Archive for May, 2009
Monday Open Thread
What’s on your mind this Monday morning?
We’re wondering what the CIA is going to do to Nancy Pelosi this week. What’s really interesting is what the Republicans, specifically Michael Steele, will do.
Steele is a smart, smart man. Will he give the go ahead for the GOP to take Pelosi down and encourage her ouster, or will Steele keep Pelosi around so she damages Democrats in 2010? Personally, we want Pelosi to go down now, but we’d also like to see her take down as many bad Democrats from the far left with her as possible. All the Pelosi Democrats can go as far as we are concerned.
The CIA seems to have something new in store for Madame Speaker every week, so we wonder what day the new surprise will come this time. What do you think, and what do you think it will be?
It’s almost like Christmas morning waiting to open the presents, anticipating Pelosi getting what’s coming to her.
Keep your eyes on this: plan to secure Pakistan's nukes when government falls this summer
For some reason, the MSM keeps saying “if” Pakistan’s government collapses this summer, but the Taliban, Al Queda, and possibly even Dracula are all hard at work toppling Pakistan’s government…all because the current President of the United States is an international joke and they know they will get away with it.
As Pakistan’s government collapses, Dr. Utopia will dither and send Susan Rice to the UN Security Council for various resolutions condemning Pakistan’s descent into chaos — resolutions that will be vetoed by China and/or Russia and maybe even France, too.
Dr. Utopia is clueless.
His cluelessness will lead to chaos and destruction on a global scale.
Elections have consequences, and the “change” people went on and on about last year will result in the Taliban, Al Queda, and other kooks and loons gaining a nuclear arsenal.
BUT, there’s apparently a plan in place to see that doesn’t happen. Which is good.
But, who here thinks Dr. Utopia will impede this plan and dither instead of implementing it, just like he did with the pirates while dithering whether to send Navy SEALS in on a rescue mission or instead dispatch JAG lawyers as negotiators.
That’s bad.
There are at least 100 nukes in Pakistan. If even one of them ends up in Taliban/Al Queda hands, kiss London, Rome, or Paris goodbye and say hello to WWIII…during which Dr. Utopia will dither some more, no doubt, and all Hell will break loose.
We so hope a transformation magically happens in Dr. Utopia and, like George W. Bush on 9/11, this clown becomes the man we need him to be (when a woman named Hillary is what’s really needed).
Because we just don’t see how Pakistan holds itself together past August.
We really and truly don’t.
Whoo-hoo! Our 4,000 post!
Hey ya, it’s a happy milestone for us…our 4,000 post here on HillBuzz.
Also, strangely, today is the first day in months that no one came to our site via Google looking for information on werewolves. Most of the Google searches are politically related, or people looking for some variation of the name HillBuzz, but there’s always several hundred people each day who come here looking for “werewolves”. But not today.
This has nothing to do with anything in particular, but it was just something strange we noticed on the wordpress dashboard while we kept an eye on our post count checking to see when we’d hit that 4,000 mark.
Thanks to all of you who are regulars, especially the regular commenters, for helping us keep this site going, and for helping us evolve, improve, and carry on. We would have abandoned this project long ago if not for you, so we hope you know how much you mean to us!
And now, a happy dance…
Gray Matters: a new daily feature for HillBuzz
Please give us your thoughts on this, but we think it’s a good idea for Sebastian Gray to have his own daily column here at HillBuzz, writing from on the ground here in Boystown, covering those gray areas that moderates of all stripes have in common, but with his rainbow fabulous snarky flare. We’ve gotten such a great response to Sebastian’s essays lately that we’ve asked him to commit to a regular piece we hope you all will enjoy: we’re going to call it GRAY MATTERS, and hope it establishes itself as the new heart of HillBuzz, as we continue to evolve, grow, and take our site to the next level.
As we do this, if you enjoy Sebastian’s writing and come to love GRAY MATTERS the way we hope you do, we’d appreciate the help in getting this column out there to a wider audience and even suggesting it for syndication on other sites or in publications you have connections to. We’d love to see it carried in LGBTQ papers, especially, because the gay community needs a wakeup call and Sebastian’s just the guy to do it.
