Archive for March, 2009
Why does it matter that the Vice President's daughter does cocaine, when no one cared how much cocaine Obama did?
It’s ridiculous that anyone cares what Joe Biden’s daughter is up to — or how much cocaine she does — when the MSM never cared a fig about how much cocaine Obama did through the years – and that’s something he wrote about in his books.
Most people aren’t aware Biden even has a daughter, since the focus is usually on his two sons, Beau and Hunter. Whatever she does to occupy herself through the course of a day HAS to be better and more productive than anything HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy is up to, so we say leave Ashley Biden alone.
She isn’t running for anything, she doesn’t surrogate speak for her father, and she’s never been a poster child for anti-drug efforts (unlike someone like Michael Phelps, whose drug use is newsworthy because of his hypocritical involvement in Just Say No campaigns).
Until such time as the MSM feels compelled to ask Obama questions about his New York dealer, how much cocaine he did through the years, and whether or not those habits followed him to Illinois from New York, Biden’s daughter’s antics shouldn’t be an issue.
Sadly, we’ve found through the years that the people we know who are most likely to abuse drugs are those whose parents either have a lot of money and solve all their problems for them, or they’re in the medical or legal professions. For some reason, people who’ve gone to law or med school feel laws that apply to others don’t apply to them – especially the young lawyers we know in New York and Chicago, who definitely believe drug laws aren’t applicable to them (because they went to Harvard, University of Chicago, or NYU). It seems like these people believe those diplomas either give them status high enough to avoid prosecution, or that they know enough of the right people to keep themselves out of jail no matter what they do.
And none of these people have famous parents. We can only imagine what they would be like if that was the case.
Sad, but true.
Welcome to the Olympics! Rio builds walls around two of its slums
Rio is the only city that could beat Chicago for the 2016 Olympics.
Here in Chicago, people pretty much consider it a done deal that we’ll win the Olympics (we also consider it a done deal that the city will go bankrupt putting these games on, and that they will be much, much, much more trouble than they are worth). The only way Rio can beat Chicago is if Rio get ahold of its crime problem.
Large parts of the city are in perpetual anarchy. Sporadically, the police occupy whole neighborhoods, get them under control, but then have to regroup to occupy and control new areas that have flared up. We don’t see how Rio controls these problems enough to host the Olympics.
Rio’s latest strategy is to just wall off whole sections of town that are difficult to control.
And they are doing this just in time for the IOC’s latest round of visits to Olympics hopeful cities. Chicago’s visit will be in April, and our Mayor is pulling out all the stops to beautify and repair all areas IOC officials will be taken to (this is done at the expense of repair work and beautification of other parts of town, since the Olympics have come first for the last several years in Chicago).
At least we’re not building any walls around anthing here in Chicago, though.
Hooray! Louisiana is more corrupt than Illinois!
Bad news for New Orleans, good news for Chicago.
Louisiana is ranked as a more vile and terrible place than Illinois.
Hooray!
We may be a cesspool of graft and corruption, but the Pelican State’s a big, festering swamp.
Hooray!
"Freedom Tower" in New York City renamed "One World Trade Center"
It’s hard for us to talk about the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site without being angry.
Donald Trump argued for rebuilding the Twin Towers on the site, bigger and stronger than they ever were before. It was the first time we really appreciated what a smart and forward-thinking man Trump really is, despite how ridiculous his hair and personal antics may be.
Every design put forward for the WTC site was hideous. And, in true decision by committee nature, the final design chosen for construction, the ‘Freedom Tower’, was probably the most hideous of all.
Uninspired.
Generic.
Timid.
Acquiescent.
Forgettable.
And 8 years later, still unbuilt.
It’s a national embarrassment that the WTC site is still a gaping hole in the ground, and that America didn’t hit back at the terrorists of the world by rebuilding something magnificent on the site where we were attacked in 2001. Our failure to produce a true phoenix on that site will forever be a victory of sorts to those who did us harm.
They hit us and brought two towers down. We should have dusted ourselves off and built two, or even three, towers back in their place.
If we get knocked down, we need to get right back up again. That used to be the American way.
But, digressing, the point in bringing up a subject we don’t especially care to deal with today rests in this quiet announcement that the developers behind this hideous project are now renaming it “One World Trade Center”, instead of “Freedom Tower”.
We have mixed emotions about that.
