Michigan has possibly the worst governor in America.
I was talking to my brother, who lives just south of Flint, about this yesterday, when we talked for Easter. They usually drive down to Southfield on holidays to visit with his wife’s family, but couldn’t do it due to the lockdown order.
She’s not up for re-election until 2022, but maybe she could be recalled. But she’s also on the list to be Biden’s running mate, because she has the right number of X chromosomes. Not at all clear that she would strengthen the ticket in MI, though, in the wake of this tyrannical idiocy.
[Late-morning update]
As George Turner notes in comments, there’s a very popular recall petition at Change.org.
[Update a while later]
More at Redstate.
[Update a few minutes later]
Wow, the signatures are coming in more than one per second. My brother, his wife, and their two kids have signed. My question is, is there a legal recall procedure? I don’t think this petition has any legal weight.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here is the procedure. The petition has to first be approved, then needs 25% of the people who voted in the last general election in the state. Looks like it would force a gubernatorial election in November, in which she’d have to defend her office against challenger(s).
[Update a couple minutes later]
This is the official manual for how do it. There were four and a quarter million votes in 2018, so the petition would need a little over a million signatures. Based on the Change.org petition, that seems doable.
[Update a few minutes later]
She’s not the only one; this is exposing the little tyrants all over the country.
[Update early afternoon]
These petty authoritarians are getting out of hand.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Michigan business people: Why is our state different?
Because your state elected a moron in 2018 as governor.
[Update a while later]
While Trump rants, it’s the governors who are being the Captain Queegs.
While she doesn’t come up for reelection until 2022, most of her supporters in the legislature ARE up for reelection in November. I hope Republicans are smart enough to capitalize on that.
The Change.org petition to remove her is up to 167,000 signatures, growing at a rate of 4,000 per hour. The comments on it were interesting.
If Michigan was a war zone, her seed ban would possibly violate Article 54 of the Geneva Convention and constitute a war crime.
Her decisions strike everyone as capricious and arbitrary, if not insane. What she’s likely doing is thinking about behavior and motivations (and virtue signaling) about what people are perhaps intending when they do something that could spread the virus, instead of focusing on what spreads the virus. So she’s taken upon her precious self the task of deciding what activities are essential and what are non-essential. But why would the virus care about what she regards as essential? Heck, it probably thinks it’s still infecting bats, because viruses are not noted for intelligence.
So she’s already out in the weeds with the wrong model of what needs fixing, the reason, intent, or “worth” of a behavior instead of the mechanics of the behavior. The smart governors banned large crowds to reduce the number of potential super-spreading events. It makes sense to shut down malls and sporting events (where people gather in large numbers) or perhaps places where there are daily interactions with large numbers of customers (TSA lines would be an example).
Electric linemen would be the other extreme, as they can work all day without getting within 30 feet of anybody, and they’re essential. But as far as virus transmission is concerned, the electric linemen is no different from a person who goes into the woods to take funny wildlife pictures for their Facebook page, or a person who goes fly fishing.
What a smart governor would focus on is risky activity, ones very likely to transmit the virus one-on-one, or somewhat likely to promote mass transmission. The risk times the number potentially infected would be a decent metric, because the goal is to reduce the future number of cases, and to make sure that the cases that do result are easily traceable.
Banning seeds does none of these things. She seems like she’s using emotion instead of reason, that since this is a “crisis” everybody must behave like it’s a crisis, cowering in fear and only doing things that are absolutely necessary. She’s keying on some people’s natural reaction to a particular situation instead of understanding the mechanics of the situation. Well, at any given moment some people are laughing and some people are crying because we’re not all watching the same movie on Netflix. She’s trying to dictate our behavior as if we are. Her attempts to do so will only convince folks that she’s an abusive idiot.
But if Biden wants to pick the Wicked Witch of the West as his running mate, well, we’ll so how that works out for him.
The seeds thing is Captain Queeg territory.
Yes, the petition at change.org is collecting signatures quite rapidly indeed. I wonder how many of the signers are Michigan residents that are eligible to sign an official recall petition though.