This is Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R, plumbago) wife’s birthday cake. Really! 
The Governor took some time recently away from dealing with the Flint city water emergency to celebrate in style behind blacked-out windows at an upscale Michigan restaurant.
The owner of the boutique bakery said : […] “We knew that renting out West End Grill is not a cheap thing to do on a Saturday night, but we have a lot of high end clients. We just didn’t know this one was the governor.”
The cost of the cake was not divulged but it took 30 hours to bake (build/design?), and the bakery charges by the serving: there were 60 servings in this cake. The outlandish cake seems almost by design to draw contrast to the thousands of Flint residents unable to drink and in some cases even wash with their tap water.
While under management of Gov. Snyder’s hand-picked overseer, the water system of the city of Flint, Michigan (pop. 100,000) became contaminated with high levels of lead. The contamination apparently happened, at least in part, as a result of cost saving measures. Congressional hearings are being held, but Republican Governor Snyder was not subpoenaed. Several members of his administration were forced to testify but Snyder has ‘declined an invitation’ to testify before a congressional committee on February tenth. Guess he must be busy planning his wife’s party, er, I mean, managing the water crisis.
So what is it with GOP governors and the French revolution? Last month Maine Governor Paul LePage publicly expressed his interest in bringing back the guillotine for criminals. And now Governor Snyder’s cake recalls a similar level of insensitivity to the plight of others as Marie Antoinette’s famous, “Let them eat their cake” remark directed at starving peasants.
But let’s be fair, Governor Snyder isn’t totally insensitive and he does make sacrifices. With a net worth in 2014 of approximately $200 million, the former venture capitalist and Gateway Inc. president selflessly declines his yearly state salary of $159,300 and returns it to the state. Still, it leaves him enough for cake.
Second-hand graft and influence peddling pays much better than a governor’s salary, anyway.
Like all Republicans, this man is clueless if not downright immoral.
There is a certain amount of irony in the fact that each of these two governors has embraced the opposite side of the French Revolution. Snyder, of course, is on the monarchist side with Marie Antoinette: why should he care if there is no safe water to drink in Flint — his administration was shipping bottled water to the state employees long before the issue became a public health scandal.
Oddly enough, LePage (ah) is embracing the revolutionary side, for whom the guillotine was an instrument of revenge for centuries of enforced poverty, starvation, and indentured servitude supported by priestly pronouncements justifying the arrangements as ‘God’s will.’ I guess the revenge part fits, and perhaps he sees himself as a modern-day leader of empire, an oversized Napoleon, who was no less a despot than Louis XVI, although more invested in territorial acquisition than flaunting personal wealth in the faces of peasants.
LePages’ musings far more disturbing than simply longing for the good old days of off-with-the-head justice.
Actually calls for armed RKBA-ers to kill heroin dealers ‘cuz their killing your kids’. What a gift to the anti-gun lobby. And what if this were to happen? Doesn’t seem to possess ability to carry his vitriolic logic to its end. Or maybe this is its end.
http://www.pressherald.com/2016/01/27/lepage-suggests-that-mainers-who-carry-concealed-weapons-could-help-solve-the-drug-problem/
Unfortunately all who share these sentiments don’t seem to get that it only works in non-democratic governance which last for decades or longer.
Tyranny of the majority works similar to mob rule-subject to its dictates and only as good as the mob.
When the new opposing mob gets into power, outgoing mob is now subject to the new mobs’ dictates.
But calling for the bodily harm, death or destruction for anyone other than self-defense shows a frightening lack of humanity or mentally illness to say the least. When are we going to take seemingly idle threats for what they are & at face value, insist that these so-called leaders retract & apologize or step down.
If a citizen says this about leaders, officials or LE & even fellow citizens it is taken VERY seriously and subject to prosecution depending on circumstance.
Mentally unhinged ppl, of which making threats is considered symptomatic, should not be in positions of power or governance ever period.