And we’re back in the saddle. Resizing lettering continues to frustrate. I’m going to have to seek out an expert.
In any case, you have to hand it to Governor Rick, the man has a plan for Michigan… a wicked scary plan, but a plan none-the-less. The guy has only been in charge a few weeks, and he already has sweeping authority to dismiss local governments at a whim and appoint emergency managers (be they human or corporation). It’s amazing. I’ve actually been looking at the criteria required to declare the necessary “state of emergency”. There are, in fact, a list of criteria that would have to be met, and they all sound very reasonable until you get to that last little line where the requirement is that the Governor need only suspect that the current city government (or other public body such as school districts, public utilities, etc) policies would incur a debt.
Well he can suspect anything…
It will be interesting to see if any of these powers are actually used, and the ensuing court battle that follows. Dismissing an elected body and appointing someone (or something) that is not answerable to the governed seems… contrary to the constitution somehow… we shall see.
Holy publicans batman! And I thought Wisconsin and Indiana had it bad. Sounds like your guy is just batshit crazy. The voters reap what they sow. Never been one to pound either party (don’t really affiliate with either) as I think a good idea is a good idea, doesn’t matter where it comes from. And most of the time I feel pretty certain you can’t know if something is a good idea until its tried (although conditions and implementation/execution tend to be big factors, and sometimes you can sniff out a really bad idea ahead of time). Usually I sit idly by while the extremes fight it out and then end up somewhere in the reasonable range whilst leaning one way or another. But I have to admit, this rash of repubs in fully repub controlled states just seem to be jumping off the deep end of the giddy “what we’ve always wanted to do before but couldn’t” cliff.
Indeed. I’m not actually against metros, as such… it seems to work well for Indy and what not, but it’s amazing to just watch how Snyder gets things done. The big news story was, of course, the emergency powers thing, but while everyone is focused on that, he pushes through all this little one-liner laws that in aggregate cripple unions ability to function without actually stripping their rights (why should he, since if he appoints an emergency manager, all contracts are instantly null and void, anyways). Once that dust settles, he starts chatting up Metro Govs, and it’s like a pretty little picture comes together…
This comic was actually finished Tuesday in a completely different form… Glen Beck at his infamous chalk boards telling the tale, but I just couldn’t post it… didn’t want to give him any more press, I guess…
Well… at least your governor isn’t a thug and a bully that looks like Jabba the Hutt and is trying to change the signs at the state line to read “Welcome to New Jersey, now get the hell out!”
He’s also been trying the same stuff that’s been going on in Wisconsin, except he started before them and has been taking it slower to keep it under the radar as much as possible.
Good gods, if he somehow manages to make it to the white house… I shudder to think about it, I think I’ll be moving either to canadia or to that island of plastic trash in the pacific to declare it a sovereign nation.
Isn’t it kinda dangerous for a New Jersey Governor to try and take on the mob… er Teamste… er… nevermind.
It’s amazing how quickly the entire Republican “nation” from the top to the bottom has managed to lock in on unions and public workers as their target. I fear it’s about time that I shed all party affiliation…
…or maybe start my own…
And the folks on the other side of the political aisle are deemed the crazy ones. I’m not saying there isn’t crazy on both sides, but ye gods, this is bordering on dystopian in some respects.
No, no… they’re all crazy!
I don’t think crazy quite covers it, the level of insanity being displayed on a regular basis is reaching biblical proportions, everything from tearing down vital legislation just because it has the wrong letter in front of it… a D instead of an R, to everyone getting their panties all wadded up and preparing to go to war because someone in a catalog is shown painting her son’s toenails pink, it’s stupefying to me how things could have gotten so incredibly and unbelievably insane.
They’re completely incapable of arguing issues, it’s all just party line bullshit and the rest of us are left to drown in it, they’re arguing about what color to paint the walls while the house is burning down around their ears.
I can’t even adequately convey how amazingly frustrated I get every time I watch the news, and I’d long since given up on all the usual news channels and moved to the BBC and, if you can believe it, Al Jazeera…
It’s all just so damn frustrating that I can’t even bring myself to laugh about it any more, they’re all so damn blind and stupid and stubborn I can’t imagine why some people haven’t started taking matters into their own hands yet… take their cues from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and so on, maybe they have the right idea.
But, you see, nothing like that would ever happen here because it would mean people would have to get off their asses and actually do something that didn’t involve drinking beer and watching TV, and other sacrifices no one is willing to make, because, you know… “someone else will take care of it, so why should I bother?”
…I really need to start making blog posts again…
Sorry about the rant, sometimes they just happen, kinda like seizures or something.
Rants are fine… I spent the morning at a “meet the legislators” breakfast, if you can believe it… state level… dems showed, republicans didn’t… accomplished little…
In Ohio the governor had a bill that eliminated collective bargaining for public employees EXCEPT for wages…then when that passed he snuck into his budget bill a provision to eliminate collective bargaining for wages.
Allegedly, and I could be off-base on this, along with other wage controls on teachers he wants to have controls on coaches’ wages…something like 1% of the district’s base salary. So, if your school district has a base salary of $20,000 coaches would be limited to getting $200.
Again I say I could have misunderstood this, but that seems to work out to less than $0.50 per hour for say the head football coach who has probably the coaching job with the most hours. If anywhere near true, who do they expect to do these jobs?
It doesn’t matter in the short term as long as they can break down the public system and get as much privatization as possible.
Hmmm… enough politics… time for a laugh… better start the Sunday strip!