John Edwards and the Coatless Girl. Edwards' use of the image of a "coatless girl" to represent the 35 million Americans who fall below the poverty line is coming in for some of the same sort of questioning aimed at Reagan's "welfare queen."

"Edwards would do better to say there's a girl somewhere in America who's cold because her family can't afford to fix the furnace," said Robert E. Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, who has analyzed data from the Census Bureau and other agencies on the living standards of the poor. Since the typical American family below the poverty line has a car, air-conditioning, a microwave oven, a stereo and two color televisions with cable or satellite service, Mr. Rector said, it was implausible to assume the family could not afford coats.

(Nice caricature of Ralph Nader at that link too.)