Archive for June, 2010
Sunday Open Thread: June 13th, 2010
What’s on your minds this Sunday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
Can you tell us a little bit about what’s happening to small businesses in your area? Have you noticed any stores closing, and if so, which ones? What’s the mood of people you know in terms of jobs?
Do you know any rabid Obama cultists? If so, are they still feeling the love for their Lightbringer, or have they begun to wakeup?
Help us get a big picture look at the mood of the country by reporting on your own slice of the nation.
QUESTION: What does it mean that Saudi Arabia is publicly giving Israel permission to fly through its airspace to bomb Iran?
What do you make of this new development, where Saudi Arabia is publicly giving Israel permission to bomb Iran by flying through Saudi air space?
We don’t have a great handle on how the Saudis operate or what motivates them.
We believe they’ve been lying for decades about how much oil they really have, and we’ve read a great deal about their Wahabbism and desire to spread this oppressive cult around the world. We also know they actually prefer Israel’s existence to Iran’s, which is fascinating, considering the anti-semitism in the Middle East.
Can anyone weigh in on this who has more insight to share?
What message is Saudi Arabia sending, and to whom, and what’s their aim in this?
Saturday Open Thread: June 12th, 2010
What’s on your minds this Saturday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
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Here are a couple of quick Boystown updates for you:
(1) Pie Hole Pizza Joint has been closed for about a week now. The colorful sign is down, and the windows are all covered in white paper. It’s very sad, since we miss the place, and still have a bad feeling about its closure because of the behavior of its owner Doug Brandt at the end. We supported this man and his business and did everything we could to help him stay open — but we had to be honest about the fact that his business decisions to try to operate as both a pizza shop and a community youth outreach center had a detrimental impact on the neighborhood, because he made it known that underaged wild kids could hang out there all night, and terrorize the surrounding streets using Pie Hole as their base once the Center on Halsted shut down each night.
Well, with Pie Hole gone, the neighborhood has improved DRAMATICALLY around the Roscoe & Halsted intersection. Those “kids” Pie Hole attracted late at night no longer congregate there, as no one is giving them a place to “hang out”. This means people are able to walk the streets safely, and not have to deal with their hooting and hollering, pushing, shoving, pickpocketing, and other “charms”.
They haven’t left the neighborhood completely, because the Center is still actively drawing them to Boystown, but now when the Center closes they’ve moved further south, and roost after dark in the parking lot of the bank that’s at Belmont and Halsted (across from SPIN nightclub on the one side, and the Lucky Horseshoe on the other). The Horseshoe chases these thugs out of their parking lot whenever they try to assemble there, but there’s no one at the bank after dark, and so the “kids” have free reign to form their packs there (and wait for people to try to use the ATM, where they harass them).
In speaking to the police, the biggest problem with these thugs is the fact that few in the gayborhood want to get involved and actually follow through with complaints against them. They harass people every night, but few people call the cops on them. When the cops are involved, even fewer want to go through the trouble of filling out the paperwork to complain against the “kids” and have them arrested. THEN there’s the next step of having to go to court at 9am on the other side of town on a random work day to appear in court and testify against these thugs. People don’t want to take off work to go to a court facility on the west side (usually the one at Belmont and Western, which is not a pleasant part of town to be in) to follow through with putting these thugs behind bars.
And the “kids” know this. So, they carry on with relative impunity because they’ve learned that gay guys make great victims because few, if any, of them will actually navigate the Byzantine process of taking their complaints all the way up the bureaucratic chain to state’s attorney Anita Alvarez.
The problems in the neighborhood are not going to abate as long as the Center on Halsted is in business…but now that Pie Hole is not operating as a late-night makeshift private youth center, at least there’s nothing drawing these “kids” right to the heart of Boystown in that prime location.
