It’s shaping up to be another busy week, so here’s a quick update on the European Debt Crisis front:
Detroit went bankrupt. One stranger was acquitted for shooting another stranger. Which do you think the media spent more time covering?
Stockton, California can now breath a small sigh of relief. It’s no longer the largest American city to declare bankruptcy. Detroit has filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy.
Bonus: The city has more than 100,000 creditors.
This is the endpoint of the cradle-to-grave welfare state. Certainly Detroit got there faster than most will, thanks to endemic corruption, horrific mismanagement, and an overwhelmingly unionized (and thus expensive and inflexible) manufacturing base workforce. But the problem of overspending, bloated government, overregulation, declining population and cronyism are endemic to blue states and members of the European Union. Greece’s future is Detroit (with possibly fewer race riots), California’s future is Greece, and deficit spending continues, eventually the United States’ future is that of California.
Texas Attorney General and 2014 Gubernatorial frontrunner Greg Abbott will be taking questions tonight on Twitter starting at 8 PM. Just use the #askabbott hashtag to ask the AG anything you want.
And as long as we’re on the subject of Abbott, here’s a video interview (though the sound quality is a little wonky):
Abbott makes his run official: “That’s why I’m asking you, the people of Texas, to elect me as your next governor.”
Jay Root posted this pic of the sign they handed out at Greg Abbott’s San Antonio event
Livestream of the announcement here.
Lots of standard family introductions and Abbott telling his life story, including the accident that put him in a wheelchair. “Politicians get up and talk about having a spine of steel. I actually have one.”
“The very day the President signed ObamaCare, I took him to court to fight for our constitutional rights.”
“The second amendment and the tenth amendment are not suggestions. They are guaranteed rights that I will preserve, protect, and defend.”
More later.
Today is Bastille Day, so here’s a memorial by Rush:
Every year Jerry Pournelle puts up an informative blurb on Bastille Day:
On July 14, 1789, the Paris revolutionaries with aid of the local militia stormed the Bastille, a fortress in downtown Paris which was similar in purpose to the Tower of London. The revolutionaries freed all the prisoners held in the Bastille on royal warrants. They were all aristocrats: four forgers, two madmen, and a young man who had challenged the best swordsman in Paris to a duel, and whose father had him locked up so that the duel could not take place. The garrison consisted largely of invalid and retired French soldiers. After the surrender much of the garrison was slaughtered and their heads paraded on pikes. The four forgers vanished. The two madmen were sent to the common madhouse where they much missed the special treatment they’d had in the Bastille. The final freed prisoner joined the Revolution, became Citizen Egalite, and was later killed by guillotine in the Place de la Concorde for joining the wrong faction.
Eventually, the death toll from the French Revolution’s “Reign of Terror” would range in “the tens of thousands, with 16,594 executed by guillotine…and another 25,000 in summary executions across France.”
There are many, many reasons the American Revolution was different from the French Revolution…
Last night was the night when we, as Americans, set aside our political differences and came together to watch Sharknado. But time hurries on! Time for another Friday LinkSwarm: