Reflecting at the Year's End

We in the fictional news business have had a great year! We've had so much to be sarcastic and unpleasant about.  Just consider:

• Kim Chee Who, the restrained and civilized leader of North Korea. What more need we say?
• Vladimir Putin, the last in a long line of statesmen, including Richard Nixon, Dick Cheney, and Benito Mussolini, who can be trusted with a weapon, since they only shoot their friends or their own feet.
• Pakistan, a country now regretting its long-standing policy of nurturing savagery and violence on its Western border. (Pro tip: a buffer state is supposed to keep the bad guys away from you.)
• Nigeria, where the government has sentenced a number of its soldiers to death for refusing to go into combat without guns or ammunition.
• The Scots voters who (narrowly) expressed a preference for being part of the United Kingdom.
• The rest of the United Kingdom, which (narrowly) decided to turn down a US offer to become the fifty-first state.
• Raul Castro; just visualize him making a scale-balancing gesture with his hands: "Russia, the US? Russia, the US? Gosh, why didn't I think of this before? Thanks, Your Holiness."
• The fringies and nut jobs who will find, in the current outpouring of outrage over police shootings (by and of), an excuse to do some shooting of their own.
• Detroit, where everyone some people a few people are celebrating a successful bankruptcy. Bankruptcy, of course, is a way of legally reneging on debt. But still, whoopee!
• And finally, the good folks of our own state, who want the damn roads fixed and are damned if they'll pay one red cent more in taxes to get it done. See, the problem is, money used to grow on trees, and then the Emerald Ash Borer came along and ...

Problem is, from our stand point, all of that is more or less real.  As the saying goes, you can't make this stuff up, and since that's our stock in trade, we have to look elsewhere for inspiration.  Oh, well. At least we can contemplate a well-deserved retirement on the lake front property in Shiawassee County. The only question is, which lake will get there first, Huron or Michigan?

Have a good festive season, and join us in hoping that we have to make up more of the bad news next year, instead of just reading about it.

Key indicator down at end of week

Today's scorecard includes several data points that are expected to factor into a slight downward variance in the International Rubbish Index (1).

Segolene Royal, the ex-wife of French President Hollande (as opposed to the ex-live-in- partner or the girlfriend for whom he dumped the latter) has been brought back into the cabinet, despite her lack of real depth in areas such as nuclear energy. Last time she was in charge of things, she said publically that France depended on nukes for 17% of its energy, whereas the real number was 77%. This comes at a time when France is dithering its way toward backing out of its near-criminal reliance on nuclear power, and so there is some concern with this frankly silly management change. Score: -1.

A man who hit a 10 year old boy in Detroit when the youth stepped out in front of the man's pickup was mobbed, beaten into a coma, and robbed as well. A Detroit police sergeant said "... this is not conducive to how the city of Detroit generally handles things...” For the sheer nerve of that statement: Score: -2.
2014 04 09: update: he wasn't robbed. That was a rumor.

And an ad on the back cover of Archaeology Magazine touts tourism in Texas, concluding with the slogan "Texas: It's like a whole other country." Score: Here's hopin': +1.

In summary, adding the indicators produced a net reduction in the IRI, leaving it down 2.

(1) The International Rubbish Index or IRI is an indicator of the extent to which things appear to be going to hell in a handcart. It is maintained and published by the Research Institute of Michigan, a subsidiary of Wood-Charles Associates.

Every year ...

... along about this time it all goes dry. Nothin' there for love or money that'll get you ...

Wait. Sorry. I shouldn't listen to New Riders while I'm blogging. I'll start over.

Every year along about this time the people who make news and the journalists (or what passes for them) who report on it return from vacation, During their absence, the volume of silly, irrelevant stories, focusing on silly, irrelevant people usually goes way up, and then, boom!, at the end of August, things get serious again. This morning, with my granola, I ran across all of the following, just in about ten minutes reading.

• Snarking about Detroit: First, the Mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, said that he'd consider living in Detroit, but that he'd "...blow the place up and start all over." He attributed Detroit's problems to poor leadership. Not surprisingly, the man currently demonstrating the accuracy of that assessment, Detroit's lame-ass duck mayor, Dave Bing, says "Nuh-uh!". The best Bing could come up with as a riposte was to criticize Menino's use of the phrase "blow up", considering Boston's recent unfortunate incident. Classy, Mr. Mayor.
  
  Then, not willing to leave well enough alone, the ex-Mayor of Milwaukee, John O. Norquist, weighed in, saying that tearing down the city is a "stupid idea".
  
  This puts Bing in a difficult place, having on the one hand to resent the suggestion from one of his peers that Detroit should be blown up, while simultaneously hearing from another (ex)head of a decaying Midwestern berg-on-a-lake metropolis that his, Bing's, policy of tearing things down is "stupid." Tough place to be, especially since Mayor Bing is now mostly assigned to fetching coffee for Kevin Orr, the Emergency Manager.
  
  
  
• Not everyone, of course, is talking in these critical terms about the city. Beloved musical performer and one-time Pepsi spokesman MC Hammer publicly prayed for Detroit, saying "... Detroit still can't be touched!" We concur, in the same sense that it's inadvisable to touch a rattlesnake or in the sense your mother had in mind when she said "Don't touch that! You don't know where it's been!"
  
  
• Moving up to the state level, Michigan is apparently on a list of states (actually so are almost half of the rest of 'em) that "...do not require schools or day care centers to meet minimum standards to protect children during major emergencies...". This is deplorable, especially in light of recent disasters such as the continued threat from the legislature. "We just don't have any plan for dealing with these statewide attacks on our educational system," said a spokesman for Is-our-children-lerning?, a non-profit organization concerned with cuts in educational funding. "I mean, are you aware that unlike dozens of other states, Michigan has no plan for arming third-graders and sending them to Lansing?"
  

There were other interesting bits of commentary by other interesting nit-wits, including good old Donald Rumsfeld, snarking at the President for not having nuked Damascus yet, but frankly, it's time to get something useful done.

I know you'll be as shocked as I was

The Detroit Emergency Financial Manager says that things are lot worse than anyone thought. Especially those people who claimed that Detroit was turning itself around and didn't need no stinkin' Financial Manager. Astonishing.

Who am I (to stand and wonder, to wait ...)

I have been characterized, when anyone pays enough attention to bother characterizing me, as a "liberal" and even a "Democrat," primarily because I often mock, abuse, cast stones at, and generally disrespect Republicans and conservatives. I respond, when I pay enough attention, by asserting I am Rubber, You are Glue ... --- Oh, yeah! Well, yo' momma so left of center, she ... by asserting that I approach issues without reference to ideology or partisanship, and that I am just mindlessly cynical a true independent.

The current social and economic situation in Detroit gives me a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the extent to which I cannot be easily lumped into one political grouping, just because I usually make the sign of averting when I hear of take a position in opposition to that of the Republican party. Some people see the appointment of an Emergency Financial Manager for the city as a disenfranchisement of the voters, since it effectively yanks the rug out from under the Mayor and City Council, for whom, hard as it may be to imagine, someone actually voted. My view is, to quote a associate of mine, so what's your point?

The City of Detroit, under the leadership of people elected by the city's voters, has become an embarrassment, an international joke, and a flaming disaster, not only for itself but for the whole state. No matter how much both of us may regret it, Detroit and the State of Michigan are inseparable, part of the same family, as it were, and the patience of the family is exhausted. Detroit -- its leaders, its voters, and all -- just got a bad performance review, and the state is putting them on an improvement plan.

Whether or not the EFM can "succeed" (and the definition of success in this case is wildly unclear, ranging from, on the one hand, a return to at least marginally balanced books to, at the other extreme, selling the whole place to North Korea,) something has to be attempted. Under the current crew of idiots Mayor and Council, nothing would have been tried, nothing would have changed, no effort beyond quibbling and posturing would have been imaginable.

So, while the state Democrats consider whether they can make an issue of it in opposition to the Governor's reelection campaign, and the Republicans undoubtedly hope to smear the Dems as being "soft on Detroit," I'm in the unusual position, for me, of backing Snyder.

Local news

As is their wont, various media continue to compile their best and worst lists of things. (I wonder, actually, if anyone's thought of compiling a list of the best and worst lists of the best and worst things?)

Anyway, Detroit has recently been named the fourth worst managed city in the country, behind Stockton, California; Miami; and San Bernardino, California. The article, which I did not bother to read in detail because it's too damned depressing, was a touch vague about the criteria they used, and I think they did Detroit a great injustice, knocking them back down to fourth place. All the hard work that's been done in the last 15 years to turn it into the worst managed city, bar none, deserves greater recognition than this.

Needless to say, Ann Arbor doesn't even make the list. But it's not to say we don't try. Paula Gardner, of Ann Arbor.com, even dared to use the "CC" words in this article. No, ye of short memory, I don't mean cubic centimeters, I mean convention center! Here we go again.

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Update: Snyder is about to name an Emergency Manager for Detroit.

Probably a hoax

Amazing. Lends a whole new meaning the term "gated community."

I found this just weird enough that I sent it to Snopes.com for their attention.

Stay classy

I'm not completely sure I have this right, but here's what I think the newspaper story was trying to tell me:

One of the strictures under which Kwame Kilpatrick is attempting to exist at the moment is that he has to report all income to the court, since he has a restitution order to pay off. He stated on that report for December that he had no income.

Somebody somehow managed to get him a bunch of money, something on the order of $2000, and they wired it to it him. And he went to pick it up at Walmart or something like that. And a Fox news reporter spotted him doing so on the Walmart's security camera. So now he's in a bunch more trouble.

I'm just not going to say a word about the emergency manager laws. Not a word.