Archive for September, 2009
The Most Horrific Thing We Have Ever Seen Tweeted on Twitter That Wasn't Said By Claire McCaskill
Honestly, we have no idea what to say to this.
There are maybe 10 moments in life when we were so stunned by something we just didn’t know what to say or do. One of those was riding in an elevator with Oprah Winfrey and several important people here in Chicago about 4 years ago when she let out an ear-splitting, elephantine fart and everyone else pretended they didn’t hear a damn thing. And they didn’t smell anything either. The Germans were more subtle on the Western Front with mustard gas than Lake Michigan’s own Charybdis is with the olfactory encore of that afternoon’s chili-con-carnage.
Another time was being handed the newspaper on the day Matthew Shephard was found brutalized and clinging to life in Wyoming and seeing his sweet, delicate face for the first time as someone read aloud what those heathens did to him, realizing that, living in Cleveland, surrounded by ignorance, that something just like that could have happened to one of us too.
9/11.
The Challenger explosion, which we watched live eating cereal in the living room as kids, dropping the spoon into the milk and making a big splash that soaked our tan He-Man pajamas (which our mother insisted we have instead of the Jem ones, because the Jem ones were periwinkle and would, in her mind, make us grow up to be gay, so we had to have the He-Man ones instead…WHOOPS).
And, seriously, this Tweet on Twitter today isn’t of the earth-shaking, international news variety, but it really and truly did make our blood run cold…and we just don’t know what to say about it.
So just read it, and the article in Politics Daily that discusses it.
In short, a pregnant woman in a board meeting tweeted that she was having a miscarriage. If she had stopped there, we would have chalked it up to TMI.
But, she went further.
She actually tweeted how glad she was that she miscarried, because the state she lives in is “f***ed up” and requires a three week waiting period for an abortion.
Never before have we understood what motivates people to stand outside abortion clinics screaming and yelling at the women going inside…but we caught a sense of that in reading that callous and perverse tweet.
Now, we aren’t saying we agree with those protestors in any way…so don’t jump on us and start any attacks. We have several friends who were brutally raped; two of those rapes resulted in pregnancies; one of those led to an abortion. We also have another friend whose life was threatened by her pregnancy, and she had no choice if she wanted to live. So, we know real life good people who had to make the most difficult choices of their lives…and they agonize over this to this day.
None of these women we know would be so flippant ant Tweeter-happy with news of a miscarriage and talk of abortion.
Whether you support abortion rights or not, we think we can all agree that abortion is something that should not be tweeted about…should not be treated so casually.
It really and truly chills us that someone did this.
We just don’t know what else to say but, WOW. What kind of person does that?
UPDATE:
It seems the woman who wrote this tweet about miscarriage/abortion has Asperger’s Syndrome — something we are very familiar with as our friend Sebastian used to live with a guy who had it (David), and we all had to deal with David on a regular basis. In essence, Asperger’s is a form of autism where a person is highly intelligent and functional, but that person has zero appreciation for the feelings of other people. ”Jokes” to an Asperger person can be cruel and highly inappropriate, because AS (Asperger’s sufferers) do not think about how their “jokes” come off to others…and don’t realize how awful the things they say can be. David, for instance, once ruined Thanksgiving dinner with friends by talking about how disgusting and gross he thought vaginas were. Everything that day reminded him of vaginas, from the turkey to the vegetables to the silverware. It was truly bizarre, and he just wouldn’t stop talking about vaginas. Sebastian had to take David outside and try to convince him no one thought he was funny and that he was making everyone uncomfortably. David insisted he was hilariously funny, and that what he was doing was “inspired comedy” because “of course the forks and spoons don’t look like vaginas, that’s why calling them vaginas is funny”. And he would then laugh hysterically over it.
The tweet about miscarriage/abortion is still vile…but if the woman who wrote it is AS, man alive does it make more sense now. That’s totally something David would have written too.
How do we know this?
Because David’s sister miscarried once and he — honest to goodness — said, “Well, now Myra doesn’t have to have that abortion she was saving up for”.
Jackass.
David’s family was so used to this garbage from him that they totally ignored it…but people who hadn’t lived with him for 30 years were always stunned at his callousness and insensitivity.
What was always worse, to us, was how he reveled in all this…he always seemed to take delight in making people uncomfortable. That’s just our take on it, but no matter how many times he was told that “people just don’t say things like this, David, and especially not at Thanksgiving dinner”, David just kept telling his “jokes” at every occasion.
