Gov. Snyder Thinks He Was Elected Dictator of Michigan!

Go here to see the video, for some damn reason, my version of WordPress doesn’t like MSNBC’s embedded code. (curses under his breath)

This morning on Morning Joke Joe, Rev. Sharpton asked an excellent question, which prompted Governor Snyder to reveal how he feels about our right to elect our local leaders.

Rev. Al: …how do you deal with the fact that the “customers” as Kevin called them, feel disenfranchised. I mean, you made a unilateral decision. Their elected officials have really been, their power has been taken away and it undermines peoples right to vote because the only one who voted for Kevin was you. And this is something that is very disturbing that you have governors undermine the will of voters. There was s referendum last year that was opposed to this kind of action, you did it anyway.

Gov. Snyder: Reverend, if you look at it, the old law went away but we put in a new one that really was responsive to the issues that came up during that process. If you look at it, I’m also the elected official. I was elected by the people of Michigan, so there is an elected official responsible for this process and I think that is critically important.

Rev. Al: But what about the local elected officials, what about if I’m in Detroit, Rev. Charles Williams and others are raising this. In all due respect, and I voted for a city council and a mayor to represent me during this financial crisis. Now you bring in someone unelected, like in Pontiac, we had someone on the show who talked about an emergency manager came and sold the Silverdome for a half a million dollars that had been valued at several million dollars, over 200…I mean, Kevin has no one to answer to in the local constituency. That’s undemocratic. (emphasis mine)

Gov. Snyder: Blah, blah, blah….(my words)

If you want to know the details of what is happening in Michigan, go over to Eclectablog.com and spend some time in the archives, because Chris Savage has been all over this for many years and has the facts to back him up.

*Primal Scream*

Now that I got that out of the way, Governor Snyder’s response to Reverend Al’s first question is an admission that he thinks he was elected dictator of Michigan. How else can it be interpreted? He said, “I’m also the elected official”, which translates as, I have authority over local officials and I have the power to invalidate their elections. I am a supreme elected official, I take precedent over those peons.

But let’s back up a little. He said prior to that, in regards to the referendum that we in Michigan overturned on November 6th, 2012, that the law “went away”, as if it just got lost on its way to Lansing. The people of Michigan made their voices heard, but Snyder ignored us and the Republican’s abused their control of the Michigan legislature and passed a new one. They slipped some money into this one, which they claim under Michigan’s laws makes it immune from a referendum.

It’s not just the goal of the law that’s offensive. House Republicans, stinging from a voter referendum last month that overturned the previous emergency financial manager act, have arrogantly inserted an almost $6 million appropriation into the new emergency financial manager law. By adding an appropriation, Republicans hope to make the law immune to another voter referendum.

It’s just one more example of the dirty tricks that Koch-financed Republicans across the country are pulling to privatize states and sell them off to their corporate buddies like the Koch brothers.

This has to change NOW!

Cross-posted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles

I Feel Great, I’ve Stopped Watching Morning Joe – Please Join Me!

I made the decision this morning to NEVER watch Morning Joe again. I’ve been tuning them out a lot over the last few months, see many previous posts about why they are so bad. I’m now watching American Morning on CNN and I kind of like it. They actually talk about news stories, they have real Democrats on not just Jonathon Capehart and Harold Ford Jr. who smooch Joe’s ass all morning. Or Mike Barnicle who may have a few progressive leanings, but is clearly not a Democrat at all.

I feel fucking great not having watched the propaganda this morning, it’s like a breath of fresh air. I realized that Morning Joe was ruining my attitude for the entire day, it kind of set me off on the wrong track. Just like when I quit smoking 10 years ago, I just made the decision and did it. I will not be turning them on ever again and it feels great. I highly recommend it to you all and I have to give some credit to Roberta in MN for helping me to see the light. Thanks Roberta, I feel like a million bucks. :)

Morning Joe – Alternate Realities On Your TV!

