Justin's Political Corner
Moments ago, Gary Peters announced that he will run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Carl Levin in 2014.
h/t: eclectablog.com
Steve Cookson (R-Poplar Bluff) , the state House elementary and secondary education committee chairman, filed legislation Wednesday that would mandate school-age children of welfare recipients attend public school 90 percent of the time, unless the children are physically disabled, “in order to receive benefits.” The one-sentence bill does not specify if medical absences would be counted or if students from private, parochial or charter schools would face a similar mandate.
The legislation is similar to a 2011 law passed in Michigan and to a bill pending in Tennessee.
“This thing is so crazy that it would have devastating effects on the families already in a precarious situation,” state Rep. Kevin McManus (D-Kansas City) told The Huffington Post. “If you had a child suffering from mono or leukemia, you would take away food stamps and assistance and possibly have them lose their home. It is misguided.”
Cookson did not return a message left at his Jefferson City office. The bill has not been referred to a House committee.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) signed a similar welfare attendance law last year,saying it was needed to make sure children receive education and end generational poverty. Opponents said that truancy affects all socioeconomic groups, not just the poor.
Tennessee legislators are debating a bill that would tie welfare benefits to school attendance and performance. “We have such a problem with generational poverty here,” Tennessee state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville) told current.com in January. “I have always said the golden ticket out of poverty is education. And education, to me, is a three-part stool — schools, teachers and the family. We have already put a huge burden on our schools and our teachers. What we have not done is put a burden on the family to make sure they are stepping up to the plate.”
H/T: Huffington Post
Today in union-hating by Dana Loesch: She is defending right-wing loon and The Dana Show regular Steven Crowder’s false accusations that the union member was “assaulting” him, when in fact it was the other way around.
DanaLoeschRadio.com:
It’s insane to allege that Crowder — who wasn’t standing near the union member, who appeared to trip over his own feet rather than was “pushed,” and who had his back turned and turned with hands up in a non-threatening manner — pushed the union member. Where is Dunnings’ evidence? Why didn’t the union bring charges? Because it’s a bogus assertion.
Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings said he didn’t obtain the full video until he got it from a far left group which is an absolute, outright lie as the full, unedited video was posted by Crowder when he posted the edited-for-TV video.The full, unedited video was always available.
Dunnings is simply protecting the union members behind the riot which saw them destroy property, put women and children in harm’s way, and assault those who were videotaped simply asking questions. It’s an embarrassment to the office in which he serves.
Dunnings did his job properly, and this is typical of her to demonize unions.
The Lansing State Journal, on the other hand, called out Crowder’s phony baloney:
It turns out that I was 100% correct. Ingham County Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III is not filing charges in the incident because Crowder provided him with highly-edited video and the full, unedited version shows that his “attacker” was simply defending himself.
Nice try Crowder. You’re a fraud and now everybody knows it.
Loesch and Crowder both are manipulative liars.
Imagine if a democratically-elected mayor was suddenly neutered and replaced by an “emergency manager” with the power to steamroll City Council. Imagine if the manager had the authority to unilaterally modify or even eradicate collective bargaining agreements and used that authority to entirely wipe out public sector unions. For Detroit, and it’s staunch labor movement, that scenario is less far-fetched than it sounds. In fact, it’s already happening in the Michigan city of Pontiac.
Since Lou Schimmel became Pontiac’s emergency manager in 2011, he has privatized the Department of Public Works,outsourced police services to the Oakland County sheriff’s office, and turned over the city’s fire department to nearby Waterford Township, killing the public sector unions which represented the city’s firefighters and cops. He’s put every city property, including City Hall, up for sale andcut the city’s public employee workforce by about 90%. And he’s done it all without the consent of the city council.
Across Michigan, emergency managers installed by the state are using sweeping powers to privatize public services, lay off city employees, and weaken public sector unions with little standing in their way. Now the same thing is likely to happen in Motor City, one of the industrial centers of America.
Ostensibly a mechanism for rescuing insolvent Michigan cities and school districts from the brink of bankruptcy, the Emergency Management system has turned into a way for unelected officials to break up public sector unions, privatize public services, and drastically shrink the size of municipal governments. Currently, five Michigan cities are being administered by emergency managers—all of whom were appointed by the state’s Local Emergency Financial Assistance Loan Board (ELB).
When a city fails to meet certain financial benchmarks, the state can step in.
If not, then the ELB—which includes gubernatorial appointees—will likely appoint an emergency manager.
