Please help with a response to my Repuke sister!

I would love some assistance for a brief but powerful reply to shut her up. She sent some stupid audio of Howard Stern (of all people) interviewing people in Harlem about who they're voting for and if they said Obama, they replaced his talking points with McCain's and saying, "So if something happens to Obama, you're OK with Palin being President" to which the people on the audio said, "Yes." Her comment was, "This my friends is our voting public...hilarious. I think they too may have a loan with a balloon payment due soon."

I told her had an issue with what she was implying by sending such crap. This is what she wrote:

"Ouch...I was actually just talking voting public in general but now that you bring it up we can talk when your guy is in office and I am redistributing my "wealth" to my "comrades" who choose to not work as hard or try to educate themselves....oh I don't know... like the folks in the audio. I think they are all taking us for a ride and that includes Mr. Carter, er I mean Obama.."

Thanks! I swear, my grandmother is rolling over in her grave right now...

workin' out for ya?

This is classic propaganda. They define the terms of the debate, reducing the question to a silly premise, then ask a *seemingly* direct question with the only answer being that your side is totally crackers.

How many people did they interview who replied, "What the hell? Palin's not running with Obama!" only to edit out their responses.

This shit can't be debated with, honestly. Just give up and kick their asses in November.

I have no other advice for you : Either change them, quiet them, or dump them ... Your choice ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjxzmaXAg9E

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJghQMq49dw

or educate themselves.

I have brothers like this that I haven't spoken to for 30 years. I have better things to do with my time than to waste it people who are this self-absorbed and gullible.

I have brothers who are just the opposite as well. So it all works out.

she is right... Stop Corporate Welfare!

Get the oil companies off the Government's tit!

Tell John McCain to give back his Social Security and Disability - his family fortune is enormous, yet he gets almost $250,000 per year from the poor taxpayers just trying to make it through until Friday. Its just sick, I tell ya!

The poor and middle class spend about 90% of what they make - they put it all back into their communities, flower shops, clothing stores, restaurants, buying washing machines and cars. Adding to the bottom line of those who make over $250,000/year. How wrong!! Rich people count on TAX BREAKS to represent their income - what their businesses make from the middle class is IRRELEVANT! The wealthy sock most of their tax cuts away, or buy extra homes/vacations overseas - they put as little as possible back into our economy - trickle down your own damn self!





there.

I don't understand it.

There are going to be millions of people voting for Obama.

Many of them, just as many voters for McCain, will be uninformed voters who make up their mind for whom to vote on something other than some issue that they might be randomly asked about.

I care deeply about a piece of pending legislation relating to intellectual property on the internet, which will directly impact what I do for a living. I have no idea what either of the candidates positions are, nor does it have anything to do with why I am voting for Obama.

Some people select their candidate simply on how they feel about that person. That probably has a lot to do with the improvement of Obama's poll ratings after every debate - the guy seems calm, intelligent, and confident. Quite frankly, you could have a candidate who was a genius, but also a nutcase. In fact, Nixon might qualify there. Nixon was very bright, and a very effective president in a lot of ways. He was also paranoid, which was more of a problem than anything else.

So, quite frankly, someone could ask me how I felt about Obama's position on something entirely fictional that I don't spend much time worrying about, and you'd probably get a similar answer out of me - whatever... I'm voting for the guy because I believe it is important to once again engage the rest of the world constructively - what his stand on X, Y, or Z might be is simply not that much of a priority in my own opinion of "what matters".

You can tell her that while there may be a few people who don't follow politics at all like the group Howard Stern was making fun of,

it is more scary that some people would prefer to vote for a Republican after they have ruined our economy and led us into a war on false pretenses.

Tell her you find it scary that some people are going to vote for the Republican party that promoted deregulation and then bailed out the wealthy folks on Wall Street because they are angry that poor people might get a bail out from Obama.

I chose to reply with the following:

It breaks my heart to feel so much anger coming from you. I hope you find a way to deal with an Obama presidency without giving yourself a heart attack.

I love you, but don't send me crap like that again.

there are relative to how many poor are there whom she thinks deserve our help. Does she think of the total number of people needing assistance 50+% are people who "choose to not work as hard or try to educate themselves"?, 60%? 30%? 20%? 100%??? She needs to identify the rational basis for her estimate of this number. If she's guessing, she needs to admit that.

It would be good if you had some rational data to quantify this group of people who "choose not to work as hard or who don't educate themselves." This will require some google-ing or a phone call to the SRS, so you have a basis for addressing her answer to the question in paragraph one above, BUT even if you can't come up with actual welfare data, if she is guessing (and she probably IS just guessing) your guess as to what this figure is *IS* as legitimate as hers.

Once you've established, basically, that not all of the people requiring assistance are "un-deserving", i.e. that there is some proportion of "deserving" to "un-deserving" in the overall group, the question becomes: how do we help those who "deserve" our assistance (and who will improve themselves because of our assistance), while at the same time avoiding helping those we have deemed "un-deserving". How do we separate the two groups? Shall we take children away from "undeserving" adults? Or shall we just NOT help those who "deserve" help at all so as to be sure that no help goes to those who are "un-deserving"?

This brings us to the question: How do we define "deserving" and "un-deserving"? If someone is just simply beyond a certain age, is 20 hours a week "deserving", but not 19 hours? If so, does this mean that the younger you are the more hours you must work in order to be "deserving"?

We also need to examine the definition of those "who don't educate themselves". If our schools didn't have something that a student needed very very early on and that child got further and further behind, or if a working single parent didn't teach the lessons of self-discipline well enough that a child learns how to study, are they counted amongst those who "don't educate themselves"? How, exactly, shall we identify those who chose not to educate themselves? What are the criteria?

You could also ask about your sister's assumptions about her "wealth" that we want to re-distribute. She is probably opposed to us handing out money to the "undeserving", but what if, instead, we paid for evening child-care so an "un-deserving" single parent could go learn Microsoft Office and, thus, improve their employability? Would that be okay, or would that be too much competition for the jobs that she thinks should go to the "deserving"? What if we paid for exercise classes at a community center, tied to things such as food coupons, so that "un-deserving" diabetics have a chance to manage their disease without drugs and, thus, stay out of our hospitals as they age?

I suspect that none of the above really matters to some people, but at least by discussing it you might get her to admit that possibility rather than continuing to pretend that she would be generous if everyone would just conform to her idea of who deserves what.