I will not be satisfied until myself and TimJ are in broad agreement about this issue...that being said, where is the common ground? I am quite "liberal", as a matter of fact my sympathy lies with the poor and repressed. I would never think that seeing people sit on their porch means that they are living on the dole; also the system seems to be designed to keep a large portion of people in low wage, low skill jobs. There is much more to being poor than laziness, many hard working people are severly disadvantaged and rarely are they starting from a position of strength in their lives which would allow them to get ahead. It would be unimaginably difficult to be a single mother with three kids and a high school education, trying to wait tables and go to night school. I do not believe that the reason people are poor is they simply do not want to work.
That being said, some people screw up! I work in one of the best manufacturing jobs in central Illinois and am paid pretty well...and yet we have people fired for missing too many days, being late, doing drugs, just making life more difficult for themselves and their families. Not everyone who is bad off got that way due a corrupt system. Some people make things hard on themselves. The specific examples set-up by the OP are not people trying to work in San Francisco who can't afford $500,000 houses and have to live 60-70 miles from work. They live in relatively inexpensive parts of the country with plenty of housing and plenty of low paying jobs all around them.
That last sentence is important. You stated (paraphrasing here) that it is insulting to people with low paying jobs that maybe they should just get a job closer to work. Why?? The person who drove 66 miles to a job paying $7.25 an hour, how is that a failure of local government to insure adequate housing or adequate decent jobs? There is housing closer to her work; there are jobs closer to her home, right? Why shouldn't she have to move or get a different job if she can't afford to get to work now? By she I mean the specific people in the OP, not the entire class of working poor.
Many people are compelled by circumstances into working or living in less than optimal situations, but the specific examples in the original post do not on the surface appear to be a case of that. Do you see something different here, TimJ? All I see are a couple people doing foolish things.