Day: September 27, 2009

Some do not come running

Chicagoans for Rio! is the Fox-Chicago Channel 12 WFLD-TV’s execrable, damnable minute and four seconds that — heavens to Betsy! — portrays a web site that argues against and provides testimonials against Chicago 2016 Olympics. 

Horrors! Disloyal! Woefully outside the box! Clearly a case of The Enemy of the People arising in our midst.

Just so you can judge for yourself how horrible and disloyal, the site is Chicagoans for Rio 2016, which says

It would be exciting to host the Olympics here in Chicago.  But you know what be even better?  Rio de Janeiro.  Just let Rio host the 2016 Olympics.  We don’t mind.  Honest.

Second City vs. Marvelous City.  Go marvelous!

And for a capsule commentary that sums the Rio First concept, look to Larry Horist’s letter in Sun-Times:

First and foremost, all those businesslike economic projections flowing out of City Hall and the Chicago boosters are fabrications, theories. . . .  Should we get the Olympics, the costs will be higher than projected and the income lower. The promised ancillary benefits will never materialize. The [deleterious] impact on the working-class taxpayer will be significant.

. . . . [V]irtually every independent accounting authority says the city’s projections are nothing but hype. Even the promised insurance policy that is supposed to protect the taxpayers is full of holes — billions of dollars in costs will come out of Chicago workers’ paychecks. Our hard-earned money will be redistributed to the rich and powerful friends of City Hall.

In the twisted irony of Chicago politics, those who will scoop up millions of dollars in windfall profits will have the best accommodations, the best seats, the best parties. The working-stiff footing the bill will watch the hometown Olympics on television, find it impossible to get into a restaurant, stand in long lines for entertainment venues and have to make their way to work in super congestion. I say: Go! Go! Rio! [Italics added]

Oh, and by the bye and FYI, Drudge has it that the Chicago Olympic Committee said don’t run that minute and four seconds clip, because

its broadcast “would harm Chicago’s chances” to be awarded the games.

The station’s news director ordered staff to hold fire after the report aired once last Thursday morning, claims a source.

The committee is right: the Go Rio movement would hurt their project.

 

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Mysterious zoning

An oracular explanation is sought at Chicago’s long-overdue Department of Zoning Oversight Fellowship Forum for a favorable outcome at City Hall.  First, PDB channels keys:

If you lose your keys, you might put yourself in their place and ask, where would I be?  Then you might be able to find your keys through a sequential path of logic, or you might just stumble across them by dumb luck.  Both result in a found set of keys, but only one path demonstrates that something is at work here beyond your understanding, a higher order.

Fair enough.  As for the long-sought favorable outcome in which the zoning administrators gave approval for three (3) sets of drawings, leaving the architect with incomplete “cosmic understanding” of what happened:

Since there appears to be no sequence of logic here, it fits that Zoning exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity.  Some might call it divine.

He thanks “the oracle,” likening the challenge to “trying to take the white out of rice.”

Always on Sunday: In the liberal park with Clarence

I appreciate Chi Trib’s Clarence Page because he tells me how libs are reacting to this or that issue of the day, like the recent guerilla journalism practiced in l’affair ACORN.

This catching of ACORN people in the act was done by “pranksters,” he says. Conservative objections to ACORN demonstrate an “obsession.” Fox News’s Glenn Beck becomes “deranged” at the mention of it, as in his anti-newspaper crusade: “Pick up the phone” and call one to complain, urged Beck.

All in all, the video prank became an “embarrassment [that] sends to the world the worst possible picture of low-income Americans, the very people whom ACORN is supposed to help.” (No fair!) It “spurred Washington’s usually sluggish funding gears to spin into warp drive,” says Page, stretching metaphorical possibilities. How about, It turned off the spigot?

Page alludes to ACORN’s voter-registration fraudulency, finding consolation in a claimed lack of voting by Mickey Mouse and others. He notes Obama’s legal pleading for ACORN in a motor-voter case in 1995 but says nothing of his teaching ACORN people how to do things the Alinsky way.

Neither does he say anything about ACORN’s Alinsky-style picketing and muscling of bankers in its push to give out mortages to people who later defaulted and helped the real estate market sputter and slow to a crawl. Nor of Obama’s recent professing ignorance of ACORN’s prolific funding by the feds over many years. Nor of Obama’s presidential campaign’s hiring ACORN for millions within the last two years.

But one does not read Page for that sort of information. One reads him to catch the latest on what libs are saying, and one should not complain but be thankful for what one gets when he opens up his Tribune op-ed page on any given Sunday.

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Instant response: Friendly challenge from Rick in Ann Arbor:

Clarence Page ought to check with his personal psychoanalyst, just to make sure that his parole from the Mental Hospital is still good.  . . .  HOw can he possibly judge that my objection to ACORN is an obsession ???  Beside being of dubious intellectual talent, is he also a Board Certified Psychiatrist ??

Not that I know of.

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