Via the comments, here’s the story of a real American, who’s fighting for his and his community’s freedom from the yoke of oppressive taxation:
Doug Knox retired with his wife to a small ranch outside of Alturas. His driveway is lined with American and Confederate flags, and he is single-handedly leading the opposition to the parcel tax with radio and television ads.
“If it costs me $10,000 to $15,000, I’m willing to do it,” Knox says. “Because I do not believe that throwing money at a problem is the way to go it, and put it on the backs of the taxpayers.” But even the staunchly conservative county supervisors– who’ve come under fire for creating the crisis– admit the parcel tax may be the only choice.
That parcel tax will be used to finance the county hospital:
But it’s no exaggeration to say that the county hospital in Alturas — even with its limited services — is a lifeline to the people who live here. The closest full-service hospitals are hours away, and the nearby medical centers over the mountains are often unreachable during winter storms.
If the tax vote does succeed, we can only hope that Knox will challenge it in court to protect the Constitutional right of Modoc County residents to die in the back of an ambulance stuck in a snowstorm.
beltane
If one of those many flag poles should happen to crash down on Mr. Knox’s head, the emergency room staff should just look at him and laugh.
me
Hah! They’re going to vote themselves out of a large chunk of their tax base!
Punchy
There is some STROOOOONG disconnect and wicked irony going on in this sentence.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
As Punchy says, so much irony. Throwing money at a problem won’t solve anything, unless I do it.
I have an idea for him though: How about we require that everyone either have health insurance, or those that refuse to buy it be required to pay some money each year in case they have to use the medical services? I’m even willing to subsidize those who cannot afford to pay this fee.
Villago Delenda Est
Confederate flags.
Confederate flags.
Say no more, say no more.
J.W. Hamner
Because there’s nothing more patriotic than commemorating traitors!
beltane
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): I find that throwing money at a problem usually does solve it. Even many personal problems are more easily solvable when money is thrown at them.
Throwing bullshit at problems never works, though. Maybe the teabaggers will figure this out one day.
flukebucket
Not really crazy if you believe that the lower the taxes the higher the revenue.
The fact that the guy is willing to spend more fighting a tax than the tax would ever cost him proves that there is no reasoning with people like him.
Athenae
I have people like this on my condo board. “I will spend $100 proving I owe $20 less on this water bill!” It’s gotten so I do want to throw money at the problem, in the form of giving them $20 to go the fuck away.
Hey, maybe that’s something we can build into the next stimulus.
A.
beltane
@flukebucket: We should stop calling taxes taxes and start calling them “courtesy fees” or “you are the most awesome patriot ever” fees, maybe even send them a cheap commemorative medal of Ronald Reagan and Charleton Heston when they pay their fee. They would eat that up.
geg6
Well, dog knows, proudly flying the flag of traitors and spending oodles of cash in order to shut down the town’s largest employer and only hospital tells everyone what a patriotic Merikan he is compared to all those Islamofascistcommies who expect medical treatment and who are the DFHs who provide medical care to the deadbeats who aren’t him, an obvious master of the universe right there with John Galt.
me
It’s a rural county. I wonder where they think the additional economic activity will come from. Without a hospital who in their right mind going to open a new business there?
NonyNony
@beltane:
I am all in favor of rebranding “taxes” as “Patriot Money”. If necessary we can throw in some kind of NPR-style scheme where the more “Patriot Money” you give from your income taxes every year, the better tacky patriot-themed gift you receive.
Omnes Omnibus
@beltane: I agree. The majority of problems I currently have would be quickly solved by throwing money at them.
Frank
Weren’t the people who fought for the Confederate traitors? If so, isn’t this guy a traitor for carrying one?
Furthermore, it is so typical for these anti-tax people to scream about taxes. Never mind that we have among the lowest in the western world.
But what these loudmouths never do is offer what spending they would cut in order to make the tax cut possible.