What in the hell are those idiots on Morning Joe smoking so early in the morning? How can they sit around and blab about how unpopular President Obama is when in fact he is the most popular politician on the scene right now? His approval ratings have climbed to 54% in some polls, that’s about exactly what he got in votes in 2008. How can these boneheads pretend that he is unpopular when in fact he is very popular. I know they want to equate the whole pendulum swing back towards the Republicans as Obama’s fault, when in reality it is the natural course of midterm elections, combined with a bad economy. People are taking out there anger out on incumbents and there happens to be more D incumbents than R’s. Remember how in the last two elections that the Dems sweeped out a bunch of Republicans even in strongly Republican areas. The talking heads on Television, not just the idiots on Morning Joe, have their heads so far up their asses that I imagine it’s pretty dark in their worlds right about now. It probably stinks pretty bad too, thus the nasty looks on their faces.

In a poll conducted in 2009 on the media, 70% of the respondents said the media was out of touch with average Americans. Morning Joe proves that every single morning.  It’s one massive political circle jerk. It should be fun watching the media twist and turn their narrative to fit the results of the elections tonight. I’ll bet that the actual results will be 5 – 7% higher for Dems than the final tracking polls in most elections. The cell phone effect. Whatever happens, in two more years there will be another election with a very popular president running who knows how to run a race. I’m sure glad President Obama did more in his first two years than most presidents do in 4 or 8 years. It must be why his approval rating is exactly where he started, in the low 50’s. Reality….what a concept.

Scarborough Gets Challenged By Bernstein – Watch His Head Explode!

I’m watching Morning Joke on MSNBC and loving it for once. Carl Bernstein is bringing a little reality to the show and it’s making Joe Scarborough go nuts. You can see the anger bubbling over because his carefully crafted narrative about the President is coming unraveled. He even made the snarky comment to Carl that went something like “we’ll be back and Carl will tell us why Obama is perfect” or something to that effect. When in reality, Carl was acknowledging the presidents flaws but didn’t allow Joe to propagate his narrative, it drives him nuts. I doubt that Carl will be back real soon after today. The rest of the show should be fun because clearly Carl won’t let Joe paint him into the corner that Joe likes to do to his other supposedly liberal guests like Jonathon Capehart and Harold Ford Jr. who never seem to disagree with Joe, probably for fear of never being asked back.

Go Carl Bernstein, you rock dude. Updates as they happen this morning…if anything good happens.

Update:

Why does Scarborough think that Jon Stewart has “turned” on the president, he obviously doesn’t watch the Daily Show very often. Jon certainly makes fun of the president and has been critical of some things, but for the most part, Jon Stewart is pretty darn supportive of him. Some people see things as so polarized, they don’t understand when people might actually not agree with everything someone does, but still support them. I get that all the time in my comments, everything is not black and white, no matter how hard they try to make it that way. Simple minds like to simplify things, it’s easier for their small brains to digest it that way.

Update 2:

Wow, a poll result on Morning Joke that didn’t fit the narrative, but of course they quickly went away from it….ONLY 8% in a New York Times poll blame the Obama administration for the bad economy. 8%…..is that how the media has been portraying it for the last 2 fucking years? That number speaks volumes about the false narrative that has been being pushed constantly in the media. And yet, ONLY 8% blame the Obama Administration. NEW Narrative, the American people blame Bush for the shitpile we are in, deal with it media.

Another Morning Fiasco With Joe!

Guest Blogger Staci

I’m watching Morning Joe, and screaming at my television.  The “conversations” being promoted today are especially aggravating for me as really simple arguments can be put forth to debunk them, yet Joe and his crew are laying out bullshit as if it’s paving the road to economic survival of this country.

Stimulus didn’t work

This narrative drives me nuts.  First of all, there is no way possible to prove to people that if there had been no stimulus, this economy would have surely tanked for the next generation – if this is their mindset.  I think most people have forgotten the effect on both the psyche and the markets, when the government allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse.  The following day, the stock market fell over 504 points, a 4.42% loss of assets IN ONE DAY.  Two weeks later, when Congress voted down Hank Paulson’s three-page joke of a stimulus plan the market ended the day with a 733 point drop, an additional 7.87% loss of wealth.  We’re talking about the retirement plans of a lot of people taking a huge negative hit. I worked for a financial planning company at the time.  I did the reviews on the effects of the stocks on these retirement plans.  I saw so many company plans lose in the tens of millions of dollars between that time and when Obama signed the stimulus.  For all the people crying today, take a look at your 401(k) statements from the end of 2008 and right now and keep a straight face while telling me that the stimulus didn’t work.

