Breaking News
Scott Brown is totally going to win the Senate race. Nobody showed up at Elizabeth Warren rally today despite 6 Mayors being there.
h/t LegalInsurrection for this.
Now, let’s look at the facts here. Five former and one current Mayor assembled for a rally for Elizabeth Warren in Worcester, Massachusetts. Since no one else showed up to attend the rally, there were more Mayors there than regular people. Almost everyone in attendance was a Mayor.
When I used to do event planning for a living I used to have nightmares about things like this: planning an event for months, working hard to bring everything under budget, inviting scores of people…and no one would show up. That never happened to me, THANK GOODNESS…but I would seriously wake up in cold sweats from dreams about it.
Honestly, let’s think about the Massachusetts Senate race for a second:
* Scott Brown is hot. He’s a former Cosmo centerfold. I smile a little every time I see him. I’m sure there are a great many women in Massachusetts who will vote for the “cutie” no matter who they vote for in the presidential race.
* Scott Brown is a guy people would want to have a beer with (if not wake up next to). Straight guys don’t find him too handsome…but see him as a guy they’d like as a buddy.
* Martha Coakley was a much better candidate than Elizabeth Warren.
* The Ministry of Truth said for a month that Warren beat Brown and that no Republican would take “the Kennedy seat”
* Brown made almost every pundit look like a buffoon back in 2010 by winning the race they said he couldn’t win.
I really like this guy. Always have. He is what he is and he represents the people of Massachusetts, who want their Senator to vote for things that I don’t agree with all the time…but he is light years better in the Senate than Ted Kennedy. He is light years better than Martha Coakley would have been…and he’s better than Elizabeth Warren would be.
I think Scott Brown is the best Senator that Massachusetts could hope for…and my contacts in the state tell me that he’s going to win and Elizabeth Warren is hated.
THIS rally above lends credence to that.
I will tell you that as an event planner anything I did outside in Chicago always attracted crowds of lookyloos. There is always a crowd for anything…unless people want nothing to do with whoever the event is for.
People want NOTHING TO DO WITH Elizabeth Warren.
Scott Brown will win even though Obama will win Massachusetts. Minitru won’t admit it, because it’s claiming that Massachusetts voters are just going to vote for Obama AND Warren…but that’s not true. They’re going to split the vote and keep the cutie in office.
How about distributing some “The Hope and the Change on Hulu.com” palm cards at church tomorrow (or wherever you go on Sunday)?
[ You can also find a PDF of this HERE that's printable.]
As of tomorrow, we’ll have just two days left to get as many people as possible to know about ‘The Hope and the Change” being available for FREE on Hulu.com. I truly believe that no one who sees this movie can possibly vote for Barack Obama. The trick is getting the people who NEED to see it to watch it.
That’s where you come in.
Tomorrow, a lot of people will be heading to church. Why not take some palm cards with you when you go and hand them out to people you see telling them about this movie called “The Hope and the Change” that talks about how all those promises from 2008 really worked out.
Maybe you can ask the priest or preacher to tell people how they can watch “The Hope and the Change” for FREE on Hulu.com too. Can’t hurt to ask, right?
If you aren’t religious but there is a church near you, why not find out when mass or services are held and be out there as people leave the building…and you can pass out palm cards then.
Is there a place where a lot of people go on Sundays where you live? Then why not go there and hand out palm cards?
If you are someone who does not like talking to strangers, you can just walk around your neighborhood with a stack of palm cards and a roll of tape and stick them anonymously to people’s doors. I also like to take them to the windows of cars too (or put them under the windshield wiper if you can). I carry a stack of palm cards with me wherever I go and leave them all over the place. I even snuck some into the grocery store by the deli section…where they had all these coupons for different meats (that were just little stacks of paper too). I’ve been putting the palm cards there when no one was looking, next to the coupons, and no one’s gotten rid of them. I hope people take a palm card while they are picking up their meat coupons.
I leave word about this FREE Hulu availability for the movie on the bus and trains, anywhere there is a cork board, and I hand them out to people as they pass me on the street.
“Hey, there’s a free movie that’s showing on Hulu. Check it out,” I say. And they take the card, say thanks, and keep moving. They never want to engage in more conversation than that. My boyfriend Justin is very shy and does not like talking to strangers but he enjoys going around and putting the palm cards everywhere. Justin takes them to the gym and slips them into all the open lockers. He leaves them in the aisles at the drug store and puts them into all the magazines that are for sale on news stands (like they are those subscription cards). Justin loves finding places to slip these cards so we get the word out guerrilla-style that “The Hope and the Change” is free to watch on Hulu.com.
I ran out of printer ink and didn’t want to order more so I’ve been printing these out at Kinko’s and then cutting them; I usually run off $100 of them in color and end up with 900 palm cards to pass out each day…but you could print them in black and white too. Justin and I were saving up to go to Washington for the Inauguration but honestly I’d rather spend that on making up more palm cards and spreading the word about Hulu.com and the movie…so we’re driving up to Wisconsin every morning until Monday to get as many of these palm cards out to people in Wisconsin across the Illinois border as possible.
On Tuesday we’re both doing things for the election (with Justin poll watching and me running things here doing a live stream transcript of everything that happens that day), but between now and Monday afternoon we are trying to get as many palm cards out to people as possible.
If you could consider printing off a bunch of sheets, cutting them out, and distributing them where you live (especially church tomorrow) then I think we can do all we can to get as many folks as possible to watch this movie.
CAN YOU HELP SPREAD THE WORD?
What other good places can people leave palm cards on Sunday and Monday?
GREAT MERCIFUL ZEUS: You must read this description of what’s happening on Staten Island…and how angry people are over the marathon
UPDATE: Due to a nationwide outcry, Michael Bloomberg is finally doing what he should have done immediately: as of 430pm CST, the NYC Marathon has been canceled. Now, let’s hope public pressure forces him to provide all the materials that were allocated for the Marathon to the people of New York who need them. Things like the three generators kept in Central Park to power the media tents for the race, all the shoes, clothes, food, water, etc. that were being held in reserve for the spoiled runners…and everything else that the City was hoarding in preparation for the marathon that can now be diverted to people made homeless by Hurricane Sandy.
Will Bloomberg do the right thing and help his people now that the distraction of this race is over?
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Original Post:
Over at EW.com, they have some guy named Theo Rossi writing in; he’s on a show I’ve never heard of that I think is about drugs and criminals (if it had singing and dancing and/or Muppets, I’d know all about it but I think this is a straight guy show on cable) and he’s from Staten Island.
