Republicans to retake Michigan State House from Democrats, ending 2022 absolute hegemony over state government

 The Detroit News has Republicans with 57 seats so far in the Michigan State House, Democrats with 45, 8 undecided.

Even if all the undecided go Democrat, that's a 4-seat majority for the Republicans.

Democrats sound the dog-whistle to legal and illegal aliens to go vote, Chinese non-citizen shows them all how to commit vote fraud at a polling place in Michigan

 

The Chinese man – a student at the University of Michigan – cast his ballot on Sunday and then reached out to local election officials later that day in an attempt to get the ballot back, according to a source familiar with the situation. 

The man registered to vote at the polling place on Sunday, the source said. He used his university ID and other documents to demonstrate his residency in Ann Arbor while filling out a same-day voter registration forms, the source said. The Detroit News first reported the details. ... 

 

WELL WHY WOULD HE DO THAT?

He's the sacrificial lamb, that's why. 

All he risks is deportation for committing perjury and vote fraud. But there are millions of people here right now who should be deported for breaking the immigration law but Democrats won't enforce that law. 

That's what's going on here: Don't admit you did it like this lunatic did and presto, nothing to prosecute!

"It is illegal to lie on Michigan voter registration forms, ballot applications, or ballot submission forms."

But there is no mechanism to detect such lying, and Democrats aren't interested in creating one.

The rest of us are chumps, showing up with our drivers licenses thinking our id protects the integrity of the system when the system was deliberately designed with this giant same day registration loophole you could drive the entire communist party of China through.

The whole episode is a vote fraud instruction manual.

I wonder how much they paid him.

It appears that the student’s vote can’t be nullified after the fact and will be counted.

Washtenaw County Clerk Lawrence Kestenbaum told CNN ballots can’t be retrieved once they have gone through the tabulator. Unlike vote-by-mail, ballots cast at in-person voting locations don’t contain any identifying information about the individual voter, making it impossible to determine which one belonged to the student, Kestenbaum said.

“There’s a box of ballots underneath the tabulator and all of the ballots — they all look the same … there’s no way to go back and undo it,” Kestenbaum said in an interview.

Experts said this is a standard election procedure to maintain secrecy. 

The story is here. 

Yeah, let's blame the secret ballot now.

Justin Amash polling at 8%: I'm going to wipe the floor with Mike Rogers lol

 

As he campaigns, Amash said, he encounters few Michigan Republicans who support Rogers outside of his party affiliation or his relationship with Trump.   

“I’m just going to, you know, wipe the floor with him.”  

Quoted here, June 10th.

Peter Meijer wisely dropped out at the end of April.

Trump endorsed Rogers on Monday, March 11th.

 

Yeah no

 

Average US vehicle age is now a record 12.2 years

 

 

The average age of a car on the road is 13.1 years, while trucks sit at 11.6 years, according to the analysis.

Another incompetent FBI sting operation against the vast right wing conspiracy comes a cropper in Michigan

Remember the Hutaree in 2010?

Obama's FBI tried to transform them, a bunch of yahoos living in a trailer park, into some sort of "armed revolt" against the government hot on the heels of protests after passage of Obamacare. 

"Five days away from fundamentally transforming America", lol, meant sending in paid government operatives to fabricate a dangerous political threat to the nation from the right. 

The m/o hasn't changed.

Now the 2020 Wolverine Watchmen Militia conspiracy to kidnap Governor Hitler has unraveled along similar lines, involving FBI infiltration with multiple actors, orchestration, and entrapment, all of which resulted in a lot of "tough talk" from the so-called conspirators, who were high on drugs and alcohol supplied by the FBI, but no planning of a mission, let alone no possession of an independent capacity to carry one out.

Two Defendants Found Not Guilty in Alleged Plot Against Whitmer

Mistrial Declared for Two Others

2 acquitted in alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov... 

 

BLACK EYE FOR DOJ... 

 

Meanwhile in the real world, BLM and Antifa are responsible for $2 billion in riot damage all across the fruited plain in 2020 but the authorities continue to do not one thing about any of them even as BLM leaders have misused funds they raised and lavished it on themselves.

 

Like many so-called January 6th insurrectionists who have been kept locked up for over a year without trial, the two who were acquitted yesterday had been kept locked up for 18 months even though they were ultimately found not guilty. 

The travesty of justice continues in America, at the hands of those entrusted with it.

Abolish the FBI.

LOL, the cops moved in to retake the Ambassador Bridge this morning after the truckers left early, but by 5:30pm it was a stalemate again as the people of Windsor took their place

 

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2022/02/12/ambassador-bridge-blockade-border-protest-windsor-detroit/6764897001/

The FBI rank and file are as bad as the leadership: Close the whole thing down

We keep hearing in FBI's defense that all the problems are at the top, but that the rank and file are God's gift to America.

