This one time I was mad because the water company dug in my backyard without notifying me, so I’m not allowed to find this hysterical over-reaction funny, but I do anyway:
The Arizona Republic reported this weekend about the intense debate surrounding a change to the community’s garbage collection services. Currently, Fountain Hills’ 25,000 residents can choose between five different collectors. Under the new system, the community has hired a single trash collector to meet the town’s garbage hauling needs, collection days will be reduced to once-a-week, and curbside recycling services will be added. ABC15 reports that Town Manager Rick Davis estimated “total savings to reach about $1,000,000 a year,” and that officials also hope the changes will cut down on pollution, noise, and traffic.
Tea Party groups have come out strongly against the measure. The Republic reports some people have dubbed it “trashcare,” as if it were the local, municipal waste-related cousin of “Obamacare.” Fliers were distributed that read “The Hills Will Have Eyes,” and which raised the specter of a “Fountain Hills Green Police” poking around citizens’ garbage bins. On its website, Arizona Campaign for Liberty warned that “The Fountain Hills Mayor & Town Council is attempting to restrict resident’s choice in trash services by forcing residents into a single payer system!” The Fountain Hills Tea Party’s website reads, “Once more, government is trying to interfere with free market economics.”
“The Hills Will Have Eyes” is some quality stuff. I know that I will probably have to read 4-5 more pieces explaining what horrible person I am, because making fun of these teahadists for some reason really, really upsets libertarians, but if I can’t have a laugh at the expense of these clowns, what’s the point of having a blog?
BTW- check out this unreasonable tyrant of a mayor:
Schlum says he’s received more email about this issue than any other one he’s seen in his two years as mayor. But while the emails before last Thursday tended to be from people opposing the change, since then Schlum reports he’s received more messages in support.
He said he had friends on both side of the issue, and expressed understanding for those concerned with government taking choices away from citizens, no matter how small. But he offered an assurance:
“If this doesn’t work, it’s a contract, and we can get out of it,” he said. “That’s the beauty of doing it in a smaller town.”
It’s more than a contract- it is a slippery slope to socialism! The hills have eyes! Single payer garbage removal!
meh
just sayin john, you don’t have to swing at every pitch
Allan
And a new tag is born.
General Stuck
Gotta give you credit senor Cole, you get hold of a bone that suits you, nobody gonna make you drop it.
That said, this is all some fairly fine entertainment, and educational too. Takes the mind off the wingnut House hostage crisis of all time coming to your stations in 2011.
We may all need to hold on to that garbage for some Freedom Salad.
Redshirt
Hopefully, they’ll turn there sights on themselves: Only ONE Republican Party to choose from? FASCISM! I should have as many to choose from as I wish!
Henceforth: I am now the Republican Redshirt Party, and keep your dirty gummint hands off!
BGinCHI
When multiple garbage collection is illegal, only criminals will have garbage.
And that mayor is a fucking garbage altruist.
Poopyman
“The hills have eyes!” So do the taters in the trash those commies are going to be hauling away. They cannot escape those eyes!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
No matter what it takes, no matter what the cost, people cannot start thinking that government can do something correctly.
me
Reduce pollution? Hell no and Al Gore is fat also, too.
Rosalita
My apologies if this has been covered in the many posts on this subject–but who is paying for the trash pickup? The town or the property owners?
Since the commission made this choice on bids, that looks like it’s a town service. However, the residents are screaming like it’s coming out of their pockets (which I know it kinda is even if it’s a town service) or they can’t choose the cheapest collector. If a town service and this is the most cost effective, what the hell is their problem?
Mike Kay (Team America)
The last thing we need a monopolistic corporate garbage system.
Geesh, doncha watch Dylan Ratigan?
gwangung
@Rosalita: Well, going to a single collector is quieter, less pollution, adds services AND IS CHEAPER.
Yeah, I don’t understand it, either.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Rosalita: Freedom. Just because Single Payer would be cheaper, allow better service, and cover everyone, doesn’t mean it’s right. You gotta think about the freedoms.
ETA: I was talking about garbage, BTW.
aimai
I can’t wait to see “Red Dawn: 2011.” I believe it will be known by its subtitle “Trash, the Collectering.”
aimai
Zifnab
So if we have a hissy fit like this at everything, I wonder whether we’ll eventually get hissy fit burnout or just become naturally reactionary to anything even vaguely communal?
How soon before they come for our condos, our buses, and our rental cars?
freelancer
ZOMG – a guy in blue shorts handed me an envelope today. MAILCARE!
HOLY LIVING FUCK! – It might snow this month and I saw an Orange city truck salting the roads. PLOWCARE!
