Singgggg T-Baby Siiinnnggg Girlll…

Detroit’s top lawyer resigns over ‘ghetto’ remarks

BY ZACHARY GORCHOW AND DAVID ASHENFELTER
Free Press Staff Writers

The City of Detroit’s top lawyer resigned Thursday, a day after she allegedly said the city’s predominantly black 36th District Court was “acting like a ghetto court.”

Deputy Mayor Saul Green accepted her resignation Thursday, the same day that 36th District Court Chief Judge Marylin Atkins sent a letter to Kathleen Leavey and other city officials protesting her alleged remarks.

Leavey said in an interview this morning that her remarks were taken out of context.

Leavey, who is white, said she got into a heated discussion Wednesday with a court administrator about the court’s handling of a lawsuit against the court in which it asked the city to pay the judgment of $400,000 against it without warning.

“I told her people regard this as a ghetto court because of the way they treat people,” Leavey said.

Leavey said she was referring to long lines and slow service at the court – not it’s predominately African-American group of judges and rejected Atkins’ labeling of her as a racist. The administrator contacted Atkins, who contacted Deputy Mayor Saul Green, Leavey said.

“In her mind it was racist, and the mayor and deputy mayor also felt it was racist and felt I had to resign,” she said.

Atkins said today her letter speaks for itself.

A letter she wrote to Leavey said the remarks came during a Jan. 14 meeting between Leavey, Chief Assistant Corporation Counsel Dennis Mazurek and members of the court staff. They met to discuss funding for the court.

Atkins said in the letter that Leavey told court staffers that “when the court stopped ‘acting like a ghetto court,’ the city would be more inclined to pay for our operations” – a claim Leavey denied.

The letter said Mazurek called the court a “part-time” operation because judges are unavailable in the afternoons and that the court is uncooperative with the city.

Atkins said in the letter that she was “absolutely offended by your characterization of this court as ‘ghetto.’ How dare you! Not only are your words insulting and racist to this court and the entire city, but they are highly unprofessional coming from the highest ranking attorney for the City of Detroit.

“This entire court has worked too hard under my leadership for the past nine years to be denigrated by you or anyone else. Our court enjoys a positive reputation in the city and we have the hardest-working, most dedicated judges and employees that you can find in any other court in the State of Michigan. Just because you cannot dictate your wishes to us is no basis for you to ignore your legal responsibility as our funding unit or stoop to racially charged insults.

“I am not asking for an apology because I know it would not be sincere,” Atkins continued. The letter was addressed to Mayor Ken Cockrel Jr., Green, judges and magistrates of the court, City Council President Monica Conyers and Council President Pro Tem JoAnn Watson.

Leavey said she will return to her former post as an attorney for the Law Department, a move allowed by union rules that let appointees, if they lose their mayoral appointment, revert to their previous civil servant position, if they had one.

Cockrel spokesman Daniel Cherrin said Leavey was asked to resign because her comments were “inappropriate.”

“It’s an unfortunate development in Kathy’s long and productive career as a city employee,” he said. “The mayor was disappointed by her comments, which were unacceptable and do not reflect the values and policies of the City of Detroit or his administration.”

Leavey, former head of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, was put in charge of the Law Department following the departure of John Johnson in the text-messaging scandal involving former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

Contact DAVID ASHENFELTER at dashenfelter@freepress.com.

Contact ZACHARY GORCHOW at zgorchow@freepress.com.

Staff writer Joe Swickard contributed to this report.

The heads of the major car firms asked for a bail-out from Congress

More than 100 General Motors (GM) employees, dealers and retirees cheered and waved signs that said “Here to Stay” as the car maker showed off its latest offerings at the start of the 2009 Detroit auto show.

Even though it was carefully stage managed, the message was simple: GM plans to pull through its current troubles.

Whether after that shrinkage there is enough room for three US-based [carmakers], we’ll have to see GM boss Rick Wagoner

Like its rival Chrysler, GM got a helping hand from the US taxpayer in the form of a loan.

And its chief executive Rick Wagoner says the money is being used to “keep the business running during this difficult time”.

The loan is enough to keep GM going until Barack Obama is into the first few months of his presidency.

Mr Wagoner would not comment on whether the struggling automaker would go back to Congress to ask for more money on top of the $13.4bn (£9bn) it has already been pledged.

Instead he was cautious, saying only that “at this point the funding that we’ve got is going to be adequate”.

Collapsing demand

GM says that its sales have fallen sharply and inventories are high

It is struggling amid an economic meltdown that has curbed consumers appetites for new vehicles.

That made 2008 the worst year for new car and truck sales since 1992.

And Mr Wagoner is not upbeat for his firm’s short-term prospects.

“Eventually we’ll get some recovery, but for now we have to plan for low industry volumes and for cutting out our costs and capacity to be able to manage against that,” he says.