Villago Delenda Est
@me:
Without a hospital who in their right mind going to open a new business there
These people do not think things through.
It’s like my favorite group of glibertarians, computer hardware and software engineers, who rail about government spending, when it was government spending that made their careers possible. Of course, for many of them, it happened before they were born (the Apollo program, etc) so it doesn’t exist. But they lack any sense of history and understanding of how things are built on other things…they think it’s all presented magically by some invisible sky buddy or something.
flukebucket
I don’t think they think that far ahead. Trying to understand people like that is a lesson in futility. These are the kinds of people who can work for the government and at the same time tell you government is the greatest evil in the nation.
I think calling it a fee instead of a tax is a good idea and the commemorative Reagan and Heston coins would be a great selling tool.
Mary
@Punchy: I was just going to post the exact same thing.
flukebucket
@Omnes Omnibus:
Reminds me of a saying I once heard. “I have never seen a problem that more money would make worse.”
It is like the guys who just raise hell about how awful the schools are and they propose to make them better by cutting funding.
Sometimes it all does just seems so hopeless.
Tonybrown74
I don’t wish ill of anyone, even jackasses like this man.
However, it will take a personal tragedy for him to realize the foolish nature of his “crusade”. His wife (or some other close family member) is going to have to suffer from a life-threatening emergency before he realizes how important that hospital is to him.
I really hate this whole, “it don’t affect me, so fuck you,” mindset of these people.
gex
@Villago Delenda Est: Recall from the barber licensing discussion. The fiscal conservative response is to say that you can’t prove the licensing reduces public health risks. Even though there used to be problems before licensing and now there seem not to be problems.
It is incumbent on you to prove that private industry would not have created the Internet independently. Otherwise you can’t prove that taxes and government spending were beneficial.
I hate arguing with the evidence resistant. These are people whose favorite phrase is correlation != causation in every single case where evidence disagrees with their positions.
Violet
@beltane:
Heck, call them a “Patriot Contribution” or “Reagan Bucks,” as in “To fix this hospital every citizen needs to donate $100 Reagan Bucks.” Pretty soon they’ll knocking on everyone’s door to make sure they’re all paid up on their Reagan Bucks.
demo woman
If the hospital closes, folks might have to sell their house in order to relocate to find another job. Who’s going to buy their house? The new tea party slogan, How to create a ghost town, one flag at a time.
Villago Delenda Est
@gex:
Before DARPA started work on the technology that would become the internet, the sooper-geniouses at Ma Bell told the guys at the Pentagon asking about computers talking to each other over phone wires that such an idea was IMPOSSIBLE. It could not be done. Ever. Furthermore, we won’t provide it. So they put DARPA to work on it, and here we are, sending bits back and forth (at some point) over copper wires!
You’ll also recall that these same sooper-geniouses insisted that cell phone companies needed to pay them for using their infrastructure when people on cell phones called into the general public switched telephone network. When ISPs used those same rules to extract fees from the incumbent local exchange carriers (modem dialins to the ISPs’ switches, originating on the ILEC’s network) they cried foul! Their own greedy rules that they sought to apply on the cell phone providers neatly hoisted them on their own petard.
kindness
I heard about this last week on NPR. Yea, this asshole is a new guy too. Moved into the community within the last couple years. Bet he votes against the school bonds too. Hell, his kids are grown so why pay for someone elses?
There comes a point where ones selfishness is biting off your nose to spite your face. This guy has it in spades.
catclub
@Villago Delenda Est:
“they think it’s all presented magically by some invisible sky buddy or something. ”
My experience is that they think they did it all themselves,
and they had no help from anyone.
Athenae
Or by instituting tax caps, which force school districts to go to referendum every time they need $50 to buy pencils. But hey, taxes are theft, and my kids are in private school so fuck yours anyway.
A.
jwb
@Villago Delenda Est: Yes, and you notice how much a business wants regulation when it benefits the bottom line.
arguingwithsignposts
I think we misheard Grover Norquist. He didn’t want to make government small enough so he could drown *it* in a bathtub, he wanted to make it small enough so *we* could drown in a bathtub.
