"Exhibit A" in Depravity (a bit off-topic)

[mary]

The City of Detroit. We have a mayor here who had an affair with his chief of staff, Christine Beatty, and exchanged 14,000, soft-core porn text-messages with her (makes you wonder, if they text-messaged that much, when they had time to... ). When two of Detroit's Finest (and I mean that: Officers Brown and Nelthrope were fine police officers and simply did their jobs as his bodyguards) blew the whistle on him, he and Beatty conspired to fire them, and this eventually resulted in the already cash-strapped Detroit having to pay a $9,000,000.00, wrongful discharge judgment to them. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his lovely and gracious mistress lied about why the officers were discharged under oath, thus committing perjury. Check out the stories on www.detnews.com if any of this interests you.

Now it comes out today that in another Kilpatrick scandal, an exotic dancer, Tamara Green, who was killed in 2003 after a party at the mayor's mansion, was assaulted with a baseball bat by the mayor's wife first to the extent that she required hospitalization. (Carlita Kilpatrick came home unexpectedly, burst into the party and didn't like what she saw of a dance that Ms. Green was doing with her husband.) This was shortly before a Detroit police officer was, shall we say, encouraged to put between 3 and 18 bullets into Ms. Green's back as she sat in a car (depending upon whom you believe; all we know is that all of the bullets came from a "piece" issued to a Detroit police officer). This lady left three young kids and a suit sounding in wrongful death has been filed against the city by her oldest son. Check out www.wxyz.com for details of this, if you're interested...

So where do we stand today? Mayor Kilpatrick vows to stay in office and "move the city forward;" Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy is still "considering" whether either the mayor and/or Beatty should be indicted for perjury, and morals have flown out the window. There is no such thing as morality in southeastern MI public life anymore. Is it any wonder the churches are in the state they're in? By the way - and this is definitely "on topic" - when Kilpatrick addressed the city a few weeks ago, after the text-message scandal broke, he did so from his pastor's study, in his church. This would be funny if it weren't so sick and so sad.

My prediction is that the intelligent Kym Worthy, deciding, reasonably, that she would like to continue to breathe, will determine that "not enough evidence" exists to bring a charge of perjury against anyone. The mayor will stay in office, and Detroit will continue as even more of an international laughingstock than it already is.

I was born in Detroit and lived there for over 20 years... But long ago, I stopped admitting it except when anonymity is involved, as it is here. The city needs prayer, for there are still a few righteous people there... Darned few... Tomorrow night, Mayor Kilpatrick is going to give his "State of the City" address - and all but three members of the Detroit city council are going to be no-shows at it. (It'll be televised on all local stations.)

Will any of this get national play? No, at least not much, because it's Detroit. (Reminds me of the last few lines of the movie "Chinatown:" "Forget it, Jake; it's Chinatown...")

I'm pretty sick of living this place & wish I could leave. (I'm sorry, but what NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer did is "small potatoes" compared to what we've got going on here in Day-TWA.) But then, is there anywhere else to go?

mary