I am deeply sorry for any pain that the character I portrayed brought to my communities. As a recent college grad who has spent time working to improve communities and empower those without a voice, this role is not in any way representative of who I am. It was absolutely a mistake on my part and one that, over time, I hope can be forgiven. I feel horrible about my participation and I am determined to resolve my actions.

Even his fellow Republicans roundly criticized Hoekstra for the racially insensitve attack ad, which aired during the Super Bowl and featured Chan in what’s meant to be rural China thanking Stabenow because “we take your jobs.” Former Michigan GOP Chairman Saul Anuzis called the ad “dumb” and in “bad taste.”

Pete Hoekstra

Hoekstra’s ad, which aired during the Super Bowl last weekend, featured an Asian woman in a rice paddy in China — the scene was actually shot in California — speaking broken English and thanking Stabenow because “we take your jobs.” Hoesktra is currently running for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat. Watch the ad here.

ThinkProgress spoke with Anuzis at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday about the ad. Anuzis spared few punches, calling the ad “dumb” and in “bad taste.”

KEYES: There’s been a bit of a controversy this week with this new ad. What’s your take? Do you think it was in poor taste?

ANUZIS: I’m not too worried about the poor taste, I just think it was a dumb ad. Pete Hoekstra voted to raise taxes, Pete Hoekstra voted for the “Bridge to Nowhere,” Pete Hoekstra voted five times to increase the debt ceiling, and then he goes out and leads with his chin by saying, “I’m against Debbie Stabenow because she sold all of our debt to China.” Well, he voted for that debt. [...]

KEYES: A lot of people have said this borderlines on racial insensitivity. Do you think you would agree with that?

ANUZIS: At best it was in bad taste. It’s not something I would have done. But I’m not too worried about that as much as the issues that are behind that. I think the beauty of this ad is the hypocrisy that Pete Hoekstra is trying to go after Debbie Stabenow for spending when he voted the same way.

Anuzis also called out Hoekstra for his “hypocrisy” in voting for many of the proposals that increased the very debt discussed in the ‘China’ ad.

Though Hoekstra originally unveiled the ad on the website www.debbiespenditnow.com, a major backlash ensued and he took down the site yesterday, now redirecting visitors to his campaign website. The ad itself is still live on Youtube, however.

His Republican primary opponent, Clark Durant, released a response ad this week, criticizing Hoekstra’s ad as “demeaning.”

During the 2010 campaign, then-Rep. Zack Space (D-OH) began the recent trend with an ad supposedly depicting a parade in China — the actual footage was of Asian Americans in San Francisco — and a tagline “thanking” his opponent: “As they say in China, xie xie Mr. Gibbs!” An anti-spending front group, Citizens Against Government Waste, followed suit with a cryptic ad raising the prospect that our national debt would cause America’s economic downfall and soon force us to work for the Chinese. Most reprehensibly, Mark Amodei ran an ad in a Nevada special election depicting a Chinese military invasion in front of the U.S. Capitol building as it flies the Chinese flag.

Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), currently running to unseat Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), is the latest to try to stoke anti-Chinese fears for political gain. His new ad, entitled “Now”, shows a woman in what’s meant to be rural China speaking broken English and thanking Stabenow because “we take your jobs.” “Your economy get very weak, ours get very good,” the woman says. “Hoekstra’s mock website hosting the ad features Chinese characters adorned with two Chinese flags. Watch it:

These ads are not-so-subtly intended to provoke nativist fears, and do so by purveying unfortunate stereotypes. Yet despite Hoekstra’s fear-mongering, the fact remains that China still holds just 9.5 percent of the United States’ debt, over four times less than what American bondholders own.

Under the Michigan 2020 Plan, Michigan’s high school graduates will be eligible for free tuition at one of Michigan’s community colleges or universities, where the median tuition level is currently around $9,575 per year. The program will be funded entirely by eliminating $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes and putting that money towards students:

“Study after study after study has emphasized the importance of a highly educated workforce in the economic vitality of any state in the 21st century,” said Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing.

