A decent burial
The people who think that the group of baseball fans who have been trying to save Tiger Stadium from demolition will raise the money they need by Aug. 1 to turn aside the wrecking ball are the same kind of folks who believe Barak Obama is going to give them $4,000 to go to college.
I like and admire Ernie Harwell and Gary Spicer. They are good people whose hearts are in the right place. I, too, have revered the old ball yard at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. I saw most of the biggest football and baseball stars of the 20th century perform there.
Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, Al Kaline and Mickey Lolich, Bobby Layne, Johnny Unitas, Bart Starr and Jimmy Brown.
Tiger Stadium has provided too many fond memories to allow it to deteriorate and become yet another Detroit landmark eyesore.
It's time to move on. Let's give it a decent burial.
Why a stealth campaign?
Isn't it curious that the group that wants to rewrite the Michigan Constitution to make government less expensive and "more transparent" refuses to divulge the names of the person or persons who are footing the bill for their petition drive?
An obscure group based in Hastings, MI, that calls itself Reform Michigan Government, Now! has been conducting a stealth petition drive for months, seeking to collect some 360,000 signatures by July 1 to get their amendment on the November ballot.
Hey, everybody wants to reform government. But in this case, voters would be wise to be careful what they wish for because they just might get it.
This anonymous lashup would not only slash the size and form of the legislative and judicial branches, it woud cut the pay of just about every elected official to the point where only the independently wealthy - or folks who aren't averse to accepting favors - will even want to serve.
They argue, of course, that this wold make government "more accountable" and limit the influence of lobbyists and bureaucrats, who pretty much steer Lansing now. Sure thing.
You'd think that any person or group with such high ideals, however, would be proud to admit authorship. Unless, of course, they have another agenda.
Boot some dupa, Barak.
While it is not uncommon for political candidates to stack the house with supporters while barring potential rabble-rousers at high profile photo-op events, I wonder what would have happened at the recent Obama rally at Cobo Arena if my wife's sainted Polish grandmother had shown up wearing her babushka head scarf?
If it had been our long-departed "botch" and not those two Muslim-American women who got the ziggy from Obama's roadies at this week's rally because they were wearing traditional Islamic head scarves, somebody would have ended up with boot prints on their dupas.
And I don't even want to think about the firestorm of criticism that would have surrounded John McCain if his handlers had been that insensitive to Muslim guests.
I suspected early on that Obama's handlers were loading his crowds with acceptable faces when I watched the TV clips of the youthful senator's appearance at the suburban Taylor campus of Wayne County Community College earlier this week. Why Taylor, I wondered? Why not the CC's headquarters campus in downtown Detroit? Or the east side campus on Connor? Isn't that where the hardcore Democrats live?
Then it struck me. The Detroit-based WCCC student body was likely to be "too African American" for a guy who's struggling to convince white America that he's neither a religious terrorist nor a black activist. Heaven knows, Obama has enough of a problem trying to shake the out-of-the-mainstream image created by his Arabic name (he's a Christian, incidentally). The last thing he needs is to leave even the slightest impression that he's catering to blacks to the exclusion of persons of other racial backgrounds.
As for his handlers' intolerant barring of the two scarved women, who were first invited to sit behind Obama (where the TV cameras would see them) during the Cobo speech and then turned aside by his screeners because they didn't pass Obama's uniform muster, the ladies deserved more than a cursory dismissal from some staff roadie and they got it when Sen. Obama did the right thing - after the insult hit the media - and called each personally to backfill his apology.
Obama ought to show them and the nation he's sincere, however, by publicly booting some dupa on those misguided donkies who caused the insult in the first place.
Veeps, Fieger, ashes and a primate boss.
Random thoughts:
* With nothing more to be done about the presidential nominations, politics now turns to the theater of the absurd, i.e., who should Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama select as a vice presidential running mates?
I recently have notified both candidates that if nominated I will not run and if elected I will not serve. (I think a few folks have said that once or twice before. The first rule of journalism, however, is that if you steal a quote from one person, it's plagiarism. If you steal quotes from a lot of people, it's considered "research.")
