America's poor actually live pretty durn well

[tblue37]

64. But *before* the article excerpt you did post your own comment

explaining that the excerpt was from an article *debunking* the Heritage Foundation's BS.

I teach college English, and one thing that always frustrates me is how careless people are about paying attention to what someone else says in speech or writing. Part of the problem is just half-a**ed listening, but part of it is not listening *at all* and being determined to hear only what they want to hear. As a result, people often assume you have said the exact *opposite* of what you have actually said--as happened in this case.

One semester, when trying to encourage a class full of students struggling with writing essays about poetry and claiming that they were not capable of figuring out what poems mean. I said, "This seems hard only because it is new and unfamiliar. You can learn to do it, just as so many students before you have learned to do it. You are not any less intelligent than they were. Your brains are just as good as theirs, just as goood as mine. I see no signs at all that any of you have suffered damage to your perfectly functional brains."

So naturally four of the students in that class complained on their class evaluations at the end of the term that I had called the whole class brain damaged and stupid!