AOC called out after claiming Trump food-stamp revisions might have left her family 'starved'

Idiot

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., received pushback Thursday after claiming her family "might've just starved" had the Trump administration's tightened requirements for food stamp recipients been in place when her father died in 2008.
Critics claimed the freshman congresswoman misrepresented the new rule, pointing out that it applies only to childless, able-bodied adults under 50.
The Agriculture Department (USDA) finalized the first of three proposed rules targeting the Supplemental Nutrition Program, known as SNAP. The plan announced Wednesday will limit states from exempting work-eligible adults from having to maintain steady employment in order to receive benefits.
Ocasio-Cortez, 30, responded to the announcement on Twitter on Thursday:
“My family relied on food stamps (EBT) when my dad died at 48. I was a student. If this happened then, we might’ve just starved. Now, many people will,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It’s shameful how the GOP works overtime to create freebies for the rich while dissolving lifelines of those who need it most.”
The New York Democrat was 19 and about to begin her sophomore year at Boston University when her father, Sergio Ocasio, died of lung cancer. It is likely her mother still would have claimed her as a dependent at that time.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think tank, challenged the “Squad” member’s claim, writing:
“The rule applies to able-bodied adults between the ages of 18 and 49 who do not have dependents. The rule wouldn’t apply to parents with minor children, the elderly, or disabled people.”
Several Twitter users also slammed the New York Democrat for spreading “Fake News” online by implying the new rule prevents children from receiving benefits. Some users also pointed out that able-bodied adults between ages 18 and 49 without dependents can still qualify for food stamps if they train or work a minimum of 20 hours a week.
“Create 'freebies' for the rich @AOC? You and your radical, socialist crew believe the Forgotten men and women, every day middle-class Americans are the 'rich'. Tax relief for hard working Americans is hardly a 'freebie,' Catalina Lauf, a Republican candidate seeking a U.S. House seat from Illinois’ 14th Congressional District, wrote in response to Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet. Lauf -- the 26-year-old daughter of a small-business owner and a legal immigrant from Guatemala – has been billed by some as the Republican counterweight to Ocasio-Cortez.
SNAP feeds more than 36 million people. Under current rules, work-eligible able-bodied adults without dependents and between the ages of 18 and 49 can receive only three months of SNAP benefits in a three-year period if they don’t meet the 20-hour work requirement.
The new rule, which will take effect on April 1, 2020, imposes stricter criteria for states to meet in order to issue waivers. Under the plan, states can only issue waivers if a city or county has an unemployment rate of 6 percent or higher. The waivers will be good for one year and will require the governor to support the request.
The USDA estimates the change would save roughly $5.5 billion over five years and cut benefits for roughly 688,000 SNAP recipients.  Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said the rule will help move people “from welfare to work.”
“We’re taking action to reform our SNAP program in order to restore the dignity of work to a sizable segment of our population and be respectful of the taxpayers who fund the program,” Perdue told reporters Wednesday. “Americans are generous people who believe it is their responsibility to help their fellow citizens when they encounter a difficult stretch. That’s the commitment behind SNAP, but, like other welfare programs, it was never intended to be a way of life.”
Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., said the plan will only serve to punish workers whose jobs are seasonal or unreliable. She is the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, & Forestry. “This administration is out of touch with families who are struggling to make ends meet by working seasonal jobs or part-time jobs with unreliable hours,” Stabenow said, according to The Associated Press.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also blasted the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce public benefits, saying: “Instead of combating food insecurity for millions, connecting workers to good-paying jobs or addressing income inequality, the administration is inflicting their draconian rule on millions of Americans across the nation who face the highest barriers to employment and economic stability.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Impeachment Cartoons

