Be there or be conservative

The premier progressive event of the year in Michigan is Progress Michigan‘s Michigan Summit. This impressive conference offers a chance to network, learn and become inspired in your work as a progressive organizer and activist in our state.

This year’s Michigan Summit takes place this Saturday, June 8, 2013 beginning at 8 a.m. at Brody Hall in East Lansing, MI.

The keynote speakers this year are UAW President Bob King and Partnership for Working Families Executive Director Leslie Moody.

Click through for details and links.

Give ’em hell, ladies! Just a week after dogs ravaged and killed goats and chickens at the Catherine Ferguson Academy, the school for pregnant Detroit girls is back in the news. This time the spunky girls who have shown tenacity that rivals any other single group in Detroit are suing the Detroit Public Schools and the charter school that runs […]

One term nerd, indeed

Public Policy Polling has the first Michigan gubernatorial poll out since Mark Schauer declared his candidacy and the news is very, very bad for incumbent governor Rick Snyder. According to PPP, Mark Schauer leads Snyder by four points, a huge margin for someone who is relatively unknown outside of the 7th Congressional District where he once served as Congressman.

More after the jump.

A champion of the people

This Friday, Congressman John Dingell will break Senator Robert Byrd’s record for the longest serving member of Congress having served 57 years and 177 days. He is already the Dean of the House, the longest continuously serving member of the House of Representatives. Although I am in the Congressional district next Congressman Dingell’s, I have gotten to know him well through my community organizing activities with the Washtenaw County Democratic Party. I’m proud to call him and his wife Debbie friends.

In his 57 years in Congress, Congressman Dingell has cast tens of thousands of votes and has been associated with some of the most historical legislation in our country’s history. Every session, he has carried on the tradition first set by his father of introducing legislation to create a single-payer, universal health care system in the United States of America.

Click through for a list of some of the other legislation that bear his mark and much, much more.

This is a public service announcement If you live in Michigan, you should have a look at this video from Fox 47 News about the Giant Hogweed. It’s a huge plant that is cropping up around the state and it can cause serious health problems ranging from skin discoloration to blistering and even blindness. Children and pets are particularly vulnerable. […]

Another one bites the dust Yesterday, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder declared a financial emergency in Hamtramck, Michigan. As I’ve written about before, this will be Round Two for the culturally-diverse city. They had an Emergency Financial Manager, Lou Schimmel, back in 2000 when John Engler was governor. Hamtramck (spelled correctly, pronounced “Ham-TRAM-ick”), is rare in that the city actually asked […]

Gentlemen, the 1950s called and they’d like their chauvinistic worldview back

The dissolution of society around us. The disintegration of marriage. Something going terribly wrong in American society. Minority communities torn apart. American society torn apart. A catastrophic issue. The loss of a generation. The undermining of our social order.

What is it that’s causing this societal conflagration? According to Fox News commentators Lou Dobbs, Juan Williams, Erick Erickson, and Doug Schoen, it’s the fact that, in 40% of American households with children, women are the primary wage earner. Who knew that women earning more than men would have such a corrosive impact on the very fabric of our American society?

Nobody except these sexist swine. Details after the jump.

Last week, the BlueGreen Alliance announced the launch of its “Repair America” campaign designed to push action on repairing crucial national infrastructure across the country and create thousands of valuable jobs in the process. The BlueGreen Alliance is a partnership of labor and environmental groups working to expand the number of jobs in the renewable energy sector. Over 100 people […]

You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the problem.

NOTE: This post has an important update that I urge you to read (after the jump.)

It’s no secret that much of what happens in the Snyder administration regarding Emergency Managers and school funding/operations is secret. WDIV’s Kevin Dietz is reporting on more evidence that has been uncovered and this one is a real doozy. Based on emails procured through a lawsuit filed by Detroit activist Robert Davis, Dietz reports that the governor and Detroit Mayor Dave Bing were discussing who Detroit’s Emergency Manager would be long before any of it was public. They arranged for an office staffer to serve as a go-between in their correspondence, passing messages back and forth through a private email account so that the emails wouldn’t reside on state government servers.

Details with video after the jump.

We didn’t know you cared…

Yesterday, Michigan Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville announced he would introduce legislation that would save the Detroit Institute of Arts art collection from being sold off to help solve Detroit’s budget crisis. While it’s a welcomed move, it would be nice if similar moves would be taken to protect poor folks, union families and retirees in cities with Emergency Managers.

Details and analysis await you after the jump.

This isn’t going away, governor

Retired government employees from both Flint and Pontiac have filed a complaint with the U.S. District Court in Detroit to have Public Act 436 and its predecessor Public Act 4 — Michigan’s anti-democratic Emergency Manager laws — declared illegal under the Bankruptcy Clause and Contracts Clause of the US Constitution, as well as Chapter 9 of Title 11 of the United States Code. The complaint (pdf) rests largely on the argument that these laws favored one set of creditors over others. Namely, they claim retirees and unions have seen their contracts negatively impacted while businesses and banks have gotten away without taking a hit.

Details are after the jump.