I know Mark Ouimet is popular in Ann Arbor but when you look at the mounting evidence, I urge you to take a second look at Scio Township Trustee Christine Green (Democrat) if you’re even thinking about voting for Mr. Ouimet.
First there Ouimet’s abuse of the per diem system as a County Commissioner. Another good link HERE.
Then there is the issue of Ouimet has misled the public about his academic credentials:
Republican state House candidate Mark Ouimet earned the master’s degree he lists in his campaign literature from a Louisiana correspondence school that was raided by the FBI and determined to be a fraudulent diploma mill at one point, AnnArbor.com has learned.Ouimet, a Washtenaw County commissioner running for Michigan’s 52nd District House seat against Democrat Christine Green, acknowledged in interviews he obtained his master’s in business administration from the now-defunct LaSalle University in Mandeville, La.
Ouimet obtained his MBA in the years following the federal crackdown, when it appears LaSalle was beginning efforts to clean up its act and distance itself from its fraudulent past. However, much skepticism still surrounded the school, and despite curriculum changes, it never received accreditation before going out of business.
According to media reports, the FBI raided the Louisiana school in July 1996 following a five-year investigation, finding it made bogus claims about being accredited and defrauded thousands of students. The school, with only a handful of workers, pulled in roughly $36 million from selling phony degrees from 1989 to 1996, the FBI said in court filings.
Ouimet is shading the truth about himself and is aleady capitulating to his Republican Party bosses. Despite saying last spring that he would work across party lines, it’s clear that Ouimet has no ability to say “no” to his party. While Ouimet pretends to be a nice guy, his party is running a series of the most offensive smear mailings and robocalls that I’ve ever seen.
In addition to the five robocalls against Ouimet’s opponent Christine Green that I have already written about (HERE and HERE), there have been two more in the past week, each more a more nasty personal attack on Green than the last.
I have also received dozens of mailings against Green from the Michigan Republican Party. They have almost comically bad Photoshopped photos of Christine Green tying her to higher taxes and wasteful spending in Lansing and Washington. But Green is a Scio Township trustee. She’s never voted for a tax hike in her life. On two of the more recent mailings the Republican Party put her home phone number on the literature.
Mark Ouimet’s response? To run an incessant radio ad saying how much he hates negative campaigning and a television commercial about how he’s going to work with Democrats. Really, Mark? How are you going to work with Democrats when (a) you can’t even get your Party to stop running a mudslinging attack campaign against your Democratic opponent and (b) you and your party have so demonized Democrats that there is simply no longer any way for you to work with them?
Yes, he’s a nice guy. But the evidence is mounting that he is also less than honest about himself and his past and that he’s simply another typical Republican, unable to detach himeself from his party’s odious mudslinging. And, in my opinion, he should not be rewarded for this behavior by being voted to represent our district in the Michigan House of Representatives.
I’m just sayin’…
