Politics-What's on your mind?

[Orema]

2022 and 2224 is on my mind.

2022
Michigan primary voting is in a couple weeks and I'm voting Democrat right down the line. I'm not doing absentee voting this year. Will show up, stand in line, cast my vote.

2024
As usual, am commited to voting for the Democratic nominee—no matter whom it is nor how much I may have to hold my breath while voting. I don't like it when Non-Democratic politicians (Bernie Sanders comes to mind) get a chance at the Democratic nomination, but they too will get my vote if any of them become the nominee for the Democratic party.

I imagine the usual suspects will run again for the Democratic nomination (Bloomberg, Booker, Buttigieg, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Kerry, O'Rourke). I expect Newsome and others to join the crowd. I can't stand half these people, especially Bloomberg, but even he will get my vote if nominated.

And I would still vote for Clinton if she ran again. I still think she'd make a better president than Biden, Trump, or DeSantis (whom I expect will be the Republican nominee).

[Orema]

Was watching the hearings the other night and of course it was all about Trump. At the same time the local affiliate interrupted the hearings with commercials for Republican politicians who proudly claim to be endorsed by Trump (primary voting in my state is coming up on August 2 and we're being bombarded with political commercials). It had a surreal aspect to it, but more than anything I was left with the feeling that nothing will come of these hearings. A few people may be punished (Bannon comes to mind), but not Trump nor his family. And Trump will maintain power with Republicans.

I'll need another escape this political season. Horatio Cane and his team are still looking good (I know, I need to move on). Maybe I'll keep my subscription to Paramount Plus, but it will probably be cheaper to just purchase CSI: Miami on Prime or DVD. Or maybe I'll revisit The Wire, Omar has a wonderful way of putting things in the right perspective.

[Orema]

Michigan Republican candidates for governor, Ryan Kelley, Garrett Soldano, Tudor Dixon and Kevin Rinke at a debate in Grand Rapids, Mich. on July 6. (Michael Buck/AP)


Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) first term has been wracked by turmoil. She has dealt with a bitter backlash over pandemic restrictions, been the subject of a kidnapping plot and sparred repeatedly with former president Donald Trump. She has even taken heat over a private plane flight to visit her ailing father.

But, as the state’s Michigan’s GOP gubernatorial primary nears on Aug. 2, the Democratic governor seems to be sitting comfortably above the chaos among her potential Republican challengers.

Five of 10 Republican candidates were kicked off the ballot last month for submitting fraudulent petition signatures, prompting the best-known among the disqualified, former Detroit police chief James Craig, to run as a write-in candidate.

One of the surviving five, Ryan Kelley, was arrested by the FBI for participating in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Kelley has pleaded not guilty, and an appeals court ruled he can stay on the ballot.

The putative front-runner, Tudor Dixon, is a Grand Rapids conservative commentator who in mid-July held a within-the-margin-of-error lead. She is backed by the wealthy and politically influential Dick and Betsy DeVos (education secretary in the Trump administration). Dixon has fervently courted Trump’s endorsement — so far, unsuccessfully — and embraced plenty of MAGA-friendly issues. (She thinks Trump won Michigan in 2020, even though he trailed Joe Biden by 154,000 votes.)

All this has not exactly aided the GOP dream of unseating Whitmer. A recent Detroit News/WDIV poll showed the governor comfortably ahead of all her challengers in head-to-head match ups, including leading Dixon, 50.7 percent to 40.3 percent.

How could a state once known for producing moderate Republicans get to this point? Michigan, after all, gave us former president Gerald Ford, and governors George W. Romney and William G. Milliken, who, between them, kept the governor’s mansion in GOP hands from 1963 to 1983.

You can partly blame demographics. Many of the old-school Republicans of my parents’ era are dying or are retired (some might say hiding) from active participation. For whatever reason, their courtliness has not survived, perhaps because the swerve at the national party’s top was toward nastiness.

