Archive for August, 2009
Have you heard about the "Lil' Monkey" doll controversy yet? RAAAAAAACISM!
Yesterday, we were watching CNN for what was probably the first time in at least 5 months. During a segment on Campbell Brown’s show (America’s Favorite Robot), they ran a bit about the “Lil’ Monkey” dolls that Costco had been selling: these are dolls that come in three different skin tones, white (Caucasian), brown (Latino/a), and black (African). The dolls, while differently skin-toned, all come with a little toy stuffed monkey, a stuffed banana, and a little pink outfit with a sweat band and sweatshirt that says, “Lil’ Monkey” on it.
Cue the wails and cries of RAAAAAAACISM! here.
Henry Gates, prepare your dydee for rolling on the floor soiling!
If you are in any way even remotely between Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson and a camera, get out of the way now!
In reality, this is a case of toys being manufactured in Asia where the design and production teams have no idea what’s appropriate for the American market. What we think happened here is that someone at a toy company had a bunch of stuffed monkey dolls leftover from something…perhaps the Chinese zodiac year of the monkey. What are we going to do with all those stuffed monkeys? Well, we also have a bunch of baby dolls lying around the factory. And we have those fertility symbol, stuffed bananas leftover from Fertility Day, too. We could cheaply make up some little pink outfits and write something in English on them that none of the Asian executives will bother to have translated and then we could sell the monkeys + babies + phallus symbols + English writing to Americans…who buy just about any crappy toys Asians make for discount stores!
If you ever travel in Asia, you see crazy things like this all the time. Young Asians walk around with tee shirts that read WHORE on them, and they have no idea what message they’re sending (and we are talking about 5-6 year olds, whose PARENTS dressed them in this, not having a clue what the word “whore” means in English…they just think the western writing looks pretty, the way bid, muscled studs get random Chinese words tattooed on their big bulging biceps, not realizing the characters really mean “little girl” or “ladybug”). Sites like www.Engrish.com are chock full of this kind of thing.
No one who manufactured these dolls intended anything RAAAACIST! with the monkeys…but the Costco buyers sure were stupid to purchase these dolls.
But, the more we think about it, the more it feels like some Costco purchasing requirement automatically built into contracts caused this. When buying dolls, we bet purveyors are automatically obliged to provide Costco with dolls in three skin tones: white, brown, and black. Any dolls bought by Costco must, we speculate, be “diverse” in skin tone. We can easily imagine the PC-police lawyers working that into all the contracts with manufactures. ”You must give us white dolls, brown dolls, and black dolls, no exceptions!”.
They really should just stop selling anything with monkeys on it, period, because then there would be no way anything like this could ever happen. It feels like the company didn’t see a problem with a white or brown doll having the toy monkey paired with it…and it didn’t occur to them that the black doll varient would cause Al Sharpton and Henry Gates’ ears to prick up and eyes to sparkle, delighted at the chance to shout RAAAAAACIST! from the nearest mountain tops.
Sometimes, when we hear about things like the “Lil’ Monkey” controversy, we just wish there were no monkeys around, period. Get rid of all the primates at the Lincoln Park Zoo. The ones with the red butts are gross to look at anyway. Planet of the Apes is poorly made and irritating to watch, so let’s just ban that. We hate seeing President Reagan in those old movies with Bonzo, so unpresidential, so those should be banned too. We’ll kind of miss King Kong, but can live without it. Maybe they could remake it with a giant squirrel or something.
Getting rid of all monkeys, from zoos, from cartoons, from movies, from banana advertisements, whatever, would solve so many problems it seems.
And we, as gay men, tried thinking about how we would feel if we ever saw a doll sold at Costco dressed up in rainbow colors, clutching a pineapple (or some other fruit), with “Lil’ Faggot” written on its sweatband.
Are we bad people because we think that would be fabulous and hilarious and would probably buy the lot of them to give as Christmas presents? ”Lil’ Faggot” would be roll-on-the-floor ridiculous, covetable, and collectible in every way. We’d love it.
But, it’s obvious we as a minority have different perspectives on this kind of thing than black people do. We also have a better sense of humor and irony, with much less opportunism in making wailing, rolling around the floor, messing our dydees issues about things.
Yes, black people had a raw deal for many years and were called all sorts of ridiculous and awful names while enduring unimaginable violence, discrimination, and ridicule.
Sounds a lot like growing up gay in Cleveland or Pittsburgh. ”Lil’ Faggot” or “Lil’ Sissy” would actually have been terms of endearment compared to what some of us got as little boys clearly destined for showtunes night at Sidetracks. There were so many jobs back in Ohio or Pennsylvania we just KNOW we didn’t get because the old-school, Mad Men-styled employers didn’t want a “faggot” on the team. The black community’s got Emmett Till. We’ve got Matthew Shephard. The only gay bar in Cleveland, The Grid, was located directly across the street from The Crazy Horse Saloon, a venue for female strippers and the drunk, something-to-prove, frat boys who patronized it. Try going out for a night to be yourself and let down your guard in the only place you could in a city that felt like it actively hated you…only to live in terror knowing you had to pass within the Crazy Horse’s orbit to get there, or get home afterward, always aware there’s frequently baseball bats in frat boys’ cars…which might as well have had “Fag Basher” burned into them.
