Detroit throws in the towel

Berlin in 1945 or America in 2013?

Detroit, the eleventh largest city in America declared bankruptcy.  This is not a surprise but it should be a warning to everyone.  There are four other cities in Michigan in similar straits (ironic since Detroit means "the straits") and other cities in America like Stockton, CA and San Bernodino, CA who are in the same boat.

The governor of Michigan appointed an "Emergency Manager" who has nearly dictatorial powers and has rendered the Mayor and City Council of Detroit impotent.  This sounds a lot like what happened to Rome.  Gross mismanagement followed by dictatorship.

The city government failed by spending more than it had.  The unions failed by demanding more than the city had and the city of course agreed.  Several corrupt mayors came and went (straight into a jail cell). The voters kept putting the same people in and in while cheering on "soak the rich" policies that drove away businesses and investment.

Almost 40% of the street lights don't work, there are over 77,000 abandoned buildings, and there are wild dogs and even wilder humans running around large stretches of the abandoned city.

If you give Greece a lot of crap for its financial problems, Athens will point past you and at Detroit.  How does this affect anyone living outside of Detroit?

 Take a look at the federal government's balance sheet.

Homeland Security Adrift

Janet Neopalito resigned from leading one of the most useless parts of the federal government--the Department of Homeland Security.

Fifteen of the forty-five leadership positions are now vacant.  We should make it forty-five for forty-five because the DHS does nothing.  Our borders are not secure, traveling by airlines is a complete nightmare and the average TSA agent is a mindless drone with an IQ of 45 who could not handle a threat of any kind, real or imagined. The Israelis, who live with a real terrorist threat everyday, handle it in stride without turning their much smaller and more vulnerable country into a mismanaged police state that spies on its own citizens and still cannot detect threats like the Boston Bombers even when the Russians give out warnings.

Shut it down.  It wastes money and accomplishes nothing.

And there is no one in charge of anything.

Like anyone would notice.

Happy Fourth of July

Happy Fourth of July!

Best Stanley Cup ever?

If the 2013 Stanley Cup was not the best Cup series ever, it was pretty close.  The only things that could have made it better was if the Penguins were winning it or if the series went to game seven. After three different overtime games, the players must have felt it was just like seven games. 

What made this series so great was not just the Finals but the path to get there.  For whatever reason, the last four team to have won the Cup where in the Final Four.  Pittsburgh had won it in 2009, followed by Chicago in 2010, the Boston Bruins in 2011, and last year, the Los Angeles Kings took the Cup home to that hotbed of hockey, Southern California.

LA came close to repeating but fell in the Western finals and I am not even sure Pittsburgh was there, getting swept in four but the Boston-Chicago series made up for it.  Not only was it an Original Six match up, it was a good physical series with no let up.

Until Boston let two Blackhawk goals slide by in seventeen seconds.  The Boston crowd watched a seemingly safe 2-1 lead and game seven trip to Chicago turn into a Blackhawks Cup celebration on their ice.

One of the greatest sports traditions in the world is the Cup presentation and the players lining up to shake hands.  I always wonder what the losing team is thinking but that seems obvious enough--next year, WE will win this thing.

The Pittsburgh Penguins lost to Detroit in 2008 on their home ice but came back to beat those same RedWings in seven in 2009 in Detroit.

Yes, it can happen.

Will it?

That, my friend, is why they play the game.

Luster Lost...

 

In 2008, Candidate Obama gave a speech in Berlin in front of hundreds of thousands of cheering Germans who believed in Hope and Change.  In 2013, Obama stood in front of a couple thousand vetted guests, hosted by a German government clearly uncomfortable with their guest whose government is spying not only on the whole world, every American citizen, and even the rest of the US government itself! 

When Obama went to Ireland, the typical fawning, slobbering press followed him around but there was a curious lack of excitement about his visit.  One Irish lawmaker seemed to have the answer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnJCvKA-oEU

Blundering back into the Middle East

Maybe Obama is trying to pull attention away from the multiple scandals plaguing his administration. Maybe Haliburton is trying to make more money.  Maybe those making US foreign policy are utterly clueless....

Best answer: all of the above

SecState John Kerry has announced that the United States is going to send military aid to Syrian rebels.  Obviously, he does not remember Libya (see May 19 blog entry).  All the US will succeed in doing it arming people who will eventually attack it (again, see Libya).  Making matters worse is the US stationing fighters in Jordan, supposedly at Jordanian request.  It starts to look like the establishment of a no-fly zone.

A no-fly zone over Syria would be much more difficult than the operation over Libya.  The Syrian anti-aircraft defense system is actually an operating system that looks pretty dense and has been built with Russian, and possibly Chinese, help. There might be Russian and Chinese personnel on the ground there too.

The United States claims that Damascus is using chemical weapons, namely sarin, against the rebels in the northwest of the country.  Syria denies this.  The real question here is "Is this any of America's business?" 

The United States might be claiming to intervene in the name of humanitarian purposes but after the IRS and NSA revelations, can anyone anywhere trust anything that comes out of Washington.  And the human rights front sees somewhat shaky when those same scandals are brought to light combined with the very real possibility of Eric Snowden possibly defecting to China or Russia.  Correct interpretation or not, this is how most of the world sees it.

Stay out of Libya, let Afghanistan wind down, and let that part of the world continue on its merry way to self-destruction.  Sit back and watch the show.  Most importantly, don't let it drag you down with it.

Off the rails and off a cliff...

If you were wondering, that still, I believe, is from Back To The Future III.

It is also a pretty good description of what is happening to Hope and Change.

If lying about Benghazi was not bad enough, the government spying on the news organizations and the IRS scandal did not make things worse, now we have even more examples of the IRS spending other people's money like drunken sailors and even MORE government spying...

...on everyone.

The Guardian, a British newspaper, broke the story about the impossibly wide scope of National Security Agency spying on phone calls, internet usage, and phone records.  Notice the leakers did not go to an American newspaper.  This is completely insane.

Not to mention illegal, tyrannical, and utterly unnecessary.

How do you listen in on a hundred million phone calls?  Is it even possible?  Do you know how much this would cost?

Then the First Lady gets heckled by a Gay activist and Eric Holder makes the usual donkey's behind out of himself and you really wonder if you should hold on to American citizenship.

If there is one thing we have learned, it is this----the Tea Party was right all along.

Time to yank the chain on this government.