My mother, a staunch Michigan Republican, started worrying about this more than two decades ago. In 2000, watching the Bush-Gore race, she worried that the mean turn politics had taken, as well as intense scrutiny of politicians’ personal lives, would drive good potential candidates away. She wondered, “Who are they going to get to run?”

Now, in the wild Michigan GOP primary and in too many Republican races across the country, instead of men and women of distinction, we get amateurs who cry victim at every opportunity. That includes, astonishingly, when they fail to follow a basic civic rite that earlier generations had little problem handling: collecting petition signatures to win a spot on the ballot.

My mother approached this task with a reverence that matched her activity in our Catholic church’s Madonna Guild. As a child, I remember seeing her big brown clipboard, holding a petition with neat rows of spaces for names, addresses and signatures. When she filled a page, she signed it and turned it into the local party office for verification.

Contrast the care she and other campaign volunteers back then took with the sloppy approach that the disqualified GOP five delegated this crucial task. Lacking the networks that seasoned party veterans could boast, they simply hired petition circulators.

Instead of rounding up real voters, these paid collectors turned in page after page of fake names, not just for governor but for other races. Eye-popping stories have emerged of petitions left sitting out on picnic tables for anyone to walk by and sign.

The irony of this mess is that people in Michigan are fired up to vote. The Detroit News/WDIV poll found that state residents scored 9.2 on a scale of one to 10 when it comes to being motivated to go to the polls. People who consider themselves “strong Democrats” ranked highest, with “strong Republicans” right behind them.

In other words, the ousted Republican candidates didn’t have to cheat: If they’d put the time in, they could have landed on the ballot, legally.

Now contrast the Republican petition debacle with the largely Democratic-supported ballot drive to codify abortion rights in the Michigan constitution this fall collected the most signatures of any initiative in state history.

Although the flood of more than 750,000 signatures has yet to be verified, organizers of the Reproductive Freedom for All campaign are confident they easily met the threshold of 450,000 valid names required to make it onto the ballot.

The professionalism of that signature-collection campaign only underlined the cynical amateurishness of the GOP candidates’ petition effort.

If voters reelect Whitmer this fall, despite the tumult of her first term, it may be because she represents a calmer bet, compared with the alternative. For that, thanks in part will be due to the vanishing of Michigan’s moderate Republicans.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...primary-chaos/
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Whitmer has my vote this year. Too bad she isn't running for POTUS in 2024 (I'm banking that she'll run in 2028— Gretchen for President ). She'd get my vote for POTUS, if only in the primaries. I'd vote for her before voting for Newsome and I like him. I'd probably vote for Whitmer before VP Harris in the POTUS primaries if they ever run against each other.

[JDeere]

I read online that there is a new party..The Forward Party, a mix of dems and repubs and others who are not aligned with their parties ideals, etc.

I'm waiting to see how that pans out before making comments, just found it interesting.

[Soft*Silver]

Originally Posted by JDeere

I read online that there is a new party..The Forward Party, a mix of dems and repubs and others who are not aligned with their parties ideals, etc.

I'm waiting to see how that pans out before making comments, just found it interesting.

I saw that too! I’m wondering how that’s going to pan out and how it will affect voting. I don’t want to see what happened with Hillary and Bernie again. If the people who voted for those two had joined together and voted for one of them Trump would’ve never gotten into office. My fear is that a new forward party with divide votes again. But I guess change must start somewhere….

[nhplowboi]

Trump will be receiving a *tax-break* for Ivana’s golf course grave plot. Per NJ law, the property is now deemed a cemetery & is thus tax-exempt. I have read this a couple of times today. Wow..... could he go any lower?

[Orema]

Originally Posted by nhplowboi

Trump will be receiving a *tax-break* for Ivana’s golf course grave plot. Per NJ law, the property is now deemed a cemetery & is thus tax-exempt. I have read this a couple of times today. Wow..... could he go any lower?

Unfortunately, I think he can go lower, though I can't imagine how.

If nothing else, she was the former wife of a former President and she deserved more than this.