We are lousy at marketing HillBuzz and increasing readership. There is just not enough time in the day to do that and also produce quality content…so if you grow to love GRAY MATTERS, we’d love your help in making it the huge success we think it could very well become.
We were approached by a local Chicago LGBTQ publication about taking Sebastian’s column into the weekly-feature realm, and we’re hoping that happens soon, which would be the first time HillBuzz would cross the bridge into printed word, so this is an exciting development for us here at Buzzquarters that will complement what we do online and help us reach a bigger audience.
EVERYTHING we do is geared towards our goals of energizing moderates and taking back our government from wasteful loons, while bringing down ACORN and supporting great candidates, especially women, from both sides of the aisle who are part of Generation Hillary or Team Sarah.
Please share your thoughts on this new concept for us and let us know how else you think we could make GRAY MATTERS a success.
Save us Hillary Clinton, you are our only hope!
We’re live-blogging this because it’s happening right now, as we type, at the Center on Halsted here in Boystown, and we just happened to be walking by. It’s so ridiculous, it’s almost impossible for us to believe.
There are about 15 gay men outside the center, waving rainbow flags and holding signs, protesting Dr. Utopia — and we know for a FACT that at least 4 of them were some of Dr. Utopia’s biggest supporters during the primaries (and, in the case of one of these sandwich-lovers, we mean BIGGEST literally, in every sense of the word). We know who these people are because Team Hillary opposed them for the better part of a year, and Captain Potbelly, in particular, used to crash our debate parties, events, Team Hillary meetings, phone banks, etc. trying to convince everyone we needed to dump our champ and start drinking the Kool-Aid.
Well, my, have things changed (even if his Oprah-esque diet hasn’t).
These men are protesting several things:
(1) Dr. Utopia’s broken promises on Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell
(2) Dr. Utopia’s tacit support of Prop-8 (for not instructing his followers to vote against it) and the black community’s OVERWHELMING backing of discrimination in California (85% of black voters said YES on Prop-8, more than any other group of voters)
(3) The killing of Iaqi gay men, a new phenomenon that’s emerged since the dawn of The Golden Age of Hope and Change
(4) Dr. Utopia’s personal decision to cut HIV/AIDS spending (which will soon result in MANY AIDS clinics closing, including some here in Chicago)
These men are now calling out for Hillary Clinton to save us all.
HILLARY CLINTON: SAVE US
OBAMA: STOP ANTI-GAY HATE IN IRAQ
IRAQI GAYS UNDER ATTACK
HILLARY, HELP IRAQI GAYS!
Where were they when Hillary Clinton needed them, and their help could have prevented this protest from ever taking place, because the LGBTQ community would have had a LIONESS in the White House with a proven track record for supporting the LGBTQ community.
Hillary Clinton could have been President of the United States, and the LGBTQ community would have had a true friend as the most powerful person on the planet — a woman who keeps her promises and is steadfastly loyal to ALL Americans, regardless of who they date, and who has consistently gone out on great limbs to stand up for equality all around the world.
Dr. Utopia’s never so much as marched in a pride parade, and isn’t doing a damn thing for gays in Iraq or anywhere else.
Even the Kool-Aid Gang here in the Obamatopia of Chicago are waking up to this, as surprising as this is to us.
And if you can’t detect it in this post, there are still very bad feelings between Team Hillary and the Kool-Aid Gang in Chicago. Dr. Utopia’s followers did things to us that are absolutely unspeakable: rocks through our windows, harassment at our jobs, calls in the middle of the night threatening violence, rape, the cutting off of appendages, you name it. All because we backed Clinton instead of Dr. Utopia. And this wasn’t even the black community hitting at us: these were fellow gay men, who knew who we were, and used every bit of personal knowledge to hit us as hard as they could in hopes of breaking our spirits and eliminating Team Hillary as a political threat.
Well, it didn’t work, and we campaigned hard for HRC every day, one of us losing his JOB because these low-lifes kept bringing the battle to his job so his boss finally, after three times telling him he was sick of the answering machine filling up with political messages, eliminated his position “for budgetary reasons”.
Republicans NEVER did anything like this to any of us, in any of the campaigns we have been involved in. This was Alinsky method/ACORN/Obama playbook pages brought to life.
