Cutting to the chase: Mickey Kaus is full of crap, again. In his column today or yesterday he rambles on about giving the welfare moms the $18,000 "retraining money"---RE-training?---in cash. He says Bush should give them the money rather than to a government agency. This would mean they can choose how to "retrain" themselves. These people need to be trained. Period. Anybody who has ever worked with these people know that they have life histories of making bad decisions. They will choose bad programs, fake schools, or find some scam---because most of them are penny ante scammers anyway--where a fake school takes the money and kicks back half. They don't think about tomorrow til five minutes before midnight. They have never planned anything. They don't have dreams they have fantasies. They have drug "problems." They have crime "problems."
They have a life like the cab driver in "Collateral" who lives in a fictional world, only they have no jobs just fantasies about life, politics, jobs, and relationships. They marry the worst possible people, if they bother to marry. They drift from place to place. The entire structure of their lives must be changed and they must be willing to change; something 99% of the people I've worked with say they want to do but never do.
Somebody has to supervise these people and control their "training money" or nothing will happen. I referred yesterday to the Jane Galt piece that you should read. Too many of us are in the "business" of criticizing or evaluating things we know nothing about---we've read about it--. Sullivan, a Brit homo from Oxford, knows nothing about this country only what he invents in his own deviant brain; he's not Little League, not a class presdident, never ridden an American School bus; Lefty elites that know nothing past the latest Page Six and the latest literate fad; guys writing about Baghdad from London; you get my drift.
Bottom line for me is that a person who is really trying to break that cycle of poverty deserves help, but help from people other than government hacks. Personal help from people like us. Mentors, if you will. That is what MUST happen.
BTW: Yesterday, due to my own bad writing, I clearly implied that the GOP was somehow "at fault" in killing Intel Reform. The fact is that there are valid reasons to rewrite parts of it. The main concern is that the bill as written keeps intel from the "war fighter", instead channeling all to bureaucrats at the CIA and others before getting to the people who need it. Remember the time when we had Bin Laden nailed but the people on the ground had to clear an attack through lawyers in Florida? He got away. The illegal immigrantion, best summed up by Kim duToit, is also a factor. So now I'm more or less clear.
