Such a strange story in the Freep Sunday, a Rochelle Riley special on the aftermath of a case everyone who was paying attention in 2005 knows about — a mother and her two sons, killed instantly by a drunk driver. The case was especially egregious in the details: It happened at midday. The driver was utterly shitfaced. He hit her car, stopped to make a left turn into the dentist’s office, at an estimated 70 miles per hour. There wasn’t a single skid mark to indicate he tried to slow down first. He was driving a Yukon, she an Accord. So, so awful. All Gary Weinstein’s chickens and their dam in one fell swoop.

This was in 2005. The driver, Tom Wellinger, was tried and convicted of second-degree murder, and is serving 19-30 years in prison. So what’s the story about? Forgiveness.

Now. If you know me at all, you know I am a world-champion grudge holder. If you were filling out brackets for this sport, you’d be smart to have me and David Simon in the final four, perhaps with an Albanian and Sicilian blood-feuder. It’s not that I’m incapable of forgiveness. I just don’t like the version peddled today, in which you forgive someone who has wronged you by hugging them on Oprah’s set and then adding them to your Christmas-card list. This seems crazy to me. This is the forgiveness I practice: I decide to put stuff behind me. And then I move on. But I reserve the right to not like the other person forever and ever.

Because what else can you do? It’s been my experience that when you get seriously fucked over, it’s pretty rare for the fucker to come back later and say, “I did a terrible thing to you. I apologize, and I ask your forgiveness.” Nooooo. They go on about their lives, eating ice cream and otherwise not being bothered by the face they see in the mirror every day. Life could hardly go on, otherwise. Because we’ve all been that fucker, sometime, to someone. We might not even be aware of it.

But this new brand of forgiveness is the hot thing now, and it’s the bass line of this piece by Riley, which promotes a film project called Project Forgive, being produced by a woman who knew both men at the center of this story — Weinstein the widower and Wellinger the drunk driver, and here’s where I start to look around for the nearest exit:

“There are two Toms,” she said (of the killer), “Tom, this man who killed a family and is in jail, and Tom, a beautiful, loving family man who happened to make a horrific mistake.”

Sure, that guy. Stories at the time indicated this beautiful man was on an epic bender at the time, with a blood-alcohol content around .4. Riley picks up on this ironic detail:

The saddest twist of fate, she said, was that Tom Wellinger’s immediate family had flown to Michigan the day of the accident to stage an intervention over his drinking.

It was scheduled for the next day.

That is not the saddest twist of fate, sorry, no. The saddest twist of fate is the three dead people, and have you ever been to an intervention? Frequently, the person at the center says, “No, I’m not checking into your little rehab center. In fact, I’m leaving right now” and walks out of the room. But she’s going somewhere here, and it’s in the direction of forgiveness. Then this mushroom pops up in the middle of the copy:

(Weinstein) also attributes much of his success and life philosophy to Landmark personal development seminars, something that he said chased away many girlfriends but intrigued the woman he eventually married. (His wife) attended a seminar with him and eventually became a Landmark leader.

What is a Landmark personal development seminar? There’s no explanation. So I went a-Googling. And wow:

If, like me, you are not in the habit of sharing highly personal tidbits of your life with 148 strangers for 13 hours a day, three days in a row, then let me, uh, share with you what that experience feels like. It feels like intergalactic jet lag, or like someone has pumped your head full of a global weather system, heavy on the cumulonimbus. Some of the 148 strangers were crying so much, they looked as if they had been boiled.

And wow:

After nearly 40 hours inside the basement of Landmark Education’s world headquarters, I have not Transformed. Nor have I “popped” like microwave popcorn, as the Forum Leader striding back and forth at the front of the windowless gray room has promised. In fact, by the time he starts yelling and stabbing the board with a piece of chalk around hour 36, it’s become clear that I’ll be the hard kernel left at the bottom of this three-and-a-half-day Landmark Forum. I have, however, Invented the Possibility of a Future in which I get a big, fat raise, a Future I’ll Choose to Powerfully Enroll my bosses in, now that I am open to Miracles Around Money.

And an even bigger wow:

Though it’s hardly a secret, Landmark does not advertise that it is the buttoned-down reincarnation of the ultimate ’70s self-actualization philosophy, est.

Dragging that around in your backpack — to borrow an image from “Up in the Air” — you almost have to find yourself confronting your wife’s killer in a jail cell, and asking after his kids.

