If people reading this blog know one thing about me, it’s probably my politics. If they know anything else about me, it’s my sense of humor. But somewhere on the list is my love of the library. Seattle has a great system. New York where I grew up also has a great system, but I honestly don’t remember much about it. What I remember more is that I have family near the first public library paid for with tax money in the country, and hearing that history over the course of many summers rubbed off on me.
Currently, I have 4 books checked out of the Seattle Public Library and I spend far too much time managing my hold list. I’ve recently started reading comics for the first time since I was a kid, and the graphic novel selection is great. I doubt I’d have gotten into them if not for being able to check out some, often pretty silly ones, for free.
Anyway, all this to say fuck the Koch brothers for making anti-library robocalls. What kind of monsters do that?
There is always Josephine County in Oregon. They made news a couple of years back when the voters during the bush presidency chose to shutter the county library system. The area’s only income is tourism and old people who retire there to die.
The economy used to include logging but they cut down all the trees they are allowed and need to wait 80 years for a new crop to grow. With climate change, the forests keeps burning up before new growth can get established and or invader bugs kill the heat weakened trees.
Anyway
In May 2007, all libraries in Josephine County were closed due to lack of county government funding. Conservative radio is the only radio there so they were hammered every day with “goverment is bad” and “Taxes are evil.” The retirees didn’t want to pay for knowledge, they were done learning. They certainly didn’t want to pay a whopping $36 a year in taxes if it didn’t benefit them.
The patrons of the community stepped up and reopened four of the libraries in the county as non profits.
“Josephine Community Libraries, Inc. (JCLI) is a nonprofit, nongovernmental library system serving the 82,000 residents of Josephine County. It is a privately run, public library that relies on membership contributions for funding and a large and varied volunteer force to staff operations and support functions”
“Our libraries are supported by contributing donors; however a donation is not required to obtain a library card. Suggested minimum donation is $25.00.”
I wonder how many of those cheap retirees have library cards that they didn’t pay for. Brilliant on their part, all the benefits without having to pay for them.
So, with all this in in mind, was Andrew Carnegie doing the right thing in his later years, or merely making a futile attempt to cover for his earlier transgressions? Or, does it really matter?
Koch Brother. Republican. Monster. Bigots. Loons. Nazis. Fraud. Hypocrite. Liar. Fear Mongerer. Radical. Extremist. Self Righteous.
All one in the same. They are all interchangeable. Except the last couple are just traits and not part of their DNA like the others listed.
Let’s pay waitresses a real wage, instead of 2 bucks an hour plus tips, so they don’t have to deal with assholes like this.
http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2.....r-the-tip/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: This probably isn’t an appearance issue. It’s more likely a cheapskate just doesn’t want to tip issue.
Restaurants are an example of an industry that lies to consumers. A $20 meal doesn’t cost $20; it costs $20 plus .096% sales tax plus .005% stadium tax plus 15% (or more) tip (which is mandatory, because it’s how restaurant employees get paid, and they don’t get paid otherwise), equals $25.53, which is 27.65% more than the advertised price.
@1 “they cut down all the trees”
The rubes blame environmentalists for the death of Oregon’s and Washington’s timber industry. Here’s what actually happened:
(1) In the 1970s,our forests were being logged 5 times faster than their regeneration rate. Had this continued, all the trees — and all the jobs — would have been gone in a few years. You can log sustainably and have some jobs forever, or log as fast as possible and have a lot of jobs for a few years, but you can’t have both.
(2) By the 1970s, at the height of the logging boom, the industry was shipping raw logs to Japan instead of processing them in local sawmills. Cheap foreign labor, not environmentalists, killed the sawmill jobs.
(3) The timber industry left the Pacific Northwest because it’s cheaper to (a) import lumber from Canada and (b) harvest timber in the southeastern U.S. Competition, not enviromentalists, killed the logging jobs.
But the rubes are gonna believe what they wanna believe, and truth’s got nuthin’ to do with it.
Democratic caucuses are Saturday, March 26. I can’t attend because of a schedule conflict, so I won’t be voting for anybody this time.
The ugly side of charter schools.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol.....est-scores
@ 6 RR
Thank you Ronald Reagan. He set the policy in the 1960s while he was Governor. I remember when I was a kid, driving through the Redwoods with my parents and seeing these gigantic logs on the trucks. One log on each one, easily 15 feet in diameter and 60 or so feet long.. They were cutting 2500 year old trees to feed the sawmills, which did boost the local economy in places like Willits for a short time. Now those sawmill buildings have been standing empty for more than 30 years, falling down, and most of them still have some of the machinery inside them. If it wasn’t for Pot, Mendocino and Humboldt Counties wouldn’t have any sort of economy at all.
There are a lot of cocaine-financed 4500 sq/ft houses that are built almost entirely out of Redwood. The stumps remain and the area has gone wild with non-native trees.
Thank you, Ronald Reagan, you fucking greedy, stupid, corrupt asshole.
7 rabbit you can do an surrogate caucus apparently
http://kence.org/2016/02/24/ev.....ic-caucus/
@10 Nope, the deadline is past.
Roger, Did you change your name to get around the filter blocker?
@6 You left out the part where logging became more and more industrialized requiring fewer and fewer lumberjacks and no more oxen. Of course if we blame a small owl on these labor losses and keep at the logging using these new methods maybe local communities will focus on the small owl and remain mad at it and won’t notice their jobs were disappearing and gone the way of buggy whip workers.
@9 Reagan didn’t set the policy by himself. And a lot of those trees were on Federal land.
A different kind of monster than the ones who want to know what you are borrowing from the library and putting it into a secret database.
The kind of folk who oppose libraries especially those with money want to keep you dumb and down on the farm. They want to keep doing things the Koch way, self interest doesn’t make them monsters, but you don’t have to like what they are doing.
By the way I think public libraries and university libraries ect are one of the great things about these United States and the dissemination of information to the people.
Golly vomit producer, only 13,000 acres of forests were farmed while 58,000 acres were made into Redwoods National Park.
Seems to be an almost 4.5:1 ratio!
More of your standard conservative hateful BULLSHITTIUM!
@12 No, I made a typo.
@16 Out of how many acres originally covered by ancient redwood forests in California?