{"id":513,"date":"2010-08-06T03:10:57","date_gmt":"2010-08-05T21:10:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/?p=513"},"modified":"2010-08-06T03:10:57","modified_gmt":"2010-08-05T21:10:57","slug":"tea-party-politics-at-a-colorado-landfill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/08\/06\/tea-party-politics-at-a-colorado-landfill\/","title":{"rendered":"Tea Party Politics at a Colorado Landfill"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So this morning I load up a trailer and head to the Custer County landfill (how backwoods folk in the West dispose of their trash) and the laconic landfill dude notices my Obama-Biden sticker on the back of the car and says, &#8220;Well it&#8217;s going to cost you $300 for that Obama sticker.&#8221; He isn&#8217;t smiling. I try to laugh it off and counter, &#8220;Oh, yeah? I thought I&#8217;d get the 50% Obama voter discount.&#8221; Landfill dude and his sidekick (if they had a TV detective show it would be titled Bald &amp; Grizzled) are not amused. They launch into a Tea Party argument with more passion than I want to deal with, lugging a load of trash at 10 o&#8217;clock in the a.m. Grizzled says, &#8220;I don&#8217;t care what kind of minority runs the country, I just want one who knows what the hell he&#8217;s doin&#8217;.&#8221; (True quote.) He mentions minority in his first comment about Obama, trying to show how open-minded and all he is. Bald says, &#8220;That&#8217;ll be $18.&#8221; I grin and say, &#8220;Well with that 50% discount, I guess it&#8217;s nine then.&#8221;<br \/>\nHe shakes his head like I&#8217;m skating on thin ice. The Gail Collins op-ed in today&#8217;s NY \u00a0Times has some good examples of nutty &#8220;I&#8217;m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore&#8221; Tea Party behavior.<br \/>\nGrizzled and Bald have replaced my favorite landfill dude, with whom I used to argue Global Warming. His basic take on the subject was, &#8220;Those scientists don&#8217;t know a thing.&#8221; But we had some good discussions, although neither of us would budge. For perspective, he would admit that the Wet Mountain Valley was regularly covered in snow November to April; now, that&#8217;s a rarity. I live below an abandoned (<em>defunct<\/em> is perhaps the best word) ski resort, which flourished in the 1980s. It has now become a Christian resort. One that features sharp-shooting on the weekends. (Prompting me to wonder, &#8220;What would Jesus shoot?&#8221;) Kind of creepy, when the Christian out-of-towners on the hillside above you are shooting guns all afternoon.<br \/>\nA recent piece on Global Warming, which too many have conveniently decided is a myth, in MSNBC, headline of &#8220;Latest Decade Warmest on Record&#8221;: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/38454658\/ns\/us_news-environment\/\">http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/38454658\/ns\/us_news-environment\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So this morning I load up a trailer and head to the Custer County landfill (how backwoods folk in the West dispose of their trash) and the laconic landfill dude notices my Obama-Biden sticker on the back of the car &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/08\/06\/tea-party-politics-at-a-colorado-landfill\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-west"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}