“I want him to speak so that the world will know he’s not a monster,” Weinstein said. “My understanding is that he’s not. I can appreciate that people who know what happened to me think I should be vindictive against him for what he did. But I don’t come at it from that point at all.”

Again: Wow. I can’t figure if this is brilliant or not. If I’d done something like Wellinger did, I think a fate worse than death would be to have my victim’s survivors embrace me like this. To care about my family. To tell people I’m not a monster. Maybe this is jujitsu. But there was a strange undercurrent to this story. Some things can’t be forgiven in that way.

Or maybe I’m just in dire need of a Landmark personal-development seminar. Has anyone here done one of these?

How was your weekend. We saw “The Hunger Games,” about which I’ll have more to say tomorrow. In the meantime? Bloggage:

For you photography nerds, inside the 3D conversion of “Titanic.”

Thirty-six billions dollars’ worth of student-loan debt is held by people 60 and older. (Speaking of wow.)

Remember when college riots were sparked by politics and anger over national policy? Yeah, me neither.

Monday awaits! Another slog of a week, but one I’m happy to participate in.

I went to some play-actin’ last night. This one, specifically, which wasn’t entirely a play but was more than a monologue — “The Troublemakers,” about Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo’s sojourn in Detroit, while Rivera painted the murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

My takeaway was that little changes. Rich people seek out artists and vice versa. The former puts up with the latter’s insults — Frida, pretending ignorance of English, would tell the Grosse Pointe matrons throwing tea parties in her honor, “I shit on you” — and the latter turns up at those parties in exchange for patronage. The piece’s high points — the pair’s arrival, Frida’s wrenching miscarriage, the debut of the murals — were the tentpoles that carried the narrative through.

Some folks I know were in it. Not a bad way to spend a Tuesday night.

But now I have little bloggage. Nope. Now I have no bloggage. Got any to share?

Food Truck Nation has engulfed the D.

I made fun of Mitt Romney’s op-ed in the Detroit News the other day, but it had a more serious focus that’s getting serious blowback:

Former Obama administration auto czar Steve Rattner called Romney’s position on the $85 million bailout “clueless.”

“Romney’s op-ed piece once again demonstrated that he is either completely clueless or thoroughly disingenuous when it comes to the auto rescues,” Rattner said Tuesday. “The fact is that had the government not stepped in (under both President Bush and Obama), GM and Chrysler would have closed their doors and liquidated, bringing down the entire auto sector, with them. With suppliers also closed, Ford would have had to shut, at least for a time. More than a million jobs would have been lost. Michigan, and the entire industrial Midwest, would have been devastated.”

“Romney’s suggestion that private capital could have been found is utterly fantastical. The Auto Task Force spoke diligently to every conceivable provider of funds and at that moment, with the stock market in free fall and the economy shedding 700,000 jobs a month, no one — I repeat, no one — had the slightest interest in funding these companies on any terms. I challenge Romney to produce one single individual, investment fund or other source of money that can demonstrably disprove the conclusion of every member of the Auto Task Force and virtually every independent expert who was consulted.”

Well, hell yeah. How can memories be so short? It was only three years ago. Those were nail-biting days around here. Around everywhere. But especially here. The government arranged a shotgun marriage between Fiat and Chrysler. Private equity? Private equity was all on the phone with its bankers in Geneva, screaming about krugerrands and safe rooms.

Still, tomorrow Romney will win the endorsement of the governor. No hard feelings, I guess. Whether it’ll be enough to fend off the Santorumentum remains to be seen. Two weeks to the primary, and the ads are just starting. Here’s one of Romney’s. It’s kind of the opposite of the imported-from-Detroit spots — Detroit sucks, ain’t it a shame? Rope-a-dope!

And I think the Hoekstra ad was a rousing success, having spread his name far and wide, even as every passing day brings more umbrage. Mission accomplished.

I can already feel the teeth-grinding setting in. Oh, it’s 2008 all over again.

Can we lighten up? Sure.

The hair and shoes I’m not crazy about, but I really like this dress of Katy Perry’s. I’m such a sucker for a good color-blocking.

Sorry, can’t stay light. Vaginal-damn-wanding? Are you kidding me? I think Roy has the best one-liner on this.

I’m going to bed.

