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Mitt Romney Declines To Condemn Hecklers At Obama Stops

By STEVE PEOPLES 06/19/12 01:46 PM ET

WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney has declined to call on his supporters to stop heckling President Barack Obama's campaign.

He told Fox News Radio on Tuesday that he doesn't believe in "unilateral disarmament," but said it would "be a nice thing" if both sides would stop yelling at each other during campaign events.

Over the weekend, Obama adviser David Axelrod condemned anti-Romney heckling during the Republican candidate's bus tour, which ends Tuesday in Michigan.

Romney was asked if he would also condemn heckling during Obama events. He declined.

Responding to Romney later Tuesday, the Obama campaign said it had sent a strong message to its supporters that the campaign should be about an open exchange of ideas, not drowning out the other side by heckling and crashing events.

"Campaigns are a reflection of their candidate," said Ben LaBolt, the Obama campaign's spokesman. "Mitt Romney has a different view, endorsing heckling."

Axelrod was heckled aggressively by Romney supporters during a news conference last month in Boston. Romney supporters also regularly drive a campaign bus around to Obama events and honk the horn repeatedly.

Romney said Tuesday that American politics has a "long history of heckling and free speech."

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/19/mitt-romney-heckling-obama-campaign-stops_n_1609156.html [with embedded video report on the organized staffers and volunteers gathered, equipped and sent as brownshirts by the Romney campaign itself to not just heckle but intentionally completely disrupt Axelrod's campaign event in Boston ({linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76443615 and preceding and following), and comments]


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Mitt Romney's Education Plan: Overview and Analysis (Part Two)


Mitt Romney.

by David Barnett
Contributing Writer
On Jun 18, 2012

PoliticOlogy’s Analysis

As part of a weekly series exploring the policy positions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, this article examines Mitt Romney's education plan: what it claims, what it promises, and whether it delivers. Make sure to check back on Wednesday for a full analysis of Barack Obama's education plans, and follow PoliticOlogy [ http://ology.com/channel/politics ] for weekly analyses of the candidates' positions.

Click Here [ http://www.ology.com/post/96244/mitt-romney-s-education-plan-overview-and-analysis ] to Return to Overview

Click Here [ http://www.ology.com/post/96246/mitt-romney-s-education-plan-overview-and-analysis-part-three- ] to Continue to Conclusion

Romney's education plan has a misleading focus on choice, efficiency, transparency and results. But once broken down, the plan's flaws become obvious and untenable.

Promoting choice and innovation:

Romney’s new, innovative approach to education reform comes directly from Milton Friedman, who wrote the following [ http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-023.html ]:

Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system — i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools. The most feasible way to bring about such a transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. The voucher must be universal, available to all parents, and large enough to cover the costs of a high-quality education. No conditions should be attached to the vouchers that interfere with the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to explore, and to innovate.

Friedman's idea is simple: education would be better without government regulation and districting. The problem is that freedom and choice in schools rarely serve the most disadvantaged students. Dr. Pedro Noguera, a professor at NYU and director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, argues [ http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/24/opinion-confronting-challenges-of-american-educationcivil-rights-issue-of-our-time/ ] that choice systems rarely enhance schools uniformly; instead, choice systems "have the effect of concentrating the neediest children in the most troubled schools."

This point can't be passed over. When politicians like Romney say that American schools are failing to compete with schools in Beijing, they aren’t talking about every school. Normal and charter public schools can operate well and efficiently, producing test scores that rival the results from any other school in the world. But, for the most part, you'll only find those schools in affluent communities.

Poverty is a huge obstacle to higher student achievement [ http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/24/opinion-confronting-challenges-of-american-educationcivil-rights-issue-of-our-time/ ]. Giving the 2011 Ridley Lecture at UVA, Dr. Noguera said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxRL-aOoevE ],

For the most part, in this country, if you are born poor, you stay poor. And schools, typically, are much more likely to be implicated in reproducing poverty across generations than in breaking it. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Policy makers aren't dumb; they know this. Yet, their policies rarely take any strides to reduce the deleterious effects of poverty on education. Rather, they introduce measures that magnify the illusion of choice, hiding the reality that choice systems do very little for the impoverished [ http://schottfoundation.org/drupal/docs/redlining-exec-summary.pdf ] and disadvantaged.

There is a secondary issue: the available research shows that vouchers and charters have negligible effects [ http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf ] on school performance. In a study conducted by the Center on Education Policy [ http://www.nsba.org/Advocacy/Key-Issues/SchoolVouchers/VoucherStrategyCenter/VoucherResearch/Summary-of-the-Center-on-Education-Policys-report-on-voucher-developments-and-status-July-2011.pdf ], researchers came to three significant conclusions: vouchers do not have a strong effect on students' academic achievement; voucher proponents rarely talk about student achievement, focusing instead on freedom, choice, parent satisfaction and graduation rates; and, voucher programs are "moving beyond serving traditionally low-income families reaching middle-income families in broader geographic areas." This is what Friedman meant by "no conditions should be attached to the vouchers." Unfortunately, this results in clusters of underperforming schools, serving mostly poor kids.

There is another practical concern. Perfect mobility and information do not exist. For choice to be free, consumers — in this case parents and students — must know what the product is — in this case schools — and how good it is. But there is no reliable way to systematically evaluate school performance. And, there is no way to ensure transportation for the underprivileged.

Ensuring High Standards and Responsibility, Recruiting and Rewarding Teachers:

Because the second and third part of Romney’s K-12 education plan both rely on test scores, critiques of it can be comined.

There is something to be said about math and reading scores. But what about everything else? Music, history and art have no purpose in education? Most educators will agree that there is a reason — and a good one — for a multidisciplinary approach to education. This, however, is not central critique of the standards based approach to education reform.

John Jackson, the president of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, and Dr. Noguera have an apt analogy about the ways in which standards based reforms reinforce existing patters of inequality [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/why-education-inequality-persists--and-how-to-fix-it/2012/05/15/gIQAXEIeSU_blog.html ]:

It is as if New York is testing black, Latino and poor students on their swimming abilities after knowingly relegating them to pools where the water has been drained. These students are then stigmatized as failures, their parents labeled as less than fully engaged, and their teachers called ineffective.

As such, standards mean little more than means by which government officials can deem schools, parents, students and teachers failures. The strange mess of it all is that test scores (even for a single teacher) vary widely from year to year [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxRL-aOoevE ], indicating that it is very difficult to assess a teacher’s effect on student academic achievement.

What’s more, there is no way to systematically evaluate schools reliably and objectively [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/a-new-look-at-the-credo-charter-school-study/2011/10/07/gIQAl8r5aL_blog.html ]. To ensure responsibility, there must be transparency and perfect information, both of which are impossible to achieve. So, what are standards used for? Punishment.

Romney hopes to eliminate tenure, making it easier to "guarantee success in the classroom." There is no research to reaffirm that teachers perform better if their jobs are constantly in jeopardy. Nonetheless, Romney understands tenure to be a mark of stasis and a failing status quo.

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Related Post:

Romney’s Bold, Unprecedented Plan To Do Nothing About Education
http://www.ology.com/app.php/post/80216/romney-s-bold-unprecedented-plan-to-do-nothing-about-education

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© 2012 Ology

http://www.ology.com/post/96245/mitt-romney-s-education-plan-overview-and-analysis-part-two-


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Paul Krugman: 'Ireland Is Romney Economics In Practice'

By Bonnie Kavoussi
Posted: 06/19/2012 1:39 pm Updated: 06/19/2012 11:24 pm

If Mitt Romney is elected president, the U.S. will experience an economic disaster the likes of which have been recently seen in Ireland, according to Paul Krugman.