Please read his whole piece on how it’s all reminding him of “The Walking Dead”: no electricity, no water, no heat, no food, no gas. There are 4 hour waits for gas. But the most dangerous part for Democrats is what he says about the marathon:
I’ve been trying to hit every shelter on Staten Island to do what I can, just to make people smile. A lot of people know me and know I’m from here. My flight has been changed six times now. Finally, I got a flight for Sunday. Then, the city decides they are going ahead with the New York City Marathon. The bridges will be closed, so I can’t get to the airport. How are they doing a marathon when most people don’t have power? On top of it, the hotels in Manhattan have been nice enough to put up people who have no homes. They are charging them $200 as opposed to $700 a night. But now they are throwing these people out because they’ve got people from all over the world coming to run the marathon. They are throwing out the survivors! So I call Jet Blue and say I can’t fly Sunday because I can’t get from Staten Island to JFK Airport. And they said ‘Okay Theo.’ They know me know because I’ve been calling them every 15 minutes. They say, ‘Theo, we can get you on a flight Friday.’ I say book it! I call up the car service, and they say, ‘We can’t pick you up, we have no gas.’ All my friends on Staten Island say, ‘How are we going to get you there? We have no gas.’ And the people who do have gas, don’t want to waste it going to JFK. So I’ve got to call and change my flight again. Now I’m leaving Monday. Everybody says if we don’t have gas in our cars by Monday, if the roads aren’t clear by Monday, that’s it … we’re throwing in the towel.
If Michael Bloomberg REALLY insists on this Marathon happening, he will eclipse Ray Nagin of New Orleans as being the stupidest and worst Mayor in the country’s history.
I need to keep repeating this, apparently, because the fear porn mongers are still claiming this storm is good for Barack Obama. Like Hell it is.
Every day, New Yorkers get angrier. While the Ministry of Truth is not reporting on this…word of the devastation is making its way to the public via the entertainment sites.
People know what is going on, and this weekend they are going to ask why in Hell the Democrats who control everything in New York aren’t bringing back order.
“Post-apocalyptic” is not an adjective that benefits Barack Obama in any way just four days before the election.
Read the whole thing, seriously. It’s worth your time.
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PS — Here’s an interesting twist to all this: the selfish Marathon runners are demanding that refugees be thrown out of hotels because the runners had reservations. Some hotels are standing up to the prima donna runners.
I was the head of security at a hotel in Cleveland a decade ago. I don’t know about New York, but in Ohio and the City of Cleveland itself, there were innkeepers’ laws that prohibited us from evicting a guest for anything but nonpayment, destruction of property, violence, or noise complaints from other guests. If a guest didn’t pay, we could change the electronic lock and force them to come down to the front desk…but we were not allowed to remove a guest’s possessions from a room and take then anywhere. If we did, we’d get sued by anyone smart enough to involve a lawyer. At the security seminars I had to attend for my job, I heard stories of hotel’s making stupid mistakes and removing people’s bags…and the guests then claiming that a $5,000 computer was missing and another $1,000 in cash etc. In the end, the hotels were forced to settle because they could not prove that the staff DIDN’T take those valuables while removing the guest’s belongings from rooms.
Innkeepers’ laws are on the books to protect travelers from being kicked out into the cold with nowhere else to go in a strange city. They are especially enforced during nightmare scenarios…such as Hurricane Sandy. All hotels overbook by a certain percentage every night, due to people not showing up for reservations. The later you arrive to check-in, the more likely you are to be told that the hotel is overbooked and you need to go elsewhere. Hotels are required to make other reservations for you and to also pay for your stay somewhere else that night; this is called “walking a guest” to another property, though you don’t literally “walk” over there with the person. It is one of the most stressful situations to deal with for anyone working the front desk, because people scream and yell and even throw things when they arrive at a hotel at 1am or whenever and are told there is no room at the inn.
I remember many instances where a guest kept extending his or her stay and we couldn’t do anything about it. We’d try to persuade them to leave, and we’d charge them a higher rate for staying (which was legal), but we couldn’t remove the person. The police would not help us and in fact would side with the guest because as long as the hotel is being paid then we could not evict them unless they were committing damage or causing noise complaints. If we lied and said someone was doing that, we’d be sued. Hotels do not like being sued.
So, unless the refugees voluntarily leave the hotels I don’t think there is anything the marathon runners can do about it. The hotels will NOT risk the bad PR by booting the refugees out. That’s something a hotel brand would not survive. Forever, that company would be known as the one that threw people who survived a hurricane out into the street just because some marathon runners were coming. A General Manager would have to be out of his mind to approve that. And, frankly, cops will not help evict the refugees. No way in Hell that is happening.
So I just don’t know what Bloomberg is smoking in pushing to hold this marathon as scheduled. If he really goes ahead with this for Sunday, it is going to be all out bedlam.
SHOCKER: Chicago Gay Activist Art Johnston Hosted Man Dressed As Hitler At His 2012 Halloween Party
Chicago gay activist Art Johnston is one of the key funders of Equality Illinois, an organization that frequently maligns Republicans as bigots and revs up Democrats (especially gay Democrats) to vote against conservatives because both Equality Illinois and Johnston himself claim that only Democrats are sensitive to all the members of “our community”. Johnston’s also the main owner of Sidetrack the Video Bar, which is the largest and most famous gay bar in Boystown. Recently, Sidetrack hosted a big party for Cyndi Lauper and the premier of her “Kinky Boots” stage show in Chicago…in addition to other big events like the “Night of a Hundred” drag show that was, incidentally, a big fundraiser for Equality Illinois. So the bar and the organization it helps fund are inextricably connected.
Considering Equality Illinois’ stated mission, it’s strange that Sidetrack time and again makes questionable decisions that seem hypocritical in light of Johnston’s professed mission for “equality” here in Illinois.
On the bar’s official website right now, in the section devoted to its Halloween party, are proudly displayed photos of a friend of Johnston’s dressed up as Adolf Hitler. The photos were taken by one of the bartenders, Archer Coe, and were selected by hand for publication on the bar’s website to commemorate the highlights of the 2012 Sidetrack Halloween party…which included a man dressed up as Adolf Hitler. Not everyone who wore a costume to the party was photographed and put up on the website…but two photos of Johnston’s friend dressed up as Hitler are up there.
Art Johnston, it must be noted, is also a major donor and fundraising bundler for Barack Obama and other Democrats.
Can you IMAGINE what the Left would do if anyone connected to Republican political campaigns in even a tangential way had a friend who dressed up as Adolf Hitler attend his Halloween event at his place of business? And then that person proudly displayed those photos on his website? Great Merciful Zeus, it would be front page news and the Ministry of Truth that is our national media would pillory the candidate because he accepted checks from the guy who hosted Adolf Hitler at his Halloween party.
When gays are this insensitive to Jewish people (or to the memories of the many gays that Adolf Hitler executed in concentration camps alongside the Jews…where gays were branded with pink triangles instead of Stars of David), Minitru looks away because gays are the Democrat Party’s ATM (the GayTM)..and so if gays now think Hitler’s funny or an ideal party guest, then it’s okay for them to do this…but it would be riot-worthy if a Republican did it.
Sidetrack has a long history of hypocrisy like this, and doing things that are the polar opposite of all the stated goals of Equality Illinois. Since Johnston and all of his staff are Democrats, Minitru believes they should be immune to charges of hypocrisy…because Sidetrack does a lot of heavy lifting for Democrats in Chicago. Some of the past incidents that have occurred at the bar include:
* Hosting the premiere of the now-defunct Boystown talk show “Only at Brunch” (that lasted exactly one episode), which featured one cast member mocking Trig Palin for having Down Syndrome; this video was played on all the screens inside Sidetrack with free promotion contributed by Johnston to pack as many people inside to see the video as possible.
