Playahata

Fellow Michiganders (and honorary Michiganders around the world):

The call has gone out and I’m asking everyone who can to take Wednesday off and head to the State Capitol in Lansing to protest the cruel and downright frightening legislation currently being jammed down our throats.

What is most shocking to many is that the new governor, who ran against the Tea Party and defeated the right wing of his party in the primaries — and then ran in the general election as “just a nerd from Ann Arbor” who was a moderate, not an ideologue — has pulled off one of the biggest Jekyll and Hyde ruses I’ve ever seen in electoral politics.

Governor Snyder, once elected, yanked off his nice-guy mask to reveal that he is in fact a multi-millionaire hell-bent on destroying our state and turning it over to his buddies from Wall Street.

In just 8 short weeks he has: (more…)

Two incidents connected to the ongoing mass protests in Wisconsin underscore the utter ruthlessness of the ruling class in its determination to drive down the living conditions of workers, not only in that state but throughout the United States.

Jeff Cox, the Republican deputy attorney general of Indiana recently told the liberal magazine Mother Jones that he favored “live ammunition” as the response to the protests in Wisconsin. He described workers protesting benefit cuts and attacks on their legal rights as “political enemies” and “thugs” and declared, “You’re damned right I advocate deadly force.” Cox, a state attorney for eight years, was fired Wednesday after the magazine published the exchange.

A blogger from a pro-union web site in Buffalo, New York contacted Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Tuesday, posing as billionaire David Koch, one of the leading backers of corporate union-busting and the ultra-right Tea Party movement. The blogger, Ian Murphy, recorded the call and published the transcript Wednesday.

In the course of a 20-minute conversation, Murphy elicited a series of provocative remarks from the Republican governor. Walker suggested that felony charges could be trumped up against Democratic state senators who had blocked passage of his anti-union legislation by fleeing the state, offered to negotiate with his opponents using a baseball bat, and discussed the pros and cons of “planting some troublemakers” in the crowds demonstrating outside the state capitol. (more…)