-By Warner Todd Huston
What an inelegant way for such an illustrious career to end — perhaps if only temporarily. Congressman Thad McCotter (R, Mich) not only didn’t get enough signatures on his nominating petitions to get himself on the ballot for his reelection, the petitions his team did turn in were rife with duplicates and outright fraud. Now he’s announced that he is not running for reelection because of all this.
McCotter, 46, has been in Congress for ten years and has been considered a rising conservative star. He even made an abortive attempt to run for the 2012 GOP nomination for the White House. Now, he’s out of Congress on his ear due to nothing other than neglect of the nomination process.
McCotter initially announced that he was going to carry out a write-in campaign but has given up that idea, too.
As he announced the end of his last ditch effort to keep his seat, he had a message for Michiganders. “To those who unhappy at this news, I’m sorry; to those happy at this news, you’re welcome,” he said.
The write-in effort was necessary because McCotter’s campaign utterly bollixed the nominating petitions, didn’t get enough signatures, and clearly committed fraud in order to try and get the petitions in on time.
Continue reading “
Inexcusable: Thad McCotter Out of Congress Over Petition Sigs Snafu”
News has emerged that a Michigan public school illegally used its automatic phone calling system to call the homes of every student to urge parents to join the recall effort against Republican Governor Rick Snyder last month. To imagine that they can illegally use public school facilities for a partisan, left-wing political effort, this is the arrogance of left-wingers in our mis-educational system writ large.
News during this past week a story made the rounds that police in Michigan may be using a device in random traffic stops that instantly copies all the data on your cell phone and stores it for later use by police. It was said that this data copying is going on without consent and without a warrant. Michigan police are denying this claim, but the ACLU posted a letter warning them against this policy regardless. The fear here is, of course, that copying cell phone data without a warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s proscription against illegal search and seizure.
Michigan’s union thugs have found a new way to hide their on-the-job union activism from the prying eyes of public transparency — or at least they think they have. Activist school teachers are using their state-sponsored email accounts to discuss their strike ideas, their union work slow down ideas and other illegal activities but are claiming that these emails are “personal” and therefore should not be open to Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests by the state’s budget hawks, government transparency advocates, and the news media.
Early in 2010 two former leaders of the Michigan Democrat Party came up with a brilliant idea, one that has just gotten them charged with election fraud.
For some strange reason the left-wing Internet site Slate.com thinks that the City of Detroit needs a statue erected to an anti-Christian, anti-American pop icon. That’s right, Slate thinks that Detroit needs to diss Jesus, slam capitalism, and attack the United States of America as an evil, violent nation. Strange recommendation for a city that literally drove America’s capitalist success story, isn’t it?
Thanks to an increasingly lowered level of public discourse and comportment, more than ever those notorious or infamous for their behavior are help up as people worth applauding. Just as unfortunate, many of these lowlives are ending up voted in as our representatives in state and federal offices. Michigan thinks it has a way to address this problem, but the sad thing is they even have to do it at all.
I really hate to report this, but friend to the blog Chet Zarko of Michigan has suddenly passed away.