To try to shift the focus away from its survival plan and back to its carmaking – GM unveiled several new models, including an electric Cadillac concept car that uses the same technology as the Chevrolet Volt.

During the presentation, Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chairman, told the audience that he once accidentally ran out of power 12 miles from his house and had to call on a friend to come and pick him up.

GM is hoping its strength around the world, and its actions at home, will give it enough power to get through this crisis.

Union fears

Further job losses are causing despair for the industry’s workers

Just outside, members of the United Auto Workers union and their supporters held a small rally.

Among those braving the cold was Jim Reed.

He lost his job as a skilled tradesmen at Chrysler three years ago and with the recession deepening, he worries things could get worse.

“If the economy is bad there’s nobody going to buy a car because there’s nobody working, and it’s one vicious circle,” he said.

There is also anger at the extra concessions union members are being asked to make.

In exchange for receiving a government loan, GM and Chrysler must re-negotiate their union contracts by 17 February.

But even if they can reach agreement, that may not be enough to guarantee the future of Detroit’s big automakers.

Last hopes

Back inside the show, among the gleaming pieces of metal that represent the industry’s hopes for the future, motor analyst David Cole warned this could be the last show in which all of the “Big Three” take part.

“There is a possibility that a company like Chrysler will be absorbed or broken up, but we just don’t know,” he said.

Unlike General Motors and Ford, Chrysler doesn’t have an international base to fall back on.

And with sales falling in the US, there simply is not the need for so many cars to be made.

To adjust to this new reality will require a major overhaul of the industry, believes GM boss Rick Wagoner.

“Whether after that shrinkage there is enough room for three US-based [carmakers], we’ll have to see,” he said.

Ford, GM can crow about Detroit auto show

BY TOM WALSH
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Show far, show good.

Sorry for the silliness, but after the catastrophic tailspin of 2008, just reaching the midpoint of January 2009 without another major shock to the Detroit automotive scene feels like a giddy victory.

As the black-tie crowd shivers its way into Cobo Center tonight for the Detroit auto show’s Charity Preview, it’s clear that the 2009 show looks like a two-thumbs-up hit for Ford and General Motors, with even a few kind words from the critics for a concept shown by much-maligned Chrysler.

Yes, yes, there were low expectations for the Detroit Three and the Detroit show — with Nissan, Mitsubishi and others AWOL — and there’s a lot of treacherous terrain ahead. But let’s take a day or two to appreciate what went well this week.

The show goes on

First, Detroit’s not dead yet. Just as every morning we wake up is a good morning, it’s an accomplishment of sorts that the cars and trucks, the models, the thousands of journalists, converged upon Cobo on schedule this week, just as they do every January. At least we have a show, which may be more than you can say for Tokyo, where the big biennial motor show this October may be canceled.

Second, Ford and GM, two of Detroit’s walking-dead dinosaurs as described by southern senators in rescue loan hearings in Washington, D.C., have looked almost sprightly this week.

Ford took North American Truck of the Year honors with the 2009 F-150 and came within a whisker of winning the top car prize with the Flex. It might have won, too, except some judges don’t consider the family hauler to be a car.

Picky, picky.

The 2010 Ford Taurus looks to be exactly what recent impostors were not. Curvy on the outside and packed with edgy new technology and interior features, the 2010 edition looks like a worthy successor to the nameplate that saved Ford’s bacon in the 1980s.

Even Chrysler is praised

GM, though saddled with a heavier debt load than Ford and with $13.4 billion in new bridge loans from the U.S. Treasury, still managed to impress with new products, from the tiny new Chevrolet Spark micro-car aimed at U.S. shores in 2011 to the Cadillac Converj electric luxury coupe concept.

So lyrical were GM design chief Ed Welburn’s words describing the contours of the Converj that U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee critic of Detroit’s automakers, proclaimed Welburn “a poet” during the senator’s tour of Cobo Tuesday.

Chrysler LLC has abandoned the old mountain-and-waterfall Jeep display that had anchored the midsection of previous shows. And there were no outlandish antics, such as cattle drives and crashing vehicles through glass, which marked Chrysler media events at past shows.

Still, despite a consensus among the media pundits that Chrysler won’t survive the year in anything resembling its current corporate form, the carmaker won some praise for the 200C electric concept. Automotive Web site Jalopnik called the 200C “shockingly attractive.”

We’ll have to be happy with that, for now.

Contact TOM WALSH at 313-223-4430 or twalsh@freepress.com.

Barack Obama’s Cadillac Presidential Limousine revealed

With U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration just days away, General Motors has revealed the custom armored Cadillac limousine America’s new leader will soon ride in on a regular basis. The car first attracted a great deal of media attention when our spy photographers snapped images of a prototype undergoing testing and now we’ve learned additional details about the future president’s limousine.