"Ireland is Romney economics in practice," the Nobel-Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist said on the Colbert Report on Monday. "I think Ireland is America's future if Romney is president." (h/t Politico [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77578.html ].)

"They've laid off a large fraction of their public workforce, they've slashed spending, they've had extreme austerity programs, they haven't really raised taxes on corporations or the rich at all, they have 14 percent unemployment, 30 percent youth unemployment, zero economic growth," Krugman said.

Romney, the likely Republican nominee for president, recently suggested that the government [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/08/romney-on-obama-is-he-really-that-out-of-touch/ ] should lay off more firemen, policemen, and teachers, according to CNN. Romney's campaign website says [ http://www.mittromney.com/issues/spending ] that if elected president, Romney would aim to slash federal spending at least 18 percent by the end of his first term.

Conservatives like Romney loved Ireland's economic program before the country fell into a depression, in part because it had "the lowest corporate tax rates," Krugman said on the Colbert Report. Ireland fell into recession again [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/mar/22/ireland-recession-global-slowdown-exports ] at the end of last year.

After Krugman finished his criticism of Romney's economic plan, there was a pause as Colbert tried to think of a good retort. "Well the Irish can handle it, OK? The Irish do very well in bleak, depressing times," Colbert said. "They've got those jigs and everything that they do."

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/19/paul-krugman-ireland-is-r_n_1609089.html [with Colbert segment with Krugman embedded (original at http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/415483/june-18-2012/paul-krugman ), and comments]


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Lost in Recession, Toll on Underemployed and Underpaid


Applicants, some already employed but looking for something better, at a weekly job fair in June sponsored by the Atlanta Workforce Development Agency.
Stephen Morton for The New York Times

Tough Times, Even for Those With Jobs
These are uneasy times for even those with jobs: Wages have been stagnant, benefits are shrinking, and fewer workers than before have been quitting their jobs, which often signals a lack of confidence that there are better jobs to move into.

Sources: “The State of Working America, 12th Edition,” Economic Policy Institute; Bureau of Labor Statistics
[ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/18/us/employed-workers-lack-confidence.html ]


Jonathan Adkins of Loganville, Ga., waited for his number to be called during a weekly job fair sponsored by the Atlanta Workforce Development Agency.
Stephen Morton for The New York Times


Sherry Woods, a van driver, sought a new job at the Atlanta fair.
Stephen Morton for The New York Times


Garland Miller has degrees in finance and accounting but works as a server at a restaurant. He went to a University of Georgia alumni job fair in Duluth.
Stephen Morton for The New York Times

By MICHAEL COOPER
Published: June 18, 2012

Throughout the Great Recession and the not-so-great recovery, the most commonly discussed measure of misery has been unemployment. But many middle-class and working-class people who are fortunate enough to have work are struggling as well, which is why Sherry Woods, a 59-year-old van driver from Atlanta, found herself standing in line at a jobs fair this month, with her résumé tucked inside a Bible.

She opened it occasionally to reread a favorite verse from Philippians: “And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ.”

Ms. Woods’s current job has not been meeting her needs. When she began driving a passenger van last year, she earned $9 an hour and worked 40 hours a week. Then her wage was cut to $8 an hour, and her hours were drastically scaled back. Last month she earned just $233. So Ms. Woods, who said that she had been threatened with eviction for missing rent payments and had been postponing an appointment with the eye doctor because she lacks insurance, has been looking for another, better job. It has not been easy.

“I’m looking for something else, anything else,” she said. “More hours. Better pay. Actual benefits.”

These are anxious days for American workers. Many, like Ms. Woods, are underemployed. Others find pay that is simply not keeping up with their expenses: adjusted for inflation, the median hourly wage was lower in 2011 than it was a decade earlier, according to data from a forthcoming book by the Economic Policy Institute [ http://www.epi.org/ ( http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/economic_policy_institute/index.html )], “The State of Working America, 12th Edition [ http://stateofworkingamerica.org/ ].” Good benefits are harder to come by, and people are staying longer in jobs that they want to leave, afraid that they will not be able to find something better. Only 2.1 million people quit their jobs [ http://www.bls.gov/web/jolts/jlt_labstatgraphs.pdf ] in March, down from the 2.9 million people who quit in December 2007, the first month of the recession [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/r/recession_and_depression/index.html ].

“Unfortunately, the wage problems brought on by the recession pile on top of a three-decade stagnation of wages for low- and middle-wage workers,” said Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a research group in Washington that studies the labor market. “In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there has been persistent high unemployment as households reduced debt and scaled back purchases. The consequence for wages has been substantially slower growth across the board, including white-collar and college-educated workers.”

Now, with the economy shaping up as the central issue of the presidential election, both President Obama and Mitt Romney have been relentlessly trying to make the case that their policies would bring prosperity back. The unease of voters is striking: in a New York Times/CBS News poll [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/19/us/politics/20120419_poll_docs.html ] in April, half of the respondents said they thought the next generation of Americans would be worse off, while only about a quarter said it would have a better future.

And household wealth is dropping. The Federal Reserve reported [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/business/economy/family-net-worth-drops-to-level-of-early-90s-fed-says.html ] last week that the economic crisis left the median American family in 2010 with no more wealth than in the early 1990s, wiping away two decades of gains. With stocks too risky for many small investors and savings accounts paying little interest, building up a nest egg is a challenge even for those who can afford to sock away some of their money.

Expenses like putting a child through college — where tuition has been rising faster [ http://trends.collegeboard.org/college_pricing ] than inflation or wages — can be a daunting task. When Morgan Woodward, 21, began her freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley, three years ago, her parents paid about $9,000 a year in tuition and fees. Now they pay [ http://students.berkeley.edu/finaid/news/detail25.htm ] closer to $13,000, and they are bracing for the possibility of another jump next year. With their incomes flat, though, they recently borrowed money to pay for her final year, and to begin paying the tuition of their son, who plans to start college this fall.

“You know there is going to be small incremental increases in tuition, but not the 8, 10, 12 percent increase every year we’ve seen,” said Ms. Woodward’s father, Cliff Woodward, 52, who lives in Pleasanton, Calif., and is an independent sales representative for an eyeglass company. So the Woodwards, who drive cars with 150,000 and 120,000 miles on them, have cut back.

“No vacations, no big screens,” Mr. Woodward said. “We’ve cut down on going out a little bit, but it’s worth it.”

People with college degrees still get jobs with better pay and benefits than those without, but many recent college graduates are finding it hard to land the kinds of jobs they had envisioned. David Thande, 27, who graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, five years ago, works part time as a clerk in an Apple Store.

“I’m not even full time, so I spend about 45 minutes every day begging people for hours, checking if someone canceled, struggling to make it work,” Mr. Thande said, adding that he had fallen behind on paying back his student loans [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/student_loans/index.html ].

Garland Miller, 28, who has degrees in finance and accounting from the University of Georgia and Kennesaw State University, had hoped to land a job at a big accounting firm, and to have been able to buy a home by now. Instead he finds himself working as the lead server at a steakhouse. But he has not given up on trying to move into the field that he prepared himself for: This month, he attended a jobs fair in Duluth, a suburb of Atlanta, organized by the University of Georgia for its alumni.