Steeplejack
__
Stupid question: Then who the hell is supposed to pay for it?
Oh, wait–I guess it’s supposed to be a self-supporting, profit-making unit of Invisible Hand Medical Services Inc.
gnomedad
I keep forgetting what these guys allow as legitimate functions of government apart from blowing shit up.
stuckinred
@me: Herb
The Bearded Blogger
When the Roman Empire started to collapse, did being a selfish dick turn into a kind of religion?
Also too, libertarians are just lazy thinkers.
Omnes Omnibus
@catclub:
That fits with what I have seen. Graduates of public schools from kindergarten through law school who work for the state government complaining that the government can’t do anything right. I am tempted to tell them that with respect to their education, I am tempted to agree with them. I also would like to suggest that, if they are unable to do anything right as a government worker, they resign and save the taxpayers from paying their salary.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@gnomedad: I believe they also see it as government’s job to keep people they don’t like from doing things they don’t like.
Gay sex and/or marriage.
Abortions.
Admiring Thomas Jefferson.
You know. All that shit.
The Bearded Blogger
@arguingwithsignposts: +10 exp for you!
you win the thread
@gnomedad: Warrantless intrusions into privacy are also part of legitimate government functions. Also, subsidizing the wealthy and promoting right wing causes.
Scott
Like one of the people quoted in the article says: “Ghost town this way.”
And five years down the line, Doug Knox will have moved to a city that has a hospital. He’ll read some article about how far Modoc County has fallen since losing their hospital, their employers, and their tax base, and he’ll say to himself, “Gee, how on earth did that happen?” He’ll probably genuinely have no idea.
Redshift
@Villago Delenda Est: And they’re against Net Neutrality, because telecom companies ought to be able to make a profit off the Internet that “they” built (and if neutrality is good, the free market will of course provide it, and government regulation is always bad.)
Zifnab
@Frank:
Nonsense. He clearly wants to cut the hospital. And who can blame him? When has anyone ever benefited from a hospital? It’s boilerplate government waste.
stuckinred
jwb
@flukebucket: “Reminds me of a saying I once heard. ‘I have never seen a problem that more money would make worse.'”
You might say that the fact that the more money CEOs and the banking industry gets, the worse they behave. It has also been frequently noted on this blog that the fact that reporters now make so much money greatly affects the way they do their job. So you might make the case that at high income levels, more money can and often does make problems worse. But I agree that in normal situations, more money almost always helps and never makes problems worse.
Redshift
@Scott: Oh, I bet he’ll have a very strong idea, probably something do to with their not being conservative enough in some way.
someguy
Oppose tax hikes = more people die.
Pretty simple.
me
@stuckinred: Sounds like a plan.
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub:
Yeah, you’re right. They did it all, in John Galt style, without any help of any possible kind from anyone at all.
They are the godhead.
Zifnab
@someguy: But at least they’ll die free.
Face
Do these shitheads also oppose taxes to pay for police and fire departments? If so, wow.
Breezeblock
Not just a ghost town, but maybe even a ghost county!
When you think about it that way, that’s something Modoc Countians can aspire to!
Nick
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Oh hey, that sounds like a great idea. Do you think Congress would pass it?
oh wait
morzer
Does he plan to pay in $500 Confederate bills 2 years after the ratification of the peace treaty with the US?
Indie Tarheel
@Violet:
Correctified, also, too.
bemused
If the town loses it’s hospital, Doug Knox better pray that he and his wife stay healthy and never have an unexpected medical crisis.
flukebucket
@jwb:
And more money can exacerbate a drug problem. So you have valid points.
