All the news and views fit to consume during your morning grumpy.
1. A new report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness reveals that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) (aka IslamoFascoKenyanStimulusBill) was a crucial tool in keeping Americans off the street. Roughly $1.5 billion of Recovery Act funds were spent on “rental assistance and programs steering recently evicted people toward new housing.”
The Homelessness Research Institute, put the number of Americans living on the streets or in shelters at just over 636,000 in 2011. That’s down about 6,000 from the group’s 2009 estimate. The figure is based on reports and street counts from state and local agencies that receive federal housing funds.
Roman said the stimulus money, coupled with pre-recession federal programs aimed at veterans and the chronically ill, have kept that figure down even as the U.S. economy saw its worst downturn since the 1930s.
The Center for American Progress notes:
In fact, the Homelessness Prevention Rapid Re-housing Program (HPRP) program alone, which was directly funded by the Recovery Act, helped 94 percent of the program’s participants who were homeless or a step away from homelessness find permanent housing. The Recovery Act also kept 6 million Americans out of poverty and created at least 3.3 million jobs.
Mitt “Mr. 1%” Romney and Newt “Teach the blacks how to work” Gingrich would have let those people rot on the streets. The churches will help them, right?
2. I designed a new campaign poster for the Newt Gingrich 2012 Presidential Campaign after watching the interview with his second wife on ABC News last night.
Allegations made by Marianne Gingrich that Newt wanted an “open marriage,” so that he could carry on an affair with the woman who would become his present wife, were repeated throughout the day on various networks and had been the explosive opening to a nationally televised debate earlier in the evening.
(Newt) Gingrich said that “every personal friend I have who knew us in that period says the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They weren’t interested, because they would like to attack any Republican.”
Ah, yes. The tired old “liberal media” canard. A surefire way for any Republican under fire to inoculate himself from thorough enterprise journalism…blame those dirty liberals in the media. But does the charge hold up? Studies show it does not.
Conservatives are extremely well represented in every facet of the media. The correlative point is that even the genuine liberal media are not so liberal. And they are no match—either in size, ferocity or commitment—for the massive conservative media structure that, more than ever, determines the shape and scope of our political agenda.
In a careful 1999 study published in the academic journal Communications Research, four scholars examined the use of the “liberal media” argument and discovered a fourfold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But a review of the media’s actual ideological content, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for this view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to “increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials.”
