Lloyd Constantine

Chatham Plaza: Home of the Whopper

For this column, The Weekender briefly descends from the heady heights of presidential politics to the wetlands on the Chatham Village/Ghent border. I attended the public hearing held on the evening of Sept. 19 at Tracy Memorial Village Hall concerning two competing visions for the development of about a dozen acres abutting Route 66. As one now dead politician frequently intoned while in office (free large latté at Ralph’s to the first reader who sends that president’s name to me at lloydconstantine@gmail.com), “let me make one thing perfectly clear, I am not,” suggesting by the title of this column that the best use of the building currently housing Price Chopper, should it leave, is a 23,000-square-foot Burger King. But there were many whoppers, little lies and ludicrous pronouncements made at this public hearing. Without categorizing them, my favorites were the overarching claim to competence and trustworthiness by the Price Chopper contingent and the equally absurd assertion of objectivity and civic mindedness by the Chatham Plaza team. Read More 

Mitt Romney — The ‘Karma Chameleon’

Republicans who are Evangelical Protestants (and make up a majority of likely voters in the key early Iowa and South Carolina primaries) are worried that candidate Mitt Romney is not a Christian and more specifically that he’s a Mormon. However, a broader group of voters, including The Weekender, increasingly focus on the distinct possibility that Romney is reptilian and specifically, as the Culture Club crooned, a “Karma Chameleon” who “comes and goes” depending upon which way the wind blows. Read More 

Listen to Governor Perry’s call and respond

President Obama’s Midwest bus tour and the Republican straw poll in Iowa marked the beginning of the 2012 campaign. However, neither the president nor any of the Iowa contestants commanded the attention paid to the entry of Texas Governor Rick Perry into the contest for the Republican nomination. In the first of a periodic series of columns on the presidential candidates, The Weekender examines Perry and whether his intemperate criticism of Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are merely Texas tough guy talk or an important indication of what this candidate really stands for and the path he would follow if elected. Read More