My Predictions for 2007

1. Plans will be finalized to put a number of prefab condos where Cleveland NJROTC High School’s football field and chemistry lab and pseudo-armory used to be.

2. Schnucks will announce that they will renovate their Grand and Potomac location a la the Target in Hampton Village, meaning limited ground-level parking, a lot of underground parking, leaving enough room for more retail space. Mayor Slay will praise the move, touting that a major grocer is returning to St. Louis.

3. Ted Kennedy and John McCain will introduce a new plan to end illegal immigration forever, which won’t be much different from their old plan.

4. St. Louis City Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Diana Bourisaw will be fired, and so will her successor. MODESE will continue to bluff about a takeover, while Mayor Slay and the Post-Dispatch editors will bemoan the “chaos and instability” in the SLPS, the latter doing so in every other DTI issue during the year.

5. By the end of the summer construction season, MODOT will announce that the Highway 40 reconstruction project will take eight more years for a total of nine, instead of the three overall years they are projecting now.

6. Mitt Romney will bow out of the 2008 Presidential Race. Also in the Gubernatorial world, I sense an impeachment or resignation of some relatively unpopular Republican governor in some state, though I don’t think it’ll be Blunt. My guess is either Mitch Daniels of Indiana, or Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky. And Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) will win reelection over Bobby Jindal (R) for GOV-LA, for the same racial reasons she beat him in 2003.

7. While Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to be fading in various Democrat Presidential polls now, it’s just MSM hype during a slow news cycle, especially regarding that dark one from Chicago.  By December 31, she will have the nomination virtually locked up such that all the 2008 Primaries and Caucuses on the Democrat side will be formalities. Her intraparty competition will either get out of the way voluntarily or be pushed out of the way (perhaps in a nefarious sense of the phrase) during 2007.

8. Ford or GM or maybe both seek bankruptcy protection and announce reduction of their assembly line work force by a very high fraction.

9. A low-level civil war will break out between blacks and Hispanics in California sometime during the summer, lasting about a month. It will likely be in L.A., but Oakland isn’t out of the question. It will necessitate a callup of the National Guard, though Gov. Schwarzenegger and President Bush will at first be loath to “pull the trigger” on calling up the Guard for that purpose, because of the fear of “racism” cat calls from black and Hispanic civil rights orgs.

10. After Independence Day and another truncated and poorly attended Fair St. Louis, there will be serious talk about ending the Fair for a number of years if not permanently, despite Mayor Slay’s propaganda about 2007’s Fair being a great success.

11. The former St. Louis Center will complete its first of many many years as being empty, unused, and deteriorating. Meanwhile, Mayor Slay will publicly praise every rumor of the revitalization of the edifice as evidence of urban renewal.

12. The big semi-circular hole north of New Busch Stadium in downtown St. Louis that exists on January 1, 2007, will still be there unmolested on December 31, 2007.