It's true there is no comparison og Chicago to Detroit. Motown is - always was - a boom or bust city; the only trump card in its deck is the auto industry. Halberstam's classic on the industry documents the American companies' failure to recognize and respect the threat of foreign competition. Over the next decades, they continued operation based on short term profits, ignoring the looming reality of an oil production peak - Pumping out SUVs and failing to increase gas mileage across all models.

Detroit began losing population to the newly-developed suburbs shortly after WWII. It wasn't so much a white flight as a white filter, because of the racist policies of the FHA. I'm old enough to remember when vlack folks couldn't get a conventional loan. Typically, they bought older homes in the city on land contract.

All this, the HUD scandle, the civil disorders in 1967, etc. have militated again the growth and sutaining of my city.

timbukton, your contrast of Detroit to the Points compared to East and West Berlin is stunning. I lived in the western sector, before the wall, in 1955-56. East berlin was a moonscape while much of the West Berlin, particularly Zehledorf in the U.S. Sector, was lovely.

Yes, there is much of Detroit that is still lovely. Some of Detroit's neighborhoods are its best-kept secret; mine for instance, just up the street from U of D Mercy University. Oh, and timbukton forgot to mention we have great jazz here, knowing audiences evoke great performances. Our jazz festival over Labor Day on the river is not to be missed.

Detroiters are indeed polite. Friends who moved here from other urban centers were always struck by the fact that we line up to board buses and are more polite drivers than most other places.

This is the first time I have seen this "famous" guy. I don't get MSMBC in the my subscription of first tier satellite. I can't believe how bad this he is. He had an easy quarry he could have unmasked as a brainless shill for what has got to be the lowest point of character assination in McCain's campaign.

Instead, he goads her to repeat again and again the Big Lie, presumably in an effort to kick up sand between the two candidates. Here was an opportunity for him to peel off the superficial layer of talking points and challenge her to document her inflammatory accusations with details of sources and supporting evidence. He blew it because that would have required crack investigation journalism in preparation for this interview. A lost art, it seems.

if he felt exceptional pleasure at sticking it to the Rebublican party for exploiting him and then kicking him to the curb; moreso because his reasons for doing so are entirely legitimate

ones.

Powell's endorsement takes him a long way towards political and character redemption.

Among your best! May I quote you?

The theory of probability

With regards to pure negativity

The chicanery of McCainery

Is a black hole of relativity...

Relatively speaking:

The McCain campaign has been sucked in

By its own negative grinding gravity

And is floating in the nega-verse

Into its own stinking cavity......

I think Zogby's polls and projected win - I saw him on TV a day or so before the election - for Kerry were correct; I believe Ohio, and possibly New Mexico were stolen.

Some of the 2004 post-election analysis of returns from touch-screen counties sound mighty fishy, like the circumstantial evidence in Thoreau's trout in the milk.

is a deeply disturbed woman.

The Republican Party and all its principle players are guilty of grave constitutional transgressions, terrifing abuses of power and a level of incompency not seen since the Harding administration. Our progressives' offensive cup runneth over; for god's sake, leave this poor sick woman to professional help and attend to the real issues we need to continue to address.

...anyone who believes dinosaurs and humans were contemporaies because she saw photos of human prints with human prints would believe every Curve Ball charletan who crossed her path.

God help us if she ends up in D.C.

Some officials are also in the "Candorville" strip for the past couple of weeks: CNN's Anderson is embedded in Vietnam looking for McCain's lost honor.

I agree that paper ballots are still the best option. The whole idea of voting precincts within walking distance is so a small team of officials can manually handle a relatively small number of voters.

Automated voting technology has led some Election Commissions to decrease the number of precincts, thereby increasing the number of voters per precinct. My community of 14 homes now is down from four to three precincts, two of which are a mile away for some residents.

In the Detroit Free Press this am, there is a story about machines malfunctioning in Oakland County. The scanning machines give a different total each time the same batch of ballots are run. Something about the accumulation of paper dust. Oi.

One of my earliest memories, when I was about four, my mother took me with her to vote. I started to follow her into the booth, but one of the voting officials took my hand and said that that was one place where no one could join her; her vote was hers alone to decide and cast. This was about 1937, when booths had short curtains that left the back of the legs exposed. I remember gravely waiting for my mom to finish, reassured by the sight of her legs, and gaining my first lesson about the sanctity of the voting booth and the importance of the act.

You are absoulutely correct in your depiction of that time. Radical rsistance reflected the radical government oppression of dissent. Like thousands of others here in Michigan, I was in a secret state police file for the "crime" of publicly being opposed to the Vietnam War.

I was going to post this Sarah screed, but nevermind. Whatever.