Look out, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Raleigh. You could be next.

After touting the outcome of his decision (actually George W. Bush regrettably got the ball rolling) to bail out the Big Three, President Obama told the nation on Wednesday night that it doesn’t have to end there!

“What’s happening in Detroit can happen in other industries,” Obama beamed. “It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh.”

Leaving aside for a second that he also declared “no bailouts, no handouts and no copouts” (we will leave that aside because he certainly did not mean it), let’s consider what is happening in Detroit – and whether this is really what we want to see on a widespread basis across the nation.

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This week, the New York Times breathlessly reported in its New York Region section that the New York Police Department had committed a politically incorrect felony by using a film, The Third Jihad, to train its officers on the hidden agenda of many Muslims residing in the U.S. That hidden agenda is the destruction of the United States.

Apparently, the Times doesn’t realize that some Muslims in and out of this country want to harm New Yorkers and other Americans. The article says about the film: “Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.

“This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America,” a narrator intones. “A strategy to infiltrate and dominate America. … This is the war you don’t know about.”

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Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Detroit bore the stigma of being the most dangerous city in America.  Then, things seemed to get slightly better.  For a while, Washington D.C., New Orleans, Chicago and Los Angeles tossed the “most dangerous” title back and forth like a hot potato.  Not to be outdone, last year Motor City criminals reclaimed their crown.  In 2011 Detroit was once again the U.S. city in which you are most likely to be murdered.  So far, in 2012, things are getting worse.  Crimes like robbery, rape and non-lethal assault are down, slightly, but still far ahead of most cities.

So the city has taken the bold step of cracking down – on the victims.

Earlier this month, to combat auto theft, Detroit police banned parking on certain streets in the downtown entertainment district.  Violators who chose to park in normally legal spaces had their vehicles towed away, at their expense.  In short, the city banned parking in public parking spaces, because the vehicle owners might be the victim of grand theft auto.

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Thank you, South Carolina! On Saturday, you administered a most-needed beatdown to Mitt Romney and put the lie, once and for all, to the twin myths of his “inevitability” and “electability.” The sheer scale of the wipeout clearly showed just how much Romney is disliked by and will never win over the conservative base, notwithstanding denial-driven emotional protestations by the media and GOP beltway establishment.

So, with the battle now fully joined and what looks to be a long Romney vs. Gingrich primary battle serving as a proxy in the war for the soul of the GOP between the Tea Party and the establishment, we move on to Florida on January 31^st. And while this was a most satisfying victory for both Gingrich and the heretofore quiet conservative base which finally found its voice and deafeningly roared, neither should read more into it than is there or rest on their laurels.

Romney still has a big money and organization advantage, which is no small thing in an expensive state like Florida. He’s been running ads for two weeks and many early votes have already been cast, prior to the big turnaround in South Carolina. So he has a bit of a head start. Rick Santorum will bleed votes away, especially as the establishment uses him as a stalking horse, propping him up as long as they can.

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While it is fashionable these days to engage in vitriol and vilification of the political “other side,” I am having a hard time thinking of Willard Mitt Romney as truly evil. Really.

Sure, I cringe when I think about having a private equity guy in the White House. I know enough about that business to realize that it can be creative and helpful or deeply cold-blooded and destructive. Romney’s work at Bain Capital apparently included plenty of both kinds of deals. That makes me uncomfortable. But it’s a big jump from knowing that to believing that one can divine what’s in a man’s soul. People are complicated, Romney more so than most.

Along with his shortcomings, Romney has some very good qualities – as a candidate and as a person – that make him by far the best Republican in the presidential field. None of those qualities make me want to vote for him in the fall, for reasons I will explain shortly. But even so, it’s worth noting some of them:

• Romney is no ideologue: Like Ronald Reagan, Romney has a strong pragmatic streak. As governor of Massachusetts, he was willing to pair spending cuts with revenue increases by raising fees and closing loopholes in the state tax code. That does not endear him to Tea Party activists. But a “cuts only” approach to fixing the Massachusetts budget would have been a nonstarter. Mitt chose to get things done.
• He made health care a priority: “Romneycare,” seen as Romney’s biggest vulnerability in the primaries, was actually a ground-breaking achievement. It is not the approach I would have chosen to provide near-universal health care in Massachusetts. But, for the most part, it worked and provided a template for the national Affordable Care Act. Read the rest of this entry »

The big news today coming out of Lansing is that the city government of the Capital City will ink a deal with a tribe from the Upper Peninsula to expand casino gambling. I’ll spare you the predictable joke about legalized gambling in the state’s capital city, at least until the next paragraph.