Guys! I said Guys! Did you know that the city owned gas company occassionally stops by YOUR PROPERTY to check your meters? TYRRANY!
Zifnab
So if we have a hissy fit like this at everything, I wonder whether we’ll eventually get hissy fit burnout or just become naturally reactionary to anything even vaguely communal?
How soon before they come for our condos, our buses, and our rental cars?
General Stuck
@Rosalita:
I doubt there many, or any towns of any size in America that completely leave garbage collection up to it’s residents. Or, at least with some ordinances to haul it off, or else. it is an obvious public health issue, though tea party mandates likely include the right to a cholera outbreak, in the service of freedom. It’s all about choice, unless you are a woman, and pregnant.
BGinCHI
@aimai: Doubtless M. Night Shamylan is working on Trash: The Haunting of Fountain Hills.
Mike Kay (Team America)
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): exactly! Freedom Works. Humans can not outperform the free market.
Phyllis
A town near here at one time had opt-in home garbage collection, which one paid for. The alternative was putting your garbage in the trunk of your vehicle and carrying it off to the roadside dumpsters. Which 1) truly makes one plan when having fresh shrimp for dinner and 2) usually found me lmao at the cheapskate with four or five bags of trash stuffed into the trunk of his Mercedes that I routinely saw at the dumpsite.
ETA: Doesn’t a savings of a million dollars a year indicate ‘smaller government’. And isn’t that what they want? I haz a confused.
FlipYrWhig
Every municipal service should be provided by the maximum number of possible providers, all competing with one another. For instance, mowing the lawn at the offices of the city government? With tax money? Hell no. Everyone who wants that thing mowed should go down there and make sure their individual proportionate share of the lawn is taken care of, as they see fit, or not.
bjacques
Michael Berryman is my hero! And The Hills Have Eyes was so good even the sequel was tolerable.
“Are you too good for dog…or is dog too good for you!?”
jl
Balloon Juice is my favorite sanitary landfill/sports/gardening/pets/artsncrafts/music/drinking/food/cooking blog.
Now if we could only get the politics out of the damn thing.
Could we have a post on the history of the industrial organization of municipal trash collection in the United States?
We need to get this party started right!
Edit: also something on the art, music and poetry of garbage dumps.
Warren Terra
First they came for the garbage, and I did not speak up, for I was nit a garbage.
(Though, actually, this might explain the vociferous responses of the Teahaddists and some of the Glibertarians).
Fwiffo
So now it’s socialism when you cut back on government spending?
Nellcote
It’s good news for John McCain!
Mike Kay (Team America)
First they came for my mail, then they came for my water, then they came for my heating, then they came for my snow, and now they coming for my trash.
This is exactly what Hitler and Stalin did.
Andre
You know what’s next on this monopolistic trainride to madness?
Yellowstone’s grizzly bear monopoly
If we do not kill the bears, the bears will kill us and take our garbage trucks.
J
It is in the realm of refuse removal that the heavy hand of the state stands most starkly revealed. Everywhere those who love freedom will rally to the cause of those in Fountain Hills, ground down under the heel of tyranny. Our thoughts will be with them as they struggle for freedom against despotic oppression. Or something.
MikeJ
@jl:
Generally that topic is saved for April 4th. At least in Memphis.
BGinCHI
@jl: I feel like I’m at an Ivy League Blog majoring in Garbage.
cleek
@General Stuck:
the town i grew up in didn’t have city trash pickup. we had to haul it to the dump every week or so. that was 25 years ago, though. who knows how they it these days…
Bill E Pilgrim
One of the Red Dwarf books featured an Earth that had been entirely abandoned and turned into a garbage dump for the other planets in the solar system.
Perhaps a glimpse of the future after the tea baggers have opted out of the waste disposal system, the currency system, the education system, and the rest of the solar system, and we leave them the planet to choke on their own refusal to cooperate with anyone, even each other.
FlipYrWhig
@freelancer:
Pure socia1ism. Everyone should take individual responsibility for salting the road outside his property. You can hire a company with “plows” and “salt” or you can just put on some boots and throw some kitty litter on there. If you’re not the one driving on it, it’s not your problem. The important thing is, freedom.
Jay S
Balloon Juice: “All garbage, all the time” :-)
Zifnab
@Andre: Someones just trolling for an opportunity to get his face on The Colbert Report.
General Stuck
@Andre:
Living in America these days, is like being trapped in a never ending Ed Wood movie.
b-psycho
This shit sounds like a joke, it’s so plainly fucking stupid.
