‘Obamaphones’: A Case Study in How Race Perverts the Spending Debate

Jamilah King writes for Colorlines: “As Washington has debated the sequester and the fake crisis of federal spending, some leading conservatives have revived a familiar meme about an old program called Lifeline, which is a longstanding federal subsidy created to make phone service accessible to people who are elderly, very low-income or living in rural areas. Like the furor surrounding Obamacare in 2009, the ongoing stir over ‘Obama phones,’ as the program has been dubbed, is instructive. It illustrates just how bizarre the right can make reality look when it uses race to demonize government.”