Michibash alive and well at Mackinac Center, Detroit News

Remember when Mike Bishop would go on tv and stomp his foot and complain about everything? “Michigan sucks! No one should come to Michigan! Everything sucks! This Governor sucks! And she has stupid hair!” He just made you feel bad about being in Michigan?

Remember that? Well based on what the Governor said at the #misots a few weeks ago, I thought those days were gone.

But you can always count on Nolan Finley and the Mackinac Center to pee in your cheerios.

Sources close to Raleigh Studios in Pontiac told me Wednesday that the owners have not made their required monthly escrow set-aside payments since October, and won’t have the money to meet their biannual bond obligation when it comes due Feb. 1.

…

That’s because the deal quarterbacked by former Gov. Jennifer Granholm in 2009 made the state employee pension funds the guarantor of the $18 million in bonds sold to help build the $80 million studio, located inside the abandoned facilities of the old General Motors Centerpoint truck complex

Here we go with the “sources close to …” He must be campaigning for a show on Fox “Sources say ..” News. But I digress.

So after the hand-off by Finley, The conservative Mackinac Center takes the ball and runs with it, using Finley’s article as basis for their own article titled “Michigan’s Solyndra.”

Insert eye roll.

The Republicans kill the business incentives, chase business away, and then call it Granholm’s failure. Even Senator Randy Richardville (barf) wasn’t comfortable with this:

“A few years ago we told some Michigan investors that if they invest in an industry that we would back them. And we gave them parameters and now we’ve changed that. We sent several businesses away that would help recoup that investment.”

There is no denying that Raleigh will miss it’s next payment. It expects to make its August payment as well as reimburse the pension fund, and it is in no danger of closing. The Republicans don’t tell you that part, nor do they tell you that Rick Snyder is defending the film credit cuts with faulty and disingenuous logic. The most glaring example: Snyder said it was better to fund Pure Michigan, because it has a higher return on investment than the film credits. What Snyder didn’t tell you is that Pure Michigan has been in action since 2006 and did not go national until Governor Granholm approved $45 million in funding in 2009.

Good thing Snyder wasn’t in charge in 2006, or we wouldn’t have Pure Michigan either.

But Snyder must know that, as must Finley and of his like-minded goofballs at the Mackinac Center.

Meanwhile, Marvel Studios took The Avengers out of Detroit and went to Ohio, where they offer incentives up to 35%. And that’s not the only movie we lost.

If these were auto jobs, Republicans would be insisting that the workers make concessions so that Michigan would get the business. But since they are movie production jobs, Republicans are insisting that the employer has to “make their own business plan.”

This is just one more case of Republicans suffocating a new business and then using it as a political tool as it struggles to breathe. Meanwhile the rest of the film-making industry is looking at us wondering wtf we’re doing.

For the Republicans, Michibash just never gets old.

I don't just blog policy. I MOCK IT.

Christine

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