Michigan represent!

Michigan’s next Secretary of State, Professor Jocelyn Benson was on Up with Steve Kornacki this morning, talking about what’s happening in Michigan right now, how Detroit got to where it is today, and our path forward. It was a refreshingly smart and thoughtful conversation.

Watch it after the jump.

Scott Walker has eradicated freedom of expression, free speech, and freedom to assemble in Wisconsin [Photo credit: Anne Savage, special to Eclectablog] This is shocking and can’t help but lead to lawsuits. Singers singing protest songs in the Wisconsin state Capitol building have been getting arrested in large numbers this week. Great coverage of this at Daily Kos by “Giles […]

If you have to stop people from voting to win, your ideas suck As North Carolina passes the most offensive set of voter suppression laws in the nation, you have to hand it to Republicans. Pursuing voter ID is a poll-tested strategy: consistent majorities support these laws under the guise that they’re protecting the integrity of elections. The only problem […]

The Michigan Nurses Association, Medicaid Expansion Now Coalition and MICHUHCAN invite legislators and the public to an educational forum. Medicaid expansion is still waiting for a vote in the Michigan Senate. And although a Senate workgroup has developed a revised version of the bill approved by the House weeks ago, there’s no guarantee of a swift vote. In fact, there […]

A little justice please? Early this month, I wrote two pieces about Brooke Harris, a teacher fired first from a Flint charter school for helping students to organize a fundraiser for the family of Trayvon Martin and more recently fired by the Education Achievement Authority (HERE and HERE.) At Brooke’s per-termination hearing, she learned that she was being accused of […]

The DIA is a superhero among museums. But that doesn’t mean it should have to save Detroit. I don’t understand this obsession some people have with the Detroit Institute of Arts selling off the treasures in its collection. Do they think it’s the DIA’s responsibility to save Detroit? Because it’s not. Of course, the people who think the DIA should […]

There’s a new Savage in town… Wildly popular sex advice columnist Dan Savage (@FakeDanSavage on Twitter) is heading out on vacation next week. As he has in the past, he will have someone else answer his daily “Savage Love Letter of the Day”. Next week, that someone else will be me. “I think it would be hilarious to have another […]

Republicans hate picking winners and losers except when they don’t Amid all the drama surrounding Detroit’s bankruptcy this past week, there was a supremely ironic announcement made that came the same day a federal bankruptcy court judge cleared the way for Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr to proceed with the Chapter 9 filing. Plans for new sports complex, centered around a […]

Too poor to bail Graphic by Anne Savage Not that we were expecting the federal government to do for a failing urban giant like Detroit what they did for big corporations like GM and Chrysler or monstrous banks like Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase. But this right here? This is dickish: Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is pushing an amendment that […]

That must have been one very convincing sales job… Photo by Anne C. Savage, special to Eclectablog Back in January when the Snyder administration was negotiating with Kevyn Orr to become Detroit’s Emergency Manager, well ahead of the city even being declared in a financial emergency, Orr had this to say about Michigan’s newly-enacted Emergency Manager law, Public Act 436 […]

Whether we can say the same for Michigan Senate Republicans remains to be seen. While the Senate workgroup congratulates itself for overhauling the Medicaid expansion bill that already passed the Michigan House weeks ago, nurses are working every day with patients who desperately need help getting healthcare coverage. So desperately, in fact, that some of those patients have died because […]