He’s probably still pulling this crap somewhere right now, though none of us have talked to him in over two years now.
Help us save real, actual jobs — while the City of Chicago focuses only on Olympics nonsense
Vintage buildings like this are facing financial ruin because of the Life Safety Ordinance's deadlines
Here’s just one example of what’s happening in Chicago because all of the City’s focus is misplaced on the Olympics: thousands of jobs around the City are in jeopardy right now because no one is paying any attention to the condo associations’ budgeting process, which is hitting a fiscal brick wall in October.
Here’s the deal: several years ago there was a fire in an old county-owned building where several people died. In classic government fashion, the City passed a reactionary ordinance demanding extensive “Life Safety Measures” for all buildings by 2012. Individually, each of the line items in this ordinance are worthwhile, but taken in total they sum to an unfunded mandate from the City council that’s forcing the private sector to cut blue collar jobs. What seems to have happened is this: after the fire in the County-owned building, a meeting was held in which everyone on City Council brainstormed what they thought would make old buildings safer…high tech communications systems that need expensive rewiring, sprinkler systems in every room of vintage buildings with mahogany ceilings and frescoes that would be ruined by those installations, enclosing architecturally significant open marble staircases from the turn of the century, ripping off antique wooden doors to install bulky modern fire doors.
Many Chicago condos and apartment buildings are from the 1900s and 1920s. In the Lakeview neighborhood where we live, local community activist Jennifer Koerner, 36, has been speaking out about the jobs being lost because the City of Chicago has been too distracted lately to see the problem with the Life Safety Ordinance.
“Immediately, when you say “Life Safety Ordinance” some people stop listening because they can’t imagine anything being wrong with legislation promoting life safety. No one, including myself, is against life safety or fire prevention and detection measures. The problem is that the City government has imposed measures with this ordinance that are bankrupting condo associations and forcing us to layoff the maintenance and door staff because jobs are the first line item to go in our budgets,” Koerner, a Realtor with over a decade of experience in the property management business, explained today at an organizational meeting to mount her effort to save those jobs.
The crux of the problem is this: the City Council voted to impose millions of dollars in building improvements on thousands of vintage properties around Chicago, all required by the year 2012.
The property managers of these buildings were then forced to develop phased plans to implement all of the City’s requirements, which need to be budgeted over time because of their immense expense and the fact that these property managers, unlike the government, don’t have seemingly unlimited resources to dump into this all at once.
At the same time, the County recently raised property taxes (in a down economy), in a city that already has the highest sales tax in the country, high energy taxes, tuck pointing requirements (expensive brickwork mandates that cost additional millions), and all the taxes and new regulations coming down the pipe for the Cap and Trade “carbon footprint” fiasco the current White House is so keen on. All of this adds up to an enormous strain on property managers’ budgets, particularly in a condo association where many residents are barely holding on to their homes.
Koerner drives that point home, saying “the City’s put us in the awful position with this Life Safety Ordinance of having to choose between laying off our door staff because we can’t afford to pay them or issuing expensive special assessments to condo owners when we know a great many of them are just BARELY making their mortgages and the assessments could force them into bankruptcy and make them lose their homes. The door and maintenance staff are also homeowners just barely making it, so losing their jobs would force them into bankruptcy and take their homes away, too. So essentially it’s Sophie’s choice on who’s going to be out on the street because of this ordinance”.
This is a classic example of good intentions run amuck in the bubble of City government, where no one on the City Council appreciates the ramifications of the legislation they pass.
The private market is already taking care of the life safety issues, too, because all of these vintage buildings need to be insured. Private insurers insist on safety standards before the buildings can receive their occupancy permits and buy insurance. The private insurers, who will not take a risk on an unsafe building, stand to lose fortunes if they ever give their approval to buildings at risk for any sort of fire or other structural damage. All of the buildings being forced to pump millions into the Life Safety Ordinance’s overzealous improvements are insured…and have passed all of their safety inspections. So the Life Safety Improvements, while certainly high tech and nice, are largely redundant in many ways. For example, a building might not have a modern, Star Trek-esque voice that comes over an expensive PA System saying “There is a fire in the building. Evacuate. There is a fire in the building. Evacuate”, repeating the message in Spanish, Polish, Romulan, and pig Latin, but it has a wake-the-dead loud alarm bell that will shake the fillings out of your teeth as it announces any emergency to a three block radius. The City’s ordinance requires the Star Trek announcement, when the buildings already have excellent, old-school fire alarms. See how the good intentions have run amuck with no consideration for the extreme cost to building owners with this redundancy?