“single-payer trash pickup!” “government hands off my Medicare!!” “Abolish the 17th Amendment, right after electing this last Senator!!”…This shit is why I never took the “tea party” garbage seriously, and to this day remain puzzled as to why some people still think it’s some kind of principled anti-government movement as opposed to a bunch of angry old confused (mostly) white folks holding the same contradictions that that demographic has held forever. Come on, trash pickup? Who fucking cares? How about some screaming that war crimes are going unpunished?
FlipYrWhig
@J: If you want a picture of the future, imagine a booted man pushing the button that compresses the bags of garbage—forever.
me
@Andre: Colbert was right!
General Stuck
@cleek:
I grew up in Appalachia, where every garbage owner was master of their domain. It often wasn’t pretty, the result.
Xecky Gilchrist
The “trashcare” horseshit is from the same sort of minds that searched a classroom for commie lit.
ETA: as Edroso the Magnificent might say, Skree skree commies skree!
ED et al, this isn’t about choice or efficiency, this is about howling batshit craziness.
Zifnab
@Bill E Pilgrim: You know, one of these days we’re finally going to get interplanetary travel and it’ll be interesting to see how many folks just pull up and bail. There’s got to be an intrinsic evolutionary characteristic that causes us to see a crap hole situation and immediately want to pick up and leave.
mr. whipple
These idiots need to be mocked mercilessly. Go away, or we shall taunt you some more!
Percy Percy
Anybody else read about this and the guy whose house burned down because he didn’t pay the fee and think about what a pain in the ass it is to have research different trash collectors and remember to write one more check to the fire department? I’m delighted to have my city’s government provide me with no choice about this stuff. Life is complicated enough.
Sloegin
Simple enough, rename the contract winner to “Atlas Shrugged Recycling & Sanitation” and have all the tea-towelheads wet themselves.
Problem solved.
BR
@Fwiffo:
Of course it is. It always has been: single-payer health care would have decreased our health care costs by more than any other proposal out there. Medicare has a far lower overhead than any private insurer.
“Fiscal responsibility” is not about fiscal responsibility.
“Spreading freedom and democracy” is not about spreading freedom and democracy.
“Getting government out of your life” is not about getting government out of your life.
bjacques
The Hills Have Eyes is basically a reworking of the legend of the Sawney Beane clan. Which, of course, makes it teh awesome.
You’re either on the garbage truck or off it.
me
@Zifnab: Although, if Heinlein is right, all we’ll get is a free market legal system on the moon.
FlipYrWhig
@Sloegin: Atlas Lugged, for all your hauling needs!
fasteddie9318
The beautiful part of the “The Hills Will Have Eyes” line of attack is that somehow these morans are paranoid enough to think that the local police are going to spend hours per week combing through their trash in some desperate attempt to violate their constitutional rights and hang some crime or another on them.
What seals it as high comedy is that it’s a lead-pipe cinch that nearly every one of these putzes voted to reelect George W. Bush and his State Security Apparatus. So the local equivalent of Barney Fife hypothetically picking through their trash is a more serious breach of constitutional protections than actual warrantless eavesdropping on their telephone and email communications by the federal government.
Mike Kay (Team America)
@b-psycho:
The last thing we need right now is another Big Goverment witch hunt. The kind of investigation you suggest reminds me of Stalin’s tyrannical purges of the military. Plus it’s a power grab, after all, who watches the watchmen?.
Catsy
@BGinCHI:
Does the title refer to the movie or its plot?
arguingwithsignposts
@FlipYrWhig:
Win.
Zandar
Welcome to
BalloonGarbage Juice. Please sort your recyclables or Tunch will kill you.Mike Kay (Team America)
@BR: single-payer is anti-democratic.
goblue72
Please continue to mock. The lazy morons who couldn’t bother to pay attention in class and barely graduated high school but who think its the “educated elite” who are the problem deserve our unending scorn and ridicule.
Morons who think saving a million dollars a year is socialism are just that – morons. They SHOULD be made to feel bad, they SHOULD be ashmed for even opening their mouths.
El Tiburon
In the distance a dog barks.
And E.D. vows revenge.
Xecky Gilchrist
@fasteddie9318: What seals it as high comedy is that it’s a lead-pipe cinch that nearly every one of these putzes voted to reelect George W. Bush and his State Security Apparatus.
You know, that makes me wonder if a lot of teatardism isn’t some kind of “My God, what have I done?” reaction to voting for Dumbya and all that. Unable to accept the horror of what they supported – and phoned in cowardly anonymous death threats to detractors of – they had a psychotic break and can now only cower and gibber and shriek.
…nah, too introspective. Never mind.
BGinCHI
@Catsy: It should, by rights, refer to his whole sodding career.
What a dumbass.
