For those of you who missed the opening night keynote speeches at Netroots Nation in Detroit, here is my speech welcoming the conference attendees to the Motor City.

Some insurers want to raise your rates significantly for 2015. In Michigan, it’s your right to tell them how you feel about that. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has gone a long way toward making health insurance more affordable, but until there’s full reform of the insurance industry, there isn’t very much incentive for insurance companies to stop raising your […]

WARNING: Trigger alert for those sensitive to discussions of rape of any kind. The former host of a popular “family friendly” Christian morning show based in Grand Rapids has admitted to the rape of a bound 12-year old boy. John Balyo was indicted in June. The charges, which can be read HERE, are “sexual exploitation of a child” and “possession […]

NOW can we ask, “Where are the jobs”??? Back in February, Michigan had the 4th highest unemployment rate in the country. Today, we have the 3rd highest at 7.5%. That’s up from last month, by the way. In fact, only Mississippi and Rhode Island – who are tied for last place – and Nevada are higher. 46 states and the […]

  The Republican Party’s first convention took place “under the oaks” in Jackson, Michigan on July 6th, 1854. A crowd of three thousand felt-hatted Free Soilers, top-hatted ex-Whigs and hatless abolitionists* gathered in the summer’s wet heat for a day to organize in protest of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had shattered the fantasy that America could survive a half-slave and […]

My wife Anne, who lived in St. Louis, Missouri when we met, often tells people that I “wooed her with Michigan”. And it’s true. Michigan has so much to offer from big cities to secluded forests and everything in between. We have over 19 million acres of forested land, about 4 million of which is state-owned. This immense amount of […]

Back in March, I wrote about an effort by McCoig Materials to create a gravel mine just north of Chelsea, Michigan in Lyndon Township. Here’s what I wrote then: As you look at the photo of downtown Chelsea above, imagine 80 gravel trucks a day, 6 days a week rumbling through the middle of it and then back again after […]

Pioneers, Reformers, & Millionaires is a historical narrative that reads like a novel. Elizabeth A. Homer is a public historian with a passion for political and women’s history — and a curator with more than 20 years of experience at the Michigan Women’s Historical Center and Hall of Fame and the Turner-Dodge House. This spring, she published a book, Pioneers, […]

University of Michigan law professor Steven Croley was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as general counsel for the U.S. Energy Department this week. Croley, the husband of State Supreme Court Justice Bridget Mary McCormack, has been working for the White House as deputy assistant and deputy counsel to President Obama and spends his weeks working at the White House. He […]

Tens of thousands have been cut off from the benefits they earned.

A study released this week found that the Michigan legislature’s cuts to unemployment insurance have meant a loss of benefits for 14,000 to 32,000 Michiganders a week. (full disclosure here, one of the study’s authors is a personal friend, and has been a client on other issues).

For those who may have missed it at the time, Governor Snyder and the legislature shorted the period the short-term jobless can collect unemployment from 26 weeks to 20 weeks, along with reducing eligibility and making it easier for employers to contest claims. And this was during a period where the national unemployment rate has remained high, and Michigan’s jobless rate one of the highest in the nation.

Karen is just one of 272,500 Michiganders who signed up for coverage through Healthcare.gov, where a strong finish to 2014 enrollment bodes well for next year. So much good news, it’s hard to know where to begin. On Thursday, Obama administration officials predicted health insurance premiums would be stable in 2015, thanks to a large and varied pool of insured […]