Archive for March 23rd, 2010
And on the frabjou day, the Lightbringer delivered unto us a unicorn
h/t seapea
America’s most dangerous drag queen has delivered unto us a unicorn at last.
Another Alexi Giannoulias Dead Man Walking Story
Here’s another story in the Tribune about efforts underway behind the scenes to force Alexi Giannoulias to abandon his Senate candidacy, since his whole family seems sure to go down with Broadway Bank’s failure. The assumption is that once the feds take over the bank, all of the Giannouliases’ crime connections will come to light, and the public will know the full extent of everything the Giannoulias Family did for the mob in Chicago.
The Tribune is largely written by interns and kindergarteners these days, so take it for what it is worth, but here’s the gist of what it says:
(1) Giannoulias is going to be dumped as the Senate candidate — which we’ve believed for some time will happen.
(2) Lisa Madigan will turn down a chance to run for the Senate — honestly, we don’t know enough about the Madigans to say whether that is true or not. She’s ambitious, but for whatever reason never seems to want to make any of the power moves people forever insist she’s plotting. Maybe she just loves the attention all this speculation gives her and all she wants is to be Attorney General. Or, maybe she wants Bill Brady to beat Pat Quinn for Governor in the fall, so that she can run for Governor herself in 4 years and that’s the only ambition she has. But, if she wanted the Senate nomination, her father the villainous Mike Madigan, Speaker of the Illinois House, would surely give it to her.
(3) The article says yet again that Rahm Emanuel could be the Senate pick — which we think is ridiculous. Giannoulias is not going to enjoy being pushed to the side, so if we were him, we’d do everything we could to tear down whomever replaced us. People in Illinois don’t like Emanuel to begin with, and Republicans especially can’t stand him…so there’s an awful lot about Emanuel that would come out in any campaign. It would not be like running for his Congressional seat. The stakes are much, much higher. Screaming at people naked in the showers is not the full extent of Emanuel’s nude adventures with men.
(4) Bill Daley, the imperial mayor’s brother, is the other candidate the Tribune thinks would take Giannoulias’ place. There’s no love for the Daley family in this state. Daley is a nice enough man, but he’s a buffoon a large part of the time. Good luck with that one, we say.
(5) David Hoffman is put down by the Tribune, even though we know for a fact his campaign staff from the primary has not found other jobs and is waiting to work for him again, for SOMETHING. The Tribune notes how shrill and childish Hoffman comes off in interviews, and we have to say we agree with that characterization. He is certainly someone we like on paper, and we like the people working for him, but there’s a reason we ourselves didn’t volunteer for his campaign. After we met him at an event, we realized what an ass he is in person. He’d probably make a great Senator, but life’s much too short to spend what little free time we have campaigning for an ass. Maybe he’ll get that under control someday. We hope so. If he was nicer to people, maybe he would have won the primary against Giannoulias in the first place.
(6) It’s a major slam against the lackluster Mark Kirk campaign that the Tribune thinks either Emanuel or Daley would mop the floor with Kirk in November, once either of them took Giannoulias’ place. Just think about that for a minute. The Tribune is saying Kirk’s campaign would lose to someone who has such a late start, coming in at the last minute after the Democrat candidate was forced out of the race under great scandal. And Kirk STILL can’t win, after all of that. This says a lot more about Kirk than it does about either Emanuel or Daley. His campaign is terrible. He lies to voters every single day about his Cap & Tax vote and what made him do that, not to mention how he’d vote in the future. He’s rude in person, and he uses his reserve service in the National Guard to deflect any question he doesn’t want to answer. Ask him something about Cap & Tax and he’ll start talking about what the food in Afghanistan is like instead. Try it. You’ll see. It’s shameless. He is a true caricature of a speaking out of both sides of his mouth, never telling the truth, shameless liar of a politician.
But, he’s still better than Giannoulias. He’s better than Rahm Emanuel too…better than Lisa Madigan.
Better than Hoffman or Daley?
We’re not so sure about that. At least we’d know where Hoffman and Daley honestly stand on issues…and neither of them pulls the “instead of answering your question, I’ll talk about being int he reserves” garbage.
We still bet all of this will be resolved by Easter, and Giannoulias will be forced to resign the nomination.
Just more political theater here in Illinois.
Supreme Court Watch: Precedent established in New Deal for Court to strike down overreach of government
Here’s an interesting piece in the Chicago Tribune, of all places, bringing up the excellent point that the Supreme Court in the 1930s struck down parts of the New Deal that overreached and extended too far the powers of the federal government over the states.
