Joe F Spaulding 🦉 Profile picture
Harley rider | Comic book nerd | Gerrymander slayer | Best petition strategist in Michigan | Fmr: @clairecmc @notpoliticians @distillsocial | he/him/his 🇲🇽
rootwoman123 Profile picture cejabe Profile picture 2 subscribed
Aug 12 11 tweets 3 min read
A lot of really smart people didn't study poli-sci at a Catholic school in West Michigan and don't know many of the architects behind Project 2025 are the product of local Catholic pushback against liberation theology in Latin America in the 90s and 2000s

rapidgrowthmedia.com/devnews/ActonI… Not me. I interned with Jeff Smith in college. No activist in the country has tracked Acton Institute and the DeVos Family more thoroughly and consistently than Jeff.

Betsy DeVos saying she wants in with Trump again reaffirms the Project 2025 threat.

griid.org/2012/02/27/dev…
Jun 15, 2023 15 tweets 4 min read
Every bill in this article is good actually, and Senator Nesbitt again confuses what is good for his wealthy donors and what is good for the Michigan economy and its workers.

When he has to choose between the two, he'll pick his donors every time. "California raised a national alarm when it adopted a narrow definition of who qualifies as an independent contractor."

The national alarm this raised was at Uber headquarters because they were exploiting their drivers. California is one of the largest economies in the world.
Jun 14, 2023 17 tweets 4 min read
I'm at the Ottawa Area Intermediate School District Board meeting.

Guess what the Ottawa Impact whack jobs are upset about on this agenda... Image #OAISD covers career and technical education through the Career Line Tech Center, Special Education through the Ottawa Area Center, and other non-traditional education paths for Ottawa County.

Multiple school districts in the area benefit from their services.
Jun 12, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
I'm at the Zeeland Public Schools Board of Education Meeting. Big budget meeting.

The room is overpacked, and my whack job alarm is going off very loud, but ZAAC is also here and they are pretty much heros. Rumor is there will be a book ban chat.

Stay tuned!
#ZeelandSchools Image There is a second issue on the table that may be driving the majority of people to this meeting. The board is considering having 24 half days on the calendar next year, when most schools have 4-6. They were added as a way to accommodate tea her trainings tied to state funding.
May 8, 2023 7 tweets 5 min read
1/7
2,000 days ago, a few thousand Michiganders started collecting signatures for a petition to end gerrymandering.

If they handed their petitions in today instead of December 2017, they still would have collected an average of more than 200+ per day or 8+ per hour.
#MIPol
🧵: Image 2/7
In the very first election after maps were ungerrymandered, our entire legislature both reflected the electorate proportionally and also was controlled by Democrats for the first time in my life.

The new governing trifecta opened up new legislation.

fox2detroit.com/news/michigan-…
Mar 29, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
Why did @wopanthers fire Ryan Lancaster as head wrestling coach? He's been regional coach of the year 2 years in a row, which means he was a contender for state coach of the year twice. He started the girls wrestling program.

The school's reasons are dumb and vague... The athletic director insists that Ryan didn't win enough. Off the bat, you know they're full of it. I've lived here for decades. Other sports have horrible records without coaching changes. It's a clear cover-up for something politically motivated...
Mar 28, 2023 36 tweets 11 min read
This first public comment at the #OttawaCBoC meeting is 🔥🔥🔥

Joe Moss wants to stop other elected commissioners to ask permission from him before talking about any topic. Joe Murray is the grandson of a previous board member. He is upset that Joe Moss and Ottawa Impact are holding a jobs program for their friends and family. He ripps into John Gibbs for being the loser that he is. He is mad about wasting tax dollars. A lot of tax dollars.
Feb 4, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
Barry County, MI Sheriff Dar Leaf attributes a police officer in Memphis getting shot to "temper tantrums" over what he calls the "situation" in Memphis.

The sheriff whines that it makes it harder for him to hire employees.

Good.

He doesn't even say Tyre Nichols' name. I think he's calling cops stupid in this one? Or at least the ones that are willing to work for him?

It's a pretty egregious self-own.
Jan 31, 2023 12 tweets 6 min read
CM Doug Zylstra explains former Republican Attorney General of Michigan Mike Cox is on record saying the commission doesn't have the authority legally to replace the health administrator without cause. Then Jacob Bonnema says CM Curran's question went unanswered...
#OttawaCounty Rewind 5 minutes, and you'll see Curran asking about the review process for the position. Moss quickly pipes in, unrecognized by the chair, and proceeds to sandwich grandstanding between two questions.