“I’m not in a job where I’m using all of my skills,” Mr. Miller said. He said that with many baby boomers unable to retire as early as they had hoped, there are fewer opportunities for younger workers to move up and take their places. “Instead you have everybody competing for entry-level positions,” he said.

Things are much worse for people without college degrees, though. The real entry-level hourly wage for men who recently graduated from high school fell to $11.68 last year, from $15.64 in 1979, according to data [ http://www.epi.org/chart/ib-327-table-1-hourly-wages-entry-level-2/ ] from the Economic Policy Institute. And the percentage of those jobs that offer health insurance has plummeted to 22.8 percent, from 63.3 percent in 1979.

Though inflation has stayed relatively low in recent years, it has remained high for some of the most important things: college, health care and even, recently, food. The price of food in the home rose [ http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/consumerpriceindex.htm ] by 4.8 percent last year, one of the biggest jumps in the last two decades.

Sam Chea, 38, who lives in Oakland and works nights delivering pizzas for Domino’s, said that he had been feeling the pinch at grocery stores, and worried that his lack of a college education was making it harder for him to find decent work. The other day he went to the nearby city of El Cerrito to apply for a second job at Nation’s Giant Hamburgers, a regional chain.

“I’ll be more secure with another job,” he said. “It’s scary. I don’t have an education, and I’m worried about my rent.”

“Everything’s gone up. Rent went up, gas went up, food went up, milk went up, cheeseburgers went up, even cigarettes went up,” said Mr. Chea, who had stopped at the barbershop to spiff up before his job interview. “I’m used to getting a haircut for $6 or $7, but they charged me $9. Even haircuts have gone up.”

Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta; Malia Wollan from El Cerrito, Calif.; and Ian Lovett from Los Angeles.

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Related

It’s the Economy: How to Make Jobs Disappear (June 24, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/magazine/are-the-jobs-number-killing-jobs.html

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© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/us/many-american-workers-are-underemployed-and-underpaid.html [with comments]


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'Back At Square One': As States Repurpose Welfare Funds, More Families Fall Through Safety Net


Brianna Butler stands outside the job-search class that the state of Georgia requires her to attend in order to receive a monthly welfare check.

Peter S. Goodman
Posted: 06/19/2012 12:07 pm

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. -- Brianna Butler would prefer never again to see the inside of the DeKalb County welfare office. She is eager to work. This she says repeatedly.

But she is a 19-year-old single mother with no one to look after her 10-month-old daughter, making work essentially beyond reach. Reluctantly, she has turned to an alternative that might at least provide minimal sustenance: She is applying for monthly $235 welfare checks from the state of Georgia.

Butler is eligible for those checks. Officially, she is homeless and has no income. Most nights, she sleeps on the floor at her mother's house in this predominantly African-American suburb of Atlanta, where 1 in 5 people live in poverty. Her mother is out of work and behind on her bills. When Butler runs out of money for baby food, she gives her daughter nothing but "water or juice for a day or two," she says, "just to tide her over."

Without childcare, however, she cannot satisfy Georgia's requirements that she first attend four weeks of classes designed to teach her how to look for a job, how to write a resume, how to handle an interview. So, instead of a job or welfare, Butler has only a bitter sense of resignation that she must do whatever it takes to secure cash.

She calls up older men whom she meets on the bus, en route to the county welfare office, in the aisles at the grocery store, wherever -- men who have made plain their appreciation for her youthful looks, while offering their phone numbers. She negotiates transactions that stave off tragedy for another day: sex for diaper money; a night's companionship for a sum that buys frozen vegetables and infant formula.

"They want something and I want something," Butler says. "It don't feel good, but I don't put myself down, because I've got to do what I've got to do. It's easy to judge me, so long as you're not walking in my shoes."

Butler is among the millions of low-income Americans sliding into the ranks of a group experts call "the disconnected" -- people who are both out of work and not receiving welfare. Their desperate straits reflect the extent to which key components of the American social safety net have been substantially reduced in recent years, just as the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression has amplified demand for help.

In Georgia, as in many states, gaining cash assistance has become increasingly difficult since the landmark welfare reform signed into law by President Clinton in 1996. Nationally, the share of poor families with children that were drawing welfare cash benefits plummeted from 68 percent to 27 percent between 1996 and 2010, according to an analysis of federal data by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). During the same period, the number of poor families with children grew from 6.2 million to 7.3 million.



Behind these precise data points lie messy stories of frustration over the seeming impossibility of navigating a bewildering welfare system that sometimes seems rigged for rejection; over mounting bills that can't be paid; over plans subject to constant renegotiation in lives ruled by scarcity. Like many states, Georgia does not track what happens to people who are eliminated from its welfare rolls. But in conversations with six women who have tried to gain cash assistance here, this is the picture that emerges: Vexation, fear and deepening trouble.

"When we weaken that support, we're moving people into very desperate situations," says LaDonna Pavetti, a welfare public policy expert at the CBPP. "They never know from one day to the next what life is going to bring."

Butler's experience provides a counterpoint to the narrative of self-sufficiency that was supposed to accompany welfare reform. Previously, a family could receive cash assistance for as long as they met eligibility requirements, which centered primarily on income and assets. But the reforms replaced that system with a new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), under which the federal government delivers lump-sum grants to states and allows them to tailor their programs as they see fit. Many states have imposed time limits, along with requirements that recipients engage in so-called work-related activities: working, looking for work or attending classes.

Advocates for welfare reform embraced the emphasis on work as a curative for the dependency they said the old system had fostered. Clinton touted the reform as a historic opportunity for poor families to trade welfare checks for paychecks. The government was to aid this transition with key support programs, including subsidized childcare and public transportation.

But a weak job market has eliminated working opportunities, especially for those who lack college degrees. Budget shortfalls have pared the promised supports. The size of the federal TANF grants to states has stayed flat, but shrinking in inflation-adjusted terms. States are given discretion in allocating the grants, and most have diverted increasing slices of this money to plug holes in their budgets, leaving less for cash assistance.

The one feature of welfare reform that has endured, say experts, is the emphasis on slashing welfare rolls.

"It's basically disappeared in a lot of states," says Peter Edelman, the Clinton assistant secretary of social services who resigned his post in protest of welfare reform, arguing that it abandoned vulnerable families. "We have a huge hole in the safety net."

Nowhere has this dynamic been more pronounced than in Georgia. Over the last decade, the number of adult TANF recipients in the state has fallen from more than 29,000 to fewer than 4,000, according to federal data.

"Things happen in welfare offices where people make it very difficult to get on the rolls," says Pavett, the CBPP expert. "Nobody gets on in Georgia."

Between 1996 and 2010, the number of families with poor children nearly doubled within the state, reaching 274,000, according to the CBPP analysis. Yet during those same years, the percentage of Georgia's poor families with children who were receiving cash assistance dropped from 98 percent to just 8 percent.

"The things you have to go through to get it," says Butler. "It's like, 'Why am I even wasting my time?' Everybody in the state knows. You know how hard it is to get TANF."

'THE WORD HAS GOTTEN OUT'

Ann Carter, TANF unit manager at Georgia's Department of Human Services, looks at the plunge in her state's welfare rolls and declares progress. "It's good news," she says. "The goal is to remove them to self-sufficiency, and as soon as possible."

