Fox to oversee henhouse
The Times on Trump’s choice of Ben Carson:
With no experience in government or running a large bureaucracy, Mr. Carson, 65, publicly waffled over whether to join the administration. He will oversee an agency with a $47 billion budget, bringing to the job a philosophical opposition to government programs that encourage what he calls “dependency” and engage in “social engineering.”
He has no expertise in housing policy, but he did spend part of his childhood in public housing, said a close friend, Armstrong Williams, and he was raised by a dauntless mother with a grammar-school education. In his autobiography he stressed that individual effort, not government programs, were the key to overcoming poverty.
Yeah that’s great. I’ve been to the doctor for checkups a few times, therefore I’m qualified to be Surgeon General, right? Why not, this is America.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development oversees programs that provide vouchers and other rental assistance for five million low-income families, fights urban blight and helps struggling homeowners stave off foreclosures.
So given his emphasis on the fatuous claim that individual effort, not government programs, is the key to overcoming poverty, no doubt he’ll be doing away with all those pesky vouchers, not to mention the struggling remainders of federal public housing.
Mr. Carson will be charged with enforcing the same civil rights law once used in a federal lawsuit against Mr. Trump. He and his father were accused in 1973 of refusing to rent to African-Americans in their buildings. A former Trump superintendent testified that he had been told to mark a “C,” for “colored,” on the applications of black apartment seekers. The Trumps denied the charges and countersued the government. They ultimately signed a consent degree in which they did not admit guilt, but agreed to desegregate their properties.
A band of brothers.
In the category of good news:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/11/23/elizabeth-warren-asks-federal-agency-review-donald-trump-chaotic-transition/hGfvViGnxB8lvmdGKNQBUK/story.html
The choice of the GAO is inspired–Warren’s picked one of the few federal offices the GOP likes (since they’re often the ones to call out financial boondoggles on the Left) to ensure that some $9M dollars of taxpayer money is being well-spent on the transition. If she ever runs nationally, I’m voting for her the first day I legally can.
Armstrong Williams is his close friend? LOL, why didn’t I guess. Williams is the guy who was caught secretly accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Department of Education to promote No Child Left Behind on his tv show. I’m sure Carson will find some money in HUD’s budget for his close friend.
His individual effort? Or his mom’s?
Most of the Republican candidates spent a lot of time pointing out that their parents were poor, hard-working, etc. In other words, someone that was not them sacrificed a lot of effort to send them to school, to push them to succeed, and to get them where they are today.
Some of us had moms who committed huge effort to push us away from school, to push us toward marriage and a dozen kids, to push us to stay barefoot and pregnant. What I wouldn’t have given for one of their poor (we were poor, too) but hard-working mothers who encouraged them, gave them what they needed, and sacrificed themselves for the benefit of the men who now are grown to become men who would like to take away a lot of the ability of the poor women (and men) to help their children in the same way. If I had been given a fraction of what they were given by these mothers (or bartender fathers), I might be in the running for president, too.
I guess what I’m saying is that it isn’t hard work and talent alone that take you there, it’s having support from family, from community (which is where I got most of my support) and from society. That sometimes means financial support.
iknklast, that is one of the most salient, and over looked, political points I’ve seen made in recent times. Thank you.
Indeed. Will be above the fold shortly.
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Thank you, Rob, Ophelia. i have thought about that a lot lately. I was watching a biopic of E. O. Wilson, and he talked about how childhood activities had led him to be who he is, without ever mentioning the woman who brought him up…I thought, how I wish I could have had those same opportunities; I might have gotten to science a lot earlier, and with a lot more possibility to succeed, if I had half his opportunities. He seemed to think that this is the norm…most of these men never see the reality that a lot of us live, and they assume that what they experience is the same that all these other “losers” have had, but have not taken advantage of.
Yeah. We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know it and we don’t even know THAT we don’t know it. Rumsfeld was right about that one thing, despite all the mockery.