If Detroit receives an Emergency Manager, more than half of the state’s black population, living in primarily urban centers, will be governed by un-elected leaders. More than 5,000 unionized city employees in Detroit—all of whom have already been working without a collective bargaining agreement since last spring—will totally lose control of contract bargaining.
Schimmel, whose office did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, is the third EM to preside over Pontiac since 2009.
“He’s the roughest, toughest one,” said Democratic City Councilman Don Watkins. In fact, said Watkins, Schimmel has completely disregarded the City Council, leaving the city’s elected legislative body impotent and irrelevant. Council members no longer receive compensation for their part-time work as elected representatives, though the mayor is on the EM’s payroll as a consultant.
Managers in other cities have attempted similar maneuvers. In Muskegon Heights, the EM for the town’s public schools fired 158 teachers in Mid-2012 and turned over management of the school district to a private company called Mosaica Education. Reporters later discovered that many of the new Muskegon Heights educators were not legally certified to teach in Michigan. Meanwhile, in the historic union town of Flint, the EM unilaterally imposed contract concessionson public employee unions and outsourced waste collection.
Pontiac too was once a union town but that is no longer the case, said Watkins. The “whole goal” of those policies, Watkins believes, “is not to have city employees. They want to have every city service be handled by private companies.”
Emergency Managers haven’t always held such sweeping powers. Until 2011, they were called Emergency Financial Managers and their authority was defined by a state law called Public Act 72 [PDF]. Passed under Democratic Governor James Blanchard in 1990, it empowered the state government to appoint managers to run city budgets or school districts which would otherwise remain financially insolvent. After the 2008 financial crash, the Democratic administration of Governor Jennifer Granholm appointed several EFMs.
But even before the crash, some people were unsatisfied with what they saw as the limited authority of EFMs. Under Granholm’s administration, Schimmel was a manager in the town of Hamtramck and an adjunct scholar at the Mackinaw Center, a right-wing Michigan think tank. In 2005, he wrote an essay for Mackinac arguing that Public Act 72 didn’t give EFMs “all of the necessary tools to be successful.” The authority to tinker with public sector union contracts was particularly limited, he complained.
State Republicans who rose to power in 2010 agreed. With a Republican governor, Rick Snyder, and solid majorities in the House and Senate, the legislature passed Public Act 4 in 2011, transforming Emergency Financial Managers into Emergency Managers and expanding their authority. In particular, the newly dubbed EMs now had the power to unilaterally modify collective bargaining agreements with public sector unions.
The EMs appointed under Snyder haven’t been shy about exercising their new authority, said John Philo of the Sugar Law Center, which has challenged the law in court. “Emergency Managers in general have looked at the unions as their major targets for cutting costs, and that’s regardless of whether the unions have been willing to negotiate and give concessions,” he told MSNBC.
In an article describing Public Act 4 as “financial martial law,” Mother Jones’ Andrew Kroll suggested that Mackinac had “inspired” the bill. The president of the Center, which is connected to ALEC and played a key role in making Michigan a right-to-work state, called that description an exaggeration. But Mackinac has been more than effusive in its praise of the act. Michael Van Beek, the center’s director of education policy, has even compared the new emergency manager role to that of a “modern-day Cincinnatus“—a reference to the historical figure who temporarily became dictator of Ancient Rome in order to save it from military defeat.
For others on the right and in the business community, Public Act 4 has been a boon for fiscal solvency. In late December, Pontiac received a bond rating upgrade from Fitch Ratings, and the financial publication Crain’s Detroit Business has subsequently held up Schimmel’s tenure as a tentative success.
However, even emergency management proponents believe that there is still work to be done.
“There are cities that have found their own ways towards success,” said Ari Adler, press secretary for Republican State House Speaker Jase Bolger. “I don’t think we have anything that has shined as an example just yet, that has turned around completely.”
“The proof is going to be in how the [Pontiac] City Council acts” once Schimmel steps down, said James Hohman, a fiscal policy analyst at the Mackinac Center. It is unclear when Schimmel will decide to turn control of Pontiac back to its elected leaders.
On Election Day 2012, Michigan voters repealed Public Act 4. But the fight was far from over.
“You can vote to eliminate Emergency Managers, but you can’t vote to eliminate the emergency,” said Adler, Speaker Bolger’s press secretary. Republicans in the state legislature, arguing that Public Act 72 was still insufficient to deal with local budget crises, got to work crafting a replacement.