There is an October 7th City Council Meeting that Jennifer Koerner wants to speak at — to make a presentation arguing that the Life Safety Improvements should be given an extra three years, taking the deadline to 2015. That will allow condo and apartment building owners more wiggle room in their budgets to phase in all of those mandates without having to layoff staff or issue additional assessments to building. For an average unit in a typical building in Lakeview, the home owners are already paying around $600 a month in building maintenance fees (what you might call a building assessment where you live…which is money that goes to the homeowners’ association/property manager and is not a tax going to the government…this is the fee you pay each month to keep the building going and to pay the staff…larger units pay more and smaller units, like studios, pay less). If the buildings need to issue a “special assessment” to cover the budget shortfalls and meet the stringent deadline for the Life Safety Ordinance, while preserving those staff jobs, homeowners could be stuck with bills of tens of thousands of dollars that would come due immediately. People would need to take out loans to cover this, or lose their homes.
This whole problem could be avoided by pushing back that Life Safety Ordinance deadline back to 2015.
That would save the jobs…keep people in their homes…and not force anyone to take out loans they cannot afford.
The City of Chicago needs to put this Life Safety Ordinance on the meeting agenda for October 7th, 2009. It’s time to talk about something else besides the Olympics here in Chicago, and actually have the City government work for its people and do something to keep people working and in their homes.
PLEASE email and call the following City Council Members and tell them to add the Life Safety Ordinance to the October 7th, 2009 agenda and allow community activist Jennifer Koerner to have her say at the meeting:
Email blast list:
ward01@cityofchicago.org, ward02@cityofchicago.org, ward03@cityofchicago.org, bstone@cityofchicago.org, ward49@cityofchicago.org, maryann@masmith48.org, ward47@cityofchicago.org, ward46@cityofchicago.org, ward04@cityofchicago.org, ward05@cityofchicago.org, ward06@cityofchicago.org, ward07@cityofchicago.org, ward08@cityofchicago.org, ward09@cityofchicago.org, ward10@cityofchicago.org, ward11@cityofchicago.org, ward12@cityofchicago.org, ward12@cityofchicago.org, ward13@cityofchicago.org, ward14@cityofchicago.org, ward15@cityofchicago.org, ward16@cityofchicago.org, ward17@cityofchicago.org, ward18@cityofchicago.org, ward19@cityofchicago.org, ward20@cityofchicago.org, ward21@cityofchicago.org, ward22@cityofchicago.org, ward23@cityofchicago.org, ward24@cityofchicago.org, ward25@cityofchicago.org, ward26@cityofchicago.org, ward27@cityofchicago.org, ward28@cityofchicago.org, ward29@cityofchicago.org, ward30@cityofchicag.org, ward31@cityofchicago.org, ward32@cityofchicago.org, ward33@cityofchicago.org, ward34@cityofchicago.org, ward35@cityofchicago.org, ward36@cityofchicago.org, ward37@cityofchicago.org, ward38@cityofchicago.org, ward39@cityofchicago.org, ward40@cityofchicago.org, ward41@cityofchicago.org, ward42@cityofchicago.org, ward43@cityofchicago.org, ward44@cityofchicago.org, ward45@cityofchicago.org, vdaley@cityofchicago.org, office@ward42chicago.com, bdoherty@cityofchicago.org, emitts@cityofchicago.org, wbanks@cityofchicago.org, caustin34@cityofchicago.org, mell@cityofchicago.org, rsuarez@cityofchicago.org, ehsmith@cityofchicago.org, wburnett@cityofchicago.org, dsolis@cityofchicago.org, mzalewski@cityofchicago.org, vrugai@cityofchicago.org, eburke@cityofchicago.org, folivo@cityofchicago.org, jbalcer@cityofchicago.org, LHairston@cityofchicago.org, tpreckwinkle@cityofchicago.org
Aldermen (what we in Chicago call City Council Members):
Manuel Flores (773) 278-0101
Robert Fioretti (312) 263-9273
Pat Dowell (773) 373-9273
Toni Preckwinkle (773) 536-8103
Leslie Hairston (773) 324-5555
Fredenna Lyle (773) 846-7006
Sandi Jackson (773) 375-9180
Michelle Harris (773) 874-3300
Anthony Beale (773) 785-1100
John Pope (773) 721-1999
James Balcer (773) 254-6677
George A. Cardenas (773) 523-8250
Frank Olivo (773) 581-8000
Ed Burke (773) 471-1414
Toni Foulkes (773) 863-0220
JoAnn Thompson (773) 434-3399
Latasha Thomas (773) 723-0908
Lona Lane (773) 471-1991
Virginia A. Rugai (773) 238-8766
Willie Cochran (773) 955-5610
Howard Brookens Jr. (773) 881-9300
Ricardo Munoz (773) 762-1771
Michael Zalewski (773) 582-4444
Sharon Denise Dixon (773) 522-2430
Daniel Solis (773) 523-4100
