Hattip to Matthew Archbold at Creative Minority Report.  Eric Metaxas, biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Protestant minister and theologian martyred by the Nazis, compares the contraceptive mandate to steps taken by the Nazis against the churches in the thirties.

“I met the president. I gave him a copy of my book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which he said he’s going to read,” Metaxas said during the interview. “In that book, you read about what happened to an amazingly great country called Germany…”
“In the beginning, it always starts really, really small. We need to understand as Americans — if we do not see this as a bright line in the sand — if you’re not a Catholic, if you use contraception — doesn’t matter. Because eventually, this kind of government overreach will affect you.”

Metaxas is no nutty fringe character, but rather a serious scholar.  I agree with his analysis.  The contraceptive mandate has aroused a storm of opposition and well it should.  The contraceptive mandate is a terrible infringement on religious liberty and frightening for what it could portend.

Last night in Missouri Rick Santorum finally got to go one on one against Romney, since Gingrich did not bother to get on the ballot, and the results were devastating to the Weathervane.  Santorum won two to one, garnering 55% of the vote to 25% for Romney, with Ron Paul bringing up the rear with 12%.  Santorum won every county in the state.  The Romney camp will claim that since this was a non-binding beauty contest and that Romney did little campaigning in the state, this is meaningless.  Rubbish!  What does it say about the Romney campaign and its appeal to Republican voters that they lost this badly in a state that has been a bellweather of the nation in most Presidential elections?

However, Missouri was not the end of the bad news for Romney last night.  In the Minnesota caucuses Santorum came in first with a stunning 45% and second was, wait for it, Ron Paul with 27%.  Romney, who won the caucuses by 20 points in 2008, came in third  at 17% with Gingrich being Tail-end-Newt with 11%

To complete the trifecta of woe for the Weathervane last night, we turn to Colorado, a state Romney was supposed to win according to the polls.  In the caucuses, Santorum came in first with 40%, Romney took second at 35%, Gingrich a very distant third at 13%, just edging out Paul at 12%.

So, the night couldn’t have been better for Santorum or worse for Romney, but what does it all mean?

1.  Romney as Bad Dogfood-There is an apocryphal story in the advertising industy about a brand of dogfood brought out by a mega corporation that spent lavishly on a huge advertising campaign.  However, the dog food sold poorly.  The advertising budget was doubled.  The dog food sold even more poorly.  The ad budget was tripled.  The dog food stayed on the shelves.  Finally the CEO of the company asked his secretary who bred dogs with her husband what was wrong with the dog food.  She replied, “Well, we tried to feed it to our dogs, and they kept upsetting the bowls and would growl at us if we tried to fill them back up with that stuff.  Dogs really, really hate it!”.  Since the onset of this campaign the Republican voters have been giving off every signal known to man that they really, really do not want Romney to carry the standard against Obama in the fall.  Last night they sent yet another such message, that the GOP establishment will seek to ignore.

2.  Bye, Bye, Newt-Last night Republican voters sent another clear message.  “Newt, you had your chance to defeat Romney and you blew it.  Now we are going to give Rick a shot.”

3.  The anti-Santorum Avalanche-The Romney campaign has given up on attempting to convince people that their sow’s ear of a candidate is actually a silk purse.  They have only one tactic:  bury the opponent under a mountain of negative ads.  That is how they beat Gingrich in Florida, with a good assist from Newt’s lacklustre campaign in the Sunshine State, and that is what they are now ginning up against Santorum.

4.  Money on the Way-Santorum throughout has run a less than shoe-string campaign.  With last night’s humiliation of Romney, almost all anti-Romney money is now going to be flowing to Santorum.

5.  You Plan Your Campaign and You Campaign Your Plan-Throughout this campaign Santorum’s plan has been to be the last viable anti-Romney standing and to defeat Romney one on one.  Last night, that plan began to bear fruit.  The odds are still against Santorum getting the nomination, but after last night, no one can discount that possibility.

Admittedly he will be behind Romney in the delegate count, especially considering that no delegates were up for grabs in Missouri.  But 200,000 people went to the polls in Missouri, and a majority of them voted for Santorum (and again, I’ll admit that Gingrich was not on the ballot there).  He drubbed Romney in Minnesota as well.

This primary season has been a wild one, and who knows what will happen in the coming weeks.  The Romney sleaze machine* is already out in full force hitting Santorum.  Santorum is radically underfunded compared to Romney and even Newt, although that makes his victories thus far that much more impressive.  Right now it is looking like a two-man race, but it’s not between Newt and Romney but rather Romney and Santorum.

*: I wrote a post a few weeks back in which I said that Newt was and perhaps still is a jerk.  For the record, Mitt is kind of a jerk, and over two election cycles has proven himself to be a rather despicable campaigner.  For those of you who would vote for Romney in the general election, I suppose the silver lining is that the man is willing to fight dirty.  So at least he’s got that going for him.  Which is nice.

Honestly, there is nothing wrong with Obama’s decision.  Not only did the Supreme Court get it right in the Citizens United case, I think that most of the campaign finance restrictions in this country are either unconstitutional or are simply bad policy choices that actually exacerbate the problems with how campaigns are financed.  Every new regulation only creates some other entity that further eliminates transparency from the process and merely complicates things unnecessarily.

What is amusing is the blatant hypocrisy, and this is one of those rare times when the term actually applies.  The word hypocrite is often thrown around incorrectly.  Jonah Goldberg has been one of the foremost crusaders against the incorrect usage of the term.  A hypocrite is not someone who claims to uphold a certain principle and then falls short of meeting the ideal.  If that were the meaning of hypocrisy, then all sin is hypocrisy.  No, a hypocrite is one who pretends to have certain virtues but who, in fact, does not posses said virtues.  We all fail to live up to our own moral standards from time to time, but the point is that we are at least trying.  Does anyone for one second really believe that Barack Obama truly doesn’t want to receive funding from corporations or wealthy donors?  Of course not.  It was a populist front meant to distract attention away from the failings of his own administration.  He was absolutely insincere at the State of the Union, and he’s been insincere on this issue from day one.  This is a guy who raked in more money from Wall Street and other financial institutions than his Republican competitor in 2008, who still collects a hefty amount from this sector, and yet who pretends to be absolutely appalled that these groups have the temerity to influence elections through their campaign contributions.

Yet there are still going to be those who act shocked – SHOCKED! – that Obama could betray his stated principles.  As the examples of Doug Kmiec and Kathy Dahlkemper show, never discount the blindness of those who just want to believe.  Darwin’s already covered this ground earlier, so I won’t belabor the point.  It just astounds me that a man can be so transparently dishonest time and time and time again, and yet there will always be obedient lapdogs ready to be fooled again.

These amounts vary not only due to region and inflation over time (food inflation has actually been pretty high over the last five years, grocery store prices are up 6% from last year) but also because these are different attempts to model how the food stamp program works. Food stamp benefits are based on the idea of supplementing a family’s income so that the family can (according to the program’s rationale) afford to consume the amount of food budgeted according to the “thrifty plan” from the USDA “cost of food at home” guidelines. Of course, since food stamps can’t be used for anything other than approved food items, and they’re given to people who are already very short of money, the effective result is that people are often trying to get all their food off just the food stamp amount, even if the program is assuming it’s only a supplement.

What got me thinking about the topic is that I saw one of these “hunger challenges” linked to some time ago, via some Catholic organization which was encouraging people to take part “in solidarity with the poor”. I saw the amount mentioned in the San Francisco challenge of $33 per person per week and thought, “Wait a minute, for our family of seven that would be $231. That’s more than we spend per week on food, and we’re around the top 20% line in family income.” In normal times, we were spending around $200/wk on food. Since we’ve been on a tight budget paying off the boiler, we’ve managed to get that down to $100-$150 depending on the week (including household cleaners, diapers, toilet paper, paper towels, etc.)

So, is being on food stamps really cushy? Are these challenges just designed wrong? Being a chronic number cruncher, I had to get into it a bit.

First off, it seemed like the challenge was designed for one adult to take, so I wanted to make sure that I was translating it to family terms right. Here’s my formula: The 2011 San Francisco Food Bank challenge (based on average food stamp benefits in CA for that year) was based on $33 per person per week. The USDA thrifty plan budgets $41.50 per week for an adult male between 19 and 50. Based on that, I’m assuming a payout of 80% of the estimated thrifty plan cost. Now I need to figure out how much our family would be budgeted according to the thrifty plan:
1 male 19-50 at $41.50
1 female 19-50 at $36.80
1 child age 1 at $21.10
1 child age 2-3 at $23.10
1 child age 4-5 at $24.00
1 child age 6-8 at $30.70
1 child age 9-11 at $35.00
Total: $212.20

Now you discount by 10% because we’re a family with 7 or more members: $190.98

Now you assume we only get 80% of that budget as a food stamp allotment: $152.78

That now puts the amount pretty much in line with what is a doable but tight food budget for our family. Having established that, my further thoughts fall into three categories:

How Do We Keep Our Food Budget at Food Stamp Levels?
Even when we were feeling fairly flush, and not trying to keep our food budget super low, we never spent all that much more than $200 per week on groceries, and while averaging $120/wk for the last while has taken concentration, it doesn’t really take that much deprivation. I think part of that probably comes from that fast that MrsDarwin and I both come from fairly frugal backgrounds, so our cooking instincts are low cost. Here are some of the keys to keep things cheap:

- It’s winter, so we’re having a lot of soups: a carton of broth and a pound of dry beans with various things thrown in for body or flavor can easily feed all seven of us for about $5 and leave enough to put away several servings of left overs.

