Archive for August, 2009
If you aren't reading The Showtune Mosh Pit, you don't know what you are missing
Our good friend Paul started writing a column called “The Showtune Mosh Pit” for Broadway World, all about the gossip he gleams from his various conversations around town about what’s going on in New York on Broadway, including things he overhears at Sidetracks on showtunes sing-a-long nights. We don’t know how Paul does it, but the guy gets all the latest gossip on Broadway, typically causing a good portion of Boystown to twitter and tweet with excitement about whatever latest tidbit Paul’s got.
It is all just simply BEYOND gay.
Welcome to fabulous, people.
Though if you don’t enjoy yelling highly inappropriate and often vulgar things up at video screens in place of the actual lyrics to musicals, you might not think any of this is at all amusing.
But, we are really proud of Paul. We’d been telling him for YEARS he needed to start a column on all the Broadway gossip he gets, since the guy knows just about everyone in the Chicago arts community and has all sorts of adventures in New York with the theater crowd.
Plus, for those of you who enjoy our stories of life in Boystown, here’s another take on it, by way of Paul, focusing more on the showtunes side of the street where we go for the political jugular generally.
Go, Paul, Go!
PS – The video above has nothing to do with Paul, Broadway, or mosh pits. But, it’s a clip from a benefit they did at Sidetracks recently for something, with lots of singing and a rendition of our new favorite thing in the world, “Don’t Stop Believing” from FOX’s upcoming show GLEE. Just a taste of some of the fun to be had in Boystown…and why we love this place so much.
What was really on that Russian ship and who really "hijacked" it?
This is absolutely fascinating…and we doubt we’ll ever know the real answer to any of these questions…but what was REALLY on that Russian “timber ship” and who really “hijacked” it and took it to Africa?
This article speculates some sort of nuclear device could have been snuck out of Russia for sale to Syrians (or maybe Iranians). The “hijacking” could have either been a ruse to turn off the ship’s tracking devices and go somewhere it shouldn’t have gone…or possibly “good guys” of some kind, most likely Mossad, took over the vessel and diverted it so that its nuclear cargo could never make it to Syria or Iran. If that’s the case, then we love Israel more today than ever. Way to go Mossad…doing what America won’t do under Dr. Utopia.
This is the kind of thing that can keep you up late at night too freaked out to fall asleep, thinking about what REALLY went down with that ship.
Sure is fishy though.
Sarah Palin asks who's keeping America from energy independence and why
This is interesting — Sarah Palin’s asking the same question we started this week with. Who, exactly, is keeping America from energy independence and why?
One of the things we’re trying to do around here is become disciplined about focusing on a question like this and finding the answer. The thing is, we’re not detectives or trained journalists. We are a group of guys in Boystown who do the best we can to juggle this effort with all the other drama in our lives. We don’t have the experience systematically going after something like the answer to this energy independence question.
So, we are trying our best to get there. We’d like your help with that evolution, because if we can master this between now and 2012, maybe we could have a real impact on the next presidential election and help bring Dr. Utopia down.
Sarah Palin, private citizen, is being remarkably effective in getting her message out. We hope she continues to force energy independence to the front as a signature issue for 2012. The questions she raises need to be answered. If states are BEGGING to develop their energy reserves, then who in Washington is preventing this from happening?
Once those people are identified, the next question is what needs to be done to get the public to drive these people from power so energy independence can be a reality.
We need a whole new generation of detectives to develop the skills to get to the bottom of this stuff. Each of us, every day, getting that much better about being disciplined, focused, on point, and relentless about using the Internet, government agencies, and other research tools to do the job that reporters in the MSM refuse to do.
Knowledge is power…and an empowered public possessing knowledge is a nightmare to vested, entrenched anti-American interests in Washington.
Sarah Palin seems to be rallying people to step up and start learning and investigating on their own…and we certainly want to answer that call.
As always, Go, Sarah, Go!
UPDATED: Three men beaten near Boystown: one an off-duty fireman
There was another attack last night near Boystown: this time it was an off-duty fireman, beaten and robbed in Lincoln Park.
