SLIDELL, La. - A $1.63 property tax bill that never reached its destination in 1996 has turned into a nightmare for Kermit and Dolores Atwood, who are now trying to keep from losing their home over the unpaid notice. Dolores Atwood calls the events that followed the wayward bill, including the eventual sale of their home at a sheriff's tax sale, "seven years of emotional hell." "I don't know how much more I can endure," said Atwood, 69, while sitting in a FEMA trailer in front of her Hurricane Katrina-ravaged home north of Slidell. The couple hope recent state court decisions, which say their home should never have been put up for sale, withstand appeals by a land company. In 2000, the Atwoods learned their four-bedroom home had been sold in a tax sale three years earlier for the $1.63 in unpaid taxes, plus 10 cents interest and $125 in sale costs.

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of "liberalism," they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."
- Norman Thomas, U.S. Socialist Party presidential candidate
1940, 1944 and 1948