Pix ‘n’ links starts today with this guy, taxidermy’d into eternity but relevant just the same:

A coyote was spotted in my neighborhood, so there was a stand-up on the news today and the usual blah-blah about not taking shots at them, and so on. I’ll be careful putting the bunny outside, but what else can you do? Detroit is a wild-ass place.

That photo’s from Flickr, taken by someone named…Kristymp, and all rights are? Reserved, yes.

Links? A few:

One week later, the brush fires continue to flare up at the Susan G. Komen Foundation, already going down in the history of screwups as one of the best EVAHR. Is Nancy Brinker the next to go? At this point it’s a little too-too for me, but hey — it’s still got legs.

You know what bugs me about these stories? They play the news media like a fiddle, that’s what.

The miracle of makeup: Some of you have seen this before, but it bears repeating — O’Brien from “Downton Abbey” is a babe. And quite a good actress, ’cause she sells dowdy.

Oh weekend, come to me. I promise I’ll be good.

On a good day, I can travel between Grosse Pointe and Lansing in one hour, 40 minutes. Yesterday was a good day in the morning, less so in the afternoon. I spent what seemed like forever traveling just a couple of miles, while watching my very accurate miles-remaining gauge drop from 10 to zero. Which meant an early freeway exit for fuel, which meant Connor between Warren and Mack and the sort of fueling experience I don’t get in my neighborhood, i.e.:

I’ve never seen one of those locking frames before. It seems to be there to keep rampaging scrappers from, what? Stealing the innards of a gas pump? I’m mystified. Someone already got the face plate for the receipt printer. It was the kind of place you don’t let your guard down, although at 5 p.m. or so, it’s not that bad. Bought 13.85 gallons. My tank holds 14. Close call.

I’ve said it before: Detroit really resets your bad-neighborhood meter. This was near the soup kitchen where I volunteered in the after-school program a couple years ago, near this guy, near the corner where I saw a dead pit bull lie in the street literally for weeks, being run over and over and over, until it was little more than a leathery patch. Never was cleaned up. It snowed deep again, and I never saw it again. Probably the plow ground it into atomic particles, and that was that.

Sorry about no post yesterday. That will happen from time to time. The new job, and commuting, and teaching has me pretty strung out. Know, my little peaches, that you’re always on my mind, but there’s always something else to do. The Center for Michigan has a feature called Truth Squad, a Politifact-like feature, and yesterday I TS’d the Pete Hoekstra Debbie Spend-it-now spot — it’ll be here pretty soon, if not by the time you read this. There’s always something to do, somewhere.

That’s a good thing, I hasten to add.

So, some links?

I liked Dogs Against Romney on Facebook because I found them amusing, but they are filling up my feed with pitches to buy bumper stickers and T-shirts, and I may have to unlike. One joke can stretch pretty far, but you have to be decent about it. Still, credit where it’s due. It’s a good one.

One of those stories that makes you wish the internet would disappear.

And now I think I’ll watch “Southland.” Just…because.

I gotta admit: I was encouraged by the centurions.

When Madonna made her Super Bowl halftime entrance on a stage being towed by an army of Roman soldiers, I thought perhaps a miracle had happened, and she had developed a sense of humor about herself. It was a witty comment on the field as the arena of gladiatorial battle; of herself, as a man-eater who could only be satisfied by an army of ’em; of, I dunno, the episode of “Rome” where Cleopatra travels about in a giant house being toted by a few dozen Nubians, while their princess lolls inside, smoking opium.

And then the show started, and oh well.

The sound was bad, but that happens in fast-changing live shows. The dancing was robotic, but that happens when everyone is hired for their robotic nature, so as not to distract from the star. And the music! Madonna’s greatest hits. Sure, of course. Because what she’s really promoting is her new movie, which no one wants to see. Madonna has been looking for her post-pop career for longer than she was fully present as a pop star, but she always ends up having to add the pop-star thing, contribute a song to the soundtrack so at least it’ll be eligible for one little award. And now, to get people to see “W.E.,” she’ll do the Super Bowl halftime show and give some interviews.

I read one the other day. She was asked about Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII’s Nazi sympathies. She denied they had any. Oh? How did she figure that? “Research,” she flatly stated. There’s not one substantive piece of evidence to prove they were Hitler-lovers, so that’s that.