But the state does not know what happens to people who used to be on welfare and aren't anymore. "We don't have a program to follow them," Carter says.

Multiple indications suggest that what happens next is deeper poverty.

Since 2005, the rate of poverty among Georgia families headed by single mothers has climbed from 39.6 percent to 41.4 percent, according to Census data.

Yet even as poverty has expanded in Georgia, the number of people who merely apply for TANF has actually fallen. In 2004, when Georgia's unemployment rate was less than 5 percent, roughly 12,000 people a month applied for cash assistance in the state, according to data tracked by the federal government. Last year, with the state's unemployment rate near 10 percent, the number of applications for cash assistance had fallen by half.

"Once we explain the program, the majority of people are going to withdraw their applications because of the work requirements," says Carter. "Some of them just don't feel that it's worth the effort and the time. The word has gotten out. Georgia has done a great job in educating the community that you're not going to receive the cash benefit unless you participate in the work requirement."

Social service agencies say the message is reinforced inside county welfare offices, where staff actively discourage people from applying for TANF. The fewer people who draw TANF benefits, the more federal TANF money is left to be allocated to other parts of Georgia's budget.

The Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence used to deploy volunteers to county welfare offices to help poor women fill out TANF applications. No longer.

"They're not giving out TANF anymore," says Allison P. Smith, the coalition's director of public policy. "People literally were stopped before they were even given a paper application. They were dissuaded by any number of people working in the welfare office, who would say things like, 'We'll make you jump through a lot of hoops.' 'We'll make you get your tubes tied.' 'We'll be more inclined to investigate you for child abuse or neglect, because this indicates you can't take care of your kids.' There was such a financial interest on the part of the state to keep the rolls down that they were willing to do whatever they needed to do."

In early March, Shadashia Gilbert arrived at the DeKalb County welfare office in the Atlanta suburb of Decatur to apply for TANF. She was living with her unemployed mother. They were behind on the rent and living day to day.

Brandon's father has been abusive, Gilbert says, and he was out of work, meaning she could not rely on him for child support. She hoped TANF would allow her to keep the lights on while she looked for work and continued college classes.

"This is so temporary," she says. "I'm going to finish my education and be financially stable and not depend on the government for anything."

She and Brandon arrived at the welfare office at about 8:30 a.m. They entered the low-slung brick complex and rode the elevator to the third floor. As soon as they stepped into the TANF department, she felt as if they had entered a space engineered for discomfort.

The windowless waiting room contained rows of blue vinyl chairs with prominent rips in the seats. More than a dozen women occupied the space, some with newborn babies in car seats. Toddlers wandered around, some screaming impatiently. The room had no toys, no play area, nothing to occupy the children stuck there for hours.

There they remained until 4 p.m., she said.

"You just sit in the room, with nothing to eat or drink," she said. "If you leave to go get something to eat, you lose your spot."

When their turn finally came, the caseworker treated Gilbert with contempt, she said.

"She told me, 'Why do you even want TANF?'" Gilbert said. "'You look like you make enough money. You don't want to be down here. You shouldn't want it. The $250, that's nothing. You shouldn't even want the money.'"

"They judge you," Gilbert said. "They make people feel bad. They interrogate you like you're a criminal. They look down on you because you're asking for help."

Gilbert eventually secured subsidized childcare, then got a job at a local pizza place, where she earns minimum wage. She has given up on cash assistance. She never even received a response to her application, she says.

"They didn't have to tell me," she says. "You just know. They are not going to give it to you."

FOREVER MEMORIES

In the rare moments when she can see past the struggles that shape her days, Brianna Butler imagines an alternate version of her life. She recalls how she was an honors student in elementary school, how she excelled in advanced trigonometry in high school, and how she had hoped to enroll in a local community college and pursue a career in law, maybe journalism.

"I really like debates," she says. "I used to love writing."

When she speaks in this vein, her eyes flicker to life, revealing her as the teenager she still is, despite her adult burdens. But advanced trigonometry has given way to the basic arithmetic of unpaid bills, a problem set rendered ever more challenging by unplanned motherhood.

She got pregnant in her senior year of high school, she says, after a late-night party and too many drinks. No one in her family was terribly surprised, least of all her mother, who had delivered Butler when she was herself only 18.

"She was just happy that I made it that far," Butler says.

Her mother was out of work and relying on food stamps, earning cash on the side by styling women's hair. She was looking after her own frail parents and left no doubt that caring for the baby would be Butler's sole responsibility.

"She made clear that it was my child," Butler says. "I was going to have to take care of my own child."

Kamiya was born on July 7, 2011. The baby's father was out of the picture by then, and he earned so little through occasional stints as an electrician that he was in no position to pay child support, Butler says. Two months later, still a high school student, she went to the welfare office and applied for TANF, securing a monthly check for $235.

A distant relative who runs a daycare business agreed to look after Kamiya for free while Butler completed high school. But when she graduated in January, the accumulated pressures of teenage motherhood landed with force. Her relative demanded full payment for daycare -- $165 a week. Without a job, she could not pay. Without childcare, she could not even look for a job or make it to the work readiness classes the state required of her as a condition of maintaining her TANF check.

"I would have either had to pay for daycare out of pocket, and I didn't have the money, or pay my mother to watch her," she says. "I don't have the kind of family that helps you out unless they get something in return. I was basically stuck."

She applied for subsidized childcare through the state's program, but the welfare office in Decatur repeatedly mislaid her paperwork, she says. The office referred questions to the state Department of Human Services, which declined to discuss Butler's case, citing confidentiality rules.

Her mother had helped her establish herself in an apartment in a neatly maintained, low-income complex of brick townhouses called the Parc Chateau. She had aimed to get a job and then enroll in college classes. But once the welfare office noticed she was missing her classes, they cut her TANF check and she lost the apartment.

So ended the only time she can recall when she felt a sense of control.

"I like to just be by myself," she says. "I had a chance to think about what I wanted to do with my life. But when it came to paying my bills, none of that thinking done me any good."

The academic literature is lean on people who lose their welfare benefits, but what surveys exist paint a bleak portrait.

A 2000 survey of Iowa families that left TANF a year earlier found that roughly 1 in 10 was subsisting on monthly income of $500 or less. Compared to those surveyed with higher incomes, these families were more than twice as likely to have experienced hunger and three times as likely to have been homeless. They were also more likely to have lived without heat, electricity or a telephone -- factors that exacerbated their disconnection from potential jobs and aid.

An Urban Institute paper published in 2003 traced how such women coped with their circumstances: through a combination of food stamps, low-income housing programs, charity and the aid of friends and relatives.

In short, in a patchwork fashion.

When Butler lost her TANF check, she moved into a grey, one-story house that her mother had rented in Stone Mountain, where a sign on the living-room wall serves up intentional irony -- "Cherished Moments. Shared Joy. Forever Memories. Family."

What gets shared here, says Butler, is irritation and insufficiency, each reinforcing the other.

Her mother sleeps in one of the four bedrooms, along with her sister, Butler's cousin and Kamiya, who occupies a crib in the corner. Butler's grandparents take up two bedrooms, while her 18-year-old sister and her son fill the last.

Every night, Butler scrounges for her own space.

"I sleep on the floor of whatever room I feel like lying in," she says. "Whatever room where somebody don't mind."

