One nut job out

[Crackpot]

http://michiganradio.org/post/judge-kar ... ly-elected

Judge: Karen Spranger out as Macomb County clerk, was not legally elected
By EMMA WINOWIECKI • 59 MINUTES AGO

Karen Spranger is no longer the Macomb County Clerk and Register of Deeds.

A judge ruled Tuesday that Spranger was not legally elected, and therefore can no longer serve in the position she has held since 2016. The decision is effective immediately.

St. Clair County Judge Daniel Kelly ruled that Spranger lied about her residency in election filings. Court filings state that Spranger listed a home in Warren as her residence, but Macomb County officials argued that the house was uninhabitable, since it had no running water or electricity. The house was subsequently found filled chest-high with trash and with wild animals using it as shelter.

Spranger claims she was too poor to have utilities.

John Schapka is Macomb County corporation counsel. He says a majority vote by Macomb County's circuit court judges will choose Spranger's replacement. That person will hold office until the next election, in November.

Spranger's term was not short on controversy, to say the least. From multiple lawsuits to restraining orders to court order violations, Spranger's erratic behavior has earned press attention since before she took office.

[RayThom]

I bet she's a cat hoarder, too.

[Crackpot]

I’m surprised you didn’t go for the picture of her decked out in tin foil at a city council meeting.

[Crackpot]

this article gives the judges ruling and a brief rundown of her time in office

At the bottom of this one has a list of “full coverage”links whose length alone will give you an idea of what we’ve been dealing with.

FYI There are multiple ad breaks within the full coverage links.

[Crackpot]

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/mac ... ave-office

Oh dear there are more.

[Lord Jim]

How did this prize get elected in the first place?

[Crackpot]

In a word Trump. Even then she won by the slimmest margins

[Crackpot]

I am waiting to hear about the US Marshals coming to take over the country Government tho.

[BoSoxGal]

That pic of her looks like she has meth mouth . . . or alternatively, Mountain Dew mouth . . .

[BoSoxGal]

Yikes, skimming some of those articles gave me PTSD flashbacks from my own time dealing with rednecks in county politics.

[Crackpot]

The thing is Macomb isn’t exactly “redneck” it’s the 3rd largest county in Michigan right next to the other two largest.

[Scooter]

It sounds like Froot Loops Central. Note the date - long before the whack-a-doo in question had time to make her mark. Worth reading through for the cast of nutbars that have been elected to run this funny farm.

Macomb County politics in a class by itself — for weirdness

By Jack Lessenberry
Published on Nov. 18, 2016

WARREN, Mich. — Finally — if this year’s presidential election wasn’t wacky enough, look at what may just be the politically craziest county in Michigan, if not the planet.

That would be Macomb County, the state’s third largest, a place of 850,000 people, small cities, sprawling older suburbs, and, in the north, farm country.

Plus very, very bizarre politics.

For starters, take Jim Fouts, the mayor of Warren, the county’s largest city. Three years ago, video surfaced of the mayor, then 71, and his 27-year-old executive assistant apparently having a romantic tryst in Chicago.

What was especially controversial about that was that soon after the trip, the mayor gave the assistant a huge raise.

Prior to that, the mayor had been known mainly for unsuccessfully battling in the courts to try to conceal his age from the public, and from a strong obsession with Frank Sinatra, whose music he had piped into city offices.

You might think this was political suicide, but things are a little different in Macomb. Last year, the good people of Warren re-elected Mr. Fouts, who got 85 percent of the vote.

Soon afterward, the city gave him a 14 percent raise, and voters then changed the law so that he could run for a fourth term next year.

Back in 2000, a jury found longtime Macomb Sheriff William Hackel guilty of raping a 25-year-old young woman at a Michigan Sheriffs’ Association meeting. Hackel, who left her hotel room and went to dinner with his wife afterward, argued that the sex was consensual.

But he went to prison, and the post was soon filled by … his son, Mark Hackel, a Democrat who today is the county executive. “Family ties have played an extraordinary role in this county’s politics for a few decades,” said Chad Selweski, a journalist whose blog “Politically Speaking” is usually recognized as the best source of news about Macomb.

There is “a sense of entitlement,” among the county’s politicians, he said, which features entrenched families and “close-knit cliques, almost mafia-like in their approach, that reward loyalty and punish freelancing of any kind.”

Macomb wasn’t always this way. Prior to the 1950s, it was a sleepy agricultural area with a county seat, Mount Clemens, known mostly for its mineral baths.

But when Detroit’s white population began to flee to the suburbs, blue-collar workers tended to go northeast to Macomb; white-collar ones west, to Oakland County.