Stacking the deck: Impeachment hearing spotlights anti-Trump professors

I didn’t expect much from the House Judiciary hearing, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Democrats have already decided to impeach Donald Trump, and stacked the witness table with three professors who passionately insisted that the House has no choice. Only one professor said impeachment was absolutely not warranted.
These are smart and learned academics, but the deck was obviously stacked.
The committee’s top leaders set the tone Wednesday.
Chairman Jerry Nadler declared that “never before in the history of the republic” has “the president engaged in a course of conduct that included all of the acts that most concerned the Framers.” The New York Democrat added that Trump’s “level of obstruction is without precedent.”
Ranking minority member Doug Collins blamed the proceedings on “a deep-seated hatred” of Trump.
“This is not an impeachment. This is just a simple railroad job…You just don’t like the guy,” the Georgia Republican said.
And his party forced roll-call votes on such matters as postponing the hearing and forcing Adam Schiff and the whistleblower to testify, just to shake things up and make a point.
Whether or not you buy the president’s case that impeachment is a “hoax” and a “witch hunt”—a “dirty word,” Trump said from NATO in London--no one can deny that the process has been bathed in partisanship.
Democrats served notice they were firmly in charge by leaking, to Politico, Nadler’s private assurance to his colleagues that “I’m not going to take any s---.”
Any faint hope that the four professors would be appearing just as expert fact-finders was quickly dashed.
Michael Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina said that Trump’s abuses of power “are worse than the misconduct of any prior president.”
Pamela Karlan of Stanford said that “if we are to keep faith with the Constitution and our Republic, President Trump must be held to account.”
She got into it with Collins, who said the witnesses couldn’t have digested the Intel Committee’s report on impeachment, declaring: “I’m insulted by the suggestion that as a law professor I don’t care about those facts.”
It quickly emerged that Karlan had recently donated a thousand bucks to Elizabeth Warren.
Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, the only critical witness, said Democrats were using “the shortest proceeding, with the thinnest evidentiary record, and the narrowest grounds ever used to impeach a president.”
Turley made a point of saying he didn’t support Trump politically and had voted against him in 2016. But he said he is mad about this impeachment, as are his wife, his kids and his dogs. He got so much airtime that at times it seemed like the Turley Show.
But critics will note that Turley told the very same committee in 1998 that he supported Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
This was a check-the-box hearing, following the GOP’s example two decades ago, a bow in the direction of debating the standards for impeaching a chief executive. But relentless partisanship carried the day.
At one point, GOP congressman Steve Chabot quoted Nadler saying that impeachment would unnecessarily divide the country—back when Clinton was facing removal from office over the Monica Lewinsky debacle.
The public is growing tired of the process, and support for impeachment and removal seems stuck at 50 percent. Wednesday's hearing added to the sense that House Democrats know full well what they want to do—and are determined to do it before Christmas.
By the same token, Senate Republicans know what they want to do and will acquit Trump in January, unless it drags on into February.
That’s why the Judiciary hearing felt like an empty exercise that didn’t move the needle and isn’t destined to be a ratings smash.

Rep. Al Green rips slams committee over impeachment experts: 'not one person of color'

A Texas congressman slammed his fellow Democrats Wednesday after “not one person of color” was called as an expert to testify during the first day of impeachment hearings conducted by the House Judiciary Committee.
Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, rebuked his colleagues in a speech on the House floor before the committee hearing began. Three legal scholars later testified at the request of Democrats in the first Judiciary Committee impeachment inquiry hearing. Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, was the sole witness called by the GOP.
“I rise because I love my country, but I also rise today with heartfelt regrets. It hurts my heart, Mr. Speaker, to see the Judiciary Committee hearing experts on the topic of impeachment — one of the seminal issues of this Congress — hearing experts... and not one person of color among the experts,” Green told the House floor.
“What subliminal message are we sending to the world when we have experts but not one person of color? Are we saying that there are no people of color who are experts on this topic of impeachment?” Green continued. He claimed the House committee was taking advantage of black voters without affording them equal representation in the impeachment process.
“I refuse to be ignored and taken for granted. I came here to represent the people who are ignored and taken for granted. Not one person of color among the constitutional scholars,” he said. “It seems that there’s a desire among some to have the output of people of color without input from the people of color.”
“I rise today to say that this is not about Democrats. It’s not about Republicans. It’s about fairness,” Green said. “It’s about whether or not we have matured to the point in this country where we’re going to treat all people equally.”
Turley argued against impeaching President Trump. Stanford Law professor Pamela Karlan, Harvard Law professor and Bloomberg columnist Noah Feldman and University of North Carolina Law professor Michael Gerhardt were called by Democrats on the committee, and they said Trump's actions were impeachable.
Green’s speech comes a day after a leading progressive activist lamented that only white candidates will grace the upcoming Democratic presidential debate stage following Sen. Kamala Harris’s departure from the 2020 race.
"It's a sad state of affairs to have six white candidates on stage, many of whom don't necessarily speak with black women, who are the powerhouse voters -- and we're at this moment where we went from the most diverse set of candidates in the history -- certainly in my lifetime -- to an all-white stage," Aimee Allison told MSNBC on Tuesday.
Allison is the founder and president of She the People, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring “that women of color will never be taken for granted again in elections."
Fox News' Sam Dorman and Brian Flood contributed to this report.

