“Affordable Housing” and “Diversity” are big chanting points of blue-state liberals.

Provided that the affordable housing, and the diverse people who pay for it, aren’t actually anywhere near you.

Upper West Side Manhattanites recoil at people living in RVs among them:

Farther uptown, on Central Park West — where the neighborhood’s most expensive rental, a town house with a pool, fetches a cool $75,000 a month — stands a 19-foot, 1975 Dodge Sportsman with gold rims and two cameras affixed to its exterior.

“It looks like it would fit more in the mountains of West Virginia than on the Upper West Side,” said area resident Ron Hoffman.

The Dodge owner, who only gave his name as Robert, refused to answer any questions.

Neighbors are puzzled by the RV’s windows, which are covered by gold curtains.

“He once told me he just uses it to store things — but if that’s the case, why would you have everything blacked out so you can’t see the person inside!” said longtime resident Bill Smith.

“I don’t think it should be here,” added Mario Parisi, 86. “We’re all waiting to park. Sitting there all the time is not a good idea — it’s a monster.”

Diversity is a wonderful thing.

Just not near us.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Report finds no evidence of widespread sexual misconduct in Secret Service.  Good to know.

Of course, that depends on what “sexual misconduct” means.  We all remember “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

And what “widespread” means (get your mind out of the gutter, we’re talking about sexual misconduct not . . . oh, never mind).Joe Doakes

The bar for “right” versus “wrong” has been set so low these days.  , a snake could get over it without jumping.

We return to look at the nascent Minnesota GOP race for U.S. Senate.  We broke down the GOP governor’s battle royale here.

____

While the Minnesota GOP governor’s race has attracted most of the attention from the state’s punditry and conservative activists, the race for U.S. Senate has been at best a political red-headed stepchild – an electoral Clint Howard.  A bevy of unheralded candidates and little money raised hasn’t fundamentally altered the state of the race since July.  This despite the increasingly polling weakness of Sen. Al Franken.

Much like the man who he’ll likely be sharing the top of the DFL ticket with, Gov. Mark Dayton, Sen. Al Franken has seen his approval rating collapse, with the last six months essentially undo six years of polling gains following his contested 312-vote margin of victory.  Franken’s approval rating has dipped to 39%, with a bare majority of 51% disapproving.  Ideologically sympathetic pollsters have pegged Franken’s percentages much higher, but his 10-12% early head-to-head numbers against a mostly unknown GOP field suggests Minnesota’s junior senator hasn’t found the political elixir that Sen. Amy Klobuchar rode to victory just a scant 12+ months ago.  The question remains whether Republicans can take advantage. (more…)

Let’s see; we have a state majority installed largely through money coordinated by the Governor’s ex-wife and paid for by the her and his buddies from the country club.

When Governor Messinger Dayton speaks, his lips are controlled by his chief of staff Bob Hume, who is very credibly rumored to be “romantically involved” – evidence indicates dating or married to, but the principals keep it under wraps – with Carrie Lucking, “executive director” of the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota (Of course, we don’t know anything official; merely that during the Governor’s last budget speech, Lucking was tweeting picayune details of the budget that seem unlikely to have come from someone who hadn’t had an advance look at the proposal.  Some say it’s because Hume must have given Lucking an advance look at the Governor’s budget.  I’d suspect it was more like Lucking let Hume look at it.  But I digress).

And of course, the director of Minnesota’s flailing “MNSure” program spent two weeks during the catastrophic rollout of her website playing little spoon in Costa Rica to the state Medicaid director’s big spoon.

So I suppose the real question about Governor Messinger Dayton’s hiring of Minnesota DFL Executive Director Ken Martin’s wife as his deputy chief of staff isn’t “why all the nepotism”.  It’s “why isn’t the spouse of every powerful DFL functionary making six figures on the public teat”.

Because clearly someone reliable needs to be able to spell Bob Hume in making sure Governor Messinger Dayton doesn’t deviate from the chanting points.  Bob’s gotta be exhausted.

It’s party time, Dems!