When John F. Kennedy edged Richard Nixon for president in Michigan in 1960, he did so largely by racking up 62 percent of the vote in Macomb, his best showing in any large suburban county in the nation.

However, things changed dramatically in 1980, when blue-collar workers nationwide swung to Ronald Reagan, and the national media fastened on the so-called “Reagan Democrats” of Macomb as their symbol.

Some stories depicted Macomb residents as culturally boorish ethnic whites, largely of Polish or Italian extraction, who don’t much like people of color. But that’s a caricature.

President Obama carried the county twice, and in 2013, Macomb residents voted to support the Detroit Institute of Arts. But there was a big backlash this time. Many Macomb residents clearly didn’t like Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump got 54 percent of the Macomb vote; his plurality of 48,348 was almost four times his statewide margin.

Macomb voters also dashed the region’s hopes for a bus-based regional transit system that would have unified city and suburban buses and added a new fleet of fast ones to Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

More than 60 percent of Macomb voters said no, killing it.

But races like the transit proposal and the presidency of the United States weren’t where the excitement was in Macomb County this year. The real action was the race for … public works commissioner, the person who oversees water and sewer infrastructure in the county.

U.S. Rep. Candice Miller, a Republican with a totally safe seat in Congress, gave it up to run for the job, taking on a longtime incumbent, Democrat Anthony Marrocco.

The campaign was bizarre, expensive, and nasty, Final figures are expected to show that at least $3 million was spent on this obscure race.

If you want a sample of the tone, Mr. Selweski reported that “the Miller campaign demanded that Marrocco pay back the $66,000 in attorney fees … spent on defending the public works commissioner in a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a girlfriend/​stripper he hired to work in his office.”

For her part, Ms. Miller denied her rival’s claim that she doesn’t have a college degree because “she got knocked up in high school.” In the end, Ms. Miller won.

That wasn’t the weirdest outcome by far, however. Macomb Republicans nominated a woman named Karen Spranger for county clerk. She has no government experience, except the kind that comes from not paying your property taxes on time. Her house has no running water and is in foreclosure.

Larry Rocca has also been frequently late with his taxes and has a long history of legal financial troubles.

Those include defaulting on a personal loan and being fined by the state for improperly handling real estate accounts.

The voters elected him treasurer.

“How to explain it? You can’t,” Mr. Selweski said. “It’s Macomb County politics. It’s a mystery.”

[Crackpot]

The only real argument I have there is the guilt by association with Mark Hackel. The man has done a good job since appearing in the local political scene (where his name nearly did him in.)

[RayThom]

Welcome to Macomb County -- known for its mineral baths... and shallow gene pools.

How can our Fouts & Hackel Tourist Agency help you?

[BoSoxGal]

The thing is Macomb isn’t exactly “redneck” it’s the 3rd largest county in Michigan right next to the other two largest.

Plenty redneck enough if they voted for Trump & that nutjob clerk, too!

[Crackpot]

No they’re working class. You know the the group that both sides take for granted and screw at the expense of whatever the major parties cause of the moment is. They are fed up with “establishment politics” because the establishment has proven not to give a shit about them. They are the people the Democrats lost (either by low turnout or defection that gave Michigan to Trump and the county seat (barely) to Spranger.

But it is so much easier to disparage people than to understand them.

[BoSoxGal]

Right; except I’m from a solid working class background and didn’t vote for Trump - along with millions of other working class people who are frustrated with the system and feeling left behind by the politicians.

So easy to generalize all of a class under one umbrella of thought, rather than recognize that a spectrum exists within any socioeconomic class of people.

[Lord Jim]

Plenty redneck enough if they voted for Trump & that nutjob clerk, too

Apparently, those "rednecks" voted twice for Obama:

(From the article Scooter posted)

President Obama carried the county twice...

...Donald Trump got 54 percent of the Macomb vote; his plurality of 48,348 was almost four times his statewide margin.

What that clearly shows is that if Hillary Clinton had been only slightly better at appealing to working class white voters, (voters that Obama was able to appeal to; voters that I see she continues to publicly malign... ) she would have won Michigan...

(And I'm sure if we did a similar drill down for Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, we would find similar results)

In retrospect, knowing what we know now, the biggest favor Jim Comey could have done for the Democratic party, (and the country) would have been to recommend that she be indicted for her use of an unauthorized email server to store classified information...

If that had happened, she most likely would have had to resign from the ticket, and the DNC would probably have replaced her with Joe Biden, (who would have had an appeal to minorities at least equal to Hillary's without her toxic impact on working class whites) who would most likely have then gone on to win the Presidency...