Matt Gaetz grills impeachment witnesses over Democratic donations, slams professor's dig at Barron Trump

House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., grilled three of the four impeachment panel witnesses for their past support for Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton, and admonished one for making a joke at the expense of the teenage son of President Trump.
Gaetz began his allotted five minutes of question time by responding to the previous questioner, House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem S. Jeffries, D-N.Y., who noted that Americans had elected a Democrat majority in the House to serve as a check on Trump.
"The will of the American people also elected Donald Trump to be president of the United States in the 2016 election, and there's one party that can't seem to get over it," Gaetz said, adding that unlike Jeffries' caucus, Republicans haven't focused all of their resources on attempting to remove the top official in the opposing party, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
"Frankly, we'd love to govern with you," he added.
Turning to the professors, he asked UNC-Chapel Hill Professor Michael Gerhardt to confirm that he donated to President Barack Obama.
"My family did, yes," Gerhardt responded.
Shifting his attention to Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, Gaetz noted the educator has written several articles that portray Trump in a negative light.
"Mar-a-Lago ad belongs in impeachment file," Gaetz said, repeating the title of an April 2017 piece Feldman wrote for Bloomberg Opinion.
Gaetz further pressed Feldman, asking him: "Do you believe you're outside of the political mainstream on the question of impeachment?"
Responding to Gaetz, Feldman said impeachment is warranted whenever a president abuses their power for personal gain or when they "corrupt the democratic process." The professor added he was an "impeachment skeptic" until the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
After the exchange, Gaetz turned to Stanford Law Professor Pamela Karlan and challenged her on reported four-figure donations to Clinton, Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
"Why so much more for Hillary than the other two?" he added, smiling.
The Florida lawmaker went on to criticize Karlan for a remark she made while answering an earlier question by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas.
Karlan had told Jackson Lee that there is a difference between what Trump can do as president and the powers of a medieval king.
"The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son 'Barron', he can't make him a baron."
Gaetz fumed at the remark, saying it does not lend "credibility" to her argument.
"When you invoke the president's son's name here, when you try to make a little joke out of referencing Barron Trump... it makes you look mean, it makes you look like you are attacking someone's family: the minor child of the president of the United States."
Later, First Lady Melania Trump ripped Karlan for bringing up her son, claiming she should be ashamed for using a child in the pursuit of public "pandering."
"A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics," Mrs. Trump wrote. "Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it."

