The conservative war on the poor continues unabated. Yesterday, the First Lady had her picture taken twice. First by a man on his cell phone captured in turn by a AP photographer. The original AP caption for the picture reads  "First lady Michelle Obama, right, stops to have her photo taken as she helps to hand out meals during her visit to Miriam's Kitchen in Washington, Thursday, March 5, 2009. The center provides meals, case management services and housing support to nearly 250 men and women in Washington." But that picture of a poor man with a cellphone taking a picture of the First Lady has set of a firestorm of conservative hate for how can a man getting a free meal have a cell phone. How dare he have clothes on even? Damn it that man should be near naked before he dare get a free meal.

Here's Andrew Malcolm, the former press secretary to First Lady Laura Bush, writing in the Los Angeles Times:

First Lady Michelle Obama showed up Thursday as a surprise and welcome volunteer at Miriam's Kitchen, a soup kitchen for homeless poor people not far from the White House.

She brought with her some food donated by White House staff.

The first lady served up mushroom risotto and broccoli to a long line of homeless men and women during part of her First Lady Michelle Obama volunteers as a food server at Miriam's Kitchen a soup kitchen for poor homeless in Washington DC 3-5-09 lunch hour and in these photos poses for a picture by one homeless diner obviously excited to be in the first lady's presence.

Obama said she hoped her service would cause other Americans to volunteer to help the less fortunate in their own communities.

And, of course, such images of need might also help build support for her husband's economic and healthcare reform agenda, although a Miriam's spokeswoman said their average "guest" has been homeless since about the time Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Miriam's is a privately funded soup kitchen about seven blocks from the White House that has 1,200 volunteers and serves about 300, mainly men, each morning. Our colleague Mark Silva has more on the volunteer work in the Swamp here.

Both of these news photos were widely distributed across the country and even around the world.

It doesn't detract from the first lady's generous gesture or the real needs she seeks to highlight to ask two bothersome journalistic questions about these news photos:

If this unidentified meal recipient is too poor to buy his own food, how does he afford a cellphone?

And if he is homeless, where do they send the cellphone bills?

Then over at the National Review's Corner blog, Kathryn Jean Lopez added her two cents stating that, "America has the wealthiest poor people in the world." Actually, I think it is Norway who has the 'wealthiest poor people in the world' but don't let facts get in the way of a talking point. She added, "I don't envy this man's situation, whatever it is, and don't mean to make light of it. But we are a blessed people when our poor have cell phones." Blessed, yeah, that's the word that comes to my mind.

What irks Mr. Malcolm, Ms, Lopez and others like Michelle Malkin is that the poor aren't, well, poor enough. How can you be poor and have a cell phone?  Horror of horrors, it might surprise the conservative begated community that some of the homeless have ATM cards and bank accounts. Must someone pass a destitute standard to earn relief?

It may shock and disturb Mr. Malcolm, Ms. Lopez and Ms. Malkin to learn that many of the people who go to food kitchens aren't homeless but they are poor and they are poor thanks to the policies conservatives have enacted since the days of Ronald Reagan. And many of these urban poor may even have jobs but the over 20% erosion of the purchasing power of the minimum wage since 1981 has left many of the working poor living in single resident only (SRO) hotels. These are modern tenements aimed at extracting every last penny from the poor. An SRO runs $180 a week for shared bath. $225 with bath. It's a room and a bed, not much else. There's a 14% tax on that since it's a hotel.

Here in San Francisco, our city run four shelters are "beyond full," with at least 450 families with 800 children living in single-room hotels in the city. These SROs don't have cooking facilities. For the urban poor that means eating out or at best a microwave in their rooms. And so for many, going to a soup kitchen is the only option to get a balanced meal at least a few times a week.

I'm sure Mr. Malcolm, Ms. Lopez and Ms. Malkin are horrified that the poor might own a microwave. Damn the poor, they're just not poor enough. So let's mock them for taking a picture of the First Lady on a cellphone. Frankly, I am surprised that they didn't mock the Mushroom Risotto served on the menu. The lack of compassion is beyond belief.

Nor is this attack on the poor for not being poor enough a new line for conservatives. Take the Academy Award winning Best Picture for 2008 Slumdog Millionaire. It too became a conservative talking point last December courtesy of Larry Elder, a conservative African-American LA-based and recently retired radio talk show host. Mr. Elders thinks after seeing the movie that well that the poor in America don't have it so bad and liberals who complain about poverty in America should just shut up about it already. From Real Clear Politics:

The viewer of this film is stunned -- time and time again -- at the poverty that makes the poorest rundown shack in Appalachia look like the honeymoon suite at the Bellagio.

In America, we consider a family of four "poor" if its annual income falls below $21,203. And we actually undercount income -- ignoring assets accumulated in prior years and disregarding non-cash welfare, such as taxpayer-funded education, lunch programs, health care, food stamps and subsidies for public housing. Only 6 percent of poor households, according to The Heritage Foundation, are overcrowded -- meaning more than one person per room. More than two-thirds of "poor" Americans live in housing with more than two rooms per person. And 43 percent of America's poor households own their own homes -- and the average poor person's home has three bedrooms, one-and-a-half bathrooms, a garage and a porch or a patio.

"Overall," writes Heritage, "the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians."

"Nearly three-quarters of poor U.S. households own a car," says the study, "31 percent own two or more cars. Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions. Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception. Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher."

