Democrats Have Been Siphoning the Tank in the Motor City

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Walter Russell Mead at Via Media:

There is something profoundly wrong with an American political culture that accepts chronic misgovernment in major cities as OK. It is not OK; the people who do these things may call themselves liberal Democrats and wear the mantle of defenders of the poor, but over and over their actions place them among the most cold blooded enemies and oppressors of the weak.

Detroit is a city that has been allowed to decay under decades of Democrat rule.  That has always been easy for us to know because it is obvious to anyone with eyes to see.  Less obvious but now known to all is that the Democrats that have run the city for the last 50 years have also been looting its treasury.

Former mayor of Detroit Kwame Kilpatrick was sentenced to 5 years in prison in May, 2010 for a parole violation on his previous obstruction of justice conviction. A year later he was paroled. He now faces Federal charges that will go to trial in September. He is looking at a probalble 18-year sentence if convicted, according to legal prognosticators. Federal prosecutors offered only a 15-year sentence in a recent plea offer, indicating how strongly they believe in their case. Kilpatrick turned it down.

Kilpatrick’s defense is the usual playing of the race card, that ace in hole that Black politicians trot out when they are accused of corruption.  They didn’t do anything wrong, their accusers are racists.  In Kilpatrick’s case, it’s an odd defense to make in a city where Black voters decide every election.  Anyway, he’s gone to that well too many times and it isn’t working anymore.

The Wikipedia page on Kwame Kilpatrick is like no other.  It reads like a true crime novel only the subjects of most crime stories are not nearly as shameless and brazen.  Unless you live in Detroit or nearby you have probably not heard much about the deep corruption and outright theft of public funds that has gone on in that city.  Walter Russell Mead has written extensively and lamented the fact that the national legacy media has chosen to ignore it.  Everyone who votes should be familiar with what happens to a city that is under the exclusive control of Democrats.  If one-tenth the fraud, profiteering, crony capitalism and plain old crookedness went on anywhere that is run by Republicans it would dominate the news cycle in all 50 states.  The Wikipedia page noted above and Mead’s Rouge Democrats Loot Detroit As Nation Sleeps  should be read and studied by anyone who thinks they might be in danger of voting for a Democrat anywhere anytime.

Mead ends his latest piece on Detroit this way:

American cities have been festering pits of graft and bad governance since at least the early 19th century, but there is a difference between the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall and the nihilistic destruction practiced by some of today’s urban machines. Today’s situation, in which some city machines are so dysfunctional that the parasite is literally killing the host (and not just in Detroit), is new and, again, the most vulnerable in our society suffer the worst consequences. Minority children are the greatest ultimate victims of this loathsome corruption: they attend horrible schools and grow up in decaying, unsafe urban landscapes where there is no growth, no jobs and no opportunity for the young.

How is it anything but racist not to care about that — and not to burn with the desire to put the scabrous thugs who misgovern our cities and waste our social funds in prison where they belong?

 Every city in America that has any fraction of the Detroit disease is run by Democrats.  It is not possible to name a single city under Republican control in which anything similar exists.  Of course, it’s almost not possible to name a single city that is under Republican control.

Buffett Trails S&P 500 for Third Straight Year

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Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) shareholders missed out on better returns from the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index by sticking with Chairman Warren Buffett after each of his last three annual meetings.

All of which makes the absence of a clear succession plan ever more troubling. Maybe Buffett should worry more about Berkshire’s governance than what you and I pay in taxes.

via www.professorbainbridge.com

Remember though, Warren Buffett is an investment genius.  Oracle of Omaha, you know.

Isn’t there a mutual fund available that enables anyone to buy the S&P 500?  Yeah, I think so.

Bow Tie’n White Boys

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While whites (prominent liberals excepted) are held to impossible standards and accused of racism for innocuous comments that some racially motivated liberal can twist and mischaracterize in order to call it a racist slur, blacks can say anything they want, making comments about any white person that need no twisting or mischaracterization at all because what they say is so overtly and plainly racist. The comment by a prominent black woman that is described below is racist because it is a black person demeaning a white person on the basis of race and suggesting that her skin color makes her superior. That is what has always been racist, it’s what some white people in America used to do and what the overwhelming majority of white people rejected and drove out of American culture several decades ago. Or, they thought they had done. It is sad to see blacks like the woman in the video below trying to bring it back and perpetuate it.