Days after Michigan officially made itself a right-to-work state, and just hours before the end of the 2011-2012 legislative session, the lame duck Republican majority pulled an all-nighter. The November elections had cost the state Republicans a chunk of their commanding majority in both houses, and so they were using their last minutes of uncontested dominance to pass as much of their agenda as they possibly could.
“We were here until about 4:30 in the morning, jamming through any number of divisive pieces of legislation under the cover of night,” Robert McCann, the communications director for the State Senate’s Democratic caucus, told MSNBC. Around two in the morning, Michigan Republicans successfully passed Public Act 36, which Democrats argue is essentially a clone of Public Act 4.
“It’s really the exact same law,” said McCann. “They changed the wording of it a little bit.”
The new law allows cities to choose between a consent agreement, an EM, bankruptcy, or mediation with creditors. The EM’s power to unilaterally alter collective bargaining agreements reemerged in the new law.
Because of the expansive powers over collective bargaining reinserted into the new Emergency Manager law, Detroit teachers are racing to put together a new contract before the law goes into effect on March 27. That same day Michigan will officially become a right-to-work state, and by then, Detroit’s new Emergency Manager will have likely taken office.
Johnson, who heads the teachers federation, said both pieces of legislation were part of a “relentless and unprecedented assault upon labor unions in general and teachers unions in particular.”
Speaking from experience in Pontiac, officials there said there was little anyone could do to push back once their cities were under the control of an emergency manager. “We’re just hoping he’ll leave,” said Watkins, the city council member, referring to Pontiac’s EM.
Michigan Democrats, still in the minority in the legislature, said they would continue to oppose the law but offered no specific plans to try to repeal it or challenge it in court, said McCann, the spokesman for Democrats in the state Senate. “We’re going to keep talking about how this law flew right in the face of what voters just told us last year, and we’re going to keep carrying that message forward,” he said.
Michigan’s stance on city management take-overs seems more aggressive than in other states but that could change. “Most states have a law that says the state can intervene in local governments if there’s a crisis of sorts, but I don’t think they’re nearly as strong as in Michigan,” said Scorsone.
h/t: msnbc.com
Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted Monday of racketeering conspiracy after prosecutors said he presided over a breathtaking profit machine by rigging contracts and demanding bribes.
The racketeering count carries up to 20 years in prison.
Kilpatrick was convicted of at least six other criminal counts and acquitted of one, and jurors said they were unable to reach a verdict on two. Kilpatrick was charged with 30 federal crimes. The verdict was still being delivered in federal court in Detroit.
Jurors began deliberating Feb. 18.
Kilpatrick, 42, was charged with bribery, extortion and tax evasion, among other crimes. His father, Bernard, and Bobby Ferguson, a friend of Kilpatrick’s and a city contractor, are also defendants.
Prosecutors said that Kilpatrick, a Democrat, steered $83 million in city contracts to Ferguson in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks. They also told jurors that the ex-mayor raided his own nonprofit for personal expenses.
Kilpatrick’s lawyer told jurors that Kilpatrick never extorted anyone and that he only helped Ferguson win city business because he knew Ferguson would hire people who live in Detroit.
Kilpatrick was considered a rising Democratic star when he was elected in 2001, but his tenure was scarred by allegations of cronyism, nepotism and out-of-control spending.
He pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in 2008 for lying in a civil trial during which he denied having an affair with his former chief of staff and plotting with her to fire the deputy police chief. He resigned and spent three months in jail.
h/t: NBCnews.com
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan says he will not seek re-election in 2014. He says he wants to do his job as Senate Armed Services chairman and as an advocate for his home state “without the distraction of campaigning for re-election.”
Levin was first elected to the Senate in 1978 and is the longest-serving senator in Michigan’s history. The 78-year-old lawmaker says in a statement the decision was “extremely difficult.” He says he loves representing the people of Michigan and fighting for what he believes is important for them.
h/t: Yahoo! News
Citing runaway deficits and long-term debts Detroit could never repay on its own, Gov. Rick Snyder today pulled the trigger and announced he will appoint an emergency financial manager
for the state’s largest city. Snyder said he has a top candidate in mind, and that person would be in charge for 18 months.
The decision means Motown will soon have someone new in charge of restructuring Detroit’s dire financial mess. That restructuring likely will include drastic cuts in public services and a top-down rethinking of the type of government a shrunken city with a dwindling tax base can afford.
