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Payne: The Weiser hit job
Posted by hpayne on December 16, 2012
For decades, Detroit vote fraud has been legendary – if hard to prove.
Under the notoriously corrupt administration of Kwame Kilpatrick, fraud complaints reached a fever pitch in the 2004 presidential election and the 2005 mayoral election with allegations of vote coaching, vote buying, ballot tampering, and dead people voting. In 2004, Republican charges of ballot tampering at Cobo Center led to police intervention. In 2005, fraud accusations by Kilpatrick’s Democratic opponent, Freman Hendrix, led to a federal judge calling Detroit voting processes illegal and relieving the city clerk of her duties, the Detroit director of elections asking the Wayne County prosecutor to investigate vote buying, and the FBI launching a full-scale, two-year investigation. When the FBI ended its discovery process with no charges, Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley erupted in fury.
“(The investigation) has ended with no charges filed, no employees indicted and former City Clerk Jackie Currie getting away with her office sending out ballots with Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s name already checked. So is that it? Is that good enough?” the Free Press columnist raged.
Yet, this week, when videotape surfaced of former Michigan Republican Party Chairman Ron Weiser accusing the Kilpatrick Administration of vote fraud, the Free Press. . . suggested Weiser was a racist on its Sunday front page.
Huh?
Echoing similar attacks from the Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer, the Free Press’s hit job on Weiser has nothing to do with racism and everything to do with Weiser’s masterminding Republicans’ successful passage of Michigan right-to-work legislation.
Call it The Empire Strikes Back. Or, more precisely, the Michigan Democratic Establishment Strikes Back.
Weiser and Republican businessman Dick DeVos are credited with spearheading the extraordinary passage of right-to-work in Michigan, the cradle of the United Autoworkers Union. The Democratic establishment, led by The Free Press, Big Labor, and Brewer raged against RTW which threatens Democratic Party fund-raising by giving workers the right to choose whether to pay union dues (dues that ultimately go to electing Democratic candidates).
The Free Press was particularly outspoken – devoting its front page to strident calls to defeat RTW. In defeat, the Freep and Brewer are now trying to smear Weiser as a racist for telling a Milton tea party group back in August that (funny the videotape, taken by a Democratic Party operative, is showing up just now), without the Coleman Young and Kwame Kilpatrick machines, Mitt Romney had a chance to win Michigan.
“There’s no machine to go to pool halls and barbershops and put those people on buses and then bus them from precinct to precinct where they vote multiple times,” says Weiser on the tape.
Though unproven, Weiser’s comments are not inconsistent with past fraud allegations made by Republicans and Democrats alike in Detroit. Yet, the Free Press – the same paper that lamented that the FBI did not convict on those allegations in the past – is now accusing Weiser of racism (ironically, Kilpatrick accused The Freep of racism for investigating his texting/sex scandal).
The charge is absurd on its face. Businessman Weiser is a so-called “Ann Arbor Republican” – economically conservative with a distaste for the GOP’s more strident social policy wing. “I know Ron Weiser and he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” says Matt Davis, an MLive.com columnist and former state GOP employee – who also happens to be African-American.
The Freep’s hit job is consistent with the paper’s partisan 2012 coverage in which it devoted 6 articles in 2 days to Republican Romney’s ill-advised 47 percent comments – while completely ignoring Democrat Obama’s equally outrageous “you didn’t build that” comments about American entrepreneurs.
This time, the Freep ripped Governor Snyder for his support of RTW – but ignored the violence of union thugs who destroyed the hot dog stand of an African-American vendor , Clint Tarver, as they rampaged against right-to-work at the state capitol.
Now that is worthy of a newspaper’s front page.
Payne: Debbie damns Obamacare taxes
Posted by hpayne on December 12, 2012
Finally, bipartisanship in Washington.
Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow has suddenly noticed – THREE YEARS after she approved Obamacare – that the act punishes medical device-makers with job-killing taxes.
Michigan’s junior senator joined 17 other Democratic U.S. Senators and senators-elect in signing a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week calling for a “delay in the implementation” of the medical device tax in Obamacare, reports the Wall Street Journal.
We’re not making this up. Republican and small businesses have been screaming about the 2.3 percent excise tax – effecting companies like Michigan-based, Stabenow-constituent Stryker (not that you would know reading the press) which has laid off 5 percent of its workers to compensate for its $100M tax bill in 2013.
“The medical technology industry directly employs over 400,000 people in the United States. . . . (The) industry has received little guidance about how to comply with the tax – causing significant uncertainty and confusion for businesses,” reads Stabenow’s letter. “We urge you to support delaying enactment of this provision in a fiscally responsible manner.”
Welcome to Planet Earth, senator.
Meanwhile, she still insists that a hike in income taxes on those making over $250,000 a year – that is, a tax hike that will hammer small businesses – is good for the economy.
A House Small Business tax subcommittee estimates that President Obama’s 5 percent hike on 940,000, small, so-called Subchapter S companies would levy $500B in tax increases and cost 700,000 jobs.
How to explain this dissonance? Democrats are the Party of Big Business.
Corporations like Stryker employ high-paying lobbyists in Washington to get senators’ attention. The small business community – individuals mostly pay Subchapter S taxes – have no such clout. “Democrats sent their letter to Reid less than three weeks after dozens of medical device industry executives ‘swarmed’ Capitol Hill in a lobbying push that resulted in more than 60 different meetings with legislators,” reports The Daily Caller.
Like the Obamacare battle that pitted Big Hospital against doctors and Big Insurance against small clinics, Stabenow chose the Big Boys. But now Big Medical Device doesn’t like Big Hospital’s Obamacare. What is a Democrat to do?
Payne: The anti-choice Left
Posted by hpayne on December 9, 2012
Remember when liberals were pro-choice?
Just weeks after winning a presidential election in which they celebrated an individual’s right to choose gay marriage and abortion, Michigan’s Left is laying siege to the state capitol in a last ditch bid to refuse Michigan workers the right to choose whether to underwrite Big Labor.
