Let Them Eat Cake

U.S. taxpayers are paying more than $40,000 a month for office rent, staff, phones and an SUV for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert - even as he makes megabank as a corporate lobbyist and a paid rep for foreign governments.

The funding is perfectly legal under a federal law that, for some reason, provides five years of benefits for former speakers. Maybe it's got something to do with the guys benefiting from the rules are the same ones who write them? Just a wild hunch...

Hastert's welfare money could subsidize maybe 40 or 50 people's health insurance payments and chip some numbers off of the annual uninsured death toll. It could put a lot of infinitely more useful members of society through college... maybe save a few foreclosed homes. But that would run contrary to good old fashioned, stand-on-your-own-two-feet conservative principles that regard taxpayer funding (for people who ain't already rich) as anathema. Much better to burn money subsidizing Hastert's fat, rich ass instead.

Sure, Hastert's entitled to the money under the arcane rules of the House - just as multi-millionaire McCain is still entitled to squirrel away his monthly Social Security checks because he's old - but there's always the option of refusing the money because you don't f*cking need it.

Our pols may as well start wearing powdered wigs and keeping po' folk as pets if this is the level of self-serving greed and insensitivity they're at. WWJD? Don't ask.