Someone often does mind, and not just about the floor space she occupies -- blocking access to the lone bathroom -- but also about which of the groceries she has eaten. When Butler brings home her own food, she double-knots the bags and hides them in a storage closet.

Someone minds when she borrows clothing.

"I don't have my own clothes," Butler says, on this day wearing a pink- and grey-striped summer dress that her mother reluctantly lent her.

Someone often minds that she and Kamiya are in the way, which feels like a problem nearly every second her daughter is awake.

A rambunctious girl with a face so expressive that she seems almost adult, Kamiya is a rare source of happiness in Butler's life. "That baby's smart," she says. "That baby keeps you smiling so much."

That baby is also prone to doing what babies do, perpetually questing for this or that, climbing up on the living room sofa -- which Butler's mother has deemed off-limits -- and tearing into belongings that sit piled in the bedrooms. She works her vocal cords, demanding attention. Someone always seems to be hollering that Butler needs to come running and grab her. Someone always seems to be implying that she isn't doing enough for her child.

"There's too much arguing at my mother's house," she says. "Everybody in the house makes it clear -- this is not my house."

Butler hopes to move into a nearby motel that charges $198 a month for a room with a double bed, a microwave and a refrigerator.

"I won't have folks yelling all day," she says. "I've got my privacy. I don't have to worry about nobody touching my stuff."

But how can she manage that move when she doesn't have a job? And how can she get a job or any regular source of income, even a $235-a-month welfare check, when she has no one to look after her baby?

Any thought that starts off toward a better place tends to run into this thicket and stop cold.

"I wish I would have just waited to have a child," she says. "I've reached the point where I've wanted to give my baby away, 'cause I just can't do it."

She says this and her face contorts in pain -- because she cannot imagine a tenable life with Kamiya, and yet cannot imagine any life without her; because she wonders how her daughter is being shaped by her proximity to strife.

"I worry about her all the time," she says. "Every single day."

Butler's cellphone rings. The caller is a man who sweet-talked her at a train station on her way to the welfare office. He wants to get together, right now. She hangs up in disgust.

"He said he'd get me a phone, get me a room, what they all say they can do -- put money in my pocket," she says. "A lot of people tell me all the things they can do for me, and half of them ain't done it yet."

She doesn't need a phone. She needs infant formula for Kamiya, who has run through the free cans she gets every month from the federal Women, Infants and Children program. She can't get together now, because Kamiya's paternal grandmother has been taking care of her and is supposed to be dropping her off any minute.

Butler sifts through the day's mail and pulls out bills: more than $400 to cover the cleaning at her old apartment, plus late fees and rent; a $168 bill from the electric company.

"This junk is hard," she says. "I'm thinking about who I'm about to call to get some money."

A letter from the Department of Human Services tells her that her application for subsidized childcare has been "denied due to funding." What does this mean?

She calls the woman whose name is on the letter, and is told to disregard it.

Even if Butler successfully negotiates this bureaucracy, arranges childcare and then manages to attend her required classes and keep her TANF check, that would supply a grand total of $235 per month. Her mother is planning to move with her parents into a special home for the elderly, where she will be caretaker, meaning Butler will soon need to secure her own place to live. Her monthly check would hardly cover that.

The core objective of welfare reform was to end dependence on cash assistance. In that regard, it has been a stunning success: Few can depend on $235 a month. But TANF was also supposed to be a bridge to self-sufficiency. Butler's experience is the sort of story cited by those who argue that it has fallen short.

"I can't wait to get a job," she says constantly. But the jobs she has been applying for -- a sanitation spot at an aquarium, warehouse work, a hotel maid position -- pay no more than $9 an hour. They all require experience. Her resume ends after a part-time job serving food at a Chinese restaurant for minimum wage. She was recently rejected for a job at Wendy's.

"I'm not a stranger to work," Butler says. "I don't mind doing stuff out of my comfort zone, as long as it's honest. But as far as my experience goes, I don't see getting a job."

Here is what some experts cite as the fundamental flaw of welfare reform: It was launched in the mid-1990s, when the job market was so tight that even a single mother with little experience could land some sort of position, provided she was given the supports. Even then, however, the sorts of jobs she could expect to secure were unlikely to lift her out of poverty. Now, many women on TANF cannot reasonably expect to get any job at all.

Since the passage of welfare reform in 1996, the share of employed working-age women with high school degrees but no college education has dropped from about 54 percent to 46 percent, according to Labor Department data.

To be eligible for TANF today in Georgia, a family of three can have income of no more than $784 a month. Which means that a single mother who gets on TANF and winds up with a minimum-wage job without health benefits is counted in the ledgers as a success -- even as she remains officially poor.

"We've told everybody, 'You've got to get a job,' but the kinds of jobs that are available for both men and women, with or without children, are not family-sustaining jobs," says Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. "Employment is not the anti-poverty solution. That's the bottom line."

'THROW US TO THE WOLVES'

Butler had not wanted to bother with TANF again, not after losing her check in March. But her mother insisted that she seek cash aid as a condition of moving back in, so in April she applied and was again approved. Again, she was told that she would have to attend work-readiness classes every weekday for four weeks before she would receive her check. Again, she applied for subsidized childcare.

And now, again, she is sitting in the waiting room at the DeKalb County welfare office, waiting for her name to be called so she can ask why she has not received the paperwork she needs to establish subsidized childcare.

She has taken two trains and a bus to get here -- a two-hour journey -- using a farecard she borrowed from a friend. She has twice dropped off the required forms, she says, and is baffled as to why the welfare office still has not processed her file.

"There aren't a lot of reasons around here," she says. "The worst part is the waiting and the coming back and the having to start over all the time. They lose your paperwork like it's nothing."

She waits for an hour and is summoned to the front desk, where a clerk tells her that her caseworker is not here. She is off all week, so nothing can be solved today. Butler has missed another day of her required work-readiness classes, putting her check in jeopardy -- this, for nothing.

"This is crazy," she says. "I've got to do it all over again. They're going to end up closing my case. These folks don't care about us. They just give us paper and throw us to the wolves."

The next day, Kamiya's paternal grandmother is willing to watch her, so Butler goes to class. She and a dozen other women gather in a room tucked in a darkened wing of an aging Decatur shopping mall.

The classes only reinforce the futility of her situation, Butler says. The instructors constantly tell students they don't belong in the program.

"They tell you, 'Don't apply for TANF,'" she says. "The lady says, 'If you know you're not job-ready, then don't come.'"

"Job-ready" means having childcare and transportation, as well as being able to satisfy an office dress code. At class, Butler is wearing an oversized, fraying, white button-down shirt emblazoned with an eagle, the logo of a college football team in North Carolina. A guy gave it to her, she says. It's all she has to cover her black tank top, which would be deemed unacceptable. She's wearing her mother's black dress shoes, which are at least a size too small, and her feet are killing her.

These are not just her issues. One woman in her class is "much more homeless than me," Butler says. She's living out of her car, raising three small children. The baby's father is abusive and she has a temporary restraining order on him. How is she supposed to be job-ready?

But when people ask these sorts of questions in class, they get answers that seem dismissive.

"The lady who runs the class, she'll say, 'You find a way to do it,'" Butler says. "She'll tell you to figure it out. She'll say, 'I understand what you're telling me, but' -- there's always the 'but.' She's just following the rules. I learn not to get mad at stuff like that."

Here is the plainest product of Butler's experience with the welfare system, her practiced creativity in keeping Kamiya fed despite her lack of regular income.

