If Jon Carlson hates it, it must be good....
(John Carlson, local conservative twit, trying to compensate for what is undoubtedly a subnormal penis)
UPDATE: I forgot to link to the story about the new facility.
Even here in liberal Seattle, we have the local conservatives. One of the most obnoxious is Jon Carlson - a blowhard's blowhard. He hosts a daily radio talk show (or so I'm told. I would never listen to something that vulgar)
Miss Carlson has got her hair-do in a muss (yes, that's such a gay thing to say, but people like Carlson deserve it) over the latest Seattle experiment: A home for chronic street drunks.
My interest in this as a potential retirement community aside, I think it's a great idea. It's a place for the old drunks that have tried rehab and failed. The men and women you see stumbling around asking for money, who live on the street and die on the street.
These people are people too, and putting them in a place where they have a roof over their head and some medical attention is much better - and much less expensive - than the old way of hauling them to the emergency room when they fall down or get rolled or collapse from the various ailments chronic drunks tend to collapse from. It's also the humane thing to do, but boneheads like Carlson don't know from humane. They're too busy being Christian.
Anyway, it's the sort of thing that makes one proud to be a Seattlite. I'll stop my liberal posturing now, and come back in a little bit with some sort of tirade on dust mops or something
posted by Catalina Vel-DuRay @ Thursday, July 06, 2006
2 Comments:
At 10:30 AM,
daisymayrobin said…
My question is: Do they have onsite medical attention? Or, does the staff still have to call 911?
I have heard that instead of an ambulance being called to a street corner, they are now called to these "drinking safe houses", which is costing taxpayers the exact same amount of money as it did before. What we have added is the additional cost of building a new facility, the costs of maintaining said facility, and the salaries of the people who work there.
Believe me, I'm a card carrying liberal, but I am curious how this experiment will pan out in the years to come.
At 11:45 AM,
Catalina Vel-DuRay said…
I hadn't linked the article yet when daisymayrobin left her comments (It's there now), but to answer her questions: There is *some* medical attention on-site, but there are still a huge amount of 911 calls. The building was built with government funds, and is operated by the Downtown Emergency Service Center. DESC receives funding from the City, County, State and Federal governments, along with United Way and private philanthropy. I don't know what the ratio of private to public funding is.
I'm the first to admit that this is not the solution for everyone -
and I had my doubts at first as well - but it seems like a
cost-effective way to deal with the chronic, hard-core, homeless alcoholics that have always/will always be with us. It's essentially warehousing them, but
that's better than the costs associated with arresting them, putting them up in the drunk tank overnight, court appearences,
yadda, yadda, yadda.
Of course, if it were up to me, there would also be a nice camp up in the mountains for the street people who actually want to get sober, but without a bunch of Jesus talk. Putting it in a remote location would make it far away from the temptations of life on the street. No one would be forced to go, but it would be available to them.
If nothing else, it's remarkable in that it's the one thing that the Bush administration and I agree on ;-)
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