Roberto Maldonado (773) 395-0143
Walter Burnett Jr. (312) 432-1995
Ed Smith (773) 533-0900
Isaac S. Carothers (773) 261-4646
Ariel E. Reboyras (773) 794-3095
Ray Suarez (773) 486-6488
Scott Waguespack (773) 248-1330
Richard F. Mell (773) 478-8040
Carrie Austin (773) 928-6961
Rey Colon (773) 365-3535
William JP Banks (773) 622-3232
Emma Mitts (773) 745-2894
Thomas R. Allen (73) 545-3838
Margaret Laurino (773) 736-5594
Patrick O’Connor (773) 769-1140
Brian Doherty (773) 792-1991
Brendan Reilly (312) 642-4242
Vi Daley (773) 327-9111
Thomas Tunney (773) 525-6034
Patrick Levar (773) 545-2545
Helen Shiller (773) 878-4646
Eugene Schulter (773) 348-8400
Mary Ann Smith (773) 784-5277
Joseph A. Moore (773) 338-5796
Bernard Stone (773) 764-5050
Wednesday Open Thread: September 30th, 2009
Please tell the voting members of the IOC that the 2016 Games should go to Rio, giving South America it’s first Olympics, while sparing Chicago the financial burden and 7 years of corruption and graft the Olympics would bring us.
What many of you don’t appreciate is the fact that Mayor Daley has been involved in corrupt hiring and pay-to-play schemes for years. Federal Courts have repeatedly stepped in to bring that under control, somewhat, and prevent Daley from abusing City finances too much.
There will be no such controls over the Olympics. The Mayor will just use the money flowing into those Games freely, doling it out to his supporters and relatives like it was candy. And there will be absolutely no one who can keep track of it or stop it.
That should be sobering to everyone out there. THAT is why we are working so hard to convince the IOC to send these Games to RIO.
Please help us — we have only 2 days left to stop this!
Read the rest of this entry »
How do you think the individual members of the IOC will vote on Friday?
We’re curious how you think the votes will shake out on Friday when the IOC convenes in Copenhagen to decide who is awarded the 2016 Olympics.
Looking at the list of IOC members, where do you think the votes will shake out?
What countries, by way of their rep, will vote for which city?
We’ll never know the answer, because the vote is secret, but we’re wondering what you are thinking.
For instance, we think if there is multi-tier voting, all Spanish-speaking votes for Madrid in the first round go to Rio when Madrid is eliminated with Tokyo and the final vote comes down between Chicago and Rio.
Or, are we out of it completely and do you think Tokyo and Madrid are really still contenders?
Where does Africa’s votes go? What about Asia? How much does Europe really love “The One”? How much of all this do you see as any sort of reflection on Dr. Utopia?
Chime in.
HELP! Save our city! Contact List of IOC voting members to tell them to send the Games to Rio!
The 2016 Olympic Games would destroy the city of Chicago financially.
Mayor Daley only wants these Games, and the Chicago political machine is only backing this bid, because the Olympics are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for milking billions of dollars out of city, state, and federal coffers to funnel to all of Daley’s family members, friends, and political allies.
On Friday the IOC will decide who gets the Olympics: Chicago or Rio. Technically, Madrid and Tokyo are still in the running too, but Asia just had the Beijing Games and London is hosting the Games in Europe in 2012. That makes Chicago and Rio feel like the only viable options.
As citizens of Chicago for the last 5-6 years, we’ve come to know this town well and can fully anticipate what impact winning the Olympics would have. It would open a Pandorrian box of greed, opportunism, waste, and corruption the likes of which none of us have ever seen.
People who understand the immense financial black hole the Olympics would be have mobilized to encourage the IOC to send the Games to Rio. Chicagoans who love this city are doing everything they can to save it from the destructive greed of Mayor Daley and the White House. We keep warning the IOC of the danger inherent in awarding the Games to Chicago…the same way Professor Jones warned the fools who tried opening another box no one ever should have opened…like this:
Now, winning the Olympics will not make people’s faces melt off (but if it does, we can only hope Oprah is there for that…and it happens a safe distance from the city itself, because there’s an awful lot of face on Oprah, so there’d be an awful lot of melted-face gushing everywhere). But, it will unleash the forces of graft and corruption Chicago is notorious for…and release them with a vengeance.