On Sunday, the Left’s flagship paper, The Detroit Free Press, used its front page to attack Governor Rick Snyder for boldly defying the state’s Big Labor lobby in favor of granting Michiganians the right-to-work – just as 23 other states (including Indiana) have done. Snyder “is failing to rise to the challenge of tough leadership — having the mettle to stand up to your political allies when they’re wrong, and having the courage to stand by principle, even when your friends pressure you to abandon it,” complained Freep editorial page editor Stephen Henderson in a desperate A1 column. “That’ll cost him, and his party. More important, it will cost Michigan.”
But all the evidence points to the contrary.
“Right-to-work states outperform forced-union states in almost every measurable category of worker well-being,” reports The Wall Street Journal editorial page last year. “A new study in the Cato Journal. . . found that from 1977 through 2007 there was ‘a very strong and highly statistically significant relationship between right-to-work laws and economic growth.’ Right-to-work states experienced a 23 percent faster rise in per capita income over that period. The two regions that have lost the most jobs in recent years, the once-industrial Northeast and Midwest, are mostly forced-union states.”
Michiganians intuitively understand this as they have watched the auto industry move south to right-to-work states over the last three decades with foreign transplants like Kia, VW, and BMW all making right-to-work a priority in where they locate new plants.
As a result, Michigan voters support RTW by a 51-41 margin, according to a new poll by Steve Mitchell. This solid support defies Freep claims that the governor’s position came from” acquiescing to a radical GOP cabal.”
You’re not a radical cabal if the majority supports you.
Governor Snyder stood on the principle of individual liberty in explaining his Johnny-come-lately embrace of RTW: “The unions ought to be able to present a good value proposition, instead of saying you have to join a union to keep your job,” he explained to The Freep. “This isn’t to damage the unions. It isn’t anti-union. This could make unions better, by making them more responsive to their members.”
Henderson laments the divisiveness that Snyder’s RTW reversal will bring: “On Tuesday, when the Legislature resumes its right-to-work steamroller, the streets will be filled. We’ll be Wisconsin.”
What planet has he been on the last two years?
The state capital has been under siege since 2010 by unions protesting Snyder’s education, labor, and spending reforms. Despite the governor’s conciliatory rhetoric, not a single Democrat has supported his major reforms.
In truth, the governoronly switched positions on right-to-work when the UAW’s Bob King betrayed him last March in putting Prop 2 on the ballot – a slap in Snyder’s face that would have outlawed worker’s right-to-work IN THE STATE CONSTITUTION. Michigan’s “radical cabal” of voters defeated that power grab by 58-42 percent on Nov. 6.
But Henderson’s feigned outrage over Snyder’s “betrayal” is particularly rich given The Freep’s support of Obamacare.
Henderson & Co. have vigorously defended that divisive legislation – despite no bipartisan support, despite Obama’s strong-arming the law through Congress including lying to former GOP Rep. Bart Stupak that it would not federally-fund abortion, and despite its unpopularity with American voters. Now that’s a radical cabal.
“The money, the time, the bitter feelings — none of it will be worth it. Right-to-work will consume Michigan politics for years to come,” writes The Freep without a hint of irony – the same publication that deemed Obamacare worthy despite its cost in jobs, debt, and national unity.
” How much more radical (the GOP)has become,” concludes Henderson. “Snyder was the hope for something different — and better.” Better is exactly what Snyder has delivered: A RTW bill that is popular with the public, that will bring jobs back to Michigan, and that will give every Michigan worker freedom of choice.
That’s radical?
Payne: The Nerd follows The Knife
Posted by hpayne on December 6, 2012
The Nerd mimics The Knife.
Rick Snyder’s gubernatorial twin, Indiana Businessman-Governor Mitch “The Knife” Daniels, for years vowed that he had no interest in signing a right-to-work bill. Like Snyder, Daniels saw it as an unnecessarily divisive issue that impeded his budget reform priorities.
Yet when Indiana’s right-to-work bill crossed Daniels’ desk this January, The Knife proudly signed it. And at that moment, the game changed for Rick Snyder as well. Just one year later, One Tough Nerd announced at a news conference today that he, too, would support a right-to-work law from his Republican legislature – making Indiana’s neighbor the second Midwest R2W state.
“This is inconsistent with Snyder’s goals to concentrate on making Michigan more attractive to business,” said an angry Mark Schauer, ex-Democratic Michigan Congressman and Big Labor tool, on The Frank Beckmann Show this AM.
No, it’s exactly in line with those goals.
“In this lousy national economy, Indiana needs every advantage it can get,” said The Knife in January. Ditto The Nerd. With a stroke of his pen, Daniels instantly made Indiana more competitive to business – and Michigan (the cradle of the UAW) less so. As The Michigan View’s Robert Laurie reported in February, Caterpillar almost instantly relocated a plant from union-friendly Illinois to Muncie, Indiana. Indeed, as anyone covering the auto industry in the last few decades knows, foreign transplants like Kia make right-to-work a priority in picking states for manufacturing expansion.
Add Big Labor’s political miscalculation in the 2012 campaign of trying to undo Snyder’s first term reforms with the needlessly expensive, $30 million, Prop 2 campaign and you have One Determined Nerd to support right-to-work in Michigan.
Like Daniels in Indiana – who didn’t sign R2W until he had secured a second term – the political timing is good for Snyder as well: By signing a R2W bill in the current lame duck session, Republicans will have two full years to see R2W successfully implemented in Michigan. Come the guv’s re-election campaign in 2014, voters will see that the sky didn’t fall – indeed, that R2W helped Michigan’s business outlook and empowers individuals by giving them workplace choice.
Snyder and Republicans are learning what 23 other R2W states already know: That right-to-work brings higher jobs growth and higher per capita incomes.
The Nerd bravely goes where The Knife has gone before. Call him “The Spine.”
Payne: The War for Worker Freedom
Posted by hpayne on December 5, 2012
UAW President Bob King, led a violent, mob union protest against the Republican legislature’s right-to-work bills in Lansing Thursday – but it’s King that the protestors should be turning against. Were it not for his introduction of the divisive Prop 2 in November’s campaign, right-to-work would not be an issue today.
With his March announcement of a constitutional amendment to ban right-to-work and reverse Republican-led government reforms, sources say that King united a broad coalition of business, grass-roots activists, and legislators in a long-term strategy to not only defeat Prop 2 – but to enact game-changing right-to-work legislation in Michigan.
