Beating up on the poor and the non-white has long been the national past time of the right. In Kansas they have raised it to an art form — the art of spite and malice aforethought inflicted on those too weak and politically-powerless to fight back. Recently, the Kansas state legislature sent a bill to governor Sam Brownback’s desk that bans welfare recipients from spending their aid money at specific types of businesses, such as on cruises, and fortune tellers. No longer will the Kansan welfare kings and queens be able to drive their welfare Cadillacs, filled with steak and lobster, down to the waterfront, shiftlessly shuffle up the gang plank and sail the seven seas with Carnival or Royal Caribbean while sipping free pina coladas on the Lido deck and having their fortunes told. You know, like most poor people do every day. Before we even get to the ludicrous question of whether welfare recipients were blowing taxpayer money on cruise ship tickets and fortune tellers, let us review the geography of the United States. The Atlantic ocean is 5,815 miles away from Kansas, and the Pacific is 3,699 miles in the opposite direction. But somehow the distance seems trivial when one considers the prospect of welfare recipients being able to afford cruises. Currently a week long Carnival Cruise vacation package for two will set you back $1,336, not including the cost of getting from Kansas to the ocean, which, lowballing it probably costs $800 round trip for two people, for a total cost of $2,116. The maximum monthly TANF payout for a family of three in Kansas is…wait for it…$429.00. So to save up enough welfare money to finance the cruise, a family of three would have no spend ZERO money for four months — no rent, no food, no electricity, no gas, no water, no cable, no Internet, no nothing — to be barely able to pony up the $2116.00 it’s gonna cost to go on that seven day cruise for two. So forget for a moment the basics of economics, math, geography, human nature and common sense — as the courageous Kansas legislature has done so you don’t have to — and thank your God that yet another trillion dollar, treasury-draining scam perpetrated by the lazy Godless bastards of the poor against hard-working Jesus-loving white people has been exposed and neutralized by the base political instincts of rich right wing assholes and all who do their bidding. — COLE NOWLIN