RE: Strother's Film Festival

I guess weighing in on the injustice of supporting RiverRun is more fun than something like, say, weighing in on my earlier topic of so-called 'conservative' pundits who continue to wave the flag for our failing president?

Well, let's see. I didn't hear Laura Ingraham's remarks and what's-his-name's reporting wasn't very detailed. Your synopsis wasn't much more than a diatribe, and since Mrs. Ingraham is given to belaboring your beloved celebrity elite for belaboring all of us with their unsolicited opinions, you can hardly be cast as an objective observer. With all that, there wasn't much for me to say. In the interest of balance, you probably should have taken the clueless dhimmi, Helen Thomas, to task for proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is no smarter than Bush by asking him the equivalent of the wife-beater question.

Well, W/S currently has a program of funding downtown restaurants, many of which have defaulted and/or are behind on their loans. I can't say that I'm for that program.

Nor am I, but you're still in violation of the lemming rule.

That is truly corporate welfare as it measurably benefits only one entity: the restaurant owner.

First, that's not entirely true since it also benefits the employees of the restaurant and the city and county sales tax base, but that is beside the point. Whether or not this qualifies as corporate welfare, which it clearly does, has nothing to do with whether it benefits one person or forty. What makes it corporate welfare is the fact that the government confiscates wealth from you and me and redistributes it to a corporate entity.

Let's end that program and spend the funds on proven successes — like RiverRun, for example.

Great, let's stop one instance of corporate welfare so we can fund another. Put another way, let's stop doing one dumb thing so we can do another. Is that really what you intended?

A wide variety of tax-paying citizens benefit from that, myself included...That's good for all of us.

And there it is, the siren song of the looters and moochers. Someone thinks it's good for all of us so that gives them the moral authority to rob us and hand the proceeds over to their chosen mascot.

Most folks who are so adamantly repelled by culture on their block (and in their neighborhood) generally don't live on one (or in one)...

Nope, that's dishonest, Strother. This isn't about being repelled by culture or "art." This is about the nanny state robbing us to fund what some group of elites believe to be "good for all of us." Nice try at forcing the Neanderthal metaphor, though.

...you can always opt to live outside W/S where you don't pay city taxes.

You're very mistaken if you think Winston-Salem is the only place this is going on. In any case, your attempt to morph the taxes stolen from city residents into some kind of voluntary contribution is weak. You can't negate the immorality by simply saying people should just run away from it.

And here's a 'good job!' for trying to turn the subject of RiverRun into class warfare; wait, I thought that just liberals used that as a tactic for argument? I guess you can use it, too, huh?

I mulled over half a dozen responses to this before deciding on the one that takes the high road. I'm going to suggest that you do some research on what constitutes class warfare. Hopefully you'll have the good grace to be completely embarrassed by what you wrote and we'll pretend this unfortunate incident never occurred.