In many ways, those questions have been nipping at Detroit for decades, but the issues came to a head over the last 18 months as increasingly dour economic forecasts found a city unable to address fundamental questions about its debt.
“I look at today as a sad day, a day I wish had never happened in the history of Detroit, but also a day of optimism and promise,” Snyder said.
He reiterated that Detroit, once among the most prosperous cities in the nation, “went from the top to the bottom over the last 50 years,” losing more than half its population.
Snyder told an invited audience for a broadcast discussion on his decision. The forum was moderated by Stephen Henderson and Nolan Finley, editorial page editors of the Free Press and the Detroit News, at Wayne State University.
Snyder said he will not name who the emergency manager will be right away.
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing said he “did not favor” an emergency manager.
“The Governor has made his decision, and it was his decision alone to make,” Bing said in a statement. “While I respect it, I have said all along that I do not favor an Emergency Manager for the City of Detroit. I will look at the impact of the Governor’s decision as well as other options, to determine my next course of action.
“I don’t support the appointment of an EFM as it eliminates democratically elected leadership in our city,” said Brown, a former deputy police chief. “However, the question is does Mayor Dave Bing and the City Council as-a-body going forward have the will to abandon the privatization ordinance, alter the City Charter to address roadblocks, and support state legislation to change the pension board? In my view, as-a-body City Council is not willing to make these changes. The only alternative is for the governor to appoint an EFM who has the will to implement the necessary reforms.”
H/T: Detroit Free Press
(via Think Progress: Fox News: Al Jazeera America Is A Plot To Activate Muslim Sleeper Cells In Detroit)
In a typical “fair and balanced” panel, Fox News warned on Wednesday that Al Jazeera is set to “infiltrate” the United States amid dire warnings about “sleeper cells” in the Muslim suburbs of Detroit.
Host Megan Kelly began a segment about Al Jazeera’s expansion into the American television market by raising questions about the network’s “real anti-American bias.” Contributor Lisa Daftari agreed, veering into blatant Islamophobic fear-mongering in the process:
DAFTARI: The point is they want to differentiate themselves from their sister network, but at the same time, it’s the same thing. They’re having the same type of coverage. They’re apparently expanding to eight cities, including Detroit, Michigan. Detroit, Michigan is a large ex-pat community of Muslim-Americans and sleeper cells have been detected. You can Google this, you can find out all this information. So if you’re trying to set yourself apart the Qatari petro-dollars are backing this, you’re still developing in this area where the sleeper cells have been detected. They’re going to have do do much more to prove to me that they’re different from their sister network.
Daftari was referring to the suburbs of Detroit — like Dearborn, MI and others — which have high populations of refugees and immigrants from Muslim-majority nations like Lebanon. Dearborn has been the target of hate speech and protests against Muslims for years now. As for the specific “sleeper cells” she was referring to, in 2008 a former Dearborn resident was convicted of “providing material support” to Hezbollah — hardly the makings of a widespread support for terrorism.
Late last week, democracy scored two important victories over a Republican plan to rig future presidential elections by changing the way electoral votes are counted in several key blue states. Two Virginia Republican state senators spoke out against the plan, effectively killing it. And Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford (R) attacked the election-rigging scheme as trying to “change the rules of the game.”
In Michigan, however, which is the bluest of the six blue states where the election-rigging plan has been discussed, state House Speaker Jase Bolger (R) appears quite open to rigging his state’s electoral college votes to benefit Republicans.
In other words, Republican voters in Michigan are upset that Democrats win elections simply because there are more of them. And Bolger wants to fix that by giving the few Republicans more votes than the majority.
(via How Republicans Plan To Rig The Next Presidential Election, In Six Pictures | ThinkProgress)
Yesterday, Virginia Republicans took the first step to move a GOP plan to rig the Electoral College forward in that state. Similar plans are under consideration in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
The Republican election rigging plan targets blue states that President Obama won in 2008 and 2012, and changes the way they allocate electoral votes to give many of these votes away for free to the Republican candidate for president. Under the Republican Plan, most electoral votes will be allocated to the winner of individual Congressional districts, rather than to the winner of the state as a whole. Because the Republican Plan would be implemented in states that are heavily gerrymandered to favor Republicans, the resulting maps would all but guarantee that the Republican would win a majority of each state’s electoral votes, even if the Democratic candidate wins the state as a whole.
