Renee Fleming is a mother and grandmother who has spent most of her 54 years living on the streets of Brooklyn, except when she’s been in prison. But the last time she went in, she found a helping hand from Providence House, a New York-based charity that visits women in prison and helps re-unite them with their children, find them housing, and secure a job when they get out.

It was Providence House, Renee told ThinkProgress through tears, that saved her life. She has spent the last six months living at the home and has a job as a telemarketer in Brooklyn. Renee is also one of Mitt Romney’s 47 percent — she depends on government benefits like welfare and the Housing Rehabilitation Program, which provides the assistance that helps her stay at the Providence House.

“This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever felt so serene, because of the nuns, because of our sisters,” Fleming said. “At 54 years old, I’m finally free. I can do it, through Providence House.” Watch Renee tell her story:

To Romney, that may make Fleming someone who he’ll “never convince” to take “personal responsibility and care for their lives.” Through tears, though, Fleming told ThinkProgress that she “takes full responsibility” for her past mistakes, and that Romney’s comments have her worried about this election — she plans to vote in November for the first time in her life — because the budget cuts pushed by Romney and running mate Paul Ryan could jeopardize the types of programs that made her “truly free.”

“I’m really afraid. I’m so scared,” Fleming said about potential budget cuts, which one official from Providence House said could jeopardize the programs, like food stamps and housing assistance, on which Fleming and other residents depend. “I’ve just got so much hope, and I’m afraid at the same time.”

Providence House receives a modest amount of federal money through grants, according to Sister Janet Kinney, Providence House’s executive director. The women it helps, given their circumstances, are largely dependent on government aid for food, housing, and health care. And while the national rate of women who return to prison is nearly 40 percent, the recidivism rate for Providence House residents is just five percent, Kinney said during a speech at the Nuns On A Bus rally in New York yesterday.

Programs like Providence House’s have risen to prominence during the Nuns On A Bus tour, which has highlighted religiously-affiliated poverty programs that would be jeopardized by the cuts contained in the House GOP budget, which Ryan authored and Romney supports. The majority of those cuts come from programs that help the poor and middle class — people like Renee Fleming, who has a job, a place to live, and a chance to make life better for her and her family for the first time in her life.

Last week, Facebook announced it would cease using facial recognition technology on European Union users and delete all data following complaints from member states and an inquiry by the Irish Data Commissioner. While the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission here in the U.S. over Facebook’s use of the same technology, the complaint remains pending — repeating a familiar narrative of online giants facing higher levels of scrutiny in European Union countries than in the United States.

In the U.S. numerous agencies enforce a “patchwork” of laws defining online privacy protections in different sectors, leaving some areas with very little oversight and users without a clear path to pursue if they feel their rights have been violated. It’s a different story in the E.U., where online privacy policy is guided by the Data Protection Directive — a sort of bill of rights for online users that provides member nations with guidelines for national level laws guaranteeing a base level of control for users.

European protections are on the cusp of becoming even more robust with proposed regulation this year that would implement rules superseding national level laws and extending the scope of protections to apply to all foreign companies processing the data of EU residents. The new regulation also comes with some teeth: Penalties up to two percent of global revenues for offending companies.

To put that into perspective, this summer Google agreed to pay the largest Federal Trade Commission settlement ever to an individual company: It amounted to five hours of 2011 revenues. Under the proposed European Commission Data Protection rules it could have amounted to one hundred seventy-five hours of revenue.

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Mitt Romney has argued for months that President Obama raised taxes on middle class Americans and small businesses during his first term. But during a rally in Ohio on Tuesday, the GOP presidential candidate inadvertently undermined his claim, calling tax increases a “new idea” that Obama would institute in a second term:

ROMNEY: His idea now. He’s got one new, one new idea. I admit this, he has one thing he did not do in his first four years, said he’s going to do in his next four years, which is to raise taxes. And is there anybody who thinks that raising taxes will help grow the economy?

Watch it:

The leader of the Nuns On A Bus tour that has criss-crossed the nation highlighting the effect the House Republican budget would have on low-income Americans said Monday that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s recent comments about the “47 percent” “show that he is “out of touch” and “has no idea how hard it is at the margins of our society.”

ThinkProgress spoke to Sister Simone Campbell, the executive director of NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby, in New York, where the Nuns got off the bus and onto the Staten Island ferry to highlight the GOP budget’s impacts on poverty programs in New York City. Aboard the ferry, Campbell said Romney’s comments “broke my heart” because they demonstrated his lack of knowledge about the living conditions of America’s poorest citizens:

CAMPBELL: I mean, it was shocking to me that a person who says he wants to be the leader of our nation believes that 47 percent of our country is basically lazy or dependent or indolent. That was shocking to me. But then, it broke my heart that he would be so out of touch, that he would so not know the truth of folks at the margins of our society who work so hard. And he obviously doesn’t know that if you work a minimum wage job, if you’re a child care, if you’re providing janitorial services, or if you’re a day laborer, if you work for minimum wage, you’re still in poverty. He has no idea how hard it is at the margins of our society.

The Nuns tour, which hit nine states earlier this year, was in New York to protest the House GOP budget authored by Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan. Even before he chose Ryan as his running mate, Romney supported the Ryan budget, which makes a majority of its spending cuts from programs that benefit the poor, including food stamps, Medicaid, and other assistance programs.

