Three Things: Dial M for Michigan

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

It was a big week for the Mitten State which I call home — big ups and equally big downs, like a roller coaster.

Must admit the low points which made the high points possible made me nauseous and sick with dread.

~ 3 ~

High point: Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow had a breakout week with a kick-ass-and-take-names speech on the senate floor this past Tuesday.

The wretched low point: state senator Lana Theis’ hateful fundraising email which I won’t share; the 22nd state senate district which includes Livingston County and smaller portions of Genesee, Shiawasee, and Ingham counties have a lot to answer for having elected this hater.

McMorrow how every Democrat should do it: cede not one inch to the right-wing and its unrestrained hate when Democrats are doing everything which makes our cities, states, nation livable. Push back hard against the corrupting, toxic hate.

GOP voters in Michigan need to snap the hell out of their hate spiral and take a good look around them — as the motto says, Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice. These peninsulas aren’t just theirs alone and they’re pleasant because we occupy it together, cooperatively and collaboratively. Hate did not make this state great.

~ 2 ~

Another high point: Michigan state senator Erika Geiss also blew the doors out of the state senate chambers with her heartbreaking appeal on Wednesday:

The sickening low point: yet another Black person’s life was lost to excessive police force on April 4, when a routine traffic stop ended with a Grand Rapids officer shooting a 26-year-old driver at point blank range in the head. It is absolutely unacceptable that a traffic stop results in a driver’s death, even when the driver attempts to grab an officer’s taser. If the officer could manage to pull his gun and shoot he had enough control of the situation to restrain the driver.

This abuse by police cannot continue. Citizens deserve far better public safety. How many times do we have to demand this before change happens?

Senator Geiss and every BIPOC resident in this state and nation should not have to fear for their family members’ safety in public or private from the very people they employ to keep the public safe.

~ 1 ~

Sickened by Senator Lana Theis’ hateful rhetoric against people who don’t fit her personal model, sickened further by the shooting death of an unarmed driver, the Michigan GOP served up another dose of noxiousness with its convention this weekend.

You may already have seen Rudy Giuliani sliming his way out of the Grand Rapids airport via retweet by Marcy, but in case you haven’t:

The MIGOP convention was an event important enough to warrant Giuliani sliding into Michigan, perhaps to network with his fellow co-conspirators about the attempt to fraudulently foist different electors on the state, or a future attempt to do so. They would have been easy to meet in one location considering their respective roles in the MIGOP apparatus.

Perhaps it was important for Giuliani to see how other efforts to enable an illegitimate GOP stranglehold on power — like the selection of Big Lie

A loop-de-loop: it’d be nice to know if former MIGOP Randy Bishop attended the MIGOP convention. He’s suddenly flipped parties and is now running as a Democrat for the state’s 37th senate district. He’d run in 2010 as a Republican in the same district, which includes Antrim County now as it did before redistricting. The Detroit News ran an article about Bishop’s filing to run (paywalled); unlike most of the state legislature candidate filings, Bishop’s was noteworthy because he’d said on his “Trucker Randy” radio show last month that “A family should be a white mom, white dad and white kids.

Why he thinks that will win over even the few Democrats in his majority white district isn’t obvious; it’s not just overt racism but a rejection of cities down state like Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, Benton Harbor, and Muskegon which have larger percentages of BIPOC residents and provide substantial amounts of state tax revenues. The 37th district, while 88% white, is home to a substantive number of Michigan’s Native Americans including Bay Mills Indian Community (Chippewa), Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, and Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa/Chippewa Indians. The tribes bring in a lot of tourism dollars to a very rural district.

Bishop’s rhetoric is just plain hateful and has no place in the Democratic Party in any state, and certainly not in Michigan’s 37th senate district. He must surely know this, which makes his candidacy look like a ratfucking operation of some sort.

Remember that Antrim County, home to roughly 23,000 Michigan residents, was at the center of the attempted election fraud in November 2020, when human error led to false claims the voting tabulators counted votes incorrectly. A judge dismissed claims of fraud by the GOP last May.

MIGOP’s canvasser Aaron Van Langevelde certified the election for Biden, refusing to cooperate with the conspiracy theory that the Dominion tabulators flipped votes. In January 2021 when Langevelde’s term expired, he was not re-nominated as canvasser by his party.

During the lawsuit filed by Antrim County resident Bill Bailey over the alleged ballot tabulation fraud, his attorney Matthew DePerno questioned the legitimacy of all future elections.

Which makes DePerno’s Trump-supported nomination as MIGOP’s candidate for Michigan’s secretary of state quite the joke: if the elections can’t be trusted, could this election be trusted if he should win?

Such ridiculously bad faith by MIGOP to nominate a Big Lie proponent who would have supported the fraudulent electors’ conspiracy to overturn Michigan’s election.

~ 0 ~

Finally, a high point — some of the diversity which makes Michigan great.