“Freedom Tower” would have been a good name for a stunningly beautiful, original, and landmark building on that site. Something epic and enchanting and deserving of the name “Freedom Tower”.
Not the ugly, awkward, meek thing pictured above.
So, the name and the design never matched in our book.
But, just like the Sears Tower being renamed the Willis Tower, we’re never fans of name changes in general. And we do have a problem with the deliberate move away from “Freedom” made by the developers, who feel it is too patriotic and American to attract international tenants.
Making something “international” doesn’t necessarily make it any good. Typically, it just makes it watered down and generic, like most of everything else in the business world today.
So, all things considered, maybe a generic name for a genric and ugly building is the right call after all.
Though, everyone involved in this project should still be ashamed of themselves. Eight long years and this monstrosity still isn’t built yet. No matter what you want to call it, that hole in the ground should have been filled a long, long time ago.
Here's a miniseries you will never get to see on TV: an honest look at The Kennedys of Massachusetts, by the creator of FOX's 24
The miniseries would look into Joseph P. Kennedy’s adventures in London in the leadup to WWII, where he tried to convince the British government to surrender to Hitler and was forcibly recalled by President Roosevelt as a result. This will, presumably, come after detailing exactly how the Kennedy family made all of its money off bootlegging during Prohibition, and how Kennedy got to be Ambassador to the Court of St. James in the first place.
The leadup to the 1960 election would be fascinating, especially the part where Chicago’s first Mayor Daley found a way to raise the dead to get so many votes for John F. Kennedy. George Romero could possibly direct that particular hour of the miniseries.
Speaking of the dead, it’s a damn shame Jacques Cousteau is gone, because someone with practice shooting underwater is needed by the time the miniseries reaches 1969 and covers Ted Kennedy’s Oldsmobile-as-submarine school of driving (in which he killed Mary Jo Kopechne, but still, to this day, won’t admit what he did to her).
It’s amazing the good the FOX/24 team can do calling the Kennedys out for all the terrible things they’ve done through the years, tearing away Jackie Kennedy’s elaborate and ornate Camelot myth to glimpse the truth behind the faded cardboard glory.
All of ten minutes will be reserved for the accomplishments of HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy, swirling around to either an old Neil Diamond or Roy Orbison song, throwing Hermes silk into the air, giggling all through Bergdorf’s, in a scene that should, you know, look something like, you know, this:
Stimulus Trillions Should Have Been Spent on Energy Development
Washington is incredibly myopic and amnesiac most of the time. Just last year, oil prices were at $146/barrel, but dropped precipitously, and now rest around $54/barrel. OPEC, in its infinite greed wisdom, has not only cut production, but has also terminated development projects until at least 2013. This means no money is being spent internationally to tap into new reserves of oil and guarantee stable prices for the future.
The private sector is also curtailing investment in new energy sources, from deep water West African oil to extraction of Canadian sand oil. Because the economy is tanking, the first division hit of any company is research and development. Since these businesses are trying to stay alive, they figure the first thing they can cut are investments in their future.
But, here’s the problem: decreased oil production today means the price of oil will continue to rise, which benefits OPEC and oil companies, but does not benefit Americans. We need more energy production, because when we start to emerge from this recesssion and demand for oil ratchets up again, we won’t have the supply to meet that demand, and prices will shoot up higher than the $146 we saw in 2008.
Smart spending by the Obama Administration would have been investment in oil exploration and development wherever America has oil. Instead of dumping One Trillion Dollars into Democrats’ pet pork-barrel projects throughout the US, we should have invested half of that money in Alaskan energy production, and the other half in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic seaboard.
Those three areas, together, would guarantee ample energy production by the time the economy crawls out of recession. We don’t even know how much oil is available in the Arctic — the potential there could very well eclipse the Middle East’s reserves, rendering OPEC relatively irrelevent and impotent in a generation.
Investment in energy, with an Energy Secretary who knows how to run a bureaucracy and fight Congress for projects that will make America truly energy independent, is what we need…not the ridiculous, redundant, wasteful projects cobbled together by the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumverate in Washington.
Friday Open Thread
What’s on your mind as we head into the weekend?
If you had to list the top three most important things that happened this week, what would they be?
What are some things you want people to know more about, or want us to write about?
Do you have any updates on Terrible People like Helen Jones-Kelley, David Kernel, Claire McCaskill, Bill Richardson, HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy, or any others you want us to keep track of?
Send your requests if you’ve got ‘em.
