This horse is almost dead, but I will beat on it anyway. As we all know, there is an uproar over an incident at a town hall somewhere in the Houston area. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee supposedly took out her cellphone in the middle of a citizen's question, thus proving all sorts of horrible things about liberals. Here is the shortest version of the video:
I think the video is probably faked: take a close look at the part from 0:15 to 0:45. And even if real the interpretatioon is dubious
A woman whose name appears to be "Tracy" (according to a subtitle on the video) was supposedly asking Rep. Lee a serious question about insurance when the Congresswoman arrogantly whipped out a cellphone and ignored her. Tracy is a cancer survivor who managed to get her insurance to pay for her care and she was worried that she wouldn't have gotten as good care under ObamaCare.
We never actually see Tracy and Lee in the same frame. We see two head shots of Tracy for about 14 seconds and male voices says "She's not listening to you!" The male voices could have been dubbed in later: they sound a little different from the other sounds on the video (but maybe they were just closer to the camera than Tracy was.) There is a jump cut (the video was made with multiple cameras) to Lee, who is indeed on the phone. This is a pretty obvious point, but that video could have been taken at a different time. For about 30 seconds, people shout at Lee, who does put her phone away. We never see Tracy during this time.
She puts her phone away just as someone's head blocks the view, which could be a sign of fakery. Around 0:46 the camera pans from Lee to Tracy, which is harder to fake, but not unfakeable. I think the pan was faked: I beleive two pans were matched to each other. (It is even possible that the footage of Lee in the middle of the piece was reversed: i.e., she only took out her phone after Tracy spoke and we are seeing that footage backwards.)
Even if this is a real video, and even if Tracy was real (she could be a phony), this is a dumb scene: Tracy was looking right at Lee, who was either on the phone already or took it out in the middle of the question. (Like I said, we only see Tracy, even though there was more than one camera used to make the video.) Yes, it is not polite to pull out your phone while someone is talking to you--- but it is also impolite not to wait for the other person to get off the phone. Tracy was not exactly going out of her way to be polite.