* During the 2010 Illinois gubernatorial race between Democrat Pat Quinn and Republican Bill Brady, Sidetrack plastered its windows on Halsted with large signs that read “Brady’s a bigot!”, “Stop Brady!”, and “Bill Brady Hates Gays!”. But during the campaign, the only hatred in evidence was coming from the gay “community” towards Brady (and not the other way around).
* Four days after Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head during an assassination attempt in Tucson, Sidetrack’s co-owner Jose “Pepe” “Pep” Pena (Johnston’s domestic partner) personally played a roughly 12-minute video montage showing images of Governor Sarah Palin and her family being executed with assault rifles in the woods like they were the Romanovs; this clip was followed by a collection of scenes from horror movies showing people being murdered violently until a final image appeared asking Sidetrack patrons, “Wouldn’t it be great if this happened to Sarah Palin?”. That hateful anti-Palin montage ran regularly on the screens after that, because Pena insists “it’s funny and people hate her”.
* On “Comedy Thursdays”, Sidetrack plays (to this day) a clip of an elderly woman being raped by a large dog. As the terrified grandma screams for help, her twisted family members stand by laughing as the massive canine becomes erect, mounts her, and shoves her to the ground to penetrate her. Sidetrack patrons are encouraged to laugh and laugh at this old woman being raped by a dog. Welcome to “Comedy Thursdays!”. Hope you love rape.
* During the 2011 summer season, Sidetrack hosted the ill-fated “Laugh Track Thursdays” live comedy events where local comedians were invited to perform in cabaret style. One of the “comics” was Chicago public school teacher Bradley Thomas Balof (who also works sometimes as a male stripper, nude model, and Sidetrack bartender) whose routine included “jokes” about how stupid his black students were and how difficult they are to teach. These were “jokes” in the line of “Starqueesha is so dumb, she asked what’s the number for 9-1-1″. Hardy, har, har at Sidetrack. It’s widely speculated that Sidetrack got in enough hot water over the racist jokes told during “Laugh Track” events that they were discontinued after August of 2011.
* Christians are mocked relentlessly at Sidetrack. This included Bradley Thomas Balof taking to the stage at various events this summer to rev the crowd up in hatred against Chick-Fil-A (including one where Sidetrack had someone stand there in a yellow chicken costume while patrons were encouraged to scream obscenities at the proxy for the restaurant, like it was a two-minute-hate from 1984). Sidetrack shows nonstop video montages in the bar that depict priests as pedophiles, nuns as either pregnant or sexually insatiable, and Jesus in degrading and compromising positions that are often sexual in nature. Nothing like this would ever be done towards Muslims at Sidetrack. Jews, apparently, get visits by Adolf Hitler there, though.
This goes on all the time.
But the weird thing is that not all gay bars are like this; in Chicago, only Sidetrack does this stuff. At other bars, the owners keep things strictly about having fun, dancing, drinking, and enjoying music. At Sidetrack, hatred is pushed by Johnston and Pena and the Sidetrack staff. This happens over and over again, and Sidetrack never tones it down no matter how many patrons complain. Johnston, who often introduces himself as “Chicago’s Harvey Milk”, long ago soured on running just a bar and instead maintains an active propaganda center for the Left’s talking points in the heart of Boystown.
There’s a place like this in every major city, actually. It’s how Democrats keep gays on the party’s plantation…by coopting big public events and using high profile venues to indoctrinate young gay guys just coming out to hate Christians, mock Jews, make fun of women, and treat Republicans as “the enemy”. If guys want to keep going to Sidetrack and to be part of all the cool events they hold there, then they have to learn that what “gay community leaders” like Johnston want is how they must all behave. This is the Left’s control mechanism for gays…and it’s not just happening in Chicago.
If you’re someone who has a problem with Sidetrack proudly displaying Art Johnston’s friend dressed up as Adolf Hitler for Halloween, please let them know:
Sidetrack the Video Bar
3349 North Halsted
Chicago, IL 60657Phone – 773.477.9189
And why not copy these guys too?
Equality Illinois
3318 N. Halsted St. (New Address)Chicago, IL 60657
tel: 773-477-7173
fax: 773-477-6912
tollfree: 888-434-7888
URGENT NEW YORK GROUND REPORT: Violence to break out this weekend over the Marathon’s diversion of resources
Today while Justin and I were driving to Wisconsin and back to do some canvassing for Romney/Ryan in the morning, I used the time on the road to make calls to a handful of friends I have not yet been able to reach in New York City. All of them live in Manhattan and were spared any direct damage from Hurricane Sandy — but all of them have friends and family in Brooklyn, Staten Island, Long Island, and other areas that were impacted by flooding and wind damage. Most of these people do not know each other…but EVERY CALL WAS THE SAME.
Immediately after we established they were fine and had survived relatively in tact, all of them said a variation of this to me: THERE IS GOING TO BE VIOLENCE THIS WEEKEND. BECAUSE OF THE MARATHON.
The anger in these people’s voices was thick when they talked about “that (insert expletive here) Michael Bloomberg and that (another expletive, this time really colorful) Marathon”. The only thing I can compare this to is one of those episodes of 20/20 where they report on some kind of caged animal attack…and they begin the segment by showing some rube taunting a lion for the delight of roadside tourists…and anyone with sense to them can just SEE that the lion is getting angrier and in moments is going to maul that Bubba. There’s this tension you feel as a viewer, just knowing what is going to happen, but being unable to stop it.
THAT is how my New York contacts report on the mood in the city right now…with the wealthy New Yorkers like Bloomberg completely oblivious that they are taunting an angry lion by going forward with the Marathon.
One of my friends used to date a Port Authority cop and is still friendly with him. She tells me that the cop is enveloped in a sense of pure dread headed into this weekend. This is a cop who worked recovery operations and was on duty at the dumps sifting through rubble after 9/11 looking for body parts to identify…and he says that right now he feels the worst he’s felt since then. He is horrified by the Mayor’s decision to go forward with the Marathon because “people are going to die when the fighting starts over this”. The cop describes New York right now as “a powder keg” and Bloomberg is lightning the fuse by diverting generators, food, water, and other resources to the Marathon.
Anyone with sense about him would postpone this event, or cancel it outright this year. But Bloomberg is pressing ahead with this because Democrats can’t risk political fallout for admitting that New York hasn’t yet recovered from the hurricane…and in doing this, Democrats are actually sealing their own doom because hosting the Marathon will result in more anger and damage to the party than canceling it would have. This is why Democrats should never hold high elected office…they forever make situations worse by trying to cover things up, hide the truth, or score political points.
An ex of mine who lives in the city and is a comic book artist told me his family on Long Island are furious and are now voting for Mitt Romney because they are disgusted with Democrats; this is an ex who wouldn’t speak to me from 2008-2010 because I backed McCain/Palin after the nomination was taken away from Hillary in 2008. He finally admitted I was right about Obama after Obamacare passed, because his dad is a doctor and told him that the mandate and all its 20 myriad taxes would destroy the economy as we know it and ruin medical practice in this country. My ex’s parents have never voted Republican in their lives but are doing so on Tuesday…and he reports that many of his parents’ friends and their families are doing the same. Once again, this is first hand reporting on the ground telling you that Hurricane Sandy did not help Obama…but it actually damaged Democrats immensely, only the Ministry of Truth won’t report on that. ”It’s kind of like the dam hurts with all the flooding and people are letting all their pent-up frustration and anger burst out…and it’s all going towards Obama,” my ex reported. ”And with them going ahead with the Marathon people are saying it’s just because canceling it would hurt Obama, so people are angry. There’s going to be a riot this weekend, I really think there will be”.
