Smells as Bad as Yesterday's Diapers

Drudgereport had a link to the Detroit Mayor's 'State of the City' address where he dropped the 'n' word without flinching. Well I found that there was some sort of scandal going on but I couldn't find any articles on the local Detroit news site Drudge sent me too. So I did a bit of digging on my own.

How the heck has this man kept his job??? Here's what I found:

Mayor scandal raises concerns about broader impact on Detroit:

"When Kilpatrick took office in 2002, he was heralded as the 'hip hop mayor' and drew national adulation for his energy, ideas and diamond earring. But the luster dimmed as he became mired in miscues involving a plan to have the Police Department lease a Navigator for his wife, rang up more than $200,000 on his city-issued credit card and then was forced to cut back city services and lay off hundreds of workers."

WHAT?? A Navigator for his wife? Why? And why would the cops pay for it?
I'm wondering what he put on that credit card that he didn't get charged with embezzlement.
Then the people re-elected him in 2005 ... whoever ran against him must have been really bad because I couldn't imagine that people would want a man like that back in office!
But wait it gets better (or worse):

The Detroit News was able to track down the mayor and his family at the vacation home in a golf course community in Tallahassee, Fla. Kilpatrick bought the house in June for $430,000 with a $344,000 mortgage from Quicken Loans, which is planning to move its headquarters to downtown Detroit in the next 18 months

Somebody want to tell me how this doesn't smack of an under-the-table exchange? I would be taking a really good look at what kind of tax breaks and incentives they are getting.

....rumors of wild party at the Manoogian Mansion....
....the city's finances have been jeopardized by the mayor's actions and
decisions in various court cases that have cost the city millions of dollars," [Councilman Kwame Kerryatta] said...
.....John Riehl, president of AFSCME Local 207, which represents water
department workers, said Kilpatrick should step down and that that union will hold a picket outside city hall Wednesday calling for the mayor to quit.
"He should resign. There is no excuse for what he did," said Riehl, who also
dismissed reports that heads of 17 unions would decide Friday to ask the mayor to step down or they would initiate a recall drive

So what triggered all this you might ask? A sexual affair that was lied about and then hidden with city resources and was lied about under oath.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy is expected this morning to announce how she will address the text messages, which contradict August testimony by the mayor and Chief of Staff Christine Beatty in a Whistleblowers lawsuit filed by two former police officers that resulted in the city paying an $8 million settlement.

It seems that the mayor and his chief of staff were setting up rendezvous around the country, not just around the city, and there is questions about whether taxpayers money was used for it. So of course, the police investigated ... and got shit-canned for it.

Although I do have to say that it seems like cities are settling out of court more and more these days, whether they feel they are guilty of the charge or not (1) just to get it out of the way (2) so it doesn't hit the papers (3) its more convienient. The worse are the public vs. police ones, at least here.

This will be an interesting one to keep an eye on because my understanding is that when he was elected in 2005 he promised he had "cleaned up his act" from the first term -- but at the speech mentioned already (State of the City) he got quite the round of applause from the audience, as if they didn't care that he might be neck deep into something that they could be paying for.

Hmmm. I dub this a bigger scandal than NY-Gov. right now!