Friday, March 11, 2011

My Toilet, My Choice!

This is pretty funny! It's not too often the Senate dabbles in toilet talk - at least in a productive way. But Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) did just that yesterday when he gripped about low flow government toilet standards that have made toilets less effective.

I'm familiar with these kind of Al Gore toilets and you can tell the difference. Often you have to flush it twice (which kind of defeats the purpose of limiting the number of gallons flushed in newer toilets, doesn't it?) to get it to do the job the old toilets used to do.

I think Sen. Paul speaks for many of us when he says, “I’ve been waiting 20 years to talk about how bad these toilets are!"

Here are some humorous blurbs from a Politico article on the hearing:
Amplify’d from www.politico.com

Paul wants government hands off his toilet

And don’t even get him started about his toilet.

“Frankly, my toilets don’t work in my house, and I blame you and people like you who want to tell me what I can install in my house,” Paul said. He added, “I find it insulting.
“But you come instead with fines [and] threats of jail.” (For the record, at no point during the hearing did Hogan threaten to arrest Paul.)
Hogan said, “My view is what you want —”

“Is to buy a toilet that works!” Paul interrupted.
“I’ve been waiting 20 years to talk about how bad these toilets are,” Paul later said.
Chairman Jeff Bingaman responded, “Well, I’m sorry about your toilet.”
Read more at www.politico.com

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The truly asinine thing about low flow shower heads, low flow toilets, etc. is that they supposedly solve a problem that does not exist. We're told we need them so we won't "waste so much water". It is impossible to waste water. Here's why. Pick any point in the water cycle - I'll start with rain.

It rains. Water flows over the land into a river. The city water treatment plant takes some water out of that river and purifies it. It gets piped to your house, where you use it to flush your toilet. It travels down the sewer pipes to a waste treatment plant, which purifies it and puts it back in the river it came from. The river eventually reaches an ocean. The water you flushed eventually evaporates, becomes part of a cloud, and falls to the earth as rain.

The amount of water on the planet is, essentially, fixed. You could leave your taps on 24/7 and all you would waste is money. It is impossible for you to "waste" water.

Here's the ACTUAL problem they're trying to avoid dealing with by passing laws requiring low flow toilets and shower heads: society needs more water treatment capacity as our population grows. But building water purification plants and waste treatment plants is expensive, and politicians don't see campaigning for additional capacity as a winner during elections. So rather than do what is NEEDED, and increasing capacity, they pass laws to reduce our water usage so they can DELAY when the expansion in capacity will have to occur.