Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Trump Admin Moves Toward Shutting Down Food Stamp Loopholes

 Via Billy

 U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue speaks during a forum April 18, 2018, in Washington, D.C.
The proposed changes could save taxpayers $15 billion every year over the next 10 years, USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a statement.
The Trump Administration plans to implement a rule change to close loopholes that states have been using to exempt large portions of healthy, younger food stamp recipients from work requirements.

The new rule changes the application process for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, from every two years to every year, and narrows the unemployment benchmark for applicants.

Federal law allows states to waive work requirements for areas with high unemployment rates (10 percent and above), and higher than the national rate (currently 3.7 percent). For decades, states have abused this flexibility in order to waive work requirements for as many ABWDs as possible, the Foundation for Government Accountability says.

“Despite record low unemployment rates nationwide, more than a third of the nation lives in an area where work requirements have been waived,” FGA said.

More @ WJ

Erdogan Won't Meet Bolton After Bolton Insists On Protecting Kurds

Via Billy


On Tuesday, White House national security adviser John R. Bolton left Turkey’s capital, Ankara, after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, angered that Bolton had stated that Turkey needed to promise it would not attack the Kurds after the United States pulled its troops from Syria, refused to meet with Bolton, then told the Turkish parliament that Bolton was delivering a message from Israel. He stated, "Bolton's remarks in Israel are not acceptable. It is not possible for me to swallow this. Bolton made a serious mistake. If he thinks that way, he is in a big mistake. We will not compromise."

The Legacy of D.W. Griffith

 

None knew it then, but in 1915, Southern agrarian influence on the movies was at its height. The film trade had just left Fort Lee, New Jersey, only to land in the equally piously named Mount Lee, California. Of course, the latter’s new name was Hollywood, due to its Kansas prohibitionist developers, but it was also the same name as the Richmond cemetery sanctified by so many Confederate figures.

More important was that the industry leader was director David Wark Griffith, son of a Kentucky Confederate colonel and the man who dominated the industry almost from the moment he started making shorts for Biograph. All that was really pre-history. On February 8, he premiered The Birth of a Nation at Clune’s Auditorium. This Southern view of the Confederacy and Reconstruction is the most important movie in history. It became the biggest hit ever and provided the cash for innumerable film fortunes. Politics aside, no film historian disagrees that it’s the most important film artistically in that it served as the textbook for generations of filmmakers.