"I have to ask people for money," she says. "A male friend. I call somebody and tell them my situation, and they give me an ultimatum: Hang out with them. Go out to eat. Go to their house."

Butler is not coy about what she expects from these encounters -- usually $40 or $50, though once she made $80. The guy took her to Waffle House for dinner, followed by drinks at his house, where she spent the night. She paid her mother $20 to take care of Kamiya.

She talks about this arrangement as if discussing, say, how one might apply duct tape to patch a crack in a window for lack of money to buy a new pane.

"I just got to keep trying to do what I've got to do," she says.

And yet it takes a toll. Reality seeps in.

"I try not to let it bother me none," she says. "I just hide everything. I just make it seem like everything's straight. But not everything's straight."

Back when she was in high school, she sometimes used to cut herself, she says. When she got pregnant, she stopped, feeling a sense of responsibility, an imperative to endure.

But she wonders how long she can keep it up, she says.

She feels herself sliding into despair.

"The other day, I thought about hurting myself," she says. "When this depression thing comes down, it comes down."

On a recent Friday, she goes into the welfare office to pick up her free bus pass for the following week -- the transportation component of the TANF program. Her caseworker comes out from behind a door to tell her that she has missed too many classes. Her file has been closed.

She is furious. She is confused. It is all so familiar.

"Now I've got nothing," she says. "Right now, I'm back at square one."

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/19/breakdown-tanf-needy-families-states_n_1606242.html [with comments]


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As San Jose Clears Encampments of Homeless, it Also Stores Their Belongings


City workers removed a piece of artwork from a homeless campsite in San Jose in June.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
More Photos
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/06/19/us/20120620_HOMELESS.html

By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: June 19, 2012

SAN JOSE, Calif. — For years, the authorities periodically swept the banks of San Jose’s waterways, dismantling and discarding the elaborate, makeshift homes built by hundreds of homeless people. Tons of debris cleared, the homeless returned within days or hours.

The cat-and-mouse game served to check their numbers, at least enough to prevent a flood of complaints from residents nearby. But maintaining that balance has recently grown more complicated: fearing lawsuits by advocates for the homeless, the city has begun storing the belongings of people whose encampments have been cleared.

“The city of San Jose has become hip to that,” said Anna Davis, 45, standing in the woods along a creek where the city had just dismantled her shack. “They can’t just step over us anymore.”

City officials will store the belongings collected from three trial cleanups for 90 days before assessing the new policy’s cost and effectiveness. Nine people were removed from half a dozen makeshift homes this week, representing a fraction of the 800 to 1,000 people living along this city’s waterways. The total homeless population is more than 4,000, according to city figures.

Like many other places here in Silicon Valley and in the Bay Area just north, San Jose is struggling to cope with entrenched homeless encampments that proliferated during the financial crisis. Faced with increasingly impatient homeowners, residents and businesses, communities long known for their tolerance of the homeless, like San Francisco, have taken a harder stance by trying to restrict the behavior and presence of the homeless in public areas.

Berkeley, a magnet for the homeless because of its generous social services, is considering an ordinance that would prohibit sitting on sidewalks in commercial areas between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. The move, homeless advocates say, reflects a nationwide trend of criminalizing homelessness.

“It’s homeless fatigue,” said Neil Donovan, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless [ http://www.nationalhomeless.org/ ] in Washington.

New homeless encampments first cropped up in late 2007 along the West Coast before spreading to the rest of the country, Mr. Donovan said. Despite the improving economy, the number of encampments has remained steady because of cuts in social services.

In San Jose, encampments, which tend to be clustered and hidden in the woods along Coyote Creek and the Guadalupe River, have increased because of rising rents, stubborn unemployment and cuts in social services and outreach workers, according to a recent city report.

Last year the city and county water district spent about $250,000 removing a total of 175 tons of material in 36 sweeps. Given 72 hours’ notice, many of the homeless took their most valuable possessions, leaving behind trash for the authorities to collect, said Leslee Hamilton, executive director of the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy [ http://www.grpg.org/ ].

“They would come back to a clean place,” Ms. Hamilton said. “It was concierge service.”

Though the cleanups offered no real solution to the homeless problem, they were necessary to keep the encampments from swelling and waterways from becoming overpolluted, city officials said.

“This is about the homeless, the environment and the community,” said Leslye Corsiglia, the city’s housing director. “It’s too simple to say it’s just a homeless problem.”

Last fall, two homeless people whose possessions had been discarded during cleanups filed complaints with the city’s independent police auditor, LaDoris Cordell. Ms. Cordell dug up a long-forgotten 1990 city memo that required the city to keep the belongings of the homeless, and she warned that San Jose was vulnerable to lawsuits filed by advocates for the homeless for violating the memo’s guidelines.

In 2008, the city of Fresno settled a suit [ http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1496429/fresnos_23m_settlement_in_homeless_case_finalized/ ] for $2.35 million for destroying the belongings of hundreds of homeless during sweeps. The authorities suspended the cleanups in San Jose in March, leading to more complaints about growing encampments near residential areas. In late May, they decided to resume the cleanups, but with the new storage policy and a new emphasis on moving the homeless into temporary shelters and eventually long-term housing. The homeless can reclaim their possessions at a city warehouse.

“Would you rather spend money on vouchers, getting them into motels and some sort of subsidized housing, or on what Fresno did to settle a lawsuit?” Ms. Cordell said.

At the first trial cleanup in late May, the authorities collected six tons of material from six people’s camp under an overpass and stored 38 60-gallon bags of possessions, said Jennifer Garnett, a spokeswoman for the city’s environmental services, adding that the cleanup cost $7,000.

Of the six homeless people there, only one remains in a temporary shelter provided by social workers, and two have already returned to the spot under the overpass, Ms. Garnett said.

A later cleanup yielded better results, with all but one of nine homeless people accepting offers of temporary shelter at a motel. Using a two-year, $500,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, Downtown Streets Team, a private organization, hired some of the homeless to clean stretches of Coyote Creek regularly in their area, paying them $100 a week. The homeless people will stay at the motel until the end of the month before moving into long-term housing, said Eileen Richardson, the organization’s executive director.

The morning of the cleanup, Félix Ramiro Casillas, the one person who declined to go to the motel, enjoyed his last minutes in the shack that he had carved out of the creek bank. He had raised a plywood roof over his bedroom, fashioning a skylight with plastic bags over his bed. A nonworking television sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by paintings, artificial flowers and a collection of wine glasses.

“That’s Tiffany,” he said, picking up a glass. “That’s why I keep it.”

Mr. Casillas, who is in his 40s, said he had been at the same spot for four years. He had returned after every annual cleanup, rebuilding from scratch, and said he would do so again this time. He once worked as a waiter and gardener in San Francisco, he said, but began hearing voices in his left ear about five years ago.

“I can’t live with other people because I yell at night and they get upset with me,” he said.

As city workers began carrying away his shack, piece by piece, Mr. Casillas pushed a shopping cart filled with favorite paintings and other possessions. Ignoring the calls of social workers, Mr. Casillas, wearing a cowboy hat, sunglasses and a leather jacket, hurried through the park. A yellow earplug was lodged in his left ear.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/us/after-cleanups-san-jose-stores-property-of-homeless.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/us/after-cleanups-san-jose-stores-property-of-homeless.html?pagewanted=all ]

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Joe Walsh, GOP Congressman, Introduces New Federal Voter ID Bill



By Nick Wing
Posted: 06/19/2012 1:36 pm Updated: 06/19/2012 2:10 pm

Tea Party-backed Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) on Tuesday unveiled a new push to enact a national voter ID law ahead of the 2012 elections.

