Comments on: Pesky Brother-in-Law, Thanksgiving Edition

By: PeonInChief

PeonInChief — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:05:50 +0000

For those of you who don’t live anywhere near the poverty line:

1. Poor people may rent homes with AC and dishwashers, but those appliances are old and suck electricity. Poor people often can’t use them because they can’t afford the electricity. But rentals should come with those amenities, as poor people often pay half their income for rent.

2. Yeah, our society has a lot of cast-offs. Once I put a working TV next to the dumpster with a “free to good home” sign. It was gone within the hour. The same is true for a lot of other consumer electronics, so much so that I tried to give away a 7-year-old phone system and found no takers.

3. Everyone now has to have limited basic cable to receive the broadcast channels. The “converter boxes” don’t work and now that most of the middle class and rich have cable, local governments no longer bother to provide TV reception over the air. Comcast reports that limited basic cable (which costs more than $17 a month) is their most popular service. Most of us aren’t getting the high level packages. Instead we’re paying a couple hundred dollars a year to get what we used to get for free.

And as for Obama, the only defense of him is that there’s not enough difference between him and Mitt Romney to fill a thimble.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 07:00:24 +0000

The correct answer for Obama’s failure is, “Yeah, he shouldn’t have rehired Bush’s highest economic advisor. But it’s silly to expect a Republican President to fix a problem caused by Republican ideology.”

Obama has failed, and he will continue to fail indefinitely, because he’s just a different flavor of oligarch. That doesn’t mean that we have an alternative.

By: urban legend

urban legend — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 03:15:22 +0000

But herein is seen the fatal flaw of liberals: Bro’-n’Law has one sentence sound-bytes; Jared gives them several paragraphs in retort. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ…
The rule is (a) 10 word maximum, three or four words ideal; (b) no Latin-derived words, (c) two syllables max in any word. Anglo-Saxon grunts good. Latin or Greek sophistication, bad, very, very bad.

It takes hard work and a grasp of the common person with little time and not a lot of knowledge — OK, the obnoxious formulation, the LIV or low-information voter. But it can be done. You keep honing it down, honing it down and honing it down until you’re down to those four one or two-syllable Anglo-Saxon words that shape the way an issue is understood — kind of like Grover Norquist, except now you’re drowning ineffective communications in the bathtub.

Example: “Jobs first. We aren’t going to help on the deficit until people are making money and paying taxes again.” OK, 19 words, only one three-syllable word and there’s no substitute for it. It sends up the deficit-hawk pretty effectively, and gives people what they want to hear anyway. Pretty good start, but needs more work.

Another one about the deficit: “Deficit panic is ridiculous. We’ve had worse deficits before, and when the country started growing we worked ourselves out of it. We can do it again.”