Now, you report, the multinational corporations that grow salmon want federal handouts when their fish die of disease.

He has traversed the country calling President Obama "the greatest food-stamp president in American history" and presenting African-Americans with the great revelation that they should prefer paychecks to federal handouts.

Critics blasted it this week as exactly the type of behavior that has left Amtrak famously dependent on federal handouts.

For years they survived in tents and shanties, dependent on federal handouts because they were too mentally disturbed to work for a living and in most cases afraid to enter a building with a solid roof for fear it would crash down and kill them.

Don't you listen to no government types, they just want to turn us into mealy-mouthed dependents who can't live without a federal handout.

This time LH brings the more subtle funny - mistaking "governor of a sparsely populated and isolated state hugely dependent on federal handouts" for "sufficient experience as a political leader to take on the office of the chief executive".

Palin is "governor of a sparsely populated and isolated state hugely dependent on federal handouts."

Each year, freeloading corporations grab nearly $170 billion in tax-funded federal handouts to help them do the things they should be paying for themselves (and that doesn't even count all the corporate welfare they're getting from state and local governments).

"Indian tribes are encouraged to become self-sufficient and we're always criticized for expecting federal handouts or state welfare programs," said Albert Alvidrez, tribal governor for the Tigua Indian Reservation of Texas.

From the start it was far less self-sufficient than it liked to pretend: the unfettered individualism depended on federal handouts.