I received a fascinating e-mail the other day. It was apparently intended as a joke but I couldn’t laugh.

It sounded far too much like the truth.

As best I recall the story, a liberal and a conservative were walking down the street together when they came upon a homeless man. The conservative reached for his wallet, handed the man a $20 bill and a business card with a job offer attached.

The liberal then reached for the conservative’s wallet, handed the homeless man a $100 bill and gave him directions to the welfare office.

Ouch!

That one hurts.

It reminds me of the latest scandal involving the two faces of the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the State of Illinois KidCare program.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the federal government allocated Illinois $122 million annually to administer its share of the three-year medical services program for the disadvantaged…but there’s a catch. Any unused funds go back to Washington at the end of the year. Last year, that meant Springfield had to send the great white fathers in D.C. a rebate check for $84 million.

Of course, this irritated the liberal Republican governor of Illinois, George Ryan, who sought and found a way to kill two birds with the one proverbial stone. He got the good reverend off his case and also bought easy access to the black community by offering Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition a $763,000 no-bid state contract to promote KidCare and sign-up needy recipients.

Well and good, if Jackson had delivered the goods.

Statistics released by the Rainbow Push Coalition claim the organization made KidCare presentations to 8,300 people.

But only 151 families signed up.

That comes out to a finder’s fee of nearly five thousand dollars for every family brought into the KidCare program by Jackson’s coalition.

Similar community groups without Jackson’s "star appeal" were being paid just $50 apiece for each family recruited to join KidCare.

It’s hard to justify those kinds of comparative figures as anything but a wholesale rape of the system and theft from the taxpayers of America by the Rainbow/Push Coalition.

Jesse Jackson has gone on record blasting President Bush over the latter’s Faith-Based initiative program. Not only is the Reverend’s stand hypocritical…it may be killing the goose that lays his golden egg.

I think it’s time for this conservative to move his wallet to a buttoned-down pocket.

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