Michigan currently pays out roughly $34 billion in tax credits. Under the Michigan 2020 Plan recently unveiled, $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes would be eliminated. Democrats put the tuition proposal’s cost at least at $1.8 billion. [...]

Under the plan, graduates who spent their entire K-12 years in Michigan schools would be eligible for the full award, which equates to the median tuition level of all public universities — currently $9,575 per year. Those who attended school for awhile outside the state would get a percentage of that amount.

College tuition has tripled in the last 30 years and is only trending upwards. Indeed, college price tags could get as high as $422,000 come 2034. And with student loans increasingly hard to find in a restricted credit market, families could certainly use the help in sending their children to a college close by.

What’s more, Michigan Senate Democrats note that the elimination of $3.5 billion in tax loopholes is only a 10 percent reduction in the tax credits the state already doles out. In fact, the program costs almost exactly as much as the $1.7 billion tax cut Snyder implemented for corporations.

The plan should appeal to Republicans as “it can be done without raising taxes one cent,” said Whitmer. “It’s not about whether Michigan can afford to do this, it’s whether we can afford not to.”

Last year, the School Aid Fund ran a surplus (much like the overall budget for this year). However, GOP Gov. Rick Snyder siphoned off the School Aid Fund’s money “to plug a shortfall in the state’s General Fund.” To assuage infuriated educators, he agreed to a one-time payment of $200 per student, $100 of which was only received if the district adopted “financial best practices” — including school employees paying at least 10 percent of their health insurance premiums.

But now Republicans say that one-time payment is up, and K-12 schools will not have enough money to make up for the loss come next year. Why? As the Kalamazoo Gazette reports, while Republicans were gutting the School Aid Fund, they also passed a $1.6 billion tax cut for businesses that is costing schools $700 million per year, or $500 per student:

New revenues will offset about $1.3 billion of the $1.6 billion business tax cut, said David Zin, an economist for the Senate Fiscal Agency.

But almost all revenues are going into the state’s General Fund rather than the School Aid Fund, which is losing more than $700 million a year from the business tax cut.

In short, while the General Fund gets new revenues to replace money lost from the tax cut, the School Aid Fund does not.

Thus, the School Aid Fund will see its lowest revenues since 1994, according to the state Senate Fiscal Agency. Kalamazoo Public Schools superintendent Michael Rice said that the decrease in funding means “school districts have seen their revenues eroded by about one-sixth since 2005, when taking inflation into account.” “It’s not simply that the School Aid Fund is at its lowest level,” he added. “It’s also that $1 given to us today buys one-sixth less that it did five years ago.”

Of course, prioritizing the wealthy over working Michiganders is nothing new for Snyder and his colleagues. While enacting $1.7 billion in tax cuts for corporations last year, Snyder also “shaved billions of dollars off future health care and retirement commitments,” ended the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, enacted a regressive increase in personal taxes, and cut aid for 11,000 families and nearly 30,000 children.

Surveying this field of foregone responsibility, Mattawan Public School Superintendent Patrick Bird said Republicans “[have] given a huge tax break to corporations, but where are they taking those dollars from?”

Today, the Flint Journal points out that the managers receive six-figure salaries, set by the state and paid for by the local communities, which are all cash-strapped (or else they wouldn’t be subject to emergency managers in the first place). In Flint, in fact, the manager earns more than the mayor earns:

By law, the pay of Michigan’s five emergency managers — ranging from $132,000 to $250,000 — is set by the state, but the money actually is paid by the local communities they’re in charge of. [...]

Mayor Dayne Walling’s was Flint’s highest-paid elected official, receiving $91,800 before [Flint emergency manager Michael] Brown eliminated his pay and benefits and those of city council members.

Brown on Tuesday partially restored Walling’s pay to $55,000 and council members each will receive $7,000 a year.

The Journal points out that law has dictated that local communities pay the salaries of emergency managers since 1990, but Snyder’s expansion of the law means that many more communities have become subject to it than ever before. Activists are working to repeal the law via referendum of through a court ruling.