At every step of the way in the construction and planning process for these Games, the Chicago machine will exploit the vulnerability and naiveity of private donors, the IOC, and everyone in the federal government sending enormous checks Chicago’s way.
Please contact the following IOC members and tell them to give the Games to Rio, make history with the first South American Olympics, and avert years of scandal and bad headlines with all the corruption and embarrassingly bad deals the Chicago Olympics would bring. If Atlanta was a blot on the record books with its bombing and Salt Lake City shamed the IOC with its own scandals, just imagine what a PR nightmare Chicago could be.
Take it from people who know how things work here…the Chicago Games would be a nightmare…please make sure the following people know it (email blast list provided):
akcol@de16.vsnl.net.in, amsd@iam.net.ma, antongeesink@iocnetherlands.com, antun.vrdoljak@zg.hinet.hr, arne.ljungqvist@rf.se, austinsealy@sealygroup.com, baumann@giba.com, bea.allen@gmail.com, beckiescott2@aol.com, bubka@stels.net, carlos.nuzman@cob.org.br, chang@iocmember.at, chenchong@olympic.cn, ckwutpe@ms15.hinet.net, claudia@bokel.name, corinne@hroffice.ae, craig.reedie@boa.org.uk, drthbach@aol.com, elguerroujh@yahoo.fr, etude@denis-oswald.com, fasel@iihf.com, fff@mweb.com.na, fflbeau@sapo.pt, fidelmendoza1925@gmail.com, fih.president@planet.nl, fje@elrocom.com, francesco.riccibitti@itftennis.com, fwnyangweso@yahoo.com, gerhard.heiberg@ioc.olympic.org, g-heinze@freenet.de, gunilla.lindberg@sok.se, guydrut@hotmail.com, helsam@mweb.co.za, henryhsu1206@yahoo.com.tw, herzog.maurice@wanadoo.fr, igaya-wbc@ah.wakwak.com, info@ocasia.org, info@paralympic.org, ivandibos@hotmail.com, jas@gbsfinanzas.es, jimena@oem.com.mx, john.coates@olympics.com.au, kai.holm@dif.dk, kasper@fisski.ch, kristina.wilberg@rf.se, kullabor@telia.com, laminediak@sentoo.sn, lassanapalenfo@hotmail.com, lyco@codetil.net.do, manu@manueladicenta.it, max.kozin@russport.ru, meliton.sanchez@gmail.com, moon.daesung@gmail.com, n_hoevertsz@hotmail.com, nauticalbotero@une.net.co, nawal.el-moutawakel@cm.iaaf.org, nhs@dif.dk, nmoutawakel@hotmail.com, nock@iconnect.co.ke, office@palschmitt.com, ovr.sport@gmail.com, patrick@olympicsport.ie, pbbvelaz@teleline.es, pcolesioc@bigpond.com, peter.tallberg@kolumbus.fi, praza@packages.com.pk, presidencia@cob.org.br, president@iaaf.org, randhirpatiala@gmail.com, rania_elwani@link.net, rcarrion@bppr.com, reynaldo@oem.com.mx, richard.pound@ioc.olympic.org, rjc@veritasinvestmentsllc.com, rmitchell@connect.com.fj, s.rettondini@eurolympic.org, sak74@hotmail.com, saoc@saudiolympic.org.sa, shmagvan@yahoo.com, smirnov@roc.ru, s-okano@mbp.nifty.com, ssa@treetonline.com, stankovic@fiba.com, tamas.ajan@iwfnet.net, tay@taywilson.co.nz, tbkhoury@inco.com.lb, titirita27@hotmail.com, ttfok@netvigator.com, uerdener@hacettepe.edu.tr, walthertroegernok@web.de, wkalts@duwest.com, yasmine@cafonline.com, zhenliang.he@263.net
The IOC members above are:
Ashwini Kumar (India)
Nawal El Moutawakel (Morocco)
Anton Geesink (Netherlands)
Antun Vrdoljak (Croatia)
Arne Ljungvist (Sweden)
Austin L. Sealy (Barbados)
Patrick Baumann (Switzerland)
Beatrice Allen (Gambia)
Rebecca Scott (USA)
Sergey Bubka (Ukraine)
Carlos Arthur Nuzman (Brazil)
Ung Chang (Austria)
Zaiqing Yu (China)
Claudia Bokel (Germany)
Haya Bint Al Hussein (United Arab Emirates)
Craig Reedie (Great Britain)
Thomas Bach (Germany)
Hicham El Guerrouj (Morocco)
Denis Oswald (Switzerland)
Ren Fasel (Switzerland)
Frank Fredericks (Namibia)
Fernando F. Lima Bello (Portugal)
Fidel Mendoza Carrasquilla (Columbia)
