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Budget battle: Media vs. taxpayers ( The Michigan View 3.1.11)
Posted by hpayne on March 1, 2011
On the website of the Newspaper Guild — the union that represents most major newspaper newsrooms in the United States —a headline accompanied by a raised fist urges members to “Stand with Wisconsin.” Another report tells reporters “How to help the Wisconsin workers.” And a Guild Reporter story celebrates that “D.C. unionists mass 2,000 to show solidarity with Wisconsin workers.”
In the Republicans vs. Big Labor standoff in Wisconsin, Big Media has taken a decidedly pro-labor tone. Even as newspapers frown on reporters joining the protesters, the Guild site offers an insight into how much today’s media sides with them. Today’s MSM is not only uniformly liberal — it is also one of the few American workplaces still unionized.
As a result, the Mainstream Media has sided with Big Labor — representing just 13 percent of America — against the majority of Americans whose newly-elected representatives are trying to stem the sea of red ink caused by unsustainable union benefits.
The Wisconsin battle highlights how out-of-touch union benefits have become in the public sector. “The showdown in Wisconsin over fringe benefits for public employees boils down to one number: 74.2,” writes Robert Costrell in the Wall Street Journal. “That’s how many cents the public pays Milwaukee public-school teachers and other employees for retirement and health benefits for every dollar they receive in salary. The corresponding rate for employees of private firms is 24.3 cents.”
“Facing a $137 million budget deficit, (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker) has decided to try to avoid laying off 5,500 state workers by proposing that they contribute 5.8 percent of their income towards their pensions and 12.6 percent towards health insurance,” reports John Fund in the same newspaper. “That’s roughly the national average for public pension payments, and it is less than half the national average of what government workers contribute to health care. Mr. Walker also wants to limit the power of public-employee unions to negotiate contracts and work rules — something that 24 states already limit or ban.”
But you’ll have to go to the editorial page to find Costrell and Fund’s reporting.
On American news pages, by contrast, reporters have largely taken up the Big Labor line that Wisconsin (and other state budget battles such as Michigan) are about fundamental worker rights.
For example, under a front page headline, “Battle over union rights boils over,” The Detroit Free Press “news section” on Sunday editorialized that (Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s) decision to stay out of a growing national fight over whether public employees should be able to negotiate hours and benefits, go on strike and otherwise collectively bargain may be wiser than he knows.”
The Freep’s accompanying “sidebar story” followed a union worker in Wisconsin with the headline: “‘Every worker has sacrificed more than enough.'”Readers of these stories will find nary a word on the outrageous benefits that public workers enjoy, the inherent problems that collective bargaining in the monopoly government market poses, or even the highly controversial move of Democratic state lawmakers to leave Wisconsin in order to throw a wrench in the democratic process.
“Good evening. From the Mideast to the American Midwest tonight, people are rising up,” said NBC news anchor Brian Williams last week. “Citizens uprisings are changing the world. … Tonight, we’re going to begin in Wisconsin. The state capitol has been taken over by the people.”
Media critic Bernie Goldberg – himself a onetime Big Media insider – took Williams and the rest of the media to task.
“Surely Brian Williams understands that there are far more differences than similarities between the desperate protesters in Cairo and the middle class union workers in Wisconsin. But that didn’t stop him from making it sound like they were all in it together, somehow united to break the chains of their oppression.”
Williams’ bias is typical of an MSM that reduces all labor disputes to civil rights stories. Like the debate over Obamacare, the MSM has abdicated its responsibility to report the news fairly. Obamacare, we are told, was about “health care rights” and now balancing state budgets is about “workers’ rights.”
Bad sequel: Hollywood Albom meet Ethanol Al (The Michigan View 2.25.11)
Posted by hpayne on February 25, 2011
It gets a 40 cent-per-dollar public subsidy. It was supposed to be the future of Michigan jobs. But it won’t get the headliner treatment Thursday in Livonia. It was all a con.
Big Ethanol meet Big Hollywood.
Last night, celebrities Mitch Albom and Jeff Daniels extolled Big Hollywood as the pig du jour at the taxpayer trough. But close your eyes, imagine them in open-collar leisure suits, and they could just as well be 1970s pitchmen for the ethanol industry “future”— a future dependent on endless corporate welfare.
Ethanol also had plenty of subsidy celebs to sell its cornball politics. Singer Willie Nelson, Al Gore, GM CEO Rick Wagoner, Barack Obama and more. For decades they promised that corn ethanol, like film subsidies, would be America’s future. They produced studies. They held rallies. They denied overwhelming evidence against it. Sound familiar?
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the trough. One of the celebs confessed.
“It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol,” Al Gore finally admitted last year. Et tu, Al? The benefits of ethanol are “trivial,” he added, but “it’s hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going.” Big Ethanol’s job promise was a snow job.
Like the film subsidies, ethanol’s claim on the public purse came amidst crisis as liberal Jimmy Carter said it would solve our 1970’s energy problems. Film credits surfaced during Michigan’s recent recession as liberal Jennifer Granholm said they would answer our jobs anxieties. Pro-ethanol studies proved its worth. Jobs! Independence! Nirvana!
“While the rest of the economy slowly recovers, American ethanol production has been an economic success story,” said the Oklahoma Farm Report’s website. “According to an economic analysis from Cardno ENTRIX economist John Urbanchuk, 70,600 Americans are employed directly in the production of ethanol and in industries providing goods and services to ethanol producers.”
Your turn, film lobbyists.
“A just-released Ernst & Young study suggests for every tax dollar spent in the film/TV businesses in Michigan, nearly $6 of business is generated,” writes Albom in the Detroit Film Reports – er – Free Press. “If that’s even remotely accurate, how do you argue against it? The incentives clearly have created thousands of jobs and kept young bright minds from fleeing.”
The studies were bunkum. Like its ethanol predecessor, independent studies of film welfare found budget losses and minimal job impact.
Big Ethanol’s subsidy snowballed through the last 40 years, picking up more dependents despite the critics. Similarly, the film credits are piling up bipartisan support as more studios open in influential political jurisdictions from Detroit (Democrat Mayor Bing supports!) to Pontiac (Republican Brooks Patterson supports!).
The ethanol jobs promise was a mirage. With subsidies came a per gallon consumption mandate. Plants sprouted around the Midwest. The result? VeraSun, one of the largest ethanol makers, went bankrupt. In 2008, the industry asked Congress for a bailout.
Despite Mr., Gore’s mea culpa, the ethanol subsidy remains, costing taxpayers $6 billion a year. Republican Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn are boldly proposing that the ethanol subsidy die.
The film subsidy has been milking the Michigan treasury for three years while promising Michigan false hopes of a new era. Governor Rick Snyder has boldly offered to phase out this boondoggle before it consumes any more of Michigan dollars.
Time to walk out on this ugly sequel.
Nerd outplays Bing ( The Michigan View 2.23.11)
Posted by hpayne on February 24, 2011
Governor Rick Snyder has set a new standard of leadership in Michigan and all other officials will be measured by it. Snyder’s State of the State and budget messages offered refreshingly bold visions for facing the state’s intractable problems square in the eye — regardless of the howls from entrenched interests.
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing’s State of Michigan’s Largest City Tuesday night did not live up to this standard.
Bing is a good man, a competent man, and a needed tonic after the corruption of the Kwame Kilpatrick era. But more than any jurisdiction in this state, Detroit needs to be “reinvented” to use Snyder’s term. “It is time to . . . develop a blueprint for our future and reestablish Detroit as the world’s most innovative city,” said Bing Tuesday.
But his plans do not live up to his own challenge. On taxes, on union wages, on education, and — most crucially — on the city’s non-existent family culture, Bing proposes little that would tackle the fundamental problems bleeding this city.
