Posted on 09/07/2011 4:37:27 AM PDT by MontaniSemperLiberi
"We are one nation. We are one people....
We've heard that before. Sixteen years ago, when we were an editor at City Journal, we worked on an article by Julia Vitullo-Martin titled "Detroit Fights Back." "No American city ever fell as far or as fast as Detroit," Vitullo-Martin began. "But now Detroit is poised for a comeback. Every signal--economic, political, social--is positive." One hopeful development was the retirement of five-term mayor Coleman Young, whose tenure had proved disastrous....
[Obama] parachuted into this city's sanitized, heavily-securitized [sic] downtown square-mile of corporate headquarters and Whole Foods markets - safe from the murderous streets of the city's other 138 square miles that have claimed 250 lives already this year and put Detroit on path for a staggering 50 per 100,000 residents murder rate in 2011....
Meanwhile, Coleman Young, who had been a civil rights hero, deliberately accelerated his city's decline:
Middle-class citizens, white and black, sought the lower taxes and better services available right across Eight Mile Road, Detroit's northern border. White flight escalated again during the court-ordered school busing efforts of the seventies. Mayor Young antagonized whites further by promoting a confrontational stance toward the suburbs--a stance that allowed him to consolidate his political base by fanning the resentments of an increasingly black Detroit. . . .
Many white Detroit business people, unwilling to be quoted by name, look back on the Young years with particular bitterness. Says one, who left the city in 1982: "Coleman was a racist, and he made it clear that white businesses were unwelcome, which meant to me that we would go unprotected. We could get robbed, burned out, preyed upon by city inspectors, and Coleman wouldn't do anything. He encouraged attacks on us. There was absolutely no reason--not a one--to stay in Detroit."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The Lonely Lives of Scientists
"Stanford Scientist Studies the Sex Life of Corn"--headline, San Jose Mercury News, Sept. 4
"Venus Scientists Feel Neglected"--headline, Nature.com, Sept. 2
“keepin’ up the skeer...”
Maybe they could elect Jim Leyland as mayor.
Black racism has been around for a VERY long time; of course everyone knows blacks can't be racist.... /sarc
Every time I read about Detroit, I think of the stories about Rome circa 600 or 700 AD when the population shrunk to about 35,000. Entire sections of the city were grown over or inhabited by wild animals. People took bricks from the Collosseum to build houses. A great city turned into a ghost town. Same with Detroit only they didn’t experience waves of barbarian invasions.
Monica Conyers had a habit of complaining about white people getting contracts in Detroit.
One thing Detroit has going for it today is a mayor who actually worked for a living and isn’t afraid of the unions.
More from the article:
Two Former Enron Advisers in One!
“Mr. Cantor’s critics have been quick to accuse him of hypocrisy, and with good reason. After all, he and his Republican colleagues showed no comparable interest in paying for the Bush administration’s huge unfunded initiatives. In particular, they did nothing to offset the cost of the Iraq war, which now stands at $800 billion and counting.”—Paul Krugman, New York Times, Sept. 2
“Should disaster aid, as a matter of sound public finance, be offset by immediate cuts in other spending? No. The time-honored principle, backed by economists right and left, is that temporary bursts of spending—which usually arise when there’s a war to fight, but can also arise from other causes, including financial crises and natural disasters—are a good reason to run temporary budget deficits.”—Krugman, same column
“Obama saw “a city that’s coming back” because he avoided the vast majority of the city, which has “been to heck” and remains there.”
This is typical of everything “O” does and thinks....because he is an ‘outsider’ in relation to America and American life.
As far as “O’s” failure/refusal to disavow Hoffa’s speech-only moments earlier and in the SAME venue, I can only say that these people have ALL forgotten that there are TWO parties in America.
It is how our system works. Remember???
ESPN apparently has their marching orders. When they broadcast the Tigers / White sox game they used all the words about a city on the move.
Even the regular broadcast crew doesn’t promote Detroit that much.
A side note on the intelligence of the ESPN broadcasters. Um, no that is not the golden gate bridge, that’s the Ambassador bridge. LOL
Made the exact same comparison yesterday.
GMTA!
——We are one nation. We are one people——
No, we are not.
We are a nation divided and at or on the brink of war. The whole northeast and the west coast strip are no longer America. They are sewers of utopian crap gone rancid. Till they are either gone of cleansed of the progressive disease, there will be no unity
Two Former Enron Advisers in One!--I
■"Mr. Cantor's critics have been quick to accuse him of hypocrisy, and with good reason. After all, he and his Republican colleagues showed no comparable interest in paying for the Bush administration's huge unfunded initiatives. In particular, they did nothing to offset the cost of the Iraq war, which now stands at $800 billion and counting."--Paul Krugman, New York Times, Sept. 2
■"Should disaster aid, as a matter of sound public finance, be offset by immediate cuts in other spending? No. The time-honored principle, backed by economists right and left, is that temporary bursts of spending--which usually arise when there's a war to fight, but can also arise from other causes, including financial crises and natural disasters--are a good reason to run temporary budget deficits."--Krugman, same column
“... that is not the golden gate bridge, that’s the Ambassador bridge...”
Thank the NEA for that one. I guess Geography isn’t an important subject either!!
Just what the he&^ do these ‘teachers’ get paid to teach any more?
It's on the move all right. LOL.
Reminds me of the ridiculously optimistic story about how Detroit was going to come back because hipsters were moving in.
Chuckle. It's been a while since I've read Taranto. Thanks for posting.
The sad thing is the lost potential of Detroit. There are lots of productive smart people around Detroit but not in Detroit.
They won’t be returning to Detroit because returning means paying protection money to gangsters like Hoffa.
It’s not just the northeast and the coasts. It’s every major metropolitan area in the country.
Young Obama traveled to his father's country to a tiny native village in Kenya
called Alego, where his stepmother still lives in the house where he grew up.
"When I become president, I'll turn superpower America into a Third World
backwater and make sure Americans live in hovels with dirt floors like this."
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