This kind of stuff has been on our mind since the black community in California pushed Prop-8 through last November, and since black thugs from the Southside of Chicago started coming up to Boystown at night to beat and rob gay men at gunpoint in recent months. The MSM treats every imagined slight against black people as if it is the very end of the world…while completely ignoring evil things the black community does, and does to the LGBTQ community in particular. Black thugs pass their gay-bashing tricks down from generation to generation here in Chicago. When we talk about the robbings going on in Boystown right now, we’re told by guys who’ve lived here for 20 years that this comes in cycles…like wolves in the wild teaching the new litter of pups where the best hunting is…and it looks like a new crop of thugs has taken over the Boystown hunting ground from their older predecessors. It sure feels like there’s a story here for journalists to go after…this hatred against gays in the black community that prompts them to GLEEFULLY vote for something like Prop-8 while teaching their younger brothers or proteges how best to gay bash and rob the LGBTQ community.
But, will the MSM ever run a piece on this?
Nope.
Will they jump up and down, roll on the floor, and wail to the Heavens about dolls clearly made by oblivious manufacturers in Asia and stupidly approved by diversity-mandated purchasing agreements in corporate America?
You bet your stuffed bananas they will.
Ridiculous.
As always.
PS — the ironic thing about the “Lil’ Monkey” dolls is that whenever some product is taken off shelves in the States, it’s shipped overseas to Africa or the Pacific to be sold for pennies. This happens with all the sports merchandise made up for sale the day after the Super Bowl…they make up GIANTS WIN! and BROWNS WIN! jerseys, shirts, air fresheners, whatever…knowing full well they’re going to take a loss on 1/2 of what they print up, because only one of those teams will win. The BROWNS WIN! materials forever end up being sold in Cote D’Ivoire or Ghana, somewhere that people have no idea what the shirts are talking about. It’s like an alternate universe in Botswana where the Chicago Cubs or Cleveland Indians win the World Series, according to shirts people are still wearing, all because these things have to be unloaded SOMEWHERE since they can’t be sold in the US.
That’s EXACTLY what’s going to happen to the Lil’ Monkey dolls. They’ll be sold in Kenya or Zaire and no one will think anything’s wrong with them. No one will be offended by a doll, or see it as RAAAAAACIST! They’ll just buy a cheap doll for their kids with a little stuffed animal in it and the kids will play with it and never suffer any Sharpton-worthy emotional distress over it.
UPDATE:
Today was also the beginning of the trial of a black man accused of raping, murdering, and mutilating the bodies of a white couple in Tennessee. Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian were BOTH tied up, raped, murdered and in Newsom’s case was covered with gasoline and set on fire. Why? Because they were white and their black attackers hated white people and so they raped and murdered them.
Where’s Henry Gates, Al Sharpton, Eric Holder, Jesse Jackson, Spike Lee, John Lewis, James Clyburne and the rest of the race-baiting brigade when black people seek out white victims for hate crimes? Where’s the distinguished and loquacious Henry Gates when blacks from the Southside come up to Boystown in Chicago for some good, old-fashioned hate crimes and gay-bashing?
Black people can be RAAAAACISTS! too. Black people can commit hate crimes too.
Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian should remind everyone of that.
Because this sure as Hell is a lot more serious than some stupid, poorly made, and idiotically packaged doll with a monkey.
Term Limits for US Senators: Constitutional Amendment Needed
Kay Bailey Hutchinson is living proof that we don’t, contrary to what some of you claim, automatically support a politician just because she is a woman (see also: Kathleen Sebelius, Claire McCaskill, Elizabeth Dole, Sarah Feigenholtz, and others). CAN’T STAND HER. Never have, never will.
Hutch is running a disastrous campaign to steal the Republican gubernatorial nomination from Rick Perry, someone we don’t like much either, for myriad reasons (including the reason we don’t like Congressman Aaron Schock, Governor Charlie Crist, Senators Trent Lott and Larry Craig, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel either). She’s in such bad shape, she’s awkardly and stupidly trying to use gay innuendo against Perry, which is not as ridiculous as Hutch claiming Perry shouldn’t win the nomination because he’s been in office 10 years and term limits are needed.
Well, Hutch, YOU’VE BEEN A SENATOR FOR 18 LONG YEARS! Where are your term limits? Oh, and why are you so terrible and stupid?
That totally reminds us of our favorite pre-YouTube bit of political theater back in December 1998 from Congresswoman Maxine Waters (footage of which we wish and wish was online). Say what you want about her (and she does do a lot of crazy, bad things…but she was a staunch Clintonite in the 90s and a Hillary supporter to the hilt in the 2008 primaries…and we will ALWAYS have her back, no matter what nuttiness she’s up to, of which there’s a lot…more than a Planters factory), but we will never forget, during the Republican attacks on President Clinton for infidelity, when Waters went for presumptive new-Speaker Bob Livingston’s throat as he called upon the President to resign. So, Waters, noting Livingston’s own infidelity, told him to resign. ”You resign! You resign! You resign!”, she shouted, banging her hand on a table over and over again. You resign!
And pompous, hypocritical ass Livingston indeed did resign.
Mad Max SCHOOLED him but good.
And that’s pretty much how we feel about Hutch as well…if she has such a problem with Rick Perry not having term limits, she should be a driving force behind getting term limits enacted in the United States Senate.
Two terms are all a President of the United States is allowed…but why are Senators allowed to Ted Kennedy their way through decades of bloated, aristocratic, lobbyist-fed largesse? Two six-year terms should be all a Senator is allowed. This would, of course, require a Constitutional amendment, just like the one required to George Washington all future Commnaders in Chief to just two terms, no more, Franklin D. Roosevelt be damned.
Just imagine if, starting in 2010, Senators were limited to two terms, for a total time in Washington of 12 years MAX.
Roughly 33 Senators are up for re-election every 2 years. This means that after a few election cycles, factoring in the reality that incumbents win re-election 80-90% of the time, that eventually the United States Senate would start to have fresh recruits pumped in every two years…since Senators elected in 2010 and presumably re-elected in 2016 would then be ineligible to run again…opening the door for a whole new class.
