It’s the mother lode of all potty jokes: In November, San Francisco voters will decide whether to rechristen the city’s Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant as the George. W Bush Sewage Plant.
So great is the pun potential–Cleaning up Bush’s mess! Memorializing the president of the affluent with effluent!–that Keith Olberman covered the issue with the help of a comedian and newspapers are dropping stinkers too (LA Times: “San Franciscans’ Planned ‘Tribute’ to Bush Stirs Some Muck”). The website of the initiative’s sponsor, the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco, says, “No other president in American history has accomplished so much in such a short time.” So much, well, you know.
In the spring the members of the Presidential Memorial Commission began circulating a petition in support of the measure, often in city parks, while wearing Uncle Sam outfits and blaring patriotic music from a boom box. Yesterday the San Francisco Department of Elections certified that they’d turned in enough valid signatures to qualify the measure for the ballot, opening a new chapter in the time-honored tradition of wacky San Francisco ballot measures.
Not everybody in the city supports the idea. Officials at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission say the plant is an award winning facility. (A more fitting memorial would be the Sewerage Agency of Southern Marin, which in February spilled 2.7 million gallons of poop water into San Francisco Bay). San Francisco, after all, cleans up its own shit just fine.
