From a press report concerning this week's GE shareholders' meeting in Detroit. The first two paragraphs:
DETROIT (WWJ) – A group of protestors carried signs and played dodgeball Monday afternoon outside WDIV-TV in downtown Detroit.
Pastor W.J. Rideoutof All God’s People Church in Detroit said they came together to protest the $4.7 billion in tax breaks General Electric has received from the federal government.
From the end:
GE spokesman Andrew Williams says the company got a tax break in 2008 when it lost billions in the financial crisis. But he says GE paid a billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2010 and supports closing tax loopholes even though it may cost the company more.
So ... we really have a good deal of agreement here. Protestors dislike the tax breaks given to a massive, outsourcing corporation; and the corporation thinks that the taxes it pays are too low and is happy to kick in more to help out.
It began Monday, with protestors chanting "We are the 99 Percent" in front of WDIV-TV, the Detroit affiliate of NBC which is owned by General Electric. By Wednesday, Obama Big Labor ally and UAW President Bob King hopes his organization of the Obama-supported Occupy Wall Street movement, the "99 Percent Spring," will reach its crescendo against Obama Big Business ally Jeffrey Immelt and his GE shareholders meeting at the Obama-bailed out General Motors headquarters in downtown Detroit.
CAPITALISM IN RUINS! A COALITION FRAYING! BLOOD, GORE, VOMIT IN THE STREETS!!!!!11!!!!1! As for Nolan Finley, he strikes a slightly more statesmenlike tone in warning that if people bitch about what GE agrees is an overly generous tax environment for them, that the entire city of Detroit will suffer untold tragedy and that it will be the fault of Bob King.
Who is helping to pay this site's hosting and bandwidth bills? Judy Daubenmeier, chairwoman of the Livingston County Democratic Party, that's who. And, she did it on behalf of the Livingston County Dems, who she says are ready to go this election year with two candidates lined up to contest state House elections down in that neck of the woods ... nearly a month, she said, before filing deadline. As for the local races, they're working on that.
She's hoping the get the word out about their Winans Day Dinner, which is the party's most important fund raising event of the year. More importantly, candidates for the state Supreme Court Bridget Mary McCormack and Sheila Johnson are reportedly confirmed guests, as is state Rep. Mark Meadows (D-East Lansing). Carl Levin and Mark Brewer are both invited. If you'd like to attend, tickets are $50 if purchased before April 30, and $60 if purchased after that date.
As for the rest of you, if you'd like to sponsor this website and help to pay its bills, or if you'd just like to get the word out (or even just pay to post a photo of your cat where people will notice it), contact me at ebaerren@michiganliberal.com. Rates are $25 by the day, $100 by the week, and $360 for an entire month. You'd be supporting work that not only informs and delights, but occasionally gets noticed.
Schwarz said Sunday the author of the email and tweet got “a little over exuberant” about the purpose of his visit.
“She sent out kind of an all points bulletin but that’s not going to be the announcement,” Schwarz told The Detroit News.
If he winds up running, let it be known that he followed the gameplan to build excitement for his candidacy that we last saw from Andy Dillon. Strangely enough, both share a title as Very Serious Persons.
According to MIRS News, Michigan Barber School Director Darryl Green called it “the craziest thing I've ever heard of" and "total irresponsibility." He also trotted out the usual “public health and safety” scare tactics that are the common refrain of licensure protectionists, summoning the specter of AIDS and Hepatitis C should freedom reign and consumers be allowed to use their own judgment.
It's all fun and games until the evil gubmint bureaucrat forcefed barbicide to the patrons of the unlicensed barber.
Actually, they must be mad because apparently benevolent overlord Rick Michigan's regulatory hatchet squad bought the scare stories about public health and the potential of incompetent barbers burning customers by misusing caustic chemicals around their heads opted to not drop barbers from the list of occupations that will no longer have a state oversight board.