Money won’t solve all problems but I would sure rather have too much than not enough of it.
aimai
@Violet:
Actually, I think you need to go farther–you have to make it a “membership fee” that is only available to “property owners.” (The hospital services will continue to be available to non propertied persons who can’t afford the fee but we won’t mention that in the glossy borchure–but if you are a property owner you *must* pay the membership. It will entitle you to use of the emergency room (for a further fee) and use of the ambulance services (for a further fee), and doctor’s services (for a fee negotiated by your insurance company). If you have property but no insurance then you *still* get to access to the hospital for the same cash fee as everyone else without insurance. But if you don’t pay your “membership fee” you can’t use the hospital at all. That would work. These people love the idea of exclusive communities and membership fees–they line up to join golf courses and gated communities.
aimai
New Yorker
Meanwhile, the economies in New York and Massachusetts, those evil soshulist tax holes, are doing much better than the country as a whole.
I pay a decent amount of taxes living in New York. I also get nicely maintained parks, a police force that has helped get the crime rate down to levels unthinkable 20 years ago, a great fire department, etc. It’s almost like these two things are related….
OK, I admit wanting to kick the chancellor of the MTA in the balls every so often, as I’m not a fan of increased fares on the subways/buses coinciding with service cuts, but other than that, I can’t complain too much about what my local taxes are doing.
Jinx
@Punchy:
This is truly a conflicted idiot. The flags alone are a window into his madness. He’s simultaneously advocating treason and national unity. Irony wept.
flavortext
From Wikipedia:
This guy hates taxes, but moved to a county where the economy is based on government spending? Lollll.
(But I guess you could say that about most rural areas. The irony never ceases to amaze me)
Omnes Omnibus
@Jinx:
No, irony shot itself last month, leaving a note that said it could no longer face the evening news. Irony is survived by sarcasm and snark who are doing just fine.
thomas
@Villago Delenda Est:
there is s critical shortage of critical thinking.
I work in a firm that does 95%+ of its work for municipalities and counties, yet most of those I work with continually gripe about taxes.
Go figure.
sloan
Doug Knox knows that if he’s successful, he’ll increase his own chances of an early death. He knows this. But we have a Dem in the WH, so the hell with it – he’s going full teabagger just to prove an ideological point to himself and his handful of neighbors who will also be harmed by his actions. It’s not conservative – hell I don’t know what you would call it at this point. It’s just pig-headed selfishness. He refuses to pay the money to provide his own damn medical care. He knows he’ll need it one day but he wants to destroy it rather than pay his own inevitable expenses. He wasn’t out there protesting when it was funded with other people’s money, was he? But hey, Doug will die with a few more pennies in the bank! Freedom!
Sometimes I wish that Republicans would control everything just so the rest of America could see what a disaster it would be. Then I remember that we just tried that for nearly a decade and we’re still dealing with the consequences. And it looks like voters are going right back to Republicans all over again because Dems didn’t make it all better in 18 months.
What the hell is wrong with these people?
meander
I’m having trouble finding it right now, but the San Francisco Chronicle has written a few stories in recent months about how rural counties like Modoc are subsidized by urban counties. Just like on the Federal level, the more liberal counties — in California, it’s coastal places like the Bay Area and L.A. — contribute more and get less than the more conservative counties — the inland counties, especially those to the north. And yet, these subsidized communities are screaming about being taxed to death, probably ignorant of the huge transfer of wealth from urban to rural areas.
roshan
After the taxes are removed, few years down the line you would open up the newspaper and read about how someone named Doug Knox, was traveling with a car fully loaded with automatic weapons and ammunition to blow up the Tides foundation. You can bet Media Matters is going to trace it all the way back here! (only if they themselves are not bombed out before that)
Chad N Freude
@gex:
Demonstrably false, since those two words are not in their monosyllabic vocabularies. And what’s that suspiciously Muslim-looking symbol — the one that looks like a mosque next to a skyscraper?
evinfuilt
Genius, pure Genius. He’s a self parody.
meander
@meander: I found the link just a few seconds after the edit period closed. The S.F. Chronicle included this:
Chad N Freude
@Omnes Omnibus: Most excellent!