Monday morning, Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero lauded the agreement as a way to anchor downtown Lansing and stimulate economic activity. He even said it will be built with a union workforce, a feather tossed to construction workers who during the mayor’s tenure have had no love lost for him (rumblings from within held that during the 2010 gubernatorial race they preferred Bernero’s Democratic opponent, Andy Dillon, a milksop of a House Speaker who is now state treasurer).

If plans go forward, the casino will be a few short blocks from the Capitol, giving lawmakers on marathon sessions gambling the state’s future on ideas that have never held up when put into practice – we call this fiscal conservatism – an opportunity to legally wager away yet more taxpayer dollars at the poker tables.

At least it will keep them out of the downtown bars.

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Newt Gingrich may be a jerk, but his broadside against CNN’s John King in last week’s South Carolina debate was on target for more reasons than even he probably realizes.

I do not have any sympathy for Gingrich when it comes to his past marital infidelity. While no one knows the whole story of his marriage to former wife Marianne, we know enough just from what he’s admitted to fairly conclude that he was a pretty bad husband. Maybe she was a bad wife too – I don’t know – but she’s not running for president.

That said, King’s decision to open the debate with a question about Gingrich’s personal life was deplorable – not because it was hurtful to Gingrich, but because it was a complete waste of time in a forum that could be useful to the voters if only someone would have the nerve to kick the media out of it.

These are not debates. They are joint press conferences in which self-aggrandizing journalists pretending to be “moderators” ask questions with no purpose other than to provoke drama and force mistakes. There is almost nothing voters can learn from these events that will help them decide which candidate would make the best president.

There are several reasons for this, chief among them being the fact that members of the media are allowed to participate at all. The problem with the media moderators is not that they carry their liberal bias into the debate, although many do. The problem is that the moderators are so focused on asking “the tough questions” that they can’t create an atmosphere that allows for substantive discussion of issues.

There is a difference between a tough question and a question that allows you to learn something useful.

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Last Friday, across the country, thousands of citizens and grassroots organizations occupied courthouses, law firms and sidewalks calling for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Why? Because two years earlier, on January 20, 2009, the United States Supreme Court struck down an important federal law that limited the ability of corporations to directly influence political campaigns.  In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a slim majority of five Justices voted to expand the First Amendment protections for corporations, enabling them to spend millions of dollars on commercials and other media in an attempt to influence the outcome of elections.

In interpreting the First Amendment to find that corporations are entitled to the same sorts of free speech protections that citizens enjoy, the court notably cast aside any concern that allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns would invite an appearance or perception of corruption.

But they premised their dismissal of the corruption concern on the idea of disclosure and transparency.  In finding that corporations now have a “right” to influence our elections, citizens, the court reasoned, also have a “right” to know who is spending what.   And, Justice Kennedy wrote in Citizens United, “disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way. This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”

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I made my much publicized unconventional endorsement at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference last week in Charleston, South Carolina. As predicted, the media did not like it, but the people loved it.

I endorsed “the People”. We the people!

The media did not like it because it did not fit their desire to have another quick hot scoop news story that would have about a hot minute-long news cycle. Just look at the endorsements of Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry. They were not stories very long and their impact on the endorsees was questionable.

A single presidential candidate is not going to save this country. “We the People” are going to save this country from its current path of collapse. Yes, collapse is a strong word, but if one honestly considers the facts, that’s the only conclusion one can make about the direction we are headed.

Facts: The national debt is out of control. The economy is not in a recovery. We have an energy crisis. Our space program no longer leads the world . The world is not safer. Our military has been weakened. Most people are not better off than they were three years ago when President Obama took office.

Big government liberals don’t consider the facts. They can’t even handle the facts because the facts do not validate their preconceived emotional motives and objectives. They don’t always know what those objectives are, such as the ill-purposed “Occupy Wall Street” protests. They just want to protest and distract attention in the media from the failures of this administration, and from the need for real solutions to problems.

Our nation is broke. Washington is broken.

It is clear that we are not going to change Washington from the inside. We will have to change it from the outside and from the bottom up. The people!

That means we will have to get specific commitments about specific solutions from candidates before they get elected. The heat must come from that candidate’s constituency, which is hereby endorsed and empowered to take the heat to them. Asking them to adopt the 9-9-9 tax reform plan would be a good start.

But regardless of who is elected, neither he nor the next Congress will take the steps that are necessary to turn this country around unless the people demand that he do so.

I was encouraged by some students at the College of Charleston during a rally with Stephen Colbert last week, when they shouted out “thanks for endorsing me”. Endorsing the people is a wake-up call to action.

Several reporters kept asking me during interviews what endorsing the people means. This shows just how insulated and out of touch with the people they are. The media class and the political class believe they are in charge.

Endorsing the people was a reminder that elected officials work for us, and that we are in charge if we assert our collective power. They forget that, so we have to remind them.

We the People are coming. We want our power back.