The measures require some unemployed workers to take new jobs after 10 weeks of benefits even if the available work is outside their previous experience or pays lower wages than they were making before. They also make it harder for someone to collect jobless benefits if they’re fired for cause or leave a job voluntarily.[...]

Snyder disagreed with critics who say requiring jobless workers to take a job paying 120 percent of their weekly benefit could trap them in a low-wage position by leaving them little time to look for work in their area of expertise.

“It’s to encourage people to work. It’s not to have them go backward,” Snyder said of the legislation. “It’s easiest to find a job when you’ve gotten a job.”

This new requirement comes in addition to Snyder’s decision to cut the availability of unemployment insurance from 26 weeks to 20 weeks starting in 2012. The measure also encapsulates Snyder’s priorities over his first year in office — placing the burden on the most vulnerable for the sake of the state’s bottom line. In 2011, he “shaved billions of dollars off future health care and retirement commitments,” proposed ending the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, cut funding for school districts by eight to ten percent, cut aid for 11,000 low-income families and nearly 30,000 children, and enacted a regressive increase in personal taxes — all in the name of the deficit.

Naturally, not all Michiganders were asked to share in such sacrifices — namely, corporations. While more than 1.5 million of his constituents faced poverty, Snyder enacted a $1.7 billion tax cut for corporations, or about “$30 in corporate tax cuts for every dollar saved in welfare benefit cuts.” Indeed, Snyder pushed to cut the state’s business taxes by nearly $2 billion, or 86 percent.

In enacting such preferential treatment for those who need it least, Snyder did earn an impressive recognition in 2011. For his first year in office, Snyder ranked as one of the most unpopular governors in the country.

Michiganders are standing up for this family and trying to help them keep their home. (Credit: Bartosz Kumor)

As winter sets in on Michigan, the Occupy movement is moving into homes — foreclosed homes, that is. With the assistance of a newly formed group Occupy Our Homes, homeowners facing foreclosure in Michigan and across the country are fighting back.

Michigan is one of four states that had over half of the nation’s home foreclosures last month. The same four states (including California, Florida and Illinois) make up only 26% of the country’s population. According to RealtyTrac, 1 in 282 homes in Michigan received a foreclosure notice in October 2011.

Chart courtesy of RealtyTrac.

On Tuesday of this week, as part of a National Day of Action for the Occupy movement, one couple in the Detroit suburb of Southgate, Michigan took a stand against attempts to throw them out of their home. Debbie and Robert Henry, with support and help from the friends, neighbors, community supporters, and allies from Occupy Detroit, announced that they would not comply with any efforts to foreclose on their home or to evict them.

The Henrys have lived in their home near where Debbie grew up for 7 years. The home is now worth less than a third of what they paid for it thanks to collapse of the housing market
fueled, in part, by the very banks responsible for many of the foreclosures across the country. Their mortgage was originally through Countrywide Financial, but was eventually sold to Bank of America. After Debbie had a stroke and lost her job, she and her husband were unable to maintain their payments and attempted to obtain a mortgage loan modification. However,
unbeknownst to them, Bank of America proceeded to sell their mortgage to Fannie Mae rather than working with them to stay in their home. The sale of this mortgage and thousands of
others like it has the ironic effect of transferring the cost of the foreclosure process to American taxpayers. Bank of America, meanwhile, reported a $6.2 billion profit in the third quarter of 2011.

“Our home was our future, and we thought that we’d invested wisely. We were making our payments, even though now it’s worth a third of what we paid for it,” said Debbie, a former
manager at a food services company. “But after I had my stroke, we just couldn’t keep up. We tried to work with the banks to get a fair deal, but they gave us the run-around for years. Now they want to throw us out. I thought they got all this taxpayer money so that families like us could have a second chance.”