Treat this as an open thread.

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67 replies
  1. Rayne says:

    Post was getting overlong but I’d really wanted to point to MIGOP’s bullshit on their website:

    Diverse, my eye. Not with the kind of hateful crap Lana Theis spouted.

    • Rayne says:

      “COVID failures,” like the GOP-promulgated ‘Let Them Play’ op which harassed Gov. Whitmer into reopening schools, causing massive outbreaks in K-12 public schools during the Beta wave?

      “Woke ideologies”? What are those? We all know they mean they reject BIPOC Americans as citizens with equal rights, but they can’t come out and say it — they have to encode their racist dog whistles. Lee Atwater would be so proud of them.

      • Tarkeel says:

        I’d love to see someone use the term “awakened” instead of “woke” in a discussion just to see how long it takes them to catch on.

        • Rayne says:

          I’m waiting to whip out the Bible they claim as their own on them:

          Wake yourself, wake yourself, stand up, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the hand of the Lord the cup of his wrath, who have drunk to the dregs the bowl, the cup of staggering. — Isaiah 51:17

          But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. — Matthew 24:42-43

          Therefore stay awake — for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning — Mark 13:35

          But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man. — Luke 21:36

          And do this, understanding the occasion. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, for our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. — Romans 13:11

          So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. — 1 Thessalonians 5:6

          But stay woke at all times…keep woke. Where do they think “woke” came from in Black American culture after all?

          • Jim O'Neill says:

            Lifelong Michigan resident here, Rayne – thanks for all of this. Please keep your spotlight shinin’ on our state.

          • Tarkeel says:

            As a non-religious person, I wasn’t aware of the biblical connotations, so thanks for that Rayne. I’ve always thought of it more in the context of RATM’s Wake Up; ie having become aware of the flaws in our society.

            On a different note, I don’t think any of these would recognize Jesus if they’d met him on the street.

              • Ginevra diBenci says:

                Then there’s the whole woke Jewish social-justice liberal thing. They might let him pray in church with them, but they wouldn’t invite him to Denny’s for brunch with the innocent kids.

            • Charles Wolf says:

              Awake! is a mag put out by Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s been around for as long as I can remember… and I (vaguely) remember Truman.

    • Rayne says:

      I think he only had to mark party affiliation on his candidacy filing. That’s it. There are two other real Democrats in the primary for the same seat, fortunately, but the district is incredibly red and will probably go GOP. The question is whether it goes for a Trumper or someone less Trumpy.

      ADDER: I went and checked — he parted with $100 because he surely didn’t get 200-400 partisan nominating petitions.
      See https://www.michigan.gov/sos/-/media/Project/Websites/sos/25delrio/Filing_for_Office_Partisan_Offices_2022_719292_7.pdf

        • Rayne says:

          Oh yeah, there’s a LOT more to this mess. It’s still a solidly conservative district; if they have a habit of voting a straight ticket — ticking just a single box — the seat won’t go to this DINO racist. I just hope the Democrats in the district can figure out how to ensure this bullshit is explained to their constituency.
          https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/northern-michigan-trucker-randy-and-pay-play-claims-roil-senate-race

          ADDER: I want to laugh about this asshole woodtick but he’s dangerous.
          https://michiganadvance.com/2022/04/25/michigan-dems-denounce-right-wing-radio-host-for-racist-comments-on-families/

          The largest local paper picked up the pay-for-play story but between the paywall and moving the story to a different URL I can’t pull it up to see if the DINO Bishop angle was included.

          • klynn says:

            To get to the foundation of his motives is key. I have not found anyone who has dug deep enough to explain his reason for running Dem. He really needs to be challenged on the “why” of his running Dem. It’s a dangerous game, not a matter of a change of heart.

            • Rayne says:

              It’s the ability of partisan voters to cross over in the primary which is driving Bishop — he is trying to keep Democrats from crossing over to vote for a moderate GOP in the primary to ensure they get a less Trumpy state senator because the GOP’s primary winner will likely win the seat in a strongly conservative district.

              The one part of the district which leans left is Traverse City area and it’s those folks he is trying to knock out.

      • Tracy Lynn says:

        So it seems like a tried and true strategy (it has been done locally in California), but I’m not sure how running as a D in a solidly red district will insure the Trumpiest R candidate in MI 37 wins the general. In theory, the Democrats would want to stay in their lane and not cross over to vote for a middle-of-the-road R in the primary to be sure this clown doesn’t represent the Democratic party in the general.

        There are other potential issues for Dems in this scenario. I don’t know if Michigan’s party politics work like California’s, but here when candidates win the primary, those candidates are automatically appointed to their county’s Democratic Central Committee for the next term regardless of whether they win the general.

        Or, perhaps this candidacy is merely a distraction from something else. What else is roiling beneath the surface in the area?

