increasingly cultivates the temptation to be an island unto itself.More at that top link.
So many examples from these last few years come to mind: magazine covers devoted to President Nicolas Sarkozy almost every week; the Jan. 7 issue of Le Figaro, naming Joan of Arc Woman of the Year. An issue of Le Figaro Magazine devoted to a portrait of the French people declared: “France is noble in essence, the mother of liberty, the rights of man, letters, arts, and sciences.”
Transfuge, a Parisian literary magazine, offered a harsh assessment this month: French literature, obsessed with the past, is entering the 21st century walking backward. Indeed, the French don’t like the 21st century, and would gladly give it back. Their desire has its roots in a confluence of failures (the defeat in 1940 and the loss of their colonial empire) and the rejection, by other European nations, of building a Europe à la française — France on a bigger scale. France has become a middling power, with a mass culture and a society of consumption like everyone else. Gaullism and Communism kept up the illusion that a great history, a great destiny were still France’s to be had. It didn’t pan out that way. So as the world heeds France less, the French long to shut themselves off from it, to turn toward olden days and protect themselves.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court and the Obama administration are set for another politically charged clash Wednesday as the justices take up Arizona's tough crackdown on illegal immigrants.FLASHBACK: "'Phoenix Rising' for SB 1070 at Arizona State Capitol."
It will be a rematch of the attorneys who argued the healthcare case a month ago, and another chapter in the partisan philosophical struggle over states' rights and the role of the federal government.
And once again, President Obama's lawyers are likely to face skeptical questions from the high court. Last year, the court's five more-conservative justices rebuffed the administration and upheld an earlier Arizona immigration law that targeted employers who hired illegal workers.
To prevail this year, the administration must convince at least one of the five to switch sides and rule that the state is going too far and interfering with the federal government's control over immigration policy.
The election-year legal battle goes to the heart of the dispute between Republicans and Democrats over what to do about the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country.
Arizona and five other Republican-led states seek a stepped-up effort to arrest and deport illegal immigrants. They say the federal system is broken and fault Obama for what they consider a "relaxed" enforcement policy.
If cleared by the courts, Arizona would tell its police to check the immigration status of people they lawfully stop and suspect of being in the country illegally. If they were unable to show a driver's license or other "proof of legal presence," they would be arrested and held for federal immigration agents. Arizona also would make it a crime to lack immigration papers or for illegal immigrants to seek work.
UPDATE : Deparment of Justice PR Katie Dixon also worked for the Democratic National Committee and Organizing For America, according to her LinkedIn profile. [Editor's note: following the publication of this article, the Past Employers section of Dixon's LinkedIn profile has been made private.]Read the whole thing.
“We have a clear agenda in this regard: Disclose, reform the system reducing the role of money in campaigns, and amend the Constitution to rid it of this ability for special interests to use secret, unlimited, huge amounts of money flowing to campaigns.”Via CNS News and Linkmaster Smith:
Well, if you’ve been reading this blog and my column, the outcome of today’s Utah GOP convention will not be a surprise.Well, I guess those "radical libertarians" don't take well to threats.
Despite amassing a giant, $6 million campaign war chest and calling in every last chit with Republican friends and cronies, 77-year-old GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch will now face upstart conservative entrepreneur and renowned state pension reformer Dan Liljenquist (with campaign coffers of about $200,000) in a primary contest. He fell short of the 60 percent needed to avoid the primary race.
'California is God's best moment," says Joel Kotkin. "It's the best place in the world to live." Or at least it used to be.Continue reading.
Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation's premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for hipsters who had grown up listening to the Mamas & the Papas' iconic "California Dreamin'" and the Beach Boys' "California Girls." But it also attracted young, ambitious people "who had a lot of dreams, wanted to build big companies." Think Intel, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.
Now, however, the Golden State's fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn't Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.
Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.
With new domestic oil and gas production being one of the few bright spots in the otherwise lousy Obama economy, it’s ironic that Dick Cheney’s legacy may be helping Obama get re-elected.IMAGE CREDIT: The People's Cube, "Obama’s Necessarily Sky Rocket Gasoline."