In 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population -- rich and poor -- lived with air conditioning, while today 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning. The average poor American has more living space than the average citizen -- of all income levels -- living in many cities throughout Europe, including Paris, London, Vienna and Athens.

Right now, our economy is in a recession of unknown duration, with rising unemployment and vast economic anxiety. But we live here, in America -- a country of vast prosperity, freedom of choice, and a control over our own destinies that much of the world simply finds breathtaking. And this film reminds us that things could be worse -- much, much worse.

That Larry Elder is stunned at the brutality of the poverty in the film likely means that Larry Elder is among the 82% of Americans who don't possess a passport and thus never leave these shores to see the world and if he does it's likely Europe and not the slums of Asia's megacities. Frankly, he doesn't need a passport to see harsh poverty but he likely walks, or better put drives, right past it daily. He's just blind to it. It's uncomfortable and so unpleasant so he ignores it. Well, I am not blind to it. It is a daily assault upon my sense and sensibilities. Every morning as I drag myself to work I walk down Sanchez to 17th Street for my morning ritual. There, mocha in hand, I head to the Castro Muni Station to catch my train. Turning the corner, a block later at the corner of Noe and 17th Street, one shopping laden with the Earthly possessions of two men one standing guard the other asleep on a tarp with a sleeping bag tossed over him. I've walked past them almost daily for months. They have all the room in the world for they have no room. Poverty in San Francisco, the glittering metropolis just north of the world's high tech industry, is indeed something to behold and visualize. There's at least two neighborhoods in the city with a poverty rate over 50%. Just blocks from where I am now over in the Tenderloin, over a third of its residents live in poverty. Poverty is all around us, Larry Elder just doesn't want to see it.

But what really galls me is that the Heritage Foundation report written in 2005 has long been debunked. I see no point in re-inventing the wheel so here's Dr. Amy Glasmeier of Penn State's Center for the Study of Poverty in America on what constitutes poverty in America:

For years now, as a nation we have been debating whether the poor are truly poor given their access to material goods such as housing, washing machines, televisions, and cars. In reality, the nature of life for the truly poor is about "not enough", as in not enough income to eat properly, little access to basic goods such as adequate clothing or shelter and heat. We have finally reached a time when we can all agree that the poor are truly, truly poor. And their numbers are growing rapidly.

Recent Census estimates reveal that the population percentage considered severely poor has reached a 32-year high. Between 2000 and 2005, the percent living at half of poverty-level income increased by 26%. The descent into destitution spares no community or group in society. America's urban, suburban and rural communities are all witnesses to the growth of what adds up to the "abject poor."

The abjectly poor in America are individuals living on $5,250 a year. For a family of three, two adults and a child, the level of income is $6,922; for a family of four, $10,222. This level of poverty in comparative terms is only slightly above the poverty line originally set in the 1960s and affords a person little more than food and shelter.

The $5,250 for an abjectly poor individual means a bare bones budget of$437/month. Of that total, no more than $50 is available per week for food, or $7.14 day--about two big Macs and a drink, or 1200-1600 calories a day and 120 grams of fat. The residual income supports a housing expenditure in the same range of $200/month, which in most places in the country yields a bed in a group home, leaving about $37 for incidentals.

Even more sobering is the fact that the number of severely poor is growing rapidly. In 1975 the severely poor were 30% of the population in poverty. Today a dismaying 43% of persons in poverty are severely poor by national standards. But more embarrassing than the share of the poverty population truly poor is the increase in the number of persons descending into severe poverty. While the rate of new entrants moving into poverty is somewhat stable, those who are becoming truly poor are increasing at a rate 56% higher than the growth rate of new entrants into poverty.

No demographic is immune to its reach. The severely poor are more likely to be of working age than young or old, though a large share of the truly poor are children under seventeen. The largest number of abjectly poor are white (two times as many as blacks), but blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately likely to be most affected. Women, the prime target of welfare reform, on a proportionate basis are one third more likely to face deep poverty than men.

No region is untouched by this growth in the number of truly poor. The 15.89 million abjectly poor Americans live predominantly in the South (6.5 million) followed by the West and the Midwest (3.5 and 3.1 million, respectively). States with the highest share of abjectly poor have historically had high poverty levels (e.g., the Delta, Appalachia and the U.S.-Mexico Border). The largest totals are, not surprisingly, in the biggest states, although Georgia and North Carolina are also a part of this august group. States with the fastest rate of growth are some unlikely places--Minnesota, New Hampshire, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. Previously these states escaped the ranks of the worst in terms of social ills due to progressive policies, investments in education, and tolerant societies. Now even they must question their own policies toward the poor.

Is this evidence of welfare reform gone drastically off course? Are we seeing the consequences of low taxes for high-income individuals and the resulting growth in income inequality? Are we harvesting the seeds planted twenty years ago in the minds of the nation's citizens that government is the cause rather than the cure for economic insecurity? According to this view, government is the reason that people are poor. Its programs allow them to choose not to work, when in fact programs should be fostering self-sufficiency for all. Like everything associated with poverty, I guess it depends on your point-of-view.

No, we don't have legions of child beggars whose eyes have been burnt out with acid but beggars aplenty we have in one of the richest countries on Earth. It's not just the beggars. It's also millions of Americans who aren't getting enough to eat or who to stretch their food dollar eat poorly, it's millions without preventative health care plans who then delay care and treatment until it's too late thus overburden our emergency rooms. Talk to a librarian in any major city in the United States, chances are they are also our nation's social workers now.