LBJ = Bush

New Rule: No more Texas Presidents.

To Greg Sargent:
"Watch the YouTube and find out." huh?
Cute, real cute...you try watching videos with a 26.4Kbps dial-up connection, and see how you like guessing games when the answer could have been provided.
Some of us can't get even middling-speed dial-up, let alone affordable broadband, or afford satellite Internet. Your reliance on a video clip seems elitist to one unserved by up-to-date technology.

If he told you, it would have spoiled the surprise when seeing Kennedy's comments.

And I don't think it's "elitist" to ask people to watch a video. If you haven't heard, YouTube's all the rage.

If we took a poll of this blog, my guess would be 80% are using something faster than dial-up speed. Here's a recent report from Pew:

Adoption of high-speed internet at home grew twice as fast in the year prior to March 2006 than in the same time frame from 2004 to 2005. Middle-income Americans accounted for much of the increase, along with African Americans and new internet users coming online with broadband at home. At the end of March 2006, 42% of Americans had high-speed at home, up from 30% in March 2005, or a 40% increase. And 48 million Americans -- mostly those with high-speed at home -- have posted content to the internet.

I do understand the digital divide is a real issue, but it's quickly closing.

Alternatively, you could have just nicely asked for someone here to tell you the answer, instead of being all crankypants. 

It was LBJ, by the way... 

And since the video was from CNN, you can probably read the entire clip at their transripts page, here. 

Dissent Protects Democracy.

OK, perhaps the transcript along with the video would have been better.

Maybe I'm the one being a crankypants? 

Dissent Protects Democracy.

I'm with janderson and irishkg on both counts. I'm pretty stunned that any progressive would brush off the 20 percent of us (and I suspect it's more than that but don't know for sure) who aren't on broadband. It's bad enough that so much of our culture is now inaccessible to people without home Internet, but to happily dismiss the folks who can't afford or simply don't have access to a high-speed connection? Wow. Anybody with an income less than $50K or so, or who lives and works in rural America, just forget it. The progressive movement doesn't need or want you. Hell of a message.

Listen, not everybody lives in the suburbs with a nice income. I recently moved from the Boston suburbs to rural Vermont, and outside Vermont's bigger "cities" (all of which combined have fewer people than the suburban "town" I used to live in), There. Is. No. Broadband. I'm extremely lucky that the quirky little local telco that serves my tiny farming town offers DSL, but it's hardly something anybody would recognize as "high-speed."

And I wholeheartedly share the irritation with this kind of tease in blog posts or anywhere else. Yuck.

Greg, I love you. Go thou and sin no more!

I was going to shut up, but I just read jstein's comment and want to say thanks for explaining it so well.

The phone company doesn't offer DSL here, all they did was offer to punch my TS card.
For young folks, that's an old expression meaning to brush off a complaint, as in "You don't like it..here, I'll punch your TS (for Tough Sh*t) card for you."

Excellent rule.

True.

The problem is the Bush family and the conservative movement. They aren't the same.

The dangerous Bushes are all in Florida today. And the conservative movement is a Southern phenomonon.

Happily dismiss? Who happily dismissed you?

"Anybody with an income less than $50K or so, or who lives and works in rural America, just forget it. The progressive movement doesn't need or want you. Hell of a message."

Oof. I didn't realize this one post by this one man represented the feelings of an entire movement. This post wasn't written in spanish, so I guess the progressives don't want the hispanic vote either.

80/20 rule comes to mind...