Well, there’s that famous photo, and her friends’ and contemporaries’ accounts of her belief that Herr Hitler would put things right, and make her queen, once he got Europe under his boot. But of course Madge would be a Wallis fan, because they’re both such rebels! They don’t care what society thinks! They’re headstrong, too tempestuous to tame! And so on. Which is why I don’t have much hope for whatever she does next. Because she takes herself so, so seriously, with the Grande Ladye faux-British accent and always referring to herself as an “ah-tist.”

What she needs is a sitdown with Bette Midler. They’ll get along, and Bette will set her straight. Bette puts her background singers in mermaid tails and does a wheelchair dance routine. Bruce Vilanch writes her material. I’ve loved Bette since…well, since I first laid eyes on her, but especially since she came to sing at a Rolling Stone anniversary thing, maybe the 10-year party, and did what she does best: Walk into a place taking itself far too seriously and get them to stop. I remember she sang a song and then looked down at Sonny and Cher, sitting ringside. “What’s the matter, Sonny?” she asked. “Never seen a woman with bazooms before?”

Bette is about 66 now, still killing it (when she wants to), and is perfectly positioned to be Madonna’s life coach, and last best hope to find a career doing anything other than another lip-synched medley of greatest hits. If the first piece of advice she offers is “hire Bruce Vilanch,” we can at least thank her for that.

Other than that, it was a good Super Bowl, I guess. Liked the Chevy Silverado commercial best, but thought the rest were mostly meh. Clint Eastwood did his little Chrysler sermonette; I think that campaign is now officially played. You have the bookends now; let’s let it go. By next year, we’ll either have a new president (who thinks Chrysler would be better off lying dead on the ground, some private-equity vultures picking over its parts) or four more years of Obama. The case for the bailout has been made. Stop making it.

What did you think? Of all of it?

Everybody’s thinking Super Bowl food.

For the record, I’ve never had an abortion, but my wedding was performed by a minister whose day job was executive director of our local Planned Parenthood office, and he asked that, in lieu of a fee-for-service, we make a comparable donation to the cause. I did so without hesitation, and I will in the future, because the first birth control prescription I ever filled was written by a PP doctor. And because I did that, and kept doing it, I never had to deal with the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy.

So I’m pro-Planned Parenthood.

I’ve always been suspicious of the Susan G. Komen people, on the other hand, for reasons many of you have thrashed out in comments in recent days — I always thought they were more about marketing their pinkness than anything else. I don’t like the phrase “for the cure,” as it should be pretty clear by now that cancer will likely never be “cured” in the strict sense of the word, although treatments continue to improve and we know so much more about the disease that we may well get pretty close to the ideal. And one of the things we know is that one key to surviving breast cancer is early detection, and the nominal money Planned Parenthood gets from the Komen organization (not enough to pay the Komen CEO’s salary for two years) goes for breast-cancer screening.

Being wealthy women, I wonder if the Komen folks have considered how many women use the services at Planned Parenthood as pretty much the beginning and end of their primary care. You may not be able to afford a doctor and a mammogram, but if you show up at PP, they’ll at least give you a pelvic and breast exam and pap smear, free or close to it. And yes, surely PP will get enough to make up the loss this year, but what about next year, and the year after that?

So much has been written about this in the past few days, and I know I’m late coming to it. But women’s health — and especially the right of women to make decisions about their lives and reproductive health free from meddling from state legislatures, federal-court judges and the pink-ribboned busybodies in Dallas — is very important to me. Not one more penny for the pink from me. Don’t show me your pledge sheet for your walk/run/whatever for the cure. I cut off United Way in Fort Wayne for precisely this reason some years ago. Planned Parenthood was there for me when I needed them, and I think I need to be there for them now. It’s really that simple.

So. Bloggage?

Another good Bridge yesterday, with another installment in an ongoing project, following a number of families who were cast adrift by welfare reform in Michigan last year. You can read the stories there, but this was the angle I found most interesting:

…In 27 of Michigan’s 83 counties, the number of welfare cases is the same or higher than before the time limit was instituted.

Meanwhile, welfare cases in the state’s most populous county – Wayne County – are down 27 percent. In that one county alone, 8,621 families fewer families are receiving cash assistance.

Here’s another way to look at it: Of all families who have stopped receiving welfare checks since September, 54 percent live in Wayne County.

Wayne County = Detroit, in case you haven’t figured that out yet.