It’s ironic, too, because for the longest time the Left has tried to scare conservatives by claiming that blacks would riot on November 6th if Obama is not reelected…and, thus, one of the reasons giving for reelecting him was to keep blacks from rioting (so vote for Obama because otherwise the cities will burn). Democrats are now pushing forward with this idiotic Marathon while people in New York are in need of those resources to meet their basic needs…and not a single person in the party has sense enough to see the explosion of anger this is going to cause.
“It’s going to be bad. It’s going to be Rodney King bad. Just angry people smashing things and killing people because they are so mad that food and water and electricity is being taken for the Marathon but not given to them. I think they’re going to attack the Marathon runners and beat them. If I knew anyone who wanted to run that race, I’d tell them to just not come because they are going to get hurt”, one of my friends from college, a public school teacher in NYC, told me this morning. She believes that throngs of New Yorkers who have no heat, food, water, or electricity (or even homes) are going to descend on the Marathon route and take their anger out on the people running the race and “beat the (expletive) out of them”. She thinks they will also mob the Marathon headquarters “and take what they want” before the race even starts.
For the last two months, the Ministry of Truth has been constantly pushing stories designed to terrify Republicans and cripple them with frost-fingered fear in the lead up to this election. Great Merciful Zeus, it is a divine irony that the people who need to be truly afraid right now are Democrats…because they are playing with dynamite in regards to this Marathon and they are completely ignoring the dangers in going forward with an event that sucks resources from hurricane-affected areas just so the very wealthy can have their massive parade/party throughout the city.
“What you don’t understand is what a nightmare that race is in a normal year. It makes life Hell on us under normal circumstances, especially with all the people form out of town who come to clog up the city. You want to do THAT right NOW when all Hell just broke loose? Are you out of your damn mind?”, another friend said. I sympathize with this because when Chicago hosts big public events life grinds to a halt in the Loop. All summer long, various neighborhoods hold street festivals that disrupt life for whole weekends. A few times a year, Chicago shuts down certain major roads for bicycle races, marathons, 5ks, or whatever. One time, Mayor Daley allowed Michigan Avenue to be shut down for Oprah Winfrey for THREE DAYS (I believe she was being moved from one part of town to possibly the lake, which might have been a more natural habitat for that charybdis).
I think if Hurricane Sandy happened in Chicago, Mayor Daley would have postponed a race that was supposed to be run the very next weekend. He would have had sense to know that people would explode with anger if basic needs weren’t being met but the City diverted resources to a race. Rahm Emanuel, the current Mayor, would probably let the race proceed because he’d be more worried that canceling the race would disappoint people…and then they wouldn’t vote for Obama on Tuesday as a result. It looks like Michael Bloomberg is in the Rahm Emanuel school of thought.
I really hope New Yorkers can keep it under control but I’ll tell you that Chicago was mighty cold and wet today. Justin and I have everything we need, yet I woke up this morning and felt pretty snappy because I do not much like the cold. I had to really control myself to be polite to Justin and he had to restrain himself because he hates driving but we wanted to hit Wisconsin every day to canvass before the election. I can easily see how New Yorkers who are wet, cold, hungry, and living in the dark would be ready to explode with the slightest provocation. I’ve been to New York many times and people there are on the edge of violence on a gorgeous, breezy, bright summer day. So many people in such a tight space puts everyone on edge…and then throw in a hurricane flooding the subways and forcing people to walk two hours over bridges and through damp tunnels to get to work…and you have people who will be furious that a City that can’t get its act together to restore life to normal can take the weekend off to screw around with a race?
There is no way that this ends well…unless someone makes Bloomberg postpone or cancel the Marathon.
“It’s going to get ugly. Real ugly. Please pray that people stay patient and don’t explode”.
For any of you that were afraid Hurricane Sandy would end up helping Barack Obama…I hope you now see that it’s really DEMOCRATS who should be afraid of the damage this storm is going to do to them between now and November 6th.
Middle Class New Yorkers Are Eating Out of Garbage Dumpsters. Do you see why I said it was stupid to believe “Hurricane Sandy would be good for Obama!”
[ H/t Drudge Report for the image that should clearly show all of you that, no, Hurricane Sandy was NOT politically good for Barack Obama and Democrats ]
Honestly, I don’t like calling people stupid…but for the last few days we’ve seen all the usual fear porn mongers on conservative sites frantically claiming that “Hurricane Sandy would be good for Obama!” or that “Because of Hurricane Sandy Obama will win the election!”. The people who are writing this stuff are either stupid…or are they are deliberately lying to their readers just to drive up web traffic and freak people out for fun. A lot of you out there read that stuff on either AceofSpades or HotAir or Breitbart (Andrew Breitbart would truly be ashamed of what happened to his websites and who is writing there now) or wherever and were reduced to quivering puddles by brushes with frost-fingered fear. I have no idea why you believe the fear mongers, but you choose to…and I only hope you see how wrong these people all are.
Please do not allow the fear mongers to keep panicking you by letting them toy with your emotions for their own fun and profit.
I told you from the beginning that Democrats are incompetent and their response to Hurricane Sandy will be inept, as everything the last four years with them in control has been. Barack Obama has no idea what he is doing and most of the team he brought with him to Washington from Chicago are buffoons. They have not done a single thing right in four years, and they were not able to do anything right in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. I told you that by Friday of this week people in the one-party-rule Democrat enclaves affected by the path of Hurricane Sandy would be FURIOUS because the slow-moving and incompetent public sector unions there would not restore order quickly…and conditions would look like those in a horror movie. This is how things will be in New York and New Jersey until the spring, folks…and certainly until after the election next Tuesday.
Today, we learn that well-dressed middle class New Yorkers are EATING OUT OF GARBAGE DUMPSTERS because Democrats have not restored basic services in a city they completely control and a state they control.
Do you understand the ramifications of this?
It’s only been a day or two since Sandy and this is already happening. By next Tuesday, there will be full-on riots in New York over food, water, electricity, heat, and basic shelter. These riots will actually happen, unlike the ones the fear mongers insist will take place when Obama loses. It is not a far step for middle class people to make from eating garbage out of dumpsters to killing each other for food in Manhattan. It has gone all kinds of Escape from New York out there…on Barack Obama’s watch.
Contrary to the fear porn you read by Ace, Allahpundit, Ben Shapiro, and others this is a VERY BAD THING FOR BARACK OBAMA.
Democrats are showing they have no idea how to handle any crisis…and people who heard for the last seven years what a monster George W. Bush was because of Katrina are now scratching their heads and wondering why on Earth Democrats can’t get it together with Sandy.
Seriously, open your eyes and just read the stories that Drudge is flashing today…about the chaos and ineptitude Democrats are manifesting in New York and New Jersey in the storm’s wake.