While Snyder seems to get bolder as he becomes more familiar with Michigan’s horrifying fiscal crisis, Bing seems to be falling back into Detroit’s familiar, soft platitudes. They’re the platitudes that oozed from the screen before Bing’s speech as Eminem’s now iconic (in Detroit anyway) “Detroit is back” Chrysler commercial warmed up the crowd. “I believe we have turned a corner,” Bing smiled. But Detroit has been turning corners for a decade and winding back at the same spot.
On taxes, Bing ignored the state’s discriminatory commuter tax which is a deterrent to entrepreneurs wanting to locate businesses in the city. So onerous is this tax that no less a city booster than Quicken Loans’ Dan Gilbert paid the tax costs of all 1,700 of his employees when he announced they would be moving to new company HQ downtown. Like Snyder and his dramatic proposal for the flattening of income and business taxes, a big move by Bing on income taxes would send a powerful message.
But there was none.
On union wages, Bing acknowledged the reality that public employee pensions are “unsustainable” and that the city needs to “achieve . . . cost savings.” Eliminating Detroit’s so-called living wage rule for contractors would send a powerful message that Bing is not only committed to sane wages but also to providing constituents the most affordable services. Sure, such a proposal would have brought union members into the streets – likely diverting them from Lansing where Snyder has been willing to endure Big Labor’s arrows for the public good.
But Bing did not address the living wage.
Or the city’s very high combined property taxes. Or its utility tax.
Nor did he propose anything radical on education. Thanks to Lansing, Detroit has been turning education corners since 1999 when David Adamany was appointed by Gov. John Engler as interim CEO for Detroit Public Schools. The new Aamany is another Lansing appointee, Robert Bobb who, like his predecessor, has found DPS to be a nest of entrenched scorpions. Enter Bing who make could Detroit the laboratory of America for charter school innovation – much as Milwaukee was two decades ago with school choice.
But the ex-Piston sharpshooter missed his shot.
But it is Bing’s failure to use the bully pulpit to address Detroit’s struggling families that will most haunt this city. Detroit is failing today primarily because black males have abandoned their families to a tragic 85 percent illegitimacy rate.
As study open study has shown, this is the seed that drives every pathology in inner cities like Detroit (and white rural areas like Appalachia). Fatherless males are more likely to drop out of school, to become adult illiterates, to engage in crime, to repeat the cycle. Bing rightly applauded the city’s reduction in murders under his watch. But at 34 killings per 100,000 residents, Detroit is still one of the four urban horsemen of the Apocalypse. Only New Orleans, Baltimore, St. Louis and Detroit among major U.S cities have murder rates above 30 per 100,000.
By contrast, Chicago has half Detroit’s murder rate. Where do want to move your family? Where do you want your kid moving for her first job? Game. Set. Match.
Detroit will continue to hemorrhage middle class population until leaders like Mayor Bing step up and preach that Detroit’s family culture is intolerable. That nurturing parents – especially for young boys – is essential to a successful society.
Until that happens, headlines like Tuesdays “Detroit pizza delivery man shoots, kills alleged robber” will continue to overshadow State of the City platitudes.
Payne: Union AstroTurf ( the Michigan View 2.23.11)
Posted by hpayne on February 23, 2011
As the Tea Party movement gained steam in 2009, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously derided the movement as “AstroTurf” – an artificial grassroots movement created by the Republican establishment “to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich.” The charge was pure fantasy as the Tea Party proved to be a historic grassroots movement that energized voters – many of them who had never been part of organized politics before – and swept in huge numbers of Republicans candidates.
Now, as Democrats try to get off the floor from their November Tea Party pounding, they are trumpeting union demonstrations from Wisconsin to Michigan as evidence of a grassroots backlash of their own.
That too is Democratic fantasy. This really is an AstroTurf movement.
In Wisconsin, Big Labor – backed by Barrack Obama’s campaign organization, Organizing for America – has mustered busloads of teachers and other union members to fight union reforms that are a direct threat to organized labor’s power. In short, it is anything but a grassroots movement as even the Democratic New York Times figured out.
“The demonstrations have been more organized than organic, with some of the Democratic Party’s top strategists in Madison and Washington helping to assemble giant crowds,” reported the Times over the weekend. “Labor unions, along with the Democratic National Committee and the White House, see this moment as an opportunity to begin rallying troops for the next election.”
Ouch. Called out as AstroTurf by the house organ.
It was no different in Lansing Tuesday, where the United Steel Workers and the AFL-CIO bused in some 500 members for a demonstration against Governor Rick Snyder’s sensible plan to bring union benefits in line with the private sector.
By contrast, a handful of tea partiers turned out to cheer for Snyder’s reforms – average citizens taking time off from their regular routines on a cold Tuesday afternoon.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s union reforms – and to a lesser extent, Snyder’s – are a direct threat to organized labor as they would allow true democracy to flourish. By giving choice to government workers as to whether to join a union, Big Labor’s bosses (there’s your political establishment, Ms. Pelosi) rightly fear that they would lose dues without coerced unionization. And less dues means less money to lobby legislatures and fund candidates to do their bidding.
Organized labor represents a small minority of Americans even as it demands unequal benefits from the majority. No wonder Pelosi fears the grassroots.
The Nerd vs. The Movie Star (The Michigan View 2.20.11)
Posted by hpayne on February 21, 2011
In a tabloid-worthy clash over Michigan’s budget, the Nerd pushed back at the Movie Star this week.
Oscar-winning, Chelsea theater-owning actor Jeff Daniels answered the Governor of Michigan’s budget with the startling claim that Snyder was a liar for not keeping the state’s 42 percent tax subsidy. “It’s not what he told me privately, so to be honest, I guess he’s a politician after all,” the “Dumb and Dumber” star told the Freep.
When asked to respond, Snyder was blunt. “I didn’t make any commitments. People have a right to say what they want to say, but that’s not accurate at all,” Snyder told The Detroit News editorial board.
He said, he said. But regardless of whose memory is right, the clash obliterated Democrats’ class warfare claim that Snyder is balancing the budget on the backs of the little guy in favor of Big Business.
If so, then how come rich entertainers like Jeff Daniels are crying?
Sure seniors and union pensioners are cross about losing their bennies, but Daniels’ Big Hollywood pals are some of the budget’s biggest losers when the Nerd closed down their sweet 42 percent tax subsidy. Both Daniels and fellow Michigan millionaire celebrity Mitch Albom have been lobbyists for film candy.
Smiled upon by Governor Jenifer Granholm’s statist economic policy, Big Hollywood was one of a number of politically-favored industries Lansing picked to grow in the state. But building a business model on fickle public funds is a losing proposition – as are the subsidies themselves, which further eroded the state’s bottom line while bringing few jobs according to a study by the Mackinac Center.
As Snyder keeps repeating this budget is about fairness not favoritism. It flattens taxes, closes loopholes, and scrubs the code of Big Business tax breaks – including the Left Coast film industry. Balancing the budget on the backs of multi-millionaire celebrities like Albom and Daniels by closing their tax loopholes? Sounds like something Democrats would embrace.
And as for that disagreement between the Nerd and the celebrity. . . . For the record, Snyder’s position on eliminating movie industry goodies has been consistent since he first interviews with The News as a candidate last summer.
Obama: BigGov WiFi ( The Michigan View 2.11.11)
Posted by hpayne on February 11, 2011
t’s a picture that captures the essence of Barack Obama’s presidency. On a day of historic democratic events in Egypt as President-for-life Hosni Mubarak stepped down, Obama was en route on Air Force One to Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula to get the federal government involved in the minutiae of WiFi Internet delivery.
Why was the Obama government caught off guard as Egypt’s streets exploded in a fury of democratic demands two weeks ago? The president’s travel itinerary today provides a clue.
Voters may have sent a message in November slapping Democrats for their spendaholic over-reach, but Obama is undeterred as he used the small college town of Marquette to advocate more federal over-reach into national wireless infrastructure.
“If you can do this in the snowy U.P.,” he said. “we can do this all across America.”
