Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) and Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney haven’t always seen eye to eye on the rescue of the auto industry that saved hundreds of thousands of American jobs. Romney has held several positions on the topic: he wrote an editorial calling on the government to “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” before the rescue occurred, then attempted to claim credit for the rescue after it succeeded. He then re-upped his opposition in a Let Detroit Go Bankrupt 2.0 editorial ahead of Michigan’s Republican primary this year.

Throughout it all, Snyder’s opposing view has been clear. Like other Michigan Republicans, Snyder supported the rescue and has applauded its success. Today, though, Snyder dismissed Romney’s opposition, telling Fox News host Neil Cavuto the rescue is “history”:

SNYDER: The auto bailout issue, it’s overblown in my view. It was a very important thing, it got done, it could have been done otherwise. The main point with that is, it got done, it’s history –

CAVUTO: But Mitt Romney was against it. Maybe for all the right reasons, but in a state like yours, could it hurt him?

SNYDER: He talked about different ways to do it, and the point is, it could have been done different ways. But that’s all history. It’s behind us.

Snyder has ignored his differences with Romney on the issue before. When he endorsed Romney before the state’s primary, he didn’t mention Romney’s opposition to the rescue or the jobs it would have cost Michigan and the country.

Romney contends that the private sector should have stepped in and saved General Motors and Chrysler, pushing them toward the managed bankruptcy they eventually went through. But that position ignores the simple fact that government stepped in precisely because the private sector refused to do so. Other Republicans, auto industry insiders, and reporters who covered the auto industry have all dismissed Romney’s view as “reckless,” “dishonest,” and “pure fantasy.”

As they kick off the Republican National Convention in Tampa Bay, Florida, this week, Republicans will be descending upon the city with the nation’s highest rate of homelessness, as CBS News noted:

As Republicans gather for their national party convention in Tampa, they will be aware of the stormy weather but may not see another issue clouding the city.

The Tampa-St. Petersburg metropolitan area has the highest rate of homelessness in the nation, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness in a report issued earlier this year — 57 homeless for every 10,000 residents.

There are about 16,000 homeless people in the Tampa area, and one in five of them are children.

Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney has not laid out any plans when it comes to combating homelessness. However, back in April, an NBC News reporter overheard Romney telling rich donors that he may eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which would bring an end to critical programs like Section 8 housing vouchers and community development block grants, assuming Romney didn’t just shuffle them around to another department.

The budget crafted by Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), could cause housing assistance to disappear for about one million households, according to HUD. GOP Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) has also shown little sympathy for his state’s homeless population, proposing to completely zero out funding for homelessness prevention programs.

Meanwhile, the 2009 Recovery Act, almost uniformly opposed by Republicans, saved thousands of Americans from homelessness.

Tropical Storm Issac continues to bear down on the Gulf Coast on Monday, with the National Hurricane Center predicting that it will become a Category 1 hurricane before it makes landfall. There’s a chance that the storm will hit New Orleans nearly seven years to the day that Hurricane Katrina decimated the city.

Republicans have largely canceled the first day of the Republican National Convention in Tampa Bay, Florida, due to the storm, which swiped southern Florida yesterday. But in 2011, House Republicans displayed far less concern for the victims of natural disasters, attempting to slash funds for disaster preparedness and response, as Slate’s Dave Weigel noted at the time:

According to the House Appropriation Committee’s summary of the bill, the [GOP's 2011 continuing resolution] funds Operations, Research and Facilities for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association with $454.3 million less than it got in FY2010; this represents a $450.3 million cut from what the president’s never-passed FY2011 budget was requesting. The National Weather Service, of course, is part of NOAA — its funding drops by $126 million. The CR also reduces funding for FEMA management by $24.3 million off of the FY2010 budget, and reduces that appropriation by $783.3 million for FEMA state and local programs.

