After an eventful previous week, here’s how the first full week of March went for the entire slate of gubernatorial candidates that are gaining such little ground the RGA has already pledged to burn $3.5 million to bail out whoever advances past the primary.
Another Bad Week for James Craig
James Craig just can’t stop racking up the body blows on his apparently extremely lacking leadership skills. Still licking the wounds from getting caught lying about sending a fundraising letter calling Michigan State Police “weak-kneed…underlings,” Craig found himself the target of a “thinly veiled” swipe from Mayor Duggan in his State of the City address. In his update on Detroit’s progress over the past year, Duggan touted the decrease in crime in Detroit after Craig’s retirement, saying plainly, “The first five months of last year before we hired Chief White, it wasn’t good.”
Amazing what happens when you have a chief who tackles crime head-on rather than flees the scene because he’s not certified to do anything about it.
Johnson Threatens to Defund Detroit And Thinks a Quality Democracy Comes From Stripping Cities of the Funding They Need to Conduct Elections
Slash and figure it out later seems to be the name of the game for gubernatorial Republicans. Garrett Soldano vowed to cut Michigan’s budget across the board “every single year over the next eight years when we’re in.” James Craig said funneling taxpayer resources to private schools at the expense of public education would somehow spur school districts to improve, arguing that when “you incentivize progress, magical things begin to happen.”
Now Johnson is following in the same wrong-for-Michigan footsteps of his fellow extreme opponents, releasing an anti-voter election agenda to defund election boards in Michigan cities “such as Detroit” (mhmmm.) for having unbalanced poll books, even though these discrepancies “were marginal in the 2020 election,” are “usually linked to clerical errors,” and “don’t prove fraud occurred” according to experts. Those sapped funds would be then pushed to other cities that meet Johnson’s arbitrary standards. Naturally, the question of how those cash-strapped cities are supposed to conduct future elections wasn’t addressed.
If it sounds familiar it’s because it’s also Johnson’s non-plan for education, a voucher-style funding scheme that seeks to shutter schools and dismantle public education as we know it without “offer[ing] much detail on how that would work.”
Perry Johnson, Ryan Kelley, and Ralph Rebandt’s Triple Date at Mar-a-Lago
As previewed in his endorsement tweet last week, Perry Johnson flocked to Florida to support fellow election conspiracy theorist Matthew DePerno’s bid for Attorney General, standing beside him at Mar-a-Lago cheering on false claims that the election was stolen.
While Johnson did encourage his 11 other competitors to rally around DePerno, especially James Craig, surely he didn’t count on the ones that answered the call to be *this* desperate about it. As Trump called Republican candidates on stage in Florida, Ralph Rebandt somehow made the cut while Ryan Kelley nearly got bodied by Secret Service and had to plead to be allowed to continue his ascent. “You’re running for governor of what?” Brutal.
It’s got to be rough to storm the U.S. Capitol and declare war on your own country for someone who couldn’t even pick you out of a lineup.
Speaking of Sub-Quality Dates…
Look, everyone has the right to find love, but that doesn’t mean you have to lie about it. Johnson opted to do a late Friday news dump on himself last week, posting an old profile of his from LoveCity.com where a blurb presumably written by his past “35 year old” self says that he’s seeking an “extremely attractive” looking woman as young as 21.
Only one problem, the septuagenarian’s math on that is far from quality, as pointed out by Deadline Detroit: “It appears he fibbed about his age. It’s unclear when his profile was posted on the dating site, which started in 1996. Even if it was posted that year, Perry would have been about 48 years old, not 35.”
A man lying? On the internet? Next you’re going to tell us he isn’t 5’11.