And it will never be forgotten — especially not on days when these same sandwich-eaters and Kool-Aid drinkers now find themselves outside the Center on Halsted on a gorgeous Sunday screaming and yelling for Hillary Clinton to come and save the day, when these absolute fools are the very reason people everywhere need saving to begin with, since they helped stop Hillary Clinton from securing the Democrats’ nomination.
We will never let these fools forget what they did or whose side they were on when it really mattered.
More anecdotal evidence political correctness gets you mugged
Dear HillBuzz,
I was never going to share this story because I felt it was way too personal, even for me, but sometimes the universe brings you the wrong French toast and you realize what happened to you is part of a larger pattern out there that most people probably never realize exists, so no matter how stupid I feel in sharing this, maybe it will help someone else avoid what happened to me, and now to someone else I know too.
This past Christmas Eve, I was in New York on a trip that just kept getting extended by terrible weather in the Midwest. I had originally flown in for the “Conversation with Hillary Clinton” event hosted by America Ferara on December 15th, and planned on leaving the next day or so to head back to Chicago for the holidays, where I have my own little traditions in a city I love, especially at Christmas (take that, Elazar Bogomilsky in Seattle!).
Well, my friend Robby’s sister Ann-Louise lives in New York, and I’ve known her for 15 years or so, and she offered her couch to me instead of staying in a hotel (for the ulterior motive that Ann-Louise was having an epideral on her back December 16th and needed someone to take her to the doctor and back, and also to wait on her for the next few days while she recovered). Ann-Louise alienates most people she knows eventually and has always been the sort of “friend” I’ve had in life who I know I can’t really count on for anything – because at best I’d only be a special guest star in whatever drama she was having that day. Some people decide to be more recurring than others in Ann-Louise’s dramas (audience of one). Others get new agents and never look back.
Well, I ended up staying with Ann-Louise through almost Christmas because of her back, and then the fact that so much snow kept whalluping the Midwest that I couldn’t catch a flight back to Chicago, as every flight I booked myself on was repeatedly canceled. Finally, Ann-Louise had a hedgefund manager coming to town to take the next shift in her drama, so I got booted from her couch and was going to stay in a hotel by a good friend from college named Damy (who was headed to Puerto Rico for Christmas), offered me her place instead of a hotel, which was awesome of her. I’ve let her stay with me every time she’s had to come to Chicago on business, so Damy was happy to return the favor…but she warned me that her neighborhood was a little sketchy, north up near Harlem, and that it definitely was a part of New York I had never spent any amount of time in (since I’d only been to Harlem twice, for a meal at Sylvia’s and a visit to President Clinton’s offices a few years ago).
I finally decided to fly back to Chicago on Christmas Day, so in the meantime I worked with various people I met at the Hillary event to do what we could to stop HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy from being named Clinton’s replacement in the Senate. I had several days of driving around New York state with some of these people, trying to find Princess Caroline at an appearance somewhere, to get the chance to ask her questions I knew she couldn’t answer and prove to all New Yorkers she had no business insisting on that Senate seat (unfortunately, we never encountered her, despite our best efforts, and at least one whole afternoon camped out in Bergdorf’s waiting for her in her usual jewelry department territory).
On Christmas Eve, I was invited to different parties these Clinton supporters were having, but begged off all of them intending instead to have a politics-free, lovely evening in New York of my own design, with a nice dinner somewhere and either the musical production of White Christmas (RAAAAAAACIST!) or a movie in the evening, followed by, I’m sure, various holiday-spiced shenannigans at Posh or one of the other LGBTQ bars I like in Manhattan (because, if you haven’t realized this yet, there is no place more fun on any holiday than a gay bar where guys who’ve spent too much time in awkward holiday-related “celebrations” with family go to laugh at the absurdity of it all and have an awesome time judgmental Aunt Stella and fundamentalist Grandma Millie-free…complete, on Christmas, with de regeur “worst snowman, Santa, or reindeer sweater ever” contests).
Ann-Louise texted me, however, upset the hedgefund manager broke things off with her for the 100th time, leaving her alone on Christmas Eve, except for the large party she was throwing in her apartment with people from her building and friends of hers from NYU that I’ve never liked. I felt bad for her, and was also appreciative of her letting me stay with her for those few days, so I agreed to come and asked her, very early in the day Christmas Eve, if I could pick up anything for her party. She told me she had everything she needed, including a whole case of wine, but I asked again if I could bring anything. Once again, she said she had everything she needed, and I let it drop and went about my day intending to go to her party at 7pm that night on Christmas Eve.
