Not an impossibility, and not a true rarity, but sightings were spotty enough to be noteworthy. And now the gulls are getting to be routine.

    Last fall, I marvelled at the gulls and their sixth sense for knowing it was a Saturday and that there would be a football game at a local stadium. They are, after all, famous for finding garbage.

    On a recent afternoon, on a blue and rocky stretch of the James River, less than a half mile from that stadium, a flock of several hundred seagulls flashed like Christmas tinsel across the sun-drenched sky. And that's when I made the connection.

    They're following the garbage.

    ***

    Garbage is big business in Virginia and was a major issue when the legislature was meeting the first couple months of the year. Interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution notwithstanding, the legislature moved to crack down on garbage from New York City.

    Now Yankee-bashing is always good politics in Virginia, and cleaning up garbage is a political issue that draws support from both right and left. The bills passed. They were great politics. A great time was had by all, except, of course, the garbage companies who had made their political donations and had gotten nothing to show for it. In modern politics, that kind of double-dealing denotes integrity -- my vote wasn't bought (though their money sure was taken).

   Once again, we get to see the difference between politics and policy, and we get to see that a major problem with modern politics is the narrowness of the questions.

   ***

   Note to birders -- I know the gulls will follow the shad up the James River, too, and not just the garbage, and I'm very proud that my city has bald eagles roosting inside of city limits. We're not talking Love Canal here.

   I toured one of these mega-whopping high-tech landfills back when I was still a reporter. What I remember most was that I couldn't believe anybody could sink a million dollars an acre into compacted clay and double plastic liners and workers and compactors and still make a profit.

   Boy, was I ever wrong.

   Economists have a term for this -- inelastic demand. The garbage has to go somewhere by its own velocity, so the price becomes secondary to just getting rid of it. Here in Virginia we know something about inelastic demand because we make a lot of cigarettes here, and when people are Jonesing, price ain't the point.

   So here we have a growing industry, a captive audience in a way considering all that big city garbage has to land somewhere, and our politicians go cracking on it.

   Politics versus policy. Talk about boxing your political opponents into a corner -- force them to be in favor of garbage.

   ***

   Our governor here is a tough-guy type. Former prosecutor. Son of a butcher. None of that Eastern Elite stuff with him. I still remember the Wall Street Journal headline shortly after his election, that Jim Gilmore was part of a new breed of Republican politician -- make few promises, but keep them. Now there's a headline that says a lot about modern politics.

   Now I can't complain that the governor wants to crack down on illegal medical wastes, on unsafe garbage trucks, on all that stuff. That's my point entirely -- don't tell me you can't safely tuck garbage into environmentally safe landfills. It can be done safely, and if it takes some head-cracking now and then to make sure standards are being upheld, then so be it. Glad we got a tough-guy governor who can do it.

   The sad fact is doing garbage right, of enforcing regulations, makes for terrible politics -- and agitating for bans and limits and just generally being against Yankee trash makes great politics. Keep the politics simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker -- no garbage -- and you win.

   I can't help but think, however, that the win is short-lived. That there's a real loss in jobs and tax dollars and maybe even environmental safety in the future. That garbage has to go somewhere. I'd like to see it go someplace where it can be handled safely. And it's even better if it's handled safely and you can still make a fortune on it to boot. Especially if that fortune is in my back yard.

   ***