Tag: Schauer (page 2)

According to the Jackson Citizen-Patriot:  "Rep. Mark Schauer, D-Battle Creek, will host a small-business resource workshop at 1 p.m. Wednesday at the Jackson District Library Carnegie Building, 244 W. Michigan Ave. in Jackson."

Am I the only one who sees the irony in this?

After yesterday's vote on cap-and-tax, how can any businessperson take this man seriously? He consistently voted against businesses during his tenure in the State Legislature, repeated those same actions in Congress, and now he's going to dole out business advice?

I think this would be a great opportunity for those who are disgruntled with his representation in Congress to show up and hold his feet to the fire. Ask him about cap-and-tax.  Ask him how nationalizing health care is going to save anyone money or get better care.  Ask him why he suddenly has such an interest in "helping" businesses when his voting record is quite the opposite.

http://www.mlive.com/news/jackson/index.ssf/2009/06/rep_mark_schauer_will_host_sma.html

The 19th, you'll remember, was technically vacated at the beginning of the year when Mark Schauer broke his word to his constituents and took a seat in Congress, becoming a part of what polling data consistently tells us is one of the least popular legislative bodies in American history.  

Our readers in Calhoun and Jackson Counties, their friends and neighbors, have been without representation in Michigan's upper legislative chamber for the last one-hundred-plus days and will be until the end of 2009.  The Granholm-Cherry administration, fearing a potential partisan swing in the District and an expanded GOP majority in the Senate, delayed announcing a special election for months.  

Remember, they've got a lot more than one Senate seat to lose.  Whoever winds up being the incumbent in the 19th come the 2010 general elections will have a leg-up on the challenger.  Should the Democrats lose the 19th their path to taking control of the Senate becomes significantly more difficult with nothing less than the holy grail of legislative tasks at stake... redistricting.  

Whoever controls the Supreme Court and the state Senate come January 2011 will control legislative redistricting and partisan electoral potential for the next decade.

The man who has the liberals spooked?  Mike Nofs.

Read on...

The President's unilateral decision to all-but nationalize one of the state's largest companies, brooming its CEO while giving a free pass to other far worse players (who happened to be special interest supporters) doesn't sit particularly well the good people who value things like, oh, freedom, free markets, Capitalism, equality, the absence of double standards and hypocrisy... I could go on.  

You don't like Rick Wagoner?  Fine.  Sell your stock.  Or buy up a bunch of it (its awfully cheap these days) and exert a little shareholder control.  Its up to you because this is still America (though what it will look like three years from now at this rate...).  That's the way our market system works, or did, until late this weekend.

Our own RightMacomb was discussing the President's unprecedented intrusion into Michigan's business Sunday afternoon and by this morning Daniel Howes at the Detroit News has put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) as well with another MUST READ:

Not since World War II, with the arguable exception of President Harry S. Truman's brief control of the steel industry, has a president exercised such forceful unilateral control over firms in the private sector. And the double-standards? Towering, as if that makes any difference.

What does it say that on the same day President Obama made nice at the White House with the nation's leading bank CEOs -- none of whom have lost their jobs despite sitting on vastly larger sums of taxpayer dough -- the head of the president's auto task force was urging Wagoner to "step aside?"

"There is no standard," Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Livonia, told me. "You cannot look at what happened to Rick Wagoner and draw any policy certitude about what happened to the Wall Street CEOs. How do you reconcile the two images on Friday?"

That's a good question, but if the Congressman is looking for any sort of affirmative response I'm afraid all we'll be able to offer is the sound of crickets chirping.  Crickets and Michigan's freshman Democratic Congressman Mark Schauer who broke with even his own party boss, Jennifer Granholm (a woman whose half-hearted water-carrying for the administration on the issue wound up doing little more than make everyone her look all wet) by sounding his approval of the President's shocking behavior.

The Jackson Citizen Patriot reports:

U.S. Rep. Mark Schauer said today he respects President Obama's decision to oust General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner as a condition to receive more federal aid.

"My top priority is that the president and federal government don't give up on the domestic auto industry," the Battle Creek Democrat said.

Really?  So, if the President moved to void all union contracts and force the UAW to sign a new offer sheet at 40% of the pay and benefits that'd be cool with you too, Congressman?  20%?  Hey, he wouldn't be "giving up" on the industry, right?

And if the President were to come into the 7th District and started firing small business owners who'd been forced to layoff employees because he didn't like the job they'd been doing?

Appreciate you selling your constituents out to satisfy your partisan political interest, though, Congressman.  Swell of you.

So much for even the pretense of fiscal sanity.  Yeah, we all chuckled when we heard President Obama speak Tuesday night about the need to cut the federal budget in order to dig into that trillion dollar deficit he just created, but it is still early enough in his term that I'm willing to take the man at his word.

He says he wants to cut the budget... well OK then.  Let's cut the budget.

Apparently the national TV audience were the only ones to catch that portion of his speech, though, because yesterday's action in the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, only a few hours after the speech, seems to indicate it went right over the heads of folks like Mark Schauer and Gary Peters.

The Ivory Tower reports that the United States House of Representatives voted yesterday, largely along Party lines, to approve a massive NEW spending bill with a full 8% increase over last year's budget.

$410 BILLION total.  And the kicker?  

The bill ... provides sizable increases for a long list of health, education, transportation, housing and other domestic programs. In some cases, the boosts go to items that already got more money in the $787-billion economic-stimulus plan that became law last week.

Lawmakers did make one important nod toward austerity: They froze their salaries for 2010. Most members of Congress earn $174,000 a year; leaders get more. The freeze doesn't affect 2009 pay. Members got a $4,700 cost-of-living raise last month.

Emphasis mine.

Michigan's Congressional delegation voted overwhelmingly to support the massive new spending.  Again.  Every single Democrat, including those in swing districts like Schauer, Peters and Bart Stupak up in the relatively conservative 1st voted to ignore President Obama.  Frustratingly, so did Republicans Fred Upton and Candice Miller.

Not cool, guys.  Not cool at all.

Upton is considered a bit of a moderate and Miller is an uber-hawk for her District and funding that might head its way.  Hardly excuses, but maybe a bit of an explanation.

Props, though, to Congressmen Pete Hoekstra, Vern Ehlers, Dave Camp, Mike Rogers and Thad McCotter for standing up for a healthy dose of fiscal sanity.

Who'd have thought that two months in to Democratic President Obama's first term, only Michigan's five most conservative Republican Congressmen would be willing to listen to what the man has to say and to support him with their votes when he happens to make a lick of sense.

The rest of the delegation, Republicans AND Democrats, might be well served to tune in to Dave Ramsey after session today... never wise to spend money you don't have.  Especially when the check they're going to bounce has that many zeroes.

In Alien 3, the series' heroine, Ellen Ripley comes to a horrifying realization.  Growing inside of her is an Alien queen, a creature of incredible destructive power, its structural perfection matched only by its hostility.  "Unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality."  And this particular breed is able to reproduce without a mate.

Those familiar with the franchise will remember that when an alien enters this world, its host dies rather painfully.  Its not a pretty picture.  

Ripley is faced with an uncomfortable choice.  She can either destroy the queen, and herself along with it, or she can embrace an opportunity presented to her by an outsider.  He has the ability to take the alien and rescue her from her own horrific, premature death but Ripley understands that while handing over the specimen will grant her a temporary reprieve, the results for those around her would be cataclysmic.  

Now here we are in Michigan and we find ourselves the host to our own parasitic, job-killing queen and darn it all if President Obama isn't rumored to be offering us a chance to get rid of it.  But the consequences to those around us...

Technically NEXT Friday is Friday the 13th but if the rumors swirling around the Capitol press corp don't scare the life out of this state TODAY I'm not sure any mix of black cats, tall ladders and sci-fi horror movies could.

Read on...