King crab legs are the new t-bone steaks (via):
Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas said he’s heard “so many times” from constituents standing in line at the grocery store behind a shopper buying king crab legs. “Then he sees the food-stamp card pulled out and provided. He looks at the king crab legs and looks at his ground meat and realizes because he does pay income tax, he doesn’t get more back than he pays in. He is actually helping to pay for the king crab legs when he can’t pay for them for himself.”
Doubling down on race-baiting is a losing strategy long-term, but it may work in 2014.
srv
Thank god Republicans don’t go into Starbucks and see all those people drinking espressos.
Nicholas
If they want to spend their limited food stamp allotment on king crab legs, let ’em, but they’re going to be awfully hungry the rest of the month.
? Martin
Yes, why can’t they just stick to more practical options like fried chicken and watermelon.
Suffern ACE
Louis Gohmert makes 180,000 per year. Perhaps if he wasn’t so wasteful in his spending habits, he would be able to treat himself to nicer food. That’s the thing about those upper middle class folks: no personal discipline, yet they feel entitled to things they have not made any provisions for.
muricafukyea
Accidental ball juice troll dougBJ phones one in. I would say 85% cut/paste.
SiubhanDuinne
Unless Gohmert’s (mythical) constituents are breathing over the shoulder of the lobster queen in the checkout line, how do they even know she’s using food stamps? It’s my understanding that the SNAP card looks like any credit or debit or ATM card, and is swiped the same way. It’s not like they’re tearing pages of vouchers out of a book and handing them to the cashier.
No personal experience, thank dog, so if I’m wrong about this please let me know. But in the meantime, I’m just going to assume that Gohmert is talking out of his pasty white ass.
Jim, Foolish LIteralist
Because I live alone and am a poor planner/shopper, I go to the grocery store several times a week. I can think of one occasion where I noticed somebody paying with what looked like it might have been some kind of SNAP card, and may have been a debit card. Never occurred to me to inspect their cart.
SiubhanDuinne
Hmmm. After weeks — WEEKS, I tells ya — of FYWP behaving more-or-less rationally, I suddenly do not have permission to edit my own comment. The fuh?
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: Georgia Snap Card
Hal
This is such a common complaint from people. Someone was in line buying beer and cigarettes and t-bone steaks on welfare! Point out that you can’t use snap for beer or tobacco and the complaints turn to the types of food people buy.
Also, they drove to the store in an escalade and while waiting in line surfed the web on their iPhone.
WereBear
What really amazes me is the vast reservoir of spite that lurks in the psyche of so many Americans. They KNOW it’s a lie. But they love hearing it.
Baud
Why does Louis Gohmert hate ground beef?
What a snob.
raven
@WereBear: And don’t fucking dare relate any personal experiences that are consistent with it here or you will be savaged.
Litlebritdiftrnt
@SiubhanDuinne:
Actually that is one of the things I complain about at my local grocery store, when someone is using food stamps the cash register display prominently shows the “EBT” payment option on the screen, which is visible to all in the line at the register. It also shows “DEBIT” or “CREDIT” I really do not think that people in the line behind me need to know how I am paying for my groceries. The fact that I am paying for them should be information enough.
Steeplejack
DougJ, this is practically blog-baiting. You’re just throwing cheap chum in the water. Stupid Gohmert is stupid. That’s news? The article you linked is three weeks old. And the Gohmert quote is from last June.
ETA: Christ, for once I agree with muricafukyea. But this is only time, I swear!
raven
@Litlebritdiftrnt: Well, don’t let the purity police find out you looked.
MikeJ
@SiubhanDuinne:
They’re the same people that saw a returning vet get spit on or a feminist yell at a guy for holding a door open.
Baud
@raven:
Every big program has some fraud. I would like to see some information on how prevalent it is, and whether some states do a better job than others.
Steeplejack
@raven:
Your comment was beyond stupid. You really want to bring that up again?
raven
@Baud: Exactly, every myth has a seed of truth.
Ella in New Mexico
When I was growing up in the late 60’s and 70’s, I remember neighbors or relatives saying pretty much the exact same thing–“people on welfare are always driving Cadillacs and buying steak and lobster at the grocery store with their Food Stamps while the rest of us work our asses off for beans and rice”. Somehow, between my parents teaching me better and my ability to see the world for how it truly is, I figured out this was a bunch of crap.
Still, some may wonder why we can still hear people repeating stuff like this as if it’s a brand new way they are being victimized, and that they must become outraged and stop it immediately?
The reason it still works is because approximately 47% of the people in my generation never took their heads out of their asses long enough to notice that not only is this a rare occurrence, but also that this kind of shit is retread racism/classism and is as old as the crusts in their fucking underwear–another frequent saying when I was growing up.
These righties— such suckers for a good ole’ racially-tinged truism handed down from generation to generation.
raven
@Steeplejack: What took you so long?
Jim, Foolish LIteralist
@MikeJ: Don’t forget the child who was expelled for wishing his teacher a Merry Christmas
@Ella in New Mexico: There was a Slate article a couple of weeks ago (that I now remember i never finished) about the woman at the origin of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen”. There actually was a woman in Chicago who was running several different welfare scams, one of many criminal activities she was operating. What Reagan never mentioned when he told people about the Welfare Queen was that she had been caught, arrested and was during the ’76 primary campaign on trial for her crimes. His speeches were, you’ll be shocked to hear, carefully worded to suggest her scams were on-going and somehow unstoppable.
raven
@Jim, Foolish LIteralist: She also had murdered someone, right?