Interestingly enough, although CapCon's permanent intern felt it was very important to quote Adam Smith in promoting this, his employer apparently missed entirely the bits and pieces of Wealth of Nations in which Smith argued that educating students at public expense and public effort was an imperative to creating opportunities for the down trodden and in general preventing the outbreak of bread riots.
This is a sentiment I've heard over and over the last week from local officials regarding state government's plan to repeal the Personal Property Tax.
State legislators have promised that should the state eliminate personal property taxes, they will find a way to re-imburse the local governments for their lose of revenue.
“I don’t trust them,” said Alma City Manager Phil Moore, who testified Wednesday before the Senate Finance Committee in Lansing.
I mentioned the other day that, after writing a column about it, I swapped correspondence with a local elected Republican who ended things on this issue by saying that despite having communicated his concerns to both our state representative (Kevin Cotter) and state senator (Judy Emmons) that they're just going to do whatever they want. Brian Dickerson's most recent column is worth a read, too.
Benevolent overlord Rick Michigan might be moving up in opinion polls, but he and the rest of the Republicans who run things have lost the confidence of local elected officials of both parties. And, benevolent overlord Rick Michigan, who owes much of his electoral success to a press that spent much of its energy covering his campaign commercials rather than the white papers he released (an exception to this was an article Dawson Bell wrote, and one thing Tim Skubick put together) becoming downright suspicious that he continues to talk lofty about the need to get past partisan politics while giving in to precisely that.
"Be careful, chief. When you dig up the past, all you get is dirty." --Gideon, Minority Report.
And, we have another example of why issuing the challenge, "Bring it on," is really just asking to get your ass kicked. From MIRS:
"Trucker" Randy BISHOP, a Tea Party activist who caused waves within the Senate Republican caucus last month by forwarding personal allegations against Senate Majority Leader Randy RICHARDVILLE (R-Monroe) to the caucus, is having his own credibility questioned.
Information supplied to MIRS anonymously and then verified through public records shows that Bishop, as a former Macomb County builder, apparently didn't make good on homes promised within a subdivision in the 1990s.
As a result, he pled guilty to fraud, had a pair of state licenses revoked, filed for bankruptcy and had liens put on his property for owing $40,000 in federal and state income taxes back in the 1990s and part of the last decade.
A state employee also referred to Bishop as a person of low moral fiber, or at least that's how you'd paraphrase it if we're keeping on this post's theme of quoting movies co-starring Tim Blake Nelson. In response, Trucker Randy said that at least he didn't get a state government bailout, alluding to legislation that helped out the brother of state GOP chairman Robert Schostak.
Part of the story also involved questions on whether Randy Richardville plans to sue Trucker Randy for telling a radio show audience his plans to extort the Senate Majority Leader by threatening to release to other Republicans allegations that Richardville was unfaithful to his wife. I believe we are now in full possession of the answer to that question.
In years past, I've tried to come up with something trenchent and important to say on Earth Day, the one day we set aside to recognize that the planet we're currently standing on is the only home we currently (or probably will ever) have. This year, I added to that only with a story in my local newspaper (I'm in the middle of a freelancing cycle there due to turnover in writing staff) about how people are reducing their personal carbon footprints and saving lots of money doing it. It's a point that is simple and often ignored ... the less energy you use, the more money it leaves you at the end of things.
This is an unfulfilling line of argument for me, because it reduces everything to simple math and leaves out the human element of right and wrong. That is, it's right to do because it saves you money in the long run.
Earth Day anymore has become an opportunity for people who dislike environmentalism to take shots at it. Magic Frank did it on Friday (by continuing to shift his own personal goalposts from denying that climate change is real to questioning the economics of alternative energy sources), and Bruce Walker -- a former Mackinac Center drone who moved on to other things -- did it in Henry Payne's Museum of Half-Formed Thoughts by suggesting, in half-formed fashion, that private enterprise saved the white pine tree (it didn't actually save it ... a new way of practical thinking saved the white pine, and it saved the white pine from private enterprise; but those are inconvenient things).