El Cid
wrong post
evinfuilt
@gex:
Hum, you just made me see the similarity between Vaccination Deniers and Free Market faeries.
Both see the benefit, and just attribute it to their form of magic and not the reality. Look at those vaccine deniers on how we wiped out so many diseases with vaccination and they come up with ridiculous reasons on how it “really” happened (was the magical hand of the market.)
YellowJournalism
This is a Republican motto, isn’t it?
Chad N Freude
One thing about hospital services that hasn’t been mentioned: During the HCR debate [word used out of politeness], somebody, perhaps more than one person, pointed out that there was no need for health insurance because if someone needed medical care and couldn’t pay for it, they could go to a charity hospital, where their care would be paid for by charitable contributions. I am not making this up — even I am not stupid enough to think of this.
numbskull
@Scott:
This is EXACTLY what I observe with all of my conservative friends and family. They genuinely have no idea what the effects of their policy positions are. No clue.
YellowJournalism
The icing on this cake would be for this Knox guy to be one of those recipients. Spending taxpayer money to avoid paying taxes. Please, let this be so.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chad N Freude: Are there no workhouses?
Chad N Freude
@evinfuilt: It was indeed the market. Microbes accepted voluntary payments to stay out of kids’ bodies. Or parents bought antibodies on the immunoglobulin exchange. Or something.
Chad N Freude
@Omnes Omnibus: What the dickens are you talking about?
Citizen Alan
@Tonybrown74:
In this case, I do. I really, really do. I don’t know Doug Knox and wouldn’t recognize him if I passed him on the street. But just from reading this article I absolutely despise him and would take enormous pleasure from it if I read that he died in a horrible manner. And I hate him even more for causing me to feel such hatred for him.
I simply do not consider teabaggers to be human beings anymore. They’re soulless, inhuman animals. And they will kill us all if they have the opportunity to do so. Doug Knox will not be satisfied until we are all living in such a hideous dystopian nightmare that Orwell and Huxley would have rejected it as over the top. And when the teabaggers succeed in bringing that nightmare to fruition, somehow, they will still find a way to blame all the misery on liberals.
Die, Doug Knox. Die in a fire.
cursorial
I, for one, salute this brave one-man death panel. Way to live your own propaganda.
D-Chance.
Interesting how NPR and Mr Mix only tell 1/2 of the story. When you do a little research beyond just the one selective link, you get a totally different picture of what happened out there.
Sub-standard medical treatment, 15 years of mismanagement that’s bankrupted the county (they’re in court seeking legal protection). Funds stolen from road repair and local schools to cover for the shortfall caused by politicos who played accounting games instead of addressing the issue for years on end. Perhaps if some of that $12.5 million had been used for its original purpose of road repair, there would be easy access to the nearest full-services hospital, which is less than 20 miles away?
Holden Pattern
@Face:
Yes, yes they do. For example, one rural county in Southern Oregon, run by a bunch of tax refugee retirees from California, has rejected several law-enforcement levies over the last few years.. Last time I checked, the county has exactly two (count ’em, two) sheriffs for about 50K people spread across about 1600 square miles (everywhere except the county seat, which has its own cop shop), much of which is hills and hollows like West Virginia.
One of the sheriffs is the elected guy, who doesn’t have any law enforcement training. His deputy is a professional LEO. They have coverage from roughly when the bars get busy after work until sometime in the wee hours. If your house gets broken into during the day, that’s really your problem.
db
And in all their free time after they win, all those little Atlases can spend their free time writing messages to space aliens about their goddess:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/23/ayn-rand-world-largest-book-ad
wrb
@meander:
This is frequently claimed but it is pretty shaky. The problem is that a lot of the money they are counting is actually serving the urban residents. If a freeway, say, is built through a rural county it isn’t there for local traffic, it is primarily moving goods and people between urban areas and food, lumber etc. to the cities to feed urban appetites
Chad N Freude
@D-Chance.: OK, but you provided zero selective links. Are you willing to share your little research with the rest of us?
wrb
A consequence of the drug wars, in part. I live in a similar county.