Well, I might consider an offer from McCain. After all he was a Naval officer and I always will be a U. S. Marine. But the first time he refers to me as a "sea-going bellhop" I'll drop him like a two-foot putt.
Actually, I could care less about veep candidates in both parties. It's sorta like being the stand-in behind an All-Pro quarterback. You only get in for a play or two if he breaks a shoelace.
Funniest line I can remember about veeps was when Dandy Dan Quayle was stand-in for George H. W. Bush. The joke then was that if something happened to Bush, Secret Service orders were to shoot Quayle.
*Can you believe that attorney Geoff Feiger was acquitted of that federal rap by convincing the jury that he didn't realize that using "straw" donors to funnel campaign contributions to Democrat John Edwards four years ago was illegal?
Whatever happened to the mantra that they drum into aspiring young mouthpieces in law school that "Ignorance of the law is no excuse."?
Geoff markets himself the smartest lawyer on the planet. With air-headed jurors like that bunch, it's no wonder he believes his own TV ads.
*Nursing home humor:
While I was pushing an elderly lady's wheel chair down to lunch the other day, she informed me that her husband had died and that "he" was in the columbarium (cremation repository) at a large Grosse Pointe church.
"Sure, I miss him," she offered, "but this is the first time in our marriage that I always know where he is."
* A Hindu monkey god known for strength and valor has been named official chairman of a Tech and Management Institute in India. He's been given an incense-cleansed office with a desk and a laptop and visitors must remove their shoes. I would not suggest sharing this news with your boss tomorrow.
Poetic justice?
Is it only me, or are there others out there in bloggerland who think it's poetic justice that a Detroit casino is declaring bankruptcy?
Now they know how it feels, right?
The gambling joint in question is the Greektown Casino, the first and the smallest of the city's three gaming houses. Greektown is up to its crap tables in debt, owes $314 million and needs another $150 million to pay contractors who are threatening to stop construction on a new casino hotel that, once finished, is expected to keep the owners from rolling snake eyes for the last time.
What happened? Casinos are supposed to be cash cows, right? Large sums of money roll in and small sums of money roll out. Alas, Detroit's three money-mills are the only places in town where you can arrive in a $6,000 junker car and go home in a $220,000 bus.
The house never loses, right? Well, not so fast.
Ironically, Greektown was the original home of the gaming revolution in Detroit. The architects of the new-at-the-time industry were Greektown entrepreneurs Ted Gatzaros and Jimmy Pappas, who galvanized support of local,state and national politicians to carve out Native American land in an urban setting then wooed the Sault Ste. Marie Band of Chippewa Indians to come to town and stock it with slots and card tables.
Also ironically, Pappas and Gatzaros couldn't get approved for licensed ownership before the grand opening because (more irony) they had some bad back debts of their own at the time and couldn't pass muster with the state gaming board.
They did own much of the casino property, an adgacent hotel and several restaurants, however. And they did manage a lush cash settlement.
Frankly, I have no feeling one way or the other for casino gaming. I just mail them a few bucks every month. That way I don't have to waste my time and gasoline driving downtown, finding a place to park, paying too much for a beer and fighting the crowds and the smokers.
Let voters decide Dillon's fate in November
Much as I disagreed with the huge tax increase that Speaker Andy Dillon, D-Redford Township, pushed through the Michigan House of Representatives late last year, I didn't believe in the recall effort that was launched by tax revolter Leon Drolet and I'm pleased that it failed.
Dillon's up for re-election in November. If the folks in his district want to give him the hook then, God bless them. But any recall at this point would be (1) academic and (2) extremely costly to the taxpayers of his district, who would have been faced first with the recall, then with an election to replace him with a temporary substitute, then with another election to choose a permanent successor. Which probably would have been Dillon right back again.
Dillon didn't break any laws. He didn't violate any sacred trusts. He's a Democrat. He never promised not to raise taxes and spend, spend, spend. That's why the voters put him where he is, for better or worse.