The social philosophy of private accumulation is a lot like Calvinism: an elect few are chosen to live in paradise, while the rest can go to Hell.
I found that little nugget while digging around in Donald Worster's "The Wealth of Nature" yesterday. It's a book written by a history professor about ecology and much of it is devoted to the idea of simple morality and agriculture, which is a topic that Worster touches on excellently. The idea that right and wrong have to be reduced to simple mathematics and dollars and cents is an example of a great selling out of human values. It is, however and sadly, a predictable thing in Babbitt nation. When all you value are dollars and cents, then intrinsics are luxuries. Unfortunately, with that you also get a reality rooted in the above quote. You may also even get eggroll.
Worster's work also makes me feel the need to reflect on the unraveling of value and also the destruction of the American community. It strikes me as no small coincidence that the unraveling of the American labor movement comes at the end of this. Organized labor itself represents a legalized community of people who come together to express its own desire for a better outcome for itself. In that respect, it is no different than the communities that sprang up across the American prairie frontiers where people had to work with each other to overcome the significant challenges to achieve their own measure of prosperity. Or, as we used to say in Kansas ... ad astra per aspera. One can imagine organized labor itself seeing value in the Anglicized version, "To the stars, through difficulties!"
Much has been made in the past, but not recently enough for my comfort, about the connections between how one treats his fellow man and how one treats the land that provides him with sustenance. It is no mere coincidence that the same rat bastards that was to deprive average people of a working wage and decent conditions and dignity also have no problem with ruining the environment commons for their own selfish wants.
We see this poor treatment of people as an outgrowth of policies and pursuits that treat the land poorly. If the real message of Earth Day is that we must preserve planetary systems and the environment not for their sake but for our own, it is not unreasonable to intuit that Earth Day isn't just about the environment but the treatment of all things in it, and that includes our fellow man.
Kitler is what we call him. You can't tell from this photo, which renders what I told y'all a couple of days ago a stinking lie. He's got a little dot of black fur on his nose that looks all the world like a Hitler moustache.
We originally went to the animal shelter to pick up a cat named Mooch who we met the week before and who, like Blackies, came right up to the cage when we started looking. The kid wanted to adopt Mooch on the spot, but I had concerns how Black would react to another animal, and decided to wait just long enough for someone else to adopt him. Kitler, who at the time was named Captain Jack Sparetoes because he's a polydactyl, picked us.
Kitler was originally as thin as a rail, probably because the animal shelter gave him only as much food as he really needed. I leave food out for the cats because I'm often gone for long stretches of time, and he's filled out to the point where we probably ought to start cutting back. He's also a hog when it comes to cat treats.
Anyway, the point of this isn't to put photos of kitties on the Internet, but to suggest that if you have a little space in your home that an animal shelter rescue animal is a fine, fine option. We've now tried twice, and hit home runs both times.
We fought a war once, you know, to settle the question of whether the land would be ruled by a single, centralized authority or whether rule would be carried out by some new form of government based on self-determination. Ultimately, it was the single, centralized authority that won out.
The route there, however, is a bit more complicated than that. After we booted King George and his redcoats from what today is the United States of America, the people who won actually tried decentralized government based on strong individual states and a weak, nearly powerless federal government. It probably fell apart and so created the first crisis in American government. Along came me like Alexander Hamilton, today a saint of the Right, who argued that what the United States needed was a strong, centralized government. Hamilton himself wanted a new monarch, so entranced with the idea of executive power was he. The document he wrote to support, under a pen name, ultimately became known as the Constitution of the United States.
We would fight yet another war less than a century later to finally settle the question of whether the United States would be governed by a strong, centralized government in Washington D.C. or a collection of weak governments seated in state capitals.
Today, we have Jack McHugh at Michigan CapCon, where you go if you positively, absolutely want only a part of the story.
