More: Rocker Ted Nugent Rips Pure Michigan Ad Campaign

LANSING — Michigan-born rocker Ted Nugent struck a nerve today when he savaged the popular Pure Michigan tourism campaign and criticized Holland’s Tulip Time Festival in a radio interview.

Nugent said during a telephone interview on the Lansing-based syndicated program “Michigan’s Big Show starring Michael Patrick Shiels” that liberalism and political correctness prevent Pure Michigan officials from highlighting in its ads what he said are the state’s biggest draws — hunting and fishing.

“How dare the Pure Michigan campaign not mention any of that because some Hash Bash hippie in charge of Michigan’s promotional campaigns is afraid to put a dead salmon, or a dead grouse, or a dead deer on the tourist brochure; but will put paragliding and tulip festivals on that brochure when no one is going to come to Michigan to go hang gliding or to go to the tulip festival?” Nugent asked.

The comments provoked an anti-Nugent eruption on social media by residents who described the 1970s rocker known as the Motor City Madman as an irrelevant has-been who shouldn’t criticize now that he has moved to Texas.

Nobody at the Michigan Economic Development Corp., which oversees the award-winning Pure Michigan campaign, would admit today to being a “Hash Bash hippie.”

Read more at Freep (Detroit Free Press, not Free Republic)

Republicans need to win just six seats to gain control of the U.S. Senate in next year’s election, but the AP reports that the GOP is struggling mightily to recruit candidates.

The 2014 elections represent a big chance for Republicans as Democrats will be defending 21 seats to Republicans’ 14. In addition, retirement announcements by several senior Democrats — in Iowa, Michigan, and Montana — have given the GOP a chance to not face an incumbent.

But so far there’s been a combination of lack of interest from prospective Republican candidates and a lack of consensus in the party on who might be the best candidate.

More: Republicans Struggle to Find Decent Senate Candidates - the Week

From The Detroit News:

An Ingham County judge on Wednesday rejected the state of Michigan’s request to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the week-old right-to-work law on grounds the public was unlawfully locked out of the Capitol during heated debate on the bill in December.

Circuit Judge William Collette is allowing the suit brought by the ACLU of Michigan and labor unions to move forward. The plaintiffs allege the Michigan State Police and Legislature violated the Open Meetings Act when protesters were locked out of the Capitol during debate on the controversial legislation.

[…]

Two right-to-work laws went into effect last Thursday banning public and private sector union contracts from requiring financial support of the union as a condition of employment. Police and firefighters were exempted from the law, a carve-out that is the subject of a separate legal challenge of the law.

Lawmakers rushed the legislation to Gov. Rick Snyder’s desk in five days in December, bypassing the normal public hearing process during the Legislature’s lame duck session.

More: The National Memo » 5 Examples of a Republican Party Gone Wild in Michigan

Wisconsin’s Republicans got most of the attention, but Michigan’s Republicans have recently proven to be the best example of a midwest gerrymandered Republican majority drunk with its power.

In 2010, in the lowest turnout since 1990, Michigan elected a Republican governor who ran as a moderate backed by big majorities in the state House and Senate. Many of the freshly minted Republicans proudly waved the banner of the Tea Party — a banner that read ‘Taxed Enough Already!’

Immediately, the newly elected governor and legislature raised taxes on pensioners and cut the earned income tax credit for the poor to help pay for a huge tax cuts for business. Over the course of the next two years, the legislatures explored the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation and even banned a female lawmaker from speaking because she used the word ‘vagina.’

But they saved the worst of their agenda until President Obama beat Mitt Romney in Romney’s birth state by 9.5 percent. Republicans lost seats in both state houses as gerrymandering protected Republican majorities. With only 4,000 more votes in four districts, Democrats would have tied up the House 55-55. Instead they only lost 5 seats and maintained a 59-51 majority.

Instead of moving to the center, Michigan’s GOP launched into an ‘inflamed duck’ session that shook the state and finally revealed to the nation what happens when a far-right Republican majority takes over a blue state.

1. Without one public hearing, the Michigan GOP enacted legislation that made Michigan — the heart of the auto industry and the union movement — into a ‘Right To Work’ state. Governor Rick Snyder claimed the law, which drew protesters from all over the state, was about jobs. But just last week, the governor said, ‘Over 90 percent of the jobs that you’re looking at aren’t going to be in a situation where right to work is even relevant.’ Weakening the unions doesn’t help the economy. It lowers wages and increases poverty. What it does help is strengthen the power of corporations who are interested in privatizing public resources. That’s been the agenda of former Republican gubernatorial candidate and Amway heir Rich DeVos for decades, which is why he made ‘financial contributions’ to the candidates who weren’t certain if they should support union busting.

