This is the first of a four part series about workers who are directly impacted by the crucial fight to make earned paid sick time required by law. (Part 2 is HERE, Part 3 is HERE, and Part 4 is HERE.) Last year, the group MI Time to Care launched a petition drive to put earned sick time on the […]

Anyone who has followed the state legislature in Michigan since Republicans assumed nearly total control in 2010 will tell you just how devastating their policies and laws have been to public education in our state. From stripping funding from schools to pay for enormous corporate tax cuts to taking away local control and handing it over to non-educator Emergency Managers […]

Michigan Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (MI-12) today introduced the Promoting Transparency in Trade Act, a bill designed to shine more sunshine on trade negotiations that result in treaties like the much-maligned Trans-Pacific Partnership. If signed into law, the legislation will require government officials to publically release the text of ongoing trade negotiations and ensure the position of the Office of the […]

In his never ending crusade to harm people who aren’t wealthy and well-connected, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, shown here sweeping up horse manure, joined a lawsuit against the federal government with twenty other states to stop new labor rules requiring businesses to pay overtime to white collar workers who make less than $913 a week or $47,476 a year. […]

How to turn Trump’s vicious personal attacks into an attack on all Americans Hillary Clinton in Michigan August 11, 2016. We shouldn’t underestimate what Hillary Clinton is facing when she steps on the stage for the first presidential debate next week. Donald Trump may or may not be a master debater — I’ll leave that to Politifact. But he’s definitely […]

I used to think that anyone who rose to a position of power and prominence in the world of education had to be smart, well-informed, and have significant teaching experience. The last few years of following the education reform debate, however, has disabused me of that notion. It seems as though so many of the people who hold positions of authority and […]

Last week I wrote about 27-year-old Republican Steve Marino. Marino is a Macomb County Commissioner and candidate for the state House. In recordings made by a Michigan Democratic Party tracker at a coffee hour, Marino bragged about cheating on his taxes and, apparently, lied about picking up bar tabs for other Republicans as a lobbyist among other things. Earlier this […]

This post has been hilariously updated below. Recent polling in Michigan’s 1st Congressional District shows Democrat Lon Johnson with a narrow 2-point lead in the “Leans Republican” district. This has Republicans freaking out and now they have resorted to airing a completely false ad contending that Johnson doesn’t live in Kalkaska as he claims and, in fact, lives in a […]

Back in March of this year, the city of Flint announced that it intended to file a lawsuit against the state of Michigan in the Court of Claims over the poisoning of the city’s drinking water with the powerful neurotoxin lead. There were no immediate plans to do so but they needed to be on record so that option remained […]

ScienceDebate.org, a coalition of fifty-six leading U.S. nonpartisan organizations, including the American Chemical Society of which I am a member, recently sent a comprehensive questionnaire to the four major presidential candidates. Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson declined to participate. The answers given by the other three candidates give us a very good look at their vision for our country, particularly […]

Donald Trump’s faceplant in front of a national audience in Flint yesterday has him rewriting history one day later in an effort to shift the narrative of his epic fail. As I wrote yesterday, Trump was four minutes into a five minute and forty-seven second speech when pastor Rev. Faith Green Timmons came up to the podium and interrupted his […]