Then, sit down and think about every single conservative writer or pundit who claimed that “Hurricane Sandy will win Obama the election!”.
If these people scared you with fear porn over this…when you are now clearly seeing that these were just outright lies…then you need to decide if you want to spend the rest of this election believing any of these people and their fear porn anymore. That’s up to you, but I hope you are honest with yourself and you can admit if you were taken in by all the cries of “SHARK! SHARK! GET OUT OF THE WATER!” that had your heart racing and your bodies gasping for air because Ace, Allahpundit, Ben Shapiro, and the others told you to panic…and today you see there was no reason to panic and they had just played you for a fool.
They did this to both drive up their web traffic and also to see how freaked out they could get you…and for a lot of you it worked. Going forward, you need to decide if you’re going to go running for the beach, knocking over old people and small children, the next time the fear porn peddlers shout “SHARK!” in the last days before November 6th.
Stop letting these guys direct emotional terrorism at you and please calm down and think about these stories before they give you heart attacks.
Barack Obama is going to lose. Nothing can save him. The election will not even be close.
And come November 7th, when you see you had no reason to be terrified…I really hope you give all the guys who scared the stuffing out of you for the last two months a piece of your mind so that they are prevented from pulling this stunt on you ever again.
FURTHER READING (h/t Drudge):
* Gas and food shortages to last in New York until after the election
* Fistfights and guns drawn in chaos caused by Democrat inaction in Sandy’s wake
* Troopers forced to guard gas stations
* Red Cross an absolute disgrace
* Leftist elite party and drink champagne while fellow New Yorkers starve
* Power will not be restored to MILLIONS until after November 11th
If you think this is going to cause anyone to vote for Democrats then you are out of your damn mind. And any conservative writer pushing that apocryphal fear porn needs to lose his job and his platform that allows him to scare the bejeebus out of people with stupid lies like this.
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UPDATE: Check this out: CATASTROPHIC damage to NYC subways.
So, my boyfriend Justin is an architect and one of the classes he took in school had something to do with transportation systems and urban planning.
He watched the video that’s embedded in the story above, the one about the catastrophic damage to the subways. Justin says there’s no way they are going to get the subways functioning again FOR A YEAR. “All of that track is going to need to be replaced because the water would have bent it when it rushed through the tunnels. It will not be safe to run trains on that, they’d derail”.
Here in Chicago, there is a “subway” called the “El”, because part of it is Elevated. One of the lines is called the Red Line, and it runs north and south…from way up past Boystown near Evanstown and then down to the depths of the Southside. Sox Stadium is roughly 3/4 or so from the end of the line…and all the track that’s south of Sox Stadium is being replaced next year…with the entire line south of Sox Stadium being shut down FOR A YEAR so it can be fixed.
It “catastrophic damage” doesn’t mean that the New York Subway system will be down for a year, then I don’t know what “catastrophic” means.
None of this will be talked about before the election, but New Yorkers are not stupid. They know the subways flooded and there will be massive damage. None of those trains are coming back into service soon. If they were back running by next summer, I would be surprised.
Just for fun, I had Justin email one of his old professors from school — the one who taught the class on transportation systems — and the guy wouldn’t guess how long it would take to fix but he said that “they will need to replace all of it and it will not be done quickly”.
Factor in the unions that deliberately drag jobs out to last longer so the unions earn more, and New Yorkers will have to adjust to life without subways for a year. I really think that will be true.
Has Anyone Thought To Survey Ohio High Schools To See If They’ve Had Mock Elections? Could be clue to how parents are voting.
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and went to Holy Name High School in Parma Heights (back when 90210-style sideburns were the rage…and I was a Brandon, never a Dylan, in that regard). I remember being in school during the 1992 election and Holy Name conducting a mock election…where we had the option of voting for Bush, Clinton, or Perot back then. I think it took place the week before the actual election because I remember we knew the results a few days before the first Tuesday in November that year. I think the results actually were broken down by grade…and then a total for the whole school (so each grade level was like a state in the electoral college, and then there was a school-wide winner). Perot won every grade level and easily took the 1992 Holy Name High School student election. I think Clinton came in second and Bush was third, but I’m positive Perot won.
This morning my boyfriend Justin and I drove up to Wisconsin to plaster a bunch of my Hulu.com palm cards (for the movie “The Hope and the Change”) in neighborhoods around Kenosha and we eventually came upon a high school, which made me wonder if schools back in Ohio are holding mock elections this year…and if so, who are the kids voting for.
I think this would be an interesting way of getting a handle on who the kids’ parents are voting for too…since while kids are in high school a lot of them repeat what their parents say at home, and they are not yet under the influence of Leftist professors in college. I don’t know how effective the public high school teachers are at indoctrinating the students with Leftist ideas, but when I went to Holy Name the nuns and lay teachers there didn’t intrude their personal beliefs into our education. I never knew anything about what any of my high school teachers thought about life outside of what was in the assigned reading…and I liked it that way.
Has anyone out there thought to call up all the high schools in Ohio and ask if they’ve held mock elections…and if so, who the kids chose for President this year?
Covering all of Ohio might be hard…but if we narrowed it down to Cuyahoga we might be able to do this; Cuyahoga County is the Greater Cleveland area, where I grew up. There’s easily two dozen Catholic high schools alone…and then there are all the public ones. I bet we’d have an interesting idea of who students’ parents are voting for if we could find out who’s winning the student elections in Ohio.
But, the caveat is that Ross Perot won the mock election when I was in school. There was something about his defiance that appealed to students. I was defiant myself because I remember scratching out “Bill” and writing “Hillary” in front of “Clinton” on the little slip I filled out in home room to “vote” back in 1992 (a few years before I was able to legally vote for Clinton in the 1996 election against Bob Dole, who until 2008 had been the worst candidate Republicans ever ran against a Democrat in my lifetime).
This year the GOP has fielded not just the best candidate ever…but a man uniquely suited to get the country back on track. I wonder if the high school kids back in Ohio pick up on that and if it’s reflected in their votes. I’d be very surprised if any residual Obama 2008 hype and Kool-Aid is still floating around that would influence them in any way…and I have a hard time believing that their parents are singing Obama’s praises at home.
The thing about Ohio that a lot of the fear porn peddlers out there don’t understand is that Ohio is probably the most fair state in the country. If you say you are going to do something, Ohioans will generally take you at your word, believe you, and then expect to see the results you promised. Ohioan like taking a chance on someone…and that’s largely to their detriment because they tend to get sold on big dreams. Whether it’s a giant baseball stadium or a Rock n’ Roll Museum or a Monorail or whatever, Ohioans enjoy a good sales pitch and are happy to jump on the bandwagon if they believe some remarkable new thing is going to save the day. But, when that doesn’t work out as promised, Ohioans have no trouble firing someone and finding a better person to do the job. There are no hard or bad feelings in Ohio. They don’t get mad at you, but they will show you the door and be noncommittal on your reference checks. They will wish you well, but intend to never see your face around town again.
This is how Ohio feels about Barack Obama.
I bet it’s showing up in the high school mock elections, if they’re being held.
This is the kind of thing I would have emailed Andrew Brietbart back in the day to see if he could facilitate a round-robin call-around to check on if this was happening.
