John Yob, progenitor of the allegedly grassroots effort Value for Michigan, says he won’t reveal the (likely high-rolling) donors to the effort, which aims to drum up support for Gov. Rick Snyder’s budget. “We will file our campaign finance reports the same time other political committees do, as legally required by the SoS office. We…
Governor Rick Snyder’s “winners and losers” budget proposes raising taxes on low-income workers and senior citizens to give an 86 percent tax break to corporations and other businesses. Governor Snyder calls that Value for Michigan and this week TV ads using kids as political props to attack teachers were launched defending his budget. We don’t…
In his tightly scripted command performance yesterday that purposely avoided questioning from the media, Governor Rick Snyder did more than unveil a budget. Unintentionally, he began unraveling myths he constructed with nearly $11 million in campaign advertising last year. Ironically—given that Snyder created himself on TV—it was an actor today that began pulling the threads…
Last week, when the Snyder administration appealed a judge’s decision to overturn the DRNE’s decision to deny an air permit to Holland Board of Public Works, they upheld former Governor Granholm’s 2009 directive to require a thorough analysis of the need for and alternatives to new sources of power before they are built. I have to say, I was quite…
Image via Wikipedia MIRS reports that almost-former Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop will not run for chair of the Michigan Republican Party. Recall that last week the chattering class in the Capitol made sure reporters knew that Bishop was up for a job in the administration of Governor-elect Rick Snyder. Bishop maintains that he hasn’t…
Image via Wikipedia Quite a bit of ink has been spilled on Governor-elect Rick Snyder’s picks to fill his cabinet (and his plan to rearrange said cabinet to resemble a boardroom.) When he’s not reuniting former Gov. John Engler‘s band of brothers, as with his pick to head the “Quality of Life” supergroup — the…
Sunday’s televised debate threw a rare spotlight on Rick Snyder, the kind he didn’t entirely control. Mostly what we heard from him was a blank pistol firing into an echo chamber–lots of empty noise repeated as meaningless sound bites like “values-based budgeting.” The format was narrow and didn’t allow for much real debate, and among…
Image by Urban~Spaceman via Flickr The inmates are taking over the asylum. In a big and incredibly under-reported story that some of us who count tea bags have been predicting for weeks now, the far right tea party caucus of the Michigan Republican Party is taking over. Thousands of cranky “tea party” types showed up…