South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer
Andre Bauer is the Republican Lt. Governor of South Carolina and is running to replace the current Governor, Mark Sanford. You know, the guy who told his staff he was going hiking on the Appalachian Trail and then went to visit his girlfriend in Argentina?
So anyway, Andre Bauer held a town hall meeting, and told this little parable about helping poor people:
“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better,” Bauer said….
Bauer’s remarks came during a speech in which he said government should take away assistance if those receiving help didn’t pass drug tests or attend parent-teacher conferences or PTA meetings if their children were receiving free and reduced-price lunches.
Not yet realizing that anyone would be troubled by this comparison, Bauer went on to say:
“I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina,” adding, “You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I’ll show you the worst test scores, folks. It’s there, period.
“So how do you fix it? Well you say, ‘Look, if you receive goods or services from the government, then you owe something back.'”
Bauer said there are no “repercussions” from accepting government assistance.
“We don’t make you take a drug test. We ought to. We don’t even make you show up to your child’s parent-teacher conference meeting or to the PTA meeting.
Hey, that’s a great idea. I think we should drug test those earthquake survivors in Haiti. Give them a drug test before they get dug out of the rubble or get any medical treatment. That’ll show those deadbeats for being to poor to get themselves out of trouble!
Now that Democrats are calling for his head (not that they have much room to criticize), Bauer is scrambling to explain himself.
“Maybe the metaphor isn’t the best metaphor. I agree with them on that,” said the 40-year-old gubernatorial candidate. “But I think there are a lot of people that use issues like this to divide people and never offer solutions. The easiest thing to do is criticize someone for saying something, other than saying, ‘Maybe we should talk about this.'”
He also said that:
he did not mean food should be taken from children, but rather that their parents should lose welfare benefits.
OK, but wouldn’t taking welfare payments away from parents result in less for for their children? Anyway, get this–it turns out Bauer himself received government help as a child.
He noted he was a beneficiary of free lunches after his parents divorced when he was 11, so he’s not bashing the needy. But he said there’s a difference between those who are truly needy and those who are just lazy.
“I came from a broken home. I have been in this situation,” he said, noting that he spent today collecting shoes, blankets and other goods for victims of the Haiti earthquake. “Do I think poor people ought to be helped? Yes. I’m saying we’ve got to do things to break the cycle.”
I guess it’s OK to help people in Haiti after all. Those earthquake survivors must be more deserving and not as “lazy” as the poor people in South Carolina.
I wish I could talk to Lt. Gov. Bauer. I’d like to ask him if the bankers who got bailed out by the government to the tune of trillions of dollars should give something back for the help they got. Should they be drug tested too? Should we find out how their kids are performing in school and whether the bankers attend PTA meetings and parent-teacher conferences? Or should we maybe ask the bankers to help out some poor people? Should we do something to “break the cycle” of greed and corruption that the bankers have engaged in?
This is an open thread.
Filed under: General | Tagged: Andre Bauer, Mark Sanford, politically tone deaf, Politics, Poverty, South Carolina |
The Confluence 
Bauer sounds like a mad hatter to me. Is he any relation to Gary?
I was wondering the same thing. They don’t look much alike though.
And this is the guy who was in charge of SC while Sanford was running around Argentina with his gf.
My first reaction, too. This guy has to have crawled out of the same stagnant gene pool as Gary.
who is Gary?
Gary Bauer is that evangelical wingnut who looks and sounds like Peter Lorre.
I’ve always thought that he looked like a bit of a pop-eyed frog. Now if he could deliver his gems in Peter Lorre’s voice, we’d be getting somewhere.
He is blowing a very loud dog whistle, the same one that Reagan used when he talked about “Welfare Queens”.
dog whistle hell. That’s a full-out air siren.
Yep. The backblast is just beginning. It’s going to get worse.
A passenger tried to open a door while an airplane was in flight.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/23/flight-dulles-diverted-denver/
great…just great. We need some cross country high-speed rail to replace these airborne disasters.
I’m completely plane phobic and get panic attacks just being near them. Of course, it figures that I have a family full of aviation lovers. And my poor husband has to drive 16+ hours to Panama City to visit our daughter and grandkids cuz there’s no way in hell I’ll take the plane.
Not with the lobbyists for the airline industry lurking around.