(PS: Love the headline.  Governor Messinger Dayton hires a “well-connected” deputy?  No!  He hired his party chair’s wife.  Nope.  No media bias whatsoever in the Twin Cities).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The fact that she was the only person who died in the crash is not the least bit suspicious, there’s nothing to see here, move along, you racist haters.

Joe Doakes

Even if you cordially detest conspiracy theory (as I do), the Obama Administration is a dog’s breakfast of head-shaking fun.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

People are claiming the sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s funeral was a fake because “. . . the man communicated nothing with his hand and arm movements.”

Maybe he accurately interpreted Barak Obama’s speech. The man basically said nothing so the interpreter said nothing.

The real complaint shouldn’t be with the meaningless interpreter, but with the content-free speakers.

Joe Doakes

Silly me.  I thought all of those sign language people were waving away nonsensically.

In yet another Berg’s Seventh Law violation, Minnesota conservative activists noted that the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota – the attack-PR firm supported by the unions and Alita Messinger, which was trying to dig on Scott Honour for not releasing his tax information – hadn’t released its tax or donor information yet.

It’s worse still in Wisconsin; a liberal-controlled county launched a shakedown of Wisconsin conservative groups, in order to find out their donors to target them for future harassment.

And this seems to be a national pattern; liberal groups caterwauling about “lack of transparency” in conservative groups, while themselves keeping their donor lists secret:

Two weeks ago, the liberal Center for Media and Democracy kicked off a national campaign to reveal the identities of anonymous contributors to conservative groups in an effort to unseat the GOP governor here.

Now the group may have to answer embarrassing questions about its own finances….CMD lists no donors on its tax returns, but its website identifies numerous financial backers without any financial data. Several are highlighted in bold and labeled “current donors.” But one important name is missing: Schwab.

Read the whole thing.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Obama-care has more holes than Swiss cheese, the latest one being something called “risk corridors” that give DHS the power to pay extra to insurers who lost money on Obama-care policies.

No, those extra payments weren’t figured into the original cost, but it’s okay – the taxpayers can make up the difference.

In other words, corporate kickbacks will cover the unexpected costs of underwriting Democrat campaigns as the public catches on to the massive fraud the President played on them last election.  Donations from insurers to Democrats will be refunded via risk corridors, sort of like the incest that goes on between NPR and the DFL with Minnesota tax dollars.

Joe Doakes

Robert Stacy McCain has the quote of the day from Twitter:

Obama has a web site that doesn’t work and drones that kill people. Amazon has a functioning web site and drones that deliver gifts.

Maybe that Galt fellow was onto something…

Let’s go to the primary sources:

Ambiguity?

It was one of the stories that got no play last session, in spite of the fact because it highlights the bizarre schizophrenia of using politics to allocate human capital, but while on the one hand AFSCME was working to unionize home-child-care providers – who are independent contractors and don’t have “management” – it was instituting full-day kindergarten, reducing the number of kids who’d be in daycare at all.

Which wasn’t entirely incongruous, if you think about it; to the DFL, racket money from daycare providers and union dues from a doubling of Kindergarten teachers are both just revenue streams.

But this?

The final rule, for the most part, confirmed a proposed rule, issued in July, which will cut the Medicare home health benefit by $22 billion over the next four years.

“Congress asked [Center for Medicaid Services],” Halamandaris said, “to do a comprehensive evaluation of the home health benefit, to isolate what works and what needs improvement, how to increase access and efficiency, and how to reduce costs while improving the quality of care. CMS did none of this. Instead, all they did was look to impose the largest possible cut —3.5 percent a year — on the Medicare home health benefit. This adds up to 14 percent over the next four years, or a total of $22 billion.”

The National Association for Home Care & Hospice has produced studies showing that the Medicare home health benefit has already endured more than its fair share of cuts. The benefit has been cut a disproportionate $78 billion since 2009. Add in the newly imposed cut and $100 billion in cuts will have been taken from the most popular and most-needed Medicare program. And as a result of these cuts by the end of 2017, 75 percent of Medicare-certified agencies will be forced under water with profit margins of zero or less.