Northern Michigan University is doing just fine, thank you very much, in extending a WiFi network across campus and the surrounding college town of Marquette where many of its 6,500 students reside. With local municipal help and grants from tech giants Intel, Motorola, Cisco, and Lenovo (whose products augment NMU’s so-called WiMAX broadband technology), the university is a model for extending Internet service to rural Yoopers.
And with ZERO federal money.
Yet, Obama wants to use NMU as a model for federal WiFi spending. Stuck in the economics of the 1930s, Obama harkened back to FDR’s Rural Electrification Administration in advancing a new federal infrastructure program (even as the rural, 21st century town in front of him already has privately-financed WiFi). Obama has already been “investing” millions in rural WiFi as part of his mammoth stimulus bill. The deceptively-titled Recovery Act – actually a front for an Obama New Deal to spend on self-indulgent, “transformative” tech – provided some $7 billion for broadband toys, including $2.5 billion for the Rural Utility Service (yet another federal bureaucracy tucked away in the rolls of federal budget fat) at the Agriculture Dept. for rural areas
Michigan’s Oakland County, for example – the 4th richest county in America – has received $32 million in stimulus welfare for its “rural” population.
This kind of largesse has attracted the attention of incoming Republicans who have scheduled oversight hearings on how this money is being spent. “Before we target any more of our scarce taxpayer dollars for broadband,” Michigan Rep. and House Energy Committee Chair Fred Upton said in response to Obama’s remarks, “let’s ensure our resources are being used wisely. After all, even without these billions in taxpayer subsidies, the private sector has already deployed broadband to 95 percent of the country.”
At least his National Wireless Initiative (NWI) piggybacks on proven technologies like laptops and PDAs that have spawned vast, privately-funded 4G and cellular networks. And his NWI is progressive in that it will auction off more spectrum so that these networks can grow (though, as Heritage Foundation regulatory expert Diane Katz points out, the FCC has been a bureaucratic hindrance in recognizing market advances).
By contrast, his ambitious, transformative agenda to transform America to a Green economy depends on government not only funding an entire national grid of alternative wind and solar power, but creating the products dependent on it – electric vehicles – via massive federal battery expenditure and consumer tax credits.
The mind boggles at this kind of central planning in 21st century America.
Like kids in a candy store – “God, wouldn’t it be wonderful? Why don’t we invest $100 billion? Let’s just go build it!” Veep Biden told TIME magazine – the Obama administration is spending one-sixth of the stimulus bill, an estimated $130 billon, on this folly.
Where the consumer marketplace has established gasoline-powered cars as its preferred mode of transportation with a vast private network of gas sations to support it, the Obama Administration is trying to force an alternative government solution with electric cars powered by windmills. To use the WiFi analogy, it’s as if Obama decided that Blackberrys and laptops were immoral technologies dependent on foreign lithium (80 percent of the world’s lithium resources are in South America) and decided that the “digital devices of the future” should be steam-powered laptops connected by cable lines.
Rather than the grand, market socialist vision of a new green economy, Obama’s merely wasteful rural WiFi expenditure (of the $28 billion in auction monies, $15 billion will be distributed as federal WiFi pork) looks modest by comparison.
Still, the idea that rural WiFi is an essential federal service proves Washington has lost perspective on economic priorities. When asked why Marquette’s private-local model should be hijacked as a model for federal expenditures, an NMU spokesman says that tapping private capital was “hard.”
Well, yes, it’s so much easier to have government just “give “it to you. NMU’s WiMAX solution fits its campus and community. It may not fit others. But consolidate the model under a clumsy, one-size-fits-all federal program, and it becomes another inflexible, expensive federal program.
And that’s precisely what voters rejected last November.
Stabenow: More green for the rich (The Michigan View 2.7.11)
Posted by hpayne on February 8, 2011
Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow sweetened subsidies for wealthy Americans Monday by introducing legislation that would allow buyers of electric vehicles like the $87,000 Fisker Karma and the $40,000 Chevy Volt to claim their $7500 tax credit at the time of purchase. Currently, the tax credit can only be claimed on April 15.
“This is a new technology. . . just like cell phones and computers were at the beginning and as more people bought them, the price came down dramatically,” Stabenow told WJR Radio’s Frank Beckmann before introducing her Charging America Forward Act. “The same is true of the automobile.”
Except that cell phone and computer buyers didn’t get massive subsidies from taxpayers.
Indeed, her digital examples are proof of the folly of her legislation. Government has no more idea what the auto technology of tomorrow is than that cell phones would emerge to dominate telephony 30 years ago. Efforts to pick winners and losers only wastes taxpayer resources and diverts capital from more worthy endeavors.
“I remember getting a big cell phone put in the back of my car for $1500,” Michigan’s chauffeured junior senator said. A pity the well-to-do didn’t receive subsidies then.
This time, however, Stabenow is looking out for the fat cats.
In addition to the purchase subsidy, her bill would also aid the rich (high-priced electric cars are targeted at buyers making $200,000 and up) in buying electric accessories like $2500 home charging stations so the wealthy won’t be inconvenienced by long charge times.
“We’re extending the tax credits for the charging stations,” she said. The bill would expand the current tax candy beyond the charging stations to wiring and other costs associated with mansion and workplace installation.
Of course, Stabenow claims that electrics won’t always be the chariots of the gentry. Carefully choosing her words with Beckmann to avoid tipping off listeners to new “spending,” she claimed that she is “investing in the cars of the future.”
But “investing” means distributing money to profitable ventures. And as Beckmann pointed out, hybrid-electrics have actually been declining in popularity. Stabenow’s response? “Knock on wood” that will change, she said. That isn’t the language of an investor – it’s the language of a frivolous pol who is recklessly spending other people’s dough.
In addition to rewarding the green gentry with more green in their wallet, Stabenow’s bill also takes care of Democrats’ corporate cronies. The act authorizes the U.S. Energy Department to throw another $2 billion at “the manufacturing of advanced batteries and components.” These grants have overwhelmingly gone to politically-connected companies like A123 Systems and South Korea’s LG Chem.
“Other countries are acting to develop their own advanced vehicle markets because they realize the tremendous economic potential this new technology represents,” said Stabenow in a statement defending her market socialism. “These initiatives will allow Michigan innovators to continue to out-compete the world and create new jobs here.”
Apparently, Stabenow is unaware that the U.S. has become the world’s dominate economy – with 30 percent of the world’s GDP – by NOT following the destructive Democratic Socialism found in Europe and elsewhere.
Payne: Michigan 1, Obamacare 0 (The Michigan View 2.5.11)
Posted by hpayne on February 5, 2011
Michigan hasn’t had many chances to celebrate in recent years, but last week was a good week in its War on Obamacare.
The state was one of 26 that won a key court battle in Florida that declared not only that the law’s forced purchase of health insurance is unconstitutional – but that the entire law was void. The partisan, federal takeover of health care is a dagger at the heart of business – which is why the state’s small business lobby – the Michigan Federation of Independent Business – joined the attorney general’s Florida suit.
State media – in Lansing absorbing the details of Governor Snyder’s report on state finances – gave short shrift to the momentous ruling. But the state’s fisc will never recover without sustained economic growth, and Obamacare is a major reason why employment rolls have lagged the last twelve months. Obamacare is forcing huge new costs on business – beginning with premium rate hikes as high as 18 percent.
How big was the Florida decision by Judge Roger Vinson for Michigan? Hear the roar.
“We are very pleased by the judge’s ruling,” said Michigan NFIB Director Charles Owns, “The mandates, penalties and regulatory burdens imposed by this law are costly and confusing to Michigan small businesses.”
Democrats like John Dingell and Gary Peters claim that small business wins from Obamacare, but the truth is small business has been one of the law’s fiercest opponents.