The Nuns On A Bus tour invited Romney and Ryan to join them during a stop in Ohio early in October but have yet to get an answer. But that visit, Campbell said, might be exactly what Romney needs. “That’s why we’ve invited them to come October 10 to Cincinnati, to have him listen to folks experience,” Campbell said. “Not speak, we want him to listen, to let his heart be broken by the truth of people in the U.S. That’s what he needs.”

Hours after union-busting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) tweeted that he wants the “real refs” back on National Football League fields this weekend, another Wisconsin Republican came out in favor of the locked out union referees while on the campaign trail.

The Green Bay Packers lost on a controversial last-second play that was ruled incorrectly by scab officials Monday night, leading Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan (also from Wisconsin) to come out in favor of putting the professional referees back on the field:

Did you guys watch that Packer game last night? I mean, ha. Give me a break. It is time to get the real refs. And you know what, it reminds me of President Obama and the economy. If you can’t get it right, it’s time to get out. I have think that these refs work part time for the Obama administration in the budget office. They see the national debt clock staring them in the face, they see a debt crisis and they just ignore and pretend it didn’t even happen. They’re trying to pick the winners and losers and they don’t even do that very well.

Ryan, his odd and factually incorrect analogy to the Obama administration aside, seems to have had a sudden change in support for organized workers when his favorite football team was affected by their incompetence. Though he has at times sided with unions, Ryan supported Walker’s radical move to effectively end collective bargaining for many of the state’s public workers and denounced the ensuing protests outside the state capitol by saying, “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”

Mitt Romney got himself in trouble when he wrote off 47 percent of Americans who “are dependent upon government.” But he also got his math wrong.

It turns out that 96 percent of Americans have used government assistance at one point or another in their lives, ranging from Social Security to grant programs. In a New York Times op-ed Monday, Professors Suzanne Mettler and John Sides point out that a vast majority of Americans have some tie to the government and that, in 2008, 96 percent of people used government help. The data comes from a 2008 Cornell study of 21 social programs:

The survey asked about people’s policy usage throughout their lives, not just at a moment in time, and it included questions about social policies embedded in the tax code, which are usually overlooked.

What the data reveal is striking: nearly all Americans — 96 percent — have relied on the federal government to assist them. Young adults, who are not yet eligible for many policies, account for most of the remaining 4 percent.

On average, people reported that they had used five social policies at some point in their lives. An individual typically had received two direct social benefits in the form of checks, goods or services paid for by government, like Social Security or unemployment insurance.

As Sides and Mettler are quick to point out, the survey does not include “government activity that benefits everyone — national defense, the interstate highway system, food safety regulations — but only tangible benefits.”

This means that Romney was not just insulting those who are too poor to pay a federal income tax. If Romney believes that dependence on government leads people to “believe that they are victims” who would never take “personal responsibility and care for their lives,” he has written off 96 percent of the country.

As ThinkProgress has reported, several states took their share of the $25 billion foreclosure fraud settlement and used it to balance their budgets instead of providing help to homeowners. New Jersey is one of those states, where Gov. Chris Christie plunked the money into the state’s general fund, not specifically earmarking it for foreclosure prevention.

And that isn’t the only way in which Christie is keeping aid from getting to homeowners who need it. According to a report by WABC’s Jim Hoffer, another pot of federal money delivered to the Garden State to prevent foreclosure has gone largely unused:

Two years ago, New Jersey received $300 million from the federal government to help the unemployed from losing their homes.

The state used that money to create the “Homekeeper Loan” program. [...]

Data Eyewitness News obtained show since 2010, Homekeeper has only approved 498 families for foreclosure assistance, but nearly 2,000 homeowners have been denied help.

In fact, less than $4-million of the $300-million has been spent ranking New Jersey last among 18 recipient states in giving out these emergency foreclosure funds.

Christie blew off Hoffer’s question about the program during a press conference, telling Hoffer “don’t show up once in a blue moon and think you’re going to dominate my press conference.” Watch it:

New Jersey is now second in the country in the percentage of homeowners with seriously delinquent mortgages, trailing only Florida.

The National Football League’s decision to lock out its unionized officials at the beginning of this season has had serious consequences, as the incompetence of the replacement referees has jeopardized player safety, led to obvious mistakes, and drawn criticism from fans, the media, coaches, and players. And now, elected officials are getting their jabs in too.

After the Green Bay Packers were robbed of a win by an blown call during Monday Night Football, union-busting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) — a Packers fan — took to Twitter this morning to demanded the return of the league’s unionized officials:

Walker’s sudden support of union labor is surprising, given his push for a radical union-busting law that effectively ended collective bargaining for many of Wisconsin’s public employees. The law, which Walker and his fellow Republicans pitched as necessary to fix Wisconsin’s budget before admitting that it was the “first step” in an anti-union strategy, was so unpopular that it led to massive protests outside the state capitol in Madison and recall elections against Walker and six Republicans in the state senate.

Multiple Packers players, incidentally, urged Wisconsinites to vote against Walker in the recall. And while Walker decries the scab officials who replaced union labor on the football field, he doesn’t hold himself to the same standard: after his union-busting law went into effect, union workers were replaced with prison labor.