Els van Breda Vriesman (Switzerland)
Francisco J. Elizalde (Phillipines)
Francesco Ricci Bitti (Great Britain)
Francis W. Nyanweso (Uganda)
Gerhard Heiberg (Norway)
Gunther Heinze (Germany)
Gunilla Lindberg (Sweden)
Guy Drut (France)
Sam Ramsamy (South Africa)
Henry Hsu (Taiwan)
Maurice Herzog (France)
Chiharu Igaya (Japan)
Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah (Kuwait)
Philip Craven MBE (Germany)
Ivan Dibos (Peru)
Juan Antonio Samaranch, Jr. (Spain) * He was the IOC’s leader in 1996 for the Atlanta Games and was not a fan of US efforts then or in Salt Lake
Mario Vazquez Rana (Mexico)
John Dowling Coates AC (Australia)
Kai Holm (Spain)
Gian-Franco Kasper (Switzerland)
Kristina Wilberg (?)
Gunnar Ericsson (Sweden)
Lamine Diack (Monaco)
Lassana Palenfo (Ivory Coast)
Roque Napoleon Munoz Pena (Dominican Republic)
Manuela Di Centa (Italy)
Shamil Tarpischev (Russia)
Meliton Sanchez Rivas (Panama)
Dae Sung Moon (Korea)
Nicole Hoevertsz (Aruba)
Andres Botero Phillipsbourne (Columbia)
Nawal El Moutawakel (Morocco)
Niels Holst-Sorensen (Denmark)
Kipchonge Keino (Kenya)
Pal Schmitt (Hungary)
Olegario Vazquez Rana (Mexico)
Patrick Joseph Hickey (Ireland)
Dona Pilar de Borbon (Spain)
Phillip Walter Coles A.M. (Australia)
Pernilla Wiberg (Monaco)
Peter Tallberg (Finland)
Syed Walid Ali (Pakistan)
Lamine Diack (Monaco)
Raja Randhir Singh (India)
D’Rania Elwani (Egypt)
Richard L. Carrion (Puerto Rico)
Reynaldo Gonzalez Lopez (Mexico)
Richard W. Pound (Canada)
Robert Ctvrtlik (USA)
Robin E. Mitchell (Fiji)
Mario Pescante (Italy)
Saku Koivu (Canada)
Prince Nawaf Faisal Fahd Abdulaziz (Saudi Arabia)
Shagdarjav Magvan (Mongolia)
Vitay Smirnov (Russia)
Shun-ichiro Okano (Japan)
Syed Shahid Ali (Pakistan)
Borislav Stankovic (Switzerland)
Tamas Ajan (Hungary)
Tay Wilson (New Zealand)
Toni Khoury (Lebanon)
Rita Subowo (Indonesia)
Timothy Tsun Ting Fok (China)
Ugur Erdener (Turkey)
Walther Troger (Germany)
Willi Kaltschmitt Lujan (Guatemala)
Issa Hayatou (Egypt)
Zhenliang He (China)
Doesn't it seem like no one trusted the current First Lady not to F-up the Olympics bid?
Proud of the Olympics and the IOC for the first time in her adult life.
On Friday, our current First Lady was supposed to plead the case for the Chicago Olympics, but instead her husband will do that for her.
Her husband, incidentally, is apparently the acting President of the Chicago Chamber of Commerce.
Oh, he’s also the current President of the United States, but we all know where his real priorities lie (while his heart, of course, reamains in Honolulu, or Indonesia, or wherever the heck he considers himself “from”).
It’s just amusing to us that someone in either the White House or the Chicago Olympics Bid Committee set Mrs. Utopia up to look so stupid — the way this was all handled was TERRIBLE. The White House announces fashion-icon Mrs. Utopia would single-handedly win the Olympics for Chicago, using all of her charms and her ultra-glam fashion sense to dazzle all 100 of the IOC voting members. It was claimed by the newly-created and potentially-illegal “White House Office for Olympics Advancement and Encouragement of Vast Amounts of Graft and Corruption”, headed up by notorious slumlord and tenement profiteer Valerie Jarrett, that Mrs. Utopia would clearly save the day. Fussy Belgians and petulant Frenchman would walk into a room backing Rio, but Mrs. Utopia would seduce them over to Chicago’s side by employing all of her Southside charm to full hilt. If that failed, presumably, she’d just push and shove them with her Dennis Rodman-esque hands and throttle them until she got her way.
