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Americans now have the "right" to digital TV?

As we go into an election year spin-cycle, with the statists on both wings of the Demopublican Party competing to hand out bread and circuses with our tax dollars, THIS is just too much.

As the Snooze J reports, "Coupons offered to convert old TVs to digital".

Seems like the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (who knew we had one of those?) has been taking heat from Congress regarding its failure to properly prepare Americans with older TVs for the 2009 switchover to all HD broadcasting. So now it has set aside $1.5 Billion--let's see, thats $1,500,000,000 of OUR money--to send out $40 vouchers to defray the costs of converting an old TV into one that can receive Hi-Def. Converters sold on the free market will retail for $50-70, and the NTIA expects to pass out between 10-26 million of the vouchers (two per household, please).

What this amounts to is the US government essentially taking $5 from all 300 million American citizens and redistributing it in the form of TV vouchers to 26 million households. Want to know the cute part? There's not even a "needs test." You don't have to be poor or deprived or undocumented: you just have to ask for one. Or two. (And if you think I'm giving you the website address for this boondoggle, think again.)

I've been looking through my copy of the Constitution, even the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and I just can't find "the right to high-definition television" listed anywhere.

Oh, wait, it's there in pencil in the "Election year addendum: you have the right to a properly functioning television, so that you can watch political advertising."
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Comments

Brian Shields said…
What a steaming pile of poop.

I mean.. I don't quite think this is appropriate.

I don't even think there are that many people who are watching TV over the air anyway. Maybe 5% of the population.

Heck, down here all they'd be able to pick up is WBOC, and that's not even clear.

Poop, I say, a big old smelly pile of political poop.
January 2, 2008 at 10:14 AM
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