Michigan Governor Open to Dissolving City Of Detroit

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LANSING – It would no doubt be controversial, but the idea of dissolving the fiscally struggling city of Detroit and absorbing it into Wayne County is being tossed around in Lansing.

WWJ Lansing Bureau Chief Tim Skubick reports some state Republicans are talking about giving the city the option to vote itself into bankruptcy. And mid-Michigan Senator Rick Jones said all options should be considered — including dissolving the city.

“If we have to, that is one idea we have to look at. We really have to look at everything that is on the table,” Jones said. “Again, if this goes to federal bankruptcy, every employee down there will suffer, the city will suffer and the vultures will come in and take the jewels of Detroit and they will be gone.”

Local consultant Tom Watkins has proposed this in the past, but the idea has never played well among Detroiters.

In a live interview on WWJ Newsradio 950 Wednesday morning, Gov. Rick Snyder said he wouldn’t count anything out.

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UK Millionaires Flee Country Over Tax Hikes, British Treasury Loses Billions

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Shortly after the United Kingdom’s latest big tax hike, Great Britain’s millionaires started voting with their feet. And the result hasn’t been pretty for the British treasury.

Raising the country’s top income tax rate to 50 percent has cost the UK 7 billion pounds — about $11.2 billion — since 2010, according to London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, as wealthy taxpayers have intentionally worked less, deferred income to future years, moved their earnings overseas or left the country entirely.

Whatever the reason, the British treasury has been the big loser.

“Tax paid by the top earners fell from 13.4 billion pounds before the top tax rate came in to 6.5 billion pounds in 2010/11,” The Daily Mail reported on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown pushed the tax increase through Parliament before the 2010 elections swept his liberal Labour Party from power. During the 2009-2010 tax year, more than 16,000 Britons claimed annual incomes of more than 1 million pounds. After the tax increase, that number plunged to just 6,000.

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U.S. Bans BP From New Government Contracts After Oil Spill Deal

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(Reuters) The U.S. government banned BP Plc on Wednesday from new federal contracts over its “lack of business integrity” in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, possibly imperiling the company’s role as a top U.S. offshore oil and gas producer and the No. 1 military fuel supplier.

The suspension, announced by the Environmental Protection Agency, comes on the heels of BP’s November 15 agreement with the U.S. government to plead guilty to criminal misconduct in the Gulf of Mexico disaster, the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The British energy giant agreed to pay $4.5 billion in penalties, including a record $1.256 billion criminal fine.

BP and its affiliates are barred from new federal contracts until they demonstrate they can meet federal business standards, the EPA said. The suspension is “standard practice” and BP’s existing U.S. government contracts are not affected, it said.

The EPA acted hours before a government auction of offshore tracts in the Gulf of Mexico, a region where BP is the largest investor and lease-holder of deep-water tracts and hopes for further growth. BP is also the top fuel supplier to the U.S. military, the largest single buyer of oil in the world.

Suspension of contracts could give the government leverage to pressure BP to settle federal and state civil litigation that could top $20 billion if a court finds BP was grossly negligent in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

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“America’s Favorite Cities Survey” Disses Anchorage

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Miami has long been famed for its palm-fringed beaches and glamorous nightlife but now it can boast another attraction – its people. The Florida city has been voted home to the most beautiful people in America by a new survey.

It was a bumper year for the Floridians as they were also in the top 10 for their fashion sense and fit physique, although they also ranked as being among the most aloof.

In final place was Anchorage – the Alaska city held onto its last-place position from 2011, and the took last place for style – although local they did come in the top 20 for being both affable and a little offbeat.

The annual results from America’s Favorite Cities survey were complied by Travel + Leisure readers. Readers rated 35 metropolitan areas for qualities such as people-watching, walkable streets, and good music scenes.

In second place for attractive locals was San Diego although locals’ conversational skills were not rated highly.

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Secession: “Absolutely Nothing in the Constitution Prohibits It”

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For decades, it has been obvious that there are irreconcilable differences between Americans who want to control the lives of others and those who wish to be left alone. Which is the more peaceful solution: Americans using the brute force of government to beat liberty-minded people into submission or simply parting company? In a marriage, where vows are ignored and broken, divorce is the most peaceful solution. Similarly, our constitutional and human rights have been increasingly violated by a government instituted to protect them. Americans who support constitutional abrogation have no intention of mending their ways.

Since Barack Obama’s re-election, hundreds of thousands of petitions for secession have reached the White House. Some people have argued that secession is unconstitutional, but there’s absolutely nothing in the Constitution that prohibits it. What stops secession is the prospect of brute force by a mighty federal government, as witnessed by the costly War of 1861. Let’s look at the secession issue.

At the 1787 constitutional convention, a proposal was made to allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, rejected it, saying: “A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.”

On March 2, 1861, after seven states had seceded and two days before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Sen. James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin proposed a constitutional amendment that said, “No State or any part thereof, heretofore admitted or hereafter admitted into the Union, shall have the power to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the United States.”

Several months earlier, Reps. Daniel E. Sickles of New York, Thomas B. Florence of Pennsylvania and Otis S. Ferry of Connecticut proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit secession. Here’s my no-brainer question: Would there have been any point to offering these amendments if secession were already unconstitutional?