Well, not in Kalamazoo.

An FBI agent at the center of the investigation into the plot to kidnap and kill Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is accused of smashing his wife's head against a nightstand and choking her after a dispute stemming from their attendance at a swingers' party, according to court records.

More.

Marianne Williamson follower thinks her politics is inconsistent with her own stated religious beliefs

Marianne Williamson’s presidential candidacy shines light on ‘A Course in Miracles’:

Though most of the local study group expressed support for Williamson and her ideas, political scientists are skeptical that she has much of a chance at the presidency and at least one student of the course has reservations.

“I do not agree with her politics,” said Jeff Stephens, 54, of Kingston in Ross County. “I hope people don’t come to our group or ‘A Course in Miracles’ hoping to find that agenda because it’s not political.”

Stephens feels that some of Williamson’s views don’t fit with the teachings of the course. For instance, her plan to pay restitution to the descendants of slaves is about going back to the past and correcting an error that happened decades ago, whereas the course teaches forgiveness and not living in the past, said Stephens, who has been studying the course for a few years.

“I don’t think she’s making a good representative (of the course) as I understand it,” he said. “She’s not telling people about the course, she’s talking politics.”

Michigan's natural gas debacle last week went misreported because of an opaque, indifferent utility and stupid reporters

Over and over again we heard that the facility where there was a fire last week accounted for 64% of the utility's supply of natural gas to its customers in Michigan. And we're still hearing that today in some reports. Unfortunately, this isn't really true. It's unnecessarily alarming. 

The Ray field at Macomb has 41 billion cubic feet of stored natural gas, as only The Detroit News noted at the time, but during a normal winter when Consumers Energy pumps 2.5 billion cubic feet a day, the utility is supplying 150 billion cubic feet in two months' time. It can't all come from Macomb's storage, obviously. It's piped in from all over to be compressed at Macomb and at other stations. The problem isn't the supply, just as the utility indeed kept emphasizing, stating in various reports that Consumers has 300-350 billion cubic feet of stored gas. The problem was too much of the utility's compressor capability (64%) is centralized at Macomb, which they didn't want to emphasize when it suddenly went off-line automatically in the wake of the fire. Examine the news accounts and you will see that the reporters simplistically characterized these details and misled the public.

Critics of Consumers Energy's paltry $3 million in infrastructure spending over the last five years have a point. This utility in Michigan is notorious for spending more dark money than any other to influence politics. Now that they've had this fire, they'll have to spend more on infrastructure, but it remains for Consumers Energy to install more redundancy in its system to prevent against what happened last week. But don't hold your breath. The utility is as unlikely to do what is best for Michigan as reporters are likely suddenly to become more intelligent.

God forbid we have an EMP. I doubt any of this infrastructure would function properly after such an event, redundancy or no.

That's what alarms me. 

Critics call for overhaul after Consumers Energy CEO, who makes $6.8M, asks Michiganders to turn down heat:

On Wednesday night, as temperatures dropped to -43 degrees with the wind chill, Consumers Energy sent an emergency message to Michiganders' cell phones asking them to turn down their thermostats to 65 degrees. 

That followed a similar plea from Consumers Energy CEO Patti Poppe, who reported a Wednesday explosion that damaged a Consumers Energy facility that accounts for 64 percent of its supply. In a Facebook message, Poppe urged Michiganders to "protect the system" by turning down the heat. 

But many Michiganders responded to Poppe's plea with defiance on social media during the emergency, frustrated with being asked to pay ever-increasing rates to a private company that essentially runs a monopoly.

The facility where there was a fire is a compressor facility tasked with the job of pressurizing natural gas for its pipeline network. The facility accounts for 64% of pressurized supply, not 64% of supply, a key detail still not reported clearly in the media, which at the time unnecessarily alarmed the public during a period of dangerous, bitter cold weather. 

Consumers Energy investigates fire that led to state natural-gas alert:

The Ray plant contributes a maximum of 64 percent of the company's daily average of 2.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas to customers. Before gas can be put into the pipeline system, however, it needs to be compressed. The Ray station sits above Consumers' largest underground natural gas storage area with a capacity of 41.2 billion cubic feet of storage. Overall, Ray can compress 117 million cubic feet of gas per day, reaching pressures of 1,800 pounds per square inch. ...

"Most of the damage was on plant two. We have plant one flowing and three mostly has heat-related damage. We are working on that now," [VP Garrick Rochow] said. "Plant three will take maybe three weeks to get back online. Plant two is more significant. It was closer to the fire and flames and heat. It looks like it originated there. It is out for the season, but not going to impact ability to deliver to customers."

