As if you didn't already know that famed controversy whore Ted Rall is a complete tool, he's now calling people who donate to charity "suckers". Rall says that self reliance is for suckers and that people should be suckling from the federal teat instead of accepting private money. Blood pressure alert:

Government has been shirking its basic responsibilities since the '80s, when Ronald Reagan sold us his belief that the sick, poor and unlucky should no longer count on "big government" to help them, but should rather live and die at the whim of contributors to private charities.

That's right, everything was hunky dory until Reagan came along and screwed things up. He created all that poverty by kicking people off the government gravy train. Just ignore the record rate of home ownership, so we can go back to the double digit mortgage rates of the 1970s.

Disaster relief is too important to be left to private fundraisers, with their self-sustaining fund-raising expenses, administrative overhead (nine percent for the Red Cross) and their parochial, often religious, agendas.

Heh. Nine percent is cheap compared to the cost of government.

In the final analysis, after the floodwaters have receded and the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans have been razed under eminent domain, major charities will be lucky if they've managed to raise one percent of the total cost of Katrina. Congress, recognizing the reality that only the federal government possesses the means to deal with the calamity, has already allocated $58 billion--over 70 times the amount raised by charities--to flood relief along the Gulf of Mexico. As Bush says, that's only a "down payment."

Yeah, charity is easy to raise when you collect it at the point of a gun. Rall goes on to say that charities are part of the vast right wing conspiracy, and that the government uses them to cast people aside.

It's time to "starve the beast": private charities used by the government to justify the abdication of its duties to its citizens.

I know he sounds like a great catch, but sorry ladies Rall is already spoken for.