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By RightMichigan.com Posted in Breaking News | Democrats | Detroit | Michigan | www.RightMichigan.com — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Cross-posted on Right Michigan at www.RightMichigan.com.

I was born and raised in Grand Rapids.  This is my home.  I love it here.  I've had opportunities to move to Lansing, to head out to Washington, D.C., but none of that excites me.  For years I'd commute 75 minutes each way to work (back when gas was under $2 a gallon, thank heavens) and when it came time to buy my first house I didn't look anywhere else.  

All of that said, when I think Michigan I think Detroit.  My first umpteen cars were products of Detroit.  My sports teams are from Detroit... all save the Broncos (look out by the way, Cutler's going to be an all-pro this season).  I grew up listening to the Oldies radio station a lot and I always much preferred Motown to the "British Invasion."  And sure, Chicago is a good bit closer to my home but I don't make three or four pilgrimages a year to the Windy City.  It's not Michigan.  At the risk of getting in the middle of a long-standing Eminem / Insane Clown Posse feud, in a certain sense Detroit feels like home.  

Which makes it that much more painful to read the more and more frequent headlines about serious, lifechanging problems in the D.  I'm not talking about the Big 3, although certainly they've got their issues.  I'm talking about Detroit itself.  Where people live.  And what the people they continue to elect are doing when the lights are out and no one is looking.

When one party has an unshakeable and unassailable lock on an entire voting population and translates that into complete control of a city, look out... especially if that one party starts with the word "democrat."  You don't hear about these sorts of problems happening in Hillsdale.  Detroit?  It's an entirely different, heartbreaking story.  Or, well, collection of stories is more accurate I guess.

We all know about Kwame's continuing drama.  We know the Governor, a woman who already doesn't like the man, is considering and investigating actions that could basically impeach him all the way from Lansing, we've got alleged fraud in city contracts, we've got the firing of whistle blowers and now we've got City Council staff on videotape accepting payoffs.

It's enough to even make the Ivory Tower opine:

Other than during and immediately after the 1943 and 1967 riots, it is difficult to recall a time when Detroit's political institutions -- which stagger from mini-crisis to mini-crisis even during normal times -- have been so engulfed in chaos.

"There's nothing analogous to this," said Jeff Blaine, a retired deputy city clerk who started working for the city in 1967. "The wheels are falling off. It's amazing."

Charles Hyde, a professor at Wayne State University and an expert on Detroit history, said: "I think it really is unprecedented. And what strikes outsiders is the people sitting on these boards and in these offices don't seem to think there is a crisis."

Professor Hyde is right but he could take that a step further.  What strikes outsiders is that people sitting at the ballot box on one election day after another continue sending the same people and the same party to these boards and these offices as if there weren't any crisis.

The thanks they get?  Scandal and a national black eye or two if they're lucky, a pink slip if they're not.  1,300 of them now that the City Council rejected Hizzoner's plans to sell the Detroit portion of the Windsor tunnel.  The sale would have brought in $65 million and balanced the city's budget but alas.  It's back instead to the layoff route.  

Not that the sale was the brightest of all possible ideas or that the Council is wholly to blame this time around:

Council members said Monday that after months of seeking answers from Kilpatrick's office, they still were wary of the financing and how much control Detroit would retain over the tunnel.

"Detroit has assets we should never allow to be diminished," Councilwoman JoAnn Watson said during the meeting. "At some point, we have to find a better way to deal with our budget issues."

Yeah, well, Kwame's been kind of busy lately.  So the budget remains unbalanced heading into the new fiscal year (starting today) and more than one-thousand government employees are going to join the growing unemployment lines in Detroit.  A Democratic mayor.  An entirely Democratic City Council.  Democrats in every elected position citywide.  A total and complete monopoly and nothing but continued incompetence (at best).  The kind of incompetence that cripples families and drives everyone who can afford to leave away.  They're the lucky ones.

Especially if they have kids.  The Democrats in Lansing refuse to lift the cap on charter schools and most of the youngest Detroit residents start off immediately a step behind their suburban counterparts, despite the fact that the Detroit Public Schools receive more state money per pupil than just about anyone else on the face of the planet.  

But all the money in the world doesn't do you much good if its chronically mismanaged.  Leads to decisions like those made by the school board last night.  818 teachers and 900 non-teaching staff let go with one giant vote.  It's like the book of Revelation when an angel is loosed on the world with a harvesting sickle, swings the thing and reaps a good chunk of the population.  Boom.  Out of here.  

The scariest part is, the layoffs and the decision not to fill over one-hundred staffing vacancies was actually the least painful option.  It was actually the CORRECT move at this point in the game.  The only thing to prevent a shutdown and the immediate specter of a late starting school year.  

The saddest part?  You can take every scandal, every instance of mismanagement, every chronic budget problem, every bribe, every shady deal, every whistleblower firing, every text message, every layoff, mix them all up in a giant bag and deliver them to the voters every day from now until Dontrelle Willis returns to the Tigers starting rotation and it still wouldn't move the needle for non-Democrats on election day.  Won't change that three percent GOP vote total to five percent.  Not even to four.  

But hey, you get what you pay for.  Wait... all of these bribes and payoffs that's a truism maybe a little too close for comfort.  Try this one... buyer (or voter, rather) beware.  There, a little better.