- Using meat as a flavoring, not a dish. We’re never into big hunks of meat eaten strait at the best of times, as a matter of cost and of culture. (Plus we’re helped along at the moment by a large quantity of pig which resides in our freezer since MrsDarwin’s mother gave it to us for Christmas. We’re making it last and loving it.)

- Starch is your friend. When it comes to filling up lots of hungry young Darwins, pasta and rice are essential. For those of us decidedly not trying to grow, the recourse is portion control rather than subsisting on proteins and vegetables.

- No sodas or juices. Milk and water are the orders of the day for the young Darwins. (And I’ve cut back the beer budget to virtually nil so as to do my part.)

- Make it from scratch. We never bought much prepared food, but now we’ve taken that down to virtually nothing.

- Shop where it’s cheap. You’d think that dealing with pricing, I’d always do this, but neither of us particularly likes looking for coupons or going to havens of extreme low price. (We tend to stick to our mainstream supermarkets and Trader Joe’s.) However, since having to cut back we’ve started going to Aldi and it has allowed us to cut back a lot in certain areas. (Butter at $1.90/lb, milk at $1.99/gal, etc. Got to love German efficiency.)

Ways People Taking This Challenge Should Make It More “Real”
One of the things that makes the “Food Stamp Diet” promotional materials look deeply silly at times (especially to anyone who’s actually lived on a lower middle class budget) is the ways in which people doing it seem to be out of touch with what most people on low budgets eat and where they shop. For instance, the 2007 set of promotional materials designed for congressmen warns participants, “A gallon of milk costs close to $5, a box of cereal is more than $4 and one apple can cost .60 to $1 each. These numbers add up quickly.” I can’t imagine where they’re shopping, but I pay $1.99/gal for mild, $1.99 or less for a box of (non sugary, house brand) cereal, and $1/lb or less for apples.

So if you’re going to take the food stamp diet challenge, at a minimum stop going on about organic and the fat content of your ground beef. Buying organic is, rightly or wrongly, a luxury and one way of consuming less fat is to eat less meat rather than spending a lot of money on extra lean meat.

Also, for those who really haven’t experienced how “the other half” lives, try committing to doing all your shopping at places like Wal-Mart, Aldi, Family Dollar, etc. You’ll get more food for your money, and you’ll also find yourself standing in line with people who really do use food stamps. Whole Foods and the local farmers markets are not where the poor shop.

Why We Still Have It Way Better Than Most People On Foodstamps
All of this could easily make it sound like it’s pretty easy to get by on food stamps, indeed that the poor have it pretty easy. That is not necessarily my point here, so let me run through a couple ways in which it’s far easier for us to live on this food budget than it might be for many real families among the working poor:

- Economies of scale matter. Even the 10% discount that the USDA applies to the budget for families of 7 doesn’t make up for the fact it’s much cheaper on a per person basis to feed a large family than just 1, 2 or 3 people. Feeding two people on $44/week would be a lot harder than feeding seven people on $152/wk.

- An intact family with a stay at home parent helps a lot. One of our keys to living cheaply is that MrsDarwin is at home and able to get dinner started before I get home, make the kids lunches from scratch, etc. It would be much harder for a family with only one adult and a couple kids, or even with two working adults to stick to the same budget. Time is money, and as a single income family we have more time for certain things. (Of course, in some families, a parent, grandparent or other relative might fill this second adult slot.)

- We have the time and transportation to shop at three different stores during the course of the week and to bring in a week’s worth of supplies from each store. If we had to shop day by day, or only at stores near public transportation, it would cost us more.

- We know that we do in fact have plenty of cash flow, even if we are trying to devote most of it to paying off a big expense rather than groceries. So we don’t have any of the chronic anxiety of not being sure we’ll be able to make ends meet.

Nothing like getting all your 30 pieces of silvers’ worth!

If you couldn’t figure out the meaning of the above satirical cartoon, maybe the following may help:

Will we all be American Recusants soon?