“The clear conclusion is that saving money is more important to CMS than serving those who are so sick they cannot leave home without assistance,” Halamandaris pointed out. “It is obvious that they turned a deaf ear to our pleas on behalf of aged, infirm, disabled, and dying Americans.”

In other words, while the SEIU was working calling in markers with the DFL to unionize home-care workers, President Obama was working to shut the industry down completely.

Good job, guys.

They’re not spying on us.

They’re scouring the nation for evidence of any form of Obamcare succes story. 

Soon, they’ll be turning the Hubble Telescope toward the US…

Jimmy Kimmel:

“The only time President Obama comes to LA for money. He’s like the college student who only comes home to do his laundry and steal leftovers….”

Toronto’s crack-addict mayor Chris Farley Rob Ford is many things.

Among them; “more popular than Obama“:

According to a new Forum Research survey of 1,049 Toronto voters, Ford, who admitted to using crack in a “drunken stupor” on Nov. 5, has an approval rating of 42 percent. The Telegraph notes that though this is “a two point drop from two weeks ago, it is up from the 39 [percent] approval rating he had before he admitted smoking crack cocaine.”

In contrast, President Barack Obama’s approval rating has fallen to an all-time low this week. According to a CBS poll released Wednesday, only 37 percent of Americans approve of the job the president’s doing in the White House — a nine-point drop since October.

To be fair, Ford benefits by being mayor of a city full of Canadians.

On the other hand, I can easily see President Obama needing to triangulate his way out of this.  Perhaps with the help of Senator Booker’s pal “T-Bone”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Instead of building State Senators a nice place to do business, we should erect pup tents.  This is a part-time legislature.  We should encourage them to get their business done and go home.  Incentives work, just need to create the correct incentives.

Also, this is odd:

“Hausman’s committee usually would have had the task of vetting and approving such a large-scale project like a new Senate office building. Instead, it was placed in the tax bill in the final hours of the session and bypassed most of the usual committee process.”

She’s a Democrat.  She should already understand that laws are passed so that you can read them later to learn what’s in them.  Why is she claiming to be confused by this now?

Joe Doakes

Representative Hausman  – who, confusingly, is listed as the representative from HD66A, which we all know is Heather Martens’ district – is a good DFL soldier.  She claims what she is told to claim.

Still, this sort of thing – jamming down a huge capital expenditure without the requisite government oversight – is a little strange.

If only this state had an institution – say, with printing presses and transmitters, with a group of people who perhaps annoyingly see themselves as a monastic class of truth-seekers, but whose job was to, I dunno, report on things like this?

You may say that I’m a dreamer…

In past months, I’ve showed you how not only big-media-alum group-blog MinnPost, but “No Rant, No Slant” Minnesota Public Radio are on the take from the Joyce Foundation – which funds “Protect MN”, the anti-rights group run by Rep. Heather Martens.  I speculated that it might be the reason that MPR has been so incurious about Martens’ astroturf group, and why the MinnPost – with all its pretenses to legitimate journalism – spent the past year giving Martens a public tongue bath.

I asked – does this involvement go any higher in the Twin Cities’ “progressive” political world?

I asked, and Bill Glahn answered – ten months ago.  Joyce is a huge financial backer of “Take Action MN”, a non-profit that verges on being a political party in its own right, a descendent of “Progressive Minnesota”, which had its own unseemly connections with “non-partisan” institutions.