It’s been a long time since Sister Mary Howard’s sophomore year AP American History class and our appearances on the Academic Challenge quiz show, when we memorized all the New Deal programs and court challenges, so off the tops of our heads we don’t remember which parts of Roosevelt’s agenda the SCOTUS struck down.
Anyone up to a little research help, please fill in those blanks in this thread, so we can all be edumacated on this, since we’re sure to hear about these cases a great deal in the months ahead.
The argument the Left keeps putting forward is fatally flawed: they insist the government forces people to buy car insurance, but that applies only to people who drive cars. None of us here own cars. Only two of us have drivers’ licenses. We don’t buy car insurance because we don’t feel we need it and make informed choices in life to avoid ever requiring such insurance.
That’s exactly how we feel about health insurance.
We won’t ever buy it because we don’t feel we need it. That’s us speaking on a personal level, about our own lives. Those of us who’ve worked in big fancy corporations had insurance at different times in our lives, and frankly what we paid into those programs never seemed worth it in terms of the medical care we received. We’re all in our early 30s. We’re single guys with no dependents. Unless there’s some sort of miracle and the laws of anatomy and biology change one day, none of us, gold-star gays, are ever going to have children. So, scrying into our futures as best we can, there’s nothing that’s going to make us want to shell out $100 or so a month, or more, for something we would very rarely use.
A quick survey amongst us reveals each of us has been to Europe more times in his adult life than he’s been to see a doctor.
When those of us who’ve had insurance tried to use their benefits, they went to doctors for physicals to be told they were 100% healthy and had no problems.
Now, we realize how lucky we are that’s true — but do you see how health insurance feels like a giant waste to us, in our situations, when those physicals cost $500 or whatever, only to be told nothing was wrong and that it was, essentially, a waste of time for us to go to those appointments.
The same is true for whenever we get colds or the flu once or twice a year. We know people who go to the doctor to get antibiotics or cipro when they are sick, instead of just staying their butts home, drinking orange juice and giner ale, and eating chicken soup and jello. How much money are those people wasting going to a doctor to have him or her tell them “you have a cold, it will run its course in a few days, but here’s an expensive prescription anyway”.
Antibiotics, in our opinions, are incredibly overprescribed.
We’d love to hear from people in the medical profession, or parents out there, to learn what you think about this. We’re just offering our own take, as single guys who just suck it up and deal with colds when we get them, without rushing to a doctor’s office.
To us, medical care is only needed when something is so wrong we can’t fix it ourselves. But, to be honest, some of us here have given themselves stitches instead of going to an emergency room, because they had the basic first aid and rudimentary emergency training and kits needed to do something like that. We don’t believe for an instant the average citizen out there would use fishing line, medical scissors, and a bottle of Absolut to stitch up their own leg, so we’re the exception and not the rule on that one.
Doing things like that ourselves saved us hundreds of dollars, though.
Not having insurance all these years when we’d use very little medical care save us an absolute FORTUNE when we think about it.
But, on a level higher than all of this, we keep coming back to the simple fact that the government has no right to tell any of us what to buy. Unlike the auto insurance example Leftists are putting out there, this mandate would apply to everyone just because they are alive – a condition none of us chose, unlike the status of being active motorists. We don’t want to have to pay car insurance, so we just don’t drive. We don’t want to buy health insurance, so we just limit our risks and take care of our medical needs on our own. If we ever found ourselves in a place in our lives when we realized we couldn’t handle things medically flying solo like this (like if any of us ever had a kid or a partner, and they depended on us, so us getting sick would have a major impact on someone else) then we’d buy health insurance, the same way we’d buy auto insurance if ever we were in a place in our lives where we had to drive cars all the time.
The government should not make decisions like this for us, and we don’t believe the government is Constitutionally empowered to do something like this.
We need to look into what parts of the New Deal were struck down and why, because we don’t remember from AP History anything Roosevelt pushed that’s as intrusive and unconstitutional as the current president’s desire to force every American to buy a product against his or her will.
No matter what happens, we’re not going to buy insurance. We aren’t going to pay any fines for not buying insurance either. We’re going to call the Left’s bluff on all this, because we don’t believe for a minute they can get away with doing the things they claim they can do.
We think the SCOTUS will call their bluff too, and there’s going to be a blizzard of litigation to make that happen.
Question: Do you know of any small businesses that are now going to cut staff to avoid the Rationing Bill's penalties?
Here in Boystown, we have a lot of friends who work in the bars and restaurants on and around Halsted.
Most of these small businesses have around, or just over, 50 or so employees. Only one of them currently offers healthcare to its employees — Sidetracks, which has about 65 people on staff.