There is a block of tax refugees but what seems to be decisive are a bunch of people who think more cops means more risk and hassle for themselves for doing things that they don’t think are wrong.
numbskull
@D-Chance.: Links? Sources? Not saying you’re making it up, but if all this juicy information is out there, why not advertise?
eyepaddle
@beltane:
I am sooooooooo gonna borrow the line about “throwing bullshit at problems…”
I’ll give credit though.
Mark S.
@Chad N Freude:
The NPR story briefly touches on it:
I’d be a tad pissed off at those supervisors, but they probably got reelected because they love womb babies.
jibeaux
Spending $15k in order to save a couple hundred bucks a year and drive away your county’s largest employer, a significant portion of the population, and only emergency medical care to boot. Yep, that sounds about par for the course.
gex
@gnomedad: Jailing people who try to take their stuff. Or jailing people who like things that they don’t like. Government is apparently an instrument to be used to oppress the “others”. If it does anything more than that it is too big and intrusive into people’s freedom.
Brachiator
@Chad N Freude:
I don’t have any dog in this hunt, but I did a google search for “modoc county mismanagement” and quickly got the following links and stories (I concentrated on local stories instead of wire service reports)
http://modocindependentnews.blogspot.com/2010/05/darcy-locken.html
http://modocindependentnews.blogspot.com/2010/02/modoc-gate-survey-rick-rudometkin-has.html
http://www.ecobizwatch.com/read/rushed-bid-to-forestall-california-county-bankruptcy
The anti-tax yahoos don’t seem to have any coherent alternative to improve the situation, but their resistance may be partly a response to the ongoing fiscal problems in the county as well as their reflex stupidity.
gex
@Redshift: Um, close. It will clearly be Obama’s fault. Why? Because everything is.
Chad N Freude
@Mark S.: So the way to deal with mismanagement is to eliminate the thing that was mismanaged. I don’t suppose the supervisors considered a tax to support the hospital before deciding that misusing (i.e., stealing) restricted funds was better.
Brachiator
@Chad N Freude:
I got moderated, maybe for too many links, but a quick google search of “modoc county mismanagement” displays a wealth of background stories.
Here is one from a local blogger
Another story had this little tidbit:
gex
@Chad N Freude: Hee. Thanks for the laugh.
brantl
@beltane: FTW!
wrb
@beltane:
membership dues
greens fees
roshan
Hey Mix,
Are you going to put what Brachiator found in your post?
The $150K salary bit for Rudometkin came from here.
Mnemosyne
@D-Chance.:
And why did the politicos have to play accounting games? Because any tax increase in the state of California requires the approval of a two-thirds majority.
So you go to voters and say, “Hey, we need some money to improve the hospital.” Voters like Doug Knox say, “What? No way! No one uses hospitals!” and vote it down.
But the hospital still needs money, so the county shifts it around as best they can, hoping that the roads will deteriorate more slowly than the hospital will.
We’re very familiar with this game here in California where you have to take a small pool of money and somehow spread it out to cover every service that people demand while they simultaneously demand that their taxes remain the same. And, yes, sometimes things don’t get covered or get covered inadequately because there’s not enough money to do everything that people are demanding.
brantl
@Tonybrown74:
Mnemosyne
@Chad N Freude:
I guarantee you that they tried to get a tax, but taxes in California require a two-thirds majority of voters to approve them, so I’m guessing that the county full of Doug Knoxes voted the tax increase down.
Bonds also require a two-thirds majority, BTW, so they would also have to put that in front of the voters and get it approved before they could raise money via a bond measure.
Joshua
@D-Chance.: It’s impossible to “address the issue” nowadays, because “addressing the issue” requires people acting like adults and figuring out what they need and how much it costs. This does not happen.