His proposed Federal Elections Integrity Act would require voters to present a government-issued photo ID in order to vote in federal elections.

“Current federal law requires those voting in federal elections to be American citizens,” Walsh said in a press release [ http://walsh.house.gov/latest-news/rep-walsh-stop-voter-fraud/ ]. "This long overdue bill simply enforces that requirement and will be a huge step towards combating voter fraud in this country."

Walsh said voter fraud was a "real issue" in the country, using an oft-repeated Republican refrain about the supposed prevalence of the problem.

"We have seen plenty of examples of people lying about who they are, and convicted felons, dead people, and illegal immigrants voting. This bill is just common sense," he added. "The American people understand that it makes no sense that a photo ID is required to get a library card or board an airplane, but not required to do something as sacred as voting."

While Republican-led hysteria about alleged efforts to sway elections through illegal voting efforts has remained at the forefront of political debate -- fueled by misleading [ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/05/18/486575/james-o-keefe-william-romero-citizen/ ] documentaries and controversial voter purge efforts [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/12/justice-department-sues-florida-voter-purge_n_1591354.html ] in Florida -- voting rights activists maintain that the trepidation is unfounded.

According to a 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice [ http://www.truthaboutfraud.org/pdf/TruthAboutVoterFraud.pdf#page=14 ( http://www.truthaboutfraud.org/pdf/TruthAboutVoterFraud.pdf )], many of the examples Republicans have sought to highlight in their advocating for voter ID laws are often over-hyped and easily sensationalized, while actual instances are "more rare than death by lightning."

Opponents of voter ID laws have meanwhile argued that potentially disenfranchising minorities and the elderly [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/03/how-voter-id-laws-are-being-used-to-disenfranchise-minorities-and-the-poor/254572/ ] in order to rectify a voter fraud problem that recorded statistics suggest is virtually non-existant is unjust.

For more on how proponents of efforts to combat alleged voter fraud explain their view, check out the Daily Show's recent segment on the Florida voter purge here [ http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-june-12-2012/purge-overkill---john-oliver---florida-s-voter-registration-law ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/13/daily-show-tears-apart-rick-scott-voter-purge-video_n_1593017.html )].

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/19/joe-walsh-voter-id_n_1609311.html [with comments]


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John Boehner Blames Obama For Derailing Dream Act After He Derailed Dream Act-Style Bill


House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Tuesday that President Barack Obama's latest policy change will derail the Dream Act, even though Boehner has already said the Dream Act can't advance.

Jennifer Bendery
Posted: 06/19/2012 1:27 pm Updated: 06/19/2012 4:14 pm

WASHINGTON -- House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Tuesday that President Barack Obama's policy change on immigration makes it less likely that Congress will be able to reach a bipartisan, final solution on the matter -- a curious claim given that Boehner snuffed out that possibility months ago.

"It puts everyone in a difficult position," Boehner said of Obama's policy change, during a scrum with reporters. "I think we all have concerns for those who are caught in this trap, who through no fault of their own are here. But the president's actions are going to make it much more difficult for us to work in a bipartisan way to get to a permanent solution."

Under the change, which took effect immediately, the administration will no longer deport [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/15/obama-immigration-order-deportation-dream-act_n_1599658.html ] undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and will begin granting work permits. The policy is along the same lines as the Dream Act, a decade-old bill that previously passed the House but failed in the Senate in 2010. Some 800,000 people are expected to come forward to receive deferred action from deportation.

Boehner's charge that Obama's move means less chance for bipartisanship in moving Dream Act legislation comes after he already quashed the idea [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57422400-503544/boehner-passing-rubios-dream-act-would-be-difficult-at-best/ ] that a Dream Act-type proposal offered by someone in his own party, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), could advance.

"The problem with this issue is that we're operating in a very hostile political environment," Boehner said in April. "To deal with a very difficult issue like this, I think it would be difficult at best."

The broader issue, though, is that Republicans have stood in the way of advancing immigration reform. Senate Republicans who previously signed on to immigration reform bills have backed away [ http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1988149,00.html ] since Obama took office, and in the House, Boehner himself has chalked up Democratic efforts to build momentum on the issue as little more than politics.

Boehner said in April 2010 [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20003781-503544.html ] that an effort by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to build GOP support for an immigration bill was "nothing more than a cynical ploy to try to engage voters -- some segment of voters -- to show up in this November's elections." At the same event, Boehner said there wasn't "a chance" that Congress could tackle the issue that year and, because of Americans' focus on job creation, coming up with a solution for addressing the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the country is "not where the American people are."

House and Senate Republican leaders have been virtually silent since Obama announced the immigration directive on Friday. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined to take questions on the subject during a speaking event that same day. The president's move has put them, along with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, in the tough position of either angering their conservative base by supporting it or alienating Latino voters by opposing it.

On Tuesday, the speaker took a shot at Obama for not putting forward a broader immigration reform proposal of his own and for not working with Congress on the issue.

"There is no plan," he said. "Three and a half years he's been in office. He talks about this but there is no plan. Secondly, was there any attempt to work with the Congress? No, there was not."

The reality, though, is that Obama threw his support [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obama-renews-push-comprehensive-immigration-reform/story?id=11062758 ] behind a reform framework agreed to in July 2010 by Sens. Schumer and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). That proposal, which mirrored a House bill with 100 Democratic cosponsors, would have allowed undocumented immigrants who have jobs, are in school or serve in the U.S. military to "earn legalization" by registering with the government, passing background checks, learning English and paying taxes and fees.

That bill never advanced, however, because it did not pick up Republican supporters.

Boehner also said the real reason Obama announced the immigration policy change is because he wants to take attention away from his record on job creation.

"He can't talk about the number one issue on the minds of Americans because his policies have failed. They've made things worse," he said. "He's turned to the politics of envy and division, which I don't think the American people are going to accept."

But a Bloomberg poll [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-19/obama-immigration-policy-favored-2-to-1-by-likely-voters.html ] released Tuesday shows that a majority of Americans endorse the president's action [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/19/obama-immigration-decision_n_1608307.html ]. Sixty-four percent of likely voters said they agreed with Obama's effort to halt deportation of young undocumented immigrants. Broken down by party, 86 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents backed the decision, while 56 percent of Republicans did not.

Below, more reactions to Obama's immigration decision from around the political world:

[embedded]

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/19/john-boehner-obama-dream-act_n_1609147.html [with comments]


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Mitch McConnell Waiting on Mitt Romney on DREAM Act


Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

By Steven T. Dennis
Roll Call Staff
June 19, 2012, 3:31 p.m.
Updated: 3:44 p.m.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) [ http://www.rollcall.com/members/202.html ] said today he’s waiting for presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney to announce a position on whether he supports deporting young illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children.

“He is the leader of our party from now until November,” McConnell said, explaining why he didn’t want to comment on the matter.

President Barack Obama announced Friday his decision to stop deportations of young immigrants eligible for the DREAM Act, but Romney has for days ducked questions on what should be done with the estimated 800,000 people who would qualify. During the presidential primaries Romney said he would veto the DREAM Act, but now faces a general election in which Obama is counting on Hispanic voters to help put him over the top.