State Attorney General Bill Schuette hailed the state’s victory. “I am pleased with this ruling because it confirms the individual mandate intruded onto the basic liberties and rights that the Founders envisioned and enshrined in our Constitution for every American citizen,” Schuette said.
Dingell and Peters were lonely cheerleaders for Washington this week. With a January Free Press-WXYZ poll showing that Michiganians oppose Obamacare, 51-43 percent, that’s people, business, AG against.
Even the bad news was good news.
While the still-Democratic Senate voted on partisan lines not to follow the Republican House lead and put a stake thru Count Obamastein, it did vote to repeal the law’s so-called 1099 provision. This little gremlin forced businesses to file 1099 tax forms EVERY TIME THEY SPENT MORE THAN $600 with a single vendor.
“(This was a) vast new paperwork and accounting burden for 30 million businesses and hit start-ups hardest,” wrote the Wall Street journal editorial page, but Democrats and their ceaseless appetite for taxes saw it as a revenue stream for the hungry health care bill.
Lefty Senator Debbie Stabenow led the Democratic retreat – the vote was 81-17 – sponsoring 1099 repeal just a year after voting for it. Democrats once promised that the more skeptical Americans learned of Obamacare’s details, the more they would embrace it. The 1099 shellacking hints at the opposite – and gives momentum to GOP strategy to kill the bill piece by piece..
Lastly, Obamacare burdens states by compelling health exchanges – another cost at a time when Michigan can least afford it. The Wall Street Journal reports Wisconsin and Florida have already suspended compliance until Obamacre’s constitutionality is resolved.
Michigan should join them.
As the Mackinac Center’s Jack McHugh reports nearby, legal experts agree that the Florida court’s voiding of the law means the federal government must stop implementing Obamacare immediately (even as the White House has stubbornly flaunted the law). Says Joseph Coletti, a John Locke Foundation analyst: “Judge Vinson’s ruling frees the state of Michigan from any obligations imposed by Obamacare.”
Last week’s battlefield victories brought Michigan one step closer to defeating Obamacare for good.
Payne: The heydays of Crony Capitalism (The Michigan View 2.4.11)
Posted by hpayne on February 4, 2011
Democrats like to talk about taking on the special interests, but the truth is the Democratic Party today runs the Best Little Whorehouse in America with Big Government in bed with Big Business.
Take Michigan.
Governor Rick Snyder’s State of the State promise last month to “work to reform over-reaching regulation” drew applause from the small business community. But Big Business? Well, define “overreaching regulation.”
In an interview with The Detroit News editorial board just days after the address, Consumers Energy CEO David Joos admitted that he hoped Snyder would not roll back one of his Democratic predecessor’s most onerous regulations: Renewable Power Standards. The Republican-denounced RPS. The inefficient, windmill-mandating, expensive, over-reaching RPS.
But it’s an overreaching regulation Big Utility likes. Why?
Because that is the price it is willing to pay to play ball with new, Big Government global warming regulations. With Washington and its Democratic allies determined to intrude in Big Utility carbon emissions, Consumers and Detroit Edison and their army of lobbyists saw their opportunity to horse-trade RPS for an end to state electricity deregulation. After all, they reasonably argued, if the feds were going to force carbon caps, utilities would need rate guarantees – that is, market monopoly – to reassure their return on investment from more expensive, carbon-reducing facilities like nuclear power and clean coal.
Send the lobbyists to Lansing. Utilities get their monopoly. Democrats get their green. Done. The losers? Michigan ratepayers who will see their rates rise.
Ratepayer defenders like Attorney General Cox, the Mackinac Center and Customer Choice Coalition – all of whom warned the measure “handed a monopoly back to the two utilities” and would raise rates – are hardly big money special interests, after all.
Shortly thereafter, Big Utility asked for rate hikes of 8.1 percent (DTE) and 8.5 percent (Consumers). “The blame,” wrote Oakland Press columnist Glenn Gilbert, “belongs squarely on Gov. Jennifer Granholm.”
Granholm the anti-special interest Democrat? Welcome to crony capitalism.
Democrats on the federal level are no less adamant about their opposition to special interests – and no less in bed with them.
In January, Barack “I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are” Obama and his EPA began enforcing new rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions from any new or expanded power plant. This week, reports The Washington Examiner, the EPA issued its first exemption – to a 600 megawatt utility using gas turbines provided by FOB (Friend of Barack) CEO Jeffrey Immelt’s General Electric Corp.
The same Jeffrey Immelt who Obama just named chairman of the new White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness? The same. Big Government has been very kind to GE and its lobbyists – if not to its customers.
Immelt was also in bed with Washington on banning the traditional light bulb. Why would a company support a government ban on its products? Ah, the echo of Michigan utilities and inefficient windmills. . . .
Because GE stands to make even more money on the incandescent’s replacement – the compact fluorescent – by shutting down its old, union-shop, American light bulb facilities, and moving CFL production to China.
Is Democratic Big Government anti-special interest? The evidence points exactly to the contrary.
Orwell is back: Bulb ban is freedom (The Michigan View 2.2.11)
Posted by hpayne on February 2, 2011
In a leap of Orwellian logic, USA Today — America’s second-largest newspaper — argues in its lead editorial Tuesday that banning the incandescent light bulb is a victory for free markets.
“The best way for government to boost energy efficiency isn’t to micromanage by picking winners and losers, a job better suited to free-market innovation. It is to set a reasonable standard — miles per gallon or light per watt, for example — and let the market sort it out,” spins the editorial in support of picking winners and losers. “That’s what Congress did in 2007” in banning the bulb.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Banning is choice. Regulation is freedom.
One wonders if USA Today’s editors would tolerate this doublethink if applied to their own industry. Were Congress to ban newspapers in order to force them onto the more “planet-friendly” Internet, would USA Today swallow this as free market economics?
Michigan View contributor Ten Nugent quipped that “Obama slept through the election” after a State of the Union address that stubbornly plowed ahead with the hyper-regulation of carbon and Big Government spending. Obama’s MSM allies were apparently snoozing on the couch next to him.
Or perhaps Obamedia is very awake. And they realize that — given the unpopularity of their radical green agenda — the only way to move if forward is with Newspeak that would make Bib Brother blush.
Obamedia’s agenda is under direct assault in both the Senate and in Michigan U.S. Rep. Fred Upton’s House Energy and Commerce Committee. On Monday, Senator John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, introduced legislation stripping EPA of its self-granted power to regulate greenhouse gases. And the Michigan View argued for an immediate overturn of Upton’s 2007 Energy Bill language banning the bulb.
Upton’s committee-mate, Indiana Republican Dan Burton, is listening.
“When I introduced the BULB Act (Better Use of Light Bulbs Act), it wasn’t designed as an attack on energy conservation. It was to defend personal freedom,” writes Burton in a rebuttal to USA Today’s Ministry of Truth (at least USA Today gives its opponents a forum). “People don’t want Congress dictating the lighting they can use. They are safe, cheap and reliable.”
Doublespeak is necessary, of course, to hide realities unsupportable by fact. Having established the premise that “regulation is freedom,” USA Today’s editorial descends into absurdity. “Americans are already reaping the benefits of higher-mileage vehicles,” it says. No they aren’t. Hybrid sales have been in free fall the last 12 months as SUV sales have roared back to a majority of the market. Neither has the American market embraced the incandescent alternative, compact fluorescents. They remain a small minority of bulbs sold.
The editors go on to ignore the drawbacks of the CFL bulbs — from their short life in high-use situations to the thousands of U.S. jobs that have been lost to China as factories have shut down in preparation for the 2012 federal mandate.
“The familiar incandescent bulb is a 125-year-old design that’s handy and cheap but a huge waster of electricity,” argues USA Today. By this logic, nothing is beyond the reach of government regulation: Smaller homes, smaller cars, shorter work commutes, smaller families.
“From the health insurance you’re allowed to have, to the car you can drive, to the light bulbs you can buy, Washington is making too many decisions that are better left to you and your family,” says Burton, hearing the American voter loud and clear. “We can reverse that trend starting by flipping the switch on the BULB Act.”