Under the Republican plan, GOP lawmakers in several states that supported the Democratic candidate for president in recent elections would stop awarding all of their electoral votes to the winner of the state as a whole, and instead award most of them one-by-one to the winners of individual congressional districts. In part because of widespread Republican gerrymandering, if Republicans had implemented this election rigging plan in six key states where they currently control the state government — Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin — Mitt Romney would have won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by nearly four points.
Efforts are already underway in several of these six key states to enact this election rigging plan and all but ensure that the next President of the United States is a Republican — regardless of how the American people cast their votes in 2016. Seven Pennsylvania state house members introduced a bill implementing the GOP election rigging plan this week, and the plan already enjoys the support of Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R). A bill backed by Virginia State Senator Charles “Bill” Carrico Sr. (R) would implement the election rigging plan in Virginia. And Wisconsin Republican state Rep. Dan LeMahieu is behind an election rigging bill in his state. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) expressed support for the Republican election rigging plan, but he later backed off that support following significant criticism.
Michigan is a blue state. It supported the Democratic candidate for president in every single election for the last two decades. President Obama won the state by nearly 10 points last November. And yet, if the Republican election-rigging plan had been in effect last year, Romney would have likely won a majority of the state’s electoral votes.
Kablammo! There go GOP Gov. Rick Snyder’s approval ratings and his standing for re-election. PPP just lays him out:
Just last month when we took a first look at the 2014 landscape we talked about how much Rick Snyder had improved his popularity during his second year in office and how he led a generic Democrat for reelection by 6 points, even as Barack Obama won the state comfortably.Last week he threw all that out the window.
We now find Snyder as one of the most unpopular Governors in the country. Only 38% of voters approve of him to 56% who disapprove. There are only 2 other sitting Governors we’ve polled on who have a worse net approval rating than Snyder’s -18. He’s dropped a net 28 points from our last poll on him, the weekend before the election, when he was at a +10 spread (47/37).
Three words are to blame here: right to work. Well, of course, Snyder himself is to blame: After telling the state of Michigan that he would not push through anti-union and anti-worker “right to work” legislation (that Orwellian epithet really means “right to work for less”), he went ahead and did exactly that during a shameful lame-duck session of the legislature. (Michigan Republicans lost seats this November, so they wanted to force a vote while they still had greater numbers.) Overall, voters oppose RTW 51-41, and a similar 49-40 margin says they’d vote to overturn the law if given the chance at the ballot box.
And now for the really fun stuff. If Snyder does indeed run for a second term—something he previously said he might not do—well, he’d get pummeled, if his fortunes don’t somehow turn around. Here’s how he does against a passel of possible contenders:
38-49 vs. 2010 nominee Virg Bernero
39-47 vs. Rep. Gary Peters
38-46 vs. state Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer
39-44 vs. ex-Rep. Mark SchauerNote that ceiling of 38 to 39 percent for Snyder: All of his potential opponents are unknown to half the state, even Bernero. That means, at least right now, voters are really thinking “anyone but Snyder.” Hell, as Tom Jensen points out, Bernero lost by 18 points in 2010, so these new numbers constitute a remarkable 29-point reversal of fortune.
Don’t be thinking recall, though: Voters still oppose the notion 48-44, and as we saw in Wisconsin, those numbers tend to get worse over time, not better.
The finance chairman of the Republican National Committee and former Michigan Republican Party chairman Ron Weiser was caught on tape talking serious trash about Detroit back in August. In light of the fact that Michigan Republicans seem hellbent on taking control of the city and its resources and revenues, this major party figure’s comments, hideous as they are, are very illuminating.
In light of this video, it’s much clearer why they use the approach that they do: they despise Detroit and its citizens. They don’t treat them with respect because, simply put, they do not respect them. It’s never been clearer.
The men and women of the Republican party have a plan for Michigan and it does not include unions. It does not include public schools. It does not include poor and failing urban areas full of African Americans. It does not include women who have the right to make choices for themselves or to hold positions of power. Instead, they will crush the unions, outsource our schools to profit-making businesses, gentrify our urban areas to drive out every last poor person, especially African Americans, and they will make sure that women are forced to carry their pregnancies to full term & will be given just as much political power as the Republican men in charge say they can have.
