Archive for February 26th, 2009
More bad news for Chicago: Borders closing on Michigan Avenue
The Borders on Michigan Avenue is the largest Borders in the world — and it’s being closed in 2010, as it appears Borders itself is in deep long-term trouble (and, frankly, does not seem long for this world).
This particular Borders is enormous — an anchor on Michigan Avenue, right across from Water Tower Place, and just diagnol from the Hancock building.
Retail along Michigan Avenue is in serious trouble: most of the vertical malls, some 14 stories or more tall, are ghost towns. A few were being prepped for conversion into condo towers, but those plans fell apart when the real estate market tanked. Who knows what will happen to them now.
The high end shops were already suffering, but when things like book stores fall too, it appears consumers are really cutting back on everything that’s not absolutely necessary. As much as we love books, for the last 3-4 years we’ve bought them used from Amazon, or from ABE Books online. What Borders charged $25 for, we’ve found for $5 or so via Amazon’s used book service. As for magazines, we let all of our subscriptions lapse, and have been reading those at the library on Sundays. A lot of people are rediscovering the joys of the library these days.
Borders closing on Michigan Avenue is just another piece in the bigger picture, of what appears to be a fundamental and permanent transformation of Americans’ spending habits. It reminds us of a machine that’s not run out of gas so much as it’s become obsolete in some dramatic way: pumping more money into it isn’t going to make it run again. The problem is more complicated than that, and much, much more serious than temporarily running out of gas. All the little cogs and gears inside are warped and expired. It’s a wonder the machine ran for as long as it did.
Rahm Emanuel has a Sara Feigenholtz sign up in his yard
We know the story in this is that Rahm Emanuel basically endorsed Sara Feigenholtz for his old seat by putting this campaign sign for her up at his Chicago house — but we can’t get passed the fact his house is powder blue and strawberry pink.
Not surprised in the least, but, really? It looks like it’s made of those bubblegum cigars handed out when people have a baby.
This pretty much confirms that Feigenholtz will be a place-holder in the 5th Congressional, because Rahm wants someone in his seat who will give it up when he wants to come back to Chicago and be a Congressman again. If he’s backing Feigenholtz, that means she’s on the same page with that.
The same powder blue and strawberry pink welcome to fabulous page.
The other thing that makes us laugh about this is how much it reminds us of Teresa Heinz Kerry and the 2004 campaign. Back in Fox Chapel, near Pittsburgh, Teresa got tired of reporters staking out her family’s mansion, so to throw them off their game, one night she had her staff put up all kinds of Bush/Cheney signs all over her front yard. The next morning, the news crews vanished, since they believed they had the wrong house — and they couldn’t figure out why what they thought was the Heinz mansion had Bush/Cheney signs all over it.
Kerry would have been a terrible president, but man alive, Teresa would have been the most lively and interesting First Spouse since Frances Cleveland.
What's Hillary Clinton Doing Today? February 26th
8:30 a.m. Delicious breakfast with House Foreign Affairs Committee Members.
11:00 a.m. Bilateral with His Excellency Fatmir Sejdiu, President of the Republic of Kosovo, and with His Excellency Hashim Thaci, Prime Minister of the Republic of Kosovo.
12:45 p.m. Joint Announcement with Special Representative for North Korea Policy Ambassador Stephen Bosworth.
1:15 p.m. Bilateral with His Excellency Rangin Dadfar Spanta, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
3:45 p.m. Meeting with President Obama and Vice President Biden.
Joe Biden tells people he will be a pain in the neck
Joe Biden says he is going to travel around the country and be a pain in the neck to people.
That’s a good use of Air Force Two if ever there was one.
If we could fly around the country doing that, we totally would as well (though, honestly, we’d probably dedicate most of our time to driving Bill Richardson, Claire McCaskill, and the Kennedys crazy, because you know how much we love the lot of them).
In relation to the Trillion Dollars in Spending Obama’s pushed through Congress, with close to another half billion approved yesterday, Biden needs to especially keep an eye on Dr. Steven Chu at Energy, Ray LaHood at Transportation, and whomever finally is installed at Health and Human Services, because these three departments have the potential to waste and squander the most of the spending billions.
If Biden is really going to be an effective Spending Cop, then LaHood, most of all, needs to be watched like a HAWK.
Is Biden up to the challenge? Time will tell. But, it sure will be interesting to watch.
Rachel, the Obama Democrat, meets our friend Vanessa
There aren’t enough Cheetos in the world, people.
We're sure there's something in this to upset everyone
One of the greatest strategic mistakes LGBTQ groups made in recent years was to couch things in nebulous terms of “gay marriage”, and not in specific terms of financial and legal equality for all Americans. Period.
“Marriage” is a charged term that opens up all sorts of unwanted flood gates, while attracting crazed loons like Fred Phelps (pictured above, along with Larry Craig, Ann Coulter, Sally Kern, and Pat Boone’s guitar), and simultaneously alienating good people who would otherwise support the cause of equality, but have knee-jerk reactions to what they perceive as an assault on their traditions.
