About ready to get my second cup of coffee and I am about ready to get started on my e-mail. The weather should be rather nice today and I have a number of little tasks I would like to get done outside. But I also have some things I need to do in the kitchen so we'll see what I finish.
I found this interesting BBC article about an Australian welfare scandal. Why interesting, you ask? A couple of reasons. First, the culprit wasn't a cheating individual who scammed the system. It was the government itself. The previous Conservative administration adopted an "algorithm" which was incorrect and misidentified a large number of recipients as having received benefits they weren't entitled to. As you can imagine the results were cruel and devastating. The inquiry was a scathing indictment of the Morrison administration which is accused of misleading the cabinet and bypassing the legislature to impose it. They have had to restore the funds they clawed back from bank accounts without any warning to the recipients and facing lawsuits seeking damages. Second, is a cautionary tale because something similar can happen here. The media has carried sporadic similar stories about our government demanding repayment from Social Security recipients, sometimes decades after the payments were made, or to their survivors. Third, it brings into question how much we should trust the government. I just saw a poll on the morning news/conversation show which asked if the respondents agreed with the premise that the government was not meeting the needs of the country. All self-identified political groups (Republicans, Democrats, and Independents) agreed at about a 60% level. That is not good.
Bill Astore has a piece this morning that reinforces a question I have had for some time: what the hell is going? Cluster bombs? Really? Have we really reached the "destroy the village to save it" stage? I thought that was Russia's position from the beginning and flattening the whole country while killing its population would suit him just fine. I just didn't know where we stood.
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