BR
@El Tiburon:
Is it just me, or do E.D. and his ilk think they’re more clever than they are? I don’t mean to be an asshole, but that thought strikes me whenever I read any of his posts…
Andre
@El Tiburon:
Fixed.
John PM
This is my last comment on this debate:
“The (Fountain) Hills are alive with the smell of garbage.”
Xecky Gilchrist
@BR: That is very nearly the definition of “libertarian”, as far as I can tell. The only two things that all libertarians agree on are a) their taxes are too high and b) they’re the smartest guy in the room.
trollhattan
I don’t know why it is that garbage generates delicious snark along with flies, but it sure does. Minimum 2x trash posts/day please! (Trashy posts okay, too.)
Since Teahadists will never have an important national role they’ll take out their anger on communities small enough for them to tantrum things their way. We may need to parachute in some grownups when this occurs.
Bill E Pilgrim
@me:
Dune, the garbage planet, reflected in the deep brown-on-brown eyes of the Teamen, who lived on teabags and other rubbish churned up by giant sand rats from the depths of their mounds of trash, awaiting the savior Rand’Dib, who would appear and lead them to…
Writes itself.
Tulpa
Who cares if they voted for Bush? Do you guys have nothing left but ad hominem attacks? (sorry for the Latin, Mr Cole)
BTW, since Radley Balko and Reason are the latest targets of Trashgate blowback, keep in mind that they opposed the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, waterboarding prisoners, etc. You know, all the things your guy is either letting Bush administration officials off the hook for or continuing with his own gusto. Not to mention pioneering the doctrine of indefinite detention, which makes Bush look like an ACLU lawyer.
Zandar
The best part is the libertarian plan to use the collected trash cubes in order to build castles to fight George Soros from.
You can practically smell the free market at work there.
jl
Here in the communfascist SF Bay, our flat decided to go full compost and recycle about a year ago.
I want that kind of service, and if in that AZ town would agitate for recycling and compost pickup, even if it meant having to contract with one carrier.
This is prime example of mindlessness. Their trick is to label anything that scares, causes momentary discomfort, any change they do not like as one of the standard contemporary conservative bogymen, and yell it as loud as possible. It is pure mindless rage, fear, and childishness on the part of the poor ordinary dupes who fall for it, and cynical political manipulation on the hacks and hucksters that run the conservative movement clown show.
We need to frame that reality in a way people understand.
For me, the discipline of separating stuff into the compost bin, recycling bin, and trash bin seemed strange and bothersome at first, but then suddenly it felt very comfortable to me.
It hit me that I did exactly the same thing on the farm as a kid. You had your slop bucket for chickens and hogs. You had your stuff that was ‘recyclable’ in the old fashioned sense of the word in that you could sell it or reuse it, and you had your simple unadulterated trash that wasn’t good for anything.
So, what we have here in AZ, are a bunch of spoiled grown up children who are pissing the sh*tting their pants at the prospect of doing a few minutes of chores each day, because the city council they elected decided it was a good thing for the town to do.
Rather than discuss it with the city council, they throw a tantrum. Well, heck, were I come from, that kind of behavior got you a whuppin’.
I say, make them dang kids do their chores. Haul out them slop buckets, right now, ya hear, you dang spoiled kids.
gwangung
And they got full props here for that.
You’d know that if you were a regular reader.
Stop trying to teach your grandpa how to suck eggs.
John PM
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I will buy that book.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Tulpa: I feel your righteousness, but John has a post up already just for you. This one’s about garbage.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Tulpa: Not to mention pioneering the doctrine of indefinite detention, which makes Bush look like an ACLU lawyer.
…???
AnotherBruce
You know that in their hearts, the teabaggers really miss the Soviet Union.
jl
@Zandar: No, no, free market compacted trash cubes will be used by a genius inventor to build super computers, into which we can download ourselves and live forever, enjoying free sex with other computers, and eating anything we want.
I want pink bubble gum ice cream and chocolate cake with sprinkles on top!
And WAFFLES!
Kathy in St. Louis
I have a foster kid in the Dominican Republic and traveled in Central America this year. Both places have trouble getting their trash hauled. It’s astounding to me that these asshats would really and truly waste the precious time of elected officials on tripe like this. Haul your own damn trash, if you don’t like it, folks.
By the way, there are lots of really hungry people in those two places I just mentioned, plus here at home. Why don’t you spend some time working on that rather than on this burning issue?
Binzinerator
First they came for the garbage but since I wasn’t … no wait
You gotta break some moldy eggshells to make last week’s omelet … no that’s not it.
Um…Ooo! Oo! Jimmy Hoffa! They put him in a landfill and his body was never found!
And…wait for it…
You know who else’s body was never found?