The layout of the Ray facility, which was built out over time, is three separate buildings and three separate plants on the site at 69338 Omo Road, in Armada Township. Station No. 3, which was built in 2011, is the largest of the three.

"We don't know what activated the fire gate system," Rochow said. "We are looking at that. We do know that in the process of venting the gas that the natural gas caught fire. There was a fireball like in the pictures. As a precautionary measure, plant 1 and 2 were in operation and fire-gated. Personnel fire-gated the entire facility. When that occurred, probably 50 yards separated the buildings .... gas from plants one and two caught fire."

Rochow said it is unclear why automatic controls vented the system and how the gas caught fire. "We can see the sequence of events but still looking at the reasons," he said. ...

But Rochow said one lesson Consumers might have learned is that the plants might still be too close to one another, given the fact that venting of gas of all stations at the same time led to the fireball igniting everything at once.

"We have systems there and the proximity of the systems has eliminated (favorable) redundancy," he said. "We will learn from it and think about how investments can create more redundancy on that particular site."

News reports don't add up about how much natural gas Michigan's Consumers Energy lost in the 4.5 hour compressor fire

News on the day of the blast had indicated total supply at 350 billion cubic feet, but a day later down to 300 billion cubic feet, without making a single reference to the discrepancy in the light of the explosion and 4.5 hour fire at the Macomb compressor station.

The Detroit News, below, repeats as others have that the site of the fire is where Consumers Energy has 64% of its supply, which would be, theoretically, 224 billion cubic feet of 350 billion cubic feet, if that's truly how much they have. Yet the story below says the Ray Compressor Station, Consumers' largest storage field, has only 41.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas storage. If that's really true, Consumers Energy total supply was never 350 billion cubic feet, let alone 300 billion cubic feet, but barely 64.4 billion cubic feet.

Do you know how far that would go? It certainly wouldn't supply the natural gas needs of Consumers' customer base of 1.8 million. In fact, it would supply just 413,000 average single family households for one year, that's it.

None of these stories add up.

Someone is not telling the truth, either about the real quantity of total available natural gas stored by Consumers Energy for its customers, or about how much gas was lost in the controlled burn, or both. 

The unprecedented and repeated appeals by Consumers Energy and Michigan Governor Whitmer to residents of Michigan to dial back their thermostats to 65F during a massive below-zero blizzard which shut down hundreds of schools and businesses for almost a week suggest that Consumers Energy never had the massive supply it claimed and that Michigan's population was at real risk of disaster. 

Appeals flood consumers: Use less gas after utility fire:

Consumers said the Ray Compressor Station, where the fire occurred, accounts for roughly 64 percent of its supply. ...

The fire erupted at 10:33 a.m. at Consumers Energy's Ray Natural Gas Compressor Station on the 69300 block of Omo Road, north of 32 Mile. ...

Consumers said despite the blast and burn-off of natural gas, the utility had filled 15 large storage facilities with extra supply for their 1.8 million natural gas customers across the state in preparation for winter fuel usage. 

Personnel on hand who handle emergencies at the Ray station contacted emergency responders, who contained the fire while letting it burn until 3 p.m., said Garrick Rochow, the company's senior vice president of operations.

" ... It's the best way to make sure all of the gas is used up," Rochow said of the contained burned [sic, read "contained burn"]. "Next, we'll do a root-cause evaluation ... It's too early to know what caused this." ...

Consumers Energy's Ray Compressor Station on Omo Road, just north of 32 Mile in Armada Township, has 41.2 billion cubic feet of storage. It is the company's largest underground natural gas storage and compressor facility. (Photo: Todd McInturf, The Detroit News) ...

The blast that accompanied the fire was felt miles away. Sherry Ventimiglia lives about two miles from the Ray station, said she thought something had happened to her home.

"It felt like something fell against the house, like a tree or something like that," Ventimiglia said. "It shook the whole house. ... I literally went running through my whole house to make sure nothing had exploded or fallen. It was very intense."

Detroit News: George Soros-funded Sixteen Thirty Fund really is behind Michigan Proposition 2 just as it was behind the anti-Kavanaugh campaign

From the story here:

The Sixteen Thirty Fund is a 501(c)(4) based in Washington D.C. It recently funded Demand Justice, a social welfare organization that executed a massive campaign to oppose the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, airing 3,200 ads against Kavanaugh and receiving $2 million from George Soros to further their efforts. Is this the kind of organization we want meddling in Michigan affairs of such lasting importance?

Michigan's two main universities are now so toxic only a fool would send his kid to either one

UM feels a lot like the USSR for its severe restrictions on freedom of speech and its deliberate encouragement of rat finks.

