On October 8th, the fourth season of the FX hit TV show, American Horror Story will begin. However, you don’t have to wait until October to experience the real American horror show of corporatist governors that put corporate interests ahead of working families. People in states like Michigan get to “enjoy” that every day. Today, AFSCME is releasing a series […]

NOTE: With the impending election, trying to keep up with all of the news is like drinking from a firehose and, with a day job and other activities I’m involved in, I simply don’t have time to do an individual blog post for everything that is going on. I’m considering doing a “grab bag” like this one every day or […]

The scandals just keep piling up More evidence has emerged that being a business mogul associated with, a relative of, or even hired into the Snyder administration gives you some perks not enjoyed by others. You might, for example, have contracts with the state tossed your way like Snyder’s cousin, George Snyder. You can impact legislation that benefits you and/or […]

At around 2:00 a.m. this past Tuesday, residents in Berrien County on the west side of the state were awaken by the sound of a 24-30 inch natural gas pipeline rupturing. The noise was tremendous and some area folks said it “felt like the earth was shaking a little bit.” Vic Rogers, a farmer that lives just a quarter mile […]

The American Dream, according to dictionary.com, is defined as: the ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity traditionally held to be available to every American, or, a life of personal happiness and material comfort as traditionally sought by individuals in the U.S. I might suggest that, based on generational differences, the definition of the American Dream might be different from generation […]

In the wake of the Detroit Free Press‘s explosive eight-day exposé on Michigan charter schools which revealed an astonishing lack of oversight, transparency, and actual performance in charters, Democrats have responded this week with a bill that would place a moratorium on opening any more charters. The legislation was introduced by state Representative Sarah Roberts. Rep. Robers and minority vice […]

There’s a Buddhist saying, “First thought, best thought.” While I believe that’s true, some things still benefit from time and perspective. That’s certainly the case with TEDMED. It ended on September 12th, and my brain is still synthesizing all the brilliance I absorbed from the stage and from the leaders in health and medicine I spoke with during the conference […]

In her seemingly endless quest to find something, anything, that will change the fail-trajectory of her downward spiraling poll numbers, one of the things Terri Lynn Land has tried is to recycle a Congressional tea party idea and take it as her own. Land has attempted to co-opt the “Transportation Empowerment Act” (TEA) or, as I like to call it, […]

Several items of interest to report in Michigan’s 2014 gubernatorial campaign this afternoon. First, another poll out today shows Mark Schauer in a statistical dead heat with incumbent Republican governor Rick Snyder. This poll, by Vanguard Public Affairs, has Snyder up by just 3.2 points with a margin of error of 4 points. In the same poll, Gary Peters is […]

Back when Michigan legislators were debating whether to expand Medicaid in our state through the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), Rick Snyder expressed his concern that our state didn’t “have enough capacity to put essentially 400,000 more people into a medical home model with a primary care environment, as opposed to having them simply go to an ER”. That’s the sort […]

In her painfully good new book This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein sums up what she thinks it would take to address the threat of climate change: “In short, it means changing everything about the economy so that our pollution doesn’t change everything about our physical world.” She argues, alarmingly, that conservatives understand this far more deeply than those on the […]