“For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of the IOC and its voting body because they have given me and my husband what we want. Anyone who does not agree with us on this is a RAAACIST”.
Mrs. Utopia, with Oprah, Lake Michigan’s own Charybdis, supposedly “had this under control”.
But, doesn’t it seem like SOMEONE possibly reviewed footage of Mrs. Utopia speaking in public, without a script and teleprompter, or remembered her antics at Trinity United, where she sat for decades listening to the hatemongering and conspiratorial craziness of Jeremiah Wright on Chicago’s Southside and realize maybe this was not the right person to sell Chicago’s Olympics bid after all.
Mrs. Utopia was very effective at collecting a large salary from the University of Chicago Hospital while lending her name to programs that diverted the poor and sick to substandard “neighborhood clinics” so UC didn’t have to foot the bill for all those indigent patients.
Not so great at being able to persuade the IOC to grant Mayor Daley his wet dream of diverting BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars to his friends and relatives with Olympics construction projects.
Will Hillary Clinton make a primary challenge in 2012?
2012?
Dick Morris is hard to watch and listen to.
Hard to hear, mainly, because whenever he’s on TV he’s drowned out by the shouting of those around us, often including ourselves, because the man’s appearance on any show is greated with “Pig!”, “Toe-sucker!”, “Prostitute Pedicurist!”, and variations along that theme. He truly is human swine, and we honestly don’t think he’s ever right about much.
Dick Morris hates the Clintons and the Clintons hate him.
But, last night on FOX Morris said something very provocative, in passing, during an interview with O’Reilly. The two of them were talking about President Clinton bringing up “the vast Right Wing conspiracy” line Hillary Clinton used during a Today Show interview 11 years ago, and O’Reilly asked why he would do that. Morris launched into an exasperated diatribe about how this was essentially part of some vast Clintonian conspiracy to take the 2012 nomination away from Dr. Utopia.
Morris believes:
(1) Former President Clinton is focusing on keeping the Clinton brand out there and constantly in the news, while making hits and stirring pots that Hillary Clinton never has to.
(2) Hillary Clinton removed herself from the disaster that is domestic affairs in this administration deliberately so she can’t be blamed for any of it.
(3) Hillary Clinton is enjoying her time at State while politically calculating everything she does so that she can’t be blamed for anything bad in three years.
(4) When Dr. Utopia’s approval ratings dip to the 30s, Hillary Clinton begins her challenge for the 2012 nomination.
Morris elaborated on these points, asking O’Reilly incredulously, “Don’t you think it’s strange Hillary Clinton hasn’t said a single word about healthcare when that’s been her passion and central policy point for years? That was the center plank in her 2008 campaign but she’s not out there selling the healthcare plan and isn’t finding ways as Secretary of State to highlight the healthcare efforts” (which, frankly, she could easily do if she wanted in a whole host of ways).
O’Reilly did think it was odd.
Morris explained Clinton knows Dr. Utopia was in trouble with the healthcare plan from the start and never wanted her fingerprints on it. In other interviews, we’ve heard Morris push the idea that Deathcare is Clinton’s revenge on Dr. Utopia — that during the primaries when she knew the DNC was going to give the nomination to Dr. Utopia, Clinton stayed in the race just to keep hammering on healthcare so that candidate Utopia would have to do the same thing in the General Election and would then be forced to take on healthcare overhaul in the first year of his presidency…crippling him once that failed (which Clinton knew it would).
Morris also notes Hillary Clinton never talks about Afghanistan or Iraq and “hasn’t even said the word ‘Afghanistan’ as Secretary of State”. Why? Morris once again insists Clinton is deliberately avoiding anything she can be tarred with later. That calls to mind her vote on the Iraq War during Bush’s administration, the vote Dr. Utopia maligned her with so effectively in the campaign. If she had voted against the authorization to use force to allow the UN inspectors to do their job, she would have been painted as weak and that would have damaged her presidential chances…but the catch was that in 2008 Dr. Utopia took advantage of a changing tide of public sentiment and turned that vote against her.