What’s really interesting to us is how the media is choosing to report on these attacks. There’s a much, much bigger story here they are refusing to report on…which seems to follow the Liberal Democrats’ agenda here, especially at a time when Mayor Daley is so desperately pushing to win the 2016 Olympics.
We believe the MSM is doing everything it can to not fully report on racism/homophobia in the black community directed against the LGBTQ community. In essence, it really feels like blacks have declared open hunting season on gays in Chicago. And the liberal media refuses to talk about this racism and deliberate targeting of Boystown by residents of the South Side and Humboldt Park.
The media’s getting less and less informative about these attacks.
(1) They try not to report the race of the attackers, so that they don’t have to admit it’s blacks from the Southside heading North to crack skulls and steal wallets.
(2) They keep saying the police do not think the cases are related. This is deceptive, because they are parsing what the police are most likely actually saying. We know a lot of cops. To cops, two cases are not “related” unless the same perp committed both. What’s happening here is that gangs of black thugs are coming to Boystown to rob gays. Today criminal A and criminal B could jump someone. Tomorrow criminal C and criminal D could make a hit. Friday, it could be criminals E, F, and G doing the robbing. When these people come to Boystown, loitering at the Center on Halsted first, it seems, they travel in packs of 15-20 people at times. Unless criminal A has been caught in two of the attacks, the police will say “it’s unrelated”. However, it is actually very MUCH related because while the individual criminals might be different every time, they are all related because these criminals are all black Southsiders heading north to commit crimes in Boystown.
(3) The media also plays games with geography to make these attacks seem like they really aren’t happening all in the same vacinity. And this is SO EASY to do in Chicago, where every neighborhood has 12 different names. ”Lincoln Park” is a huge area. It’s like referring to Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and other states as “the Midwest”. It’s a big, loose term. In this example, if attacks happened in Akron, Cleveland, and Toledo, you could either say the attacks all happened in Ohio (Boystown) or they happened “in the Midwest”, which would make you think they were more spread out than they really were. Also, the media sometimes calls an area “Lakeview”, “Lincoln Park East”, “East Lakeview”, “Edgewater”, “northern Gold Coast”, “Wrigleyville”, etc. These are all essentially, give or take a street or two, the same place. It’s like saying “Cleveland” versus “Brookpark”, “Parma”, “Shaker Heights”, “East Cleveland”, “Euclid”, etc. in our Ohio/Midwest example. People who have no idea how close these areas are to one another might think these events are happening at random all over a great distance. In reality, the crimes are laser focused to hit the white, largely gay, upscale hunting grounds the Southsiders are targeting.
(4) This morning we ran into a friend who is a paramedic and said a few days ago he treated a gay man who was pushed down the stairs at the Armitage Brown Line station where three blacks from the Southside robbed him of his wallet and iPod. The only way the cops caught the guys was because the iPod was a gift and was inscribed “Happy Birthday” on the back. After his attack, the cops spotted 3-4 big black guys walking in “Lincoln Park” with a big bag. They searched the bag and found 22 iPods and a host of cell phones, all stolen. The “Happy Birthday” iPod was in the bag. None of the robbers ever have any ID on them, according to the paramedic. Sometimes these Southsiders go to the hospital for treatment when they are injured assaulting someone (like sharks who have their snouts ripped apart by the seals they’re hunting)…they deliberately don’t carry ID so they don’t have to pay the emergency room bill, but also so that the police can’t “relate” them to any other crimes. ”How did you get that gash on your face?”. They fell, they say. ”We have reports that there was an attempted robbery and the victim slashed his would-be attacker. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”. Nope. Of course not.
A few years ago, a serial killer was working Boystown and the local media did the same thing that they’re doing now….they kept insisting the murders were unrelated. There were 4-5 guys who were killed in their apartments with every instance sounding like the same person did it: the guys were all in their late 30s-mid 40s…they were all picked up from bars in Boystown (where, incidentally, Jeffrey Dahmer used to drive down from Milwaukee to hunt)…they all lived alone with no roommates…they all brought someone home to their empty apartment with them…they were all murdered naked in their kitchens.