Politics is about personalities as well as issues, and King’s key mistake was honking off Governor Snyder who, until King’s Prop 2 provocation, had tried to keep right-to-work on the sidelines.
But Prop 2 – which would also have overturned Snyder’s key budget reforms – forced One Tough Nerd’s hand.
From March on, Snyder joined conservative activists that were paving the ground – not just to defeat Prop 2 – but give every Michigan worker the freedom of right-to-work. It was an audacious strategy that took full form at The West Michigan Policy Conference in September. The conference brings together the state’s top conservative business leaders, legislators, economists, and activists – and the agenda was heavy on right-to-work.
The message was clear and it was aimed at a national audience: If King aimed to make Michigan Ground Zero to eliminate right-to-work, then business interests should make Michigan Ground Zero to enact right-to-work.
In short, defeating Prop 2 AND passing R2W in Michigan – the cradle of the UAW- would be a crippling blow to the national labor movement.
America’s fastest-growing states are right-to-work states. Indeed, Michigan has been losing jobs to southern R2W states (now including Indiana) for decades. No state would be more symbolic of labor’s decline than passage of right-to-work in Michigan. In pushing for right-to-work today, Governor Snyder – and his House and Senate partners, Bolger and Richardville – are not just crowning a strategy that has been in place for months, they are winning a major battle in America’s War for Worker Freedom.
If Snyder & Co. sign right-to-work in the next week, they will have fully committed to a war that was launched by King last March. That war will finally be won when Snyder wins re-election in 2014 – and any labor referendum to overturn right-to-work goes down in flames.
Payne: Obama auto tax breaks for the rich
Posted by hpayne on December 5, 2012
Thanks to President Obama’s massive tax breaks for wealthy auto buyers, hybrid-electric vehicle sales in November rose to a lofty 3.5 percent of all vehicle sales — numbers the industry hasn’t seen since the summer of 2008 when gasoline hit $4 a gallon.
Electric vehicles are targeted at customers making over $200,000 — and they are generously rewarded for their politically correct choice, receiving subsidies of $7,500 for a $40,000 Chevy Volt or a $36,000 Nissan Leaf. Buyers of Toyota’s $32,000 Prius plug-in get a $2,500 tax credit — and purchasers of Ford’s $33,000 C-Max Energi plug-in get $3,750. But sales for both the Volt and Leaf lagged last month, moving Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn to warn that more subsidies are necessary to keep sales numbers up (to put hybrid-electric sales in perspective, their 40,000 vehicle sales in November was 16,000 fewer than sales of the Ford F-150 pickup alone).
The increase in hybrid-electric sales came with the continued rebound of U.S. auto sales — now at their highest levels since 2007.
The bad news for greens is that the industry’s revival is coming on the backs of more-profitable trucks, with SUV sales making up a majority of the market at 50.6 percent. Greens have quietly cheered the Great Recession which brought lower carbon emissions — in part because cost-conscious auto buyers took refuge in fuel-sipping econo-boxes (sedan sales in 2007 significantly outpaced SUV sales).
“If ‘business as usual’ conditions continue, economic contractions the size of the Great Recession or even bigger will be needed to reduce atmospheric levels of CO2,” warned Tapia Granados, a researcher for the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, in a study this May.
President Obama says that global warming is “one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation.” But to fight it, he will paradoxically need continued tax breaks for the wealthy — the target of his 2012 class-warfare campaign and his fiscal-cliff negotiating stance.
Obama giveth, and Obama taketh away.
Payne: The Choice Party
Posted by hpayne on December 4, 2012
“Businesses have the choice of whether to join the Michigan Chamber of Commerce,” said Chamber President Rich Studley on The Frank Beckmann Show this morning, in contrasting state employers with the forced unionization of employees in the state of Michigan.
Freedom of choice.
That’s what’s at stake as Michigan’s Legislature gears up for the Mother of all Battles: whether to join Indiana as a Midwest right-to-work state. The Chamber’s endorsement adds urgency to the issue as Republicans try and capitalize on Big Labor’s losing Prop 2 effort this fall to permanently prevent Michigan from becoming a R2W state.
Much of the debate will center on the power plays of union vs. labor, Bob King vs. Rick Snyder, and recalls of vulnerable GOPers. But the debate also presents an opportunity for a struggling party trying to rebound from the disappointment of Campaign 2012.
That is, it is an opportunity to establish Republicans as the Party of Choice.
Choice of which school to send your kid to. Choice of light bulb. Choice of car to buy. Choice of whether to buy health insurance. Choice of whether to become an American citizen. Choice of whether to join a union.
GOPers lost in 2012 in part because they muddied their brand as the Party of Anti-Choice – on abortion, on gay marriage, on immigration. The R2W debate is a chance to reassert liberty as the Republican brand. Americans want to be left alone. They want to choose. And when Republicans are flying the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, they are a much more attractive party.
Payne: Nerd’s Revenue 101 for Obama
Posted by hpayne on December 3, 2012
In a depressingly familiar scenario, President Obama and his Washington Media chorus are singing the tired ol’ Beltway song that the only way to close the federal deficit is by raising tax rates on the wealthy. Never mind that the $160 million in extra revenue is a small fraction of Obama’s $1 trillion-dollar a year deficits. Never mind that major hikes on the capital gains and dividend taxes will depress growth and bring in less revenue. Never mind that Obama’s budget is really a sop to his wealthy friends by offering preferred special interests like green companies large tax breaks.
In Michigan, meanwhile, Governor Snyder is testing the Boehner Republican solution – steady tax rates while broadening the base by closing special interest loopholes – to good measure. Indeed, Snyder’s plan mirrors successful, pro-growth federal tax reform of the last 30 years.
Snyder’s 2011 tax reform lowered business taxes and kept income rates nearly flat while closing loopholes for pensioners as well as corporate fat cats with Big Hollywood and Big Green. Surprise – this year the state is projected to see revenues increase $300 million more than expected, according to The Detroit News.