Glahn:

The Joyce Foundation of Chicago, Illinois, was founded by Iowa lumber heiress Beatrice Joyce Kean.  This $760 million foundation has been involved with TakeAction since near the beginning of the Minnesota non-profit’s existence.  Joyce’s 2006 Annual Report (p. 25) shows a grant of $350,000 to be paid out to TakeAction over two years, “To develop and promote a political reform agenda focused on campaign finance, judicial, and voting rights reforms.”
Joyce’s 2009 IRS Form 990 reveals that the $350,000 grant to the 501(c)(3) TakeAction Minnesota Education Fund was renewed in 2008 for two additional years, “for ongoing efforts to reform and strengthen democracy in Minnesota.”[12]
Joyce’s 2011 IRS Form 990 reveals that, yet again, the $350,000 grant to the TakeAction Education Fund was renewed in 2010 for two additional years, “For advancing a political reform agenda that encompasses election administration, voting rights, campaign finance, redistricting, and judicial independence.”[13]

The Joyce Foundation’s website indicates that the TakeAction Education Fund received an additional $150,000 in 2012 for one year, “For advancing a democracy reform agenda using legislation, community organizing, movement building, coalition work, and unexpected alliances.”
Unexpected alliances?  In any event, the seven-year total of grants from the Joyce Foundation to TakeAction equals $1,200,000.

So let’s break this down:  The Joyce Foundation heavily sponsors “Progressive” non-profits, including “Take Action MN”, “Protect MN”, and (I strongly suspect) “Common Cause MN”.

And they pour money into at least two “non-profit” Minnesota media outlets that have pretensions to respectability; Minnesota Public Radio and the MinnPost.

I’ve sought comment from both organizations in the past, without success.  I’ll try again.

All of this carefully obfuscated money going to support “campaign finance…reforms” is one thing.

Going to buy friendly media coverage?

And finding willing takers, in an industry whose “code of ethics” tells journalists who avoid financial entanglements in their “journalism?”

From the Declaration of Independence, with emphasis added :

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

From the Journal – again, with emphasis added:

Copies of two subpoenas we’ve seen demand “all memoranda, email . . . correspondence, and communications” both internally and between the subpoena target and some 29 conservative groups, including Wisconsin and national nonprofits, political vendors and party committees. The groups include the League of American Voters, Wisconsin Family Action, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, Americans for Prosperity—Wisconsin, American Crossroads, the Republican Governors Association, Friends of Scott Walker and the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

One subpoena also demands “all records of income received, including fundraising information and the identity of persons contributing to the corporation.” In other words, tell us who your donors are.

Oh, yeah – and since the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel may be one newspaper that might occasionally take its lips off of the Democrat party’s boy parts long enough to worry about that whole “holding government accountable” thing…:

The investigation is taking place under Wisconsin’s John Doe law, which bars a subpoena’s targets from disclosing its contents to anyone but his attorneys. John Doe probes work much like a grand jury, allowing prosecutors to issue subpoenas and conduct searches, while the gag orders leave the targets facing the resources of the state with no way to publicly defend themselves.

And hey, just in time for campaign season!

I’ve always tried to stay hopeful for the future of this country.  But it gets harder and harder every day.

Bill Glahn has been doing the work the Twin Cities media hasn’t won’t in covering the big, unseen unreported-on force in Minnesota politics:  Take Action Minnesota.

Even among people who know that TAM exists, I think few know exactly what they’re into, and how the organization works:

Charity Status—whether legal or not, I object to TakeAction’s abuse of its tax-exempt non-profit charity status. Unlike the traditional political party—whose role the group is increasingly displacing —TakeAction can accept tax-deductible contributions from anonymous donors. Despite my best efforts at discovery, we really do not know who contributes the millions of dollars that fund TakeAction’s operations.

Quasi-Party Status—although TakeAction operates much like a political party—recruiting and financing candidates, conducting campaigns, and getting out the vote—it does not have to abide by the same laws on transparency and accountability. It acts as a closed political machine—answering to its (unknown) donors, but not to voters and taxpayers in the same way that the Democrats and Republicans must answer.

They also sit among a warren of offices for similar “progressive” “non-profits” – “ProtectMN”, “Wellstone Action” and others – in the Griggs Building, in the St. Paul Midway.  This isn’t just a happy accident, or entirely the product of the Griggs’ very low rent.  The network shares much more than just an address; phone banks, lists, staff, know-how.