But the police insisted these murders were “unrelated”. Maybe in one instance the guy still had his underwear on…so that’s unrelated because the other victims were naked. Maybe another guy was killed in his dining room and not the kitchen…UNRELATED! Everything can be unrelated if you want it to be. Like sorting clothes into color piles, something can be red or it can be burgandy or scarlet or crimson. You can have as many piles as you want, or you can have a red pile that sees the bigger picture.
When it comes to black-on-gay crime, the media wants to have as many piles as possible because the Liberals who run the media do not want to admit there’s a serious and dangerous problem with black-against-white racism and homophobia in Chicago.
With another attack near Boystown every night, things feel like they are going to get a lot worse before they get better…and the puzzle pieces won’t come together to find a solution to this because the media is so Hell-bent to insist everything is as “unrelated” as possible.
While, in the meantime, gangs of young black thugs keep heading north to Boystown to hunt and prey upong gay men, stealing their iPods, taking their wallets, and declaring open season on the LGBTQ community.
And, because the LGBTQ community is Liberal central, it’s like sheep happily, and suicidally, agreeing with wolf propaganda that there’s no danger out there from wolves…that wolves are oppressed and misunderstood…that wolves aren’t coming north to prey upon the sheep.
Baaaaaaaa!
We’d love to tell you the LGBTQ community will wake up, but the serial killer working Boystown was never caught. Either he moved away, stopped for some other reason, or he’s still working and the media just got really, really good at covering up for him. But, he’s still out there.
And so are all the wolves on the Southside, stalking their prey.
UPDATE: Two more guys were beaten and robbed near Boystown. Read the report in the Tribune. Once again, they are pulling that crap where they say the police claim the beatings are “unrelated”, though in both of the two cases this report is on the victims describe the 5-6 attackers wearing the same clothes in both attacks. Also note the Tribune DOES NOT report the race of the attackers. They report the color tee shirt and pants the attackers are wearing, but not their race. That’s interesting. We wonder if they’d report the race if 5-6 white guys attacked two black men at different times on the Southside. What do you think?
More are keeping chickens and other animals in the city — contrary to the MSM's insistence we're not in a Depression
Here’s another story about people raising chickens in cities.
We have told you before about our dear friend Abbey back in Cleveland who is urban homesteading — she bought a bunch of abandoned houses and is tearing them down to build a farm in the heart of the very worst part of the city (affectionately known as “Thunderdome” by those of who survived growing up nearby). Abbey’s already got chickens and rabbits in pens there…and recently acquired a small goat. She wants to add pigs, cows, sheep, and ostriches in the future…raising and butchering her own proteins, alongside a massive vegetable operation as well. Abbey is as hardworking and industrious as the come…and admittedly a little nuts. Love her to death…but the skinning of the bunnies thing is just creepy. No matter how tasty Abbey keeps insisting they are.
Now, we don’t think operations like Abbey’s are going to start popping up everywhere, but as things continue to worsen in this Depression the MSM refuses to admit we’re in (just listen to them read the White House’s talking points every day that “Things are getting better!”, “The recession has ended in Hong Kong!”, “Jobs will be created soon, just you keeping hoping for that change!”, etc.), we think you’ll see more and more people find creative ways to feed their families.
Back in the 90s, Martha Stewart inspired well-off people to do things like build chicken coops in their well-appointed gardens, Marie Antoinette-style, to “play farm” in odd places. But, what’s going on now is different.
This isn’t “play farm”, but people desperately trying to find ways to weather the economic storm. Growing your own food because you think that’s the only way your family is going to eat is as far removed from Martha Stewart Living as you can get.
What sort of creative things are you doing, or see your neighbors and friends doing, to stay afloat these days?
What's Hillary Clinton Doing Today? August 19th, 2009
For some reason, the State Department doesn’t have Secretary of State Clinton’s schedule up today (she might be spending the day with President Clinton, as it’s his birthday and so she and Chelsea may just be celebrating with him…or, as crazy people believe, she might be spending the day plotting and scheming against her enemies…in which case, as always, we heartily say, “You go, Hill!”), but here’s what she did yesterday:
7:45am – weekly breakfast with Vice President Joe Biden…where Hillary Clinton most likely had something sensible like whole wheat waffles and fresh fruit, while Biden ate ice cream out of a carton or cream cheese frosting straight out of a can (with his fingers, no doubt). It’s hilarious that a Cabinet member has to breakfast with Biden every day to watch him (like the armed guards that, by city law here in Chicago, have to accompany Oprah anytime she gets too close to one of our bakeries…lest we have a repeat of The Great Cupcake Induced Tragedy of ’97).