Morris says Clinton is making sure Dr. Utopia takes all the blame for everything his administration does, while she gets to keep a low profile when she wants and reemerge whenever she pleases in lights that best suit her. He insists she’s “on the wrong side” of the Honduras issue and is spending all of her time on that because “no one cares about Honduras”; to Morris, it’s a convenient excuse for her to look busy and be involved in something that few are paying attention to, but that keeps her from having to be involved in other disasters of Dr. Utopia’s doing.
Dr. Utopia’s foolish and naive policies towards the Missile Shield, the Iranian nuclear arsenal, North Korea, and carbon emissions are not Hillary Clinton’s problems…because she is keeping that foolishness as far removed from her as possible.
Ultimately, if Morris is right, in 2010 or 2011 it feels like Hillary Clinton will use one of Dr. Utopia’s failures as an excuse to leave State, making a speech in which she says she can no longer continue in the administration when she disagrees so strongly with the course this current president has set. Possibly, this could be related to Afghanistan, because everything we hear about the interaction between the White House and the boots on the ground there points to an epic fail coming fast and furious, with a Taliban resurgence in tow. If Dr. Utopia’s only talking to his commanding generals in the field once every three months or so, then victory in Afghanistan is clearly no priority to him. Dr. Utopia consistently insists we can “just hug it out” everywhere, and that if America apologizes for everything and appears humble and weak then the rest of the world will sit back and say, “Oh, this is so cute. America is no longer the villain we paint it as. American is now adorable. They want to give us hugs and kisses, so let’s all bake cupcakes for a big global picnic where all the teddy bears will come to dance”.
There are times when military people, in particular, are talking to the current president where he looks like he’s seriously imagining teddy bears at that picnic, drinking Kool-Aid and playing tag. Or, maybe he’s imagining Tyson Beckford shirtless at the car wash, again, having a suds and studs water fight with the Stanford water polo team. Again. We have no idea what craziness lurks in the mind of this naive fool.
As far as Morris’ comments go, we always default back to something a close friend of Hillary Clinton’s said to a roomful of her supporters back in the summer of 2008. Her campaign was suspended (but not ended), and about 25 of us were in a breakfast for her at Navy Pier before she spoke at a teacher’s union event. Her friend stood up and thanked everyone for their loyalty to her, and all the hard work and sacrifices we made on her behalf. He told us everything we did would never be forgotten, by the Clintons or by him personally. And then he closed his remarks by reminding everyone that Hillary Clinton is a very young 61…that she would clearly not be President of the United States in 2009…BUT THAT SHE WOULD BE PRESIDENT.
He didn’t say when, or how, but was certain of it.
Which is how we’ve always felt too.
Her challenge is, however, the same one that McCain faced unsuccessfully in 2008: how can Clinton win the presidency if she energizes her moderate base and gets all the conservatives Dems and a large swath of the independents but doesn’t turn out her liberal base (McCain lost because Republicans did not turn out to vote for him…and he got 2 million fewer votes than Bush did as a result, more than enough to have made a big difference in many states McCain could have won).
Accepting the Secretary of State job not only allowed Clinton to escape all of Dr. Utopia’s domestic troubles, but it made Liberals see what a good Democrat Clinton is…that she put aside the 2008 campaign and went to help her rival’s administration…how magnanimous of her. It was the same thing when she campaigned for Dr. Utopia in 2008…she did that to get herself in front of his supporters so they would stop seeing her as a villain. Clinton needs those Liberals the same way McCain needed the conservatives to support him. She will definitely not make her friend from Arizonia’s fatal mistake in that regard.
Are the Clintons up to something?
We hope so.
Will it be a challenge to Dr. Utopia in 2012?
We hope so.
Will we do everything we can to support whatever Clinton decides to do, whenever she decides to do it?
For the rest of our lives, baby.
While Dick Morris is as reliable and accurate as he is handsome and svelt, we’d love for him to be right about “the vast Clintonian conspiracy” because we’d sure love another crack at Dr. Utopia in caucuses and primaries where he’d no longer have ACORN, the SEIU, the Black Panthers, and his other gangs of Kool-Aid thugs to do his dirty work for him.
As ACORN, in particular, continues to crumble and people like Andrew Breitbart keep setting up more of Dr. Utopia’s dirty supporters to fall, we can, like Morris, imagine Hillary Clinton sitting back, watching it all with great interest, plotting and scheming.
And man alive, don’t we love her for it.
Plot, Hillary, Plot!
Scheme, Hillary, Scheme!