Jim, Foolish LIteralist
@raven: I think so, like I said, I didn’t finish the article, so I deleted what was my fuzzy impression that she wasn’t just a welfare scammer but a small-scale mob boss. I do remember the author said thirty-plus years later people were afraid to talk about her for fear of retribution.
SatanicPanic
These dummies will repeat any old urban myth. Wait, urban myth, that works in more ways than one.
West of the Rockies
This guy is worthless. Self-satisfied and utterly unaware of just how fucking stupid he really is, he spews lies, venom, and misinformation. I don’t usually go after someone for his/her looks because appearance is largely beyond our control, but he looks like a cross between a rat and a chimpanzee.
Ken
Rep. Gohmert might do a better job if he remembered that all the people in that line are his constituents.
GregB
@West of the Rockies:
Once he got a taste of fame in that banjo scene in Deliverance, he was destined for a life in politics.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Here’s my “standing in line behind someone with food stamps” story: this woman ended up holding up the line because she tried to buy pepper jack cheese with her WIC card, but WIC only allows regular monterey jack cheese, not pepper jack cheese, so she had to go back to the cheese aisle to get the cheese that was approved by the government.
So, yeah, it’s about as full o’ crap as a story full o’ crap could be.
Zifnab
Did you know there are people in Galveston buying crawfish? *cough*black people are destroying america*cough*
ruemara
@SiubhanDuinne: they now look like credit/debit cards. This is a horseshit story.
Darkrose
@Jim, Foolish LIteralist: The other thing about her is that according to her birth certificate, she was actually white.
Dolly Llama
@raven: I know what that looks like all too well. I take my mother’s to the store when I go back to the hometown and my sister and I make her monthly grocery runs. She never buys anything extravagant, but she buys a month’s worth, so it’s a fair volume. I’m sure when people behind me see us — an able-bodied male and female dressed nicely — use it, it just pisses them off to no end.
Yeah, Georgia will give you SNAP, but they’re gonna make sure people three lines over can see that heinous peach card.
Dolly Llama
@ruemara: Not in all states. You missed raven’s Georgia EBT card graphic above. In the South, they want EVERYBODY to know it. Consider it Georgia’s peach-colored letter on the forehead of the poor.
Percysowner
This story was much more believable when electronic funds didn’t exist and Food Stamps looked like Monopoly money. The everyone in the store could get all superior and shame you. It also led to thousands of (equally real) stories about the person who confronts the mom buying steak and a decorated cake from the bakery only to be told that she had just brought her child home from the hospital after being told the child was dying and it was the last birthday the child would ever celebrate. Ah, competing myths to prove your point, although I like the birthday one because it at least presents the idea that even poor people have “justifiable” reasons to buy luxuries, even though they shouldn’t have to justify how they spend their money any more than I do.
dmhlt
Pres. LBJ had a profound understanding the Repubican race-baiting rhetoric:
http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/1987_winter/second.html
raven
@Dolly Llama: This is a pretty good article on food stamps from the Flagpole and the reply is well done as well.
Dolly Llama
@raven: I can definitely believe from experience a newspaper person would need it. Worse hours than Wal-Mart with roughly equal pay.
g
They don’t sell that many king crab legs in East Texas.
g
@raven: Even so, who’s looking over another shopper’s shoulder so closely at the checkout line?
g
@Baud: Someone buying crab legs with an EBT card isn’t fraud. People are allowed to buy whatever legit food choices they want. They may be stupid, to buy something expensive like crab legs, which use up their monthly allowance so they can’t buy other things. But they’re allowed to be stupid – that’s not fraud.
kc
@SiubhanDuinne:
My question as well. You’d have to be breathing down their necks.
Either Gohmert is lying, or his constituents are lying to him.
ruemara
@Dolly Llama: Flip it over. It looks like a deb/cred. I should know. When you use it, you learn how to be surreptitious. You profer it covered or flipped and most card readers actually require it to be turned over to the other direction to go through properly. The California one also has EBT on it, but you’d have to be on their backs to read it.
Dolly Llama
@ruemara:
I guess that’s central to what we’re talking about, no? “Class resentment,” like everything, is something the conservatives have ass backward. They think people resent the shit out of them when the real problem is resentment irrationally running the opposite way.
West of the Rockies
This guy is surely now the most ignorant person in congress. I think he makes Bachman look like a physicist.
Ajabu
@raven: I don’t know: That looks suspiciously like a WHITE HAND holding that EBT card…
White folks get welfare? Unpossible.
Spike
In other news, Louie Gomert’s constituents don’t know the difference between king crab legs and cheap imitation crab meat.
DTOzone
@SiubhanDuinne:
Because they’re black, duhhhhhh
DTOzone
@Ella in New Mexico:
Nor have they spent nearly 2 years unemployed like I did from 2008-2010 and have to field calls from your crying mother because people were telling her I must be on drugs or an alcoholic because I don’t have a job.