2. Republicans have recognized that their only path to the presidency is to gerrymander the vote the way they have in the House. Despite voting for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1992, Michigan is represented in the House by nine Republicans and six Democrats, thanks to gerrymandered districts. And if the electoral college were to suddenly switch to relying on these same gerrymandered districts, Republicans would win the majority of the electoral votes despite losing the popular vote. So, of course, Michigan’s Republicans are ‘open’ to the possibility of rigging the next election. In fact, the only reason they didn’t in 2012 is because they assumed Mitt Romney would win the state.

Read more at National Memo.

What’s the Matter With Michigan?

It seems that no matter what I do, I can’t beat my colleague here at TAI, Walter Russell Mead, into print on any significant news story. Walter does it fast and, almost invariably, does it very well. He did it again yesterday, early in the day too, on the news that the Michigan state legislature had passed two so-called right-to-work laws.

Like Walter, my sense is that this is a big deal—a turning point in our national odyssey.  Like Walter, too, I see the basic facts in the same way. But unlike Walter, my sensibilities about this are bit different, possibly owing to the fact that he is the son of an Episcopalian clergyman, and I am the son of a rare Jewish member of the Teamsters union. Walter does say that, “Labor needs representation and many of the values that drew millions of working Americans into the labor movement endure.” I would go a bit further than that: Collective bargaining is all that keeps large numbers of Americans at least clingingly in the middle class at a time when globalization and automation are undermining a hard-achieved, broadly egalitarian U.S. social structure. What Republicans in Michigan have done is to attack the viability of collective bargaining. If companies can hire as many non-union laborers as they like, it is obvious that union bargaining power will essentially collapse.

Were that to happen, and were it to spread from Michigan to the rest of the nation, it might help some American businesses to keep their costs down and so better compete worldwide. That, arguably, might produce more jobs—if not necessarily more decently paying jobs. But at the same time, whether that happens or not, it will certainly produce more inequality and the social frictions that ultimately go with it, exacerbating a trend at least a quarter-century now in the making.

When I read the news from Lansing, I immediately began to think of another key turning point in the history of the American labor movement. Since few Americans today know much about that history, let me tell you a little something about it. No doubt you will see many parallels with current circumstances even before I have the opportunity to point them out.

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What’s the Matter With Michigan?

It seems that no matter what I do, I can’t beat my colleague here at TAI, Walter Russell Mead, into print on any significant news story. Walter does it fast and, almost invariably, does it very well. He did it again yesterday, early in the day too, on the news that the Michigan state legislature had passed two so-called right-to-work laws.

Like Walter, my sense is that this is a big deal—a turning point in our national odyssey.  Like Walter, too, I see the basic facts in the same way. But unlike Walter, my sensibilities about this are bit different, possibly owing to the fact that he is the son of an Episcopalian clergyman, and I am the son of a rare Jewish member of the Teamsters union. Walter does say that, “Labor needs representation and many of the values that drew millions of working Americans into the labor movement endure.” I would go a bit further than that: Collective bargaining is all that keeps large numbers of Americans at least clingingly in the middle class at a time when globalization and automation are undermining a hard-achieved, broadly egalitarian U.S. social structure. What Republicans in Michigan have done is to attack the viability of collective bargaining. If companies can hire as many non-union laborers as they like, it is obvious that union bargaining power will essentially collapse.

Were that to happen, and were it to spread from Michigan to the rest of the nation, it might help some American businesses to keep their costs down and so better compete worldwide. That, arguably, might produce more jobs—if not necessarily more decently paying jobs. But at the same time, whether that happens or not, it will certainly produce more inequality and the social frictions that ultimately go with it, exacerbating a trend at least a quarter-century now in the making.

When I read the news from Lansing, I immediately began to think of another key turning point in the history of the American labor movement. Since few Americans today know much about that history, let me tell you a little something about it. No doubt you will see many parallels with current circumstances even before I have the opportunity to point them out.

Reuters has a piece out today that details how the cradle of organized labor, Michigan, became a Right to Work (for less) state, and explains why it happened when it did, and as fast as it did. The thing is, it wasn’t just because an attempt to enshrine collective bargaining rights into the state constitution went down in flames:

(Reuters) - As a trained aerospace engineer, Patrick Colbeck applied his penchant for data analysis and “systematic approach” to his new job in early 2011: a Michigan state senator, recently elected and keen to create jobs in the faded industrial powerhouse.

