Michigan Mess: Governor Snyder Guts the Unions

Oh, here we go again, just as in Wisconsin, the Republicans are going after the Unions. What bothers me the most is the lack of transparency and sunshine in the way this Michigan law was struck, with almost no public discussion, and therefore the citizens have been railroaded again. Suddenly springing a new law on a state as large as this, especially with the long history of unions connected to the auto industry is shocking. without public input the process is anti-democracy - not that the GOP cares about that anymore.

This whole thing smells of the Koch Brothers and other out-of-state groups. They must think if they can't win a national election, they will buy a few state governors and wreak havoc.





Huffington Post

Gov. Rick Snyder (R) officially made Michigan a "right-to-work" state on Tuesday, signing into law two bills that significantly diminish the power of unions.

"I have signed these bills into law. ... We are moving forward on the topic of workplace fairness and equality," he said at a press conference on Tuesday evening, just hours after the state House passed the bills.

Right-to-work laws forbid contracts between companies and unions that require all workers to pay the union for bargaining on their behalf. Although business groups and conservatives cast the issue in terms of workplace freedom, unions note that the laws allow workers to opt out of supporting the union although they reap the benefits of the collective bargaining. Since the laws tend to weaken unions generally, unions, as well as President Barack Obama, call the legislation "right to work for less."

. . . Throughout the day, at least 12,500 protesters showed up at the Capitol in Lansing. The gathering occasionally turned ugly, with punches thrown and pepper spray dispersed.

The GOP-controlled state legislature had fast-tracked the two bills, which authorize right-to-work measures for public and private unions in the state, bypassing the normal committee process and public input period.

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Campaign 2012 ~ Defining Hometown

Downtown Janesville, Wisconsin
For years Republicans have enjoyed pointing out that if Al Gore had won his home state of Tennessee in the presidential election, he wouldn't have needed Florida, and the vote wouldn't have been decided by the Supreme Court in favor of George W. Bush.

Let's ignore the fact that Gore was much more a citizen of Washington D.C. than Nashville, plus the fact the he knew he seemed further to the left than Bill Clinton on most issues so Tennesseans wouldn't vote for him. He never had an illusions of sweeping all areas of the country, and some would say that Gore actually won Florida, but moving on . . .

This year, Obama won not only his birth-state of Hawaii, but his adopted home state of Illinois. Hawaii matters because of the crazy birthers who seem to forget that Hawaii IS a state of the union, but also because it is a diverse state reflecting the demographic changes that are coming for the rest of the country.

Romney lost Michigan, his birthplace, where he bragged no one needed to ask for his birth certificate. He can blame it on his previous statement that "Detroit should go bankrupt," but the fact remains that he made multiple trips to Michigan and named-dropped his father George, who was once Governor of Michigan, yet it did him absolutely no good.

Romney lost Massachusetts where he was governor once back in his "moderate left-leaning" days. Once Romney swung far to the left and began rubbing elbows with Donald Trump and quoting Rush Limbaugh, he was never going to win the Bay State.

Romney lost New Hampshire where he has the "lake house" even though he campaigned hard there and never took it out of his equation to get to 270 electoral votes.

Romney lost California where the cars in his special elevator garage live. But obviously - he was never going to win there in Blue Land.

He did win Utah, where he graduated summa cum laude from Brigham Young University and "saved the Olympics" as they say. But seriously - any Republican on the ticket was going to win Utah, a solidly red state full of Mormons. Did I mention Romney is a Mormon? So yeah, he won Utah.

But his running mate Paul Ryan had even more trouble connecting with the hometown crowd, if that's possible.

Part of Ryan's stump speech for months - and really for all of his career - was "I'm from the small-town of Janesville, Wisconsin, where my family has lived for decades," or something of that nature. He said it in every interview, in every town-hall meeting, in every speech. His wife and kids live in Janesville instead of Washington and I suspect part of that is so his children can grow up there and use it in their own campaign speeches someday.

But on election night, Janesville said "thanks but no thanks" to Paul Ryan. He not only didn't win the town of Janesville, he didn't win the district, or the state of Wisconsin.

Yet in post-election interviews Ryan is blaming the "urban" voters for his loss, which is ridiculous. Janesville isn't "urban" and I assume most of the town is as white as Paul Ryan. He can't accept that he is out of step with his own hometown.

The L.A. Times Story

. . . the Romney-Ryan ticket didn’t exactly connect with the voters back in Janesville, either.

A struggling blue-collar manufacturing town of 63,575, Janesville lies on the eastern edge of Rock County, Wis., and unofficial election tabulations from the county clerk there show that only 37% of Ryan’s hometown neighbors voted for him and his running mate. Meanwhile, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden got 62% of the Janesville vote.

The results were even slightly worse for Ryan from his own polling place at the Hedberg Public Library. Out of 1,428 votes cast there, 65% went for Obama-Biden and just 34% for Romney-Ryan.

