SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Mollv Ivins Welfare Farewell My favorite quote from the welfare-reform debate was Newt Gingrich saying. "The President has a moral obligation to sign this bill." That's Pope Newt I...
...What a triumph...
...Then, a final fillip, the bill cuts SSI allowances for poor handicapped children...
...as Rush Limbaugh would put it...
...Aside from handing responsibility for welfare over to the states and putting a five-year limit on recipients (they had to pass some kind of term limit), just what does this welfare reform do'.' Instead of a federal program for cash assistance, states will get a flat block grant for poor folks, and they can cut their own spending on welfare between 20 and 25 percent...
...Then, the bill cuts the food-stamp program by $27.5 billion over six years...
...The beloved Jessica Mitford died of cancer on July 23 in Oakland, California, at the age of seventy-eight...
...Widowed earlv in World War II, Decca then married the labor lawyer Bob Truhaft and for fiftv-three years the two of them raised hell, had fun, and fought the good fight...
...Last summer, we visited the Funeral Museum in Houston (there actually is one...
...This is the same kind of magical thinking that leads Republicans to believe they can close the budget deficit by passing a constitutional amendment...
...Picking on the poor crippled kids is an especially felicitous notion...
...This is my favorite part of the bill...
...It is a multimedia museum and we stopped to listen to a short documentary on embalming...
...The art of embalming was first invented by the ancient Egyptians...
...The networks have all been thorough in their analysis of the political back-and-forth...
...Clinton, to veto or not to veto...
...As the newsmags always said, "daughter of an eccentric British peer...
...About 300.000 of them will lose their Supplemental Security Insurance benefits, which means their families won't be able to take care of them, which means they'll be dumped into public institutions, which will be ten times as expensive...
...This is especially shrewd since food stamps are not limited to welfare recipients, but also go to the working poor...
...Of the memoirs...
...The reason people go on welfare in Mollv Ivins is a columnist for the Port Worth Star-Telegram...
...Daughters and Rebels is priceless, but I prefer the political memoir, A Fine Old Conflict...
...It's been an all-profession effort to prove that Jim Fallows, the media critic we usually enjoy denouncing, is just as right as sunshine...
...right for starters, we're looking at a major cutback in welfare spending: The reason 1 know this is because I have spent my life studying the peckerwoods in the Texas legislature...
...I love the new Republican tack on welfare—instead of denouncing welfare recipients as a bunch of ehiseler lavabouts forever buying vodka with their food stamps, the new line is that they're "victims" of a pitiless system expressly designed to rob them of independence, initiative, and gainful employment...
...Representative Clay Shaw of Florida told The Washington Post, "1 would hope the President would join us in our efforts to rescue millions of Americans out of a corrupt welfare system...
...Meanwhile, the media were helpfully covering this whole deal by exploring every nook and crannv for the political ramifications...
...If you want a role model for how to live a good and useful radical life, take notes on Decca...
...At least one million more children will be pushed into poverty by this clever stroke...
...Trouble is practically no one has told us what the damn bill will actually do...
...The New York Times actually printed her joking request for a funeral "with six black horses with plumes, dignitaries to declaim sobbingly over the flower-smothered bier, that sort of thing...
...Said Decca sotto voce, "Now there was a culture where they let the funeral directors get completely out of control...
...Rescue 911...
...The New York Times helpfully informed us that there's a five-point gap (49 percent to 44 percent) in the perception of swing voters on whether Clinton has seriously tried to change welfare...
...Of course, she had a cut-rate cremation—$475, no embalming, no frills...
...Unfortunately, malnourished children are prone to get sick, so Medicaid costs will go up...
...The narrator announced...
...Of course, she had an odd start...
...Unfortunately, she eloped with a nephew of Winston Churchill's, and a destroyer was dispatched to bring them back...
...In addition to her superb investigative journalism, Decca Mitford brought sanity and wonderful wit to leftist causes and functions...
...the first place is because they can't find jobs...
...Republicans wanted him to veto in order to give Dole a dandy campaign issue, or they wanted him to sign so they could grab the credit...
...That's Pope Newt I speaking to us from his well-known perch of moral authority there...
...Her semi-immortal panning of the ""death-services industry" in The American Wax of Death will remain a classic of muckraking journalism...
...Next, welfare recipients will have to find jobs...
...Cruel and dumb...
...the draft-dodging, dope-smoking, dead-beat dad who divorced his dying wife Newt Gingrich...
...She did it with honor and with humor...
...The Mitford clan is a whole other story: Our Mitford, MARK NEWGARDEN Decca, ran away when she was nineteen to fight in the Spanish Civil War...
Vol. 60 • September 1996 • No. 9