(2) The Mystery of the Unticketable Car: this one’s very interesting, because the crux of the mystery falls in the fact that the car we’ve been talking about, the BMW that belongs to Ed Davis here in Boystown, IS illegally parked, because it’s parked in a yellow curb zone…BUT it falls into a Twilight Zone between the responsibilities of Chicago Parking Meter Inc. (CPM), which tickets cars that don’t pay their parking meters and the Chicago Police Department (CPD), which is supposed to ticket cars that break other rules. The problem with this car is that Davis keeps parking in a yellow curb zone, and the police have grown used to ceding so much of their ticketing to the CPM that they don’t look at cars to ticket anymore. We keep observing the parking in Boystown, and Davis is the only driver we’ve been able to spot who gets away with parking in yellow curbed zones. At first we believed this was because Davis has some sort of clout, but it turns out the real fact is that he’s just the only person flagrant enough to park in a yellow curbed zone. A great many drivers here aren’t from Chicago, and in our home states yellow curbed zones are meant for loading and unloading only, and hazard lights must be on to park there. When we watch the neighborhood, we sometimes see people park, briefly, in these yellow zones — but they always put their hazards on, and are in those zones for an hour tops. Davis discovered he could park in this yellow curbed zone with impunity, because the cops in Boystown stopped writing tickets for this violation sometime in 2009, around about the time that CPM took over responsibility for the meter enforcement.
It’s an interesting chain of events that opened this loophole for Davis, but we keep asking every cop we see on the beat in Boystown if people are allowed to park in that spot for free any time they want, like Davis does, and the cops keep telling us the same thing: No. The reason Davis gets away with it, it seems, is because cops aren’t sure what exactly to ticket him for specifically. It has something to do with being within fifteen feet from a curb, in a yellow zone, but when they open up their flip books to take a look at the violation codes, they’re stymied as to which code exactly to put down. Looking at Davis’ parking ticket record, he seems to get a lot of these tickets dismissed because cops are using the wrong code on him.
We’re trying to get someone in the police department to tell us what code would stick for this spot — or tell us, once and for all, that this really is a magic parking spot that can’t ever be ticketed. In which case, we don’t think Davis should be the only person who is able to use this. If this really is a magic parking spot, anyone who lives in Chicago and wants to park for free should be able to park there too. Why should Davis be the only one to benefit from this discovery — and who knows how many other spots like this exist in the city where people can park for free if they only knew the spot existed?
Worst. President. In. History. And it's all Bush's fault.
Michele Bachmann is wonderful.
We could listen to her all day.
Can’t wait for Speaker Bachmann to take up the gavel.
QUESTION: If Democrats don't want to hold Town Hall Meetings this summer, what would happen if citizens just held them anyway, whether Democrats wanted to come or not?
If you can't get a real person to show up to or star in something, just use a puppet or a cardboard cutout. With most members of Congress, no one will even know the difference.
In the 2008 primaries, because of the idiocy of the DNC, candidates were not allowed to campaign in Florida or Michigan, with appearances in Florida especially verboten. So, one of the trips we made for Hillary Clinton’s campaign was to Ft. Meyers, Naples, and other cities in Florida where we carried a cardboard cutout of Hillary around town, asking Floridians to vote for her — which they did, in droves, giving her the state by a healthy margin (that the DNC negated completely at the May 31st Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting…aka, the Day the Party Died for us).
So, Democrats didn’t want something to happen — ie, Hillary Clinton campaigning in Florida — but her supporters found a way to make this happen anyway, party be damned.
We’ve all heard the Democrats don’t want Town Hall Meetings held this summer, because they don’t want to be berated by voters who are upset with what Democrats have been doing to the country in The Golden Age of Hope and Change.
Who gives them the right to decide whether Town Halls are held or not?
What would happen if citizens held the Town Hall Meetings anyway, invited the Democrats, and if those cowards don’t deign to show up, why can’t the citizens just stand cardboard cutouts of these people in the room and berate them by proxy?
What would be fun, too, and would make the Democrats look especially foolish, would be to create puppets of these people that look enough like them, and act as stupidly as they do, and have puppeteers speak for them based on things these actual politicians have said in public.
We bet, after a week of this, and enough YouTube videos getting out, that Democrats would suddenly want to attend Town Hall Meetings where they can speak for themselves, instead of having puppets or cardboard cutouts do it for them.
In Chicago, there’s a comedy team called Scooty & JoJo that often uses Muppet-style puppets in their shows when they can’t find enough actors to play all the parts, and the Muppets are made fairly cheaply, from what we understand, through some company online. It seems you can get them to look pretty much like anything you want…so puppets could be made for all Democrats in Congress.
And if they don’t show up to a Town Hall Meeting, there on the dais, behind a tablecloth, will be a puppet version of them, taking questions from voters, and looking as ridiculous as possible.