THANK YOU
That is a dream of mine to have bullet trains in this country,
one across the top of the country, one across the bottom of the country, and one up the east coast and one up the west coast. Regular passenger railroads could have feeder lines to meet the bullet trains at main stops.
I know it will not happen in my lifetime but this country is so beautiful and diversified people need to have the chance to see it.
WOMEN WITH INTELLIGENCE AND EXPERIENCE,MEN WHO SUPPORT THEM AND COUNTRY BEFORE PARTY ALWAYS
PUMAS,BUBBAS,EQUALISTS AND THOSE PEOPLE RULE
it wasn’t laziness on Main Street that caused the financial crisis, it was greed on Wall street.
Yup, it was ‘The Poor Millionaires AKA The Greedos’, that did it and want to continue to make the poor poorer.
OK, I am off, I just heard on CNN the anchor posing the question if Brown is the GOP’s Obama in 2012. One does a speech and the other a cheesecake (got around spammy) spread and he is NOW qualified. Oh, but the women, are all tired looking or sexually objectified.
Sorry, but it is clear that the corporations are running BOTH parties and that the VOTERS have lost their Rights and the value of their votes have been nullified.
I need some aspirin …
I’ve been hearing Brown touted as a 2012 contender too. I’ve been waiting for myiq’s “cheesecake” post to bring it up.
The corporation big wigs have a winning CHANGE meme going and they are going to use it with Brown and possibly send him to Greece to give a speech at the Parthenon with 200,000 people cheering while they serve free wine and food and book a good band.
I am sorry but I am going to grow some vegetables or start a sewing project, but I can stomach the open push by big corps of the political system while the American people become poorer and poorer each day.
Want to bet who the “Corporate Media and their talking Monkeys” back in 2012 If ( and that’s a big if ) Brown decides to pull an Obama?
Somehow I think Obama just may have the chrome stripped off of him by the very same idiots who helped him get elected!
I actually heard a neighbor of mine ( A conservative wing nut ) call Brown…”The Great White Hope!”
Unbelievable!
I’m smacking my forehead with my palm, but really, is it any different than how Ocultists spoke of their saviour?
😯 EEEAK…. 😯
omg, that’s awful
I’d like to just curl up into the fetal position for a decade. Maybe two.
Come over to my house and we’ll drink ourselves silly.
🙂 Someone actually said to me today, “Are you depressed? Sometimes you have this look like you’re losing the will to live.” lol
This was so predictable it isn’t even funny. He’s the GOP Obama and it was a really bad idea to put yet another handsome empty suited faux populist moron who looks moderate but isn’t in a small select group close to the Presidency. Michelle Obama actually inadvertantlymade a good point when she said, “Don’t vote for cute,” it’s dangerous!
“don’t vote for cute” was a dig at Palin but it was more relevant to the hopey dopey campaign BO was running
Yep. Not much danger of anyone voting for a she because she’s cute, but if the hipster and faux feminist crowd had followed her advice, we wouldn’t be in this position. 😉
I once in a while think that there is nothing wrong with this country that blowing up all the MSM outlets wouldn’t fix.
What did Dean in during 2004 was not the scream, it was the way the media went after him for saying he wanted to break up the big media conglomerates.
There really should be a law that the News media can only be owned by single corporations that do news ONLY. No more subsidiaries of huge corporate conglomerates.
I just got this “breaking news” from Politico.
the Obama team has been saying Obama is going to show his fighting side for the longest time it seems… even when he was going against Hillary and she kept getting stronger during the Texas/Ohio/PA days, they’d say we’d see a more passionate Obama, but Obama was dragging his way to the finish line and that’s even being such a media darling
Yes he showed his fighting side after the Philly debate by giving Hillary the finger. Emotionally, he is not a completely grown adult.
Check out how well he’s being received in the comments on his essay at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/22/AR2010012204216_Comments.html
😈
Wow. What a smack down. Most of it is…”We’ve heard this BS before so stuff it unless we see some real action.”
If Obama is going to make Plouffe more available to other Democrat campaigns, those congresspeople should start running as fast as they can in the other direction. Did you read Plouffe’s editorial? The man is practically illiterate. A couple of his points:
Someone needs to take this clown aside and teach him both grammar and manners. How embarassing!