The Missouri state House voted Thursday to “nullify” Obamacare, making it illegal for federal or state officials to even attempt to enforce the law. This is by far the most rigorous expression of resistance by any state legislative body to the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” The vote moves the bill to the Missouri Senate, where its prospects are not known at this time.
...
Among other provisions the bill states, “The general assembly declares that (PPACA) … exceeds the power granted to Congress under the United States Constitution and therefore is not law, but is altogether void and of no force.”
This harkens back to such great legislative feats in the state of Michigan as when Sen. Rick Jones shoehorned language into his anti-bully bill to ratify the First Amendment as having supremacy over a state law, and when Tom McMillin tried to create a singular, statewide market for light bulbs so that manufacturers could defy federal efficiency standards (standards sought by manufacturers, it has to be noted once again). The First Amendment needs not the ratification of the Michigan state Legislature, because it is part of the supreme law of the land, which happens to be the U.S. Constitution. Similarly, when we have Constitutional questions, we settle in federal court, not in state lawmaking bodies. In other words, no one with even a passing familiarity with how the legal system and American government functions believes that a bill passed in Missouri carries the slightest bit of legal weight. Does Jack McHugh? Who knows, but he's written an entire blog post alluding to his support for such a thing. Again, you take the historical and legal interpretations from these people seriously as your own peril.
Another example:
Last fall, the Michigan state Senate voted 25-12 to implement Obamacare by creating a state “exchange,” with 13 Republicans joining all Democrats in favor. ...
That's because it's not the implementation of "Obamacare," but a consumer-driven, market-based health care exchange promoted by this state's governor. To Jack McHugh, of the free-market, consumer-oriented Mackinac Center, it's an act of federalist tyranny.
And, the final indictment:
The Missouri vote took place on April 19, the 237th anniversary of the 1775 “shot heard round the world" starting the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord.
A war that was started for a lot of reasons but most directly for these people the idea of taxation without representation. The problem is that Obamacare was not an act of taxation without representation. People opposed to it were very well represented. In fact, the health care exchange and individual mandate were included in the final bill because they insisted that they be there (they then voted against both, en masse). They just happened to come up on the short end of the vote tally, which to normal persons isn't an example of not being represented but a case where you simply lost.
A message from our good friends at, I think, the Eaton County Democrats.
Please join us at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, April 23, at the Charlotte Library, to hear an important announcement from former Congressman Joe Schwarz. We are excited to have the opportunity to talk with him and hear his plans.
Other candidates will be there as well – an eventful evening!
Most eventful, if Joe Schwarz's important announcement is that he's running for Congress against Tim Walberg.
America's oldest, most immature adolescent explains at Henry Payne's Museum for Half-Formed Thoughts that when he said that if Barack Obama is re-elected he'll be dead or in jail inside of six months that it was a metaphor that needs no explaining.
By no stretch of the imagination did I ever threaten anyone's life, or hint of violence or mayhem. Metaphors needn't be explained to educated people.
Then in their ever-desperate scramble to divert attention from the crimes of their communist leaders, the Saul Alinsky "Rules for Radicals" left-wing media and terminally liberal Democrats circled their battlewagons of deceit and hate and unleashed their tsunami of lies about me and everything I said.
Apparently, he's also a jealous adolescent, angry that Allen West's nonsensical declaration that there are 81 communists in Congress attracted its own outrage.
I personally have never been prouder. If my daily activities and simple statements of truth and logic can cause such bizarre overreaction by so many, I need no more evidence that I am on the right track. When doing God's work, the devils go bonzo. So be it.
There are very few people, I think, who would define the day they were interviewed by the Secret Service for using threatening language against the president. Ted Nugent is one of them. The guy who stands on the street corner, shouting at traffic about the dogs whispering in his ears may be the other. The rest of us? It would fall under the category of "private shame."
I received a response this morning from a local official telling me this is a spot-on assessment, by the way. Mt. Pleasant will survive, he tells me (possibly by enacting an income tax), but wonders about places like Midland and Saginaw that rely on the Personal Property Tax. He is less than pleased about this. The punchline is that he's a local business owner and a registered Republican.
It's a tradition at some blogs to post photos of pets. I personally hate that tradition, because if I wanted to see photos of people's pets, I'd send them an e-mail that says, "Hi, I'm curious what your pet looks like, and would like to see a photo if you have one. The more amusing the pose, the better for me." Instead, seeing those photos makes me resentful that the content I visited the website to find was supplanted by photos of someone's cat. I also feel that way about someone who posts about music preferences and recipes and other things intended to impart the impression that the person who runs the blog you are visiting is indeed someone to be admired all the way around.
Anyway, off to the left and right are photos of my cat, Black. We also call her Blackies. I snapped this photo when she was regarding another cat currently living in my home, Kitler (for reasons that will soon become very obvious), with a great deal of intensity and resentment. Shortly after the taking of this photo, in fact, she shredded my arm when I tried to calm her about the new cat in the house.
Why have I posted a picture of my cat? Because she is a shelter rescue. Someone mailed in a little money that arrived yesterday, and while that person asked for no specific sponsorship link and logo, I thought this person might enjoy seeing a photo of an animal rescued from a shelter who now has a very good home. That much is true. In fact, I woke up on Wednesday morning to find her next to me, purring. While I originally believed that she was content and happy to receive some affection, I later learned that she cared little about me as a person, and cared only that I fill her bowl with food, which was emptied during the night.
If you are anywhere near Southwest Michigan this Saturday, come join us for the O’Brien for Congress Announcement Tour.
Mike O’Brien is our Democratic candidate to take on Fred Upton in the Sixth District this fall — or, if fate and the Republican primary voters decree, Jack Hoogendyk.
Mike O’Brien of Douglas, Michigan, will announce his candidacy for Michigan’s Sixth District in the U.S. House of Representatives in a series of events to be held in every county of the District on Saturday, April 21.
There will be a rally in Kalamazoo at Democratic Party Headquarters, 3254 S Westnedge Ave., from 10 to 11:30 AM. Speeches from local candidates, Mark Bernstein, candidate for U of M Board of Regents, and 60th District Rep. Sean McCann. Julie Fletcher, wife of late Congressman Howard Wolpe, will introduce Mike.
Mike O’Brien is a former Marine, who enlisted twenty-eight years ago, about the time that Congressman Fred Upton was becoming part of the entrenched Washington establishment.
Mike said:
I felt I had a debt to repay, and that service to others in the defense of our nation was a noble calling. I rose through the ranks, and served with pride and distinction as a Reconnaissance Marine, always mindful of the honor of serving one’s nation.
After the Marines, Mike put himself through college (Washington University) while working full time.
Rocker Ted Nugent is in trouble for remarks he made over the weekend about President Obama at the National Rifle Association’s convention in St. Louis. The Secret Service intends to contact him to ask what he meant when he said in an interview that “if Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”
Everyone has known for a long time what an overaged child Ted Nugent really is, and that if there's a part of the state best suited to him it's Jackson County. And, while you wouldn't want to take anything the guy says too seriously, let's at least not pretend to overlook the eliminationist nature of his rhetoric. He's not an official surrogate of the Romney campaign, although he does have closer ties to it than Hillary Rosen does with that of Obama, but there is a pretty thick strain on the Right that believes that all our problems could be solved by killing or maiming people who aren't just like them.
Update! ... just two days ago at Henry Payne's Museum to Half-Formed Thoughts, Nugent endorses Mitt Romney (while endorsing batshit crazy Louie Gohmert as a potential vice presidential pick).
Kitler is what we call him. You can't tell from this photo, which renders what I told y'all a couple of days ago a stinking lie. He's got a little dot of black fur on his nose that looks all the world like a Hitler moustache.
