She needs 50 minutes a month for emergencies? Seriously??????

These people consider these phones a direct gift from Obama. It desn't take much to buy there people off. Obama funnels billions to his donor/bundlers while these people crap happy bricks over a free phone.The program started under Bush which once again proves right wing social engineering doesn't work.

I pay $30/month for 200 minutes and I barely use ten minutes. But I'm not calling 911 everytime they are out of McNuggets. These leaches are pathetic and the ones that will riot when the goodies run out.

We have gone from providing what is necessarry and basic to fulfillings wants and gotta haves. 250 minutes per month! Bull pucky. (loved the McNugget comment!)

It is amazing how easy it is for the government to buy votes from their own supporters and have the entire operation paid for by their opponents.

Used to be you could buy a person's vote with a Bottle of Ripple or a pack of Cigs. Times have certainly changed!

Bridge card, section 8 voucher, medicaid, food banks, cell phones. Why would an illiterate dropout try to work?

I hve no problem with helping homebound or genuinely poor people by providing them with landline phone for emergencies. Landlind's give 911 operators the location of the caller and are relatively inexpensive for local calls.

I can't see why we are providing cell phones with 250 minutes (more if you recruit more users)to people who can obviously are ablebodied enough to make $11 per hour "protesting."

More Obama slush money at work.

The clip of the black woman with the free phone proves there is a 47%.

How are "free" cell phones different from "free" flu shots for seniors? We are all hooked.

I'll tell you how #13. A free flu shot is a $20 one time deal whereas the free phone is $30-40 a month FOREVER!! That's the difference.

"Emergency" translates to "I'm hungry and need to order a pizza".

Hackers wanted!

There are 16 trillion reasons to cut this out.

Anyone on this program should lose their right to vote, it's evidence of their diminished capacity.

Man, this woman, these people, must have a LOT of emergencies!

#13, there is a concept in economics that talks about the common good. Flu shots are for the common good - people pass the flu on to others, and it kills thousands of people in the U.S. each year. The immunizations make good economic sense.
The cell phone - obamaphone - is a different matter. The original intent of the universal connection fee was to fund 911 service, if my memory serves me. Instead, it was distorted into a free cell phone service. (lads in the hood, dealing drugs, carry several cell phones, probably free, to deal with their druggie clientele.)
Thanks barack.

I'll pass on the free flu shot too.

These free phones should not be able to access anything other than police, fire, emergency, hospitals.

They have been running slick, innocuous ads for this program for more than two years in the Philly market. It is a disgrace, but as with every other government giveaway I'm sure it will never end.
And not for nothing #7, I thought that was Sue!

Did they need an ID to activate the phones?

Free is not free. It is the free lunch mentality that has caused our economic problems in the West. The money has run out and the natural, logical, inevitable consequences of all the "free" stuff and inflated wages and benefits and other giveaways are just beginning to be felt. The party, as the saying goes, is over.

4 hours per month of "free" cellular minutes for emergencies is, of course, preposterous. That works out to about 8 minutes every single day of the month for an emergency. It would be interesting to know who came up with that number and how they arrived at it. It would be even more interesting to know the names of the bureaucrats who make such decisions. The anonymity of bureaucracy renders direct personal accountability difficult or impossible. If the names of the individuals responsible for such things were easily available, more care might be devoted to some of their decisions.

Wen I bees oud uv rocks I bee usen mah Boy-Boy fone cracker! Thaz wads:

Poor blacks are allowed to have free things paid for by racist white folks. Didn't you know that?

All part of The Plan...

Are Ipads next? I've just begun to realize there is no end to the freebies.

I'm with #18... Nothing is free. They can pay for government handouts with their vote.

I'm with #18, free phone = no vote.

Or switch the whole program to phones that only dial 911.

Oh please, I have 5 people on our phone plan with 1400 minutes & we don't come close to using it all & I have a teenager & a 23 yr old on the plan.

Now be fair. The free phones probably aren't 4G.

The FCC’s basic 911 rules require wireless service providers to transmit all 911 calls to a PSAP, regardless of whether the caller subscribes to the provider’s service or not.

http://www.fcc.gov/guides/wireless-911-services

[English] You don't need a contract or phone number to make 911 call from any cellphone.

Now, why do ppl need 250 minutes or more of air time each month for "emergencies" again ?

Neighbor said they saw someone on the news who had 17 of these cell phones and were getting another one, about every day, from the same person in the Verizon store!

My blood pressure is still boiling from being in the grocery store this morning and the bag of bones in front of me had 4 cans of Eagle Brand milk and two big packages of pecan halves. She paid for it with a card and I could see on the bottom of the screen 'EBT transaction.'. So when the sweet young lady was checking me out and finished, I was able to say how upsetting it was to see someone on food stamps be using an EBT card to buy something to make cookies with or something to that effect. She just rolled her eyes at me. She doesn't realize SHE is paying for that too.

Cut this program and bring back pay phones

Most importantly you can bet that the Obama campaign is mining these phone numbers and will use the phones as leashes to turn these people into voters, although many if not most of them probably have little natural interest in voting. Manufacturing such voters is at the core of the community organizing Obama campaign.

I also heard that a premise of this program is that they need the phones in order to get calls about jobs they have applied for. I'd like to know how often that happens and if they do get a job, is the free phone given up?

Catering to societal trash will be the undoing of our country. Wake up people. Not everybody deserves a "break". Like Dennis Miller says, "I cant help the clueless".

Let's go a little further #18 & #31. People who receive any benefit from the government, that they have not payed into, should not be able to vote.