Do you think someone could mention this to Rush and ask his listeners to help check on this?
If you are in Ohio and have kids in school, can you report in if they’ve had a mock election and if so who won?
Trick or Treat? Is Matt Drudge going to finally out Barack Obama as our “first gay president”?
So, Matt Drudge is having some Halloween fun.
He’s teasing that a sex scandal is going to rock the campaign…
As usual, Drudge has put Obama’s picture up around words that could be taken as innuendo.
Notice the proximity of the word “polling” to the pic of Obama under the sex story tease…polling as in, well, the kind of “polling” Obama enjoyed at Man’s Country Bathhouse in Chicago.
Remember that today is Halloween.
It’s a gay high-drinking day. Most gays who could get off work have been drinking since early in the morning today. Matt Drudge has probably had a few at this point. He could just be playing games and teasing people for fun.
Or, today really could be the day that Barack Obama is outed on Drudge Report for being gay.
I’ll tell you this: it’s not a sex scandal involving Barack Obama and a woman, that’s for damn sure.
No one in their right mind here in Chicago would believe THAT.
Everything you need to know about Barack Obama being gay is HERE.
Oh, yah, and here…
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UPDATE: The Left has been trying to push a story about a Tennessee GOP guy I’d never heard of who had a mistress. This was on HuffPo three days ago…and then all the loony Leftists I monitor on Facebook were going on about this the last two days (scroll down to Sunday October 29th to see them talk about it). This is the only “sex scandal” in the news right now…about some guy named Scott DesJarlais that had apparently two mistresses at once.
But that can’t be what Drudge is pushing because it was all straight people having affairs which is so…YAWN.
Definitely not Halloween fun for Drudge…and who cares about Scott DesJarlais. Man, is that a name that’s hard to spell right (or remember).
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UPDATE 835pm CST: So, yah, Matt Drudge knows folks are home with not much on tee-vee and they’re waiting for Trick or Treaters so he’s having fun.
He just dropped another clue into your goody bag, like a piece of candy.
He’s saying it involves a powerful Senator (but does not say if it’s a current Senator).
If it’s a gay scandal, the only two gay Senators currently serving are Lindsay Graham and Mark Kirk. Perhaps Democrats, so desperate to try anything in this election, are going to out one of them to try to dampen conservative spirit before the election? That makes no sense because I can’t see Graham or Kirk involved in anything weird or illegal like Larry Craig or Mark Foley or the like.
There’s no way Romney is behind leaking any sex scandal because that’s a Democrat play and Romney’s run a commendable and clean campaign. He wouldn’t go there.
And why would Democrats burn Graham or Kirk now when they can just keep blackmailing them to do what Democrats want here and there for the rest of their time in the Senate?
Democrats only out the gay Republicans when they have some big dirt on them…like Craig or Foley. Graham is going to be primaried in the next election and will probably lose, so maybe they figure they need to out him now and use the card while they can. Maybe he is into stranger things than anyone could believe?
He seems like a nice man so that would really surprise me. I’d feel bad for him, truly…but at the same time I do wish all the gay Republicans would just come out. Aaron Schock, the Peoria Congressman who could be the next Senator here in Illinois if he would just come out, keeps promising to do so “after the next election”…but then never does. I’m telling you…the guy would beat Dick Durbin in 2014 if he’d just come out, because Democrats would not know how to run against a gym-buff gay Republican in Illinois. But Schock’s still in the closet and looks to be staying there.
If the scandal is a gay one I can’t think of anyone else it would be about besides Graham or Kirk because Drudge limited it to Senators.
There are a lot of gay former Republican Senators. Trent Lott, that one guy from Tennessee Bill-something that was rumored to have messed around with Obama (he was the Senator who was also a doctor).
Guesses?
I bet Drudge will give us another candy-clue in a half hour or so.
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UPDATE 900pm CST — I hope you see what Matt Drudge has done. He should be thanked.
All the fear and anxiety people had earlier from those yelling “SHARK!” and scaring people with fear porn (about Hurricane Sandy and Chris Christie) have been erased by people enjoying the speculation about which Senator was having sex with whom and where.
Bravo, Matt Drudge!
The best remedy for terror is clearly a guessing game about a sex scandal.
Since Diane Feinstein’s picture is right near the sex scandal story and she is a powerful Senator, people are guessing the scandal is about her…but Michael Bloomberg’s picture is also in the row. I doubt Bloomberg and Feinstein are having sex. But maybe it’s about a New York Senator, such as Chuck Schumer. Bloomberg is the clue to it being New York, perhaps.
It’s like a fun game of clue:
Is it Bob Casey in the Caribbean with hookers or…
Amy Klobuchar in Peoria with some little people or…
Barbara Boxer in a Wendy’s parking lot with the guy who played Kramer on “Seinfeld” or…
we could go on all night.
– Waiting for the next drop of candy clues from Drudge in our trick-or-treat bags –
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UPDATE 915pm CST: Is it John Kerry and the underaged girls at drinking parties again?
This is so old, because he’s been doing this for years…just Google “John Kerry party” and hit IMAGES. Tons of pics of him drinking with underaged kids at all sorts of parties. While Kerry is powerful as the Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, he is not up for reelection this year so a scandal could not hit his campaign right now.
I will however run the embarrassing photo of the man again because he is a creep who, when I lived in Pittsburgh during the 2004 campaign, people would say “smells like farts”.
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UPDATE: 1030pm CST — DailyKos is saying it is Mendendez in Jersey. Something about prostitutes.
It’s being called a “David Vitter-type” scandal.
And also people are saying that folks in Jersey won’t care if he hires prostitutes.
Have you seen the man?
That’s probably the only way he gets any dates and everyone knows it.
It’s time to start yelling SHARK! at fear porn peddlers the way Michelle Malkin screams SQUIRREL! at lefties who push distraction stories
It’s Halloween night and I’m getting ready with Justin to go with my friend Althea and her kids trick-or-treating and do some other Halloween rounds in Boystown after that. I didn’t dress up this year but am out checking out other people’s costumes and seeing if I can spot any election trends. So far, I’ve seen nothing political all day here in Chicago. Lots of generic, homemade efforts that look like no one really had a lot of disposable income to go all out. It’s a pretty low-key, Great Recession Halloween here in Chicago.
I wanted to say a few things before I head out for the night though, and it’s chiefly to ask you what sort of person you want to be in life.
Do you want to be a sane person…or do you want to be a perpetual victim of emotional terrorists?
Every day between now and the election the fear porn peddlers will be out in force, coming up with some crazy new angle to drive web traffic to their sites. Erik Erickson is making A LOT OF MONEY scaring the bejeebus out of people today. He’s been working Twitter hard, from what I hear, peddling the apocryphal yarn that “Hurricane Sandy has won the election for Obama!” and “Chris Christie’s going to help Obama win!”. I’ve been hard on Erik before today, but honestly, after what he’s out there doing right now he really needs to be tarred and feathered and run out of town. What he’s doing is reprehensible…and his motive is pure PROFIT. It’s ad sales folks, and also whatever CNN is paying him to do this. I’ve said before that there needs to be serious professional consequences for anyone who is deliberately out there saying things they know not to be true…but saying it anyway because they just want to scare the daylights out of Romney voters so that their sites get a lot of hits today…and tomorrow…and all the days before November 6th.
