Congressloon Wants YOU (To Spy On Your Neighbors' Shopping Carts)

Newbie Republican Rep. Glenn Grothman is a real peach of a guy, and yes, by peach we mean a-hole. Since voters promoted him from the Wisconsin state Senate to the U.S. House of Representatives last November, he's wasted little time proving he's still the same old whackadoodle wingnut teabagger crazy guy he was back home.

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At a "listening session" at the Oshkosh City Hall, Grothman met with constituents to let them know how he's been representing their interests in the big bad cesspool of corruption that is Washington D.C., and he already knows a lot of things!

"The three biggest problems that have to be solved are welfare, the debt and our ridiculous immigration system where we're becoming the welfare magnet for the western hemisphere," Grothman said.

Does he have some ideas for how to tackle these problems? You bet he does!

Grothman said he hears stories about seemingly able-bodied people receiving disability payments, Social Security payments and Food Share benefits. He told the people in attendance to keep an eye on the types of things people on Food Share buy at the grocery store or ask people for more information if they boast about being on disability.

"I would argue some people are arranging their life to be on Food Share," Grothman said. "You just look at them and kind of wonder."

FoodShare Wisconsin is the state's food stamp program, and we all know how people on on any kind of government assistance -- not including too-big-to-fail bailouts and corporate subsidies, obviously -- are automatically suspicious. If they're dumb enough to be poor in Wisconsin, they should probably be drug tested too, according to Gov. Scott Walker, although Grothman's suggestion that citizens just look at each other and guess whether they're frauding the government with their "disabilities" so they can "eat" seems like a cheaper program, and at least as effective. (Because drug-testing welfare recipients has been proven ineffective, get it? Also too unconstitutional. The more you know!)

Complaining about food stamp recipients has been a hobby of Grothman's for more than a decade, and now that he's a congresscreep, all of U.S. America gets to hear about it. Lucky us! Back in 2004, he claimed to have "interviewed over a dozen people who check out people who pay with food stamps and all felt people on food stamps ate better -- or at least more costly -- than they did." So he's been conducting his own "keep your eye on 'em" research for quite some time! And, like any good Republican, he's quite sure that nutrition assistance programs are bad, even for the "genuinely poor," if there even is any such thing:

Finally, any program conditioned on lack of income has a certain amount of moral hazard connected with it. In so far as anything goes in these programs it discourages work. It also encourages cheating to get into the program.

So please, Wisconsin, be sure to look at your fellow grocery store shoppers, and if any of them make you "wonder," report them to Rep. Grothman immediately for suspicious food shopping. It's how you can do your part to help solve America's biggest problems.

[ The Northwestern via HuffPo / Democratic Party of Wisconsin ]