You should read Glahn’s entire series on the subject:

My latest “Who Is TakeAction?” Series:

·         Part 1—Political philosophy

·         Part 2—TakeAction takes over city politics

·         Part 3—All the cool kids went to this year’s Progressive Prom

My original TakeAction Minnesota Series:

• Part 1–Intro and the 2010 election for Minnesota Governor
• Part 2–Follow the Money, as it spins around inside the TakeAction network
• Part 3–Tracking down the money to its sources
• Part 3A—More donor names and dollar amounts
• Part 4–The lobby machine
• Part 5–The 2012 referendum on Voter ID
• Part 6–Updating Part 5 with final 2012 money figures
• Part 7–TakeAction Goes to Washington

The entire series is excellent.

Although Glahn also observes:

[S]imply from a journalistic viewpoint, the rise of TakeAction as a political force is a major story—one that has received almost no coverage from Minnesota’s legacy media. In contrast, oceans of ink have been spilled over the Tea Party and its relationship to the Republican Party. There is a man-bites-dog story waiting for an enterprising reporter to pick it up.

This is not an accident.  It’s a case of Berg’s Seventh Law in action.

And most of the Twin Cities media shares TAM’s mission, whether they admit it or not (and whether their friendly coverage/non-coverage is being purchased by some of the same donors or not).

Matt Damon needs to eat his shoe.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It’s nice to have a modern leader in office.

In the olden days, Congress passed the laws and the President faithfully carried them out. Nowadays, Congress passes laws and the President does as he chooses. He faithfully carries out those parts of the law that he likes, when he feels like it, exempting friends and delaying implementation at whim. And if a problem arises, no need to go back to Congress for amendments, he changes the law of the land by press conference.

President isn’t really a fitting title for that sort of leader. King? Supreme Leader?

I’ll go with “Czar”.

They should give the Beltway media really snazzy uniforms. Like the Swiss Guard.

…the President’s “fix” were to throw the entire insurance market into complete chaos?:

The debacle threatens to swamp Obama’s entire second-term agenda, raising questions about his competency and credibility. Polls released this week show the president’s job-approval rating at a historic low and a majority of voters saying, for the first time, that he isn’t trustworthy.
“A White House interested in stabilizing this presidency would want to leave no stone unturned in the effort to deal with both those problems,” said William Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton who’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a center-left policy research center…Insurance companies already have devised plans for next year, received the necessary approval from states and begun to sell policies. They aren’t required to continue to offer their existing policies and state insurance commissioners aren’t required to approve those 2013 plans.

“Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers,” Karen Ignagni, the president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents the industry.

What was it that Kevin Williamson said? Politics are the worst possible way to allocate resources?

Support for the anti-rights “gun safety” agenda is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Support for gun rights is a mile wide and a mile deep.

Case in point:

Although Mayors Against Illegal Guns’ efforts helped defeat GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, no one seriously expected him to win. However, of the 67 Virginia House of Delegates candidates endorsed by the National Rifle Association and targeted by Bloomberg’s group, 65 won, according to the Washington Examiner.

That’s about a 3% win rate for the splashy anti-rights group – or alternately, 97% for the good guys.

It’s been a tough year for the splashy, big-bucks rights-grabbing group:

After December’s Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, the group got behind President Obama’s call for sweeping gun control legislation. But negotiations between U.S. Sens. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Joe Manchin, D-W.V., yielded a mere milquetoast background check proposal.

Still, the Mayors Against Illegal Guns website reported that the group got firmly behind the bill and aired a new series of ads campaigning for its passage. When the measure came for a Senate vote, it went down in flames.

It wasn’t just legislation: 

The group then tried to prevent the recall of two anti-gun state senators in Colorado. Although a reported $2 million was spent to support the lawmakers, both lost their jobs, according to Reuters.

About 10% of the mayors are voting with their feet: 

Some 95 key members of the group that targets and criticizes lawmakers backed by the National Rifle Association are losing their title of “mayor.” According to an election review of Bloomberg’s membership list of about 1,000, three quit the group, 69 retired from their jobs, and 23 were rejected by voters.

And that doesn’t even count the ones that have left office for, er, other reasons.

