My, my, Governor. That didn’t take long.

Remember when Governor Snyder and his Republican colleagues were telling us all how important making Michigan a Right to Work state was for improving our economy? “It’s freedom to work!” they said. “It will make us competitive with other states!” they claimed. “It will create more and better jobs!” they told us.

Turns out that even Governor Snyder doesn’t believe that tripe. Less than a month after his Economic Development Corporation spent $144,000 on a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal touting our new Right to Work status as one of the attractive benefits of setting up shop in Michigan, this week Snyder admitted it’s all a damn lie.

Details after the jump.

Who wants to belong to a political party that can’t win fairly?

Michigan Republicans’ intend to change the rules to assign our state’s presidential electoral votes by Congressional District. While this may seem sort of innocuous, once you realize how severely they have gerrymandered our state, the implications of this begins to sink in. Here’s the reality:

• More Michiganders voted for Democrats statewide than for Republicans
• President Obama would have gotten less electoral votes than Mitt Romney in the 2012 election

I will be writing more about this topic but I wanted to draw your attention to some of the smartest writing and smartest advice on this topic that I have seen yet. It comes from MMColo at Daily Kos. Their article is titled “Republicans Plan to Steal the Presidency (And might not be able to ) and How Democrats Can Stop Them”.

It’s all there, waiting for you, after the jump.

Aye, aye, aye…

By now, most my readers know that the Republicans in Michigan have carved roughly $1 billion out of our state education budget and are ready to reduce the per-pupil funding by another $150/student this year. But what you probably don’t know that things have gotten so bad in our state’s schools that some of them don’t even have toilet paper for our kids to use when they go to school.

I’m not kidding. Follow me over the jump.

This ought to get VERY interesting

Are you grumpy with (or even angry at) the leadership of the Michigan Democratic Party? If so, there may be a chance to do something about it but you must be a registered member of the MDP no later than today to do so. You can do that HERE. This will allow you to vote at next month’s 2012 State Convention at Cobo Hall in Detroit.

Current party Chair Mark Brewer no longer has the support of the UAW, the Teamsters, or of several major Democrats including Congressman Sander Levin. Gongwer and MIRS both report that Bob King of the UAW and James Hoffa of the Teamsters have told Brewer he no longer has their support. Brewer is determined to run anyway.

The battle has already gotten nasty with MIRS reporting that a party insider is calling King’s move “the temper-tantrum school of politics,” saying that he seems “more than happy being in a minority, a shrinking minority, than growing the Democratic Party.”

Yeeouch.

Much more after the jump.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe it’s 2013…

The button shown above is the actual one that was worn by my mother when she marched, with me at her side, with 85,000 others in Chicago, during a rally for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1980. 59¢ was how much women in 1980 earned for every dollar a man made for the same job.

Today that number is 77¢. In 33 years, women have only gained 18¢ in their struggle for paycheck fairness. At that rate, to paraphrase Laurie Anderson, it will be the year 2055 before they make a buck. That is, unless Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski and Connecticut Congresswoman Rose DeLauro have anything to say about it.

Much, much more after the jump.

Click through for a second photoblog from the second inauguration of Barack Obama and Joe Biden including two exclusive interactive panoramic images.

C’mon, Governor Snyder, do the right thing

As regular readers of this site know, we have been calling on Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to expand Medicaid coverage in our state, one of the many excellent provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka “Obamacare”.) You can read LOLGOP’s pieces on this HERE and HERE and my piece HERE.

Now the Michigan Democrats are starting to move on this issue. Today, State Representative Andy Schor (D-Lansing) introduced a House Resolution today calling on Governor Snyder to expand Medicaid under the federal ACA.

As Rep. Schor notes in his press release, “under the ACA, the cost of expanding Medicaid to more residents would be covered 100 percent by the federal government from 2014 through 2016. After that, the federal government would cover no less than 90 percent of the cost.”

Much more after the jump.

They just didn’t Twitter those jpegs to your Pinterest blogs with good enough email Facebooks

Republicans have thought long and hard and have figured out why they lost the election in 2012. Although you dumb bunnies may think that it was because of their desire to benefit the very rich at the expense of our nation’s most vulnerable or because of their egregious War on Women and War on Minorities, you would, of course, be wrong. The reason they lost, according the Republicans, is because you people just didn’t understand their message well enough.

See just how dumb you are after the jump.

I apologize for the lack of posting lately. After the loss of my mother’s partner last week and then the trip to DC and two days of walking around in sub-freezing temperatures, my body finally said, “Screw it!” and I’m in bed with a nasty cold. We’ll have some more photos later today and will get back to regular posting […]

Whoever taught Young Republicans to say “straw man” deserves a royalty Get ready. Paul Ryan — the man who has already proposed a budget that would have led to the largest transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich in American history — is about to propose a new budget featuring massive cuts that will make the austerity […]

Four more years!

Yesterday, Anne and I attended the 57th Presidential Inauguration Ceremony in Washington, D.C. along with about a million other people. Attendance was down from nearly 2 million in 2009 but still dwarfs the 400,000-person crowd at George W. Bush’s second inauguration. While the crowd may have been smaller, the enthusiasm and the pure joy in the voices and faces of the people who were there was not diminished.

Anne’s photos along with President Obama’s speech, the Inaugural poem, and some reflections of the day after the jump.