{"id":1534,"date":"2010-01-25T10:40:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-25T14:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/01\/25\/why-republicans-have-to-do-better\/"},"modified":"2010-01-25T10:40:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-25T14:40:00","slug":"why-republicans-have-to-do-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/01\/25\/why-republicans-have-to-do-better\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Republicans have to do better"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s clear from this month&#8217;s election in Massachusetts that Americans want options other than the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n<p>Which is why it&#8217;s so frustrating that the Republicans continue to make bone-headed plays like this one.<\/p>\n<p>South Carolina&#8217;s lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer, was caught on tape <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=jpb4nwfiaPY\">comparing poor people to stray animals<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;My grandmother was not a highly educated woman,&#8221; Bauer says. &#8220;But she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals.  You know why?&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>A woman in the audience interrupts, saying, &#8220;Because they&#8217;ll never leave you?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But Bauer&#8217;s point is far more distasteful:  <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Because they breed!&#8221; he says. &#8220;You are facilitating the problem.  If you give an animal or person ample food supply, they will reproduce.  Especially ones that don&#8217;t think too much further than that.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>His point seems to be that by denying adequate nutrition to poor families you will convince them to have fewer babies.<\/p>\n<p>He actually argues that school lunch programs are bad because schools with the highest percentage of kids receiving free lunches have low test scores.  <\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve written here before, Americans &#8212; including myself &#8212; are interested in and open-minded about conservative ideas.<\/p>\n<p>Free market solutions to endemic poverty are clearly an important part of the overall strategy.  <\/p>\n<p>But this kind of thinking is, bluntly, barbaric.  <\/p>\n<p>Bauer suggests in his speech that anyone condemning this kind of talk is blinded by political correctness.<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s wrong.  Making sure America&#8217;s children have at least one decent meal every day isn&#8217;t politically correct, it&#8217;s morally correct.  <\/p>\n<p>From New York state to the halls of Congress, voters want a revitalized GOP, with fresh ideas for tackling our problems.<\/p>\n<p>A good next step is for national Republican leaders to repudiate Bauer&#8217;s ugliness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s clear from this month&#8217;s election in Massachusetts that Americans want options other than the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}