And while Snyder expects the lower business tax to decrease revenue in the near term, the common sense expectation is that it will ultimately increase tax revenues by attracting more business investment to the state. This would be consistent with the federal tax reform experience.
“Every major marginal rate income tax cut of the last 50 years-1964, 1981, 1986 and 2003-was followed by an unexpectedly large increase in tax revenues, a surge in taxes paid by the rich, and a more progressive tax code,”reports The Wall Street Journal. “For example, from 1980 to 2007, three tax rate cuts brought the highest marginal tax rate to 35 percent from 70 percent. Congressional Budget Office data show that when the tax rate was 70 percent, the richest 1 percent paid 18 percent of all federal income taxes. With the rate down to 35 percent in 2008, the share of taxes paid by the rich doubled to 40 percent” as upper-incomes stopped sheltering income and invested it in the economy.
The ivory-tower cloistered Obamedia ignores this inconvenient historical truth, instead parroting the Obama line that he has an election mandate to raise income tax rates.
This is more misreading of history.
In truth 2012 was a “status quo election in which both (Obama) and the Republican majority in the House were re-elected,” as Speaker Boehner noted in December 3rd letter to the president that again offered to meet him halfway with tax and entitlement spending reform – both modeled on the Obama-commissioned Simpson-Bowles plan.
Obama has responded by biting Boehner’s outstretched hand. But this is not what he promised just a few short weeks ago in the fall campaign. “He’s eager to ‘meet’ the deficit-reduction target of the Simpson-Bowles commission,” reported Fred Barnes on November 1, a week before the election. “He’s ‘confident’ he can reach a ‘grand bargain’ with Republicans on taxes and spending. To get it, he promises to be breathtakingly bipartisan. ‘I’ll wash John Boehner’s car,’ he told a radio interviewer. ‘I’ll walk Mitch McConnell’s dog.'”
Instead, Obama has reverted to his ram-Obamacare-down-their-throats partisanship of the last four years. It is not only disingenuous – but as the Reagan and Snyder tax reforms suggest, it is bad economic policy.
Payne: Hopeless and Exchange
Posted by hpayne on December 1, 2012
What part of “nationalized health care” doesn’t Michigan’s Left understand?
Democrats and their media brethren were outraged last week when Michigan House Republicans declined to dance with the Obama Administration and create a state health exchange for Obamacare. Forget that this is what happens when an arrogant president rams through legislation without ANY input from the opposing party. Forget that the Obama Administration STILL hasn’t finished writing its rules for the state health exchanges.
The bottom line is that Obamacare is a mess run by one of Washington’s most incompetent agencies – the Dept. of Health and Human Services.
Now the Obamabots want states to implement their mess as independent contractors without any idea of its costs or future obligations. That’s because – it’s NATIONALIZED HEALTH CARE. Ultimately the states have no control over health care systems they have run for decades – but are now expected to tear up and turn over to the feds.
The MSM might have learned this if it spoke with Republicans like Speaker Jase Bolger who told the Frank Beckmann Show on Friday: “There are so many questions from the federal government we just don’t know. We don’t have answers. Who will need to go through the exchange? What will the exchange look like? That caused the Health Policy Committee the greatest angst.”
Instead the Freep talked to “disappointed” hospital special interests. The Freep forgot to mention, however, that Big Hospital wrote Obamacare. These mega-corps stand to make billions from the law and they want to ride herd on local legislatures on how to rig the system for themselves.
Applause to House Republicans for not entering their constituents into contracts they do not understand. Washington Democrats broke the health care system. They own it.
Payne: Groundhog Day, starring Barack Granholm
Posted by hpayne on November 29, 2012
Obama Part 2 meet Granholm Part 2. It’s Groundhog Day in America.
A year after winning re-election over a rich, out-of-touch, China-outsourcing CEO (sound familiar?), Jennifer Granholm took Michigan to the fiscal cliff over tax hikes. The same song is being played in Washington today by Granholm’s Harvard-educated twin, Barack Obama.
In DC, nerves are raw. “Over the last two years, Congress and the president have held an endless series of secret negotiations,” complained Alabama senator Jeff Sessions today. “But the only thing these secret talks have produced is a government that skips from one crisis to the next.”
Sound familiar? It’s the fall of 2007 in Lansing all over again.
“By midday today, state House members were no closer to raising the state’s income tax from 3.9 percent to 4.6 percent than they were when an unprecedented marathon session began at 10 a.m. Friday,” reported The Detroit News on Sept. 17, 2007 as Michigan lurched towards a government shutdown. “While key Democrats said the votes would be there by midnight to increase the levy, which would generate about $1.1 billion annually, House leaders were equally vehement that there would not be a single GOP vote for a higher income tax rate today or Monday.”
Democratic Rep. Paul Condino, a lead negotiator, praised Republicans said to be considering a cave on higher taxes – despite “great personal risk” from groups threatening recalls (lawmakers were trying to plug a $1.75B hole for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1).
“Democrats say a major tax increase is needed,” reported The News. “Republicans, demanding budget cuts and government spending reforms, continued to oppose it.”
Sound familiar? In the end, Republicans agreed to an income tax hike (by 12 percent raising $1.4 B) after a brief budget shutdown – under media and public pressure.
“This budget agreement is the right solution for Michigan,” crowed a victorious Guv Granholm. “We prevented massive cuts to public education, health care, and public safety while also making extensive government reforms and passing new revenue. With the state back on solid financial footing, we can turn our focus to the critical task of jumpstarting our economy and creating new jobs.”
But the jumpstart never happened. Two years later, the unemployment rate had DOUBLED from 7.3 percent to 14 percent. And those tax revenues that were raised?
“Within literally hours of passing the tax hike,” remembers the Mackinac Center’s Jack McHugh, “the legislature passed bills spending the entire $1.4 billion.” In 2010, Rick Snyder inherited a $2 billion deficit amidst a stalled economy. The lesson is the same: pro-growth policies grow revenues, not tax hikes.
Something to think about as Obama Part 2 skips – Granholm-like – from one crisis to the next.