A lot of people seem to think 95% of their tax money is flushed down a hole, so all gubment needs to do is “cut waste” and “stop throwing money at it” and it will be fine. The Governator basically ran on that platform after Davis got recalled, and people bought it – people really thought a $15B deficit could be plugged by “cutting waste.” Not long after he took office, a bond was issued to plug the remaining deficit – in the amount of $15B.
Maybe if people started to realize that (A) government provides services, (B) it provides those services people because people want them, and (C) those services are often expensive and get more expensive over time, we can “address the issue.” But by all accounts Americans are a million miles of poorly maintained road away from that realization.
Paris
@me: It’s a rural county. I wonder where they think the additional economic activity will come from
They don’t care. They’re old and retired. They got theirs, so f’ off.
Frank
@Joshua:
These are the very same people that think wars are free. I have met tea baggers who are against any taxes, but who also think the Iraq war was the best thing since sliced bread and they can’t wait for the Iran war to start. I wonder what it is like in their brain.
Chad N Freude
@Frank: Do you ask these people how the war(s) should be paid for?
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Some of the hospital’s woes appear to stem from a cascade of bad decisions, not just from an inability to raise taxes.
Also, their tax base shriveled as the area declined economically.
I guess you could make a case that the remaining population should just pony up the scratch for the additional taxes, but this might be more sustainable in the long run if they can also put the hospital on a sounder operational footing.
By the way, the Sacramento Bee web site currently displays a California Budget Time Clock. We’re 54 days without a budget, for what, the fourth straight year with a delay. There is some rumbling that the state might start issuing IOUs again, and even more ominous rumbling that the legislature might try to kick the budget delay forward until after November.
The state legislature’s refusal to deal with their side of the budget problem makes it harder for city and county governments to get their own budgets finalized.
And even if the two thirds rule didn’t exist, they would still have to find places to get the extra money, tougher to do in a declining economy.
trollhattan
FWIW I’ve been to Alturas. To get there you drive to Nowhere, take a left, and drive another hundred miles. To say that area services are limited would be putting it politely.
I’ve got news! It typically takes a higher cost per capita to deliver services to rural residents, whether it’s running a hospital to current standards, providing safe drinking water or delivering a first class letter. Letting a community hospital close to avoid the obvious sin of paying taxes is a sign of a doomed species.
As to that hospital 20 miles distant, here’s a detail left out.
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/state&id=7622395
Modoc county is part of a giant district now represented by Uber-wingnut and carpetbagger Tom McCintock. Here’s an example of how his mind works:
trollhattan
p.s. There are county health services. Just don’t get sick on Friday, Saturday, Sunday or after 6:00 p.m. (7 on Wednesdays!).
http://www.modoccohealthservices.com/index.html
Original Lee
@NonyNony: Awesome idea. Additionally, NPR uses its fundraising as a popularity gauge for its programming. Shows that don’t hit fundraising targets get put in lousy timeslots and eventually are cancelled. Wouldn’t it be fun to tie the seniority of Congresscritters on committees to how much Patriot Money their districts raise?
DFH no.6
So 100+ comments addressing (in some detail and a fair measure of thoughtfulness) the actual substance of the post is just great and all, and as expected.
But no hipsters coming forward to comment on the post’s title?
That’s one excellent new indie band, from NY (city of) I believe. Heard ‘em in concert, have all their stuff (couple albums) on regular rotation on my IPod. They’re really good.
I’m an old fuck, but I love the music kid’s are making these days (one positive aspect of an otherwise mostly-dreary past decade).
And yeah, fuck the Doug Knox’s of the world. Evil fucking assholes, every one.
Original Lee
@DFH no.6: I’ve been using Jango to listen to some of the newer stuff. I have a “station” that includes Train, Goo Goo Dolls, and Better Than Ezra, for instance. As you say, some of it’s pretty darn good.
Anne Laurie
@Frank:
Hot, Flat and Crowded