FINALLY, there would be turnover on all the big committees currently run by bulbous toads like Ted Kennedy or ancient, addled space cadets like Robert Byrd. No longer would lobbyists be able to control the agenda, if every 12 years a new Senator took the place of someone who had been entrenched for decades. The longer someone is in Washington the more that person is corrupted by the culture of a city built upon a festering swamp. Voters aren’t sharp enough to send the likes of Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, John Kerry, Robert Byrd, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Claire McCaskill, and their ilk packing…so a two-term limit would mitigate the damage these people could do by allowing voters only one chance to send them back to Washington for that second and final term.
Now, this is of course just a fantasy on our part. There will never be a change like this to the way our government operates.
But, there SHOULD be. If Dr. Utopia really was all about the Hope! and Change! he swathed himself in last year, this is just the sort of shake-up-the-system CHANGE! that would honestly do immense good…more than we could even fathom.
Just think about energy exploration for a minute. We all know that vested interests in the status quo are continuously preventing America from developing its own internal energy reserves and becoming energy self-sufficient. The United States Senate keeps working against American energy independence. It stands to reason that if Senators were term-limited, and the people standing in the way of energy exploration were booted from office after two terms, that whatever’s holding energy development up would be removed with the likes of Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd. Entrenchment in the Senate, and the continuous re-election of incumbents, works AGAINST the best interests of this country in serving the American people.
Sure, the lobbyists will still exist…and they will take advantage of every opportunity to corrupt new Senators that come to town, just as they always have…but they’ll only have 12 years to get their tentacles around someone…instead of 18, 20, or 40+ years, during which time Senators become mere puppets of the individuals, corporations, and organizations they owe everything to.
It’s much harder to own someone’s soul if they’re only in office for a maximum 12 years. Every time a term-limited incumbent is forced out by the law, the lobbysists would have to start all over again in their seductions…meaning that, at least for a few years, constituents might actually have someone in Washington representing them who would serve their best interests…on issues like energy independence, tax reform, tort reform, you name it.
Kay Bailey Huthinson is just throwing everything she can at Rick Perry hoping something will stick…but she’s on to something when talking about term limits…she just didn’t intend to direct that sort of attention at herself.
But, this is something BOTH sides of the aisle should embrace as a real CHANGE! that needs to come to Washington.
Two terms for a President, tops.
Two terms for a Senator, tops.
Six terms for a House member, tops (equalling 12 years, just like a Senator).
One 20-year term for a SCOTUS Justice, tops.
Now, THAT would actually be change we can believe in.
Just because someone dies, it does not retroactively make them a good or magical person.
There’s a Bette Davis quote we’ve always liked, about her nemesis Joan Crawford:
“You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good…Joan Crawford is dead. Good!”
Whenever someone like Robert Novak or Tim Russert dies, the MSM falls all over itself eulogizing these worms, desperately trying to retroactively make them into industry giants whose names and faces should be carved upon pyramids and idolized for millenia to come. Tim Russert was a vile pig of a man, a sweaty, flatulent, gas bag misogynist who is missed and mourned today only by his local Dunkin’ Donuts and Hardee’s restaurants (which, post-Russert, are apparently struggling with crashed sales and an overabundance of fried goods that only a tagteam of Bill Richardson and Oprah themselves could possibly resolve).
Just because someone dies, it doesn’t suddenly make him a good person.
This reminds us of a kid named Tim Bolder back in high school in Ohio. The Bolders were complete jackasses, and rich beyond a typical Ohioan’s imagination. Tim and his twin sister Tracy were children of divorce whose parents competed for their affections with dueling BMWs and Porsches. Tracy could be alright at times, but Tim was just impossible. He rocked the Brandon Walsh sideburns and the latest Z. Cavarracci style, picked on the scholarship students at our private school, and used to walk down the hallways slamming people’s books out of their hands, making paper fly everywhere, and laughing his head off, cronies in tow. Tim Bolder was the guy who’d smoke in the bathroom, then cause the fire alarm to go off because he didn’t feel like taking his geometry test that period. He was the guy who’d vandalize posters for the student council election, writing “faggot” all over a candidate’s face, before heading to homeroom to hold court with the other rich clods, where they’d talk about how fat and ugly certain girls in our class were, and how descriptively rank and gruesome their nether regions must be (in language that would make seasoned gynecologists blush…yet, because it was Tim Bolder, our homeroom teacher never said boo to sush him down). Tim Bolder was the most vile, rich, spoiled sonnovabitch we’ve ever met…and he was rightfully hated by most of our class (even those of us who never appeared in his crosshairs, but who felt compelled to stand up in homeroom and tell this jackass running commentary on our classmates’ vaginas was not appropriate for our supposedly Catholic, private school).
And then, the first warm weekend of our junior year, Tim’s father was out of town on business, so the golden boy held court at his daddy’s Brunswick manse, drinking and drinking and drinking, with the baseball and soccer teams out in force, the varsity cheerleaders and wrestling Mat Maids bikini-clad and hero-worshiping “that guy Tim, the one with the Porsche AND a BMW…the one who is just TOO COOL.” There Tim Bolder was, on the diving board of his daddy’s pool, drink in hand, sunglasses on his face, the 1000-watt Tom Cruise idiot grin sparkling. He was hamming it up, clowning around, showing off for all the girls…king of the world when DiCaprio was still guest-starring on Growing Pains, before anyone had ever heard of Celine Dion. King of the World…unknowingly at the absolute zenith of his youth, beauty, and strength…standing there, arms raised, right before his foot slipped and he fell, hitting his head on the diving board, then crashing down against the concrete side of the pool where he broke his neck and plunged into the water.