Details on the GM-developed and Cadillac-styled limousine are understandably sparse given the main rider’s status, but the automaker has released some details and our spies have speculated the rest.

First photographed testing on public roads in July 2008, our spies noted this behemoth might actually be more of a truck than a limo. With so much armor being added, it appears GM may have needed a medium-duty truck chassis like the Topkick platform. Earlier, spies observed the limo testing along with two regular Topkick trucks and the wheels and tires on the limo appeared to be the same size as the Topkick. The tires on the limo are Goodyear Regional RHS tires, though we couldn’t tell if they are 22.5 inch or 19.5 inch wheels.

As far as powertain, all we can say for sure is that a very large motor was under the hood of the car early on in its development. The exhaust note coming from the back of the limo was quite similar to the medium-duty Topkick trucks, though previous speculation about a diesel motor turned out to be untrue.

Style-wise, we can see bits and pieces from a few different Cadillac models. Xenon headlights from the Escalade adorn the front while the rear seems to have some CTS and STS parts. We can also see holders on the top of the front fenders where two small American flags would traditionally go. The doors on this limo are absolutely astounding. We’d guess they are at least 8 inches thick.

GM ensures us that the basic vehicle isn’t much different than the one that ferries current President George W. Bush around. It’s roughly the same size, externally, as the current DTS-styled limo. The vehicle’s armor is reportedly 5 inches thick and it has tall run flat tires, thick bulletproof glass, and an entirely sealed-off interior to prevent a chemical attack from permeating the cabin. Those chrome wheels are functional, too, designed to withstand the heavy weight and to hold up well to potential attacks.

Curb weight certainly exceeds 10,000 pounds thanks to all the armoring. Inside, the Cadillac-badged limo won’t lack luxury; previous limousines have featured hand-stitched leather trim throughout.

To say that it’s the most armed passenger vehicle on the planet is probably an understatement. Don’t look for a Leftlane review of this Cadillac any time soon!

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it, about it, and subscribe to this blog RSS feed.

We’re Regular readers and subscribers of Soulbounce. Every year they publish their list for the year of the worst and best – this year we decided to give them a lil play – by letting you share in their fun.

For the Record, We’re With Soulbounce, specially on that Soulja boy BS. ignorance is no excuse especially in todays world. Lord let this be the last year we have to hear about this Soulja Boy BS cause ain’t nothin good about him  – peroid.  We’re not going to give you all 10 – so that you click and go check out the rest of the article on Soulbounce.com

Keepin it Lively,

---

The Top 10 Worst Moments in Black Music of 2008

nOvaMatic |  12/11/2008 at 12:00 PM 

It’s all fun and games until someone says something stupid, or continues singing after their brother passes out on stage. Today we’re counting down The Top 10 Worst Moments in Black Music, and most of it isn’t very funny at all. More like SAD. Perhaps when we do this list next year, we’ll all be able to engage in hearty communal schadenfreude instead of our side-eyes doing the jitterbug.

#10: ARETHA FRANKLIN VS. EVERYBODY

2008 was quite the year for this legend wasn’t it? I think maybe she released a Christmas album, right? At any rate, Aretha Franklin kept us in stitches not only by somehow murdering “Touch My Body” (which was already D.O.A.), and drawing the ire of PETA (who, admittedly, picks on rich people for GP) but with her well-publicized beef with Beyoncé and Tina Turner. Now we all know how highly Bey regards Tina, so it is without question that she would refer to her as “The Queen”.

Aretha responded from her Clock Tower in the Haunted Forest that the Grammy writers and Bey were courting controversy, which sounds more like a threat than an observation. Then Beyoncé’s father Joe Jackson Mathew Knowles told Aretha to sit down somewhere, while Tina Turner offered “Oh that crazy ReRe always got jokes!” And then Aretha told Tina to go to Hell, right before pretending Beyoncé didn’t exist. Oh, what hell you have wrought, Beyoncé!

9. THE DRU HILL “FIGHT”

We may have been born yesterday but we know a PR stunt when we see it. Dru Hill had us talking about them for a good 36 hours when they appeared on 92Q in B-More, announcing they were reuniting with the original line-up. It was all peace and love until Woody said “Jesus is way more awesome than Sisqo, so I am leaving the group!”

Then Sisqo was all “Why you ain’t say that before we got ON THE AIR WHERE EVERYONE COULD WITNESS IT AND ANTICIPATE OUR NEXT RELEASE?!”

He then proceeded to stomp about and wave his arms frantically because Woody had also hidden his pot o’gold. Weeks later Dru Hill held a competition where they auditioned new members and ended up choosing some dude they already knew. Then a new Dru Hill song came out and everyone hated it. Jesus is looking real good now, huh Sisqo?

