Bush Downtown - Nuts on Display

c Flying Debris
Chicago Police in front of the Monadnock Building and the Union League Club of Chicago (center) while Bush is inside of the Union League.

c Flying Debris
Oh yeh, and he's a Cub fan too. Give me a break, I think that we can invoke Godwin's Law on this guy.

c Flying Debris
One Million. I guess that would be the once notorious "new math".

Well I decided to take the State Sreet Subway line (Red Line) this afternoon rather than the Ravenswood Elevated line (Brown Line) so I walked into a protest right down the street! President Bush was at the Union League Club on Jackson Blvd. talking about the economy, No Child Left Behind and the 2016 Olympics. Well as you can see from the above photos, a few nuts have Mondays off, or as former Chicago Cub manager Lee Elia once said about the fans at Wrigley Field (see middle photo) "(e)ighty-five percent of the f*ckin' world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here!"

Thanks to Dr. Sanity for inclusion in her Carnival of Insanities again this week. Go read her blog!

It's Chicago!

I have yet to write about this issue but Chicago has entered the competition to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. The United States Olympic Committee has chosen Chicago over Los Angeles as the US entrant for consideration by the International Olympic Committee to host the games. I am not surprised by the choice, my pro-Chicago bias' aside we offer a city that is well suited for the host role. The Games would be centered on the lakefront, a beautifully scenic area. Most venues, planned and established, are already accessible by public transportation. Chicago has also been a convention destination for decades and is well suited to host tens of thousands of people for a few weeks.

The man behind the Chicago push has been Pat Ryan, the founder and Executive Chairman of AON Insurance, a family friend and a very impressive man. Pat Ryan is the type of person who can pull off something as complex and demanding as an Olympics. Mr. Ryan was previously mentioned by Flying Debris here. Watching video of the Washington DC presentation made me feel bad that my late father is not here to see this; he loved his hometown of Chicago and he would've been very proud to see his college friend (Notre Dame) Pat Ryan and his old friend from the Chicago Courts Mayor Daley up there accepting the nomination. If you want to read a great book about Chicago putting on another international spectacle read the Devil in the White City, a great book about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and a serial killer; the book is a history of the Fair. I do like the fact that I could easily walk to the Whitewater Course and the start of the Triathlon.


Congratulations to Pat Ryan, Mayor Daley and the entire Chicago Olympic Committee.

To see a history of the Chicago Sun Times coverage see here.