The only thing I have to say about the trash situation, for now.

Dammit, Mr. Follies beat me to the reference.

Enjoy anyway...

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.