There was blood everywhere. Bright red and arterial, looking so fake, like it was all a big joke. Some people there laughed at first, because they thought it was Tim being Tim…the Jackass/Punk’d master prankster ahead of his time.
But, it wasn’t a joke…and after the crowd realized how badly he was hurt…after the Mat Maids and cheerleaders stopped screaming and some of the baseball team pulled him out of the water…after the coma Tim was in for a few days in the hospital…we remember sitting in homeroom as our principal, Dr. K., came over the P.A. system one morning and told the school Tim Bolder was now a quadrapalegic, but that he was going to live, so in that sense our most heartfelt prayers were all answered. It was a miracle, to teachers and administrators who spent all day claiming just about everything was some miracle and proof of an ever-living, always-loving, merciful God.
The next year and a half was one big Tim Bolder-pa-looza. He was never able to come back to school and resume classes, but around Christmas of our senior year Tim would be wheeled in for various masses and celebrations, where he would be venerated as a religious object. He’d have a place next to the altar setup in the gym for masses, with candles all around him, and wonderful incense wafting smoky little halos over him if you’d catch their trails in the light just right. Father Kasmir told us over and over again, at these weekly masses, what a hero Tim Bolder was, and what a wonderful person he was…just awe-inspiring and wonderful. Of course, Father never gave any evidence of Tim Bolder’s goodness (because there just wasn’t any to be found). The school just kept repeating over and over again what a miracle Tim Bolder was and how much everyone loved him.
In religion class, we used to have to write these little prayers to read at the start of class, taking turns each day starting the period with something inspirational. It was Tim Bolder this from the Mat Maids…Tim Bolder that from the cheerleaders…Tim Bolder is my hero from some guy in a garage band…Tim Bolder is a superstar from a wrester…SAVE FERRIS came out of one of us one day, much to the teacher’s dismay, because it became against unwritten school rules to question any of this Tim Bolder hero-worship. Got called down to the Assistant Principal’s office for that one. It was almost after school detention worthy to not believe Tim Bolder was a hero and a demigod…because he got so drunk at his jackass pool party at his father’s mansion that he fell off the diving board and became quadrapalegic.
There’s something sick about our society that collectively Americans want to make gods of deeply flawed people. You know damn well how we feel about that absolute pig Tim Russert — who became a journalism god according to the MSM when he died. We feel exactly the same about that toad Robert Novak, dead today and, we imagine, already crisping nicely if, indeed, as Father Kasmir always warned us gays, there really is a Hell to welcome the wicked. Novak spent a lifetime tearing down good people, outing CIA officers, and running people over in his Corvette without even stopping to check if they were okay. He was not a worse human being than Tim Russert, but he was sure damn close.
Like Russert, the MSM will sing Novak’s praises for the next few days. Mercifully, Walter Cronkite’s celebrity-studded funeral will eclipse the tributes to Novak, in much the same way Michael Jackson dying later in the day stole the spotlight from early morning passing Farrah Fawcett. Cronkite actually deserves a place in the American pantheon of journalistic heroes, imperfect though he was. Cronkite turning against the Vietnam War brought millions of Americans with him. He was trusted and loved and genuinely seemed to do the right thing most days of his life. So, this is a man who’s deserving of adulation and presidential eulogies.
Not so for Tim Russert. Not so for Robert Novak. Not so for Michael Jackson. And as much as we truly did love her and her wacky antics, not so for Farrah Fawcett either.
We’re too generous with the hero-worship in our society. Is Andy Warhol to blame, with his 15 minutes of fame for everyone nonsense, or is it just congenital to a society without a royal family that we insist on making the flawed and ordinary regal and superlative every chance we get.
Why do we elevate a spoiled, mean-spirited party body into venerated living saint just because he broke his neck and will never walk again? Why do we forget the truly creepy things a grown man did with children because we’re so eager to pay homage to a make-believe, self-proclaimed, “King of Pop”.
King of Poop is more like it…nasty, stinky, rotten, vile, stomach-turning, sewage. That’s what Michael Jackson became King of in the end. No matter how much Thriller legitimately ROCKS and is, TRULY, pure unadulterated GENIUS on so many levels…Michael Jackson does not deserve to have the 1990s and 2000s wiped clean just because we collectively want to bebop to Billie Jean and Smooth Criminal without being reminding of Jesus Juice and inappropriate slumber parties.
NONE of us deserve to have the rotten things we do expunged just because we die or hit our heads on diving boards. The bad is always part of us, just as is the good.
The LGBTQ community seems to get this more than mainstream America. At Sidetracks, on Monday nights, there’s sing-a-long showtunes night where clips from people like Judy Garland fill the giant video screens and all the queens, young and old, belt along irreverantly with their pal Dorothy. No one pretends Garland wasn’t a giant mess. Sidetracks shows clips of young, gorgeous Judy skipping down the Yellow Brick Road or clanging bells on a trolley…but an hour or so later, there’s Judy chain-smoking on TV, looking like absolute death, pill-popped and pumped full of nobody knows what. No effort is made to erase the dark side of Garland’s rainbow in favor of an artificial Emerald City perfection. Our friend Dorothy was who she was, and dammit if the guys at Sidetracks don’t love her warts, flaws, addictions, and all.
Maybe a community that’s always told it’s going to Hell doesn’t feel the same pressure to produce saints.