About 20 people joined the Henrys at their home yesterday for a rally. Watch it:

Shannon McEvilly, a volunteer organizer with Occupy Our Homes said in a statement, “The taxpayers and citizens of this country are sick and tired of seeing bailed-out bank CEOs make
million dollar bonuses while hard-working, tax-paying families like the Henrys in Southgate get thrown out of their home. When it looked like the whole financial system was going to collapse, we sucked it up and bailed out the banks. We thought that meant they would turn around and do right by homeowners and small businesses. It’s time that banks lived up to their promises and put our community before their profits.”

Family member Suzie Williams, told MLive.com, “They don’t want a handout.
They just want fairness. They don’t deserve to spend their retirement in homelessness. I don’t care what Fannie Mae has to say about it. I will stay here with Debbie and Rob if the bank
comes to kick them out.”

Robert and Debbie hope their campaign leads to a loan modification from Fannie Mae instead of foreclosure, and that it brings attention to the plight of millions of American homeowners in similar situations. The family and their friends announced that they would engage in non-violent civil disobedience, up to and including their arrest, if local authorities attempted to remove them.

RH Reality Check explains that here was never any proof to support an anti-abortion activist’s claim of finding fetal remains in an abortion clinic’s dumpster, but the anti-abortion lobby has nevertheless used the story as an excuse to propose an unprecedented bill about the disposal of fetuses.

Laura Berman of the Detroit News reports that as a result of the bill, one of the first questions hospitals may ask women who have just miscarried or had still births is “what do you want to do with the fetus?”:

In the wake of an Eaton County abortion clinic’s Dumpster scandal, the state Senate passed a package of bills Oct. 20 to ensure the “dignified disposition of fetal remains.” But if the bills would treat fetuses with newfound dignity, they don’t extend the same compassion to those especially vulnerable women who have lost pregnancies in clinics and hospitals. [...]

“I think some women will be devastated,” says Joanne Mulhere, who counsels women undergoing loss of pregnancies at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, where about 175 women lose pregnancies through miscarriage or stillbirth annually. Patients would be handed Kleenex, as well as a form to sign, requesting the remains be cremated, buried or interred. [...]

It’s a “choice” that effectively reframes the way women are supposed to think about early pregnancy, imposing new opportunities for grief where none might have existed.

State Sen. Rebekah Warren (D) of Ann Arbor notes that “This would be the first time in Michigan law that a fetus, or fetal remains, would be classified as a dead body at 10 weeks. That’s the most stunning piece of it.”

The bill is likely to pass, either this year or next. Anti-choicers may relish the idea of tormenting women who have had abortions with graphic reminders of their “crime,” but they have no problem traumatizing couples who have just lost pregnancies in the process.

Berman sums it up: “Unfortunately, Michigan legislators have crafted a bill that’s more sensitive to the needs of tissue that fits in a tablespoon than to grown women who, at vulnerable moments, will face a new form to sign, an unsought, disturbing decision to make.”

(HT: Equality Matters.)

WHITMER: They say they care about First Amendment rights of speech, but we all know that no state can abridge your freedom of speech under the United States Constitution. This is a subterfuge, where I believe it is based on homophobia or, you know, creating rights for people. What this is about is protecting all kids. Every single kid in every walk of life. And that’s who we need to be thoughtful of as this legislation moves forward.

Watch it:

Whitmer is hopeful that the House — which is set to consider the legislation — will remove the religious and moral exceptions. Republican House Speaker Jase Bolge said he is working on changes to the bill that will “bring everyone to the middle of the road and provide protection to all students,” but still opposes language that would “enumerate specific groups for additional protection.” Research has consistently shown that legislation that specifically protects on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is a far larger deterrent than blanket prohibitions against bullying.

WHITMER: So this might solve a political problem that Republicans have. but be clear: You are papering over the problem that is a reality faced by hundreds of kids in Michigan schools every day. In fact, not only does this not protect kids who are bullied, it further endangers them by legitimizing excuses for tormenting a student. And the saddest and sickest irony of this whole thing is that it’s called ‘Matt’s Safe School Law’. And after the way that you’ve gutted it, it wouldn’t have done a damn thing to save Matt!

This is worse than doing nothing! It’s a Republican license to bully.

Watch her full remarks: