Document text
- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us March 11, 2005 AFN 'subsidy' means taxes We're finally facing the ugly truth that two city administrations and three expensive business plans said we'd never have to admit: The AFN is such a gut-shot piece of work that it can't survive without city life-support. Taxes. The Tidings, following the city's lead, called it a subsidy. It's also been suggested that the city might sell some assets for the money. It all tax money wearing a different smile. Since its inception, the AFN survived its annual revenue shortfalls by borrowing money from the city and paying it back plus interest. The interfund bookkeeping juggle stopped last year when the city borrowed $15M in private money to tidy things up. Why would a lender in his right mind loan $15M for a business worth a fraction of the loan? Because he's betting the city won't let its credit rating be trashed. The city's ability and willingness to tax makes this loan relatively secure. A private business calling itself the AFN with an equally lame track record wouldn't have found even a loan shark interested in the action. What will our taxes buy? A trench with cable running past our houses. If you actually want to use the AFN, you'll have to pay an additional fee for either city cable TV or an ISP for Internet access. It's like paying taxes for a fire department who just sit in the station until you also sign up for a monthly fire protection plan. It gets better. The majority of people buy AFN to watch TV. You'll get to support your neighbors' TV habit. Anyone Tivo last week's "Desperate Housewives"? John Gaffey Ashland Wild horses deserve better than slaughter At the turn of the century there were some two million wild horses, but today there are only 36,000. When compared to the four million cattle grazing on our public lands at tax payers expense - more than 100 cows per every horse - no one can reasonably argue that wild horses are over populated. And yet, Senator Conrad Burns (R-Montana) quietly slipped a provision into a 3,000 page omnibus spending bill that effectively guts federal protections afforded to free roaming horses and burros more than three decades, since the Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. This will allow the wholesale slaughter of these magnificent animals. The insertion of this anti-democratic rider could result in thousands of wild horses and burros being immediately sent to slaughter. Congress must quickly pass legislation correcting this horrific error assuring that policy makers don't cave into the unreasonable demands of livestock operators and that wild horses and burros remain a living legend of Americas' western lands. Also it is necessary to change the category of horses and burros listed as livestock to the category of domestic. Horses no longer pull taxis and burros rarely plow the fields where they should no longer be listed as livestock. Nina Council Ashland End the shaking of crutches - without merit Well, I'm sorry that one of Ashland's tireless Zionists, Maynard Telpner (letter of March 3), is back for another shot at me, this time with an even feebler defense of Israel and its depredations against Palestinians than in his earlier letters. Not that he and his band of Sharonistas - lacking a leg to stand on - have an easy job of it. What, after all, is left for these legless zealots to say when one weak argument after another, upon a close encounter with reason, evidence and logic from their opponents, has been pulverized? By now, they've run the gamut of logical fallacies: non-sequitur, false analogy, rationalization, straw man, missing the point, red herring, begging the question - even outright lying - have been trotted out, only to be annihilated. You name it, and it's crept - or has been carefully planted - into their arguments. So one can see the dilemma faced by these fervent, argumentless, paraplegic ideologues: They've been reduced to shaking a crutch at their adversaries! In Mr. Telpner's case, he shakes the crutch of "bigot" at me in his last letter. In his lexicon, apparently, this is a crutch-shake short of "anti-Semite," an epithet he's shaken at me in earlier letters and which he's probably reserving for future use as a shake-in-the-hole. There's another, wiser path Ashland's many enlightened Jews and Zionists could take: They could add their voices to those of most of world Jewry and most Israelis and call for peace with justice in Palestine. We could shake hands over that! Isaac Walker Ashland DailyTidings.com Home Page Archives | Revels | Classifieds | Real Estate Guide | Weather | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2005 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Deep Muscle Stimulator Ceramic Piggy Banks FREE Entertainment Guide Women's & Men's Slippers Accelerate Weightloss Products Backpacks Generic Viagra Vegas Travel Guide Search Engine Optimization Sportsbook Absinthe Supply Student Loans Hotel & Airline Reservations African Safari Hammocks Helzberg Diamonds Online Casinos Community Bonus Casino King of Spirits ink cartridges Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Mailing Lists Click Here Advertisement .:Advertisements:. Site Search: RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams