By Gary Barlow

Al to the rescue
The last Democrat elected president, Al Gore, just tossed a nice little grenade into the Democratic presidential race, posting a video online expressing support for gay and lesbian marriage equality.

"I think that gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women, to make contracts, to have hospital visiting rights, to join together in marriage," Gore said. "And I don’t understand why it is considered by some people to be a threat to heterosexual marriage to allow it by gays and lesbians. Shouldn’t we be promoting that kind of faithfulness and loyalty to one’s partner regardless of sexual orientation?”

The video was posted Jan. 17 at current.com, Gore’s online TV venture, and stands in stark contrast to the poll-tested stances of the Democratic presidential contenders—Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama—who keep repeating their separate-but-equal equivocations about supporting the rights of marriage for gays as long as they don’t have to call it marriage.

“Al Gore—Tanned, Rested and Ready.”

Gold Coast North
Hey, think getting around and finding parking in Boystown in the summer is fun now?

Well, just wait until developers finish building a little addition on Addison between Sheffield and Clark. It’s not much, really, nothing to worry about—just, oh, say, a 137-room Hyatt Hotel, a 150-unit apartment building, a 45,000-square-feet health club and maybe a Dominick’s and CVS thrown in for good measure.

The two buildings housing all that—across the street from soon-to-be-owned-by-you-the-taxpayer Wrigley Field—would each be nine stories high.

It’s in the planning stages right now, but this is, after all, the City That Clout Built, where the success rate for taking big-money developments from conception to completion is about 99.99 percent.

So get ready for even more traffic fun in the summers. At least if you end up having to walk to the store instead of fighting the congestion and drunks, you’ll have your choice of five supermarkets within a mile or so of each other. That’s more than the City’s gotten built on the entire West Side in a generation or two.

Five years and counting
So here we are five years into President Bush’s War to Prove I Can Outdo Daddy, aka the Iraq War, and you might wonder what it’s cost us.

Well, last week in the Toronto Star, Craig and Marc Kielburger laid out the cost to American taxpayers—so far it’s $500 billion and growing. Of course, they note, this doesn’t include associated costs such as medical care for injured troops, higher oil prices and replacing the equipment used by the military. Harvard economists estimate that pushes the cost up to around $2 trillion so far. Considering Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld said it would only take about $50 billion, I’d say that makes this war the mother of all government cost overruns.

The Kielburgers also laid out some of the things we could have been doing with all that cash. For example, we could have spent $135 billion this year and eliminated all the extreme poverty in the world. We could have taught every person in the world to read for $5 billion.

Giving everybody in the world who has AIDS all the meds they need—that would be about $15 billion, while immunizing every child against deadly diseases would be just $1.3 billion.

All that doesn’t even begin to address things in this country, like fixing and expanding mass transit, replacing our crumbling bridges and putting computers in the hands of every child.

Oh, well, I guess we can take comfort knowing that we stopped Saddam from using his weapons of mass destruction against us…uh…oh, that’s right. Um, OK, well, at least we brought freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people…OK, sort of…maybe. Hmmm…

Heads up
As if you didn’t have enough to worry about with the recession and all, here’s something else.

The National Security Agency acknowledged last week that a spy satellite the size of a bus is going to fall out of the sky sometime in February or March and cannot be controlled.

“Appropriate agencies are monitoring the situation,” an NSA spokesman said, which puts us all at ease, I’m sure. I mean, I suppose that means when it falls and makes you look like Wily Coyote on a bad day, at least the “appropriate agencies” will be able to peel you off the sidewalk fairly quickly.

Well, happy stargazing!