Gretchen Whitmer?

Floyd Robertson wrote:Bridge has done a few articles lately on the population problem facing Michigan, now Whitmer has plans.

Gov. Whitmer plans group to tackle Michigan’s population crisis

Over the last couple of years I've really been thinking about packing it in and moving up north year-round, but this population problem (and a housing crunch up there) have me wondering.

Floyd Robertson wrote:

Trapper Gus wrote:

Looks more like she has a plan to have a plan.

Even planning to have a plan is better than burying your head in the sand.

AvgMSUJoe wrote:

Trapper Gus wrote:

It has been more like willfully ignoring the issues. With gas taxes most likely falling over the next period of time and not being enough anyway a different way to fund the roads is needed. Toll roads suck, btw. Bay City has switched two of the four bridges over the river to toll bridges which just forces more traffic onto the free ones.

I wonder how much per household the bridges would have been? (My guess is less then 4-5 trips over the new bridges.)

MACKINAC ISLAND – A Republican businessman and a Democratic education leader will lead Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s new group focused on developing strategies to reverse decades of Michigan’s stagnant population growth.

Whitmer formally announced the effort Thursday at the Mackinac Policy Conference, naming John Rakolta and Shirley Stancato as co-chairs of the new 28-member “Growing Michigan Together Council” that will include other business, labor and education officials.

By picking bipartisan leaders who have worked together before to solve problems in Detroit, Whitmer said she hopes to take “politics out of the conversation so that we can be focused with a team Michigan mentality.”

kingstonlake wrote:

GRR Spartan wrote:Don’t recall a Gov Graham. (Corrected)

I still remember the female MI Gov. the state GOP said caused The Great Recession.

I was calling Grandholm little Graham as opposed to big Greatch.

AvgMSUJoe wrote:Gov Jenny had a lot of shit to deal with in her time. I don't blame her for most things. Engler clean up, Recession and the (gerrymandered) divided govt...

TravelinMan wrote:Jenny from the Block was a disaster, but I like Big Gretch very much. Would vote for her again.

Cameron wrote:When you think about it, isn't every Democratic failing ultimately the fault of Republicans?

Jenny from the block is a reference to a J-Lo song.

InTenSity wrote:That article is fucking weird.

Floyd Robertson wrote:

AvgMSUJoe wrote:A random national news hit piece... must be making them nervous. (Zero content, of course.)

On MSN's front page...America Should Be Scared of Gretchen Whitmer

Until recently I had msn as my home page, mostly because it was a quick link to their financial stuff. I noticed the home page started giving more and more space to fox and crap like 1945. I left them last week. Bye bye bye.

AvgMSUJoe wrote:I have the DuckDuckGo search bar. Fuck the algorithms.

When Gretchen Whitmer first emerged as the likely Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan, in late 2017, the mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, circulated a memo urging labor unions and Democrats to find a better-known figure to lead the ticket. Duggan wanted Senator Gary Peters to run; the United Auto Workers preferred Representative Dan Kildee. But neither member of Congress wanted anything to do with Lansing. Mark Bernstein, a politically connected Ann Arbor personal-injury lawyer, recalled that, while watching a University of Michigan basketball game at Duggan’s house, the Mayor tried to persuade him to get in the race. By the end of the primary, Whitmer had outlasted the established alternatives, and went to Detroit to meet with the leaders of the U.A.W. (“Big talkers,” a Whitmer insider called them.) The word was that the union and its allies were prepared to spend two million dollars on the election. “Let’s ask them for $3.5 million,” Whitmer told her campaign staff. “They’re the last ones on board—what can they say?” At the meeting, according to an aide, the U.A.W. pledged to give her the whole bundle.[

...

Last November, Whitmer tied her candidacy to a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion and won reëlection by ten points, sweeping the suburbs so convincingly that the Democrats gained control of both houses of the Michigan legislature for the first time in forty years.  (With Dixon as a foil Big Gretch would have won by this much without the abortion amendment on the ballot - it is sad to see gaslighting by The NewYorker - TG)

Since then, Whitmer’s Democratic majority has allocated more than a billion dollars to support the auto industry’s green transition; quintupled a tax credit for poor families; repealed a law that made Michigan a right-to-work state; and enacted new protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people. After a forty-three-year-old local man went on a shooting spree at Michigan State University, in February, killing three students, some modest, if hard-won, gun-control measures were put in place. “I don’t know that we’ve ever watched the legislature go as quickly as they have,” Maggie Pallone, a public-policy analyst in Lansing, said earlier this year, in an article in the Detroit News. Similar breakthroughs have come in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. What’s happening in the Midwest, one of Whitmer’s advisers told me, is a “Tea Party in reverse.”

(And The NewYorker is trolling MSU Fans - WTF?  TG)

No plan is as central to the ambitions of the Biden Democrats, in terms of both policy and politics, as the creation of a clean-energy economy. “Governor Whitmer uniquely understands that we can build an industrial commons here,” Brian Deese, who was the director of Biden’s National Economic Council, told me. “If we don’t invest in the manufacturing processes to produce these technologies, then we wind up hollowing out that capability and having supply chains that are unacceptably reliant on China.” But the Transition is also an effort to rebuild the “blue wall,” the Democrats’ stronghold on Midwestern states, which frustrated Republicans’ Presidential hopes for two decades. Damon Silvers, the policy director and special counsel of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said, “It is hard to overstate what is happening in Michigan, because, if electric-vehicle manufacturing is done union and is able to sustain middle-class families again, those families will vote for Biden, and then the U.S. stays in the Paris Agreement. And, if they don’t, then you get some version of Trump again and it all falls apart.”