100am-300pm – swearing in ceremonies for people we have never heard of in the State Department (but whom we assume are very nice)
415pm – meeting with the Foreign Minister of Columbia
Remainder of the day: being AWESOME
Happy Birthday BIG DAWG!
Today is President William Jefferson Clinton’s birthday.
We have never been able to think about the Big Dawg without smiling big from ear to ear — we just love this man. His 1992 campaign was the first one most of us here ever worked on…collecting signatures for petitions or canvassing door to door with our parents back in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or New York. We remember the old Glenn Miller recording of “Happy Days Are Here Again!’ playing loudly in many, many houses on election night when the Clintons won the White House for the first time. We think about dear Virgina Kelly, with her wild crazy hair and big jewelry, so proud of her son. Oh, that wonderful rush of seeing good, moderate Democrats in office again after so many years of Republicans and the vile, awful debacle of Carter Liberals before that.
We. Love. The. Clintons.
It’s stunning to think back to how great things were when they were in the White House. Jobs, jobs, jobs for anyone who wanted to work. The 1997 Inauguration was themed “Bridge to the 21st Century”, and all the buttons and posters and memorabilia from that celebration had all these stone bridges across the Potomac on them. We remember believing anything was possible back in those days…and felt so safe and secure with Big Dawg in the Oval and HRC in the Hillaryland of the East Wing.
We. Just. Love. The Clintons.
Sorry to repeat ourselves, but we do.
Love Them.
And we wish President Clinton so much happiness and good health and love and blessings today. He’s a politician, sure, and a very good one, but every time we’ve met this man, every time we’ve shaken his hand or had the chance to talk to him for a minute or two here and there, we truly, TRULY, believe he cares so much about the people of this country. Both Clintons do. Throw Chelsea in there too, because that is one remarkable, wonderful young woman, let us tell you.
This is all something we cannot say about the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania. We’ve met both of them, too, and walked away from the encounters certain those two care only about themselves and what people can do for them. We’ve never met the Bushes, but can’t imagine they’re like that. Bush Sr. doesn’t strike us that way either. The Reagans certainly weren’t like that.
But, we don’t want to make a birthday wish to our favorite president into a slam against the Utopias. It’s just that sitting here thinking about how real President Clinton’s connection with average people is makes us think about how good and bad his fellow presidents were with this.
And it makes us wish the Big Dawg was still living in the White House…though, this time, with Bill-land in the East Wing and HRC in the Oval where she belongs.
Who knows what President Clinton is wishing for when he gets his cake today…but we’re sure going to be wishing him well and sending many good thoughts his way for all he’s done for this country.
We love you Big Dawg!
PS – It’s also our friend Wess’ birthday too…a Team Clinton supporter to the core (still completely obsessed with the caucus fraud committed by Dr. Utopia in 2008…and always ready to answer the call for anything Hillary related). Happy Birthday Wess!
Wednesday Open Thread, August 19th 2009
What’s on your mind this Wednesday?
Here’s something totally random and frivolous we’re wondering about that we hope women, in particular, might shed some light on. We’ve been trying to save money over the last few months, so we haven’t been going out for drinks like we used to back when things were much better for us. But, last night was a friend’s birthday so we went to Sidetracks for 80s night…and even after our friend had to leave (school night), we lingered because we were honestly having so much fun just bebopping to the old tunes up on the video screens. Tuesdays are “U Request 80s” at Sidetracks, where you fill out little slips of paper asking for 80s songs you want played…and it is SO MUCH FUN to just watch the screens to see if any of your songs will be played, trying to guess which ones the VJ will pick. It’s even more fun seeing the random videos other people ask for…songs we have not thought about in 20 years popped up! It was just great, great fun…and after a truly brutal summer, we realized this was one of the few nights we’ve been able to escape the storm clouds and just smile, laugh, and enjoy ourselves.