The #1 way to defeat the Left is through ridicule.
And we don’t see how even the Leftist controlled Media can resist showing footage of a puppet Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Patrick Murphy, or other Democrat luminaries taking heat from voters. There’s even a good chance someone would get so mad as to actually rip the stuffing out of these puppets or toss them to dogs or something.
Could be hilarious.
You do realize, in the end, that Israel's going to win, right?
“President” Obama continues to attack Israel, more and more each day, now throwing his lot in with the rogue’s gallery of antisemites that constitutes the United Nations, demanding an investigation into Israel for daring to defend itself against the importation of weapons into its country by Muslim nations hellbent on its destruction.
We can’t help but think back to something Sr. Therese Marie said in AP history class over fifteen years ago now, when we were learning about all the wars Muslims have waged against Israel, and marveling at Israel’s resilience and awesome ability to kick Islam’s sorry ass nine ways to Sunday. When pressed by a student on whether Israel would always win these fights, or if one day Muslims would succeed in destroying her, Sr. Therese Marie said, without pause or equivocation, “No, Israel will win. The Israelis will always win. They are the side of good up against evil, and evil won’t win at the end of the day”.
We truly do believe this.
We also think a major war is coming that will pit the Muslim world against Israel, perhaps led by Iran, and in the end the Ayatollahs will deeply regret instigating this, as we don’t believe Israel will allow the Islamic Republic of Crazy to exist when the dust settles. Israel will do to Iran what the US should have done years ago, and usher in a regime change. If there’s any luck in the world, Israel will do the same thing to Lebanon, Syria, Lybia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and every other Muslim nation. All of their governments deserve toppling and, frankly, need to be knocked back to the stone age militarily, economically, and institutionally. We would add culturally and socially, but these lunatics are already there.
Israel will indeed win, even if she doesn’t have the United States as the ally we should naturally be for her.
Democrats are truly going to come down on the wrong side of history and fate in this under Obama — and there will be Hell to pay for them. Though Liberals and the Left may hate Israel, the vast majority in this country love our tried and true friend, and siding against Israel the way Obama is so keen on doing will only serve to further sever whatever ties are holding many out there to the Democrat Party.
You side against Israel, you side against true Americans.
You do that, and you better abandon any hope you have in getting those voters back.
"They haz ice creams in South Africa? I'm there!," says Vice President/Sheriff Joe Biden
"What oil spill disaster? I'm at the World Cup, biatches".
We don’t believe it’s appropriate for US tax payers to pay for the Biden family to travel to South Africa for the World Cup soccer matches.
It would have been appropriate to send Biden to the funeral of Poland’s president, first lady, top generals, and other high ranking officials after the horrific plane crash that took their lives in Russia earlier this year — but the Obama Administration felt that wasn’t a priority, and used the excuse that “the air is too dusty” for planes to travel to Europe on this mission.
Sheriff Biden and his lovely wife Jill, as well as whichever little Bidens are in tow, want to eat ice cream in South Africa and watch a game that 95% of Americans couldn’t care less about…FUEL THE PLANES, DISPATCH THE ENTOURAGE!
The priorities of this White House are truly sickening.
In an article about state dinners in Vanity Fair a month or so ago, there was a description of how the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations handled entertaining and perceptions of extravagance during economically poor times and when our nation was at war. None of these presidents believed it was appropriate to hold lavish state dinners, extravagant parties, or take luxury holidays while Americans were suffering at home and abroad.
The people we have in the White House — and the Naval Observatory — are a far cry from those who understood the meaning of the world “appropriate”.
We have a US Ambassador in South Africa whose job it is to represent the United States in that country, for all intents and purposes. For any official functions pertaining to soccer games, this Ambassador could have sufficed. There is no reason or excuse for the Bidens to be living it up, and eating everyone’s ice cream, in South Africa this weekend. None. Zilch.
Though he is almost completely worthless in all senses of the word, we believe Biden SHOULD be roaming the Gulf states nonstop, in his role of “waste-cutting Sheriff” that he was supposed to take on regarding the Trillion Dollar Obama-Stimulus from 2009. It was to be Biden’s job to make sure none of that money was wasted. Apparently, he’s forgotten about that, distracted by ice cream again.
Ice cream is to Joe Biden what Kal Penn is to the current “president”.