Payne: Nerd turns out lights on Granholm Energy
Posted by hpayne on November 28, 2012
It was 19 pages long. It was dull. It was a laundry list of everything environmental from farming to fish to fracking. But Governor Snyder’s energy speech Wednesday laying out a blueprint for Michigan’s energy future was not only a welcome departure from the green goo of his Gore-disciple predecessor – it was a final policy nail in the coffin of Jennifer Granholm’s attempted transformation of Michigan to a dysfunctional, wind-powered, union-run European state.
Together with his election defeat of Big Labor’s Props 2 and 4 power grabs, his restructuring of Michigan’s long-term budget liabilities, his education reform, and his leash on crony capitalism, Snyder’s sound energy policy completes the state’s return to economic fundamentals.
Welcome back to Planet Earth, Michigan.
Snyder’s energy speech was typical of the quiet, step-by-step reinvention of Michigan that Snyder has accomplished in two short years with a Republican Legislature. It understands the reality that Michigan is a manufacturing state, and that it needs cheap power to grow.
That means exploiting the state’s natural gas resources. That means encouraging coal power. That means reversing course from the disastrous green policies of Granholm. Her wind-powered, government subsidized vision of a post-Rust Belt “Green Belt” economy has misused taxpayer funds, increased electric rates, and left a landscape littered with bankrupt, Lansing-subsidized, green companies.
“Our energy needs to come at an affordable price to our businesses and homes,” said the ex-Gateway CEO, dusting off common sense that hasn’t been spoken by a Michigan governor in 10 long years. “Michigan’s electricity prices are the highest in the Midwest. That’s actually normal for Michigan, because our neighbors have more coal resources than we do and existing coal plants are hard to beat on cost. But of more concern is the fact that Michigan’s energy prices have been on a fast rise over the last few years.”
Why?
Because of 2008’s re-regulation of Michigan energy delivery, Granholm’s quixotic 10 percent alternative energy mandate (Snyder publicly campaigned against a ballot initiative that would have increased that number to 25 percent), and EPA rules that forced Michigan coal plants “to spend $3 billion so far on new environmental controls to keep key coal plants running and to shut others down.”
And then – steady yourself – in a rare Snyder moment, One Tough Nerd took a shot at Obama’s War on Coal.
“I know people disagree about the new EPA rules for coal plants,” he said, “but I think we can all agree it’s not in the best interest of the environment or the country to risk massive outages to get there at a breakneck pace. During this campaign, President Obama pledged to take an ‘all of the above’ approach to energy policy. I am hopeful that reliability, affordability, and environmental protection will also be incorporated as guiding principles into federal energy policy.”
Snyder’s plodding speech wasn’t without its political contradictions, including a shout out to the very alternative energy mandate that he acknowledges is hurting consumers with higher energy bills. But in an energy-hungry state that must have cheap carbon energy to survive, the speech was a welcome sign that Economics 101 – not Green Church doctrine – is once again Michigan’s guiding text.
Payne: The Green Church of Doha
Posted by hpayne on November 26, 2012
When the Kyoto Protocol was enacted in 1997 scientists knew it would have no discernible effect on temperatures. In 2009 Climategate exposed the fraudulent claims of leading climate scientists. And in 2012, satellite measurements indicate there has been no rise in global temperatures since 1998. Yet this week, government representatives are gathering in Doha, Qatar to forge a new agreement to fight global warming.
This is clearly a Green movement driven by religion, not science.
Determined to divert attention to China as the devil in Doha, the Obama Administration is parading its moral commitment to the Green Church. “Those who don’t know what the US is doing may not be informed of the scale and extent of the effort, but it’s enormous,” boasts Jonathan Pershing, a US climate negotiator.
But Pershing’s defense of his government was curious indeed. He cited the fracking-driven boom in natural gas production – a development that the administration has frowned upon (in Michigan and elsewhere) and is eager to regulate – and ignored the administration’s War on Coal which has had devastating effects on coal employment in the Appalachian region.
The administration’s – and its media’s – shyness to trumpet the EPA’s strangling of coal power is consistent with their silence during the campaign, when boasting of CO2 emissions cuts might draw attention to its economic costs in key states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
But the effort to demonize China has this further irony: The US coal employment picture would be much worse were it not for coal exports to China.
Obamedia has vigorously defended the administration’s War on Coal, citing recent increases in US coal employment. But that increase is entirely due to the carbon-burning, Chinese economic powerhouse. Appalachia has some of the world’s richest deposits of high-grade coal used to make steel – and with China’s unslakable thirst for steel in recent years, American coal companies were able to counter the domestic decline in coal plant demand with an increase in so-called metallurgical coal.
But now China’s economy is slowing – and so is its demand for US coal, exacerbating blue-collar unemployment in the eastern US. Fewer jobs means fewer CO2 emissions. But don’t expect the US to crow about that point in Doha.
Payne: Democrats lose the (UMW) working man
Posted by hpayne on November 22, 2012
“Representative John D. Dingell. . . said that the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions by the E.P.A. would set off a ‘glorious mess’ that would resonate throughout the economy.” – The New York Times, 2009
Much has been made since Barack Obama’s re-election of Republican failures – particularly with the crucial Latino vote in key swing states. But the Democrats are not without their own disturbing numbers. They continue to be – despite Obama’s rhetoric – the party of the anti-middle class with voting blocs over $50,000 in income voting Romney. Republicans also made a significant, 9 percent gain among Jewish voters in the face of the administration’s chilly relations with Israel – not to mention the anti-business policies felt by this famously entrepreneurial minority (800 prominent Michigan Jews took out an ad for Romney in the Jewish News before Election Day).
But consider the most disturbing fact of the 2102 election for the “party of the working man”: Democrats lost traditionally blue-collar, heavily Democratic coal country from Southern Pennsylvania to western Ohio to all of Kentucky and West Virginia.
Why? Because the Democratic Party’s upper-class, deeply devout Green class is waging war on the energy-producing working class. This year alone, thousands of miners lost their jobs because the EPA imposed strict global warming rules eliminating future coal plants.
So predictable was United Mine Workers-controlled West Virginia in the Democratic column once-upon-a-time that in 1988 it was one of just nine states that voted for the hapless Michael Dukakis. But in the last four election cycles – since Al Gore’s religion mesmerized his party – West Virginia has become a solid GOP vote for one reason: The Democratic War on Coal.