Ah, the light of logic.
Egyptian stars in Detroit: One eye on the ball, the other on Cairo (the Michigan View 1.30.11)
Posted by hpayne on January 30, 2011
Five Egyptian pro squash players are in Metro Detroit this weekend playing in the Motor City Open – but their hearts are back home with their countrymen and the Egyptian uprising. Egypt produces the best squash players in the world – eight of the world’s Top 25 players are from the Mideast nation – an elite corps of athletes that travel the globe carrying their country’s flag and playing the sport they love.
For years they have tasted the democratic riches of the United States, Europe, and Japan. But with the advent of CNN, the Internet, and Facebook, Egyptians back home in Cairo and Suez and Alexandria also know what they are missing. As in Tiananmen Square and Tehran and Tunisia before it, the Egyptian Revolution is being fed by the communications revolution.
“The people are fed up,” says Tarek Momen as he keeps a close eye on CNN between matches at the Birmingham Athletic Club, Michigan’s premier squash facility and the host of the Open. At 22 years-old, Momen is ranked #25 in the world. Nearby his countrymen – twenty-somethings Mohamed El Shorbagy (#9), Omar Masaad (15), and Mohd Ali Anwar Reda (27) – are glued to the TV as well.
“This uprising is being led by the educated classes,” continues Momen. “We need to get voting rights. Mubarak’s government held an election in December and got 99 percent of the vote. It’s a joke.”
A graduate of the prestigious American University in Cairo with a degree in electrical engineering, Momen’s English is flawless. An ambassador to the world for Egypt – where top squash players, not unlike U.S. tennis players, are national figures – he says that the Egyptian Revolution is a true populist revolt. Fed by Facebook and Twitter, the revolution has no clear leader but has exploded spontaneously since an uprising in nearby Tunisia upended that corrupt government.
Momen is not politically-involved, but his young peers in Cairo are driving this revolution. “We were all getting messages that the people should do something on the 25th,” he said referring to the first day of mass protests.
We talk about the Tea Party in the U.S. – a grass-roots American uprising against single party Democratic rule in Washington the last two years and itself grounded in America’s iconic Boston Tea Party revolutionary beginnings against a corrupt king.
He nods at the similarities of citizens taking to the streets to reclaim their government. But he points to an important difference in Egypt: under one-party Mubarak rule, the streets have no allies in government. In Washington, the Tea Partiers have natural allies in Ryan, Bachmann, and Armey; in Michigan they have Snyder and Amash and Benishek in Michigan.
In Egypt, they have no friends in the government. It is a country of crony pols and crony capitalists where the few hold power against the will of the majority.
“Here in the U.S., you have the right to vote. In Egypt, you have no real right to vote,” says Magdy Talaat, an Egyptian-born U.S. businessman in Lake Orion who has befriended the Egyptian players here.
A big squash fan, Talaat became a U.S. citizen in 1982 but still returns to Cairo every year. He says Cairo is a bustling metropolis like New York or Washington, DC – but the mood changes when it comes to politics. “You don’t talk politics,” he says. “You know that once you cross that line, the police will come and get you.”
“The United States has the best democracy in the world,” says Talaat. But with that title comes responsibility. He is outspoken when it comes to U.S. support of the Egyptian street. “Most Egyptian people have admiration for America. But they are against U.S. government policy toward Egypt because it supports dictatorship. We need regime change. The best thing for Egypt is for Mubarak to leave the country.”
Both he and squash player Momen dismiss concerns that the extremist, Iranian-backed Muslim Brotherhood is a threat to take power in Egypt – a distasteful prospect for Americans that holds echoes of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 that brought radical Islam to power under Ayatollah Khomeini.
“The Muslim Brotherhood is overrated,” says Talaat. Momen says the Brotherhood is no danger and has no influence on his young friends back home.
“Obama should support democratic change,” says Talaat, pointing out dictatorship is a breeding ground for extremists that will ultimately work against U.S. interests. “The U.S. is still a leader that has influence more than anyone can believe.”
As Mubarak has cut off Internet access, TV, and texting communications in Egypt, Momen says that he has become a source of news for his family back in Cairo (telephone landlines are still open and cell phone service has been restored – but without texting privileges).
Momen also points to the Mubarak government’s perverse strategy to apparently destabilize city neighborhoods by withdrawing police. In the last 24 hours, his family has watched from their windows in downtown Cairo as the police have disappeared and the streets have descended into chaos. The government has released hundred of inmates from jail, flooding the streets with looting hoodlums.
Momen says Mubarak is fueling instability – giving Mubarak an excuse to clamp down with his police and forcing the population to choose between the government and chaos. “The police have been replaced by thieves,” he says. “They are destroying shops and Mubarak wants us to believe that we still need him to protect us.”
As he and his mates watch CNN just a few feet from the squash courts, they worry about their families but are optimistic that this is the Egyptian flowering of the universal human desire: democracy.
Goodbye, Hurricane Carol (1.28.11)
Posted by hpayne on January 28, 2011
Climate czar Carol Browner resigned this week.
But for a mention on The Frank Beckmann Show, the news event was ignored by Michigan’s media. It should not have been. Carol Browner should be a household name in a state where the former Clinton EPA chief has done more destruction to Michigan and its inner cities than any single bureaucrat in America.
Rather than silence, there should have been a parade down Woodward Avenue celebrating the end of Hurricane Carol.
A former commissioner of the Socialist International, Carol Browner was named climate czar as an end-run around the Senate because she was too radical to be confirmed. Like her unappointed administration colleague, former-Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, Browner’s confirmation hearing would have tipped the public to the truly radical nature of the Obama Administration. Still, the fact that her name has not appeared in headlines is testament to how deep the Mainstream Media is in the tank for the leftist green agenda.
Browner first came to national prominence as Bill Clinton’s EPA Chief — and Al Gore’s indispensible aide. Browner was Gore’s ghost-writer on “Earth in the Balance,” the Tennessee senator’s 1992 Apocalyptic call to arms against alleged global warming.
“The internal combustion engine,” Browner and Gore wrote, is “a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we’re ever again likely to encounter.”
Those words launched a green movement that has snowballed into global warming regulations that have cost automakers millions of dollars, thousands of jobs, and set in motion a litigation process that holds the Detroit Three – producers of the ICE – potentially liable for billions in weather damage suits.
As climate czar, Browner was tasked with coordinating Obama’s war on industries — from carbon-emitting cars to coal-fired plants — that are vital to Michigan’s economy.
But Hurricane Carol’s damage was not limited to Fortune 500 companies. Her radical policies as EPA chief — whom underlings once called “She Who Must Be Obeyed” — in the 1990’s drew a target around Detroit’s urban poor, and are still wreaking havoc to this day.
In the late ’90s, Browner championed the effort to apply Title VII of U.S. civil rights law to industrial plant permitting, arguing that locating industrial facilities in black cities “disproportionately impacted” minorities and was therefore “environmental racism.”
I dubbed her policy of redlining cities “green redlining” in a Reason magazine cover story. Browner’s EPA actually drew circles around plants located in minority areas to encourage lawsuits. This provoked outrage among black elected officials. Some of those officials were in Michigan, where Browner’s green allies targeted plants for closure just as they had shut down two Louisiana facilities employing hundreds of minority workers.
“The full force is already being felt at CMS Energy’s Genesee Power Station with an EPA environmental justice investigation that could result in orders ranging from shutting the plant to a broader demand on all nearby industries to lower the area’s pollution,” wrote Detroit News reporter Dave Mastio in 1998. “Metro Detroit could become a hotbed of such disputes with its large minority population and massive smoke-stack industries, which are primarily clustered in poorer communities. The issue has already come up between Arab residents and Ford Motor Co. over a new paint shop in the Dearborn assembly plant.”