In wake of Nassar settlement, MSU proposes budget cut as only $39 million of $500 million sex abuse settlement is covered by liability insurance.

The taxpayers ought to demand that their assets be sold and both be burned to the ground.

Detroit News: Almost 700,000 without power in Michigan according to just two power companies

The story is here.

Here's the Consumers Energy outage map, accounting for only about 194,000 customers who lost power today in the wind storm which gusted as high as 64mph here in Grand Rapids (our power never went out, oddly enough, even though our phone and internet did):

Democrats' way of trying to rig Election 2016: 37% of all Detroit precincts showed more ballots as counted by machines than voters as counted by poll workers

The Detroit News reported here:

Of the data available, though, machines tallied at least 388 more ballots, according to a Detroit News analysis of the records. That’s 0.16 percent of the 248,000 ballots cast in the city that voted for Clinton 95 percent to 3 percent over Trump. ... The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes. “There’s always going to be small problems to some degree, but we didn’t expect the degree of problem we saw in Detroit. This isn’t normal,” said Krista Haroutunian, chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers.

Michigan primary turnout yesterday was 19.1% of registered voters

According to the Michigan Secretary of State, 1.405 million votes were cast in primary races yesterday out of 7.36 million registered through the end of July, just 56% of those cast in March.

2.5 million turned out on March 8th in the presidential primary, about 34% of registered voters, smashing an all-time record for a presidential primary set in 1972 at 1.9 million. In excess of 1.33 million of those 2.5 million votes in March were cast for Republicans vying for the presidential nomination finally secured by Donald Trump after Ted Cruz lost in Indiana.

In presidential elections since 1972, turnout nationwide has averaged 74% of those registered but just 53% of the voting age population.

Democrat turnout in Michigan's presidential primary was up 97% over 2008, so how is Donald Trump's big win here caused by Democrat cross-over votes?

The big story in Michigan is that Democrats turned out in force in the closely fought race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. It was a two point race that went down to the wire, won by Bernie by 20,000 votes out of 1.18 million cast.

But the conventional wisdom among Republicans is we're supposed to believe that there were enough large numbers of Democrats left who were energized to cross over and vote for Donald Trump to take him to victory over "real" Republicans like Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Marco Rubio.

This has to be the kookiest theory yet promoted by The Stupid Party.

I think Trump was chosen here by heretofore inactive Republican-leaning voters, not by Democrats.

God knows there's millions out there who never participate in elections. In Michigan we typically have trouble getting turnout to 20% of the voting age population. In presidential election years it averages 18.32%.

Turnout yesterday broke records going back before 1980, at 34%.  

Republican turnout was up over 30% from 2012, and over 50% from 2008, but Democrat turnout was up a whopping 97% over 2008 when Hillary and Obama famously duked it out.

A total of 601,219 votes were cast in the 2008 Democrat Primary, but in 2016 1.18 million. (There was no Democrat primary here in 2012. It was a pro-forma caucus in which 195,058 votes were cast, the vast majority for the incumbent president Barack Obama.)

Democrats were too preoccupied yesterday fighting over Hillary and Bernie to care much about Donald Trump.

That's the good news for Trump supporters, and the bad news for his Republican opponents. Donald Trump is remaking the Republican Party with support from people who appreciate his issues and strong leadership instead of theirs: manufacturing jobs, illegal immigration and trade.

Yesterday they came out of the woodwork to vote for him.

The Detroit News adopts Mitt Romney's talking points against Trump ahead of the primary, but still won't tell us how it really feels

Here, calling him an opportunist, shallow, delusional, volatile and a fraud.

What, that's all?

How it holds back I can hardly tell!

"He may not be a racist, misogynist, nativist xenophobe. But too often he sure sounds like one."

Come on, why don't you tell us how you really feel, Nolan?

Cowards. Just like Romney.

The Detroit News calls the libertarian Freedom Caucus "brats", wants Boehner back at least temporarily

Here:

"Too many House Republicans have taken their eyes off the prize. Rather than craft a patient strategy to position themselves as the party of adult leadership in a broken Washington, they have become battling brats intent on mounting quixotic fights they can’t win in the interest of proving their conservative cred."

The Detroit News says GOP malcontents weakened John Boehner's hand in dealing with Obama

Rep. Justin Amash, MI-3, a ringleader of the malcontents

Here:

Boehner has been no pushover for the Obama administration. He has staked out tough, rational positions on issues important to conservatives. But his hand has been weakened in negotiating with the White House because he has lacked the full support of such a large portion of his caucus, those members who feel symbolic fights over principle are more important than long-term victories.