Tuesday, December 30, 2014

When Talking Points Collide


If welfare recipients are mooching, lazy, degenerates.

And our troops are paragons of sacrifice, fidelity and all the martial virtues.

Then what are we to make of this?
Food Stamps, WIC, Debit Terminals at Most Commissaries Fixed

Dec 24, 2014 | by Amy Bushatz

A computer glitch that blocked commissaries from processing food stamps, electronic WIC transactions or debit card cash back has been repaired at most commissaries stateside, Defense Commissary Agency officials said Wednesday.

Commissaries overseas should be back online for transactions requiring a pin pad by Jan. 2, officials said.

The shutdown at thousands of commissaries and civilian stores was caused by the expiration of the pin pads' security certificate early this month. The certificate, good for 10 years, was installed in 2004. But the terminals’ manufacturer, Hypercom, has since been absorbed by another company, Equinox Payments.

Officials there said the expiration was "unforeseen."

In the meantime, WIC transactions have been processed on paper, debit cards have been run as credit with no cash back available, and users of the food stamp program have had to take their benefits off base.

Commissary shoppers used $130.6 million in food stamps, officially known as the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), in fiscal 2013, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the Defense Department. About $29 million in Woman and Infant Children (WIC) benefits were redeemed that same year.

About 40 percent of the pin pads that went down at commissaries Dec. 7 could be fixed remotely with a software update, DeCA officials said. The rest had to be shipped to a DeCA depot for repair. That depot had about 500 units on hand, officials said, and was able to distribute them to stores right away, decreasing the outage's impact, they said.
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Syllogisms can be treacherous territory when most of what you believe is fundamentally ridiculous.

2 comments:

Procopius said...

Yeah, the attack on the Bonus Marchers. That was good old Dougie McArthur. The Republican congressmen had been slavering to unleash him on the marchers for weeks. The soldiers also burned the shantytown (Hooverville) the marchers had erected. Those were bad times. Incidentally, not long after that Roosevelt called Huey Long the second most dangerous man in America. When asked who was the most dangerous he replied, "McArthur."

Glen Tomkins said...

My Army career ended in the Medical Corps but began in the Infantry. I discovered as a junior Infantry officer that a good bit of my workload consisted of getting my soldiers public assistance, because their paychecks sure weren't adequate to supporting a family. In fact, in those days, NCOs getting out of the Army could get a whole bunch of constructive college credit in Social Work courses.

Then the Rs came in and changed all that, restoring the dignity of our men and women in uniform, and finally getting them paid enough that they were no longer dependent on public assistance. Oh, okay, well, one out of two ain't bad. And, sure, there's the part about getting soldiers killed and maimed in unnecessary wars, and letting Christopaths take over the Air Force and Marine Corps, and letting the VA turn to muck -- but, hey, no one's perfect. At least TV shows now portray military service in a better light, so there's that.