Those skills paid off handsomely for the first-term Republican this week as Governor Rick Snyder signed into law bills co-sponsored by Colbeck that ban mandatory union membership, making Michigan the nation’s 24th right-to-work state.

From outside Michigan Republican circles, it appeared that the Republican drive to weaken unions came out of the blue - proposed, passed and signed in a mere six days.

But the transformation had been in the making since March 2011 when Colbeck and a fellow freshman, state Representative Mike Shirkey, first seriously considered legislation to ban mandatory collection of union dues as a condition of employment in Michigan. Such was their zeal, they even went to union halls to make their pitch and were treated “respectfully,” Colbeck said.

Read the whole thing here.

Another casualty of the 2010 Tea Party wave. Elections do have consequences, and since the GOP won so many statehouses in a census year, they won the right to redistrict, and it looks like they have gerrymandered themselves into power until the end of the decade at least. So I doubt Michigan will be the last state to at least attempt passing a Right to Work (for less) law.

:(

Editorial: Drinking the Kochs’ Kool-Aid

A narrative gaining currency among Rick Snyder’s defenders explains his flip-flop on right-to-work legislation as a reluctant response to labor unions who put Proposal 2 on the November ballot over the governor’s objections, then refused to bargain with good faith with him afterward.

But the truth? Snyder hasn’t gotten much respect from the groups backing right-to-work, either.

Americans For Prosperity, founded by billionaire tea party titans David and Charles Koch, is heralding Michigan’s imminent passage of right-to-work legislation laws in Michigan as “the shot heard around the world” in the fight to weaken unions.

But the group was also a significant financial backer of Proposal 5, an effort to amend the Michigan Constitution to bar tax increases without a two-thirds legislative supermajority.

So why would Snyder turn from labor unions to a group that was behind a constitutional amendment he described as “bad public policy”?

The answer may lie in another Koch-funded group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which promotes a radical right-wing agenda in states across the country, supplying “model legislation” to sympathetic lawmakers.

The organization boasts more than 2,000 legislative members. It also has corporate members, who weigh in on the model legislation before it’s approved by the group’s public-sector committee, the group’s national chairman said in an interview he gave after dozens of pieces of ALEC-written model legislation were leaked last year in a joint project by The Nation and the Center for Media and Democracy.

Michigan’s proposed right-to-work bills mirror the ALEC language practically word-for-word.

It’s unclear how many Michigan lawmakers are members of ALEC; the group doesn’t make its membership rolls public. But at least one of the lawmakers who introduced Michigan’s right-to-work legislation has been associated with ALEC.

Certainly, there are a large number of Michigan legislators who are beholden to Americans for Prosperity, or the Koch brothers. Word is the groups threatened Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville’s leadership post, and promised him a primary challenge in 2014, if he refused to move right-to-work forward.

Read more at Detroit Free Press.

Court Strikes Down Michigan’s Ban on Race-Conscious Admissions - Government - the Chronicle of Higher Education

A narrowly divided federal appeals court on Thursday struck down a voter-passed ban on the use of race-conscious admissions by Michigan’s public colleges, holding that the measure had unconstitutionally put racial-minority members at a distinct legal disadvantage in seeking from public colleges the same preferential treatment that other categories of students enjoy.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, creates a clear division among the federal courts over the issues raised, because a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit this year upheld a nearly identical California ban in a ruling that the full Ninth Circuit declined to reconsider. The existence of such a split between the federal circuit courts greatly increases the likelihood that the U.S. Supreme Court will feel compelled to weigh in on such bans on affirmative-action preferences, which have been adopted by voters in Michigan and five other states: Arizona, California, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Washington.

Michigan’s attorney general, Bill Schuette, responded to the Sixth Circuit’s ruling by announcing he would appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a written statement, he said the Michigan measure, passed by that state’s voters in 2006, “embodies the fundamental premise of what America is all about: equal opportunity under the law.”

Ward Connerly, who played a central role in the 1997 campaign for the California ban and then helped lead the campaigns for similar ballot initiatives in Michigan and other states as president of the American Civil Rights Institute, expressed hope that in the Supreme Court “a voice of sanity might prevail, and we can get these ridiculous damn challenges to our initiatives out of the way once and for all.”

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