What will YOU do to take the reins of power away from these men? You should be thinking about that every single day between now and Tuesday, November 4, 2014. And you should be acting on it.
h/t: Eclectablog
Although I’ve been reporting my suspicions (and other people’s) about the truthfulness and integrity of Fox News contributor Steven Crowder’s report of being assaulted by pro-union “thugs” at a Lansing, Michigan union protest of “right-to-work” legislation, Crowder’s dishonesty is no longer in doubt. His video has been shown to be selectively edited and he has admitted pushing the man who later hit him (after pretending otherwise).
On the night that Crowder first appeared for his lapdog interview with Sean Hannity, I wrote that there was something a little too James O’Keefe about Crowder that made me think he was not being honest about the “vicious attack” on him, caught and presented in an edited video, and which just happened to coincide with his virulently, Breitbart-esque anti-union, anti-left agenda. I became even more suspicious when, during the interview, Crowder admitted he had gone to the pro-union protest to make trouble. Still, he told Hannity his beating was “completely physically unprovoked.”
The next night, in another Hannity segment, a guest accused Crowder of first pushing the man who later punched him - which Crowder, despite a series of dancing, diversionary responses, did not deny. However, Crowder did accuse that guest of being a liar after he made the allegation.
In a moment of delicious irony, it turns out the video segment that incriminated Crowder was released - almost certainly inadvertently - by the Hannity show.
ut now, Crowder has admitted to pushing the man - exactly what he pretended to deny on Hannity. Tommy Christopher writes:
However, in an interview with Canada’s Sun News, Crowder says he actually did push the protesters whom he says were “ransacking the tent.”
“We didn’t get violent with them,” Crowder said, “but we did try to push them off the tent. That is true. We tried to push them off the tent,” and also claimed “I’ve been very honest about this.” (video below)
“Very honest?” Crowder could hardly have been less forthcoming or more deceptive about what happened. On the night of his second segment with Hannity, after the other guest had accused Crowder of pushing the union protester, Hannity said, “Wait a minute. Steven, you didn’t push anybody.” Crowder did not correct the record other than to say that Hannity had the “unedited tape.” You might say that Crowder wanted you to think he had not pushed anybody before he admitted that he had.
Even if you believe that President Obama is somehow at fault for not speaking out against whatever happened, that in no way excuses Fox from condemning the dissembling, deception and deliberate sleights of hand that came from one of their own contributors. It’s one thing to run with and promote a false story, as the network did with the sham ACORN videos, e.g. It’s quite another to run with and promote a false story from one of their own. And then remain silent about it. Here’s my search of “Crowder” of Fox News videos. Here’s a search of “Steven Crowder” on FoxNews.com. This is the kind of thing Fox News would run with 24/7 if it was another news outfit making such a mistake.
Whatever happened to Crowder should be sorted out through the criminal justice system - something he was oddly reluctant to do initially. But now there are reports that he has filed a complaint with Michigan police. Fine. If he was assaulted, I’m all for an arrest, trial and sentencing of the perpetrator. But Fox is still on the hook for its own misleading (at best) reporting no matter what.
Fox deliberately inserted itself into this story and made it a big deal. Its viewers deserve a big “mea culpa” from them now - and a full airing of the unedited video and all the facts that are known.
I knew he was lying.
h/t: Newshounds.us
Not content to push through an anti-union “right-to-work” law, new restrictive abortion policies, and an anti-Sharia law, Michigan Republicans are now pursuing a revamp of a law voters rejected at the polls barely more than a month ago.
Michigan’s House Republicans today passed a new version of the “emergency manager” law that voters repealed via ballot referendum in November. The initial version gave broader powers to state-appointed emergency managers who oversee townships that are struggling financially.
Among those powers was the ability to void union contracts and labor agreements. The new version, introduced by state Rep. Al Pscholka (R), makes small changes but still includes the provision granting the manager authority over labor contracts, as the Detroit Free Press reports:
The bill says an emergency manager will have the power to undertake “the modification, rejection, termination and renegotiation of contracts.”
The ability for an emergency manager to break or terminate collective bargaining agreements under certain circumstances was one of the most controversial aspects of PA 4.
But Pscholka said a key difference is that the new bill “gives a choice to local officials … on how to keep their heads above water.”
The new law does make changes that give localities more input with their emergency managers, and it includes a provision that gives local officials the option of choosing mediation or bankruptcy over the appointment of a manager once a financial emergency is declared. It also allows localities to remove the emergency manager a year later by a two-thirds vote from the local government.
Just as they did with the “right-to-work” law, Republicans attached an appropriations measure to the bill to make it tougher to overturn with a ballot referendum.