Horrified by Hurricane Carol’s threat to his community, Detroit mayor Dennis Archer successfully led a coalition of Midwest Republicans and black mayors to scrap “green redlining.” Addressing the Black Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting, then-U.S. Chamber president Thomas Donahue said: “I’m trying to think of a policy that would be more effective in driving away entrepreneurs and jobs from economically disadvantaged areas — and I can’t do it.”
But Browner was not done bringing pestilence to Detroit’s poor.
In the waning days of her tenure atop the EPA, she banned the pesticide Dursban — the most commonly available household product in the world to address bedbugs, cockroaches, and other nuisances.
Despite widespread protest in the scientific community, Hurricane Carol swept Dursban from the shelves. Predictably, bed bugs are back with a vengeance — hitting lower-income families in cities like Detroit hardest, says Heritage Foundation regulatory expert Diane Katz, because they “can ill afford a weekly house call from the Orkin man.”
Indeed, Detroit is the most bed bug-infested city outside New York and Philly.
When she stepped down this week, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner cited “knowledgeable sources (who) say Browner is resigning to avoid testifying under oath to a House oversight committee” led by Michigan Rep. Fred Upton after evidence emerged that “her office got caught doctoring a report to make it appear as if the administration’s drilling moratorium was approved by a panel of scientists.” With Republicans resurgent, it’s likely her primary goal of job-killing cap and trade legislation was dead anyway.
But Browner’s anti-scientific practices had long ago been felt in Michigan — a sort of state laboratory for her destructive policies.
dcHarmony: What do Stabenow and Roberts possibly have in common? (The Michigan View 1.27.11)
Posted by hpayne on January 27, 2011
As a gesture to “bipartisan civility” in the wake of the Tucson massacre, dozens of Republicans and Democrats hooked up for the State of the Union address. Washington hailed these mixed prom dates. But in the case of at least one pair united by dcHarmony, taxpayers get stuck with the dinner tab.
The Michigan delegation featured odd couples like Republican Rep. Fred Upton and his Energy Committee colleague, Democrat John Dingell, and GOPer Tim Walberg and Democrat Hansen Clarke. But the oddest couple was liberal Michigan Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow and Religious Right Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas
What could these two kids possibly have to say to one another?
Stabenow is a labor state union toadie who likes tree-hugging, anti-war rallies, and a woman’s right to choose. Roberts, on the other hand, is a farm state, Big Oil-loving, abortion-hating, Iraq War booster who likes long walks with long guns.
But Senator “I can feel global warming when I fly” Stabenow says she’s taken a shine to her right-wing warmingmonger colleague on the Senate Agriculture Committee. “For years, we have worked together to get things done in the committee, and I look forward to continuing a relationship focused on results rather than party labels,” she cooed.
Ah, the Ag Committee – where working to get things done always carries a taxpayer price tag.
Sure enough, Stabenow and Roberts have plenty in common – both hail from agricultural states where ethanol is king. The senators share a passion for subsidizing Big Ethanol, that oldest of taxpayer-bilking boondoggles. This bipartisan love-fest costs taxpayers an estimated $5 billion a year, the result of a staggering 51-cent a gallon subsidy for each gallon of ethanol. Debbie and Pat’s hobby has resulted in a tripling of corn prices as corn is diverted from impoverished mouths to the wallets of rich ethanol producers like Archer Daniels Midland.
Their passion extends to all brands of ethanol as oil “alternatives.” Roberts recently applauded a $76 million federal “investment” to locate a cellulosic ethanol plant in Kansas – and Stabenow boosts similar boondoggles in her state.
While the Michigan and Kansas senators’ SOTU date was hailed as the best of Washington, it actually represents the worst of D.C. The ethanol scam is the triumph of corporate cronyism over the public good.
Beware the new civility. It has a hand in your pocket.
President Barack Granholm ( The Michigan View 1.26.11)
Posted by hpayne on January 26, 2011
Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm has yet to start teaching her new Cal-Berkeley course on “state budgets, clean energy jobs, and diversifying the economy, and leadership” – but she already has a devoted student in the White House.
President Obama’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night was remarkably similar to the failed economic vision of Michigan’s ex-governor – complete with Granholm’s rhetorical ruse substituting “investments” for “spending” – that she laid out in her State of the State address exactly five years ago. “If the states are the laboratories of democracy,” Granholm wrote in the Huffington Post last December, “Washington can take a lesson from what is happening in Michigan.”
Sadly for the nation, Obama listened to his teacher.
“We need a moon shot,” said Granholm in the Huffington Post. “This is our Sputnik moment,” echoed the president on Tuesday. Like Granholm, he is oblivious of the fact that this tired cliche had nothing to do with economy-building (the space race created no significant marketable products) and everything to so with superpower politics.
Granholm envisioned a transformation of Michigan from Rust Belt to “Green Belt” with massive, European-like, public investments in infrastructure and alternative energy. “In five years, you’ll be blown away,” she predicted in what would become her signature line.
Ironically, thousands of state jobs were blown away as Granholm’s vision diverted pols’ attention from much-needed reforms to the state’s budget and business climate. Since her speech in 2006, the state’s unemployment rate has exploded from 7.4 percent to 11.4.
Now Obama wants to take the Granholm model national.
Indeed, he already has. Obamanomics since 2009 have mirrored Granholmnomics – and complimented it with a huge infusion of federal dollars. While Democratic organs like The New York Times have swallowed White House spin that this is a new, pro-business Obama vision, it is in fact more of the same ol’, same ol’.
Obama diverted one-sixth of the federal stimulus bill – a staggering $130 billion – to politically-connected corporations in the green sector. Obamanomics – and Granholmnomics – have always been “pro-business’ in the sense that they reward crony capitalists. Korea’s LG Chem, A123 Systems, Dow and others have receive millions in state and federal subsidies to build batteries and other visions of Granobama utopia.
“The 21st Century Jobs Fund (is) the largest investment in diversifying our economy this state has ever seen,” said Granholm in her 2006 SOS. “It’ll create tens of thousands of new jobs. We’ll invest more than $2 billion in public and private funds to develop new sectors of our economy: Advanced manufacturing. Homeland security and defense. Life sciences. Alternative energy.”
“We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology – an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people,” mimicked Obama in this years’ SOTU.
From promising more “investment” in infrastructure to high-speed rail to biofuels, Obama’s message is eerily similar to Berkeley’s new prof.
But that “future” has come crashing down in Europe where the Granhobama vision has already been tried. Entirely dependent on government largesse to survive, Granhobama’s alternative energy business model in Spain, for example, has been gutted under budget pressure. As evidence of its fragility, Granholm’s Green Belt dream has already been cast overboard by her successor, Rick Snyder, in his very first State of the State address this January as Michigan faces crushing budget pressures – pressures that Granholm ignored on her way to utopia.
Like Granholmnomics, Obamanomics is not only unsustainable – it diverts important investment dollars from the private sector. Welcome to Michigan, America.
Experts? Granholm follows Millen to NBC ( The Michigan View 1.25.11)
Posted by hpayne on January 25, 2011
Granholm’s signing by NBC’s Meet the Press as a paid commentator after eight disastrous years as Michigan governor is an eerie echo of Matt Millen’s hiring by the same network after Millen had led the Lions to a historic 0-16 season.
What is it about NBC that celebrates failure?
Millen’s eight-year tenure as head of the Lions franchise resulted in the worst eight-year record in the history of the modern NFL (31-97).
Granholm’s eight-year tenure as head of Michigan saw Michigan’s unemployment rate double from 7.5 percent when she took office to 14.9 percent in 2010 and 11.3 percent when she left office in November. She oversaw two government shutdowns, her public stimulus and green jobs initiative launched in 2007 (an eerie predictor of Barack Obamas’ economic policy) was a failure, and she was dubbed by respected Michigan political analyst Bill Ballenger “Michigan’s worst governor ever.”.
