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 […]

A bunch of half-assed governors, sorry senators and actual clowns are blasting the record of a president who prevented a Great Depression It’s pretty likely that you aren’t aware that it seems that the last two years have been the best two years of job creation since 1998-1999. And even if you are aware of this, most people aren’t. They […]

An apology must be just the beginning of the investment that must be made to rebuild the city This week the people of Flint, Michigan finally got an apology from the governor who appointed both the Emergency Manager who approved the poisoning of the city’s water and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality officials who dismissed citizens’ “perfectly legitimate scientific […]

Enroll in health insurance by January 15 for coverage that starts February 1. The new year is a time for new beginnings — or at least thinking about them. If you’re considering starting your own business or taking a similarly bold step in 2016, one thing you won’t have to worry about is buying health insurance. Like millions of other […]

Who — besides Ted Cruz — predicted that Donald Trump would spend the second half of 2015 riding racism and xenophobia to the top of the polls thus allowing a supportive Cruz a chance to angle into the GOP nomination as the “reasonable” candidate? Anyone? Getting everything wrong seemed to be the one thing pundits did right in 2015 — […]

Another massive transfer of wealth to the richest just when we need it least Whenever people point out that Ronald Reagan would be too liberal for today’s Republican Party, I get the point. He backed immigration reform and gun safety restrictions after leaving the White House. Reagan also recognized that his ability to slash government was limited by a Democratic […]

Just because Republicans should lose does not mean they will We’re less than 11 months from the most important election of our lifetime and the polls mean almost nothing at this point. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t note that given the demographic challenges conservatives have created for themselves, the sight of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz as the […]

“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 […]

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 […]