But, the night kept getting interrupted by jackasses.
We’re watching a video we love, thinking about the first time we heard the song (actually remembering being in grade school and hearing it on the radio while out for a drive to the store with our mom or whatever), really enjoying the moment, and some jerk comes over to hit on one of us…just jamming himself into our personal space, offering up some lame line. ”My friend over there wants to see your tee shirt.” Well, your friend should get glasses and then maybe he could see it from where he’s standing. ”Uh, I just had to say I couldn’t help noticing your chest”. We have no idea what to say to that one, except a chest is a chest, bud. You can notice your own anytime you want in your mirror at home, where you should be, by yourself. “What nationality are you?” Honestly, that’s just the absolute worst, and totally a weird Chicago thing too. And it’s RAAAACIST! in our book (as we’ve talked about before…because it sure feels like if you answer the “nationality question” wrong, the person won’t want to talk to you anymore).
Being out of the bars for so long, we forgot how forward and won’t-take-no-for-an-answer guys can be. Even when you tell some of these clowns that you are just out enjoying the night, watching the videos, and trying to have a drink and relax, they just keep throwing the lines out there, bothering you.
What gives them the right to presume someone at a bar watching videos has just been waiting all night to talk to them? If people are having fun, laughing, and enjoying themselves, why break into their conversation with some lame interruption? One guy literally yanked our friend Sebastian to the side last night when he was in the middle of a story. Sebastian was wearing a tee shirt that had “Berlin” written on it (as in Terry Nunn, take my breathe away, Berlin) and some random guy said to him, “I’m going to Berlin in two weeks…so where should I stay?”. Sebastian, not missing a beat, told him to stay in a hotel. ”Or the park. The park’s always nice. Go sleep in a park. Where else would you stay in foreign country?”.
None of us would ever imagine doing that…literally walking over to someone who is talking and yanking him aside to demand to know where he should stay in a city sharing a name with an 80s rock group.
If someone smiles at you from across the room, and you smile back, that’s totally an invitation to come over and ask you about foreign accommodations or to say anything bizarre and random he wants. You sure can’t complain about that person coming over if you tacitly invite it like that (though, we maintain, that nationality crap is never appropriate, anywhere, no matter how much you are burning up inside DYING to know whether someone is French, Greek, Japanese, or Polish, because you are an obsessive RAAAAACIST! who has to label people like that to get through your RAAACIST! and vile day).
But, what about when you are enjoying yourself for the first time in months and are having a really great time? What about when, for the first time in as long as you can remember, you aren’t on the verge of tears thinking about friends who’ve died or jobs you’ve lost or the financial crunch you’re in? You’ve paid for your Pilsner…you momentarily don’t have a care in the world…you’re not working a temp job that night for pennies just to make ends meet. It’s your time…and you are having fun…and you just keep getting interrupted to answer asinine questions from random guys.
How do women deal with this?
Are women bothered by it?
Is it better to just sit home and not go out anymore…even though sitting at home, for months at a stretch, gets to feeling so depressing and bleak?
Are you ever just allowed to go out and enjoy yourself and not have to talk to strangers who come up to you? Is there a way to get the message across, in a nice way, that you don’t want to make any new friends that night…that you don’t want to have to talk to people you don’t know…that you just want to revel in the good vibes of songs you love and videos you haven’t seen in years?
And the thing that really drives us nuts about this is that Sidetracks is not a pickup bar. In Boystown, there are many bars on a street called Halsted, with each one being something different: Lucky Horseshoe’s a strip club, Spin’s for 20-somethings to hookup, Minibar is pretentious and celebrity-studded (a stand and model bar, staffed exclusively by actor/model/waiters), Roscoe’s is basically a TGI Friday’s geared for hookups…but Sidetracks has no dance floor, is open and roomy, and to us, at least, feels nothing like a pickup bar. It’s a place where people go to watch videos, sing along to the music, and be with friends they already know (as opposed to someplace like Roscoe’s where you go to meet new people).
We have friends who say “one day you’ll be mad people don’t hit on you anymore”, so they insist we should be happy people keep delivering these interruptions. Do you agree with that?