Secondly, I hear the laughter at the jobs saved statistic, but nobody said it better than President Obama when he was on The View and Elizabeth Hasselbeck mocked this viewpoint.  Obama said, and I paraphrase here, it would matter if it were your job that was saved.  I’ll add this, too.  It would also change your opinion if your burning house were saved because the firehouse in your neighborhood stayed open due to stimulus dollars, or the school in your neighborhood didn’t have to increase class size for your kid because so many teachers had to be laid off.   This conversation is so stupid on its face, that it amazes me how many people will argue until they are blue – that the stimulus didn’t work.

Government Spending  vs. Household spending

This comparison is not just apples to oranges, but more like comparing the budget of a single person to the needs of the Duggars, that family with the 19 kids.  As a single person, you can make a decision to only eat macaroni and cheese because that’s what you can afford, and it could be considered financially responsible for you to live within your means.  If you’re the Duggars and you’ve got kids to feed, you better add some fruits, vegetables and milk to your grocery list of bare needs essentials.  A single person can decide to forego insurance because it’s too cost prohibitive.  The Duggars had better have some form of insurance around with that many kids.  Now, you don’t only have basic I-don’t-feel-good stuff to be concerned with.  Somebody is going to break something, or have an illness serious enough to require hospitalization or need immunizations.  Comparing those two budgets is as goofy as expecting the government to mirror the financial decisions of a household.  Medicare and Medicaid insure millions of people regardless of cost.  The food stamp program is the only means for getting groceries for families across the country and the cost for this program has increased tremendously just in the last two years.  There was also that little cost issue associated with fighting two wars.  So, to the people who want the government to cut spending, these are their three biggest costs.  Where do you want the cuts to begin?

Rich got richer in last 18 months

You betcha!  I know a guy that bought 20,000 shares of Bank of America stock when it was down to a buck.  B of A today is trading at $13.55.  Do the math.  Who better than Wall Street brokers knew when to buy and when to sit on their hands and preserve their wealth?  Any stockbroker who didn’t “get rich” in the last two years is probably not the guy I would want to watch my money.  I don’t think they are villains because they’re in possession of knowledge and know-how that I didn’t learn.  Hell, ain’t that what America is supposed to be about?

To sum it all up, shows like Morning Joe stoke the fears and emotions of the masses with these stupid arguments.  They all know better, and I guess that’s what makes me so angry.

Declare Martial Law On The Media!

If you were watching Morning Joke this morning you were witness to Pat Buchanon and Donny Deutsch getting all worked up about the “pastor” in Florida who is getting all sorts of media attention about his Koran burning stunt. They want President Obama to send federal marshals down there to stop this guy from having his little bonfire. I, on the other hand, think President Obama ought to send marshals to the studios of the 3 major cable networks and stop the asswipes from giving idiots a platform to spout there bullshit. That includes Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and all the rest of the village idiots who have risen to prominence with the help of the brain dead cable media. I am not really serious about sending marshals anywhere, but if anyone is to blame for this fucking mess, it falls squarely on the media who created this guy. The media’s MO is to pump up a story to national prominence by beating it like a dead and buried horse, which then causes the leaders in Washington to address it (think press conferences where they ask the same fucking question over and over about stupid shit), so those leaders respond reluctantly and then the media turns it on the politician and accuses them of raising it to national prominence, thus ducking their own blame for starting the whole fucking thing. How many examples of this have we had in the last year? Too damn many. And the boneheads on Morning Joke are the worst at it. At least this morning Jon Meacham and Dan Senor (of all people) tried to inject some sanity into the room, but Deutsch and Buchanon were given way too much time to spew their populist, nationalist outrage.

A False Equivalency Kind Of Morning Joe!