These guys are all counting on all of you being so euphoric when Romney wins that you will completely forget who drove you up on ledges for the last few months.
I really wish I could name names on this one, but I’d burn my source and I can’t do that to him/her…but I have a close friend who writes at another conservative site as a contributor. I will say it’s someone who knows guys like Erikson and also people at HotAir and some in the Breitbart crew. My friend says there is a loose group of conservative writers who have a little club that’s actually quite similar to the “Journolist” gang that conservatives widely mock. The conservative version of this is not about coordinating story lines, but about getting ahead in the political pundit business…since everyone in the loose group wants to write and sell books, get published, make money, etc. Which is great. What’s NOT so great is how much emphasis these guys (and they are mostly guys) put on web traffic to their sites. The way they compare their numbers and Alexa rankings reminds me of how sophomores in high school would be measuring each other up in the showers after gym class. It’s pretty juvenile…and not the least bit appealing to me.
I am telling you this in as clear a way as I can: MOST, if not all, of these guys LAUGH AT READERS who freak out over every fear porn story that’s posted. They MOCK you for being so predictable. These guys purposefully try to start a new meme every day to one up each other…and today’s meme was “Chris Christie is deliberately trying to ruin the election!”. Then another guy in the group will try to one-up it, or just keep it going, and at the end of the day when these guys IM each other or Skype or whatever…they are LAUGHING AT YOU for falling for it.
These guys call those who race around crying and bemoaning doom “chicken littles”…and all the hits the “chicken littles” bring to sites that peddle fear porn is called “feathering”. ”Nice feathering, bro”, one of these guys will say to another after he worked conservatives up in a lather that day. ”Yah, we feathered 200k in hits today over that. NICE. The Christie stuff was gold today. What are we going to do tomorrow? We’ll think of something”.
I really need you to think honestly and ask yourself if you are being played and taken advantage of like this. If so, you need to decide if this is the sort of person you want to be.
I have a great friend named Cassie who is an alcoholic. She’s a gorgeous woman, is smart and funny, but she can’t handle booze. Booze almost killed her last year when she’d get so drunk she’d forget she couldn’t drive and it was only by the grace of God that she never hurt anyone, including herself. Cassie cannot touch any kind of alcohol and though she was a great bartender she had to leave the business (finally!) earlier this year because she kept falling back into temptation whenever she’d be around booze. She tried just not drinking. She tried going to AA. But working in a bar was too much for her so she needed to stop because she didn’t want to be a drunk anymore. And now she works at Target and makes much less than she ever did before, but she’s rebuilding her life without alcohol. I quit drinking in support of my friend and beer and wine and any other kind of booze is not a part of my life anymore and I don’t miss it. I drink only diet Coke in a bar if I go to one (like tonight for Halloween) and I am never going to drink again because I just don’t want that negativity in my world.
I think some of you need to treat fear porn like booze to an alcoholic…because some of you have severe control issues with this stuff. I am saying this out of love, the way I told Cassie she was ruining her life with booze. Some of you are fraying your nerves and driving people in your lives crazy by having panic attacks every day that are initiated by guys like Erik Erickson who are playing you.
Erik Erickson is deliberately SCARING you because he is an emotional terrorist. They guy gets paid by CNN to do this…and he gets a nice salary off his site RedState.com that collects big ad sales bucks based on the number of people attracted there by fear porn. Erik is a bartender who deliberately over-serves people who’ve clearly had too much and shouldn’t be drinking…and he serves minors and people he knows should be in AA…and then he hands people the keys to cars so they can metaphorically drive drunk and maim and/or destroy the lives of others. Erik does this gleefully and with reckless abandon because Erik makes a lot of money scaring you.
It’s a shame that more of you don’t see it, because I think it’s damn near criminal what he does to people’s emotions.
And let’s be real…many of you are in a very raw emotional state right now. After watching Obama decimate our country for four years, you are terrified for your livelihood and for the futures of your children. You are in a fragile emotional state…and guys like Erik Erickson…or Allahpundit at HotAir…or Ben Shapiro at Breitbart see this and they take advantage of you because they want to get ahead in the business and they know that fear porn equals big web traffic which means career advancement for them.
They don’t care about what this does to you.
They don’t care that everything they are saying will be proved wrong on November 6th.
They’re counting on you being so euphoric after Romney’s win that you’ll forget how terrified you were in the week before the election. And they know that you’ll not do anything to any of them November 7th and they’ll be able to pull this garbage in the future, too.
I pick on Erik, Allahpundit, Ben Shapiro and (sometimes) Ace at Ace of Spades because they are the worst offenders when it comes to fear porn that I see every day. I monitor RedState, HotAir, Breitbart, and AceofSpades and enjoy 90% of what I find there (less at RedState, which is about 60% enjoyable)…but man, these sites really must be desperate for cash to push the fear porn so hard every day. There are a lot of other supposedly conservative writers who pull this too…and a lot of pundits on tee-vee and radio.
Really, anyone who wants to get ahead in the business of political writing and aspires to have a lucrative career doing this pushes fear porn to grab your attention and absolutely terrify you…because they know that if you are scared you will keep rushing back for updates until the new fear porn is ready to suck you in. Michelle Malkin calls this shouting “Squirrel!” when the Left invents some new distraction to take people’s minds off something that’s bad for Obama; I call it yelling “Shark!” when someone in conservative ranks pushes a new piece of fear porn to grab your attention and force you to repeatedly come back to his site so you and everyone you know can drive up his web traffic.
If a writer has nothing interesting or thoughtful to say, he’ll just dash off a quick “SHARK!” post and scare the stuffing out of you…because he can, and because he knows that the “SHARK!” post will get more hits than anything else he writes that whole WEEK.
These guys aren’t going to stop doing this.
They make TOO MUCH MONEY off scaring you.
The only way this changes is if YOU change.
From now on, when these guys push fear porn…you yell SHARK!
Call them out.
Do it just like Michelle Malkin does to the Left. She shouts “Squirrel!” at the lefties when they post distractions…and you need to start shouting “Shark!” at any conservative writer who is deliberately trying to scare vulnerable and emotionally raw people for fun and profit.
I am tired of them doing this and getting away with it.
There are too many nice moms who come home from work and are frazzled because they read Erik Erickson pushing fear on Twitter to make a quick buck. There are too many grandmas who are scared for the future of their grandkids and don’t need to go to bed terrified because Allahpundit or Ace or Ben Shapiro are regurgitating the Left’s talking points and presenting them to conservative readers as “SHARK!” sightings. There are too many dads or cool straight guys in general out there who are reduced to puddles because they can’t imagine an America that actually chooses four more years of Barack Obama.
Well, I am one gay guy in Chicago who is sick of my friends out there, even those I’ve never met, being emotionally terrorized every day by people who claim to be on OUR SIDE. I am sick of it so I am doing something about it and I am yelling SHARK! at these clowns every time they push fear porn…and I am going to openly talk about their ad sales and the not-coincidental fact that these guys are using SHARK! sightings to drive up their web traffic to make more money off their sites.