All that stained glass and incense, and all those candles are, ironically, just TOO MUCH stagecraft for Boystown (where men who want to wear dresses don’t need a seminary to hide behind in the pursuit of lacy fabulous). There’s been a lot of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Bea Arthur tributes since these entertainers died…but, once again, just like with Garland, no effort is made to claim any of these people were perfect. Everyone hits the dance floor when Billie Jean or Want You Back is spun by the DJ, and yet everyone shakes their heads at the sheer craziness of clips from the Martin Bashir Jackson interview or the baby dangling in Berlin or Farrah Fawcett’s oddball performance on Letterman in the 90s (promoting her Playboy pictorial from when she was rolling around naked in paint creating “art” that looked more like “one big, nasty mess”).
Bea Arthur was a difficult-to-deal with, mannish, pill at times…but she sure as Hell was FUNNY. And is missed deeply by people who accepted her warts, baritone, and all.
So, yet again, the fuss made over Robert Novak, and the efforts to lift him up into the Heavens as something he was not, proves there’s an awful lot mainstream America can learn from Boystown. As ridiculous as we all are here (and, yes, we cop to counting down the days until Superhero Friday at Lucky Horseshoe this weekend, so we are the very speedo-clad definition of RIDICULOUS), at least we don’t make saints and heroes of people who were just flawed, ordinary, weird little humans.
Tuesday Open Thread, August 18th 2009
What’s on your mind this Tuesday?
What do you think of Michael Vick playing for the Eagles?
Here’s something we’re only weighing in on because we are friends with a very nice dog who we sometimes watch when her owner is away…so the whole Michael Vick affair really disturbs us.
What Michael Vick did to those poor animals was absolutely deranged. In another time and place, where insane asylums still existed, Vick would be locked up for the rest of his life for being a psychotic. He’d be in Arkham Asylum with child molesters, elder abusers, and other sickos who mutilate animals…people with something congenitally wrong with them. People who can never be fixed, never be successfully mainstreamed back into society. The Riddler. The Joker. The Scarecrow. Charles Manson. The Unibomber. People who have true evil in their hearts.
But, there are no insane asylums anymore, and the prisons are so packed (with mostly DEA cases) that some states are letting many criminals go for lack of space.
So, we’re amazed Michael Vick actually served 19 months for what he did to those dogs. We would have thought he’d be released after a month or two — considering the fact we know of cases where human beings were killed be drunk drivers, and the drunks only served 3-6 months in county lockup. Not even real prison. So, Vick’s punishment was more than we expected.
Now that he’s out, should he be playing football again?
If we owned a team, he and other players involved in illegal activities would never be hired. Players that abuse drugs would never be hired. Coaches with criminal records would never be hired.
So, we’d probably never win a Super Bowl and our team would make the least profit in the league…and we’d be run out of the decision-making boardroom.
The sad fact is that football is not that far removed from the old gladiator matches in the Roman coliseums. People come to watch giant, brutal men brutalize one another while businessmen cheer in their thousand dollar seats. The more things change, the more they stay the same. So, it goes to reason that the guys who are best at such a brutal game would be brutal guys off the field too. Football is not a hugging or manners contest. The nature of the game dictates the toughest, meanest, biggest sons-of-you-know-whats are the best players.
The market dictates the best players get paid the most and are wanted by teams that want to win the big games.
So, economically, Vick playing football again, regardless of his incarceration and what he did to those animals makes sense…and as supporters of the free market, we have to agree with the Eagles right to take him on.
But, we also hope some fans stop supporting the Eagles, stop going to their games, stop buying their merchandise because they don’t want to be associated with a team that hires the likes of Michael Vick.
It is all about economics, after all.
Football fans are crazed about their favorite teams, so we doubt more than a handful will stop backing the Eagles because Vick’s on the roster. But, if people have a problem with what Vick did, that’s the only recourse that would have any impact…stay away from the games, and encourage all your friends and family to do the same. When the Eagles play in your town against your own home team, stay your ass home. If the Eagles were the lowest rated team on TV, and had the lowest ticket and merch sales, then maybe they’d think twice about being the employer of Michael Vick.
But, really, we do come back to those cases where drunk drivers served less time than Vick. A friend of ours was killed two years ago in Denver by a 30-something year old, white dentist. The kid who was killed was walking across the street after a basketball game, and the dentist just ran him over, right in the crosswalk, as if he was an animal. The dentist was rich, and came from a well-to-do-family. The judge allowed that case to be plead down to something ridiculous and involuntary or whatever — and he only served a short stint in county lockup, with another three years probation. After the case was closed, we talked to some police officers in Denver who had followed the trial and kept us up to date on the proceedings: everyone was disgusted the dentist didn’t do more time, but they said this is what happens most of the time when the defendent is a white professional who kills someone while drunk-driving.
So, as much as we slam Al Sharpton, Henry Gates, Eric Holder, Jesse Jackson, and the rest of the race-baiting crew, we do wonder why that dentist did less time for killing a person than Michael Vick, a black man, did for his involvement in the gruesome dog-fighting crimes. There’s much less to defend, visually and emotionally, in what Michael Vick did than for a slick defense lawyer to excuse away in terms of the white professional dentist.
The cases happened in two different states and have nothing in common, so it’s not fair for us to put them together like this, but because we knew the victim in that drunk driving case, he’s always on our minds. We’re human and can’t help letting that cloud our thoughts on this.
So, considering the fact Michael Vick did more time than a murdering dentist — and, come to think of it, Vick did more time in prison than Ted Kennedy did for murdering Mary Jo Kopechne back in 1969 (which was zero time in jail, because he’s not only a rich white man, but also a KENNEDY) — he has a right to be out in the world making a living any way he can…and the Eagles have a right to employ anyone they want and pay them whatever they want to pay them….and fans have a right to vote on that decision with their pocketbooks.