Think of it: In 2012 Appalachian blue-collars voted in a landslide for a Republican Massachusetts millionaire.
True enough, Dingell’s predicted “glorious mess” is now resonating – not only in the economy but in his own party. Dingell knows a thing or two about green fanatics trying to kill American industry – he has fought the Left’s War on the Automobile in his Big Three district west of Detroit for years. Recent redistricting means that Dingell now also represents the green university town of Ann Arbor – so his anti-environmentalist diatribes are more muted these days.
But when asked this week in a visit to Detroit News offices whether it’s a good idea for Obama’s EPA to be killing coal, he replied matter-of-factly: “Of course not.”
After all, Dingell opposed the EPA’s radical interpretation of Dingell’s own Clean Air Act to rule carbon dioxide a pollutant. “EPA got it wrong,” he says.
But science lost that fight in the Supreme Court. And as result, Democrats are losing their working man brand. Republicans lost Missouri and Indiana Senate seats this year thanks to Religious Right extremists. Meanwhile, Democrats lost Appalachia due to Religious Left Green extremists.
Both parties have been warned.
Payne: No Twinkie Bailout
Posted by hpayne on November 18, 2012
Humor
Washington, DC, AP – A $1.5 billion “Twinkie Bailout” to save Hostess Brands and 18,500 jobs fell apart Friday after President Obama’s Hostess Task Force could not come to terms with the Bakery Workers Union.
The multi-billion dollar federal rescue was unpopular with Republicans in Congress – and with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg who blamed the company for obesity in America’s children. Hostess promised that it is developing a new, low-cal pastry called the Twinkie Volt. But the union admitted it could not guarantee delivery of Michigan and Ohio to Democrats in 2016.
“Let them go bankrupt,” said the president in a New York Times op-ed.
The maker of Twinkies, Suzie Qs, Wonder Bread, and other iconic baked goods, the 82-year-old Hostess announced plans for liquidation. Industry experts said some of the company’s popular snack cake brands would likely be bought by other baked goods makers. But Mayor Bloomberg declared an immediate ban on Twinkies in New York City effective Sunday.
Payne: Appeals Court civil wrongs
Posted by hpayne on November 15, 2012
It’s 2012 in Michigan. Ethnic minorities are executives with major Michigan corporations. Their children are students at their parents’ Michigan alma maters. And on Election Day they joined a majority of Americans in re-electing a black president to a second term in office. So this week the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that Michigan’s 2006 ban on racial preferences in university admissions is unconstitutional because it denies minorities equal access to the law.
In what century are these judicial dinosaurs living?
By their perverse, Orwellian logic, we need racial preferences for president because there’s no other way to guarantee that a black man can be president. And yet the American electoral process – which, like Michigan’s constitution, guarantees no racial outcome – somehow just re-elected Barack Obama to the White House.
Indeed, Barack Obama is a better representative because America elected him on his merits. He is the realization of MLK’s dream of being judged, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.
The 6th circuit nightmare, meanwhile, seems frozen in another era – before integration, before King’s revolution, before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The logic of the court’s ruling would, incredibly, have the effect of invalidating the ’64 act (Michigan’s constitutional amendment is modeled on its language) banning racial preference in admissions because – the court’s perverse reasoning goes – it does not give minorities the same access under the 14th Amendment to draft legislation discriminating by race. We’re not making this up.
The court’s reasoning would rule Title VII of the federal law illegal because it “prohibits discrimination by covered employers on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin” just as Michigan voters in 2006 affirmed that any “public college or university. . . shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”
In a deliberate misreading of federal law, the majority opinion claims that due process is denied because a student seeking to benefit from family alumni connections could lobby the school while a racial minority would have “to amend the Michigan Constitution.” Never mind that the children of minority alumni are also legacy beneficiaries, the Civil Rights Act bans discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex or national origin” – not alumni status.
The ruling poisons today’s youth pool – multi-ethnic, worldly, connected to the planet by social media – by introducing the rigid racial classifications of a half century ago. It also flies in the face of the success of California’s similar, 15-year old, colorblind admissions amendment (passed under Prop 209 in 1996) which has benefited minorities by increasing graduation rates.
At California’s public universities more minorities are getting diplomas than ever before.
Four-year graduation rates for blacks at UC-San Diego, for example, have doubled since 1995 – nearly on par with whites and Asians. Similarly, Mexican-American graduation rates are up by 27 percent. Post-Prop 209 black and Hispanic populations at California’s two most elite universities – Berkeley and UCLA – dropped by nearly half, but the overall population of minority students across the University of California system remained remarkably stable. Why? Because minority students didn’t give up on a higher education – they simply entered colleges for which they were more qualified. Schools like UC Riverside and UC Santa Cruz have seen minority enrollments increase, with Riverside alone reporting a 240 percent increase in black admissions.
“This has produced better students all around,” says Rick Sander, a UCLA law professor and auther of a new book, “Mismatch,” which documents the harm university race preferences have visited on minorities by setting them up for failure.
But elites at Michigan universities and federal courts have a perverse sense of merit – they would rather preen as champions of “diversity” quotas than give students the best path to success.
“What this (6th Circuit ruling) means is that thousands of blacks and Latinos who would not have had a chance to go to our most selective universities will have the chance to become lawyers, doctors and leaders of all fields,” says George Washington, a Detroit attorney for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.
The facts defy that conclusion. The 6th Circuit is a setback for democracy and for ALL students. Indeed, social activists are troglodytes 50 years behind the civil rights revolution. Today, the biggest challenge to minority success is not racism in admissions – it’s the implosion of the two-parent family. It’s time for America’s elites to catch up to the 21st century.
Payne: Detroit’s 2-day driveway rule
Posted by hpayne on November 14, 2012
Detroit – For Detroit’s dwindling middle-class, living in the Motor City isn’t easy. Take, for instance, the two-day driveway rule.
“You don’t leave your car in the driveway for more than two days,” says Patrick Lindsay, Wayne State University’s Vice President for Government and Community Affairs, a lifelong city resident. “They’ll steal something.”