So far today, Joe (dead intern) Scarborough has trotted out two false equivalencies and in my book, he is the king of them. The first was his attempt to say that there is “hate speech” from both the left and the right when talking about the Mosque issue and the taxi driver being stabbed. He repeated it several times about hate speech from the left and the right. I’d like to see some examples of it from the left. I’m sure there are a few out there because there are crazies of all political persuasion, but really the Republican Party has adopted it as a tactic and is running with it. See Bob Cesca’s awesome column which is unfortunately on the Fuckington Post. Maybe Joe S. was referring to people who mention his dead intern as hate speech, oh that would be me. :)

The second false equivalency he brought up, that no one else seemed to latch on to including Ron Brownstein, is the idea that when President Obama was yelled a question on a rope line about the Iraq war he said something like “We’re getting shrimp, guys, come on”. Joe attempted to compare the George Bush comment on the golf course when he answered a serious question “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you, now watch this drive”. These are two very different instances which I won’t spend too much time spelling out. President Obama was on a rope line, smiling and shaking hands and on his way to get lunch. He didn’t answer a serious question and then get flippant like ole W did. He dodged the question completely which is exactly what he should have done in that situation. Bush’s response is a perfect example of how clueless he was by going from a serious statement to a flippant one in a split second. No equivalency at all, but that doesn’t stop Joe S. from trying to tie the two together. The man is a pro at it.

Mika “Joe McCarthy” Brzezinski Wants Names!

Kenneth Feinberg was on Morning Joe this morning and Mika was her usual moralistic self and kept hounding Kenneth Feinberg to “name names”. She had a certain blood lust in her eyes and voice, she really wants to vilify every one of those damn employees who received those bonuses. Thankfully Mike Barnicle finally said what I was thinking, (paraphrasing) do you really want to print these people’s names and on a Monday morning come in here and talk about how someone’s house was burned down. Think about it for a minute, if you worked for a big financial company and were given a bonus, would you give it back? Is the problem the person receiving the bonus or the ones at the top giving them out? Last time I checked, we lived in a capitalist country. Let’s have the argument on whether it works or not, but until then we better get used to seeing huge salaries and bonuses.

Random Thoughts On Many Things

The Tea Party

Finally the Tea Party seems to have found something that goes over the line as far as what they allow their “members” to say and do. They kicked out Mark Williams, the head of the Tea Party Express, below is just a taste the fantasy letter he wrote…

It began “Dear Mr. Lincoln,

“We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!”

Oil Spill

The media obsession with the oil spill and the immediate need to blame someone shows the immaturity of the press. Every twist and turn has caused them to hyperventilate on TV. They act like the Deep Water Horizon was the first oil well drilled in the gulf and ignore the over 30,000 other rigs out in the gulf. I wish as a country, we had done something about our dependence on foreign oil back in the 1970’s when OPEC was jerking us around.

Refudiate This!

Sarah, Sarah, Sarah…..there is this thing called “spell check” and this other thing called “dictionary.com”. You have to give her credit for sticking to her guns, right? She’s like George W. Bush in many ways, why should I be surprised that some Republicans like her? When I went to post this, I had to ignore the spell checker on “refudiate”. :)

Whoopie Goldberg, Come On!

What in the hell is wrong with Whoopie? Defending Mel Gibson after the latest racist, misogynistic rant? I googled Whoopie and the word “defends” and realized, she is a habitual defender of assholes. WTF Whoopie. Here is the list with links….

Mel Gibson

Roman Polanski

Michael Vick

Christian Bale (Here is his rant)

Jesse James (Sandra Bullock’s cheating husband)

“Single Ladies Dance” (You know, the little girls dancing like Beyonce)

Polls

As regular readers know, I’m not a fan of polls and how they are being used by the media to try to sway legislators into voting with the popular trends in the country. Morning Joe on MSNBC is barely watchable anymore. And it isn’t just because Obama has been down in the polls, it isn’t just about politics these days. Remember this where the baseball pitcher was robbed of a perfect game, someone did a poll to see what the American people thought of a bad call in a freakin baseball game. If that isn’t taking the polling phenomenon to new levels of stupid, I don’t know what is.