A little D-centric, but funny just the same, “Our How-To Guide For Making A Hardscrabble, Gritty, Post-Industrial Documentary About Detroit,” by the folks at Changing Gears. Well, there are a lot of them out there, and they all follow a pretty predictable model.

I hesitate to post this, but what the hell: The homicide investigation in Grosse Pointe ran straight off the rails night before last, with reports the husband maintained an S&M dungeon in the basement of one of his buildings. I disapprove of this sort of reporting — I try to be Dan Savage-like in my tolerance of other people’s intimate lives, but I couldn’t stop laughing yesterday about the reporter’s ominous lead-in to this piece, in which he gravely revealed the husband asked his playmates to call him “Master Bob.” This guy needs a new master name. How can anyone say “Master Bob” with a straight face? Master Roberto, Master Heinrich, Master Rudolfo, yes. Master Bob, Master Jim, Master Wally, no.

Off to work.

Sorry nothing new on the ol’ blog yesterday. I was knackered Monday night, and woke up Tuesday to discover the local homicide investigation had reached a higher gear. Alas, I had a full day at Real Work planned, and had barely arrived in Lansing when Alan called.

“A producer from Nancy Grace wants to talk to you about being on the show,” he said. Oh, wonderful.

I put it up for a vote in the office. The consensus was I needed to find out what the appearance fee was. My thinking was that I hadn’t washed my hair in two days, and there was no way I was TV-ready. But I have a weak spot for producers, who have to do the hard work of dialing for guests, and figured she was at least due a return call. I wondered if the producer was doing oppo research and had perhaps noted that I’d called her boss a “blonde harpy” at some point in the past. Or, if she’d simply searched the name, might have find that a certain commenter who goes by the name “caliban” had disparaged the blonde harpy about 10 million times. N.G. is really not my cup of tea, but I thought it might do GrossePointeToday.com some good, and what the hell? I called.

Nancy wanted me to do a phoner for about an hour, on “fear in the commmunity” after the murder. Hmm. I could probably do that. I might be on for a minute, no one would see my hair, and I could write while I was sitting on hold. Like a fool, I said OK, I’d do that.

“Let me talk to my boss,” the producer said. “We might be changing direction.”

Five minutes later, the direction had changed and no one cared about the community’s fear, because now it’s looking like the hubs is maybe just a little dirty. I said I understood, hung up and thought: whew. Tonight I watched the show and thought: Double whew. What a bunch of barking jerkoffs. Also: That is one super-soft lens they reserve for the star. Not since Liz Taylor’s “White Diamonds” ad have I seen one quite that forgiving.

It was a long day. When I got home there was a message on my home machine from CNN. Screw it. They nabbed the Patcher instead. Just as well. My hair is still dirty.

Fortunately, many linkies and much bloggage today:

We had a good Bridge yesterday. I especially liked this piece on “amenity-driven growth,” or Why Companies Keep Relocating to Chicago, Even Though the Taxes are High, aka (for you Fort Wayners) the Navistar Conundrum.

There was also a good two-story package on the (tentative) return of Michigan manufacturing, the overview and the detail piece, on a domestic ski maker.

Via Hank, a look at an all-white production of “Hairspray” in Plano, Texas. Wait, you’re thinking; isn’t “Hairspray” about white and black kids? How would you do that? With great defensiveness, it turns out:

Didn’t any black kids audition? No, said Rodenbaugh, it’s hard to recruit black kids to PCT because there aren’t that many in Plano. (African-Americans make up less than 8 percent of the Plano, Texas, population of 259,841, according to the most recent census numbers.)

So why do a show with black characters in it if you know going in that you won’t have any black kids to play them? Rodenbaugh had several answers about how much the kids wanted to do Hairspray, how they weren’t going to bow to “political correctness” and how “the parents expect this.”

Oh.

This is depressing. Pythons in the Everglades:

…In the southernmost part of the Florida Everglades, things have taken a really wild turn. Pythons and anacondas are eating everything. The most common animals in Everglades National Park — rabbits, raccoons, opposums and bobcats — are almost gone, according to a study released Monday.

The snakes are literally fighting with alligators to sit atop the swamp’s food chain. In October, a 16-foot python was found resting after devouring a deer.

Almost all the rabbits and raccoons, gone? How is that even possible?

Where is cable news on that one, anyway?