It’s too bad our friend who was killed crossing a street has no more rights, but that’s never going to change…and neither will, seemingly, our very imperfect criminal justice system.
More proof Liberal loons never think anything through: Cash for Clunkers is tanking charities
Remember yesterday how we told you about The Center on Halsted here in Boystown, and how this gorgeous community center (much ballyhooed by Liberals) is actually attracting criminal elements that are destroying the very community the Center is supposed to serve? Well, Redstate has an interesting article about another unintended consequence of something supported by Liberal loons: the Cash for Clunkers program is tanking charities.
Before Cash for Clunkers, people were donating cars they no longer wanted to various charities, like United Way, the St. Vincent DePaul Society, whatever.
But, if people can get a few thousand bucks for an old car through Cash for Clunkers, they seem to be taking that money instead.
This could not be happening at a worse time for charities, because most of their revenue is already way down. Here in Chicago, we have a lot of involvement with community theater and educational charities: the only giving activity that hasn’t been impacted by the economy is the Planned Giving/Wills/Trusts/Estates aspect, since people who arrange donations to charities after their death are thinking so long term, far-future, that the current economic Depression doesn’t really impact their plans (except those whose stock portfolios are being wiped out, of course…but most of the bequest giving is real estate, art, various collections, etc. that will be sold after the person’s death with proceeds going to a school or theater or whatever).
Annual Funds, capital campaigns, and other charitable drives that deal with the day-to-day expenses of a charity (the checkbook expenses) are hurting BIG TIME these days. Here in Chicago, theaters have been folding left and right for the last year. Troupes that once had their own theater (such as Bailiwick) for many years are now sharing space at places like The Center on Halsted, and drawing maybe 25% attendance on a Friday or Saturday night performance. Other theater groups like About Face here in Chicago are in worse shape and dangerously close to going under.
So, it’s interesting to see that “Cash for Clunkers” is taking such a hammer to nonprofit fundraising nationwide — one estimate is that charities could lose about $100 million in the next year because people will no longer give them their used cars.
Democrats did this.
And the sickest part of it is that Cash for Clunkers is such a mismanaged, disastrous joke in itself. We have a good friend whose family lives in the South and had two old trucks up on blocks in the front yard. They’d been sitting there for years, rusting, and once in a while the family actually did think about giving the cars to a local church or some other nonprofit for the tax write-off, but never got around to doing it. Well, these people are Republicans and never took advantage of any government program before but their friends kept telling them how great a deal Cash for Clunkers really was…so these people took those two old trucks down to some car lot and with other negotiations and haggling drove off the lot with two new cars they paid about $15,000 for. They wanted to buy new cars anyway, so that saved them a lot of money. They also wanted to get rid of the clunkers on their lawn, and this program gave them much, much more money for the vehicles than they would have got in a charitable tax write-off.
As the family said, “for the first time ever, those idiots in the government actually gave me some of my tax money back”.
What’s really interesting is the fact that the cars bought in Cash for Clunkers end up as waste in a scrap heap somewhere. The program’s not really taking junk cars off the road, but it’s taking junk cars off blocks in people’s yards and moving them to the junk yards at government expense. And then a whole bunch of energy is used to smash those cars into pieces and bury them in a landfill. How this supposedly helps the environment is beyond us. It’s not really helping the economy, either, because tax dollars are just subsidizing the purchase of new cars that people would have bought anyway…so instead of the Martin Family paying full price for a new car to a dealer, the Martins instead bring in cars for the Cash for Clunkers program, and the government knocks so many thousands off the price of the new cars the Martins were going to buy anyway. The dealer probably makes less on this deal than he would have if the Martins hadn’t traded in any clunkers. Also, the government is losing tax dollars on the deal instead of collecting revenue off the sale of new cars the Martins would have bought anyway.
So, the environment, the car-selling business, taxpayers, and nonprofits all lose with Cash for Clunkers. The Martins, for once in their lives, actually come out ahead because they got so many thousands of dollars for old cars they would have just given away.
But, this is totally not what Democrats intended with that program.
This is something that’s really forming a pattern: whatever Liberals do, and whatever they force through Congress, seems to blow up in their faces because they don’t seem to think anything through to its ultimate consequences. Everything this Congress and White House does is a giant Rube Goldberg device that, ironically, ends up really sticking it to nonprofits, environmentalists, the LGBTQ community, blacks, or some other Democratic core constituency in the end. Democrats hurt the people who support them by rushing bad legislation or pet projects through without ever thinking about the consequences.
It would be funny, if it wasn’t so terrible for nonprofits, in particular.
Idiots.
PS — Another thing we keep saying here, in relation to Chicago’s 2016 Olympics bid, is that landing the Games will absolutely destroy many nonprofits in Chicago. Just think about it: if the Mayor and his minions are leaning on every wealthy person in the City to give their money to the Olympics bid (and the Games themselves, as the plan is to privately fund as much of it as possible), and right now EVERYONE is hurting with so much less disposable income to go around, then don’t you think Chicago’s nonprofits will suffer a gigantic loss of revenue — because people who used to give $5,000 or $10,000 a year to them will instead be giving to the Olympics, since THAT’S where Daley will be rewarding loyalty?
The local Chicago media is clueless to this disaster on the horizon. The Shedd Aquarium, the Art Insitute, the Field Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Children’s Museum, the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Center on Halsted…you name it, they’re going to suffer because of the Olympics.
Most likely, it’s going to be the small donors who really abandon these nonprofits in favor of the Olympics. If you give $100-500 a year, or less, to some local institution because it makes you feel good, and all of a sudden there’s this big, loud, overwhelming push from the Mayor to fundraise for the glamorous Olympics instead (and believe us, the “Support the Bid” people are sure good at drumming up attention for themselves), a lot of people are going to say, “let’s give to the Olympics instead this year…we can give to the Zoo again next year, but I want to suppor the Olympics now”.