I am tired of good people falling for this and being drained mentally by emotional terrorists who know what they are doing and subject fellow conservatives to it anyway…and then laugh about it in their little Skype groups.
So as of 715pm CST on Halloween, I am going to put a stop to this once and for all and I am declaring all-out-war on the fear porn peddlers.
If they think sharks are so scary…wait ’till they get a load of a gay guy who’s sick of his friends being tortured every day.
It. Is. On.
Tempers Already Flaring in New Jersey Due to Slow-as-Snails Union Response to Disaster
I thought it would honestly take until Friday for people to become angry over the slow-as-snails public sector unions’ response to the disaster in New York and New Jersey, because I believed people would at least give the unions a day or two before becoming either aware-of or angry-at their incompetence. But, just a day or so after the storm, people in New Jersey are mad that the highly-paid but seldom-motivated unions that control city public workers all over the state are being lackadaisical when homes are still underwater and there’s no electricity in large swaths of the NYC metro area. The unions, as usual, are acting like they hadn’t even heard there was a disaster that happened.
This morning on the train I was reading USA Today over some woman’s shoulder and she (rudely) turned the page before I could finish the story, but from what I read there’s something like $15 billion in damage caused by the storm that’s uninsured. The total damage is around $30 billion, but only half of those affected had insurance…and even that’s deceptive because about 80% of the claims for those who DO have insurance will be denied because “flooding from creeks or bodies of seawater” is not covered in home owners’ insurance (only wind damage is). Flooding is covered by some kind of special government insurance that a lot of people didn’t know about. AND of things that were insured for wind damage there’s a 15% deductible for anything caused by a hurricane, since that’s considered a special kind of wind.
There are going to be so many angry people in New York and New Jersey this week. Man, they will be ticked off. Sure doesn’t put them in mind to vote Democrat at the polls next Tuesday, since they will be greeted only with incompetence and rudeness if they try calling any government agency to help them with their insurance problems. The Obama Regime is still telling people without power or cell service to go online and ask the Internet for help. Hope! Change! Geniuses!
My ex-boyfriend Harvey was injured at his place of work about seven years ago now, when we were together. It was clearly a workers’ compensation case, since the injury happened while he was in his assigned work area, using an assigned work machine the way he was trained. He was knocked unconscious, suffered a head injury, and was rushed to the most expensive hospital in Chicago by his immediate supervisor (who made all the decisions for him while he was unconscious). By the time he woke up many hours later, Harvey had already sustained hospital bills of about $30,000 from various tests and scans they had run. To this day I think Northwestern Memorial decided to test all of its CT and MRI scanning machines on him and figured, “He’s unconscious…how can he complain? Let’s see how high we can run up this bill before anyone comes to claim him!”.
Liberty Mutual was the insurance company that represented the place where Harvey worked. They denied payment of all his medical bills. Literally, the day after we submitted them, we got a denial letter. There was no way this company could have even reviewed the bills before denying them. It was clearly Liberty Mutual’s policy to just deny all claims when they came in and hope that people give up. I don’t know who these people ARE who just give up and think, “Oh, I wasn’t using that spare $30,000 for anything. Sure, I guess since you say you won’t pay the bill then maybe I should just go away now”. Harvey freaked out and thought he’d be a slave to Northwestern for the rest of his life, never being able to pay off this bill. Harvey’s mother (who was a nightmare creature from a horror movie) kept telling him that I’d never get Liberty Mutual to pay the bills, even though I knew I’d win (but it would take me a few months). The only time in my life I felt I had a nemesis was when I had to deal with Harvey’s mother; she actually hated me so much that she was rooting for Liberty Mutual to win just so I would be wrong and she could say “Toldja so!” to me. Justin’s mom CarolAnne may be a challenge some time, but she’s a sweet woman who is nobody’s nemesis. Harvey’s mother was probably the inspiration for Skeletor.
Well, I had to write a letter a day to fight Liberty Mutual’s refusal to pay Harvey’s bills…and every day I would CC someone new at the company. I started writing first to the CEO, then added the CFO, then the COO, and soon I exhausted the C-suite. Then I started also copying Vice Presidents…then middle-managers…and then just any random person I could find in the company’s online directory, whether they had anything to do with medical bills or not. I copied local news people, Senators, Harvey’s Congresscritter, the Governor, etc. I think the whole thing ended up costing us, easily, $800 or so in printer ink, paper, envelopes, and stamps. I kept track of everything we spent fighting their willful and capricious denial of his claim and ultimately they not only paid the bills but ended up awarding Harvey a $2,500 settlement to cover our correspondence costs and my time for having to write to them EVERY DAY. I remember there were 113 people copied on these letters by the time I wrote our last one. I almost didn’t know what to do with myself when they finally agreed to pay all his bills. This is many years before HillBuzz.org existed, so all the time I spend on this site every day is what I spent on fighting Liberty Mutual back then.
It took about 3 months or so to get this all resolved. Harvey’s mother seemed disappointed to learn her son would no longer have $30,000 in medical bills hanging over his head AND that he got a settlement from Liberty Mutual for them being so arbitrary and capricious in the whole process. They really did have a policy of just denying things for the sake of denying them, hoping people would give up. Harvey and I didn’t have the best of breakups, but the last time we saw each other before he moved out he said to me, “I’ll always be grateful for all the letters you wrote and for making people at Liberty Mutual cry. You also stood up to my mother like nobody ever has before, which was kind of fun to watch”.
I thought of all this today on the train because Liberty Mutual was listed as one of the major insurers in the New York and New Jersey area…and I can’t imagine this company is going to be any more prudent with those Hurricane Sandy claims than they were with a cut-and-dry workers’ compensation case here in Illinois seven years ago. Liberty Mutual is the very embodiment of “penny wise, pound foolish” and I honestly bet they are going to pull the old DENY, DENY, DENY and make life a living Hell for everyone who lost everything to flood or hurricane winds…and even FIRE in some cases. It’s just not going to be pretty and my heart goes out to all of these people who are going to be on the receiving end of this company’s arbitrary and capricious denials. If anyone affected needs tips writing letters to just about everyone who works at Liberty Mutual until they get their claims resolved, you know where to find me. It would be almost nostalgic for me to have a rematch with these awful people.
All of this is important because you need to understand that those who are on tee-vee today claiming that Hurricane Sandy helps Obama are out of their minds crazy. People are already getting angry about the slow-moving union workers who are taking their sweet time getting life back to normal. Next, people are going to be angry that companies like Liberty Mutual are deliberately screwing with them or arbitrarily and capriciously denying their claims (and hoping they just go away). Next, voters are going to be angry that the Democrats aren’t doing anything to either speed up the restoration of order or to make the insurance companies pay on the policies.
If you’ve ever dealt with City services on anything…or have ever had to fight an insurance company like Liberty Mutual that arbitrarily and capriciously denies a claim…then you’ll understand why I insist that Hurricane Sandy is the worst possible thing that could have happened to Democrats this week, since Democrats OWN almost all of the areas affected by the storm with near one-party rule.
There is no one else for affected voters to be angry at but Democrats.
No way on Earth that is good for Obama.