        • klynn says:

          “… but here when candidates win the primary, those candidates are automatically appointed to their county’s Democratic Central Committee for the next term regardless of whether they win the general.”

          This is exactly the kind of motive I am concerned about.

          • Rayne says:

            The chances he’ll win the primary are slim unless GOP voters cross over — and if they cross over they run the risk of getting a GOP primary winner they don’t want.

            ADDER: I need to check but I don’t think there’s an automatic membership in the MIDems State Central Committee. That can be remedied with rules change at state party level. There will be plenty of party members who won’t want this racist asshole anywhere near the committee.

        • bmaz says:

          Then again, look at Katie Porter. I met her in 2018 when she first ran for Congress. She was awesome, but did not think she had a chance in hell in historically red OC. She beat the incumbent, and look at her now. So, the effort is worth it.

          • earlofhuntingdon says:

            Re your comment, “WTF is Pamela Paul,” She’s written for the Economist, the NYT, the NYTBR and a variety of other publications for three decades. She supposedlly writes on finance, the internet, and “culture” issues, including pornography. That she used to be married to Bret Stephens might explain a lot. She gave him up for a hedge fund manager.

            Why the Editorial Board decided it needed to add her voice to its opinion pages is a typical NYT mystery, explicable only to minds like Dean Baquet’s.

              • earlofhuntingdon says:

                According to wiki, she married him in 1998, and divorced him some time before marrying a hedge fund manager in 2004.

                • earlofhuntingdon says:

                  A required connection for any senior post at the NYT. Joe Kahn, its new top editor, is the son and an heir of Leo Kahn, part of whose fortune came from having been a founder of Staples.

                  • earlofhuntingdon says:

                    It’s own-brand flash drives are crap, too. But it’s no longer Staples, in that it was sold to PE in 2017 and divided into three parts: office supplies in US, in Canada, and B2B.

      • Leoghann says:

        I honestly think he did it just to “own the libs.” He knows he’s offensive–that’s his shtick. And he’s bound to know that seeing a D after his name makes Democrats’ stomach turn.

      • Ginevra diBenci says:

        Bishop has said he’s doing it to “confuse the Dems.” As Rayne explained, that scarcely applies to his own district. To me it seems like a bid for outside-the-lines notoriety, which is what he’s getting.

        Can’t remember where I saw that quote. I just got back from Ann Arbor and scoured my sister’s house for local rags from there, Detroit and Benzie County to northwest where one of the best papers in the state is based. Great reporters on the ground in Michigan are the reason we know so much granular detail about Bishop, as well as the new Secretary of State/Demonhunter candidate. What a state!

  2. P J Evans says:

    I think the last time I believed a Republican was 1972. And they were well to the left of the party then.

    • Rayne says:

      I almost became a Republican in 1978. During my senior year of high school we had presentations from local party officials, both Dem and GOP. But at the time the GOP looked more like William Milliken and Gerry Ford while the Dems hereabouts looked more like bruisers and we were half way through Jimmy Carter’s term. None of it made sense so I just waited it out.

      • P J Evans says:

        This was our newly-gerrymandered congressional district – both parties were trying to get the guy out, but he won anyway. (Pete McCloskey – he’d run in the primary against Nixon, before that. He came out and walked through parts of the area new to him, and also had a booth at the county fair; he’s still the only congressmember I’ve ever met.

        • bmaz says:

          An old client of mine (cattle rustling, don’t laugh, it was a huge case) once told a story of a fictitious friend who had a guy ring his doorbell and ask for employment as a house painter. Homeowner says, sure can you paint the porch. Once done, the painter guy rings the bell again for his money, which was handed to him. Homeowner says how did it go? Painter says excellent, but it was not a Porsche, it was a Lincoln!

          • notjonathon says:

            That’s nicely cleaned up from the (quite racist) version I heard, which also figured a BMW instead of a Lincoln.

            • bmaz says:

              It has been a very long time, and, though does not always work out, I try to keep things semi-sane.

    • Fraud Guy says:

      My near brush was in college, with a cute girl inviting me to a College Republicans meeting. Alas, the requirement to follow every direction from the national party soured me on them (and the College Democrats).

      • Ginevra diBenci says:

        I read Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative to impress a cute guy in high school. Carried the book around hoping he would notice (cute guy, not Goldwater). He never said a word. So much for conservatism.

    • Belyn says:

      As an elementary school student, I supported Nixon in 1960. I voted for a republican for local office once, and accidentally for a socialist worker party candidate for state agriculture secretary. I have worked with some fine republicans, but that was long ago and those sorts seem to be missing these days.

  3. bmaz says:

    Note: Lyoya was clearly shot in the back of the head while already restrained on the ground with the officer straddling him on his back. Don’t need the autopsy for that, it is crystal clear from the video. Also, it is my understanding that the model of Taser involved has only two cartridges, and that both were already deployed. Cannot confirm that, but, if so, it was no longer a useful weapon.

