Archive for August 9th, 2010
QUESTION: Would Hillary Clinton save Obama's sorry bacon by becoming Vice President in 2012? Short answer: we hope not
This is something we really hope Secretary Clinton doesn’t do…and something we know for a fact that her daughter Chelsea doesn’t want her to do.
We can’t speak for everyone in Hillaryland, but we can speak for the Team Hillary people we know, and none of us want Secretary Clinton to save Obama’s sorry, sour bacon.
Clinton is a Democrat, and would never buck the party the way that many of her supporters (if not, in fact, most of her supporters) have. We don’t want our Hillary to come save the man who so viciously attacked her, and whose supporters on the Left so viciously attack all those who support her.
Let Obama sink, or let the magical powers he supposedly has save him.
Hillary Diana Rodham Clinton should have an Obama-free future, doing whatever she wants to do.
But, if that future includes her wanting to be Obama’s VP and take Joe Biden’s place, a job she could have had back in 2008, we’d wish her the very best as we will do our entire lives, but we won’t help her get that VP job.
Barack Obama is a terrible, inept, and socialist president. We will never help him win an election. We’re going to be working for whomever runs against him in 2012, and we hope that person is Governor Sarah Palin.
We love Hillary Clinton, and always will. We are never more delighted in this world than on the cherished occasions when we’ve been in a room with her, in a personal setting, and have heard her marvelous laugh, have listened to her tell jokes, and have seen her talk to our friends (and us) one on one.
Love the woman.
We’re honored we got to spend any time at all with a person in American history we care so much about. It’s magical to us, and always will be.
But we just won’t help Obama with anything, ever.
Donna Brazile said so famously that the new Obama Democrat Party did not need all of those Hillary voters, and Hillary supporters, and all the rest of those bitter clinging Midwesterners. Democrats would do just fine with blacks, first time voters, newly-minted immigrant citizens, and people collecting checks from the government. Everyone else who works for a living, loves this country, and is opposed to socialism and wealth redistribution need not apply.
So, if Donna Brazile is so smart, and she was right about the Democrat Party’s fortunes without the moderate, conservative, centrist Hillary supporters, then Obama can do just fine without our champ in 2012.
If Obama is so wonderful, and he didn’t have a use for Hillary Clinton as his VP pick in 2012, then it should not even be an option for him to float these stories in the news regarding how much he needs her help the next time around.
CREEPY AND SUSPICIOUS: Oil expert Matthew Simmons dies in Maine hot tub "accident"
This is truly bizarre, and makes us think of the movie 2012, where the White House had people killed in weird accidents whenever they seemed like they were going to spill the secret that the world was ending.
Matthew Simmons has been found dead in a hot tub in Maine.
He’s the man who’s been saying for the last few years that Saudi Arabia is lying about how much oil it has in its reserves, and that “the twilight in the desert” is coming (which is the name of his book on the subject).
What’s really interesting to us is that this downward curve of how much oil Simmons claims the Mideast holds seems to coincide perfectly with the inverse upsurge in Islam’s efforts to conquer the West (including the Victory Mosque the Saudis are pushing for Ground Zero in New York, as a Cordoba-style monument to their forced dhimmihood of America).
Simply put: if Simmons is right, and the Saudi oil is running out, and Saudis know their profligate spending will deplete their savings as soon as those wells run dry, then while they still have money they seem hellbent on birthing the Global Caliphate while they still have the resources to do that.
Someone like Simmons sure would be at the top of the list of those Islam would want to silence…so that any plans in the works would not have attention drawn to them. Since the current White House is a clear hand of Islam, whatever shenannigans Islam would be up to in something like this would be surely ignored by direct order of the sitting “president”.
Creepy, suspicious, stomach-wrenching stuff.
Not everything in the world is a conspiracy, of course.
But men dressed in long flowing robes, hiding behind thick beards and sunglasses, followed everywhere by women wrapped up in black sheets…forever in the company of those who openly advocate the destruction of our way of life…sure lend themselves to easy conspiracy conjecture.
Bad news for Cleveland, as heard at Market Days 2010
This past week we’ve been busy working on projects for Chicago’s Market Days — the largest street festival in the midwest, held right here in Boystown (aka, the day gays throw a big party and the rest of you are all invited).
It’s hard work, and a lot of it was volunteer on our part to help the North Halsted Merchant’s Association put on a successful festival (which raises money for neighborhood improvements and pumps the most money into the local bars and restaurants of any weekend of the year).
We literally have a dozen little notebooks full of all the interesting things that happened, but one of the things that most disturbed us we picked up last night at Sidetracks where we ran into some guys visiting from Cleveland and Cincinnati who gave us some scoop on what’s been happening back in Ohio.
Cleveland is in a lot of serious trouble, and it breaks our hearts.
For those of you who don’t know, Cleveland has suffered some devastating corporate losses in recent years, with the shuttering of LTV Steel, and all the ramifications of that, the departure of BP from Cleveland as its corporate headquarters, and the demise of National City Bank (acquired by PNC Bank of Pittsburgh, at a loss of 16,000 Cleveland jobs).
Now, we’ve learned that Key Bank, Cleveland’s top employer, will be gone within three years. The Eaton Corporation is also leaving, taking with it thousands of jobs. Several other large businesses and law firms have also announced their plans to leave Cleveland in 2011.