Community garbage collection leads right to Hitler.
different church-lady
OK, let me get this straight: the town want to save the taxpayers a cool million a year, and… the Taxed Enough Already people are flipping out?
You know what the problem with democracy is? Even insane people get to vote.
quaint irene
The Parkway authority decided to replace the fencing that runs along the back of all the houses on our street. Fair enough. Problem is, they didn’t bother telling anyone.
My dog, Katie, went missing. We found her at the end of our block, hurt and bleeding, we think from being clipped by a car. (She’s fine. God bless the pit bull’s rock-hard head.)
So the fact that, at the time, I wanted to find who’s the one I should kill with a tire iron, should make me a libertarian?
No, I just want the people in charge to do their jobs right.
Bonus , of course, would be paying my vet bill.
Xecky Gilchrist
@quaint irene: So the fact that, at the time, I wanted to find who’s the one I should kill with a tire iron, should make me a libertarian?
Only if you believe that your dog’s injury would have been OK if a private company had torn up your fence without telling you.
Mgordon
How the fuck can my street have three different trash removal companies on it a week and no curb side recyclng?
jl
@Mgordon: Why do you hate freedom?
Bill E Pilgrim
@Binzinerator: That’s actually hilarious.
First they came for the garbage, and I said nothing, because I am not garbage.
Finally they came for me, and there was no one left to refuse.
FlipYrWhig
@Bill E Pilgrim: Wretched. ;D
DougJ
@AnotherBruce:
In Soviet Union, trash collect you.
BGinCHI
@DougJ: Is that from the Collected Works of Yakov Smirnoff?
Bill E Pilgrim
@FlipYrWhig: I know, I hesitated but what the hell. I feel rotten, if that helps.
Mnemosyne
At the moment, it looks like G won’t be able to get enough time off at Christmas to allow us to go visit my parents over that weekend.
Since they live in Fountain Hills (not joking) and are in fact old, scared white people who watch Fox News 24/7, missing Christmas with them is starting to not sound like such a bad break for us after all.
Stillwater
“Once more, government is trying to interfere with free market economics.”
Why can’t we get government out of political-economy??!!
goblue72
First we had the gang who couldn’t shoot straight. Now we have the Tea Partiers who can’t even tie their own shoes.
I swear their next cause is going to be to eliminate free public education because only Communists give away an education.
Evolutionary
@General Stuck: Reading, Pa (pop about 80,000) allows everyone to pick their own private trash hauler and pay them directly. Proposed changes to this have have been defeated by referendum several times in recent years. Many people, especially renters, just take their trash out and dump it along roadsides in the country. Many of us in the surrounding area wish Reading would go to a citywide contract but it isn’t in the cards. Please note that Reading Pennsylvania is notable for having elected a socialist Mayor in the past.
We also have to hire our own trash hauler in the township where I live (if we want one) and there is very little or no active competition among the haulers for clients. We never get any ads or information about pricing from the others at all! At least three different trash hauling companies pick up on our street. Two on Wednesday and one on Friday. We put a little sticker on our mail box to indicate who we have hired, but I think the guys just know the route and which houses are theirs. Our company is the only one which does recycling BTW.
Damn, I am in moderation hell, I forgot and wrote the s-word!
Xecky Gilchrist
@goblue72: I swear their next cause is going to be to eliminate free public education because only Communists give away an education.
Actually, they’ve been making that argument since at least the 1960s.
gogol's wife
I can’t believe I’m starting to enjoy the garbage threads.
Bill Arnold
@Rosalita:
Perhaps some of the complainers deal with their trash in ways that don’t involve paying a trash collector.
e.g. burn it, or haul it themselves to a dump, or bury it, or dump it at the side of the road, or put it in random commercial dumpsters, or sneak it into other people’s trash, or…
A new trash removal tax/fee wouldn’t be easily escapable.
wasabi gasp
Yet they all choose the same imbecility.
whetstone
Ugh, you people don’t understand how the free market works: yes, there will be lots of trash haulers. Yes, it’ll be more expensive, and yes, it will cause more congestion, and yes, some of the haulers will probably suck, causing trash to rot or whatever, but after a few years, the best haulers will surely win out, and everything will work great forever. Those of you who who have ever dealt with… I dunno, PayPal… will understand.
It’s like a fellow student in one of my wife’s law school classes said (without any apparent irony): you don’t need to regulate doctors so much, because the market will figure out which ones are bad.
You see a guy with suppurating wounds, you ask him who is doctor is, and you avoid them! It’s the invisible hand expressing itself through visible, gangrenous hands.
freelancer
@Zifnab:
A new life awaits you in the Off-World Colonies!