Well, this was the first instance that day where I knew I should have trusted my instincts and just bought a few bottles of wine anyway to bring, but I didn’t want to scout for an open liquor store on Christmas Eve if I didn’t have to, and instead spent the day having a great time walking around Central Park and checking out all the Christmas window displays around town (including, monstrously, the Christmas werewolves at Bergdorf’s, which I’m sure were, in some way or another, #1 Customer Princess Caroline’s doing).
At 630pm, Ann-Louise texts to tell me she’s out of wine and needs me to bring more (which is unsurprising, if you know Robby’s sister, and remember whole cases of wine have disappeared before with no one but her in the apartment). I’m literally in the cab on the way to her apartment, looking out the window at store after store closed at 6pm for Christmas Eve. Absolutely everything I could see was closed. Not knowing this part of New York at all, I asked the cabbie to find a liquor store or someplace else that would sell wine. He, as cabbies do, spun the wheel sharply and shot us through a gap in traffic down an endless street carved between massive hulks of abandoned warehouses or tenements. In places like this, for some reason, the first thought in my head is Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in Ghost, where they just HAD to go to a play in a terrible part of town and then walk inexplicably down the dark, forboding alley, just asking for it (and then, later, in a similar alley, shadow demons rise up from the street to take a criminal who just died straight down to Hell, which would actually be sort of an improvement to the neighborhood at hand).
We zigged, then zagged, and my stomach turned upside down a few times as the cab bounced through giant potholes on streets road crews long ago gave up on, eventually zeroing in on the lone illiminated shopwindows in a five block radius, like a speeding yellow moth drawn irresistably towards a neon LIQUOR bug zapper.
I told the cabbie to keep the meter running and I would be right out after grabbing the first few bottles of wine that I could. I had no intention of loitering around in that place and wanted to get out of this part of town as fast as possible. That was somewhat unusual for me, as I’m from a part of Cleveland that’s lovingly referred to as “Thunderdome”, and generally don’t spook easily. But, there was just something about that part of town, that particular night, that just had every instinct in my body tingling that something bad was going to happen if I spent too much time there, wherever “there” was, as I had absolutely no idea how to get back to midtown from there.
I rushed in and bought four bottles of Australian reds and whites from a little Turkish man watching Charlie Brown’s Christmas special on a little flickering TV, who never looked away from the tiny screen as he took my ID and the $50 I had for the wine. So absorbed by the Peanuts gang, he accurately counted out my change without looking once at what he was doing, which amazed me enough that I never noticed the cab speed away with the only other customer who was in that liquor store with me.
As I walked out the door with a big plastic white bag in each hand, I realized the guy in the suit who left seconds before me stole my cab — clearly telling the cabbie he’d pay the meter already running but make it worth his while to JUST GO and get the Hell out of there.
The surface of the moon has more cabs than I could see anywhere in the warren of little streets in whatever largely abandoned part of town I was in. Shadow demons would have been welcome company at this point, because the feeling of being utterly alone and so vulnerable in an unfamiliar place on Christmas Eve was as real and impossible to ignore as the whispy white billows of my breathe on that very cold December night.
I just started walking, even though I had no clue where I was walking to, looking for a street I recognized that could take me back to either Damy’s apartment or to Ann-Louise’s party. Walking, in the dark, honestly scared for the first time that I could remember…more afraid for my own personal safety than I was even in Gary, Indiana during the campaign where I felt my chances of being murdered were at least 50:50.
And then, as I was headed to what I thought might possibly be a numbered avenue, I saw coming towards me a group of guys, all black, dressed in what I call hippity-hop street-style. Not businessmen. Not college kids. But, dressed like street toughs. And there I was, all 160 pounds of me, wearing a long black London Fog trench, carrying impossible to miss bright white bags, clearly drawing the only other living things on the street right towards me.
But, remember, I’m a gay Democrat who went through, easily, 20 years of liberal education in 100% Democrat surroundings that, until last year, truthfully never included a single Republican friend. The primal regions of my brain were lost in space, shouting DANGER!, DANGER WILL ROBINSON!, but my Democratic default was set to Will Truman, progressive gay man in the big bad city, refusing to racial profile the clear and present danger headed my way.