You’ll never be able to quantify any of this, because people aren’t going to tell the Shedd or Field Museum that they decided to support the Olympics instead. They just won’t give that $100 or whatever like they usually do…and the Shedd and Field Museum won’t make the connection between the Olympics and their drop in revenue.
But, if you think about it, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Like leaving Britney Spears in a room alone with some Wild Turkey, Skittles, and nothing better to do with herself. Recipe for disaster.
And, once again, the Liberal loons who are all jumping up and down for the Olympics have no appreciation for the damage the Olympics are really going to do to Chicago’s cultural, education, and community nonprofits.
Could unapologetic RAAAACIST! Barbara Boxer really lose her Senate seat?
This is fascinating: one article out there claims Barbara Boxer is in the fight of her political life to retain her Senate seat in 2010.
Of all the terrible people in the United States Senate who deserve to be retired by voters in 2010, Boxer is certainly at the top of the list. We stopped supporting her during the 2008 Democratic primaries when she backstabbed Hillary Clinton (Boxer had previously claimed she’d throw her full support behind whomever won the state of California on Super Tuesday; Clinton won the state, but Boxer never did anything for her candidacy and remained on the sidelines, while tacitly backing Dr. Utopia every chance she got).
We decided Boxer needs to be retired by voters after the recent dementia-tinged antics she’s pulled in the Senate: throwing a tantrum when an Army General called her “Ma’am” (as military men do), attacking a black man in vile, RAAAAAACIST! terms when he didn’t lockstep fall in line with whatever Boxer thought black people should automatically think and do, generally seeming out of touch and imbalanced on a regular basis.
It’s really time for Boxer to go — and it’s wonderful that Carly Fiorina is running against her on the Republican side. Fiorina is wonderful. We met her several times during the campaign at various Democrats for McCain events. She’d make a wonderful Senator.
But, can Fiorina really oust Boxer? In CALIFORNIA of all places?
We don’t know enough about the state to weigh in on that yet, but it sure would be a shocker if Boxer indeed got the boot. 2010 is a long time away in political terms, but today a poll came out that said 57% of the public doesn’t believe the Trillion Dollar “Stimulus” Democrats forced through Congress in February (without even reading it) did a damn good thing. California’s unemployment, especially in its large cities, is out of control. If 2010 is a “throw the bums out” year, Boxer certainly is one of the biggest bums whose butt could meet carpet should moderates and independents outnumber Liberal loons at California’s polls next year.
Just off the top of our heads, that makes quite a list of terrible Democrats who voters should retire in 2010:
(1) Barbara Boxer
(2) Deval Patrick
(3) Harry Reid
(4) Nancy Pelosi
(5) Chris Dodd
(6) Arlen Specter
We have to wait until 2012 for Claire McCaskill and Ted Kennedy, unfortunately.
Who else would you add to the 2010 or 2012 lists, Democrat or Republican, and what do you think the chances are that Boxer and the other 5 above will get the boot?
Monday Open Thread, August 17th 2009
What’s on your mind this Monday?
Did you see the White House quietly shut down its “Report Your Neighbor” program? Now, when anyone sends an email to the White House reporting on friends, family, and neighbors for speaking out against Dr. Utopia and his socialist agenda, the emails just bounce back with a message saying the program has been disbanded.
Here’s the thing Republicans never seem to understand: Democrats don’t ever stop doing ANYTHING. If you catch a Democrat up to something, the Democrat will outwardly stop, but will just keep doing whatever they wanted to do some other way. So, this Report Your Neighbor program was ended…but the collecting of emails, names, and IDs on people against Dr. Utopia will continue…they just will find some other way to do it. That’s the Rahm Emanuel way, baby. Republicans think they won, but it’s a pyrrhic victory because while Republicans celebrate and disband, Democrats just wait until dark and climb out of the horse (or jackass, as the case may be) and resume doing whatever it is they were doing (doing more damage before, since people think the battle’s over and there’s no reason to resist anymore). ”But I thought they stopped that,” regular Americans will say, since they don’t pay close attention to most of this stuff.
Nope…just stopped it under one name, waited a day or two, and then started it back up again calling it something else!
We are amazed, though, how truly stupid this Report Your Neighbor stuff really was from Day One. The hubris in thinking they could get away with this, even with a complicit MSM, is ASTOUNDING.
Something fun in the works: a new straight voice coming to HillBuzz
Here’s something fun we’re excited about here at HillBuzz. Our straight friend Ray, who used to run the site ChicagoansAgainstObama, is going to be contributing content to us on a rolling basis. Ray teamed up with us on DeMcCrats for McCain efforts here in Chicago: he’s a new school Republican who agrees with us on many things (except our support of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, whom Ray doesn’t seem to appreciate, try as we may to get him to see the light).
But, Ray works in the healthcare field and has a lot of interesting things to say — the stories he tells us are incredible in terms of the graft, waste, and corruption the current administration’s healthcare push will cause. He closed down his own site after the election and has been itching to get back in the game in a sense, so we’re happy to have him pop in here from time to time. Because he used to live in Boystown (with his wife…in a building full of drag queens and leathermen), he gets where we’re coming from on most things (even though he did pull up stakes and recamp to Florida last year, mainly because he loves feeling younger by being around so many old people).