Delicious, apparently.
MUST READ: Robin of Berkeley's analysis of "president" Obama as a possible schizotypal disorder case.
You must read this article from Robin of Berkeley, analyzing “president” Obama’s bizarre behavior and alien way of processing emotions and information.
There are so many things wrong with this man, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually that it should be no wonder to anyone that the Media, DNC, and ACORN/Union machine went to such great lengths to keep his personal history and true identity such a secret from voters…and maintain this embargo on his past to this day.
His admitted and chronic drug abuse.
The things pederast Frank Marshall did to him on unsupervised visits arranged by his grandfather in Hawaii.
His Islamic indoctrination in Indonesian schools.
Sitting in Jeremiah Wright’s pews for decades, while spending as much time as he could in the salon of William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
The current “president” of the United States is a seriously disturbed, troubled, and unbalanced man who has benefitted greatly from the Media’s unwillingness to turn a curious, let alone critical, eye his way. He is the figurehead and the symbol these people wanted, straight out of central casting, so admitting there’s something seriously wrong with him, mentally, would be admitting the Media itself was insane for pushing his candidacy and propping up his presidency.
The one thing Robin of Berkeley does not touch on is Obama’s Parkinsons’, which we believe firmly he has — and we believe his heavy cocaine use, documented in Dreams of My Father, contributed greatly to.
The Parkinsons’ explains some of the things schizotypal disorder doesn’t, and together they give a full picture of the fey, dithering, indecisive, lackadaisical “man” who believes himself to be a demigod “Lightbringer”, yet can’t bring himself to deliver any of his many promises, let alone handle day to day pressing matters in the office he sought and won.
AMAZING: Rolling Stone actually calls out their Lightbringer for his gross incompetence in handling the Gulf Oil Disaster
Read this Rolling Stone piece, “The Spill, the Scandal, and the President”.
If you recall, Rolling Stone ran the most hagiographic depiction of “president” Obama that we’ve ever seen, that image of him airbrushed to look like a demigod, with clear blue sky behind him, proclaiming him to be “The Lightbringer”.
Whatever respect Rolling Stone had was lost for many at that point.
Well, they’ve dialed back the supplication since…and this article above hammers “The One” for his gross incompetence and alien way of processing the greatest disaster to hit the Gulf states.
It highlights his only passion in life: the zeal to keep from ever being responsible for anything, and avoiding all job requirements of the presidency that don’t involve cocktail parties, dancing, movie stars, vacations, fancy dinners, and flying around on Air Force One to go to Broadway shows.
When even those who formerly bowed and scraped before him are now calling the affirmative action “president” the failure that he is, someone in the White House should take note that the cult of personality he cultivated and depends on is collapsing.
QUESTION: What businesses do you think will be gone by 2012?
Yesterday, we were walking on Halsted and someone asked us if we knew of a video store nearby and we had to stop and think for a moment, because all of the ones that used to be on the street closed down, years ago. There’s still a Blockbuster open not that far away from Boystown, but aside from that, all the little mom and pop shops have shuttered, and Hollywood Video went under some time ago.
We also read an article recently about the music industry collapsing some time next year or so, since digital music has made CDs obsolete and irrelevant. We know few people who’ve bought any sort of packaged music in years. The only time they do, in fact, is if they want to collect the album art for a particular artist, like Madonna or whomever. Aside from that, it’s downloads of music off iTunes, or it’s rocking out to videos on YouTube for free. The days of buying CDs are long gone.
We’re wondering what other businesses you think could be gone by the next presidential election.
What are you noticing in your own communities?
In Chicago, we’re seeing the demise of a lot of home decor shops, as people cut back on their spending and stop buying nicknacks and clutter for their homes. We’ve also seen a lot of overpriced art and clothing shops fail, as people start focusing on necessities and not extravagances. The big chocolate lounge craze that hit the city a few years ago is over, too, with these shops dwindling. The cupcakeries are still going strong, though…much to our surprise…with none of the ones in Chicago closing yet.
Dog bakeries still seem like a gold mine, too.
What do you think will be the safest bet for successful small businesses in the next few years…and which businesses do you think are most likely to fail?
How else is our nation changing in small ways that we might not notice until some things are almost totally gone, like those video stores that just disappeared as RedBox, NetFlix, and online movie viewing replaced them?
