Pastor Fred Phelps

A woman in upstate New York has been charged with skimming over $30,000 in welfare payouts by using the names and signatures of two dead people.

In Baltimore, five people were arrested in an alleged “food stamp fraud scheme and illegal drug distribution operation” based out of a grocery store where a police search reportedly found $129,000 in cash and a rifle alongside heroin, marijuana, and cocaine. An indictment alleges that the scam bilked taxpayers out of anywhere from $1.2 million to $2 million.

Last week the Michigan Senate passed a bill that would in certain cases allow drug testing of welfare recipients, a move that welfare cheerleaders lament would “further stigmatize welfare recipients.”

REPUBLICAN SPEAKS AT BERKELEY, DOESN’T GET SHOT
Libertarian centaur Rand Paul galloped valiantly behind enemy lines at the University of California at Berkeley and instead of being glitter-bombed and having a bucket of used tampons thrown in his face, he was applauded by an auditorium full of young rich sheltered communists. Paul focused on constitutional overreach by the NSA as revealed by self-exiled former CIA employee and NSA contractor Edward Snowden. During a Q&A session after his speech, Paul used Domino’s Pizza as a metaphor to illustrate how the GOP must repackage itself to appeal to young voters: “Remember Domino’s finally admitted they had bad crust? Think, Republican Party. Admit it: OK, bad crust. We need a, we need a different kind of party.” After winning the recent CPAC straw poll of potential 2016 presidential candidates, Paul also came in first in a recent CNN national poll of self-described Republican voters, a feat his father never achieved.

THOU SHALT NOT SPEAK
As we have been lectured for decades, “free speech” does not include anything that hurts people’s feelings, and “hate speech” is anything the authorities hate. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, shut up and listen, or you will be sued for every last penny.

Last week saw Turkey banning Twitter, Belgium criminalizing “a wide range of sexist speech,” and UN busybodies sticking their beaks yet further into the imaginary battle against “hate speech in Europe and beyond,” because everyone knows the UN represents the little guys rather than the big guys. The week before last, Colorado passed a bill criminalizing “cyberbullying of a minor.”

On the flip side, Minnesota’s Supreme Court ruled that encouraging people to kill themselves is protected speech under the First Amendment, and even mainstream news sources are starting to realize that free speech is increasingly a conservative issue rather than a liberal one, which we’ve been saying for years.