Archive for September 30th, 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 »
