Archive for April, 2009
What's Hillary Clinton Doing Today? April 7th, 2009
11am – Bilateral with The Right Honourable Murray McCully, MP, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of New Zealand
1135am – Joint Press Statements and Signing Ceremony with McCully
130pm – Bilateral with His Excellency Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates
315pm – Bilateral with His Excellency Jorge Taiana, Minster of Foreign Relations, International Commerce, and Religion of the Argentine Republic
430pm – Bilateral with His Excellency Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabir al Thani, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Quatar
Go, Hillary, Go!
Congressman insults snakes and crazy people
Congressman Mike Roberts unfavorably compared Nancy Pelosi to snakes and crazy people recently.
Across the country, snakes and crazy people are aghast at the comparison.
Pelosi, meanwhile remains ghastly.
Monday Open Thread
What’s on your mind this morning?
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.
Sunday Open Thread
What’s on your mind this Sunday?
What do you think about Obama allowing the North Koreans to test a missile that reached over Japan?
What do you think of Obama’s remark in Prague that he’s “not naive” and that he “can create a nuclear free world”?
For those of you who can remember the Carter Administration, was this how things started to go downhill for the US in the 70s?
It feels like Obama’s meekness, soft socialism, and talk of fantasy and unicorns is already emboldening our enemies abroad, while weakening America at home. Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, China, and Iran certainly regard all of this with great interest.
That strengthens the belief that the Republican who will defeat him in 2012 will be someone who, like Reagan, is an old-school, take no prisoners, never apologize, strengthen America, and shoot down our enemies’ missiles seconds after they launch them sort of candidate.
The three Republicans who come to mind instantly in that vein, out of those currently mentioned for 2012, are Governor Palin, Governor Sanford, and New Gingrich.
While the economy will still obviously be important in 2012, the more episodes like North Korea’s missile launch that happen between now and then will further elevate whatever Republican is seen as most able to stare down our enemies and strengthen America after 4 years of lemonade and pixie dust.
And if Iran gets its nuke by 2012 as most expect, that could be another shade of Carter for Obama: a weak Democrat trounced by developments in Iran, yet again.
What do you think?
HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy now wants to be a mermaid
Her life’s a ready-made Disney animated feature (complete with early heartbreak, decades of extravagance, a wise-cracking talking pony named Macaroni (most likely to be voiced by Seth Rogen at this point), and the endlesss happy ending that is life as a gets-almost-anything-she-desires-because-she’s-a-Kennedy American princess), so it’s no surprise HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy now wants to be a mermaid.
Last week, she appeared at a sparsely attended fundraiser Mayor Bloomberg held for himself, where she announced her desire to be the Mermayor of New York, to rule everything under the East River.
Which is a good place for Princess Caroline, in our opinion.
Really, this was all part of a poorly received and amateurly written skit Princess Caroline took part in, where the cast of Disney’s poorly received and amateurishly produced Broadway musical version of “The Little Mermaid” proved once again something doesn’t have to be any better than a kindergarten’s production to perform to nearly empty professional theaters in New York (besides giving away free tickets to the show no one wants to see, Disney’s now offering $15 seats through various online offers…and yes, the show is that bad…not just leaving at intermission bad, but leaving after one or two numbers bad…Princess Caroline’s Senate campaign bad).
Another take on gay marriage
Tangential to the above, isn’t it odd that solidly blue states like Illinois and New York don’t have marriage equality, despite being in firm Democrat control, but Iowa just ruled against discrimination this week.
Every day, the LGBTQ community in Illinois and other “true blue” states should ask what Democrats have done for them lately. If the LGBTQ lets Democrats take them for granted, we guarantee they will.
Chicago and Illinois taxpayers will get stuck with half a billion for the Olympics
Here’s an interesting story in the Tribune today about Chicago’s vain-glorious 2016 Olympics bid.
The truly salient part is hidden, and is “Chicago had to promise to cover any operating deficit up to $500 million”.
That reminds us of all the small print in credit card and other agreements designed to work over the witless and unsuspecting.
The London 2012 Olympics are now costing the city THREE TIMES what they were supposed to, with cost overruns in the billions.
Every games has cost much more than expected when the winning city was selected. Security costs alone are often double or triple what the bid committees claim they will be. The Vancouver games next year, for instance, budgeted just $175 million for security — but Canada’s spending more than $300 million at this point, and that number should jump in the coming year. Everything is like that. And Vancouver’s not mob and tainted politician controlled. Just imagine the cost overruns for construction alone in Chicago.
We don’t see how the 2016 games won’t cost AT LEAST double what the Chicago bid committee claims they will cost. If the British undersestimated their costs so much, and London doesn’t face the peculiar corruption challenges Chicago faces, we could be looking at record-smashing waste and corruption in 2016.
And who’s going to pay for all of that?
The other thing no one is thinking about is the drain the Olympics is already causing for local charities, museum, universities, and other institutions. Friends of ours who work in nonprofit development here in Chicago have seen a lot of donors, already hit hard by the economy, begging off capital campaigns because they’re donating to the Olympics bid instead. A lot of these people also maxed out to the Obama campaign as well, many of them spending money they really didn’t have in this economy.
It’s like walking into the fridge and realizing you only have 3 eggs left out of the dozen you thought was in there. Do you make one giant, extravagant, multi-ringed international party cake — or do you bake three batches of cookies and brownies to support museums, libraries, and colleges in your community? No one else is willing to pony up any more eggs for you to have it all. So, what do you do?
And how do you proceed when, in Chicago, most of the eggs end up being rotten in the end anyway?
Everytime we read about the Chicago 2016 Olympics, we feel like some guy sitting on the White Star dock, wondering how a ship could be called “unsinkable” when its water-tight compartments went only up to the ceiling, knowing full well any breach of its outer skin would soon flood the whole ship and send it to the bottom.
A disaster is coming, which won’t be truly appreciated until 2017, just as Beijing is only now realizes how little the fortnight of Olympics events are truly worth.
And if you want to talk about titanic disasters closer to home, just head to Atlanta.
What benefit did it really get from its own games 13 years ago? A lot of stuff was built, at great expense, and Atlanta’s really no better off than it was before the games. In many ways, it’s actually worse off, since the 96 Olympics bombing is the thing most people remember about the Atlanta games.
That, and whatever the heck its Olympics mascot was supposed to be.
Which was another bomb in itself.