Are we totally off base for feeling put-upon that we can’t just enjoy a beer and some 80s music without having to talk to random strangers who come up and say odd things or ask bizarre questions?
How do women handle this — as we assume straight guys are even worse about this kind of thing in straight bars than what we have to deal with at a place like Sidetracks.
Thoughts?
Great Merciful Zeus! Just watch and listen to how much Americans DO NOT WANT a single payer health insurance system.
We have a friend who we love dearly but is most likely a crazy person. She’s a Republican who bites her tongue with us in all things Clinton, because she knows we would literally go to Hell and back and fight the Devil himself bare-handed if any of the Clintons needed us to. She fully believes Hillary Clinton plots and schemes all day and has some great master plan to snag the Democrats’ nomination in 2012 and take the White House for herself. As much as we wish she’d do that, and as much as we want Hillary Clinton to be our first female president, we don’t believe that’s going to happen. We love the woman, but she had the chance to stop Dr. Utopia back in the summer of 2007 and could have derailed his campaign but she didn’t take it. She didn’t want to destroy her opponent and didn’t do what it would have taken to win…and that’s why she’s not president today. We all need to accept this and not indulge in fantasies.
BUT, there is something our crazy friend says all the time these days that’s fascinating to at the very least roll over in our minds. Our friend believes healthcare was a giant F-U to Dr. Utopia and his merry band of idiots that Hillary Clinton saddled them with knowing full well what a disaster this would be.
Our friend believes, and this has actually been echoed in a few articles we’ve read on RealClearPolitics and other places, that when Clinton realized the DNC was not going to allow her to win the nomination, she decided to continue campaigning for the sole purpose of forcing Dr. Utopia to commit to a healthcare reform agenda that he never wanted to touch with a ten foot pole. Our friend insists this was Clinton’s plan for revenge: Fine, can’t stop you from being the nominee and being president…but I can guarantee you only get one term so that I can spend the rest of my life reveling in “what could have been if only we had picked her instead of him” retrospect.
Clinton, as president, would have handled healthcare completely differently. For one thing, an idiot like Kathleen Sebelius would not be at Health and Human Services. There would be none of these crazy town hall meetings. Clinton would personally be overseeing a project she’d spent the last 16 years studying and planning for. This would not be amateur hour. Far. From. It.
The upcoming disaster that will be the culmination of this push for single payer, government run healthcare will, in our opinion, and barring a self-inflicted disaster by the GOP, guarantee Dr. Utopia as a one-term president.
Whereas Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton would have had two terms.
Democrats wasted so much on Dr. Utopia…and for what? Liberalism will be debunked for another generation. A new Reagan will emerge. Americans won’t trust Democrats again for many, many years. Congress will be back in GOP hands in either 2010 or 2012. And Democrats will realize that Clinton moderates are the way to go if they want to really get things done in Washington…not Dr. Utopia’s brand of Liberal, crazed socialism.
Our friend said Clinton accepted the fact that she lost out on her dream, and decided to ingeniously punish all those who ruined that for her.
As absurd as that is to us, we do believe the universe has a strange way of punishing those who are evil to the Clintons. Just look at what’s happened to John Edwards, Ted and Caroline Kennedy, Chris Dodd, Howard Dean, Tom Daschle, Tim Russert, Robert Novak, Bill Richardson, and others who either backstabbed or brutalized Hillary Clinton. She had absolutely nothing to do with any of these people’s public embarrassments, illnesses, or downfalls…but it is amazing her primary opponents, in particular, all fell so far, so fast, after turning on her.
Caroline Kennedy’s self-inflicted, career-ruining humiliation remains our favorite of the bunch (though seeing either Edwards or Richardson in federal prison in the next year or two might just eclipse Princess Caroline’s beclownment).
When you watch the video above, and you hear how angry people are, and you realize that the people shouting and screaming against the socialized medicine madness associate all of this with LIBERAL DEMOCRATS of the Dr. Utopian model, we just don’t understand how anyone could believe there isn’t going to be massive payback against Dr. Utopia’s supporters in office next year and in 2012.
