Friday, August 24, 2007

DeSalvatore on why he'd be a good sanitation worker

The local Fitchburg Pride paper is running a series of opinion pieces by the mayoral candidates. One a week for four weeks (obviously). By the luck of the draw, Ted DeSalvatore is the first up. Does he have something good to say? Crazier things have happened!

First off, the opinion piece written by DeSalvatore's campaign manager DeSalvatore isn't as crazy as most of what he says when he doesn't have a bunch of time to prepare a statement. Medication? Ghost-writer? Or does he just act less crazy when he's trying to get people to vote for him? You decide!

DeSalvatore starts off like so:
My wife Brenda and I came here for a home but found a family. We have never felt such an embrace. As much as we have grown to love Fitchburg, we have also been faced with many challenges. If our intention was to stay, we had to learn to fight. Fighting for our corner against drug dealers, pimps and thugs became a fight for our neighborhood, and now our city.
Good to see he's staying true to form here. First paragraph and he's already bringing up the "thugs" who invade his dreams. Also pimps and drug dealers, natch. Oh, and "fighting". He loves fighting.

As an aside, I'm glad I don't live on his corner. Not because of the supposed pimps and thugs, I have trouble believing they really hang out there too much. It just sounds like the sort of place where a crazed city councilor would be likely to come out and sock people in the nose for "looking suspicious".

Here's a treat though! Ted's crappy-ass website is incredibly vague about what he plans to do if people are crazy enough to elect him. His public statements have been too. But he's about to treat us to some specifics!
We are a service industry, but each year we find more and more of our essential services taken away yet the taxes remain. We need to consolidate departments, and/or services within departments, for increased efficiency with a reduction in cost.

This could be accomplished by: [blah, blah, blah]
Yeah, I don't understand that "service industry" thing either. But in the [blah blah blah] is a bunch of stuff he wants to do!

Unfortunately, it's all in candidate-speak. So as a public service to you, dear reader, I will now translate them:
  • "introducing on-line Internet services to facilitate departmental restructuring" = Make a website. Probably one that capitalizes things for no reason.
  • "eliminating mandatory increases and frivolous perks such as vehicle privileges" = Fuck your cost of living increase! Also, no more fire trucks.
  • "eliminating all nonessential positions and filling understaffed departments" = Fire a bunch of people I don't like, then hire others.
  • "identifying the greatest strains on city resources, eliminating whatever possible" = Eat out of dumpsters, stupid hungry people!
  • "developing an issue tracking system which all departments would share, reducing, and hopefully eliminating, overlapping efforts" = Make that website, again. Or maybe just make everyone be myspace friends. Whatever.
  • "creating revenue streams, such as selling water to other municipalities and or ventures" = Sell our tapwater and hope nobody noticed that we "violated a drinking water standard" as recently as June of last year.
  • "upgrading city buildings to be more fuel efficient, seeking those upgrades that would yield the greatest return on investment in the shortest period of time" = Do something smart, but screw it all up by looking for immediate return instead of long-term benefit.
Pretty damn specific, eh?

Enough of his "platform" though, next we move back to his other favorite group to criticize, "slumlords":
Slumlords do no background checks, fill out registration forms or remember faces. They deal in cash, don't give two hoots about your city and will keep doing what they are until the place burns down or until they get offered a high enough price.

By inviting and nurturing the criminal element into our community, they promote drug sales, prostitution and other reckless anti-social behaviors and must be shut down.
Man, slumlords suck. Apparently they also send out some sort of invitations to drug dealers and hookers, which seems odd. Are they like wedding invitations with the fancy thin paper that serves no purpose? And why can't they remember faces?

Actually, what the hell does Ted define as a slumlord anyway? It it just someone who doesn't do paperwork? Because that seems like a pretty wide net to cast. I've rented apartments in Fitchburg with minimal paperwork and they were hardly slums. Still, does that make me "the criminal element"? I did get a speeding ticket once.

You know, I'm beginning to think that "slumlords" are just a term DeSalvatore uses to describe any property owner he doesn't care for. He's never actually bothered to identify what he means when he uses the term, aside from these vague claims that they deal in cash and enjoy hanging around with hookers and drug dealers.

Sure, they're a convenient enemy to have. It's a nasty-sounding word, and there's no anti-defamation league for slumlords. Nobody's going to come forward and say "I'm a slumlord, and I'm tired of being put down!" But who the hell are they?

Something tells me that in DeSalvatore's mind a slumlord is basically any landlord in a poor or predominantly Hispanic part of town. I have nothing to back that up, mind you. It's just a guess based on where he sent his dumbass "Liberty Walk".

