No Difference, They're All Corrupt

People tell me Obama's just like Bush, Alan Grayson is just like Michele Bachmann, Harry Reid is just like John McCain, Nancy Pelosi is just like John Boehner.  There's no difference between Republicans and Democrats, so why vote and why bother caring?  Parties are for dupes and suckers.

But hey, these new Tea Party guys, I'm told, aren't career politicians.  They're different.  We should give them a try.

Guys like GOP candidate for Governor Carl Paladino.  I mean he has to be better than Eliot Spitzer or David Paterson, right?

Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they could work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in "personal hygiene."

Paladino, a wealthy Buffalo real estate developer popular with many tea party activists, isn't saying the state should jail poor people: The program would be voluntary.

But the suggestion that poor families would be better off in remote institutions, rather than among friends and family in their own neighborhoods, struck some anti-poverty activists as insulting.

Paladino is competing for the Republican nomination with former U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio. The primary is Sept. 14.

Paladino first described the idea in June at a meeting of The Journal News of White Plains and spoke about it again this week with The Associated Press.

Throughout his campaign, Paladino has criticized New York's rich menu of social service benefits, which he says encourages illegal immigrants and needy people to live in the state. He has promised a 20 percent reduction in the state budget and a 10 percent income tax cut if elected.

Here you go, smelly poor people.  Let's round you up and put you in "voluntary" work camps.  I'm sure they'll have a lot of options making Palladino's plan "voluntary" with a 20% budget cut across the board, too.  If it only were that easy...

What Palladino isn't telling New Yorkers is that a 20% budget cut in a state like New York means getting rid of everything short of police, fire, and schools...and making massive cuts in all those as well.  Everything.  What welfare program?  Exactly what does a semi-permanent underclass housed in old prisons far from the rest of New Yorkers accomplish?

Other than being a difference from the old politicians?

[UPDATE] Karoli at Crooks & Liars notes the far more obvious "round them up and put them into camps" mentality that Palladino displays here, as does Digby.