MattR
@whetstone:
Geez. I didn’t know I should be keeping an eye on the obituaries to see who died from medical complications and then note which doctors treated the deceased. Gotta go. Have many years worth of archives to dig through.
General Stuck
@Evolutionary:
Glad I don’t live there.
aimai
@BR:
Its not just you.
aimai
TooManyJens
@jl:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAxDbDAs2OI
You’re welcome.
Jules
@gogol’s wife:
I am in love with the garbage threads….
BR
@aimai:
Good to know.
I say more cat blogging less E.D.
J.W. Hamner
Freedom is just another word for a different garbage truck going down your street every morning!
This honestly doesn’t seem like an issue that should have an ideological divide… trash collection is one of the most important things that a local government is going to involve itself in… so unless you’re one of those people who think the government’s only job should be ensuring your property and gun rights, there really shouldn’t be any libertarian concern here. There are going to be pluses and minuses to any particular approach, but it’s just a strange thing to make a “principled” stand on.
But I guess that’s sort of what they do for fun.
El Cid
I am sick and tired of only have the option of a government-run Mayor’s office. Citizens should be given the right to choose among any number of Mayor services, and if no one can run a Mayor’s office off of the monthly bills from their customers, then maybe people don’t need a Mayor, much less a whole city or county government.
jimmiraybob
I don’t think that “Freedom Trash” has entered the conversation yet. I find this a threat to my Liberty.
Rosalita
@General Stuck:
In my town in CT, residents have a choice. The result is different trash pails at the curbs in different days. Or you buy a dump pass.
When I lived in SoCal the city picked it up. Much more efficient in my view. But I see that’s not a feature to these people.
bemused
Whoa, $1M savings for a town of only 25,000! That’s a hell of lot of money for a town that size. Even If I was a resident and objected to some niggly rules, that amount of savings would sway me. I’m taking a wild guess that the demographics of that town lean toward senior citizens and retirees.
cyntax
Oh, I get it. The teahadists are working up the nerve to tell their wives they want a polyamorous realtionship, but first they have to get the meme going that any compact which ties you to a binary relationship is bad.
This could take awhile.
Bill Arnold
Very vivid childhood memory of watching two garbage trucks of different species competing for territory, or mates, or something, by repeatedly charging each other and stopping before hitting. I think the bigger trunk eventually chased the smaller one off. (This was the NYC suburbs, in a time when trash hauling was dominated by aggressively territorial family businesses.)
El Cid
Teahadists love democracy so much they’re always willing to stop anyone from counting all the votes.
Via the GOS, TeaTard Joe Walsh has a lead over incombent Democrat Melissa Bean for a House seat from Illinois, and declared victory last week, but as absentee ballots from Cook County are being countered, that lead is narrowing.
So Walsh threatens to sue if Bean steals his victory by vote fraud, i.e., having more votes.
Time to ring up the Roberts Supreme Court to decide that Bush V Gore was a precedent after all.
scav
Do you know where else the creeping hand of the dreaded soçiaIizm! and public funding has insinuated itself? Yes, around the neck of heroic real ‘merkan values: Sports Stadiums! According to this 2008 research, more than half, ($5 billion plus), of the costs of the new stadiums were funded using the dreaded evil public dollars. I don’t quite know if this falls under the THERZ NO FREE CHOICE IN WHERE SPEKTATORS CAN VIEW GAMES! paranoia or the Sports Franchises are failures Just Llike Amtrak and should be LEFT TO DIE rubric. Still, be very very frightened. People can be herded into those stadiums and fed to lions. Well, certainly in Detroit they can. Colbert had better avoid Chicago is all can say.
RalfW
This is a near-perfect example of why the GOPers will not be able to do a damn thing about the budget deficit.
Elected officials, doing the job they are charged to do, found a way to save $1 million a year of taxpayer money. And the taxpayers are PISSED.
I’m glad the decline of empire is at least occasionally fun to watch.
Lysana
@cyntax:
Call me a bigot, but I’m not going to welcome a teahadist invasion of my local poly community events. It’s enough trouble when we get more than three people ordering for themselves when the rest of us are going for splitting the check. Those yabos would insist we all sit at separate tables and make sure the richest people got theirs paid for by the rest of us.
techno
It is SO appropriate that this fight is over garbage. The Libertarians actually will go out of business over issues like this.
I once lived in a transitional neighborhood–a near-to-the-center city housing district that had gone from exclusive, to cheap wartime housing, to slums, to vacant and boarded up. We dreamers had the idea we could restore the neighborhood to it’s former glory. This was raising real estate values the old-fashioned way–HARD WORK!
The Libertarians are right when they say we should prize individual initiative. The neighborhood would have never come back without it. But we also had a voice for community values. He specialized in complex Victorian painting schemes and he had to convince folks that they really needed a “painted lady.” He would say, “Just remember, how you treat the outside of the house is a demonstration of how much you care for the neighborhood. After all, you rarely see the outside of your house but your neighbors see it all the time.”
And with that sales pitch, he got work and a place in the seminal book on Victorian restoration, the neighborhood went from scary to desirable, and real estate values soared.
The problem with Libertarians is that they are extremists. They are as nuts as the commies who actually believed that every decision in life should be a group decision. The well-lived life is about striking a balance between your life as an individual and your life as a member of society.
Striking this balance is not always so easy as with a house where the inside is the individual space and the outside is for the neighborhood. But insisting that everything must conform to some Randian ideal of pure individualism leads to barking idiocies like the garbage mess discussed here.
J.W. Hamner
@bemused:
One of my favorite parts of this whole debacle is watching libertarians completely refuse to acknowledge that it’s possible to save money by going to one company via a competitive bid process with a 5 year contract. This makes complete and total sense, but when you start out erroneously calling the process “a violation of free market principles” you’re kind of stuck with the cognitive dissonance.
goblue72
@whetstone: We had the same douches in my law school. They were usually the same pricks arguing that we shouldn’t have building codes and that instead we should just let the market sort it out – if people were willing live in a dangerous, flimsy ratholes in exchange for cheaper housing, we should just let them.
The rest of the Federalist Society stooges in class would nod sagely in agreement while the rest of us fought to restrain ourselves from choking the life out of them.
bemused
@whetstone:
The woman probably thinks that the market will weed out bad food and drugs the same as doctors. I’m sure that would be of great comfort to her if one of her kids died from bad doctor care or tainted food or drugs before the magic hand of the market fixed the problems. God, people are stupid.
Mnemosyne
@scav:
The NFL keeps wanting to build a stadium and move a team to Los Angeles. I am very proud to say that LA city and county both keep saying, “So how are you guys planning to pay for that? ‘Cause we’re not giving you a dime of taxpayer money.” So the NFL goes away again hoping that a new set of
suckerssupervisors and/or a new city council will be elected.The Staples Center was built with 100% private money and, surprise surprise, makes fistfuls of cash for its owners. So let the prospective owners pay up if they want a stadium.
Barb (formerly Gex)
Nothing could make clearer that conservatives/libertarians care for nothing other than the right for the powerful to rent seek.
gwangung
which is what private business, large and small, do.
bemused
@J.W. Hamner:
I’ve pointed out to R’s on occasion that this soshal program or that actually saves money and they immediately dismiss it. If they don’t hear it from Faux, it can’t be true.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Percy Percy:
Clearly sir, you hate ‘Murka.
scav
@Mnemosyne: Good for LA – I am so not a sports person but just oddly remembered the kefuffle that kept going on and on and on in Seattle.
Sasha
I swear, sometimes I think that the Tea people are actually spoofers pretending to be lunatic idiot uber-conservatives just to caricature what such a creature would be like.
Kevin
This isn’t that crazy…remember when Eric Erickson wanted to start a revolution over…high efficiency dish soap? Peak Wingnut was a myth, they have no limit.
The Bobs
“The Hills Will Have Eyes”
They already do, what do these morans think would happen if they let their trash pile up in their front yards?
bemused
@Kevin:
LIghtbulbs! You can’t make me use those marxist low energy things. I have been stockpiling lightbulbs. I can’t get into my basement but I have enough lightbulbs for the rest of my lifetime.
sukabi
@El Cid: our town has a mayor… several years ago there was a push on to get a city manager as well… the voters said NO… quietly the town hired a city manager and several other high $$$ folks… we now have a mayor AND city manager… mayor’s salary is around $8K per year… city manager’s salary tops $100K and several other useless folks are raking in over $70K/year… this is for a town of < 6000… but we do have trash and recycling…
Margarita
This was bound to happen.
Mnemosyne
@Percy Percy:
Don’t forget, the reason that guy’s house burned down was because he was burning his trash too close to it.
Not that it means anything, but I do find it weirdly ironic.
Montysano
Obviously it’s time for Balloon Juice to retain a new front-pager to address the issues of Detritus Tyranny. Too bad that Fred Sanford is not available.
maus
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
What do you expect? If they’re stuck using arguments from lack of imagination and wallowing in their incompetence, of course the GUBMINT can’t do anything right, they don’t see it doing anything right!
Kyle
Arizona Campaign for Liberty
“Give me trash or give me death!”
FlipYrWhig
@Montysano:
What has four wheels and flies?
Tyranny.