This kind of anger is not going to magically disappear, no matter how much Dr. Utopia hopes it changes.
This will be the absolute ruin of his presidency…completing his Carterfication.
And our crazy friend believes somewhere, our favorite champ smiles, relishing every bit of it.
For those of you who still harp, hem, and haw about Clinton leaving the Senate for the State Department, and who love repeating that nonsense about her being sidelined and marginalized or whatever…don’t you realize how absolutely wonderful it is that Hillary Clinton bears no responsibility at all for any of this madness? She will not have to vote on this disaster of a bill. She didn’t have to touch the Trillion Dollars in wasted stimulus money. She does not have to go ANYWHERE to campaign for any crazy Democrats who have drunk the Kool-Aid and support this Liberal lunacy. Hillary Clinton is not being touched by a single bit of this domestic agenda insanity. Not one bit.
At the State Department, she is free and clear of all of it. She makes headlines when she wants. She says she’s working on things behind the scenes when she doesn’t want to be in the news. She can go wherever she wants in the world for as long as she wants and get involved in whatever she chooses.
And she is in no way linked to the disaster unfolding in videos like the one above.
Maybe our friend isn’t as crazy as we think.
If Republicans were smart, they'd stir lawyers up against socialized medicine. Tort reform, baby. Tort reform.
Consider this in light of some things we’ve heard Dick Morris say on TV several times in recent months: tort reform would turn lawyers against Democrats, and Democrats need personal injury lawyers as their personal ATM.
Morris famously insists the Democratic party, unlike the Republican party, is composed of distinct building blocks. This is something we never much thought about until the 2008 election, but it’s 100% true.
Going to Republican events, the people there weren’t like the people at Democrat events. The people there were there supporting McCain/Palin because they shared the same ideas, believed in the tax issues, believed in energy independence, were against socialism, etc. It didn’t seem to us that these people were there because of WHO they were, but rather WHAT THEY BELIEVED.
The difference is that at Democratic events it was always about WHO you were. If you are gay, you are a Democrat. If you are Catholic, you are a Democrat. If you are living in an urban area, you are a Democrat. If you are an old person, you are a Democrat. If you are black or Latino/a, you are a Democrat. Who cares what you believe or what you support…if you are A, B, C, or D, then you are a Democrat. Case closed!
People who are lawyers, and who make their money suing insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, etc. are Democrats…and give an awful lot of money to the DNC to make sure tort reform never happens.
Dick Morris and others have said that if Republicans put the fear in trial lawyers that healthcare reform will eliminate their ability to make fortunes off malpractice and insurance suits, then the Democrats will lose one of their most important identity-blocs. And, as Morris says, the Democratic party is composed of these specific identity-driven building blocks. If you yank out too many of them — like, for instance, old people scared of losing Medicare and trial lawyers terrified of losing their John Edwards, Ambulance Chaser, lifestyles — then the DNC’s coalition falls apart.
The old people are counted on to show up and mindlessly yank the Democrat lever in the voting booth — because they have nothing better to do than to reliably show up to vote and do as they are told.
The trial lawyers are counted on to fund the DNC — because their high-flying livelihoods depend on having someone to sue to bring in those massive fees.
If the government takes over healthcare, who would there be to sue?
The government?
Good luck with that.
If a single payer system would indeed emerge, with the White House driving private insurers out of business, then it would also drive trial lawyers out of business as well because the legistlation that would create a government run public option system would also, we bet, protect that system from litigation. The system just wouldn’t work otherwise — it couldn’t stay afloat if the government allowed itself to be sued, and to churn out settlements, the way the private insurers are sued and cough up so much to the John Edwardses of the world.
Republicans would be very, very smart to somehow Jenga the old people and trial lawyers out of the Democrats’ leaning tower of support. So much rides on these two groups. Republicans will never be able to snatch away the black, the gay, the Jewish, and the Latino/a blocs, but old people and trial lawyers can indeed be pulled from the Democrats’ stack over socialized medicine.
It’s just a matter of waiting to see if Michael Steele and the GOP are sharp enough to find a way to do it. For the record, we have every faith that’s exactly what they’ll be able to do.
