Sex, lies and text messages Motown-style

Ok, so Detroit is back in the headlines (yet again) but not about its murder-rate but over a sex scandal. But this time it is about an extramarital affair between the city's 30-something mayor Kwame Kilpatrick who is married with children and Christine Beatty, his divorced chief of staff. Sexually-charged text messages between the two came to light a year ago in local newspapers and then came back with a vengeance just recently.

For those who live in or around Detroit, this is just another idiotic situation that Kilpatrick has caught himself in. It seems like from day one of his first term as the mayor of Detroit, he's been in trouble. There was the $56,0000 SUV that he bought for his wife, using city funds, as well as constant rumours of wild, raunchy parties at the mayor's city-owned mansion, at local strip or night clubs and escapades on taxpayer-funded supposedly political out-of-state trips that involved him and his entourage of bodyguards, friends and policemen. But you could only consider a lot of the stories as rumours, because no one could present any real evidence before this, except when he left a money-trail.

Kwame and Beatty got caught and in a Bill-Clintonesque-style denied it in front of a judge. Bad move. They've been indicted for perjury and are now on the hook to serve a few years for that and more. So reports have come out that Kilpatrick might have tried to cover up the whole thing before by paying off a $9 million dollar lawsuit by two fired police officers. He lost an empoverished major industrial city $9 million! City workers have been getting laid off since about 2002. 2003 maybe. I still hear about layoffs. City services have been cut left and right. There was no appeal of the judgment to lower the amount of money being asked for, just a "quick" payoff and sealing of records. Thank goodness for the Freedom of Information Act in this case. This mayor is living large on the backs of the poor or the barely-getting-by.

Of course, he's howling about how innocent he is. How the media is out to get him. How much (I'd say little) he's done for the city. And how the (sex) messages between him and his underling, over a taxpayer-paid cellphone, should be considered private not public.

I just really hope that Detroiters are not insane to believe the stuff he is spouting. He claims to have brought in $43 million dollars worth of business annually into the city. He hasn't done anything that no other politician, city official or business person hadn't thought of before. Most of the "progress" that has happened in Detroit, well mostly in the downtown/mid-town/New Center areas of Detroit, it was all well underway before his first term. He thinks that he is above the law and more important than the citizens of Detroit. He came into the office large and in-charge. Now, he needs to just suck it up, apologize, submit his resignation, tuck his tail between his legs and get out of Detroit's way.

Start reading about it here at The Free Press: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080327/NEWS01/803270390/1001/NEWS01

Not a word

Wow! Incredible! This whole month has practically gone by and not a post the entire time. I. I. I just don't know what to say. A lot has gone on, but I haven't written a word to recount any of it. Not a word. Oh well.