We have no idea when he’ll start posting, but we hope he can take a little of the heavy lifting off us as we continue to sort a lot of things out and recover from a truly brutal summer of loss, stress, job woes, and other problems that have gotten in the way of posting as regularly as we always have. Someday, when we’re totally back on our collective feet and more distantly removed from everything that’s been going on, we hope to be able to share the full story, because there are many lessons to learn from. But, still, it’s all just too much, and too personal, to process and put out there into the world. 2009 has been a monstrous, challenging year — for us personally, and for the nation in so many ways.
As always, we continue to be surprised by how much we as moderate Democrats agree with moderate (and even conservative) Republicans…agreeing more and more as things get worse in this country, it seems. There’s a lot more purple in the world than there is bright red or screaming blue.
We think that’s the driving force behind our continued efforts with this site: showing people Americans can indeed break party lines to do what’s right for the country when need be.
We also bet interplay with someone like Ray could be an interesting feature for us — sort of a Hannity and Colmes where Colmes is gayer and less crazy and better looking and Hannity’s less of an ass and is right more often.
Do you let your children scream in restaurants?
Here’s a question for anyone out there with children, or who watch children on a regular basis: do you let your children scream their heads off in restaurants? If so, why do you do this?
It’s surprising, but we’re seeing more and more of this lately in Boystown. At lunch today at Las Mananitas on Halsted, a gay man and a woman had a little girl with them who was about 3 or 4, and she screamed bloody murder from the moment she sat down in the chair at the table next to us. Screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. It was like lunch with Liza Minnelli on a day with no prescription refills.
The woman completely ignored the little girl, who was seated right next to her (we just kept thinking how lucky that kid was that she wasn’t Christina Crawford). It was like the woman was deaf, or on drugs, or both — she totally pretended the little girl wasn’t even there. We know we didn’t imagine her, because (1) when we imagine things, they usually look a lot more like Jake Gyllenhaal in his Jarhead Santa Hat and little thong and (2) other people in the restaurant heard the screaming as clear as day (just not the little girl’s “parents”).
The man, who we still assume was either the father or an uncle, made all sorts of goofy faces and kept trying to make the little girl laugh (her name was, of course, something like Isabella or Isadora or Enchantrella…something multi-syllabic and vaguely foreign…a favorite of yuppies or guppies when naming kids). ”Oh, Isabella, oh bella, lookit the monkey face! Lookit the clowny face! Lookit Isabella! Lookit!”.
First of all, that monkey face business is just racist. RAAAAAACIST! And “clowny face” is homophobic, because, what, just because you are eating in a restaurant in a gay neighborhood we all need to be clowns to entertain a screaming preschooler? HOMOPHOOOOOOOBIC! And, thirdly, who outside of Cleveland says “lookit”?
The restaurant was busy. We were seated and ordered before Isabella and her entourage came into the restaurant. The food took much longer to come out than normal and all the waiters looked frazzled, so it felt like the kitchen was having trouble keeping up with all the extra tables the combination of a nice day + a large patio + crowds coming back from the Air and Water Show caused. Our opinion on a restaurant is that if you want fast food and are the kind of person who complains about how long things take, you should just eat at McDonald’s (or stay your ass home and cook). And don’t ever go to a gay restaurant if you only have 30 minutes to eat. Honey, you won’t get your drinks in 30 minutes. Maybe, if you’re lucky, in that time you might, just MIGHT, meet your waiter (before he disappears for a while to parts unknown). That’s why they have stacks of magazines and local weekly papers at the door of every restaurant in Boystown…you need the reading material while you wait.
Please.
So, it was hilarious to us that Isabella’s entourage started complaining, very rudely, that they hadn’t gotten their food yet. And they ordered after us. It felt like forever, but they had only been waiting for about 15 minutes.
But, there’s something about having a kid with them that makes people in Boystown act like they’re the center of the universe. We really wanted to ask that man if he was Isabella’s father because that might have explained it — maybe he felt so much like Superman because he was a gay man who had a kid that he thought he could behave any way he wanted (Lookit me, I made a baby! I am MAGIC!), and could be as demanding as he wanted, with complete disregard for everyone around him. For one thing, when we’re in a restaurant, we try not to disturb the people around us. There’s no screaming in public…no laughing or talking too loudly either (not even Panda, our friend who has a voice and laugh that make people want to kill themselves, like that’s his sick, horrific superpower). And we pay attention to the tables around us to make sure we’re not doing anything to drive people crazy or offend them. We also notice who around us has gotten their food and who’s still waiting and who ordered after us and who didn’t (always keeping an eye out for Oprah, too, because we don’t want to lose any limbs should that particular local Charybdis catch the scent of any enchiladas verdes suiza and rampage through the room).
It’s just so alien to us for someone to sit at a table with a screaming child, doing nothing to mitigate the screaming effectively, and then complain about anything.
So, we wonder if it’s ever appropriate to say something to a parent whose child is screaming its head off. Can you ask the parent what’s wrong or if there’s anything anyone else in the restaurant can do to help stop the screaming? We instinctively know TELLING someone to take the child outside or calm Isabella down would just start a fight. No one wants to be TOLD what to do with their precious miracle child.
But, have you ever effectively shamed someone into doing the right thing and taking the child outside to calm down? What did you say to achieve that?
Not addressing Isabella’s screaming, Sebastian (who was closest to Isabella’s father), did lean over and tell the guy he was out of line being so nasty to the waiter, reminding him that we had ordered long before his table did and we didn’t have our food either. It was a busy Saturday, and being nasty to the waiter wasn’t going to make anything come out faster, Mary.
You should have seen the look that guy gave Sebastian! If he got that defensive being called out for abusing the waiter, just imagine how crazed he would have been if his parenting skills were questioned.
What do you think? How do you handle situations like this when eating out?
