The Red and The Blue - part the third

There is not much that pisses me off more than Red politicians who boast about helping their constituents with aid they voted against. The various Covid relief is just the latest example.

But this has been going on since at least FDR, who brought electricity, water, sewers, roads and much of the infrastructure to the rural areas, especially the South, that the state politicians refused to provide. And yet, the voters continue to elect them. To be fair, what is perhaps the largest collections of mansions in one place is Newport, Rhode Island. Our go-to destination is Block Island, also Rhode Island, and it's on the way to Nantcuket style exclusion. The rich get richer and the poor have kids.

Appalachia is likely the epitome of laissez-faire governance, and the poster child of Red state government that ignores the needs of its people and lets the Blue states, through the federal government, make up the difference. Note that the opiod crisis was/is significantly, if not majority, an Appalachian experience.

Well, today's news brings two reports highlighting this passive-aggressive attitude of Red state government.

This first is an obituary of one Eula Hall, who created a modicum of healthcare in eastern Kentucky pretty much on her own.

Among many other things, Mrs. Hall operated the Mud Creek Clinic in eastern Kentucky for mountain people, many of them coal miners and members of their families. One night in 1982, someone looking for drugs set fire to the place. When her patients showed up the next morning to find that the clinic was gone, Mrs. Hall did not miss a beat. She and a doctor set up shop on a picnic table, had a phone installed on a nearby tree and kept their appointments.

The second is a lengthy report on rural high speed innterTubes. Once again, the Blue states will pay to 'uplift' the Red states through the auspices of Biden's initiatives. All with the intent, on the part of the Red state politicians, to draw economic advantage they didn't invest in. Way to go guys.

Rural areas have complained for years that slow, unreliable or simply unavailable internet access is restricting their economic growth. But the pandemic has given new urgency to those concerns, at the same time that President Biden\u2019s infrastructure plan — which includes $100 billion to improve broadband access — has raised hope that the problem might finally be addressed.

The report focuses on a town in Iowa, home to a very Right Wingnut coterie of politicians.

Running against socialism when Trump larded $60bn on agribusiness in the past two years over disasters of his own making seemed like a thin soup. A rural electorate immersed in Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting and Facebook lapped it up. The propaganda (Democrats eat babies – it's right there on social media), the preachers in the pulpit damning liberal judges and politicians, and a relentless ground game that saw Iowa Republicans register 20,000 more voters than Democrats put a seemingly indelible red lock on what used to be a purple state.

Just like they did under FDR, and less so under LBJ who tied the Great Society to racial equity, they want the benefits for free. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? Who are the real Welfare Queens, anyway? The net flows of money through DC have been from Blue states, which progress, to Red states, which exalt the CSA for decades.