And I bet Michael Bloomberg would call this next factoid an “unintended consequence”, if he were honest enough:

As for that Virginia election, the number of state lawmakers the NRA rated “A” actually grew from 63 to 65 as a result of Tuesday’s election.

More of this.

To: Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone, Hosts, NPR’s On The Media
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Your Concern For Journalistic Integrity

Ms. Gladstone / Mr. Garfield

I caught your story in this week’s edition of On The Media criticizing NBC for paying, not only for footage (of this spectacular skydiving accident) but for exclusive access to the principals to the story.

This – paying for access to news – is one of those things that furrow the brows of journo-wonks.   And the two of you were audibly furrowed.  Gotta hand you that.

So – paying for access to a news story is bad.  Gotcha.

So is being paid by a partisan pressure group to run a news story even worse?

Get back to us on this.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Waiting for these campaign commercials to begin:

Hi, I’m Al Franken. I was behind on votes until my lawyers outmaneuvered Norm Coleman’s lawyers and the courts made me the 60th Democrat in the Senate. Not one single Republican voted for Obama-care but I’m proud to say I cast the last vote needed to make Obama-care the law of the land. Without me, it never would have happened. I’m Al Franken, I’m responsible for Obama-care, and I approve this message.

“I’m good enough by a standard that includes Chuck Schumer and Barbara Boxer.  I’m not sure what I’m smart-enough for, and doggonnit, people are nuts to like me because for the first five-year period of my life, I’ve been able to stay innocuous”

Is Detroit’s new-found cause célèbre ignoring the past to cloud the future?

George Clooney had the Sudan.  Bono has Africa.  Anthony Bourdain – and much of the American media – apparently has Detroit.

Michigan’s So Not Grand Central Station: built in 1912 and on the national registry of historic places. It was closed in 1988 and is one of Detroit’s estimated 78,000 abandoned buildings.

In recent months, the city of Detroit has witnessed two narratives arise in Phoenix-like fashion from the economic ashes of the city, often in conjecture with themselves.  One is the purported economic revitalization of the city that gave birth to Motown and the American automotive industry.  It is a narrative fostered by Quicken Loans founder (and Cleveland Cavs owners) Dan Gilbert who, among others, has put millions into Detroit to try and restore its grandeur.  The other narrative, the so-called “ruin porn” seen in picture form below, depicts Detroit as a third-world ghetto.  A Somalia on the St. Clair River.

The former delights the denizens of Detroit with hopes of a better future.  The latter rankles them.  Gilbert himself expressed outrage when 60 Minutes balance their report on the Motor City between Gilbert’s altruism and the destruction of the out-lying portions of the city, comparing it to Dresden after the Allied bombing of World War II.  Gilbert tweeted a defiant message, stating “a city’s soul that will not die was the story & they missed it.”  But even a sympathetic, blue-collar soul as Bourdain, whose CNN show Parts Unknown highlighted the city last night, saw the need to balance Detroit’s attempts to pick itself up off the ground with the stark realities of a city undone.

The Fisher Body Plant: once part of the GM empire

Both narratives ignore the Chrysler in the room – how Detroit got to where it is today.

If the “ruin porn” industry renders pity without judgement, the acts of Dan Gilbert and others, as well-intended as they obviously are, seek a future for Detroit without acknowledging its past or present.  Not once in 60 Minutes‘ coverage did the story’s telejournalism deal with the political causes for Detroit’s decay – a corrupt, one-party institution burrowed like a tick into City Hall.  Equally, if differently, ignorant are the views of Gilbert et al who believe that once their plans to remove all of Detroit’s blight (78,000 buildings), capital will come easily rushing back into the city:

Gilbert is no fan of urban farming, though. When he envisions land cleared of  blight, he sees developers rushing in to build anew…

“When that blight is gone, maybe we don’t have to be talking about shrinking cities because it will be such a rush of people who want to get into low-value housing — when all the utilities are there and the land is pretty much close to free— not exactly free, but close to it — and all the utilities are there, it becomes very cheap for a builder/developer to develop a residential unit, and they are going to develop them and develop them in mass as soon as we get the structures down and maybe we don’t have to worry about raising peas or corn or whatever it is you do in the farm.”