I could have crossed the street away from these guys.
I could have booked it back to the liquor store, whose bright neon light I could still see out of the corner of my eye, where I imagined Lucy was still giving Charlie Brown a hard time (and Peppermint Patty still didn’t know she’s a big old lesbian).
I could have listened to my instincts, but I didn’t want to be the guy who ran away from the three black guys headed towards me, because in my liberal education, you can’t judge books by their covers, even if those books scream RUN!, RUN YOU FOOL, AND NEVER LOOK BACK!
So, the guys walk towards me. I keep walking towards them. There’s the briefest moment where I believe nothing’s going to happen as we almost, just ALMOST, pass each other without incident, but then the biggest one of them turned around behind me and hit me square on the back of the neck with some sort of MacGyvered cudgel. Another one of them pushed me up against the wall, and the whole thing literally happened so fast that I still don’t know how they took as much as they did, but they got not only those bags of wine but also my wallet, the cash in my pockets, my camera, my cellphone, and the Christmas present I had for Ann-Louise. With a good solid punch to the face for a goodbye, they left me there on some random street before I even realized the encounter was over.
And I knew this was going to happen. But, I didn’t let myself address that truth because I was always taught that believing there was anything wrong with a group of black men walking towards me, looking like trouble, was RAAAAAACIST!, no matter how unfavorable the odds were for me to escape that predicament with minimal harm.
Even though there was no one else around, I didn’t want to be called a RAAAAACIST! for judging these big, dangerous-looking books by their hippity-hop covers, even if it was my own liberal guilt doing the name-calling.
After the mugging, I don’t even know how long I sat there on the ground before I came to my senses and kept walking down the street, now without enough money to catch a cab if I could even found one. No phone. No credit cards. Nothing. I just walked and walked and walked until I found Fifth Avenue and then, after a few more blocks north, I recognized some of the streets near Damy’s apartment and made it back there. Retreating to my own personal quiet place, I just sat in the shower with the water running over me for what was probably hours and hours. With few others in the building that night showering forever, the hot water lasted so long that I was puffy and pruned on hands and feet before I finally dried off and sunk into bed, still shocked by what happened.
Damy had no internet in her apartment, so I couldn’t send Ann Louise an email about what happened. My phone was stolen, so I couldn’t call her, obviously, to tell her I was mugged on the way to her party. All of my phone numbers are in the phone and I have not remembered anyone’s actual digits since high school (I barely know my own number, to be honest, as I never need to call myself, and if I did, that would be in my phone too). So exhausted from the experience, I could barely move, with my head and neck still throbbing from being cudgeled. Even if I could get up and wander the streets looking for an Internet cafe or Kinko’s still open where I could send an email to Ann-Louise, my credit cards were gone, so I couldn’t use their machines. I had enough cash back in Damy’s apartment to pay for the train to the airport in the morning, but that was about it.
And I tell you this because when I did get back to Chicago the next day (saved ONLY by the fact that, after buying that wine, I absent-mindedly slipped my ID into my shirt pocket, instead of my coat or pants pockets, and that’s the sole reason I still had the ID and was able to get on the plane back home the next day. If I had put that in my wallet, I don’t know how I would have gotten home without any ID. So, the universe served up some lucky French toast with that), Ann-Louise sent me the nastiest email I have ever received, because I didn’t make it to her party.
She didn’t bother to ask if I was okay, or wonder why I hadn’t come when I told her I was on the way after she asked for more wine. She just called me names, implied I met some guy on the way to the party and was instead “getting up to whatever it is (I) get up to with random guys”, and then used the opportunity to smack me upside my bruised and battered head with every insult and attack she’d been saving up for use on me (the way she does for everyone, actually, with mental files always set to go for when she gets mad at a particular person).
I wrote her back and told her I was mugged on the way to her party, and called her out for not even bothering to ask how I was before launching into one of her trademarked tirades. She never wrote back, and frankly I hope I never have to speak to her again.
Robby said, after I told him this, “Well, that sure sounds like my sister. Now you know why I didn’t stay in New York for Christmas, because she’s always like this, especially on holidays when she drinks so much.”