Like Millen, however, who was hired as a pre-game NFL analyst in January, 2009 (he is now with ESPN), she will invade American’s living rooms every Sunday with her expertise gained from eight long years of futility. More irony? Millen was hired by NBC just before its big show, the Super Bowl, while Granholm’s hiring comes immediately before the poltics premier national event, the State of the Union address this Tuesday.
Not to be outdone, academia proved itself every bit as clueless as its liberal MSM brethren by also offering Granholm a job. She will teach at the University of California-Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy this spring.
Those Berkeley parents spending $50 grand on tuition are surely thrilled. And who knows? Maybe Berkeley will hire Millen as their football coach.
Rep. Peters: Giffords a victim of the ‘rhetoric of violence’ (The Michigan View 1.19.11)
Posted by hpayne on January 19, 2011
While the link between alleged Tucson killer Jared Loughner and Tea Party rhetoric has long since been obliterated by press reports that he was mentally disturbed and unengaged in politics, prominent Democrats continue to try and use the violent rhetoric narrative to gain political advantage in the new Congress.
“Those who say right-wing rhetoric was the one factor tipping Loughner misunderstand the complex nature of psychosis,” concludes even left-wing Time magazine. “In short, saying Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck caused Loughner’s actions is, to put it charitably, completely idiotic.”
Yet, incredibly, Michigan Rep.Gary Peters (R-Bloomfield Townshop) – over a week after the shootings – tried to draft Martin Luther King as an ally in the political-speech-drove-Loughner-over-the-edge campaign. “The rhetoric of violence,” Peters told supporters in a completely idiotic email after the MLK holiday, is to blame.
“Last week when I began to prepare my remarks for the MLK day celebrations I would be soon attending, I found myself struggling,” the “Peters for Congress” missive began innocently enough. “My heart was heavy. I had just attended the prayer service for my friend and colleague, Gaby Giffords and the too many victims of the mass shooting in Arizona.”
“So I turned to one of my treasured possessions: a book of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings autographed by his late wife, Coretta Scott King,” he continued, soulfully. “Dr. King taught us peace; in the face of hate, he taught us understanding.”
But then came the political knife.
“We must. . . reject hyperbole and the rhetoric of violence and to see them only as barriers to coming together to face the challenges we confront as a nation and a people,” he concluded.
And there you have it. “The rhetoric of violence” shot Gabrielle Giffords.
Beware Republicans who “target” Democratic districts. Beware Republicans who oppose “job-killing” Obamacare. More rhetoric like that and you will not only massacre more innocents ” you will defy MLK’s message of peace.
You can’t make this stuff up.
But Palin has libeled Imam Rauf (The Michigan View 1.14.11)
Posted by hpayne on January 14, 2011
When it comes to national controversies, Sarah Palin has been wronged – but she has also been wrong.
She was libeled this week as an instigator of the Tucson massacre, but she has spread libel herself about the Ground Zero Mosque imam, Faisal Rauf. “Rauf refuses to recognize that Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of our ally, Israel,” she wrote on her Facebook page last July.
Rauf is in Metro Detroit this weekend and repeated – again – that he opposes Hamas and terrorism in an interview this morning with Frank Beckmann on WJR. “Hamas is a terrorist organization. They have committed terrorist acts,” he told Beckmann.
This is consistent with what his website, CordobaInitiative.org, which states: “Hamas is both a political movement and a terrorist organization. When Hamas commits atrocious acts of terror, those actions should be condemned. Imam Feisal has forcefully and consistently condemned all forms of terrorism, including those committed by Hamas, as un-Islamic.”
Or when he told Soledad O’Brien on CNN’s Larry King Show last September 8 that “I condemn everyone and anyone who commits acts of terrorism. And Hamas has committed acts of terrorism.” He also said he would “absolutely” refuse any monies from Hamas. And Israel? “Targeting of civilians is wrong. It’s a sin in our religion, whoever does it. I am a supporter of the State of Israel,” he said in a radio interview last June.
“(I) feel it would be an intolerable and tragic mistake to allow such a project sponsored by such an individual to go forward on such hallowed ground,” Palin concluded.
But “such an individual” told Beckmann that he has had a mosque on this “hallowed ground” in lower Manhattan “for twenty years. I’m very sensitive to 9-11. Members of our mosque were among the victims – and were among the first responders.”
Many more Muslims have died at the hand of Muslim extremism than any other faith. Like most American Muslims, Rauf says he wants to build a “YMCA” to celebrate America’s tolerance for all religions.
The “tragic mistake” here is Palin’s.
Dingell: Giffords shot because Palin and GOP ‘were putting crosshairs on her’ (the Michigan View 1.14.11)
Posted by hpayne on January 14, 2011
John Dingell has not been shy this week about using the Tucson massacre for political advantage.
The View.com reported Thursday morning that the senior member of Michigan’s Congressional delegation – and the longest-serving U.S. House member – took to the House floor Wednesday afternoon to add more fuel to the narrative that Sarah Palin and Republicans were responsible for the shooting – even as President Obama was in the air to Tucson for a memorial service in which he would ask that politicians not “use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.”
But it was not the first time Dingell had spun his conspiracy theory.
On Monday at the Detroit Auto Show, Dingell was even more explicit – without any facts whatsoever – that Palin had provided a road map for Jared Loughner to kill Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
“Gabrielle Giffords had one of the great pundits of the far right come out and talk about how they were putting crosshairs on her,” Dingell told Nathan Bomey of AnnArbor.com while visiting Cobo. “It took only a little while for some fellow to believe, well, you know, that’s the case.”
Dingell’s Monday accusation came as evidence mounted that politics had nothing to do with shooter Jared Loughner’s rampage. By Wednesday, when Dingell repeated the libel back in Washington on the House floor, there was no doubt that Loughner was a deranged individual that not only was divorced from politics – he was divorced from the real world.
He was suspended from school “after police officers who removed him from a biology class told the school they believed he had mental health problems,” reports the Wall Street Journal. And Zack Osler, a friend of Loughner’s, told ABC News that “he did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio. He didn’t take sides. He wasn’t on the left. He wasn’t on the right.”
No matter. Dingell followed his Michigan colleague, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, in fingering conservative “hate speech” for Loughner’s actions.
“I saw the district of Gabrielle Giffords has a crosshairs put on it,” said Dingell departing from his prepared text. “As a lifetime rifleman and shooter, I know what crosshairs signify when you put them on somebody and I know what happened. And one other thing: ‘if ballots don’t work, bullets will.'”
Using hyperbole typical of his party’s strategy to use the Gifford’s shooting to change the GOP’s legislative momentum, Dingell compared Republican rhetoric to the racism of the civil rights movement, declaring the current political atmosphere the worst he has ever seen.
“Mr. Speaker, I have seen firsthand the anger brought on by landmark, life-changing legislation. The rage during the civil rights debates was unlike anything I had seen, until now,” said the longest-serving member of Congress.
“Within the last year I have witnessed anger at my community events that rival the behavior I witnessed during the civil rights debates,” he continued in reference to a heated town hall debate in the midst of Democrats’ attempt in 2010 to force through Obamacare against broad popular disapproval.
“What is different today is not the anger and apprehension felt by some in this country, but the inciting speech, dare I say encouragement, given by well-established folks in the seemingly mainstream political parties,” he said before ticking off the usual litany of quotes – taken out of context – by Nevada Republican candidate Sharron Angle, Texas GOP candidate Stephen Broden, Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota), conservative commentator Glenn Beck, and finally Palin’s signature: “Don’t retreat, reload.”
Dingell’s lesson was entirely partisan, as he included no controversial examples from the Left such as Bill Maher’s riffs on wanting Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh dead or even now-President Obama’s famous quote from a 2008 Philadelphia campaign speech: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
Politics, as Charles Kruathammer pointed out, is a natural theater for battleground rhetoric. Indeed, Michigan is regularly referenced as “a battleground state.” Why? “Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors,” writes Krauthammer. “Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest — ‘campaign’ — is an appropriation from warfare.”
