By centering the Olympic bid around Chicago’s iconic eatery “The Wieners Circle” did Barack Obama set hiself and Chicago up for failure?

The Wieners Circle is a fine eating establishment in Chicago known for excellent food, ethnic diversity, and friendly service. The plan was to base the Olympic Village around this classic Chi-Town eatery. Hindsight’s 20/20 as they say…

I’d say so… next time Mr President you may want to lure the IOC with Portillo’s instead!

Michelle Malkin has a great piece up about wealth redistribution and tax-increment financing associated with the O·lympics done Chicago-style:

When I worked in Seattle covering corporate welfare and city government, I became strange bedfellows with a diverse alliance of libertarians on the right and Ralph Naderites on the left who oppose “public-private partnership” deals between developers and statist Democrat AND Republican politicians.

These “public-private partnership” scams inevitably involve tax-increment financing gimmickry to siphon off tax dollars to subsidize developers/builders/contractors who then reward politicians with big campaign donations. (See here for how it works.)

The Chicago Olympics bid involves TIFs at a massive level.

And voters oppose it at their own risk — including threat of violence against them by their own representatives!

Byron York reports Michelle Obama saying… It’s a ‘sacrifice’ to travel to Europe to pitch for the Olympics. But I’m doing it for the kids.

First lady Michelle Obama(AP Photo/ Richmond Times-Dispatch, Dean Hoffmeyer, Pool)

In her speech in Copenhagen today, First Lady Michelle Obama said her trip to Denmark, along with the travel of her “dear friend” and “chit-chat buddy” Oprah Winfrey, as well as tomorrow’s visit by President Obama, is a “sacrifice” on behalf of the children of Chicago and the United States. “As much of a sacrifice as people say this is for me or Oprah or the president to come for these few days,” the first lady told a crowd of people involved in the Chicago project, “so many of you in this room have been working for years to bring this bid home.”

“As first lady, as many of you know, I’ve made it a priority to bridge the gap between the White House and communities across D.C. and across the country,” Mrs. Obama continued. “I’ve spent much of my first nine months trying to open the doors to the White House to kids who might not otherwise see themselves having access to these institutions, because that’s where I came from – communities like that where kids never dreamed that they could set foot in the White House, let alone live there…And Barack and I made a point of doing the same thing when we lived in Chicago – making the concerns of kids in all sorts of communities our own.”

And JammieWearingFool thinks, and I agree these don’t look like members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?

Get a load of this lineup. If I were a betting man I’d say they sure look like a bunch of Obama supporters. Whatever the case, it appears they sure don’t want the O-lympics in Chicago for reasons known only to them, apparently.

Six people arrested Tuesday evening in a small protest of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Games were charged with mob action Wednesday.

The five men and one woman interrupted crews that were attempting to hang an Olympic laurel from the Picasso statue in Daley Plaza by dragging the Olympic banner and tossing it into the “eternal flame,” authorities said.

Charged are 24-year-old brothers Jeremy Hammond and Jason Hammond of Glendale Heights, Brian Brown, 22, of Itasca; Jeremy Sorkin, 21, of Chicago; Johnathan Clark, 21, of Rocky Mountain, N.C.; and Anna Stafford, 20, of Wheatfield, Ind., said Tandra Simonton, a spokeswoman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.