Drolet, a rock-ribbed Macomb County Republican and a passionate if often misguided tax-fighter, didn't agree with the Democrat-controlled Legislature's successful campaign to increase our tax bill by more than $1 billion without making cuts to offset the increase. I didn't agree, either.
But I'm not into throwing good money after bad by conducting largely symbolic recalls.
Smokers' rights can go up in flames
My wife, Marilyn, has a stock answer for anyone who asks, "Do you mind if I smoke?" She smiles and responds demurely, "Frankly, I don't care if you go up in flames."
Actaully, that pretty much sums up how I feel about smokers' rights, which presently are a hot topic of debate in the Michigan Legislature. It's kind of like how I feel about the helmet law for motorcycles: Figure out a way that I won't have to support hefty auto insurance rates and state subsidies to pay for your long-term care when you run out of coverage after you bust half your bones and your fake Nazi helmet is ripped off and crushed to smithereens, and you can knock yourself out - literally.
You want to smoke outside and far away from nonsmokers, go right ahead. I don't want to be seated anywhere near you when you light up.
Second-hand smoke is a killer. Period. I quit first-hand smoking years ago. It killed too many of my friends and relatives. Who knows what my lungs look like today, but with any luck at all they're a light shade of brown instead of the black I saw the first and only time I sat in on a heart operation performed by a good friend who is a heart surgeon and watched him crack open a fat guy's chest in order to get at his heart.
This man's lungs were jet black. I don't know what I expected, but when I asked my friend, Dr. Douglas Lees, what made them that wierd color, he just shook his head. "See 'em all the time," he responded. "Heavy smoker."
The patient needed four bypasses. He died a few days later.
Maybe you don't get black lung from second-hand smoke. But maybe you do. You want to take the chance?
Detroit mayor scandal: Enough is enough
Headlines in both The Detroit News and the Free Press this week said it all: "Finally".
Too bad it was only alluding to the Red Wings and the Pistons making the playoffs in their respective pro sports and not to the topic that is uppermost in the minds of most thinking residents of southeast Michigan: Mz Jenny has "finally" set the wheels in motion in Lansing to pull the plug on Kwame Kilpatrick.
Oh, don't get too excited. Jenny's guy has met the Detroit City Council's guy to talk it over. And the ground rules are being set and the procedures agreeed upon, etc., etc. But rest assured, the NBA and NHL finals likely will be long over and the new seasons for those teams well under way before Kwame gets his day in any court, let alone gets the hook from our intrepid Democrat governor.
Frankly, in my opinion, whatever happens six weeks or (more like it) six months from now, Kilpatrick is the 2008 remake of Dead Man Walking. His goose has been cooked, his career has been folded, stapled, spindled and mutilated. He is road kill.
The pity is, however, as Kwame and other high profile Detroiters go, so goes the reputation of the city where I grew up.
So far the guy has shot himself in both feet, the knees and both arms with his post-indictment statments and actions. The only safe portion of his anatomy that's gone without a scratch seems to be his groin.
Virtually assuring his front-runner nomination for the 2008 Lock The Barn Door After the Text Message Is Stolen trophy, last week Detroit's youthful chief public official decreed (yes, King Kwame decrees) that henceforth all text messages transmitted on city-owned, taxpayer-billed cell phones and other electronic doo-dads will be the private property of the senders/receivers.
Presumably, he then texted his mystery hot tub companion, Ms. Slowsky, and jetted off to Texas "on city business" without giving the court or even his probation officer/keeper notice of where he was going until after he was gone. This, of course, infuriated the local Detroit judge, who said blah-blah-blah, promised to make Kwame say five Our Fathers and 10 Hail Marys and admonished him to write 100 times on the blackboard, "I will never dump on the court again (unless some good looking turtle happens to ask me to fly to Texas on city, or any other, kind of business)."
My hope is that the mysterious Ms. Slowsky is a Detroit resident. At least one Detroiter will be getting their money's worth out of the guy.
When Richard Nixon got wrapped up in the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and lied about it, The Detroit News was the first major daily paper to demand his ouster in a Page One Sunday editorial that bore the headline, "Enough is Enough."
