Let’s all take a break.

Just when you thought that the Three-ring Circus that tries to pass itself off as “leadership” couldn’t make an even bigger ass of themselves than they already have done to date, they just turn around and surprise you.

Same cast of characters. Same city.

And another example of ungrateful children pretending to be mature adults wasting your hard earned money.

{Click below to find out who they are and what they have done this time}

A few days ago, I passed along the story about the people who helped to rack up almost $20-billion in debt (which our illustrious governor had his hand-picked people conveniently re-write the entire rulebook on bankruptcy and ultimately made the overwhelming bulk of it magically “disappear”…thanks in part to you: The Michigan Taxpayer), kvetching and moaning that they were “overworked & underpaid”.

Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones and Detroit City Clerk Janice “Speed Racer” Winfrey spoke before the bi-annual Detroit Elected Officials Compensation Commission lamenting, among other things; the number of hours they “have” to put in, days that they “have” to work as part of their office, and the paltry amount in they pay envelope at the end of the week.

I’d recommend taking an Excedrin and some Pepto before continuing on with this post.

I’ll wait for a moment.

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All set?

Okay, back to the bug house that is Detroit.

Believe it or not, the Detroit Human Resources Commission did a comparison and recently released a report concluding that Detroit elected officials did make less than their counterparts in comparable cities (i.e. population, type of government & how the office is filled).

Short version of their findings:

• The mayor of Detroit is making 11% less than his nearest counterpart.
• Detroit Council Members made 21% less than their nearest counterpart.
• The Detroit City Council President is paid 33% less than their nearest counterpart.
• And, the Detroit City Clerk is compensated 43% less than her nearest counterpart.

No word on if cities that recently went through large bankruptcies and had most of their debt astonishingly vanish was part of the metric used to crunch those numbers above?

Well, let me bring everyone’s BP down a few points. In yesterday’s Detroit Free Press, it was announced that item had been pulled from the council agenda.

The rationale cited in that story from Detroit City Council President Pro Tem George “The Cush” Cushingberry, Jr. himself is that they “Got to get the story straight.”

Whew, that was a close one!

There shouldn’t be any more embarassingly bad press in the media. Well, for a while anyway.

In reality, how does five minutes sound?

Last night on Fox 2 Detroit, instead of spending time on pressing issues like this, or this…even something as annoying as, I don’t know, their budget, The Cush felt that he and his co-council members have been drastically overworked and are due for a vacation.

Yep, you read that correctly: Detroit City Council is considering giving themselves a “long overdue” vacation.

When Fox 2’s M.L. Elrick tried to get a follow up quote from various members of Detroit’s City Council on this issue, they deployed their tried and true methods of avoiding answering embarrassing questions (“bodyguards”/gate keepers running interference, telling the reporter to go to other officials for comment and just plain telling the reporter that they will not be answering any questions).

If you haven’t clicked on the link above, you’ve really got to see Detroit CC playing cat-and-mouse with Fox 2.

All except for newbie Councilwoman Raquel Castaneda-Lopez. She really displayed her naiveté on how the Detroit political game is played by claiming that since she didn’t draft the resolution for the vacation, she couldn’t comment on the matter.

Umm, yeah….

Sure Councilwoman.

Aren’t you glad that republicans Ron Weiser, Rick Snyder, Jase Bolger and Randy Richardville all felt that your hard earned money was necessary to bail Detroit out?

Stay tuned…