House Republicans several times that year held disaster relief hostage, demanding that the funding be offset with spending cuts elsewhere in the budget. The GOP pulled the same trick when Missouri was hit by a deadly tornado in May, when Virginia was affected by an earthquake, and when Hurricane Irene struck America’s east coast.

Republicans eventually struck a deal with Democrats as part of last August’s Budget Control Act that should make it easier to fund disaster relief. However, the House Republican budget reneged on that agreement, setting the stage for more disaster relief shenanigans when the country can least afford political games.

A New Jersey city often described as the most dangerous in the country will no longer have its own police force, as a crunched state budget has intensified an effort to reduce costs by busting the local police union. Camden, New Jersey ranks among the most crime-ridden cities in America — in 2008, it had the nation’s highest crime rate — and this year, it is on pace to set a national record for shootings and murders.

The city, however, will lay off its entire police force by the end of the year. Law enforcement duties will instead fall to a newly established division of the county police force. Unlike Camden’s city police, the county department is not unionized, and though roughly half of the city’s police officers will transition to the county department, they will lose their collective bargaining rights. The changes, Camden police officials say, is an attack on the police union, FoxNews.com reports:

“This is definitely a form of union-busting,” Camden Fraternal Order of Police President John Williamson told FoxNews.com. “This method is unproven and untested, to put your faith in an agency that doesn’t even [yet] exist.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) endorsed the plan to transition Camden’s police to county control and specifically mentioned contract disputes in a recent speech. “A county police force that has a reasonable contract, and that’s going to provide a huge increase in the number of police officers on the streets here in Camden, is a win for everybody,” Christie said at a recent event at Rutgers-Camden University, where he signed a reform bill for higher education. “I’m willing to put my name on the line for this concept.”

Christie has made his disdain for the state’s public unions clear since taking office. He signed anti-union legislation that made sweeping changes to pension and health benefits and temporarily limited collective bargaining rights in 2011. He has also made the outlandish claim that “unions are trying to break the middle class.” His budget cuts caused the layoff of 4,000 police officers last year, leaving cities like Camden and Newark unable to respond to vehicle accidents and small crimes. Cities across the state have either disbanded or made substantial cuts to their drug units.

Across the country, budget cuts like Christie’s have nailed local police forces, causing the layoffs of more than 56,000 cops since 2009. And in many states, like Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, and New Jersey, those budget cuts have been coupled with attacks on public sector unions, as the GOP attempts to use fiscal distress as an excuse to advance its anti-labor agenda.

During an interview published on Monday by Politico, Mitt Romney praised one of his favorite business leaders, Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman. According to Politico, Romney said that his cabinet “would be dominated by people from the private sector, citing Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard as a model for female leaders he would like to surround himself with.”

This isn’t the first time that Romney has pointed to Whitman — who is also the former CEO of Ebay and a former California gubernatorial candidate — as a leader to emulate. But at the moment, Whitman is presiding over a company in free-fall. HP just suffered its largest quarterly loss ever and is shedding tens of thousands of jobs:

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) posted a record (HPQ) quarterly loss and reported slumping sales for personal computers and services aimed at businesses, underscoring the turnaround challenge facing Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman.

The fiscal third-quarter loss of $8.86 billion includes a writedown for the enterprise-services unit and reflects a 10 percent decline in PC revenue…Whitman is cutting 27,000 jobs over two years.

During her unsuccessful 2010 run for California’s governorship, Whitman released a slew of half-baked economic plans. These included a proposal to balance the Golden State’s budget that, according to a ThinkProgress analysis, wouldn’t come anywhere close to actually balancing the budget.

While at Ebay, Whitman succeeded in boosting net income, but eventually left the company crippled due to disastrous acquisitions: “A year after Whitman bailed on eBay, the stock had sunk so low that employees were left holding onto stock options that would actually cost more than than eBay’s market stock price, making them worse than worthless.” Before moving to Ebay, Whitman was CEO of FTD.com, where she oversaw a fifty percent drop in business during her two-year tenure. And evidently this is the sort of experience Romney would like to bring to the federal government.