Here we are 30 years later and that still tells the story pretty well.
Fugitive deserves hard time
I think that it's absurd to even suggest that Susan LeFevre (AKA Marie Walsh or whatever else she called herself) should be allowed to go free after walking away from DeHoCo back in 1976, where she was serving 10-to-20 on a drug dealing conviction.
If fact, this recaptured fugitive's rationale for seeking freedom instead of finishing her sentence reminds me of the old story about the young man who killed both of his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.
If anything, LeFevre deserves to do a lot of hard time in some really dank Michigan prison, not some country club like the one she rode away from in her grandfather's car 32 years ago after she skipped out.
LeFevre, you understand, wasn't doing her stretch for some minor offense like holding a parade without a permit or spitting on the sidewalk. She was serving 10-to-20 years for selling $2,000 a week worth of heroin to who-knows-how-many kids.
She claims that at the time she was a 21-year-old junkie and she needed money to feed her habit. That's an excuse? Nonsense! The pertinent question here is, how many other kids did she corrupt? How many really innocent lives did she impair or ruin?
I happen to have two kids who were 23 and 21 in 1976. My son and daughter faced the same strains and stretches in their teen years that LeFevre faced in hers. There but for the grace of God, they could have been her customers.
I'll tell you this: If she had lured any of my kids or other family members into drugs by supplying their habit to pay for hers, she'd have welcomed three squares and a flop in DeHoCo compared what I'd have in store for her if I ever found her hanging out at some soccer moms' meeting in San Diego, clean or not.
"I'm beside myself," LeFevre is quoted in Saturday's Detroit News as saying, "to think that I might be locked in a room for something I did as a teen."
Shoulda thought about that a long time ago, lady.
A court convicted her of the drug charges, on evidence. Once in prison, she bolted. That's two offenses. She says she's sorry. Big deal. So are a lot of parents - who knows how many? - whose kids were doing her lines and snorting her powder.
According to LeFevre, on the day she went over the wall her granddaddy and another relative were waiting on the other side, saying the rosary. As Kwame might text-message to his squeeze-of-the-day, LOL!
Her husband of 23 years in her "other life" describes LeFevre as "a person of the highest integrity."
Proving only, I guess, that you really can fool some of the people, some of the time.
Blues sing the Blues
Cudos to Atty. Gen. Mike Cox for holding Blue Cross/Blue Shield CEO Dan Loepp's feet the the fire over the Blues' brazen attempt to use their special tax-free status as a so-called "not for profit" insurer to buy up yet another for-profit subsidiary.
It helps, of course, that Cox is a Republican testing the waters for a run at the term-limited Michigan governor's job two years from now and Loepp, a career political flack who landed the BC/BS job through his Lansing connections, spent a large part of his public life as chief of staff to former Michigan House Speaker, Democrat Curtis Hertel.
No love lost on either side there.
The Blues were formed originally in 1980 to be the "insurer of last resort" for folks who couldn't get other health care coverage for one reason or another. As part of the deal to take everybody, Lansing granted the Blues corporation an exemption from state taxes.
The Blues, of course, made a ton of profit anyway. But in order to keep their bottom line looking thin so they could retain their tax-free ride, in 1993 they worked out a deal to branch out into a for-profit sideline - the Accident Fund.
Now under Loepp, with the support of a Democrat-controlled Michigan House, they're at it again, pushing a piece of so-called "reform legislation" (over Cox's objections) that will let them branch out even further into another money-making venture while maintaining the BC/BS basic tax-free status to fund the purchase.
What's really galling Cox and others is that in order to steer pubic opinion support to their brash money grab, the Blues keep using their tax-free profits (the Blues admit to $2.4 billion in reserves) to fund a radio and TV ad blitz to brag about how the poor little Blues have been losing money insuring otherwise uninsurable Michiganians for dozens of years and aren't they just the nicest people?
No mention of the fact that they aren't doing it out of any sense of charity toward those unfortunate uninsurables. They have to insure them or end their free load and risk losing their posh executive salaries and perks.