The other businesses, we’ve been told, are going to start layoffs to get their staffs down to under 50 so that they don’t incur the penalties specified in the Rationing Bill.
Outside of Boystown, we also know a few printing shops, distributors, and construction companies that are also going to cut staff to avoid new taxes and fees.
Are you hearing anecdotes like this where you live?
We’re interested in seeing just how many people are going to lose their jobs — or not find future jobs because small businesses stop hiring — as a result of what Leftists did on Sunday.
Can you give us any information you are hearing?
Change your avatar using Gravatar.com
Avatars aren’t just creepy smurf-cats in outer space re-enacting Disney’s Pocahontas.
They’re also those little squares that pop up whenever you make comments on various sites, like this one.
We learned today you could change your avatar to anything you want it to be, by using the site www.Gravatar.com
Just go to the site and you can upload a picture from your computer that will link to whatever email you use on various sites when commenting. Then, instead of generic avatars assigned to you by the computer, you’ll have whatever picture you want to use for yourself.
You can be a blue smurf-cat if you want.
James Cameron would love that.
Purple dog people will chase you.
Don’t blame us.
Question: Which designer purse will Steny Hoyer take to the bill signing ceremony? Will he go wild with leopard, or be pretty in pink?
Washington's new power couple, with supervillain chaperone
Just like Carrie Bradshaw, but with purses instead of shoes.
That’s Congressman Steny Hoyer above, on his way to the Capitol on Sunday, with his purse stuffed full of Tic Tacs (in case anyone got hungry) and Kleenex (for when Leftists started weeping with joy), tightly holding what we think is fellow Congressman John Lewis’ hand.
We’re not sure how long the two have been dating, but we hope it’s going well. They make a really cute couple, and Democrat leadership seems really supportive of their romance — so much so that it seems George Soros himself has been assigned to chaperone these two on their dates, lest anyone get too “grabby” and run bases before the time’s right.
Can’t rush lovin’, folks. Gotta keep the dates to the streets before you mess up the sheets.
It’s sweet and old-fashioned Soros is chaperoning these two love birds.
Creepy, too, because it’s GEORGE SOROS following them around, constantly suggesting Steny buy John a rose from a vagabond street vender and nudging John to talk less about his exes and how terrible they were and instead focus on complimenting Steny and making him feel special.
“Remember to tell him how much you like his purse. He’ll like that. I can tell he spent a lot of time picking out which one he would wear, and I think he wanted to impress you. You should recognize that and make him feel special for caring so much about you to take his best purse out on your date,” we imagine Soros advising, all smiles, as happy playing matchmaker to gross Marxists as he is ruining banks and tanking economies.
Apparently, Steny’s got such a collection of MARVELOUS purses to choose from, he’s known as “The Carrie Bradshaw of Congress, But With Purses, Not Shoes”. So, if he indeed picked out his BEST purse to take on his date with John on Sunday, then Congressman Lewis should be beyond flattered.
“He’s my sweetie. He’s my boo. His heart is pure. Our love is true,” John was heard to rhyme, before the two (plus Soros) headed to a quiet part of the Capitol grounds for some “quiet time to get to know each other”.
We’re wondering if the two will color-coordinate their ties, suits, and underwear again today for the Healthcare Rationing signing ceremony at the White House.
And we, like just about EVERYONE in Washington, are just DYING to know which marvelous purse Steny will accessorize with.
Will he go wild with leopard?
Should he be pretty in pink?
Is the occasion appropriate for basic, classic black — or is that too funereal for the occasion?
What about something slick, bold, and designer — too flashy?
“Whichever purse my boo brings, I will love him just the same. A purse doesn’t make the man, the man makes his purse. Any purse would be lucky to hang on that arm, just as I’m so lucky to get to hold his hand and make laffy sounds when he whispers jokes or tickles me”, Lewis insisted, giggling a little, following Soros’ astute advice to keep the magic growing in this budding relationship.
George Soros.
Supervillain. Nazi collaborator. Evil opportunist. Criminal.
Cupid.
Tuesday Open Thread: March 23rd, 2010
h/t stacy
h/t stacy
What’s on your mind this Tuesday?
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Here’s something totally adorable we saw over at Ace of Spades and had to repost here:
The Swedish guy who did this made himself into a twin using camera tricks — it’s a very cute run through of various TV show themes.
What struck us, too, on a personal note is the kid looks like a slighter younger Sebastian. It could be his kid brother.
Here he is singing more songs:
We kind of have a thing for guys who can play guitar and sing. A talent absolutely none of us here have in the least.
Musicians rock.
In some cases, like Fredrik above, literally.
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