Perhaps Obama understood this as he tried to damp his colleagues’ raging rhetoric at the Tucson memorial service Wednesday night. His speech “was a non-accusatory, genuinely civil, case for civility, in stark contrast to what we’ve read and heard over the last few days,” reviewed Rich Lowry of the National Review. “He subtly rebuked the Left’s finger-pointing, and rose above the rancor of both sides, exactly as a president should.”
Sadly, Dingell has shown no such leadership.
“Members of this body have a duty to speak up – as do members of the media – who have been saying these kinds of things,” Dingell concluded on the House floor. “(They) will lead us into a time when we will create a threat not just to the lives and well-being of our members but also to the lives and well-being of this country and its debates.”
Auto show: Welcome to Bizarro World ( The Michigan View 1.10.11)
Posted by hpayne on January 10, 2011
In 2010 the American truck was resurgent.
Sales of American trucks leapt 18 percent as the segment regained over 50 percent of market share. As financial fears and $4 gas prices receded in the rear-view mirror, American buying habits returned to normal: Americans prefer SUVs that ride high over smaller sedans. Cars shed 6 percent of market share and hybrid-electrics’ share plummeted 17 percent.
So when the North American Auto Show opens in Detroit Monday, automakers will emphasize . . . small cars and green hybrid-electrics?
Welcome to Bizarro World, the annual Detroit auto show press week where what’s inside the walls of Cobo has little to do with the real world outside. With some 5,000 practicing members of the Green Church – liberal journalists and their Washington Democratic allies – roaming the show floor, the automakers will entertain them with politically-correct talk about building small cars to meet federal 35 mpg standards to combat global warming.
Outside, temperatures are expected to drop to below-normal temperatures of 11 degrees with snow in the forecast in the midst of a brutal Detroit winter that has city shelters taking in 25 percent more homeless than usual. And one year ago, the Climategate scandal pulled the mask off the global warming science fraud.
The show’s Alice in Wonderland quality is an annual ritual. At this decade’s start for example, for example – while SUV sales roared – General Motors rolled out a 108 mpg concept called the Precept and Ford promised an 80 mpg family car by 2003 (financed by the taxpayer-funded $1 billion USCAR program). Neither car ever came to market, but boy did they wow the press pews.
The green propaganda is loudest this year from America’s two partially-nationalized automakers, GM and Chrysler, which were rescued by Washington in part because Obamacrats wanted Detroit to make the expensive electric cars they fancy.
GM will roll out its new sub-compact twins – the Chevy Sonic and Buick Verano – built in the taxpayer-rescued, UAW-staffed Orion Township plant. The cars will make nary a profit. Indeed, the tiny cars come to market after a year of big losses for subcompacts with even Honda’s vaunted Fit sales off 20 percent.
Fortunately for taxpayers, GM trucks from its Chevy and GMC lines flew off lots in 2010 (GMC sales rate was double that of GM’s sedans). And with a profit of $5,000 a copy and up, they helped the company repay millions in taxpayer loans.
Chrysler offers another stark contrast in reality vs. perception. Just down snow-covered Jefferson Avenue from its global-warming fighting show command post in Cobo Center, Chrysler’s Jefferson North plant is operating at full capacity churning out giant Jeep Cherokee SUVs (mpg: 18) which saw sales skyrocket in 2010.
So successful is the Cherokee that Chrysler CEO – and Fiat chief – Sergio Marchionne has ordered that the SUV be the platform for a new wave of trucks from Alfa Romeo and Maserati. Yet Chrysler will shy from telling this success story before the Green press, and will instead roll out a new version of its Chrysler 300 sedan Monday.
To be fair, automakers must offer a full range of vehicles in order to meet consumer tastes should gas prices return to $4 a gallon- as most automakers eventually expect. But the effort to hide SUVs – the market success story of 2010 – is still striking.
From Ford (an electric Focus) to Toyota (more members of its Prius hybrid family) to Hyundai (the little Veloster), major manufacturers will preen low-profit green. Manufacturers know that value of press reports that paint it with a green halo rather than an “immoral” triton and devil horns. And by producing cars that help meet Washington’s fanciful 35 mpg average fuel efficiency riles, they also avoid ugly headlines about government fines and public hearings.
Auto show marketing is cynical, but manufacturer are not stupid. When the show opens to the public on January 15, carmakers will roll out their full menu of SUVs and large sedans for the public. Indeed, visiting press week and public week are a study in contrasts as the public swarms the SUVs that the holy Greens reviled the week before.
Welcome to the Detroit Auto Show press week. It’s a parallel universe.
Why we love sports (and hate politics) ( The Michigan View 1.6.11)
Posted by hpayne on January 7, 2011
Rich Rodriguez was hired to produce a winning football program at one of America’s football powers, the University of Michigan. He failed. In three years, he compiled a mediocre 15W – 22L program. He went winless against U-M’s arch rivals, Ohio State and Michigan State. On Saturday, his team was humiliated on national television in the Gator Bowl, 52-14.
On Wednesday he was fired.
Results matter in football. It’s why we love sports. And it’s why we hate politics.
Contrast the fate of Rodriquez with that of another prominent state leader, Gov. Jennifer Granholm. With storm clouds gathering but unemployment at 6.7 percent after her re-election in 2006, Michigan’s first female governor (Rodriquez was Michigan’s first coach of Hispanic descent – but so what?) promised to address looming structural problems:. “In five years, you’ll be blown away,” she said. Four years later unemployment is12.8 percent, she has presided over two budget shutdowns, and she leaves the state with $1.5 billion budget hole.
Yet she is rewarded with coverage touting her record as a visionary pol whose only sin was having the bad luck to be in office at a time of difficult circumstances.
It’s enough to make you change the channel and look for a football game.
Sports reporters buried Rodriquez in a rising flood of vitriol, all but carrying him out the door. “Rich Rodriguez never truly fit with Michigan. His personality didn’t fit. His style of play didn’t fit,” harrumphed Adam Rittenburg at ESPN.com. “Rodriguez miscalculated badly, and so did Michigan. It’s a colossal failure and a brutally painful lesson for a once-hot coach and a once-unshakeable program: Be careful what you wish for,” groused The Detroit News’ Bob Wojnowski. “In ugly, out ugly.”
“Why wouldn’t Rich Rodriguez be fired? In three years, he didn’t win a single important game,” penned Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press.
Just the facts, ma’am. The guy didn’t get the job done.
Contrast this common sense sports coverage with a whole backfield full of writers, cheerleaders and excuse-makers willing to come to QB Granholm’s defense. “History has yet to write whether her unflagging efforts to diversify the economy in areas like advanced manufacturing, technology and alternative energy pay long-term dividends to the state,” writes Crain’s Amy Lane. “She was left a bad hand by John Engler, and, unfairly, was forced to be the face of job losses in the state when. . . many of the auto industry’s problems were the result of decades of gross corporate incompetence,” whined MLive’s Darrel Dawsey. “She must have been thinking, how things would be different if she was starting where Rick Snyder beings with the ‘wind at his back,'” apologized Tim Skubick in the Oakland Press.
Please. Granholm’s stimulus and green subsidy economic program was doomed from the start, a retro-Keynesian solution that has failed everywhere it’s been tried from Spain to the Obama White House.
A pet of the Big Labor establishment, she didn’t lift a finger to fix the state’s long-term structural problems — a direct contrast to reformist Governor Mitch Daniels in neighboring Indiana who also endured bearish, double-digit unemployment economy but balanced the state budget.
When Politico and The Huffington Post offered Granholm a national stage to trumpet her “achievements,” Michigan Capitol Confidential’s Tom Gantert called Politico to ask the Website to explain what qualified her for such a forum.
Now, that sounds like what a sports reporter would have done.