This is corporate misogyny on full display. Joe Moss is a pig and a coward.
Jan 30, 2023 11 tweets 4 min read
Looks like I took the post down to soon. I'll have more on this in the morning. David thinks all of this is a joke. He has access to a volunteer list, and he used it to try to chase tail. In any reasonable employee situation, he would have been terminated and locked out of his accounts on the spot.

Ottawa Objects on Facebook is not safe.
Jan 29, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
You know how racists like to use dog whistles to signal they think more Black and Brown people living in a neighborhood leads to increased gun violence?

NIMBYs in Berkeley, CA are trying to codify that racist talking point into their state's environmental law to block housing. And the court just might let them.

That's right, they're fighting to block housing for students in Berkeley of all places, and in doing so they don't care that they're writing a law that lets white supremacists legally segregate their community with fear-mongering.
Jan 10, 2023 16 tweets 7 min read
I'm here at the Ottawa County Community meeting to help show the "chaos is a ladder" clowns at Ottawa Impact what democracy looks like.
#OttawaCounty The signage is old, the parking lots are full, the meeting is about to begin
Jan 9, 2023 16 tweets 5 min read
Jenison is having a school board meeting. Let's see how it goes... Tim is a local little league and robotics coach who moved here 5 years ago. His concern is that 2 board members believe government money should be used to fund private and charter schools. He says that's awful.
Sep 15, 2022 7 tweets 4 min read
Religion has no place in government.

TW: This video contains the most hateful anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric you'll hear in 2022, and it was spoken by pastor at a church.

86th State House District candidate Nancy DeBoer all but says she goes to this pastor for tips on how to govern. Nancy used to be mayor of Holland, until she was unelected for having the worst #cannabis take you'll ever hear in a Twitter video. Because of this video, she's now refusing to debate @LarryJackson86.

Pastor Spencer is happy to tell you what he's telling Nancy to think though 😬
Sep 13, 2022 6 tweets 1 min read
Every Pitch, Every Campaign:
1) Establish Urgency
2) Connect to Concrete Action
3) Make a Hard Ask
4) Eliminate Excuses
5) Repitch Until You Get at Least 2 Yeses Establish urgency. This election is critical. The issues on the line matter and will be decided on election day. Not voting is a *public* statement that those issues don't matter to a potential voter.
Sep 12, 2022 9 tweets 5 min read
Last week, I spoke to voters in the Holland area about issues we're facing as a county as part of a @LWVHolland
candidate meet and greet event.

This links directly to the 5 minutes I was at the microphone:
The forum was held at Herrick District Library by City Hall in downtown Holland. After her group supported defunding Patmos Library, my opponent, Lucy Ebel, failed to show up for the event.

She did show up to city hall in 2020 to rant against an anti-discrimination ordinance.
Jun 16, 2022 12 tweets 4 min read
I got Garrett Soldano on tape saying that if you're on tape using a ballot box you should be questioned by the cops He didn't say questioned the word he used was interrogated.
Jun 3, 2022 17 tweets 9 min read
If you live in the blue area of this map, we need you to vote in the Democratic Primary on August 2nd.

We need you to skip the statewide offices, our governor, SOS, and AG candidates are locked in anyway.

We need you to write in JOSEPH ALFONSO for US Congressional District 4. Image If we fail to get 3,250 voters to do this, there will only be a Republican available on the 4th house district ballot, covering cities like #Kalamazoo, #BattleCreek, #BentonHarbor, #Holland, #Portage, #Saugatuck, #StJoseph, and #SouthHaven. That Republican is absolutely terrible.
Jun 2, 2022 26 tweets 15 min read
The host from the Detroit Regional Chamber kicks off the #MIGOP #Debate by thanking the candidates for taking time away from their busy schedule of grifting and griping.
#MIGOV
#MPC22 The hosts of today's debate are @rickpluta and @RickAlbinWoodTV, both of whom I had conversations with at the Republican nominating convention in Grand Rapids a couple months ago. @DistillSocial was there too. 😇
Apr 17, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
There is some pretty serious tension in this video, but at the end, one of the protesters taps a car, and then a protest organizer uses a megaphone to tell that protester not to attack cars like that.

Then Drew here drops a pedantic racist trope about control. The video is actual evidence that in these seriously tense situations, the protesters are doing everything they can to make sure the protests continue peacefully.

The racists continue to try to paint the protesters as violent, but they will not succeed in GR.
Jun 26, 2021 14 tweets 2 min read
Get Anti-CRT #FascismTourists to agree with these Paulo Freire quotes, and then tell them who he is (a radical Brazilian educator who pretty much advocated for revolution in and through the schools), a thread "There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom."
-Pedagogy of the Oppressed