“Gay marriage” is terrible marketing. “Partner benefits” is where we would have went with this issue, years ago, and we doubt we’d be where we are today with things like Proposition-8.
We ran across the above painting by Paul Richmond, who created it for a gallery show in San Francisco called “Sweet & Low: Optimism in a Pessimistic Age”, and it made us think about something that gets us in trouble from both sides of the aisle, but is worth talking about anyway: our take on the partner benefits issue.
Notice we didn’t say “gay marriage”, because we don’t want any part of “marriage”, but one day would like the right to financial and legal security, if ever any of us here ends up in a longterm relationship and decides we want the same rights other people take for granted (including those rights that allow celebrities like Britney Spears to marry and divorce in a period of 24 hours or less, because marriage is a sacred thing that should never, ever be drunkenly rushed into and annulled the next day. It’s sacred!).
Because, really, that’s what’s at stake here — and it’s a much less interesting thing to depict in paintings. It’s property and inheritance rights, as dull and colorless as that really is on stacks of legal papers. Ultimately, all of this comes down to financial planning, probate, and being able to have the same futures and opportunities that other people have just because they’re heterosexual, but we aren’t (and can never be, no matter how much some of our families want us to be).
During the primaries, Hillary Clinton appeared on Ellen Degeneres’ TV show and told the story of the gay couple in Arkansas her parents befriended when they lived in a condo there. One of the men got sick, and the hospital wouldn’t allow his partner to visit him; worse, the sick man’s family decided to use this moment to make his illness and subsequent death all the more traumatic for all those involved, by refusing to acknowledge his partner, or treat him with basic human dignity and respect. They actually banned the man from his partner’s bedside, making the last day’s of his life an absolute living Hell — all because they didn’t like or accept that their son was gay, and so they punished him to the end, making him die alone in a dreary room instead of allowing his partner to comfort him.
Because they were religious people, don’t you know.
It was a story Hillary Clinton used to illustrate the importance of equal rights for all Americans, because if your partner is sick and dying in the hospital, you should be able to visit him or her, and his or her family should not be able to override a couple’s wishes (when this would not be allowed to happen to a heterosexual pair), no matter how “religious” they are (or how woefully they missed all those parts in religion about love, decency, and treating others with grace and goodwill).
That’s what we are ultimately talking about: basic human kindness and decency winning out over ugliness and vengeful retaliation.
On this site, we’ve talked about our dear friend Lionel who is battling prostate cancer. In his situation, Lionel’s family is very accepting of him, and has embraced his partner Todd as their son-in-law (“marriage” be damned). Todd is Lionel’s caretaker and will be with him through the end. Here in Chicago, the hospital treats Todd like any other caregiver, and allows him as much access as a wife would have, if Lionel was married to a woman, and not committed to Todd. Lionel’s family does not intrude on the decisions Lionel and Todd are making for his care and treatment, just as they wouldn’t intrude if Lionel was married to a woman. Lionel’s family is, in a word, great.
And Lionel sure is lucky to have them.
There are those of us here whose families would lock Todd out of the hospital, pretend he doesn’t exist, and wouldn’t bother to invite him to the funeral, when it came to that. One of us has a mother who refuses to admit her son is gay, and instead tells neighbors, relatives, and friends he has girlfriends. She has, in fact, invented an entire annotated fantasy world in a parallel universe where everything he does is straight, straight, straight (and the lies are so strange and elaborate, that instead of doing freelance marketing work in the fashion industry, his mother tells people he works in marketing for the Cubs, Blackhawks, and Bears…because “fashion” sets off too many warning bells for people back in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, but everyone thinks sports are fabulous).
It’s crazy. It’s wrong. And it’s what we have to deal with…on a daily basis.
Though no one alive should have to deal with something like that, or imagine the horror of laying near death in a hospital bed, not being able to stop your parents from taking over the remainder of your life and locking your partner out of it…making you die alone, so your mother could pretend you have a girlfriend somewhere (no doubt so devastated by your illness that she no longer appears in public, and that’s why no one has ever met her).
Partner benefits are important for this reason — but we have a problem when it comes to “gay marriage” as depicted by the far left, as we feel uncomfortable aping someone else’s traditions.
We are officially on record as a bunch of guys in Boystown who have absolutely no desire to ever have a wedding on a beach, dressed all in white, officiated by Miss Foozie, with drag queens as bridesmaids and a labradoodle as a flower girl. Not that there’s anything wrong with that if it’s what you want for yourself, but we’re tired of people insisting we should want such a spectacle just because straight couples make Bridezilla such must-see-TV.
Growing up gay and Catholic, with most of us serving tours of duty as altar boys, we all went to plenty of over the top elaborate weddings and have to say, honestly, that one of the great perks of being gay is never having to deal with any of that drama or wedding-planning stress. Contrary to popular belief, not all gay men are big fans of the dramz (and not all of us dream of wearing Vera Wang on “our big day” either). And we certainly don’t want to imitate straight couples and conform to molds we successfully resisted and escaped from years ago.
