Archive for April 6th, 2009
What's Hillary Clinton Doing Today?
940am – Opening Remarks at the Joint Session of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting
1220pm – Meeting with His Serene Highness, Prince Albert II of Monaco
230pm – Bilateral with His Excellency Jose Antonio Garcia Belaunde, Minister of Foreign Relations of the Republic of Peru
330pm – Bilateral with His Excellency Gonzalo Fernandez, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay
430pm – Bilateral with His Excellency Jonas Gahr Stoere, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway
Go, Hillary, Go!
Why do people willingly move into a neighborhood and then want to change it?
This article is interesting, but not in the limited sense in which it is intended, but in a much broader sense about human nature in America today.
The article is from RedState, and it’s about a mosque in Tennessee that’s demanding a new law be written to prevent buildings adjacent to the mosque from serving alcohol — even though the people who built the mosque knowingly moved into a city, and district, that allows liquor licenses. But, they built the mosque, and then decided to demand neighboring businesses be forbidden from serving alcohol.
The reason that’s interesting to us is because the same thing happens here in Chicago, without religion being involved. On Halsted here in Boystown, between Waveland and Addison, there’s a pricey condo tower called The Dakota that was built right in the middle of the strip of bars that makes Boystown famous. In fact, it’s right next to a club called Circuit, which hosts various circuit parties, theme-nights, etc. Circuit is more of a special events venue than it is a typical bar, and is only open when there is such a special event (it used to be a warehouse or autoshop in a previous life).
So, people who bought condos in The Dakota knew they were buying condos in Boystown, and knew there was a gay bar next door named Circuit. But, after they bought they condos, they started pressuring the local Alderman to close circuit down and pass an ordinance that would take away liquor licenses north of Addison, so no more bars could open near The Dakota.
Well, why the hell did you move to Boystown, on HALSTED where the bars are, if you didn’t want to live near bars?
It’s absolutely ridiculous.
The Alderman in question is Tom Tunney, and thankfully he doesn’t do anything for anyone, so The Dakota’s condo owners never got what they wanted (Tunney is heir to the Ann Sathor’s restaurant fortune, and can be more often found working in his family’s restaurants than working for his Aldermanic constituents).
This kind of thing seems to happen a lot wherever new condo towers are built in existing neighborhoods — it seems the condo owners buy the properties believing they will just run out the surrounding businesses, those buildings will be torn down, and new condo towers will rise in their place eventually.
So, this isn’t something that happens because religion is involved — it’s something that happens whenever anyone’s true plan is to take over a neighborhood and make it what they want it to be, whatever that may be.
Monday Open Thread
What’s on your mind as we start a new week?
Here are some of the things we’re thinking about:
(1) Obama has promised more lemonade and pixie dust: this time promising to eliminate all nuclear weapons on Earth. We can think of four countries who will never eliminate their nuclear weapons no matter what the United States does: Russia, North Korea, Pakistan, and Israel. India and France are probably on that list too. By this time next year, Iran will be as well. We’ve thought from the beginning that four years under Obama will seriously weaken the United States, more than Carter’s four years did. Every day, Obama seems more determined to prove that.
(2) The Chicago Olympics bid inspection was this weekend — and officials here in the city were careful to take the IOC members only to places they wanted them to see. One group that will be deeply impacted by the Olympics in 2016 are the Chicago cyclists — people who ride their bikes along the city’s lakefront paths. Most of those paths, and large swaths of the highway shouldering the lake, will be closed for about three months in 2016 for the games. If you have never spent much time in Chicago, the clyclists are largely crazed zealots. Most of them are yuppies (subspecies: nimbys) who work in the Loop but dress up in colorful spandex supersuit to go barreling down those lakefront paths at high speeds (dangerous speeds in our book). The cyclists are in a perpetual territory-marking pissing match over those lakefront paths, which are supposed to be for everyone, be they joggers, walkers, tourists, families with strollers, rollerbladers, Segway scooters, or cyclists. The cyclists, however, consider them to be exclusive high-speed bike trails and will run little old ladies over if they get in their way. LEFT! LEFT! LEFT! If you’re a tourist, or someone enjoying the paths for the first time, it takes a moment to realize the person screaming LEFT! behind you is shooting towards you at breakneck speed and will be passing on your left. Add in the language barrier of some people, and it’s a recipe for disaster served up on a daily basis in Chicago. Why they don’t have bicycle horns is beyond us. So, for all the inconvenience the Olympics will cause Chicagoans, the group that will give the Parks Department the most grief will indeed be these cyclists, as their reign of terror on the bike paths is temporarily ended for three months in 2016. We’re sure they will bitch and moan about this from now until 2016 as well, which serves the Mayor right, as he helped create these monster cyclists to begin with.
