{"id":5965,"date":"2005-12-01T11:20:37","date_gmt":"2005-12-01T16:20:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5965"},"modified":"2005-12-01T11:20:37","modified_gmt":"2005-12-01T16:20:37","slug":"faith-based-food-aid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/faith-based-food-aid\/","title":{"rendered":"Faith-based food aid"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Bush unveiled his faith-based initiative and established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, he created “outreach offices” for most of his cabinet agencies. In some instances, this followed a fairly logical strategy. By creating a faith-based office in Departments of Education, for example, the president was signaling that he wanted religious ministries to play a larger role in American schools.<\/p>\n

I was always a little confused, however, about why Bush wanted the Departments of Agriculture to have a faith-based outreach office. Is there a Christian approach to crop technology? Yesterday, it started to make more sense<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Agriculture Department said it will give at least $1 million in grants to community and faith-based organizations to help poor families apply for federal food stamps.<\/p>\n

The USDA said the grants will be used to inform the poor, immigrants and the elderly about the benefits of food stamps and show them how to apply.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The timing couldn’t be better. In early November, the Republican Congress slashed $700 million<\/a> from the food stamp program, which will ultimately deny food stamps to more than 220,000 low-income people each month by 2008. And in late November, the Republican administration announced it would spend $1 million so that faith-based groups can tell poor people about the food stamp program.<\/p>\n

So, the federal government is going to give religious ministries tax dollars to promote a food program for the poor, while at the exact same time, the federal government just made it tougher for the poor to access the same food program.<\/p>\n

Washington is becoming an increasingly strange place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Bush unveiled his faith-based initiative and established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, he created “outreach offices” for most of his cabinet agencies. In some instances, this followed a fairly logical strategy. By creating a faith-based office in Departments of Education, for example, the president was signaling that he wanted religious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5965\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}