There are a lot of emotions conjured by this experience, and the reason I never shared it was because I still have this strong sense of humiliation for being mugged. As a guy, it’s embarrassing that I didn’t fight back, but that strike to the back of my head/neck stunned me so much that I didn’t know what was going on until it was pretty much over. More than that, I feel stupid for not crossing the street to get away from those guys, or running in the other direction. And I just don’t like being a victim. It’s truly humiliating.
But, I’ve shared this because here in Chicago this week THE EXACT SAME THING HAPPENED to my friend Josh, who was walking in a relatively sketchy part of Andersonville just north of Boystown and three black guys headed his way. He could have crossed the street, but didn’t because he thought that would be seen as RAAAACIST!. Seriously, Josh did just what I did, and decided that being politically correct was more important than his own personal safety.
So, not wanting to offend his future muggers by fleeing from them, Josh walked right passed them, the same way I did, and got jumped the second his back was to them. They pounded his head into the street and jammed their hands into his pockets, taking his wallet, keys, phone, and money, but Josh clung to his bag with everything he had and stopped them from taking his laptop and expensive flat iron (as Josh is a colorist, and not a fabulous stereotype walking around with high-end styling tools in the dead of night, like a lost and confused Kyan Douglas separated from the rest of the Fab Five).
In a week where I’ve thought long and hard about the racial indoctrination we are all taught in school, after hearing what happened to Josh I decided I had to share my story today, because danger is danger, people. You should not let your fear of being called a RAAAAAACIST! ever stop you from following your instincts and protecting yourself. Who cares if it is rude to cross the street to avoid people you think could hurt you? How many people get mugged every year in situations like this? I now know two people in the last six months this EXACT SAME SCENARIO happened to, with one of them being my own damn stupid self.
Maybe you even know people this has happened to as well.
And a part of me thinks, Al Sharpton-style, muggers like this COUNT on white, liberal Democrats to freeze up and not defend themselves out of fear not from the actual mugging, but the psychological mugging caused by the last 30 years or so of shameless race-baiting the MSM so gleefully fosters.
Enough is enough. Let someone else be politically correct and cater to Al Sharpton. When I see what I think is trouble coming, I’m going to cross the street or run like Hell away from it. I lost close to $700 in that mugging, between the phone, the camera, the cash I had on me, what was in my wallet, and what I spent in deductible going to the doctor when I got back to Chicago to make sure I didn’t have a concussion (after the soreness and pain from that night just wouldn’t go away two weeks later). Josh lost a couple hundred himself.
A penny is too much to lose allowing liberal indoctrination to supercede your own instincts.
I am living proof of this, so I hope maybe sharing something painful like this might help you avoid similar fates in the future.
Sebastian Gray,
Chicago, IL
Ann Claire Williams indeed has an opposition memo, but there's nothing in it
You need to read between the lines on this one: it’s an article by a high school sophomore The New York Times that goes on at great length about all the nasty things conservatives have on file against raving lunatics like Judge Sotomayer and lesser loons like Judges Kagan and Wood in terms of what they will direct at whomever Dr. Utopia nominates for the Supreme Court. Other people are mentioned, like openly-gay Judge Kathleen Sullivan, but Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano is mentioned almost in the same breathe without the issue being raised against her (because, really, come on). The article notes the top ten opposition research pieces are all on women…and it gives the briefest mention possible to Ann Claire Williams.
Who indeed has an opposition research piece prepared on her.
The thing is, the reason she’s not interesting enough for the writer of this article to mention more than that is because unlike loons like Sotomayer, Williams is an excellent jurist, a decent human being, and the very best choice possible for the Supreme Court at this moment in time.
And she’s completely flying under the radar as the leftist media focuses on the kooks they want to pack the Court with, while the sensible, and we believe ULTIMATE, choice barely warrants a mention.
What appears to be happening is that the MSM is following the talking points Rahm Emanuel is issuing, and telling them to hype Sotomayer especially. Based on what we have repeatedly heard about this woman’s ego, she is loving every minute of the attention, but attention is all she will end up getting. Other loons are also being showered with attention, and Republicans are ready to fight all of their candidacies, with copious files prepared on all of them.
