Thanks for your patience while I enjoyed some time off from blogging to enjoy The Most Beautiful Place in America with my most beautiful wife. If you you checked in at Eclectablog through last Tuesday, you probably saw some photos from our trip to the Sleeping Bear Dunes and the Leelanau Peninsula in “the pinky” of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. I’ll have a piece up at A2Politico later this week about the impact of being named The Most Beautiful Place in America on the local economy of the area.
We returned home Wednesday night and discovered the next morning that our well pump had given up the ghost. This is annoying (and expensive) on its own but the fact that I had been camping for seven days hadn’t showered made it really “uncomfortable”. We finally got water back Friday which gave us only one day to get ready for a dinner party the next day. Awesome.
We also had to tend to our garden which went crazy in the week we were gone. Our cherry tomato plants are 8 feet tall, out Speckled Romans are over six feet tall and we had four zucchinis that were about two feet long (oops). Anne made a faux apple crisp with zucchinis that was indistinguishable from the real thing. We harvested one Gold Medal tomato that was bigger than a softball and just under three pounds. Totally not kidding. (By the way, that’s an antique produce scale we picked up during a visit to see my daughter in Wooster, Ohio a few weeks back. Isn’t it spiffy?!)
At any rate, that’s all the Eclectanews that’s fit to print. I think the best part of our trip was that there were no mosquitoes up north. I’m pretty sure they’re all in our back yard.
Here are a few Michigan-related tidbits to tide you over until I get my blogging feet back under me.
- Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s job disapproval ratings continue to skyrocket, going from 57% in July to a rather stunning 62% this month. Attaboy, Rick!
- Snyder will be endorsing Pete Hoekstra as the GOP candidate to run against Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow sometime today.
- Meanwhile, the effort to recall Snyder just passed the half-way mark. In less than two months, over 5,000 volunteers have gathered over 400,000 signatures. Recall Rick! Recall Rick! Recall Rick!
- Michigan not only has The Most Beautiful Place in America, Michigan also ranks fifth in the country among states with craft beer breweries. Can I get hellz yeah!?
- Anti-union forces appear to be doing a bang up job convincing people that unions are responsible for all that is wrong in our state. A recent poll showed that 56% of “local leaders” think unions are hurting their communities’ fiscal health. Strangely, 60% of them say their relationships with their unions are “good or excellent”. But, hey, it’s much easier to just blame unions than to take responsibility for your own actions/inactions or to put the blame where it belongs which is on a massively depressed economy caused by Republicans and their incessant need to give tax breaks to wealthy individuals and historically profitable corporations, right?
- Speaking of corporate tax breaks, turns out corporate tax breaks going back to 1990 have bankrupted Michigan’s unemployment insurance fund. Shocking, I know. I’m surprised they didn’t find a way to blame it on the unions.
- And, speaking of good relationships with unions, it’s looking increasingly likely that the UAW and and General Motors may strike an early deal in their current contract negotiations. UAW President Bob King thinks a deal will be reached before the current contract ends on September 14th, a rare event.
- Speaking of labor, President Obama will be in Detroit for a Labor Day rally next Monday and both Anne and I will be getting press passes to cover it. The last time he came for a Labor Day event in 2008 during the campaign, it was abbreviated due to Hurricane Gustav which had caused extensive damage and casualties. Then-candidate Obama didn’t feel a celebratory rally was appropriate under the circumstances.
Finally, although Republicans are experiencing a “Summer of (not) Love” across the country on their summer breaks where constiuents give them the what-for about the economy, jobs, and political hostage-taking, my own Congressman, Tim Walberg, seems to be keeping a very low profile. The only place where he announced any (two) public meetings was a page buried deep on his website and the few he has posted pictures of look pretty sparsely attended. Funny thing, if you don’t announce your public meetings, very few people, except your closest supporters, tend to show up.
Look! It’s a 13-person “crowd”!
How did we end up losing to this guy???