Meanwhile, the City is claiming its “Medical Mart” and perpetually-proposed “new Convention Center” will save the city…just like Springfield’s monorail, as we’ve talked about many times before. All the money that went into ripping up Euclid Avenue to rebuild the street actually killed most of the businesses that had been there for years — because customers didn’t want to endure the inconvenience of continuing to shop there during the construction. So, by the time the ripping up of the street was finally finished, there were no shops open for customers to walk to.
We wish we could say this was a surprise, but anyone who follows what happens in Cleveland knew this would happen. It’s been happening for 30 years in a town we love that just can’t get its act together, and always believes some pie-in-the-sky hundred-million-dollar project is the missing piece that’s going to “save the city”.
We’re left today wondering if some cities just can’t be saved, and if we have to face the reality that Cleveland might be one of them.
There is just not the population to support any of the grande schemes the city wants to engage in. Soon, the tallest skyscraper will be empty, and it will majestically lord over a Public Square that many are now afraid to traverse in broad daylight, because of how desperate many Clevelanders have become in the Obama Economy.
Whenever we encounter visitors from Ohio, they talk more and more of people ignoring the downtown city center itself, and focusing on Lyndhurst, Rocky River, Beechwood, Chagrin Falls, and the nicer suburbs afield of Cleveland proper…where it’s safer, there are jobs, and energy’s spent building up communities…not “Medical Marts” or Convention Centers, whatever the hell Medical Marts are.
Listening to the never-ending bad news coming out of Cleveland — where the city government just won’t learn — is like watching the regular drunks at the bar in Sidetracks that we’ve seen for the last five years, making the same mistakes, coming to the same bar day after day, never progressing in their lives, drinking themselves stupid, and always leaving forlorn and looking all the world like they want to kill themselves.
They keep making the same mistakes, but expecting different results. A lot of them are gray-haired old men, grandpas, who belly up to the bar, knock back drink after drink, and keep hoping some young twink is going to appear who’ll be magically attracted to them…and then the two will live happily ever after (for the five years or so remaining before the drunk ends up in a nursing home). The looks of pure desperation and unrealistic hope in these guys’ eyes would be stunning, if we weren’t so familiar with seeing that same look on the face of people in Cleveland who forever buy into the snake oil the mayor and City Council are always selling.
Monorail, monorail, monorail!
Hope! Change!
Large public construction projects to create massive new buildings do not revive depressed urban economies…anymore than going back to the bar every day over the age of 60 in Boystown is going to increase your chances of landing someone who just fell out of an Aberzombie catalog. It’s just not going to happen.
It might be harsh to hear this, or read it, as the case may be, but it’s true.
And it’s just so sad to us that instead of doing whatever it took to keep Key Bank, Eaton, and the other companies in Cleveland, the city’s off on more of its reckless spending and poorly-thought out adventures.
Is madness like this infecting your home towns too?
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PS – Another part of this involves the Gay Games 2014, which were awarded to Cleveland earlier this year, but which we think will be stripped from the city before 2010 is up.
Here’s the problem:
When Cleveland was announced as the 2014 Gay Games host city, we remember the local Chicago gay papers running the nastiest articles about the choice. One bit had a reporter (whom we know, and whom we couldn’t think of a nice thing to say about if we tried) claim she interviewed 85 people and could not find a single one who was excited about Cleveland winning the Gay Games. Truth be told, if she had interviewed us, we would have supported Cleveland because we want that money pumped into one of our home towns, but we never thought Cleveland was a good fit as the host city for something like this.
In Cleveland, if you are gay, you will be called a “faggot”, or worse, on a regular daily basis. Grew up there, can attest to that. Even in 2010, we think it would be easier to be gay in Birmingham, Alabama than it would be in Cleveland, if only for the fact that Southerners are far more polite. They’d call you “faggot” behind your back, definitely, but probably not right to your face, Cleveland-style.
How Cleveland believed it could edumacate Clevelanders to resist temptations like this and behave themselves for two weeks when not just American gays, but gays from all around the world would be in town, in a city with no gay bar in all of its downtown, and few gay-friendly anythings, is just beyond us. That is dangerous, desperate, wishful, unrealistic thinking.
And people in Chicago saw this. Others internationally saw this too. The Gay Games should be held in Boston, San Francisco, Washington DC, New York, New Orleans, Chicago, Miami, Honolulu, or San Diego. Demonstrate a community’s longstanding embrace of gays, and their ability to throw one hell of a party for two weeks straight, then give them the Gay Games.
As much as we love Cleveland, this is not a good fit for the city. Never was.
But, what we’ve heard is that financial mismanagement of the entity that’s prepping for the games is what’s going to be used as the excuse to move this to Boston or New York in 2014.
Something like $50,000 has been embezzled from Gay Games accounts (which gave us just a flash of what sort of chicanery would be going on if Chicago had won the 2016 Olympics), and fingers are being pointed in Cleveland’s gay community. Since some of us used to DJ and event plan back in Cleveland in the 90s and 2000s, we know a lot of the players involved, and most of them are crooks. Not Chicago-level, of course, but since Cleveland’s a “little Chicago” in a sense, and it’s Democrat-controlled like Chicago is, it’s just natural that the movers and shakers back home would be as crooked as the ones here.
The whole thing’s a ripe, nasty pimple that’s going to be popped soon…leading to more chagrin and disappointment falling on Cleveland. America’s punching bag, through all fault of its own.
We desperately want to swoop in and find some way to save Cleveland, but it’s a bigger problem than all of us, including all of you, put together.
The city really may be beyond saving.
As horrible a thought as that is.