Our lives long ago veered off the paths taken by our straight classmates. Facebook is now a rogue’s gallery of sorts, with cautionary tales of all those who repeatedly honored the sanctity of marriage, on their “big days”, and then divorced, remarried, and divorced again, sanctity be damned. Some of these people still live in Versailles, Pennsylvania or Dubuque, Iowa, on the same street their parents raised them on, or in some new pre-fab suburb that makes Revolutionary Road look like the feel good movie of the year.
That just wasn’t for us, folks. We’ll take a bad day in Boystown over a bad marriage in Dubuque any day. And we realize it actually takes a lot of guts to admit we’re secure in defying society’s expectations, because society’s a formidable thing to defy (especially when your family insists on pretending otherwise).
So, you might understand when we say it rings hollow for use to want to create some weird, watered-down version of a wedding, on that beach, and say we’re “almost as good as straight people, lookit us!” by doing so. Let Susie and Billy Sunshine have their “big day”. We’ll be happy to cater it and do all their seating arrangements, admire their cake and eat a half of a half of a half of a slice, and snark on the hideous Scarlet O’Hara bridesmaids dresses later, after one two many cucumber mojito truth serums. There’s nothing else about Susie and Billy’s suburban lives that we especially covet, so their “big day” holds no allure for us either.
And we look heinous in white. Truly ghastly. So don’t even go there.
But, it would be nice to finally be able to afford to buy a decent apartment, instead of renting for the rest of our lives, and the likeliest bet of that ever happening in a market like Chicago is one day taking that real estate plunge in a longterm serious relationship, where we could join forces with someone else the way married couples do, and enjoy all the legal options and protections marriage affords them (that are currently denied to us). There’s a sense of security in what Susie and Billy get on their wedding day that’s more important and covetable than anything wrapped in powder blue and tied up in white ribbon on the gift table from Tiffany’s. The older we get, and the more challenges we face single and on our own, the more we can appreciate how much easier the world is, in practical and realistic ways, for the Susie and Billys. Especially when friends like Lionel remind us of our own mortality, and how alien the world can become when you’re too sick to fight for yourself, and the person you’ve shared everything with could so easily be estranged from you by relatives you haven’t spoken to in years.
The fact that something like what Hillary Clinton described on Ellen can happen in America, in this day and age, should give us all pause. We know it scares the heck out of us. And we honestly have families who would do something like that, if allowed by state law.
It’s frightening.
So, when we think of partner benefits and whatever you want to call the issue surrounding “gay marriage”, it doesn’t conjure up images of Ellen and Portia releasing doves into the world under showers of rainbows. It’s not colorful or in-your-face or any sort of assault on anyone’s traditions. None of us wants to put on a dress and ape the sacred and beautiful ceremonies that define “marriage” to so many.
We just don’t want to never be able to buy property. We don’t want to pay inheritance taxes straight couples get to avoid. We don’t want to be penalized in any way because we don’t date women.
So, for us, it all boils down to basic accounting, and the very boring and gray world of equal rights in all matters real and practical, extending in unfortunate cases to all matters life and death as well.
And people who get so caught up in waves of emotion over this issue lose sight of all this. Proposition-8 passed in California because Obama did not take the time or initiative to explain to his voters that voting for him but backing Prop-8 was discrimination against the civil and property rights of certain members of the taxpaying public. The emotion should have been taken out of the issue, because at it’s heart this isn’t a matter of the heart, but the pocketbook, and the estate planning portfolio. Whatever boring terms you want to put it into, because that’s what it’s all going to boil down to in the end, anyway.
So, it’s a travesty of marketing that brought us to where we are today, and unfortunate nomenclature that keeps fueling an issue that should truthfully be a non-issue by now. What happened to Hillary Clinton’s parents’ friends at the hospital took place in the 80s. Why on Earth is something like that still happening somewhere today, when most decent Americans would agree it’s just downright cruel for the state to separate two people who want to be together, just because one of their families’ doesn’t like the idea of them as a couple.
Just imagine if YOUR in-laws could do that to you. How would you feel?
And remember that the next time you’re sitting in the home you own with your spouse, listening to someone talk about gay marriage one way or the other, and realize that there are those of us who’d like to own property the way you do, and have a sense of the financial security that you do, even though we don’t ever want to pretend to be you, or ape what you have and thereby, somehow, threaten the traditions you hold dear.
We don’t want to become you, or make you become us.
We just don’t want to get kicked out of the hospital and rent our apartments forever.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Swearing in Ceremony
The State Department has its own channel on YouTube, but there’s a considerable lag in posting relevant video.
However, they do have the gem above, which is the best video we’ve seen of Clinton’s swearing-in ceremony three weeks ago as Secretary of State.
It’s clear the State Department is really trying to keep up with technology and make itself more accessible to the general public, but as a rule the videos it posts on the official site are not compatible with something like WordPress, which does not allow direct embedding. So, the only videos we can post here are those we can link to from Youtube, which WordPress will embed.
It would be great if anything posted on the official State Department site was also posted immediately on the official YouTube channel.
This way, great videos like the one above can be enjoyed and shared much sooner than three weeks after they’re filmed.