I’ve seen him, his spiel is reminiscent of a really bad motivational speaker.
Based on his editorial, that sounds about right.
One who lives in a van down by the river.
But he won the Cannes Lion last year for the bestest brand marketer in the world.
Lol Well, luckily he didn’t roam around the stage with the mike for too long before switching to Fritz Lang impressionism starring Scarlett Johanssen. Maybe the jury was basing it on that.
grayslady: I quoted that section in the other thread. It’s actually the best advice in his op-ed (a reflection on how useless it was). And, it’s reminiscent of Obama’s Everybody Gets Wee-weed Up in August. Not sure why they needed Plouffe to come say what Obama, Gibbs, etc. have already been saying…since August.
You know, Wonk, I had the very same thought about the “wee-weed up” remark. These guys all seem to have some sick fixation.
“Feisty,” what an interesting word here. It’s usually applied to women to denote truculent but ineffective and ultimately ignorable.
Is feisty better than fierce. We should ask Oprah.
“Feisty?” Good grief, “feisty” is a word you use for peekapoos and Chihuahuas. Are they just flat out going to admit that Obama’s a lapdog?
This is an excellent post BB and your metaphor is right on; outrageously right on!!!!!
The comments in reply to Fluffy’s wsj article are just great. I know such a sample is probably a biased crowd but I love it anyway—they have my bias.
I like your trade-off bb. Require the banksters to create jobs—real jobs—since they are the masters of private enterprise I’m sure they could turn this thing around over night. They just need to be motivated to do the right thing. (Sure)
Maybe the banksters could fund day care centers so that poor women could work and/or go back to school.
I like that very much. Those day care centers could be placed in neighborhood housing compliments of all those foreclosures and empty spaces. They could fund a “math chair” for every elementary and middle school to support math mastery across the nation. They could sponsor neighborhood sports centers instead of those big giant stadiums that muck up traffic and leave taxpayers with a huge bill to pay. They could open savings accounts for every 6th grader in the US, send a teller to the school every week to collect student deposits and begin teaching youngsters how to save and manage money—they should like that.
This jerk’s thoughts will probably be in the revised Contract on America.
bb wrote:
when I read that I couldn’t help but think maybe they could undergo fMRI tests to compare their brain activity to that of drug addicts
Makes sense. Gambling addiction or adrenaline addiction maybe.
Lot of it is also pathologic arrogance, like BO.
Where do they find these knuckle draggers? It should be tremendously hard to find that big an asshat. They must have a farm team system and raise them from early childhood.
BTW, Gov. Sanford had to be court-ordered to accept stimulus money.
Ayn Rand would be proud. Social Darwinism at its finest.
Too Much of a Bad Thing
Who’s panting for Obama speech number 412? Exactly no one.
Pity it has to come from NRO online, but the entire article contains the sort of scathing wit that I haven’t seen since Dorothy Parker. Nice find.
Dorothy Parker. {Sigh.}
Mark Steyn is a fine writer and a great wit. I don’t have to agree with him for him to make me laugh. I always read his columns in the Orange County Register for the smile factor.
Well guess what. Even if the idea wasn’t morally reprehensible, it doesn’t work. Look at Africa. Excruciating poverty is rampant. So is reproduction.
These social Darwinistic nutcases really need to think — in addition to how stupid they are — how evil they are.
These social Darwinistic nutcases really need to think — in addition to how stupid they are — how evil they are.
you mean they can think .
The South has some ‘spainin to do on why their approach to social welfare, right to work laws, little or no consumer protection etc. has not led to prosperity for all in the south. How come if that works, the south is NOT the place to be for all the bennies of prosperity.
All I can say to that is compared to the social meccas of Ohio, Michigan, and California so far my own southwestern state is doing pretty damn good.
We’re a very long way from prosperity for all, but we’re not bankrupt yet.
I guess I am thinking South as MS, LA, AR, AL, SC, NC and their rural areas in particular. But then my hyperbole may be overwrought here. I was particularly thinking of SC and our poster child. I was there in fall and winter a couple of times and it seemed like the most thriving thing was kudso and churches (but great people and I like the way all the kids say yes ma’am and yes sir).