    • EdwardB says:

      There are two ways to use a taser, dart (two darts are fired, charge comes through a wire, both darts have to stick for it to work) and drive stun (remove the dart cartridge, exposes electrodes which are applied directly to the subject). Looks as if the officer was using drive stun mode, which can be done repeatedly. It’s worth noting that the officer relatively quickly lost control of the taser, in that Mr. Lyoya was basically just pushing his hand away. What struck me was the lack of a warning – he did say “drop the taser” several times, but he never warned Mr. Lyoya that he was going to shoot him if he didn’t. He just pulled his sidearm out, put it on the poor fellow’s head and pulled the trigger. That seems quite cold-blooded.

      • bmaz says:

        Time will tell better as to the Taser. That is why I hedged, just don’t know yet. But, dang, killed with a gunshot to the back of the head? Nope is in my book.

  4. Sonso says:

    The blind support of (police and other) violence by the right wing is directly connected to the Calvinist and Dominionist beliefs of the religious right. Concomitant to that is a belief that subservience is required of ‘weaker’ folk. These latter are all mentioned in the Bible: women, slaves, animals, nature. Every day on Washington Journal you will hear conservatives moan that Black people should just do what they’re told by the police. This rabbit hole is deep and deeply embedded in our violent history and now threatens to again destroy our present, if not our future.

  5. klynn says:

    Was looking at a headline that stated they asked a sample group what was Biden’s greatest accomplishment so far?

    I replied to a friend asking about the article, “Appointing top leadership across the branches of government and in his cabinet that are not only historic but reflect the diversity of our nation. And, probably what I appreciate personally as a parent and caregiver navigating covid and the related stresses; he is not an agent of chaos.”

  6. ernesto1581 says:

    anyway, thanks for the nod to miguel cabrera’s amazing milestone and dickerson’s great call. I was switching back and forth between a couple radio broadcasts but somehow lucked into hearing that base hit. just, wow!

  7. Molly Pitcher says:

    Still laughing out loud over Rudy’s bat guano blazer ! The flag lining would have done it alone, but he added the red and white skunk stripes on the outside.

    The bright spot in my day, so far !

  8. ducktree says:

    When I was still an infant, my family lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan for about 25 minutes (some say it was 30 minutes) as our clan moved from the Bronx to Southern California.

    I would suggest reading these two books from the Time Before: https: // studentshare.org/literature/1640577-the-awakening-by-kate-chopin-old-mortality-by-katherine-anne-porter

    They were part of a “Women In Literature” course I took at Pasadena City College before I enlisted in the USAF in 1976.

  9. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Frederick Knott would appreciate your choice of title. Just hide the key under the carpet on the fifth step.

  10. Leoghann says:

    Regarding reforming the police, I saw about a month ago that the new chief that was hired in Aurora, Colorado, to improve the culture of the department, was fired by the mayor after only a few months, because he had “too many complaints about her from officers.” Most of the time the problem goes a whole lot further than the department.

  11. duckrabbit says:

    I would just like to point out that the Rockies took two out of three in Detroit. Purple haze forever!

  12. klynn says:

    IANAL
    Family was discussing, after youngest did the math, that the current Twitter employees should crowdsource fund an employee-owned Twitter and make a better offer than Elon. Youngest did the math based on total number of Twitter users currently and what it would cost each user.

    Youngest noted that then the employees could control the quality of their work environment and the quality of Twitter. Neither may exist with Elon as owner.

    • Rayne says:

      I had been thinking a publicly-owned co-operative in which each user buys their account and a share of the company. That’d be one way to validate users at the same time while reducing bots. This wouldn’t rule out employees owning shares as well.

      The overall price of $45B would be roughly $220/user or account based on 206M active daily users.

  13. Leoghann says:

    This is totally unrelated to what’s been discussed in this thread, but I’ll press on. Today, one of my regular starter words was The Word on Wordle. So I got a hole in one, and Trump didn’t.

    • Leoghann says:

      Grassley’s “slip” was first publicized on 07 January, which was when I read of it. Since then it hasn’t gained much traction, but after the revelations about Pence’s refusal to accept SS transportation away from the building, it certainly became suspicious (as hell!).

      • klynn says:

        Check the date of the article. It’s dated Jan. 5th. So that slip started hitting news outlets on the 5th. As I recall we discussed it in one or two threads here at EW.

        • Rayne says:

          What bothers me about the slip is that it’s not mentioned in Costa/Woodwards’ Peril and Leonnig/Rucker’s I Alone Can Fix It. I need to find my copy of Karl’s Betrayal, but I don’t think it’s in there, either.

          This is like the inverse of hoarding news for a book — the avoidance of news altogether. Why would these reporters omit this?

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