I am certainly no Joe Biden fan, but that would have at least spared us the experience of The Trump Pseudo-Presidency...

Something that Hillary showed herself unable to do...

[Crackpot]

I didn’t vote for Trump either but given the dearth of options I could see how people could choose either to vote differently or just stay home.

[Crackpot]

latest

Macomb leaders push judges for "stability" as ousted clerk claims "insurrection"
By SARAH CWIEK • 4 HOURS AGO

The twists keep coming in the case of ousted Macomb County Clerk Karen Spranger, as the county’s elected leaders gathered Tuesday to call for “stability” and urge that Spranger’s current temporary replacement remain in office until the November election.

This came as Spranger appeared to attempt to regain her office by filing court documents addressing Gov. Snyder, President Trump, and others “to report a crime of Constitutional violation of the overthrow of my Constitutional offices.”

Macomb County’s chief judge picked employee Kathy Brower to fill in for Spranger last week, after a St. Clair County judge ruled her election invalid because Spranger apparently lied about living in Macomb County when she filed to run for office.

The entire Macomb Circuit Court bench is set to pick Spranger’s official interim replacement this month. But the county’s elected leaders want the judges to keep Brower on until voters choose a new clerk in November.

“I think the consensus is the fairest thing to do would be to maintain that stability,” said Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel. “Because you know the instability and the challenge that office faces right now. That would be the right thing to do on behalf of the employees, as well as the public.”

Hackel said Brower, who did not attend Tuesday’s press conference, has no interest in running for the clerk’s job. He suggested that keeping her on until November has another plus: forestalling an interim clerk who would then have an incumbent’s advantage going into the election.

“If you appoint somebody or put somebody else in that position, giving them that incumbency status or that edge--boy, especially somebody who’s going to be there in charge that elections office--that’s a challenge,” Hackel said.

Hackel says he’s “shared my thoughts” on the matter with Chief Judge James Biernat, but denied that he’s putting any political pressure on the judges by going public with them. “It’s not pressure. We’re just giving a suggestion as to what we think would be the fairest thing,” he said.

Hackel did repeatedly express his displeasure with longtime former county clerk Carmella Sabaugh, suggesting that by delaying her retirement “until the last minute,” she prevented other viable candidates from entering the race and paved the way for Spranger’s razor-thin victory over former County Commissioner Fred Miller.

He also suggested Sabaugh and Miller coordinated Sabaugh’s late exit in a “conspiracy” to clear the field for Miller. “A conspiracy doesn’t necessarily mean it’s illegal,” Hackel said. “There was a conversation between the two that decided to make this happen. Anybody who doesn’t think that’s a reality, well, I think you’re fooling yourself.”

According to the Macomb Daily, Miller plans to make the case that he should be appointed interim clerk because Spranger's candidacy was ruled invalid, making him the only eligible candidate on the last ballot.

Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith, Sheriff Anthony Wickersham, Treasurer Lawrence Rocca, and Public Works Commissioner Candice Miller also joined Hackel’s push to keep Brower on, echoing his calls for stability after Spranger’s chaotic 15-month tenure.

After the county officials made their thoughts public, Chief Judge Biernat released a statement acknowledging “the interests of all parties in ensuring a smooth transition in the Clerk’s Office.” He also stressed that by law, the county’s 14-member Circuit Court bench will make the final decision.

“The Judges take this responsibility very seriously, and we are planning on conducting a public meeting to discuss the selection of a new Clerk in an open and transparent manner,” Biernat said. “I can assure you that the Judges have not yet made a decision regarding this appointment.”

The statement also included comments from Brower, saying she “has no interest in running a political campaign” and plans to “stay away from politics and do what is needed.”

Meanwhile, Spranger filed a document in her ongoing federal conspiracy lawsuit Tuesday. Titled “Administrative claim notice of administrative overthrow of a constitutional office clerk of court of Macomb County by Rogue County Agents," it references a “Constitutional Bounty Hunter” with a North Carolina address. She requests an “immediate investigation and audit” into “possible crimes…by those public officials who are in insurrection and rebellion and who have gone on strike against the constitution.”

“My position has now been overthrown by several department heads in the county in direct violation of the charter and this state constitution as listed below,” Spranger wrote.

Macomb County Corporation Counsel John Schapka told the Detroit Free Press the document “is neither a pleading, nor a motion nor any other filing recognized by the court,” and “constitutes nothing more than conclusive evidence of a disorderly mind.”