Last night, Rachel Maddow covered the Flint water lead poisoning story for a third time in the past month. In the segment, she lauded the Michigan press – including the ACLU’s crack investigative journalist Curt Guyette who wasn’t named explicitly – for their vigilance and doggedness in pursuing this story, something I agree with completely. For this report, Maddow brought […]

Last month, I wrote about Senate Bill 571, a Republican campaign finance bill that will do a number of truly anti-democratic things. Here’s a recap from that post: [The] faux sincere desire for voters to be more informed was proven to be the lie that it is when [Republicans] passed Senate Bill 571. This bill bans using public dollars or […]

“Two North” is a story about one Christmas when my mom was spending time on the psychiatric ward of our town’s hospital after trying to commit suicide to escape a physically-abusive husband. I was thirteen. It was a cataclysmic event in our lives but it brought us together into a two-person tribe like no other event ever has in my […]

WHAT?! A corporatist presidential candidate hired a corporate shill to run his campaign?! Get oudda here! You can file this one in the “Well That Figures” file. Donald Trump, who had raised a tidy sum of just over $11,000 through the end of September in Michigan, doesn’t have any sort of ground game in Michigan at this point so, given […]

That guy on the right there is Wayne Bradley, the Michigan Republicans’ State Director of African American Engagement. He runs the GOP office in Detroit that opened two years ago with a special visit by Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul. You would think that a Republican working hard to reach out to Black Michiganders would err on the side of […]

As we wind down the year, those of us who pay attention to state politics are breathing a sigh of relief that the state legislature is no longer in session and working on ways to shape our state into the corporatocracy the Republicans so desperately want it to be. However, before they left Lansing for the year, they passed three […]

It’s well known that American corporations use off-shore tax havens to shield their profits from taxation. However, a recent report by U.S. Public Interest Group (USPIRG) gives us new details on just how widespread the tactic is and, more importantly, the impact it is having on the funding of education across the country. According to their analysis, this practice reduces […]

For the past couple of weeks, I have been trying to ensure that the utter and tragic failure of Gov. Snyder’s experiment on Detroit school children – the Education Achievement Authority – does not go down the memory hole. I told the story in 127 Eclectablog headlines and reminded people that these failures have been stacking up for four years […]

In 2012, Gretchen Driskell did what few thought possible and what fewer Michigan Democrats were able to do: she beat a locally-popular Republican incumbent, Mark Ouimet, to take back a state House seat, beating him by by six points in the Republican-leaning 52nd District. Two years later, she was such a strong candidate that the Republicans put up a weak […]

NOTE: This post has been updated. On December 11th, the faculty of the Eastern Michigan University Department of Teacher Education, part of EMU’s College of Education, passed a unanimous vote of no confidence in the “leadership” of the EMU Board of Regents in response to their decision to remain in their partnership with Gov. Rick Snyder’s failed experiment on Detroit […]

After over ten hours of behind the scenes negotiations among their caucus members, all but two Senate Republicans voted last evening to ban straight-ticket voting on Michigan ballots. The bill had been tie-barred to far-less-than-perfect legislation to permit “no reason” absentee voting. However, the tie-bar was removed before passage by the Senate and then sent back to the House where, […]