One last quote though, and it's my favorite part:
We are proud to have cleaned out the wooded area behind B.F. Brown Middle School, frequented regularly by the city's worst. Littered with bottles, needles, bleach kits, condoms, feces and more. Children played, parents had no clue. Today, all waste has been removed and the area is safe.

This is an example of my decisiveness and what you may expect when it comes to your family's safety.
Yes, you got that right. Ted would make an awesome sanitation worker! His "decisiveness" in picking up trash is remarkable!

You or I might stand there a little while thinking "Hmm, should I pick up this feces-covered needle?", but not Ted! He picks it right up and puts it in a plastic bag! That's the sort of decisiveness he has!

I'm envious, really.

So yeah, if DeSalvatore wants to quit the mayoral race and run for sanitation man or something I'm totally going to back him. But as far as being mayor goes, forget it.

10 comments:

fitchburg-shuffle said...

Let Ted run for mayor! There is no fucking way that I want him picking through my trash!

A credible source told me that he tried to pay-off bartenders at establishments that councilors and various other enemy's frequent, looking for crap to hold against them. This guy has no reason to lie, he lives in Leominster.

I'm a regular schmoe, imagine what he would search for in an officials trash.

Let the charade continue! It will be over in a month!

fitchburg-shuffle said...

I'll miss Ted! Who will I make fun of?

JustSayNoToDeSalvo said...

fitchburg-shuffle, at least you'll still exist after DeSalvo rides off into the sunset (preferably tarred and feathered and on a rail!) Poor me. I'll cease to exist, at least in recognizable form. Thanks Ted for my 15 minutes of fame.

Boy is this guy a wacko. He hasn't figured out that Fitchburg campaign signs in Leominster don't help! They must have had a buy one get a thousand free sale at the sign store. We've spotted three places so far in all of Fitchburg that have A (single) Ted sign, and fewer than a dozen distinct residences that have DeSalvo signs at all. Maybe he thinks that if you put them in pairs or more they'll make little puppy signs.

By the way, what's with all the signs on city property. The worst offender is DeSalvo, but we've seen Donnelly and Rosemary Reynolds signs on city/state right of ways too. Isn't the candidate supposed to be fined for having signs on public property?

fitchburg-shuffle said...

A buddy of mine is running for office but refuses to let me put signs on my property because I don't live in his voting area.

Fuck it! If Ted can do it, I can do it! Not the healthiest attitude to have. My neighbor has put the DeSalvatore sign that appeared on her lawn, without permission, on the abandoned property across the street from her house.

I'm guessing that the owner of that house must be a SLUMLORD! Perish the thought!

Nowoco said...

This site makes me laugh -- this is the perspective that's missing in the "mainstream" media. Thanks unicow!

JustSayNoToDeSalvo said...

Well Unicow I guess you aren't "fair and balanced" any more than I am! Maybe it's that RR mind control on us both, but I don't see the wacky posts getting through here either.

True to form, it's the upside of the full moon. HALDOL TIME, DESALVO!

The Unicow said...

Oddly enough, I haven't even been getting nutty posts that need to be deleted lately. It's been at least a couple of weeks since I've deleted anything at all.

Which either means my commenting system is somehow broken (which would be odd, since some people are clearly getting through) or the crazy folks are all simply fixating on you. Bad news for you, but quite pleasant for me!

JustSayNoToDeSalvo said...

Well don't I feel special! I guess that means we've pushed his "buttons" then. He's desperately trying to guess who we all are and since RR is known to him she takes a lot of the heat and threats. (Sorry 'bout that, Rachel, but his threatening you isn't going to shut me up. I ain't got no "buttons" to push!)

He's certainly demonstrating why he shouldn't be mayor.

I'm with fitchburg-shuffle about not wanting DeSalvo to rummage through my trash. I don't know where his hands have been!

Really Rachel said...

On a positive note (not to imply that your article isn't positive, Unicow), Tom Donnelly made his blog debut at Fitchburg Voice. Tom expressed himself well, and with ... well.. Class. Hope you'll take a quick click over to http://FitchburgVoice.blogspot.com (and come back here of course.)

Shalom

Mick said...

My wife Brenda and I came here for a home but found a family.

He didn't say where he found them, did he? Were they, like, on the street living in a dumpster or hanging around at the mall with a For Sale sign around their necks or something?

Can he, maybe, suggest where I could go to find one? I'd like a family, especially if I could return them if it doesn't work out. Where would Ted think the best place to look for a family would be? Do they tend to be forest-dwellers? Could I trap one?

Finding a ready-made family is obviously preferable to having one of your own because it's, like, easier. No muss, no fuss.

Candidates who can't write shouldn't blog. Blogging is about writing, after all (you have to explain these things to politicians).