McConnell said Romney was scheduled to talk to Latino leaders on Thursday. The DREAM Act would provide a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants who came to the United States before the age of 16, have been in the United States for five years, are younger than 30 and go to college or join the military. Obama’s order merely defers action for renewable two year periods, during which eligible people could work. But the policy could be reversed by a future president. Romney hasn’t said whether he would reverse it.

Asked if he thought allowing illegal immigrants to stay in the United States was amnesty, McConnell said that could be argued if it leads to citizenship.

When asked for his reaction to McConnell waiting for Romney and whether he would bring the DREAM Act to the floor to put people on record, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) quipped, “That’s a clown question, bro” — a reference to Nationals star Bryce Harper, who made a similar remark to a sports reporter recently.

Reid then proceeded to answer the question, saying that Romney has ducked repeatedly over what he would do. And he said Democrats have already tried twice to pass the DREAM Act, only to run into GOP filibusters.

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Asian immigrants to America surpass Hispanics in 2011 numbers


The report was released just days after the president announced a major shift in immigration policy that will allow young, undocumented immigrants to obtain work permits and avoid deportation.
Photograph: Jack Kurtz/Corbis

Shift reflects decline in immigrants from Latin America rather than a surge from Asian countries, Pew researchers note

Tom McCarthy in New York
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 June 2012 13.26 EDT

For the first time since US immigration [ ] quotas were abolished in the mid-1960s, Asian Americans have emerged as the largest immigrant group, surpassing Hispanics.

Asian Americans accounted for 36% of all immigrants in 2011, while Hispanics accounted for 31%, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center [ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans/ ]. Slightly more than 1 million people obtained permanent resident status in the United States [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa ] last year.

The shift does not reflect a surge in immigrants from Asian countries so much as a decline in immigrants from Latin America, the researchers noted. That decline has been tied to increasing strictures on immigration from Mexico, a weak US economy and stepped-up deportations under President Barack Obama [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/20/us-obama-immigration-idUSTRE78J05720110920 ].

As a group, Asian immigrants stand out for their disproportionate participation in the top end of the labor market and high levels of education and income, according to the Pew report [ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/asianamericans-graphics/ ], "The Rise of Asian-Americans". Asians account for three-quarters of new H-1B visas for highly skilled workers. India alone accounted for 56% of H-1Bs issued in 2011. The median household income of Asian Americans was $66,000, compared with a national average of $49,800.

"In an economy that increasingly relies on highly skilled workers, they are the best-educated, highest-income, fastest-growing race group in the country," Pew reported [ http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2290/asian-americans-rise-education-college-hispanics-population-income-identity-chinese-japanese-korean-vietnamese-indian-filippino ]. The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan group based in Washington, DC.

The report was released just days after the president announced a major shift in immigration policy that will allow young, undocumented immigrants to obtain work permits [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/15/barack-obama-end-deportation-undocumented-migrants ] and avoid deportation. While the effect of the new policy will likely take years to register, critics said it could encourage new immigration from Mexico and other suppliers of low-cost labor to the US economy.

The report lands a month after the Census Bureau announced that non-Hispanic whites now account for less than half [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/whites-account-for-under-half-of-births-in-us.html ] of all US births.

Asian Americans number 18.2 million, or 5.8% of the US population [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/population ]. The group is highly heterodox, including people from dozens of countries from India to the far east. The group does not show much internal cohesion. Only 14% call themselves simply "American", according to the information they gave Pew. Most Asian Americans, 62%, say they refer to themselves by their country of origin – Chinese, Filipino, Indian – or by their country of origin hyphenated with "American".

The opposite vectors of Asian and Hispanic immigration are captured in data compiled by the department of homeland security [ http://www.dhs.gov/files/statistics/publications/yearbook.shtm ]. In the years 2002-2006, the number of annual naturalized citizens from Mexico averaged 160,002, while the number from China was 62,877. In the ensuing block of five years, 2007-2011, the average number of naturalized citizens from Mexico fell to 157,223, while Chinese immigration grew to 75,807 annually.

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/19/asian-immigrants-america-surpass-hispanics [with comments]

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Asian group: Poll too complimentary

Advocates say they fear the report underplays the community's problems.
6/20/12
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77599.html

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GOP Unmoved By West Virginia Dems’ Decision To Skip Convention



Evan McMorris-Santoro
June 18, 2012, 6:48 PM

Three of the biggest names in West Virginia Democratic politics will skip the Democratic National Convention this summer, once again highlighting President Obama’s rocky relationship with the state’s electorate.

But if Sen. Joe Manchin, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and Rep. Nick Rahall — all Democrats — thought pulling out [ http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/233325-manchin-rahall-tomblin-to-skip-democratic-national-convention ] of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte this September would earn them the respect of Republicans, they’re wrong.

Tomblin made it clear the decision was an Obama snub. Like Manchin [ http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/04/joe-manchin-obama-romney.php ], he’s refused to say [ http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/archives/2012/05/tomblin-echoes.php ] whether he’s voting for Obama this November, and has publicly distanced himself from the president more than once.

“Gov. Tomblin has made the decision to not attend the Democratic National Convention,” said Tomblin campaign spokesperson Chris Stadelman. “As he has said, he has serious problems with both Gov. Romney and President Obama. The governor feels that his time is best spent working in West Virginia to move our state forward instead of attending a four-day political rally in North Carolina.”

Machin didn’t mention the president in his statement announcing he won’t attend the convention.

“I intend to spend this fall focused on the people of West Virginia, whether that’s representing them in my official U.S. Senate duties or here at home, where I can hear about their concerns and ideas to solve the problems of this great nation,” he said. “I will remain focused on bringing people together for the next generation, not the next election.”

Manchin and Tomblin face re-election fights in the fall, as does Rahall.

Rahall has said on record [ http://thetandd.com/politicalpress/w-va-gov-tomblin-keeping-obama-at-arms-length/article_042c29ea-94c6-11e1-b142-001a4bcf887a.html ] he will vote for Obama in November. Not that it will matter much: Mitt Romney’s expected to win the state handily. A virtually unknown federal inmate earned more than 40 percent of the vote [ http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/05/14/how_did_a_felon_get_41_of_the_presidential_primary_vote.html ] in the recent Democratic West Virginia primary, suggesting primary voters in the state were less than thrilled thrilled with the current Democratic president. But Rahall’s decision to skip the convention didn’t earn him much praise from Republicans.

“Rahall may have realized his re-election chances are sinking but hiding from Obama’s convention won’t change Rahall’s record of supporting President Obama and his job-destroying agenda more than 82 percent of the time in Congress,” said Nat Sillin, spokesperson for the NRCC.

The state Republican Party told TPM the trio’s decision to skip the convection won’t earn any toned-down treatment from the GOP.

“Absolutely not,” said West Virginia GOP Executive Director Chad Holland.

“The fact that they’re running and hiding from the Democrat convention when everybody knows that the only reason they’re doing it is so they don’t have to answer the question yet of who they support for president shows a profound lack of leadership,” he said. “West Virginia has serious problems and it needs serious men and women to resolve these problems. And if you can’t step up and say you support for president, I don’t know how we can trust you to solve the problems facing fellow West Virginians.”

© 2011 TPM Media LLC

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/gop-unmoved-by-west-virginia-dems-decision-to-skip-dem-convention.php [with comments]

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