“They” are Detroit’s gangs which canvas neighborhoods noting their residents’ daily habits. “Something” are radios, wheels, tires, and other easily stolen items on cars like Lindsay’s Chrysler 300 which is popular with thieves. With a dwindling tax base and overwhelmed police force, Detroit ranks Number One on Forbes’ list of Most Violent American Cities with 2,137 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
As a result, Detroit sports the nation’s highest auto premiums at a staggering $6000-a-year on a mid-size vehicle like a 2012 Chevy Malibu. The average premium in Michigan, by comparison, is $1000-a-year – nationally, $800. Detroit faithful like Lindsay call it the “love tax” – the cost they are willing to pay to stay in their hometown. Lindsay says he will never leave Detroit – he was born here, runs a church in Southeast Detroit, and had been active in local charities like Focus: HOPE – but he understands why others do.
Inconveniences like the 2-day driveway rule are too much to bear when you are paying the region’s highest income and property taxes and getting lesser services in return.
Conventional wisdom is that Detroit is losing population because of racism and the decline of the auto industry. But Detroit’s 25 percent population decline in the last decade was the black middle-class following the white middle-class exodus of the 1980s. The cost of auto insurance alone – 6 times that of surrounding townships – drives families out along with the city’s high crime and low-quality schools.
And when they abandon Detroit for the ‘burbs, folks can leave their cars in their driveways for as many days as they like.
Payne on GOP Hangover: Would Mitch Daniels have defeated Obama?
Posted by hpayne on November 13, 2012
Presidential elections are American Idol contests, mid-term elections are issues exams. On Nov. 6, 68 percent of Michigan voters – mirroring the nation as a whole – turned out to vote for Barack Obama. Two years ago, just 45 percent of Michiganders (the youth vote alone was down a whopping 60 percent without Obama on the ballot) showed up in an election that swept Republicans into command from the U.S. House to the Michigan legislature.
The difference in presidential elections and mid-terms helps explain the whiplash that conservatives feel after a 2012 defeat that seems to run counter to the Tea Party trends of two years ago – and even this fall’s Michigan ballot initiatives that trounced Democrat initiatives like Big Labor’s power grab and Big Green’s 25 percent wind mandate.
President Obama won re-election in large part because folks simply liked him better than Mitt Romney.
Presidential elections uniquely allow campaigns and the media to focus on individual flaws (Romney’s tax returns received more press this year than did Obamacare), making the vote as much a referendum on a person as on a party.
So ignore the MSM conventional wisdom that the 2012 presidential election is a cause for a radical reboot of the Republican Party. Yes, a loss is a loss is a loss. But Barack Obama should have won this election by a landslide, not 51-49. History tells us that incumbent presidents in recovery cycles – especially coming out of deep economic holes – usually dominate come re-election. Indeed, only one challenger has defeated an incumbent in a recovery cycle since WW2: Ronald Reagan. And Mitt Romney was no Ronald Reagan.
Democrats should be breathing a sigh of relief – not gloating. In fact, were it not for two factors – Romney’s weak base support and the Hispanic vote – a Republican would be headed to the White House. On Obamacare and immigration, Romney abandoned market freedom. Address these concerns and GOPers are in good shape for 2016.
Romney was a weak candidate. How weak? Rick Santorum almost beat him in Michigan. In Michigan. So weak that a dozen-count ’em, twelve – challengers entered the primary to try and defeat the man who should have been formidable after his runner-up primary finish in 2008. So weak that the GOP pleaded with conservative governors like Mitch Daniels (is there anyone today who doesn’t think the folksy, successful businessman-turned-governor from Indiana would have beaten Obama?) to enter the primary.
Conservatives pleaded with Romney to ditch Romneycare at the outset of his campaign. It was a mistake, he could have said. That’s why we have states to experiment on such things, he could have said. But the experiment was a failure and here is the data to prove why it will be an even greater disaster nationally, he could have said.
Instead, he dug in his heels, praising Romneycare even as he incongruously claimed he would ditch its twin, Obamacare, if elected. How can I trust you? the base thought even as it rallied in Tampa around the party nominee. The Massachusetts governor’s play was for Independents, concerned that they would be turned off by another flip-flop. But not only didn’t get he Independents – he lost the GOP base which turned out in even lower numbers than it did for McCain in 2008. “We didn’t talk enough about Obamacare,” commented righty talk show host Laura Ingraham after Nov. 6. That is inexcusable after an Obamacare backlash swept Republicans to power in 2010.
As for Hispanics, well – Republicans already know how to court the fastest-growing minority in America. After all, the GOP’s godfather, Ronald Reagan, granted illegal immigrants amnesty. With his embrace of immigration reform in 2004, Dubya Bush won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004 – compared to restrictionist Romney’s 27. Republicans would do well to welcome immigrants with a smile and a promise of worker permit reform – instead of the scowling, we-know-you’re-just-here-for-the-welfare-check face of the 2012 campaign. Hispanics won’t listen to your economic liberty message if they don’t think you want them in the country to begin with.
Fortunately, the new generation Republicans in the wings – Rubio, Christie, Perry, Walker – get it.
And by 2016, America may well be sick of the Democratic brand. After all, Barack Obama promised a unified America with a secure future. Instead he has given us a divisive presidency and a first-in-U.S.-history debt downgrade. His economic policies have been cruel at worst (thousands of coal miners sacrificed to the EPA’s global warming god) to incompetent at best (giving millions to wealthy green corporations that have gone bankrupt). He won ugly by dividing us One Percent from 99 Percent, employer from employee, black from white. So much for Hope. Coming out of the deepest recession since 1980 and 1992, America’s economic muscle should have carried Obama to a second term landslide as it did Reagan and Clinton before him. But his stimulus failed and his hyper-regulatory state stymied business investment.
As a result, Obama had to spin to win: It was George Bush’s fault. There is not a businessman in America who thinks we are going backwards – 12 quarters after the recovery began in 2009 – because of Bush. Fortunately for Obama, his media does.
The MSM was a crucial factor in 2012. From The New York Times to the AP to the broadcast networks to big metros like the Detroit Free Press, it was a partisan cheering section. It ignored Obamacare’s ills, the struggles of business, the laid-off coal miners, and so on.
Just take the last week of the campaign.
The media (Fox News excepted) ignored the deepening Benghazi scandal – from Obama’s fibs about its origin to the administration’s refusal to heed warnings that the embassy was under-defended. Like Jimmy Carter’s Iran, a foreign policy scandal would have opened a dangerous second front on the incumbent. On Hurricane Sandy, the press ignored FEMA incompetence in order to praise Obama’s “leadership.” And in the crucial swing state of Ohio, the MSM (correctly) ripped Mitt Romney’s false Jeeps-made-in-China ads – after an entire campaign of ignoring Obama’s falsehoods on GM’s bankruptcy, unfair treatment of Delphi pensions, and illegal favoritism for the UAW in Chapter 363 bankruptcy.
In short, Romney had to defeat Obama & Media. But contrary to media claims, Republicans have not lost the middle class – yet. Romney won earners from $50 grand and up – once again proving the GOP is the party of the middle class.
But that is the real danger of losing 2012. Obamacare – a middle class entitlement – is now the law of the land. As in Europe, Democrats believe it will make the middle class more dependent on Big Government. Then again – like the HMO backlash a decade ago – Obamacare in practice may turn the public against Democrats.
Republicans have four years to rebuild. Their hold on the middle class depends on it.
Payne: President Snyder? Alas, President Granholm
Posted by hpayne on November 11, 2012
In exit polls last Tuesday, voters bought the Obama & Media sales pitch and blamed George Bush for the worst economic recovery since WW2. On Wednesday, voters woke up to the reality that the blame rests squarely with Barack Obama.
The stock market tanked on news that Obama was re-elected, meaning four more years of fiscal cliffs, budget chaos, job-stifling Obamacare regulations, and debt downgrades. In short, Jennifer Granholm’s second term. Had Mitt Romney been elected, all of these ills would have been addressed – just as his political twin, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, immediately got down to business in Lansing with a GOP legislature in 2010.
Most immediately looms the fiscal cliff, a crisis created by Obama for the 2012 campaign.
In 2011, with Congress and Obama deadlocked over spending cuts and tax hikes, Speaker Boehner’s GOP House offered a compromise: Tax reform that would goose growth with lower rates while closing loopholes to bring in more revenue (upon entering office, Guv Snyder’s similar tax reform immediately encouraged the financial markets about Michigan’s future).
Obama, as described in Bob Woodward’s book and press accounts, rejected the deal in order to tee up his divisive, class warfare campaign against Republicans (and their likely nominee, Mitt Romney) in 2012. In short, Obama abdicated economic leadership for re-election.
Now the campaign is over. Boehner put the same deal back on the table last week. But unlike Michigan in 2010, the voters elected no change in the executive office. It’s deja vu all over again.
Payne: Sicko Moore
Posted by hpayne on November 8, 2012
On Wednesday, Michigan film-maker and Occupy Wall Street icon Michael Moore thanked Hurricane Sandy for helping swing the election to President Obama. Now that’s sicko. His words went largely unreported, echoed those of MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews, and attest to a news media that gives a pass to blowhards on the Left.
“And you, Mother Nature, with all your horrific damage, death and destruction you caused last week, you became, ironically, the undoing of a Party that didn’t believe in you or your climate changing powers,” Moore wrote on his blog about a natural disaster that many political observers credit with slowing Mitt Romney’s momentum in the week before Election Day.
Moore’s insensitive comments – Sandy has brought destruction, misery, and death to the New York metro area – echoed those of MSNC commentator Chris Matthews. And they came in the same week that Gabby Giffords’ shooter was sentenced to life, reminding Americans of hollow Democratic pleas for a new civility in the wake of that horrific assassination attempt a year ago. Moore’s words attest to Democratic hypocrisy – and a news media that gives a pass to blowhards on the Left.
Republicans are not spared controversy, however.
In the wake of Obama’s election in 2008, Rush Limbaugh’s shot at Obama – “I hope he fails” – brought down a national media firestorm on conservatives. Media outlets across the country ridiculed Limbaugh – a leading right-wing commentator – for his comments and demanded that Republicans apologize for poisoning the national conversation.
In contrast, the MSM has ignored Moore’s comments. From Michigan outlets like The Detroit Free Press to MLive.com to the national TV networks, Moore’s comments have been greeted with silence. When Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut,” the national media confronted Republican lawmakers, forcing them to put distance between themselves and the bombastic commentator – and President Obama absurdly turned Fluke into a national spokeswoman for the so-called War on Women.
Only right-wingers need watch their tongues.
Payne: The Romneycare Gap
Posted by hpayne on November 7, 2012
As an experienced governor and businessman, Mitt Romney was the better-prepared candidate for the financial challenges that face America in 2012. He lost because he faced an incumbent in a recovery cycle (however weak). He lost because the media protected President Obama from scrutiny on his failed economic record and the Benghazi and Fast and Furious scandals. He lost because the Republican Party has alienated Hispanics with its restrictionist immigration stance.
But Mitt Romney also lost because, as the father of Romneycare, he was a fatally-flawed candidate in an election about Obama’s government takeover of health care.
As such, Romney shied from Obamacare’s disturbing details because he himself had inflicted the same on Massachusetts: the individual mandate, longer waiting periods, the reduction in doctors, the exploding costs (not to mention Obamacare’s increased taxes and political favors to Big Hospital and Big Pharma).
Had Mitt Romney been without Romneycare’s baggage, he could have twinned the theme of Obama’s poor economic management with the specter of Obama’s partisan, unpopular health reform threatening patient care.
Imagine:
For the entire month of October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Romney might have paraded women – both single and married – in front of the cameras and shared their miracles of being saved by the best-on-the-planet American health system. Then he could have explained how – if they were in Obamacare’s model systems of Canada or Europe -they would not have received adequate treatment. He could have visited Michigan clinics where Canadians – denied care across the border – come for treatment.
The US leads the world in breast cancer survivability. Government-run systems lag badly because of government cost controls and doctor shortages.
Every woman would have understood that. Every woman would have grasped the threat that four more years of Obamacare posed. And the gender gap would have shrunk to nothing.