Teddy Duchamp
A pile of shit has a thousand eyes
chopper
@gwangung:
on the other hand, ‘wolverines’.
chopper
@techno:
isn’t that all that libertarian arguments end up boiling down to?
Mia
re: the trash collection thing – it’s really just a scam for money. A local gov’t around here recently did the same thing.
Previously the local gov’t had nothing to do with trash collection. Citizens could contract with any one of a number of vendors to have their trash picked up. Competition between the vendors kept rates decently low.
Gov’t saw an opportunity to become the middle man. They decided to require all the residents to buy trash service through them, and then they’d contract out the work to the same trash companies that had been dealing directly with the public before.
So the teabaggers have it right, but they’re giving the wrong reasons. It’s gov’t “scope creep”, but not so the cops can pick through your garbage – it’s so the politicians can skim your trash collection bills.
sherparick
Garbage, the last refuse of the scoundrel! Sorry, I could not resist. Apparently, as long as socialism has been subsidizing choice, all was okay. But now that it is only one, it is an outrage. But perhaps all this grumpiness and faux rage can be explained that housing prices in Phoenix have fallen by over 53% since the peak of the bubble and are starting to fall again! It makes me grumpy that my house is down 35% in old Virginny, so I feel their pain (if not the displace anger).
http://calculatedriskimages.blogspot.com/2010/10/case-shiller-cities-august-2010.html
El Cid
@sukabi: The whole city manager system began spreading at the same time, and in response to, the success in workers and union and soshullist parties in the early 20th century to win elections. (Yes, it actually happened at one time, and the best selling newspapers were labor and soshullist and ethnic newspapers.) That’s also a big reason why so many local elections went non-partisan.
WereBear
@Bill E Pilgrim: Durn brilliant.
D-Chance.
Currently, Fountain Hills’ 25,000 residents can choose between five different collectors. Under the new system, the community has hired a single trash collector…
I thought libtards were supposed to be pro-choice. What next, some liberal parent hauling around a mason jar containing a rotted banana peel suspended in formaldehyde?
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
@Bill E Pilgrim: That was good! We all know how it ends though – Rand’Dib leads the Teamen to jihad, all hopped up on garbage spice. They overrun Galt’s Gulch, leaving brown goop and don’t tread on me signs everywhere and the whole universe drowns in filth. Sigh.
mgordon
@jl: Too many shitty choices.
Mike The Dealer
I had no idea this site was such big fans of Shirley Manson.
Oh wait, this is honestly about garbage, as in trash, and not Garbage, the band. Oh well.
Woodrowfan
@Mike The Dealer:
We’re only happy when it rains…
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@Mia: I find your unsourced story about an unnamed town very, very compelling.
Very.
Mike Kay (Team America)
Reve
Mike Kay (Expletive Deleted)
xxx
Batocchio
Hmm, so yet again, “reasonable” conservatives and libertarians have made a ridiculous point that was pedantic at best, followed by smug assertions that they’re the true defenders of freedom and have given so much more thought to this issue than others. Who cares if the conservative outrage started over the horrible evils of recycling, or that the contract can be canceled? Who cares about the basics of representative government? I’m all for honest discussion and finding common ground where possible, but this gets really tiring – because as usual, it seems that every fucking conservative argument has to be graded on a curve.
(On the plus side, the dissections/rebuttals were sharp, as were the comments threads, and we did get an alt Dune story out of it…)
electricgrendel
But remember- competition always breeds efficiency! That’s why when you take away the competition your city saves 1 million dollars! ….wait. It looks like not privatizing public ultilities actually saves money because the government does not have a profit motive which inflates the price of service.
So- the next time someone blathers on about how a corporation will more efficiently provide a service ask them how they are not only going to deliver the service cheaper than the government but also do so while turning a profit. The answer is, in most instances, they cannot.
Trinity
Cole, I come to this site for the snark.
I stay for the relentless mocking.
Carry on Sir. The Idiocracy must be documented.
redoubt
@Teddy Duchamp: This also may be appropriate.
BenA
@Mia:
Ha! We pay private people here and it costs twice as much as my buddy up the road who has municipal garbage pick up. Not to mention he can put out basically anything he wants and they take it for FAR less than the idiots who will take my garbage.
It’s the same companies doing the collecting… they just charge people without municipal garbage more.
Oh and one more thing… he pays less a month for garbage AND his water. It’s one fee… goddamn communist… get more value for his money from a government based service…
twiffer
perhaps this is just me, but who the fuck cares who picks up their garbage, so long as it is picked up?
maus
@twiffer: FROG IN A POT OF BOILING WATER
Lisa
Well said – what’s the point in having a blog if you can’t make fun of idiots…