Pamela Karlan says she once crossed the street to avoid a Trump hotel in DC

The Stanford Law School professor who sparked backlash from the White House Wednesday after evoking the president’s minor son during the first day of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry had previously stated that she once crossed the street just to avoid passing one of President Trump's hotels.
Pamela Karlan, who was one of three witnesses who testified before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday, previously told a 2017 American Constitution Society panel that she couldn’t stomach walking past the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Video of the panel from two years ago resurfaced online after Karlan's public testimony.
“I came in from the airport yesterday and I got off the bus from Dulles down at L’Enfant Plaza and I walked up to the hotel and as I was walking past what used to be the old post office building and is now Trump hotel," Karlan told an audience in 2017. “I had to cross the street, of course.”
Fellow panelist, Neil Siegel, asked: “Are you staying there?”
“God, no! Never!” Karlan responded.
On Wednesday, Karlan drew ire from the White House, the Trump campaign and even First Lady Melania Trump after using 13-year-old Barron Trump’s name to illustrate her point that President Trump can’t rule like a king.
"The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron," Karlan told the committee, prompting chuckles across the room.
One of the lawmakers Karlan delivered testimony before included Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, who himself made headlines in February after tweeting he wouldn't enter Trump Tower in New York City during a snowstorm – even if he were to come inside just to buy a cup of coffee.
“It’s snowing in #NewYork. I need coffee. The closest cafe is inside Trump Tower. This is me walking to an alternative,” Swalwell said, sharing a selfie in front of the Fifth Avenue building covered in a light dusting of snow. Twitter users later mocked the four-term congressman from California, pointing out that there are many cafes in that area of New York City within short walking distance.
Swalwell announced his bid for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in April before leaving the race in July.  The former prosecutor who’s a member of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees had been a vocal critic of President Trump over the relationship between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia during Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham alluded on Twitter that Karlan’s remark during the impeachment hearing demonstrated her clear bias against the president.
“Classless move by a Democratic ‘witness’. Prof Karlan uses a teenage boy who has nothing to do with this joke of a hearing (and deserves privacy) as a punchline,” Grisham tweeted. “And what’s worse, it’s met by laughter in the hearing room. What is being done to this country is no laughing matter.”
"A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics," first lady Melania Trump also tweeted. "Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it."
Karlan later apologized during the same committee hearing, taking a dig at President Trump.
"I want to apologize for what I said earlier about the president's son,” Karlan said. "It was wrong of me to do that. I wish the president would apologize, obviously, for the things that he's done that's wrong, but I do regret having said that."
While speaking on the panel in 2017, Karlan took swipes at President Trump on a number of issues and, at one point, accused him of sexually assaulting "more women than 99.99% of all of the people who have entered this country illegally.”
“Every day Trump says something outrageous and people go, ‘ah, at least it’s not as outrageous as the day-before thing,’ Karlan began. “I remember this during the campaign, where he would say things, and you would think, ‘okay, that’s the end.’”
“When he mocked John McCain for having been shot down, when he made fun of the reporter with the disability, when the infamous tapes about grabbing women came out, and you kept thinking,” she continued. “Donald Trump has sexually assaulted more women than 99.99% of all of the people who have entered this country illegally. By himself, he’s done more."
The professor said she worries that people are getting so used to the way Trump speaks that the public will never reach a "red-light moment." She also took aim at the president over what she described as nepotism in his choice to hire his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner as White House advisers.