From Roger’s Rules by Roger Kimball:

So, Tucker Carlson, according to Democrat strategist Jehmu Greene, is “a bow tie’n white boy.” That’s what Ms Greene said on Megyn Kelly’s show America Live. I think it was the “white boy” part that was supposed to be particularly offensive. As one bow-tyin’ white boy to another, however, I find it more pathetic than irritating. Why is it that Democrats are cruising around accusing everyone in sight of being racist when it is they, not the objects of their ire, who engage in the racist behavior? Harry Stein, in his new book No Matter What . . . They’ll Call this Book Racist has some intelligent things to say about that.

Here’s the video where Ms. Greene calls Tucker Carlson a “bow tie’n white boy.” He attempts to call her on it but is talked over by her and then lets it go.

Carlson wasn’t even wearing a bow tie. Name calling, and when it’s a black liberal Democrat, racist name calling is used to deflect arguments for which the racist speaker has no rational point to make.

If any white public figure used the term “black boy” on a televised cable news show in any context it would be the end of his or her career.

Tennessee Senator Bob Corker Delivers the Saturday GOP Address

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Corker says Obama is robing young people of their heritage and their chance to achieve the American dream: “As he appeals to college students, his Administration is robbing those same young people of their American inheritance, spending their money on my generation and engaging in nothing short of generational theft.”

Young Barack Obama’s Creative Writing Style

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From a letter Barack Obama wrote to his girlfriend Alex McNear in the summer of 1982, as recounted in the forthcoming book, Barack Obama — His Story, by David Maraniss and excerpted in the current Vanity Fair:

Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.

The self-absorbed, jejune style of creative writing, I guess.

 

Anarchy 101: How Wisconsin’s Left Embraces Chaos

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The political battles in Wisconsin matter to everyone in America, not just those who live in that state, because the outcome in the fight to recall Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker will determine the future public education battles everywhere else. If the left-wing radicals in the teachers’ unions that have long held local governments and school districts in their grip prevail in this fight it will make it more difficult if not impossible to reform the education of children everywhere. No politician or bureaucrat will want to risk a similar fate if these radical anarchists are successful in unseating Governor Walker in the recall election to be held on June 5th.

Walker’s reforms, called Act 10 in Wisconsin, are working wonderfully and have restored fiscal sanity to the State of Wisconsin. School districts are on a sounder financial footing, fewer teachers are being laid off under Act 10 than under former Governor Jim Doyle, and the educational opportunities for children are improving. The radicals, however, want to go back to the old ways when public education in Wisconsin was solely for the benefit of the teachers and the unions who thrust school districts into financial turmoil, all the while keeping their jack-boots on the necks of poor and disadvantaged children, robbing them of the chance to get a decent education.

The video below is 16-minutes long but is worth your time. It does a terrific job of explaining the situation in Wisconsin and why it matters everywhere. It features Brett Healy and Brian Fraley of the MacIver Institute, Collin Roth of Media Trackers, an unidentified citizen journalist on the ground for many of the protests, and State Sen. Alberta Darling, a target of death threats, intimidation tactics, and a failed recall attempt last year.

It also features two teachers, including Kenosha’s Kristi Lacroix, and a school board member who would not be silenced by the radicals’ intimidation tactics and spoke to EAGnews about the benefits of Governor Scott Walker’s reforms.

Prestigious White Shoe Law Firms Face Financial Troubles In a New Legal Marketplace

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“There are now far more capable lawyers and law firms than there is work for them to do.”

— Michael H. Trotter, a partner in an Atlanta law firm who has written two books about the economics and management of law firms, in an interview with the New York Times on the impending collapse of the prestigious international law firm of Dewey & Leboeuf.

“With declining profits and grueling 70-hour work weeks, law has long since left behind its genteel heyday as a fulfilling and patrician lifestyle. The legal profession is just one of many undergoing seismic changes in the face of transformational technologies and new economic realities. No doubt many enterprising young lawyers will find creative ways of dealing with these changes, but in the meantime, we wish the 45,000 students graduating law school this year the best of luck.”

— Walter Russell Mead, writing today on the troubles at Dewey & Leboeuf.

I’ve written several posts on the law school bubble.  This one contains advice to a budding law graduate or anyone determined to go to law school:  Thinking of Going to Law School — Think Again.