Richard Bennett

As the five-year clock runs down on welfare in California (and elsewhere), welfare rights groups are advising recipients on the loopholes that they can exploit to collect benefits instead of working. The best of these is to cry “domestic abuse”; you’re automatically taken seriously, and the checks keep coming.

Carla Rivera reports on this program in the LA Times: (Recipients Scramble to Retain Welfare Benefits)

“Each month a victim suffered domestic abuse potentially means an extra month of aid,” said Quinn, who added that the county will try to verify such claims but mostly will rely on the word of victims. “We will also try to find counseling services for them after the fact. Domestic violence is not the only clock-stopper, but it’s one we’re extremely sensitive to and we want to bend over backward and take people at their word.”

There’s a long history of abusing the abuse exception to keep welfare coming, going back at least to the arguments welfare rights groups made against the reform back in 1996. One of their tools was a collection of studies, published by the Taylor Institute (now called the Project for Research on Welfare, Work, and Domestic Violence), in which welfare recipients were push-polled into crying abuse after they were told about the loophole.

With so much deliberate distortion going on, we’re unlikely ever to know what the overlap between domestic violence, child abuse, and welfare really is.

Some of the most bizarre (and hilarious) comments ever posted to this blog came in over the last few days in response to Glenn Reynolds’ Carville denial. The facts of the story are pretty straightforward, and supported by Kausfiles and NRO: Lott sucked-up to Strom Thurmond for years about his failed presidential bid, but it wasn’t news until Sid Blumenthal, James Carville, Josh Marshall, and Gene Lyons (Clinton operatives one and all) made it news through an e-mail and CNN campaign. So the bloggers who made the Lott Pandergate story a big deal in Blogistan were in fact doing Carville’s bidding, although, as I’ve already said, they didn’t know it at the time. Nobody wants to be made out to be an unwitting dupe of a clever cabal of operatives, so Reynolds wants to position this revelation as something odd. This is really silly, of course.

The only interesting questions about Carville’s Pandergate fiasco have to do with what the hoped-for goal was, and whether it’s really backfired. The obvious theory is that he was shooting for Lott’s resignation from the Senate, which would have created a 50/50 split once again. According to this scenario, the episode backfired, because Lottt didn’t step down and the Reeps reacted with honor, etc, etc. But Carville is a devious bastard, and he’s got a history of reaching out to the racist, Southern voter in creative ways: during Clinton’s ’92 campaign, the KKK outreach took the form of the infamous Sistah Souljah speech, the shunning of long-time Clinton bud Jesse Jackson, and highlighting welfare reform as a central campaign issue.

Alongside Poppa Bush, this strategy made him the more Klan-friendly candidate. Now that Lott has been badly treated by his party, according this scenario, KKK and CCC-oriented voters will once again return to the Democratic Party fold.

If this sounds totally paranoid to you, you don’t know how campaign managers think. One such person of my personal acquaintance once managed to secure an NRA endorsement for a candidate in a race in a very touchy-feely district in order to drive voters to her opponent; this sort of reverse-dunk thinking is actually commonplace. All it takes to pull it off is a few naifs who believe politics is about principle rather than counting votes, and Blogistan is full of such characters.

In future campaigns, the ability to manipulate Blogistan will become an important predictor of political success.

So Lott’s out as Majority Leader and Frist is in. Still no word from the blogger shock troups who did James Carville’s bidding: Josh Marshall, Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, and Virginia Postrel. Don’t accept any “blogger triumphalism” since the fingerprints of Carville and Sidney Blumenthal have been found on their keyboards, and don’t be surprised if this ends up being a plus for the Republicans.

This little story makes the Frist Scenario seem much more likely:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee is exploring a possible bid to replace Trent Lott as their chamber’s incoming majority leader and Assistant Republican Leader Don Nickles of Oklahoma will likely back Frist, sources said on Thursday.

Frist has long been our man, but we want Lott to have a nice, soft landing when it happens.

Lott Pandergate architect and chief string-puller James Carville sends a bizarre fax accepting Lott’s apology:

Carville, also a co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” faxed a letter to Lott’s office Wednesday, both accepting the senator’s apology and pledging not to criticize him further for comments made recently or for comments Lott has made in the past on the issue of race.

E-mail, Jimmy Bubba.

via Kausfiles, the best source for Pandergate string-pulling news, if not analysis.

It turns out my little Christmas fantasy was right on target after all. See: Timothy P. Carney & Trent Lott & the Courts on National Review Online

The Lott turmoil was entirely manufactured by Democratic operatives — namely by unrepentant Clintonite James Carville, who first made an issue of the remarks the same night on Crossfire — and then pushed the story behind the scenes wherever they could, explaining to pundits and politicians how this could be used to sock it to the GOP.

If Carville wins — if the bar for branding someone a racist is lowered to a single careless comment, an unreflective childhood in the south, and a belief in states’ rights — that puts every Republican politician or nominee in a little more danger. It expands the media’s definition of “extremism.” Anyone whose voting record or ideology resembles that of “disgraced former Majority Leader Trent Lott” will be suspect — and vulnerable.

This means any judge who ever used the concept of federalism in his decisions will be attacked for “using the racist codeword of ‘states rights’.”

It’s a lose-lose situation — and a checkmate for the attack dogs of personal destruction.

So here’s the chain: Carville talks it up on CNN, and then gets ABC to cover it in The Note, where Atrios sees it. Then Sidney Blumenthal (or Carville again) gets Josh Marshall to blog it. Glenn Reynolds first saw it on Marshall’s blog, and we know the rest.