Massachusetts EBT Cartoons

Bloomberg, in single digits, needs to start making news, and fast

Mike Bloomberg is having an impact.
After spending more than $35 million, he has pulled ahead of…Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, both at 2 percent. And Harris dropped out Tuesday.
I don’t see a cause and effect, though Harris ran out of money and took a parting shot at billionaires. Her campaign, overseen by her sister, had been flailing for a long time, as advance obits in the New York Times and Washington Post made clear. Harris kept changing positions, attacking rivals and retreating, playing up and playing down her prosecutor past, unable to carve out space in a crowded field. And that had nothing to do with Bloomberg, though he could benefit by picking up some of her staff.
The former New York mayor is at 6 percent in the latest Hill poll, trailing Joe Biden with 31 percent, Bernie at 15, the fading Elizabeth at 10, and the rising Mayor Pete at 9. Not exactly an earthquake.
I don’t understand the campaign that Bloomberg is running. (And that’s putting aside the dumb decision by his news service to not investigate the boss. That enabled the president, whose campaign has yanked Bloomberg News credentials, to tweet: “Mini Mike Bloomberg has instructed his third rate news organization not to investigate him or any Democrat, but to go after President Trump, only. The Failing New York Times thinks that is O.K., because their hatred & bias is so great they can’t even see straight. It’s not O.K.!”)
Bloomberg has his strengths, including his 12-year tenure as mayor, although that contains ample ammunition to alienate Democratic liberals. But he remains a remote figure for many American voters. And yet he isn’t doing the things you’d expect an eleventh-hour contender to do.
He hasn’t given major policy speeches. He hasn’t made the television rounds—not the Sunday shows or daytime cable shows or prime-time opinion shows. He hasn’t done a lengthy interview with a major newspaper.
In short, people haven’t heard his voice, except in paid commercials in which he approves this message. That’s an especially big vacuum since, by funding his own campaign, he won’t be included in the debates. And it’s exacerbated by his decision to skip Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, a maneuver that has never worked.
I don’t think he can spend his way to the nomination. He’s got to get in the batter’s box and show he can hit the pitching.
When Bloomberg launched his campaign in Norfolk, he told reporters that “I know how to win because I’ve done it time and again,” touting his advocacy on climate change, gun control, smoking and education.
Politico Magazine has a how-he-can-win piece that begins with the Beltway/Twitter take “that this is little more than a vanity run for the presidency—a play for the political affinities of the pundit class on the Acela corridor, a low-energy answer to a question no Democrat is asking. Bloomberg is, as he puts it himself, a short, Jewish, divorced billionaire from Manhattan. He is an avowed defender of Wall Street. He has been an apologist for #MeToo offenders. He oversaw a police department that stopped and frisked half a million primarily young men of color a year. Even putting all that aside, he is audaciously pledging to skip the first four primary states.”
The gist of the argument is that Bloomberg was a relative unknown when, a couple of weeks after 9/11 and with a tepid endorsement from Rudy Giuliani, he won the mayor’s office. Therefore don’t count him out.
But New York City is not America, which is why none of its mayors have ever come close to winning the White House.
The piece does sketch out an agenda: “It is easy to imagine him calling for filibuster reform, or strengthening voting rights, or even adding a Supreme Court justice. His comments over the past several years defending Wall Street have gotten him in trouble, but his aides point out that not only did Bloomberg raise taxes in a way that no other candidate in the field has, but he also built 185,000 units of affordable housing (a figure that essentially means building another South Bend, Indiana, and still having tens of thousands of housing units to spare), lowered the racial temperature in a city reeling from 9/11 and eight years of Giuliani, defended the right of Muslims to build a mosque near ground zero, drastically raised teacher pay, reduced the city’s prison population by 40 percent, mounted an aggressive anti-poverty campaign that recalculated the city’s poverty rate to allow more people to receive federal benefits, and spent $3.1 billion on new school construction.”
But Bloomberg himself should be making that case, not a Politico writer. Meanwhile, Bill de Blasio is “having a fit,” says another Politico piece, over Bloomberg’s candidacy. Having utterly flamed out in his own presidential bid, the mayor now spends considerable time attacking his predecessor.
De Blasio is quoted as saying “before his millions and millions of dollars of advertising ... we need an honest conversation about what really happened.” He also thinks Bloomberg gets better press, saying, “I think a lot of media outlets were literally worried he might buy them some day. And I think a lot of the leaders in those media outlets did not want to make waves or alienate him.”
Some allies say it helps de Blasio at home to remind people of his criticism of the former mayor, but in any event he can’t run again. The mayor may be 6’5, but this makes him look awfully small.
Bloomberg was in Mississippi Wednesday for a roundtable discussion on criminal justice reform—part of his effort to court minority voters after apologizing for his years of backing stop and frisk. But it’s late in the game for him to be doing the listening-tour thing.
Mike Bloomberg would have an outside shot if Biden’s campaign cratered, as the pundits endlessly predict it will. But as famous as the 77-year-old billionaire thinks he is, he needs to raise his profile fast, and that takes more than a bunch of slickly produced ads.