Detroit is Demolishing Houses

From CNN:

One third of Detroit's neighborhoods are empty and the city has a plan to level them, up to 10,000 homes. But that will mean some folks will have to vacate perfectly good homes.

Click the link to watch the short video.

Detroit is amping up their demolition plan utilizing a 20 million dollar federal grant in neighborhood stabilization funds. The same grant for which Youngstown applied and was rejected. It's a look at what could have been.

More here as well.

Pittsburgh Comicon 2010- Geeky Fun in the Rust Belt

The Pittsburgh Comicon took place last weekend and as usual, it was a blast. People gathered from far and wide to meet comic writers and artists, meet each other and grab some graphic novels and comics at a good price. The show organizers do a great job of providing a mix of guests from Silver Age all-stars, to today's top talent and indy publishers on their way up. It's fun to take a few minutes and speak with everyone in this sort of atmosphere. Writers will give you tips and artists will do commissions. I managed to get an original Spectre sketch from Tom Mandrake:


The venue for the show is the newly built Monroeville Convention Center. It's a very nice facility offering plenty of room, good lighting and nice concessions. The show is a little over an hour away and worth it for the kids even if you don't like comics.

We attended Sunday, which is family day, so there was free admission for the kids, sci-fi crafts, drawing classes and a costume contest. Cosplay is big at conventions. People of all ages take the opportunity to dress up as comic and movie characters. It's readily apparent that some people take a great deal of time to put their costumes together. We took a bunch of pictures:

Some of the costume contest contestants

One of the X-Men

Zombie Maddox: Reanimated to replace Roethlisberger during the suspension (his joke)

Harleyquinns

The Hellfire Club

Scarlet Witch

A Family of Fett

Costume Contest Judge Firestar

Iron Man

Anderson Cooper Kicks Butt on a Birther

Anderson Cooper interviews Arizona lawmaker Cecil Ash about his attempt to pass a ridiculous law requiring future Federal office candidates to show proof of birth. Cooper spends eight minutes destroying the myth that President Obama wasn't born in Hawaii and asking Mr. Ash why a leader, like himself, wouldn't rebut ridiculous charges that the president was born here rather than propagate the hype.

This discussion is why CNN is seen as more objective than Fox, which has never done an interview like this despite having the same facts or MSNBC which would have had Keith Olbermann conduct the interview in a manner that would have been seen as highly partisan.

Ain't Nothin' Wrong with a Snake Rodeo

Alabama is well outside the rustbelt but this article recounting environmentalists efforts to stop a snake rodeo in Opp, Alabama caught my attention. Basically a rodeo occurs when the bravest men alive, snake hunters, go into the woods around Opp and haul out a hundred or so Eastern diamondback rattlesnakes. They take the snakes to a festival in town, show them off and then eat them and make wallets and other trinkets out of them.

There are environmentalists who would like the practice to stop. These people are obviously operating at less than full mental capacity so we'll stop talking about them and their wacko position right now. I get the whole 'circle of life' thing but as a liberal who wouldn't harm a fly I have no problem with rounding up all the venomous things that slither and making boots out of them.

Ireland doesn't have any snakes and look how well that country gets along. You don't see the Irish clamoring for ill tempered reptiles with sharp fangs. No, they've learned to live without and life goes along nicely on the Emerald Isle.

As far as I'm concerned the hunters of Opp, Alabama and the other two dozen cities that hold these rodeos are doing the Lord's work. We should let them heed their calling.

How Sarah Palin Misinterprets the Boston Tea Party

Here's a fascinating article from Slate on how Sarah Palin seems to be advocating the British side of the Boston Tea Party in her recent speeches. As her lunacy rises to Michelle Bachmann levels, I find myself exulting in the freedoms granted by the First Amendment. Every time the former Alaskan governor speaks she provides thoughtful political scholars with ample evidence that lots of people get their news from headlines and four second sound bites rather than reading articles that may take ten whole minutes (gasp!) to digest.

Sarah Palin thinks Barack Obama is a wimp. She's been going around to Tea Party
rallies, invoking the spirit of revolutionary Boston and castigating Obama for
failing to exalt American power and punish our adversaries. She seems blissfully
unaware that the imperial arrogance she's preaching isn't how the American
founders behaved. It's how the British behaved, and why they lost. Palin
represents everything the original Tea Party was against.

Mrs. Palin is beginning to show the limitations of an education that took four schools to complete a bachelor's degree. Her gee whiz, folksy common sense is going to let her down as she takes the stage to discuss foreign relations issues and domestic policies with people who learned to think critically in college. A fine example of this is her continuing harping on president Obama's statement regarding America as a super power. From the article:

On Friday, she lit into Obama for saying that America is a superpower "whether
we like it or not." On her Facebook page, she asked, "Mr. President, is a strong America
a problem?" She accused Obama of being "more comfortable with an American
military that isn't quite so dominant"

If she is going to continue to equate military might with the strength of America then she will continue to reveal herself as someone who really has no understanding of what makes this country great. If she is going to continue to take statements out of context then she will reveal herself to be someone who is more comfortable taking the easy shots than doing the hard work of formulating a real argument. If she decides to run in 2012 she will be in real trouble with this strategy. Her very own Republicans will eat her alive in the debates. Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich will push her out of the campaign before she ever has a chance to face the President.

Chuck Schumer's Luggage Fight isn't Helping

Some airlines are talking about charging passengers for bringing a carry on bag onto planes. New York Senator Charles Schumer wants to pass legislation prohibiting such charges.

The senator should let the market deal with this nonsense and get on message. Right now, every Democratic legislator should be speaking about improving the economy and doing what they can to create jobs. There is no other issue right now and if Democrats waste their time messing around with luggage charges they'll be unpleasantly surprised in November.

Sent from the BlackBerry® of Michael Prelee.

A Note to City Hall

YSU is offering a class titled "Writing Successful Grants and Proposals". Level 2 starts on April 15th and the 7 hour course is a steal at 189 bucks. Mayor Williams could afford to send two folks at that price.
Sent from the BlackBerry® of Michael Prelee.

Newt Gingrich is Testing the Waters for 2012

Fox and CNN have stories about Newt Gingrich testing the water for a presidential run in 2012. To his credit, the Republican field is wide open and if he can position himself to fill a leadership vacuum in the mid-term elections this November he'll start to get some positive buzz. It looks like he wants to capture a little of that 1994 magic and see if he can lead another Republican Revolution, upsetting Obama's apple cart the same way he did Bill Clinton's.



It could work for him. If he spends 2010 pushing a mixture of populist opinions, conservative values and hammers President Obama on every policy initiative he could start to build up grass roots support. Newt's no dummy. He can do professorial (although not as well as the president) and he has the political wiles about him to zero in on what Tea Party supporters are upset about so he can play right to them.



On the other hand, people remember Gingrich as the guy who let government shutdown without a budget, who had difficulty compromising legislatively and as the leader who put party above effective governing.



His current criticism of the president feels stale in some respects already. He wants to repeal health care reform but once people get used to insurance companies not being allowed to reject them for pre-existing conditions it's going to be hard to scare up votes. No legislator is going to want to be seen as the person fighting for the right of insurance companies to say your uncle with MS can't have coverage. As the outsider it's easy for the former Speaker of the House to ask Republican candidates to take a pledge to repeal this bill. As candidates they won't want to put themselves in that position.



Mr. Gingrich faults President Obama for being 'radical', as if it's a bad thing for a leader to want to shake things up. In his three step plan he says Republicans should refuse to fund any objectionable Obama legislation. Well, they consider everything objectionable so this nasty gridlock we've seen over the past year will continue. Is that really good for the country?



The biggest hurdle to Mr. Gingrich's candidacy is going to be the Republicans themselves. Everyone remembers that the recession started on President Bush's watch. Real wages didn't increase over the course of his two terms. People will remember that as conservatives, the Congress from 2001-2007 cut taxes, authorized two wars, didn't put the war costs on the budget and increased entitlement spending. Many of these legislators will still be in office in 2012. Why do we believe they would act any differently under a President Gingrich?



These are high hurdles for Mr. Gingrich to overcome. If President Obama continues to pass legislation that is seen as good policy for Americans and the Republicans continue to be the party of no, only one party is going to have accomplishments to run on in 2012.

Home Depot Lost a Sale

Boardman Home Depot lost a sale today. We went in to look at palyset kits and found one we liked. Stood in the aisle for ten minutes and no one asked if we needed help.

We went to the service desk and explained we wanted to write up the playset and arrange delivery. They made a phone call to a sales associate and told us to walk back to the saw (?) and find the guy.

All so we could pay them 1300 bucks.

We took a walk and kept our money. Maybe the HD in Hermitage will be willing to help us without sending us on a hike all over the store.
Sent from the BlackBerry® of Michael Prelee.