NYTimes editorial error!

Looks like somebody at the NY Times didn't get the memo. They're running a homeless kids story with a DemocRat in the White House. That's against the rules! According to author Andrea Elliott:

It is no place for children. Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.

Dasani? Really? Why is this poor kid named "Dasani"?

Even her name, Dasani, speaks of a certain reach. The bottled water had come to Brooklyn's bodegas just before she was born, catching the fancy of her mother, who could not afford such indulgences. It hinted at a different, upwardly mobile clientele, a set of newcomers who over the next decade would transform the borough.

Whose fault is it that Dasani is soooooo poor? Besides the rich people who could afford bottle water that is.

Dasani's circumstances are largely the outcome of parental dysfunction. While nearly one-third of New York's homeless children are supported by a working adult, her mother and father are unemployed, have a history of arrests and are battling drug addiction.
Yet Dasani's trials are not solely of her parents' making. They are also the result of decisions made a world away, in the marble confines of City Hall. With the economy growing in 2004, the Bloomberg administration adopted sweeping new policies intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant. They would no longer get priority access to public housing and other programs, but would receive short-term help with rent. Poor people would be empowered, the mayor argued, and homelessness would decline.
But the opposite happened. As rents steadily rose and low-income wages stagnated, chronically poor families like Dasani's found themselves stuck in a shelter system with fewer exits. Families are now languishing there longer than ever — a development that Mr. Bloomberg explained by saying shelters offered "a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before."

It was them damn Republicans did it! Them and their "self reliance"!  And Barack Obama's management of the national economy had NUTTIN' to do with it!!!

Well, there's a picture of the apartment. I've lived in smaller, crappier places myself. My place did not have:

• Big screen TV.
• Electric piano
• Cell phones (yeah, plural)
• unwashed crap piled up all over the place
• Holes in the walls left unpatched by me, the renter
• seven kids.

Because:
I did not spend money on stuff I didn't need and couldn't afford.
I didn't leave my place looking like a disaster area.
I didn't have a bunch of children I couldn't look after or buy food and shoes for.
I didn't leave stuff busted when I could fix it myself. Hell, I even painted it.

So really? Andrea Elliott can pretty much k my a.

The Phantom