Now this is some funny $hit from Hillary for Texas at Hillary is 44….
http://tinyurl.com/yfbtrbx
January 27th presents an opportunity for the proletariat to watch in awe as a strong leader and gifted orator demonstrates what it means to be God-like. That leader is Steve Jobs. Later in the day Obama will mumble some shit.
Jobs has a big unveiling of Apple’s new iTablet that earlier that day.
Let’s add to that are their any sane democrats in washington DC?
Pelosi is talking about trying to still get the HRCA through but dropping the clause to make insurance companies take patients with pre-existing conditions. Isn’t that about the only good thing left in there?
You’ve got to be kidding. That *is* insanity.
I didn’t see that mentioned specifically in the NYT article. Did you see that elsewhere, by chance? The only mention of pre-existing conditions that I saw in the article had to do with children 19 years old and younger.
that was the only talking point the Ds had left (unfortunately under the kind of policy the Ds were rolling out, it sounds like the “coverage” that people would be able to afford wouldn’t really help them with their pre-existing conditions)
Yup. People with pre-existing conditions would have no limit on what insurance companies could charge them for a policy. So assuming they could even afford the premiums, they’d be unlikely to seek actual health care because of stratospheric deductibles and co-pays. Not to mention that just about anyone over the age of 40 has some sort of “pre-existing condition”.
Obama in Ohio on Friday was trying to sell his health insurance reform saying a mandate was necessary to cover pre-existing conditions.
But, a mandate with genuine competition in place to keep costs reasonable is quite different than what “health insurance reform” has panned out to be, and the denial of coverage based on pre-existing conditions is inhumane regardless.
Hillary in Las Vegas in March 2007, presidential forum on healthcare, starting around the 4:15 mark below:
BB: Brilliant post.
Thank you!
There are no words to describe this man’s stupidity. Not only is he mean-spirited but we are going through some of the worst economic times of my lifetime.
How did somelike this get into any office? I do not think the people of his state could be that bad.
WOMEN WITH INTELLIGENCE AND EXPERIENCE,MEN WHO SUPPORT THEM AND COUNTRY BEFORE PARTY ALWAYS
PUMAS,BUBBAS,EQUALISTS AND THOSE PEOPLE RULE
Among the accomplishments listed on his website:
“He has put his firsthand insights into public education to work at the State House, pushing through such common-sense school discipline legislation as the Corporal Punishment Act that protects school districts who use spankings – with parental permission – from lawsuits.”
That will make it into the new COA for sure–do well, kids, or we starve you, paddle you, and lock you in the cupboard. The woman who forced her son to kill his hamster as punishment for bad grades will be on the advisory board.
What?! You’re joking, right?
About the hamster, I mean.
http://critters.blogs.starnewsonline.com/11413/mother-accused-of-forcing-son-to-kill-his-pet-hamster/
Unfortunately, no.
http://www.wpix.com/news/local/wpix-mom-forced-son-to-kill-hamster,0,2762214.story?track=rss
I don’t think so, bb. I seem to recall reading an article about that awhile ago.
I’m afraid not. http://www.ajc.com/news/cops-mom-forces-son-280517.html
What in sulfuric HELL is wrong with some people? 👿
Is that a rhetorical question?
Anyone else hear that a Puma stalking site was just shut down because HillBuzz exposed them? Apparently the obots were harassing them at work etc.
😯 Goodness me…sounds troubling…
. . . for the Buttsniffers.
😆
We knew you’d be all over this. Wha’ happen’d?
Apparently the boys at Hillbuzz got attacked and took it personal.
http://hillbuzz.org/
“Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
Yes, do tell.
Blogstalkers out Hillbuzz, Hillbuzz returns the favor.
I’m just a spectator.
{{munches popcorn}}
They made lots of money off the Conservatives, but supposedly one or both are fairly apolitical non-voters.
WTF is right. It seems fairly paranoid to be so obsessed with PUMA. If it’s more than just a couple of deeply disturbed guys…very odd.
Although I don’t believe in doing anything for major parties, it wouldn’t hurt if the Dems threw everything into an upset in SC. I wonder if African American turnout could be as high as in 2008, which is the only way that state has a chance. Obama needs to go there and call the Lt. Gov. out, but he’s lost his magic. It make me sick to read Bauer’s comments.
All the Dems do is fight PUMAs. They ought to be fighting SOB’s Bauer.