. . . in Janesville proper, Ryan fared only a little better in his congressional run than he did in the vice presidential one. Zerban grabbed 54% of the Janesville vote to 44% for Ryan. And at the Hedberg library polling spot, Ryan was the choice of just 41% of voters to 58% for Zerban.

Ryan explained it this way, admitting he lost Janesville due to being too far right, but coming back to this "urban" thesis to explain it away (I guess he is talking about Milwawkee?. Whatever - the truth hurts.

Huffington Post

"Well, as you know, Janesville is a very Democratic town, but I'm a Republican," Ryan said in an interview with Janesville radio station WCLO. "But I've always done very well here, because more people saw me not as a Republican but just as a Janesville guy."

"When you join a national ticket for a party, you become more seen as a Republican guy than necessarily a Janesville guy," he continued. "So I think my image, or the thought people had in their minds of me once I joined the Republican ticket, was more 'Paul Ryan, Republican,' than 'Paul Ryan, Janesville guy.'"

At 11.5 points, Ryan's congressional victory margin in the state was the smallest of his eight House campaigns.

During the interview, Ryan also admitted that President Barack Obama's reelection team ran a better campaign than the Romney/Ryan folks, chalking the Democrats' win up to their ability to mobilize the "urban" vote.

"What the president and his campaign excelled at doing is mobilizing turnout in their critical base areas, and they expanded the turnout above the norms," he said. "They had record turnout in urban areas and all of our polling did not project that kind of turnout, and that's why we thought we had a very good chance at winning this race going into election day."

Romney Blows Dog Whistle for Rush and Trump

Here's Mitt Romney today doing his best dog whistle. Now that Romney has gone crazy-ass Birther, will the Republicans still rant about how "discourteous" Obama is to them?


Huffington Post

Speaking about his Michigan roots, he said, "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised."

The joke was received with hearty applause by the audience. . . .




. . . The Obama campaign quickly responded, with spokesman Ben LaBolt saying that Romney was embracing the most extreme elements in the conservative movement.

"Throughout this campaign, Governor Romney has embraced the most strident voices in his party instead of standing up to them," he said. "It's one thing to give the stage in Tampa to Donald Trump, Sheriff Arpaio, and Kris Kobach. But Governor Romney's decision to directly enlist himself in the birther movement should give pause to any rational voter across America."

Romney adviser Kevin Madden played down the joke, saying Romney was "only referencing that Michigan, where he is campaigning today, is the state where he himself was born and raised."

Rush Limbaugh was so happy he took a break from blaming Obama for Hurricane Isaac:

Media Matters

LIMBAUGH: Mitt Romney and Ryan, drawing a huge crowd in Michigan. And get this.

ROMNEY [audio clip]: I love being home in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born. No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.

LIMBAUGH: Right on, right on, right on.

Mitt Romney ~ Elitist Prep School Bully

There is a mind-blowing article by Jason Horowitz in the Washington Post about Mitt Rommney's early sixties school days at Cranbrook, a prep boarding school outside Detroit, Michigan. This is a must read! (And thanks to my friend exhpfan for the link)

Romney's schoolboy days sound like a combination American Graffiti, Harry Potter at Hogwarts, Dead Poets Society, and Lords of Discipline. Unfortunately for Romney, he doesn't come across as a young Ron Howard or Richard Dreyfuss - he's more like the character Doug Neidermeyer, the vicious ROTC bully in Animal House - the guy who spits into a freshman's face while asking "Is that a Pledge Pin!?" The lenthy article records a stupid "prank" that makes Young Mitt seem at the least intolerant and mean, and at the worst homophobic. And that's just page one. How interesting that this article came out the day after President Obama said he was in favor of gay marriage, and Romney said he definitely wasn't.
From WaPo

John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
. . . “He was just easy pickins,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it. The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall. Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

John Lauber was later thrown out of Cranbrook for smoking cigarettes, which seems remarkable given that it was 1963-65. Of course, the young Mormon Romney would never smoke or drink or do anything like that. But yeah, he would attack another student with scissors and get away with it! I'm speechless.

This afternoon, Romney has issued an "apology" for the Cranbrook incident. From ABC News:

Romney admitted during a radio interview that he did some “dumb things” but that “homosexuality was the furthest thing from his mind” when it came to the jokes he played on classmates. He laughed off the 45 year-old anecdotes during the radio interview today.
“I’m not going to be too concerned about their piece they talk about the fact that I played a lot of pranks in high school and they describe some that well you just say to yourself, back in high school well I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended obviously I apologize but overall high school years were a long time ago,” said Romney in an interview on Kilmeade and Friends radio show about his years at the Cranbook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Asked specifically as to whether he remembered an anecdote in the story that describes Romney cutting the hair of one of his classmates who was “presumed” to be gay because the candidate did not like his long hairstyle, Romney responded, “You know, I don’t.”
“I don’t remember that incident,” Romney said, laughing, before adding that whether someone was “homosexual, that was the furthest thing from my mind back in the 1960s, so that was not the case.”

Ah well . . . I bet there's more of this to come! I hope Washington Post does an article on Romney's life in Paris during Vietnam next!