Remember the ‘Obamaphone’ lady?
The Obamaphone Lady, who as far as we know hasn’t been otherwise identified, is a middle-aged black woman with a loud, gravelly voice. She exuberantly explains why she supports President Obama’s re-election: “Everybody in Cleveland [unintelligible] minority got Obama phone! Keep Obama in president, you know? He gave us a phone!”
The ‘Obamaphone’ program is more officially known as the ‘Lifeline’ program, subsidized phones for the ‘disadvantaged’ at taxpayer expense.
Who’s paying for it? You are. When you see various fees on your bill like the ‘Universal Service Fund (USF) Fee’, that’s the cash you’re paying out to subsidize the Obamaphones for welfare queens and other people who don’t want to work.
Every time I’m in an urban center, it doesn’t take long for me to spot the ‘Free Phone’ and ‘Free Health Care’ stands at streetcorners, at Walmart and in pharmacies.
But at least you’re also paying for Obamaphones for the dead.
California obtained millions in federal funds to cover phone and internet service for 94,000 dead people, a new report from the Federal Communications Commission has revealed.
The state took in $3.8 million between 2020 and 2025 through the federal Lifeline program, which spends nearly $1 billion annually to subsidize phone and internet service for low-income Americans, according to the FCC’s inspector general.
Of the 116,808 deceased individuals in opt-out states, roughly two-thirds (77,446) died after they were enrolled, the report stated.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr would like to bring out the dead, but Democrats are protesting the move claiming that it will make it harder for more welfare queens to get Obamaphones.
“It should go without saying that only beneficiaries that are both living and here legally should qualify for benefits under this program,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said. “But the data to date shows that this is not the case.”
“The FCC should be focused on making connectivity more affordable,” FCC Commissioner Ana M. Gomez,, the lone Democratic commissioner on the FCC, protested, “not erecting new barriers that risk raising phone and internet bills for the people who can least afford it.
And who has more trouble affording phones than the dead? They can’t even get jobs and they can only vote in select Democratic precincts.
Obamaphones are ‘affordable’ at the cost of making them less affordable for people who have jobs and pay their taxes. If we stopped trying to make phones ‘affordable’ for the Obamaphone lady, maybe they’d be more affordable for everyone else.
And that’s true of so much else, including health care and housing.
But apparently, at least back in 2008, younger people were being buried with their phones.
“It seems that everyone under 40 who dies takes their cell phone with them,” says Noelle Potvin, family service counselor for Hollywood Forever, a funeral home and cemetery in Hollywood, Calif. “It’s a trend with BlackBerrys, too. We even had one guy who was buried with his Game Boy.”
While statistics on cell phone burials don’t exist, funeral professionals agree it’s a fairly common occurrence — at least among the tech-savvy and the young — and some believe we’re only seeing the tip of the wired-to-the-end trend.
“It really started happening within the last five or six years,” says Frank Perman, owner and funeral director of Frank R. Perman Funeral Home, Inc. of Pittsburgh, Pa. “But I expect it to grow exponentially, especially with the price of technology getting so low. It’s not that big of a deal to bury somebody’s cell phone.”
“I’ve seen people leave cell phones on and tell me they’re going to call their loved one later,” says Vetter. “Not that anyone will answer, but they want to have that connection. I’m sure the family gathers around the phone when they call. They feel connected with that person because it’s their phone, but at the same time it helps them realize that a death has occurred.”
There’s a Stephen King story on that note. Probably inspired by this weird trend.
This whole story however does remind me of that old fad in which people afraid of being buried alive were buried with phones or the complicated bell device in the patent picture above so in case they were buried alive, they could phone someone and ask to be dug up. (See above.)
Still just because people want to be buried with their cell phones, doesn’t mean we have to pay for it.
