For as long as I can remember, most issues of Forbes magazine have been graced by columns on the automotive industry by long-time (more than 50 years) journalist-of-that-industry Jerry Flint.

Over the years, my only real gripe with Mr. Flint has been his long-running belief that “we” needed to do more to help the Detroit automakers - a viewpoint that I’ve never shared. But aside from that blemish, his columns have always been interesting and insightful, reflecting (literally) a lifetime of experience with the automotive industry.

Despite the storms that have ravaged Detroit over the past three decades, Mr. Flint has always been an optimist who has been able to find some reasonable grounds for hope for Detroit and the “Big Three.”

Until now.

In his latest column, Mr. Flint sadly gives up and throws in the towel on GM.

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Our friend from Detroit, Jacob Appel, thinks that gays need government reparations and the Detroit Free Press was so enamored of his idea that it published his plea in its April 7 issue. One has a suspicion that they missed a deadline because this story would have more properly been published on April 1, a day well known as April Fool’s Day. This one simply must be a joke.

Appel is so filled with absurd pronouncements, anti-hetero bias, and outright hatred in his piece that one simply cannot take his central thesis seriously. But his mode of thinking here does highlight the illogic of his position on the issue, so it is instructive to review it.

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The place: a city in Texas

The setting: a city council hearing on a local construction project

The chair: the wife of a powerful white Republican Congressman

What happened? Black residents of the city were told to their faces they should leave the hearing. A black labor leader who argued that the project would bring in good jobs was told by the chair, “Those workers look like you; they don’t look like me.”

I think we all know that if this happened, it would be the end of the political careers of the Congressman and his wife; that the national media storm would swamp all other news for weeks, making the Trent Lott story look puny by comparison; that the GOP’s national leadership would be compelled to offer one groveling apology after another; that liberals would raise this as a talking point in discussions of every issue, no matter how unrelated, for the rest of our natural lives.

Yet, that’s exactly what happened in Detroit, (H/T) only the races and parties were reversed:

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