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Seeing No Evil

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If you want to understand why President Obama was reelected despite a largely unsuccessful presidency and almost unprecedentedly high and continuous unemployment, just look at the Cuban-American vote.

In fact, if you want to understand America today — specifically, why it is in decline — just look at the Cuban-American vote.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, “The president captured 48% of the Cuban-American vote in Florida — a record high for a Democrat.”

Democratic presidential nominees went from 25 percent of the Cuban-American vote in 2000, to 29 percent in 2004, to 35 percent in 2008, to 48 percent in 2012.

We obviously have a dramatic trend here.

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Forget Spain, Now Italy Seen As Needing Bailout

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Even as markets have been focused on a potential bailout for Spain, analysts say Italy, which is heading for a protracted recession, may also need aid in 2013.

Although Mario Monti’s technocrat government forecasts the Italian economy will decline only marginally in 2013, analysts at Citi predict a steeper contraction of 1.4 percent, after a 2.3 percent fall this year. Meanwhile, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development lowered its 2013 estimate for Italy on Tuesday to a one percent contraction.

On top of the economic weakness is growing political uncertainty. Monti’s term ends next year and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has lashed out at the government’s austerity measures, has hinted he may run for election again.

“We still see as our baseline scenario that Italy will likely be forced to ask for an international bailout at some point in 2013,” said Citi Analyst Giada Giani in a report on the country.

“Italian economic fundamentals have not really improved, despite some improvement in market conditions. The negative feedbacks from fiscal austerity on growth have been severe, as the ability of the private sector to absorb fiscal tightening by lowering its saving rate is limited.”

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Gennifer Flowers: Bill Clinton Had Affair Go Public for Name Recognition, Wanted More as Late as 2005

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More than two decades after she became a household name for alleging she had a 12-year affair with Bill Clinton, Gennifer Flowers has made yet more shocking claims about the former president.

Flowers, who enjoyed a lucrative modelling and acting career as well as top book sales following her announcement in 1992, has claimed that Clinton called her as recently as 2005, begging to see her. Speaking with WGNO, Flowers, 62, said was at home alone in Louisiana following her divorce when her phone rang.

‘I picked up the phone and it was him,’ she told host Susan Roesgen. ‘And he wanted to come by my house and talk to me. I was taken aback; that was the last thing I expected.’ She added that, even when she refused to allow him to visit, he persisted.

‘I said, “No you can’t come over here”,’ she continued. ‘He said, “I’ll put on a hoodie and I’ll jog up there” and I said, “No, I want you to leave me alone”. And that was that.’ Former president Clinton has yet to respond to a request for comment from MailOnline over the claims.

The call allegedly came decades after Flowers claimed they had a years-long affair while Clinton was governor of Arkansas. He later claimed they only ever had one sexual encounter in the 1970s.

But in another bombshell on WGNO, Flowers claimed Clinton had in fact discussed revealing the affair in the 1990s as he was struggling to achieve the recognition he needed to win the presidency. ‘I made him a household name over night,’ she told WGNO. ‘We had had that discussion. He said, “My problem right now is that no one knows who I am. I need that name recognition”. ‘He went on to talk about the other candidates and the advantages they had… When my story came out, he was a household name.’

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AIDS Activists Arrested After Protesting Speaker Boehner’s Office in the Nude

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Three women AIDS activists saying they wanted to highlight the ‘naked truth’ about potential spending cuts in HIV programs were arrested Tuesday after taking their clothes off in the lobby of House Speaker John Boehner’s office.

The trio had the words ‘AIDS cuts kill’ painted on their bodies and had linked arms with four men who also disrobed as part of the protest.

The protest came as health officials revealed that AIDS is spreading to a new generation of young men who are having risky sex and ignoring the painful lessons learned during initial outbreak of the disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that 1 in 5 new HIV infections occur in a tiny segment of the population – young men who are gay or bisexual.

The government on Tuesday released new numbers that spotlight how the spread of the AIDS virus is heavily concentrated in young males who have sex with other males.

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Democrat Operatives Launch Class-Warfare Website

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A George Soros-funded radical think tank with close ties to the Democratic Party has launched a new website urging politicians and activists to wage class warfare while hailing what it calls a new era in politics – the use of class warfare to win elections.

WageClassWar.org was launched last week by the Campaign for America’s Future, or CAF. CAF’s co-director, Robert Borosage, explained the need for such a website.

“America’s growing diversity and its increasingly socially liberal attitudes played a big role in this election. But looking back, we are likely to see this as the first of the class warfare elections of our new Gilded Age of extreme inequality,” he wrote in a statement.

“More and more of our elections going forward will feature class warfare – only this time with the middle class fighting back. And candidates are going to have to be clear about which side they are on,” he wrote.

Continued Borosage: “In 2012, candidates who supported the economic interests of the many over the few won their elections. Populism was the voice, but economic opportunity was the message. The pundits may wring their hands, but in the future it won’t be values voters, angry white men or soccer moms that win elections. It will be class war.”

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