The Highland Park Police Station: even Detroit’s police stations no longer want anything to do with the city

And what will cause developers (yet alone individuals or businesses) to return to a city with the highest property tax rate in the country?  What will encourage retail industries when Michigan’s sales tax is 6% on top of that?  Detroit’s backers can honestly claim that the city ranks no where near the top of the tax chain (Detroit ranks 92nd nationally; Minneapolis is 52nd by comparison).  But the tax climate is far from ideal, especially the dubbed “most dangerous city in America” with a murder rate 10-times the national average.  Throw in a 58-minute response time for police, to attract businesses back, Detroit may literally need the fictional hero RoboCop (to whom a statue is being built – seriously).

There isn’t much evidence that Detroit is about to change its ways.

The Merrill Fountain at Palmer Park: has sat empty for 50 years since being moved from the Opera House. Vandals have stolen much of it.

Since Governor Rick Snyder’s decision to appoint emergency manager Kevyn Orr last spring, Detroit’s journey to bankruptcy has been managed with minimal (some would say no) input from City Hall.  As the case has headed to court, where Orr has testified about Detroit’s long-term debts of $18 billion, city officials have fought the measure almost every step of the way.  The election of Mike Duggan as mayor, the former head of the Detroit Medical Center, has been advertised as the promotion of a turnaround artist.  But while Duggan had success revitalizing the city’s Medical Center, Duggan also ran on opposing Orr’s decisions and comes as a political protégé of former Wayne County Executive Edward McNamara – an official who backed the cartoonishly corrupt Kwame Kilpatrick and had FBI agents and state police raid his own office in November 2002, over alleged corruption in airport contracts and campaign fundraising.  Meet the new boss.

The American Hotel: built in 1926, the hotel is 11 stories high with over 300 rooms. It has remained vacant since the early 90’s.

Oh, there have been the requisite platitudes.  Duggan and Orr have broken bread in what was described as a “very good first meeting.”  And Duggan has said all the right things that a reformer would state, such as being “a huge believer in lean processing. If you are not excellent at making systems work, you cannot survive…”

But the inertia of the status quo has been apparent even after only one week from the election.  The Michigan House Appropriations Committee ranking Democrat Rep. Fred Durhal, Jr. is angry that Duggan hasn’t called him yet.  Metro Detroit AFL-CIO President Chris Michalakis essentially threw down a polite ultimatum that Duggan must “honor” his commitment to working families, while suggesting the labor doesn’t trust the new mayor.  Duggan claims he just wants a seat at the table as Detroit’s debts are solved, and if Synder and Orr are smart, they’ll allow it.

Wilbur Wright High School: closed in 2005, this building actually is among the few on this list that has been demolished. 10,000 buildings have been torn down in Detroit since 2010.

The decision to abrogate Detroit’s city government in the bankruptcy process may have been politically necessary (Detroit certainly hasn’t come to grips with its position despite many, many, many opportunities), but doing so has allowed Snyder and Orr to play the villain while the usual suspects who caused this economic disaster play the victim.  However, it’s also allowed Snyder to take all the credit too.  67% of Michigan voters approved the move back in March (including 41% of Detroit), and the decision has given Snyder a welcome bump in his approval rating.  That’s a short term political fix to a long-term structural problem.

Mike Duggan may be a product of the system that failed Detroit, but he’s viewed warily by both it.  Orr’s contract expires in the fall of 2014; Duggan and the City Council can vote whether or not to renew it – almost literally the only voice they have in the process.  If that’s the first time Duggan has to impact the process, he’ll have likely caved by then to labor, vote to end Orr’s tenure and – more importantly – work to undo reforms set in place.  Should Rick Snyder not return in 2015, an opportunity to address Detroit’s deeper fundamental problems will have passed and a new administration will slap a band-aid bailout on the city, and hope more journalists write about Dan Gilbert than urban hunters who live off of raccoon to supplement their meals.