And then there’s Judge Williams…who will emerge in the end as the logical choice, with the MSM claiming what a bold surprise her pick was, and the Republicans tripping over themselves claiming they weren’t prepared for this surprise nomination.
They might be all in on this kind of charade for all we know. It sure feels like a game.
Of course, Dr. Utopia could very well pick a leftist loon like Sotomayer…but what does he gain from that? The left will vote for him no matter what — it’s moderates and cross-over Republicans he needs in 3 years to secure a second term. It doesn’t matter what the left thinks anymore…and that’s proven each and every day, mercifully.
Dr. Utopia does a lot of things that are thoughtless and stupid (especially in his gift-giving), so there’s also a chance he could pick his friend Deval Patrick for the Court, but that’s so unlikely considering the fact that he didn’t really reward any of his other friends and supporters from the campaign season. Why would he give anything to Patrick if it gets him nothing in return?
Judge Williams will get Dr. Utopia a lot of respect from moderates as well as cross-over Republicans. We hear in Chicago that she’s definitely on the short list, and many here feel she’s the one that’s going to get the nomination.
We’ll all know the answer to this before the summer is over, definitely, but the fact that Williams is mentioned AT ALL in the Times article means she’s a lot more realistic a candidate than the MSM is giving her credit for — for whatever reason.
Sunday Open Thread
What’s on your mind this Sunday?
Countdown to 4,000
This is our 3,994th post here on HillBuzz, meaning sometime tomorrow most likely we’ll break 4,000.
We have no idea how many words, or how much snark, that tallies up to, but it will be a fun milestone for us. It’s still so funny this became such a part of our lives: if you knew any of us before the 2008 campaign, the last thing we thought we’d ever do would be to write satire and snide little articles on politics for a website we run out of what became Buzzquarters here in Chicago. And we keep going, hitting 4,000 posts tomorrow (and something like 5 million hits on the site, including the old HillBuzz at blogspot and its tally) with who knows how many posts in the years ahead.
Keep commenting and letting us know what you think and feel. You’ve all become part of our lives here in Boystown, and we bet none of you ever expected that as well. There are some exciting things we’ll announce in the next few weeks in terms of new opportunities to grow our readership and get what we talk about here on HillBuzz out into the world more.
And none of this would be possible without your constant support and encouragement. We learn so much doing this every day, and the only reason we stuck with it was because all of you out there told us to keep going, and let us know when we make you or your families laugh, AND – most importantly – whenever you tell us that reading this site makes you like Hillary Clinton more or gives you new respect for moderate Democrats OR, on a very personal level, when you let us know that even if you grew up very religious or Repubican, you now count a bunch of snarky gay Hillary Dems in Boystown, Chicago amongst your virtual friends. That’s probably the greatest compliment any of us have ever had — and we can’t even begin to imagine what an impact understanding and bipartisan outreach like that can have to better this country. It gives us chills, really, thinking we could have started something that can ultimately do so much good for so many.
So, keep chiming in and telling us what you think…keep helping us all learn about ACORN and the other threats to our Democracy…keep helping us support good officials in either party while taking down the crooks in Washington and across the nation. If we work hard and stick together, there is so much we can do.
4,000 posts shows our commitment, and your loyal readship shows yours…so we very much look forward to turning that commitment into continued action in the 2010, 2012, and other races ahead.
Reminder: if you are in Chicago, please go to the Art Museum's Modern Wing FOR FREE tomorrow
If you live anywhere in Chicagoland, please don’t miss the chance to see the new Art Institute Modern Wing. Sebastian went today and will have a write-up on it tomorrow, most likely.
We just want to see as many people as possible take advantage of Target’s generosity in sponsoring the free opening weekend. Today, target gave out bottled waters and snack chips and had wonderful music playing for entertainment as Chicagoans were inviting to experience the new modern wing for free.
It was a truly great time, and there were big crowds of very happy people. If you are anywhere near Chicagoland, please be amongst those happy faces tomorrow.
Everything costs so much these days that when a FREE treat like this comes along, we want to be sure you don’t miss out on it. And, unlike with that KFC chicken that Oprah fouled up, there’s no way she can ruin the FREE museum day tomorrow (the way she ate all that chicken and left none for the rest of America, or whatever it is she did with that).