8. MY BROTHER’S BURDEN IS NOT MY OWN.

We take no pleasure in seeing Jojo Hailey collapse on stage, because we love him. We also love his crazy brother K-Ci, who heard Jojo hit the stage with a loud thud, turned and saw him lying there, then kept right on singing. We understand that you are supposed to perform through a fall (hell, all three members of Destiny’s Child taught us that), but only when someone is able to get right back up and might not be dead. He didn’t even have the decency to pack some smelling salts!

7. OTHERWISE LEGENDARY DIVAS WORKING WITH… THESE GUYS

These are the ladies that have provided us with countless years of amazing music and have typically steered away from the low-brow. Not in 2008! We don’t begrudge any singer the opportunity to appeal to a wider audience and receive a check in the process, but this got way out of hand this year.

First Mariah said “To Hell with the full range of my voice” and employed the ubiquitous T-Pain for “Migrate.” Then Whitney Houston released a buzz single with T-Pain’s law-abiding mentor Akon.

But none of that could compare to Plies‘ “Bust It Baby,” which was already a steaming pile on its own before some genius named Jermaine Dupri had to add his poor, put-upon girlfriend Janet Jackson to the remix. We are just counting the days until Celine Dion does a record with Paul Wall. Ugh!

6. T-BABY: THE PRIDE OF DETROIT
I mean, what can you say, really?

(Editors Update – “T-Baby Is NOT THE PRIDE OF DETROIT “- Detroit)

5. L.A. TIMES JOURNALIST PLAYS HIMSELF

Haha @ Chuck Phillips! We were already dumbfounded that, after all these years, he managed to find a way to cleverly re-invoke the Tupac/Bad Boy rivalry and get plenty of media attention. Only thing was, his claim that Diddy had intel that Tupac would be attacked (and eventually shot) back in 1994 was based on forged documents that didn’t even look authentic!

See, this is what happens when you want attention: someone else that wants more attention will exploit you for their own wicked purposes. Besides, there are so many more relevant and recent reasons to pick on Diddy.

4. DMX DOESN’T WATCH THE NEWS

Not that we expect much in the way of common sense when it comes to DMX, but geez! You would think once we had a viable Black candidate running for the highest office in the country that ol’ Earl would wise up for, like, five minutes? Upon learning that not only a Black man was in the running but that his name was Barack Obama, X responded with “What the f*ck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?” Le sigh. That would be funny if (1) DMX’s sense of humor wasn’t dripping in nignorance, and (2) it’s actually not funny. So he must’ve meant what he said. He was also unimpressed that a person of color was running for office (and by all accounts, at the time, had a good chance of winning), stating: “What, they gon’ give a dog a bone?

There you go. Ooh, we have a Black president now. They should’ve done that sh*t a long time ago, we wouldn’t be in the f*ckin’ position we in now. With world war coming up right now.” Oh, we get it. DMX doesn’t watch the news because he’s tired of seeing himself on it.

3. “DEFINE TEENAGER.”

It’s all downhill from here, people. We knew that if R. Kelly was found innocent of various counts of child pornography that he would continue to bless us with insipid ghetto chickenhead track after insipid ghetto chickenhead track, employing every hood motif from hair-braiding and mambo sauce to E-Z Widers.

It makes sense that he would sit down with BET after his acquittal–a network that is run by Negroes so dense that a Black man running for president wasn’t enough reason to balance their programming with more news and current events. At any rate, Touré, who seems to have the worst luck with interviewees (see next item), pointedly asked R. Kelly “Do you like teenage girls?” R. responded with “When you say ‘teenage’ how old are we talking?” Cut to: Touré wondering if he’s being paid enough to endure this bullsh*t. R. went on to say that he has some nineteen-year-old friends. That he likes to pee on.

2. “SHOUT-OUT TO THE SLAVEMASTERS!”

Soulja Boy is The Worst Person in The World for many, many reasons. Up until recently, we thought his phenomenal level of ignorance was simply a product of his fame. Sometimes when folks get famous, they become arrogant because of some misguided sense of invincibility, then the arrogance becomes vast stupidity and madness.

We prefer madness because sometimes it provides a hearty chuckle. But stupidity is a no-no, especially when it comes at the expense of our ancestors. Touré, for some inexplicable reason, found himself asking Soulja Boy a question that required critical thought and consideration–functions this young man is astoundingly incapable of: “What historical figure do you most hate?” Since Soulja Boy didn’t understand what a “historical figure” was, Touré listed a number of examples–”Hitler, bin Laden, the slave masters.”

This resulted in Soulja Boy declaring “Shout out to the slave masters! Without them we’d still be in Africa. We wouldn’t be here to get this ice and tattoos.” What’s next, an instructional dance song called “Crank That Apartheid”?

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it, about it, and subscribe to this blog RSS feed.