For a recent final exam, Nevada high school teacher Elizabeth Clausen showed her students this provocative painting by artist Michael D’Antuono and asked them to use critical thinking skills to form an opinion about how the art represents American society and our country’s history. A handful of parents were outraged and now Clausen is on temporary leave and may lose […]

No Snyder administration officials will be held accountable. And that’s exactly the problem. At long last, after activists and elected officials and even bloggers like LOLGOP and I have been sounding the alarm about the poisoning of Flint residents with lead in their drinking water, the story has finally hit the national stage. In the past week, in addition to […]

The Affordable Care Act has led us into the best job creation of the century, exactly the opposite of what the GOP predicted The predictions were ridiculous. Implement Obamacare and we’ll get a “total economic collapse.” Or maybe we’ll just “ruin our economy.” Rush Limbaugh more modestly said it would cost us “2.5 million jobs, minimum.” Instead we just got […]

Yesterday afternoon while most of us were driving home from work or home getting ready for dinner, Gov. Rick Snyder signed Senate Bill 571 into law. It’s now Public Act 269 of 2015. This legislation started out innocuously enough as a 12-page campaign finance reform bill that involved how funds are collected and distributed by organizations that manage “separate segregated […]

Nearly a year after evidence surfaced that there was a very serious, odorless, and invisible poisonous menace lurking in the water of Flint, Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder has finally declared a state of emergency in the devastated city: Gov. Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency for Flint and Genesee County Tuesday as a result of the contaminated drinking water […]

Twice in Michigan’s past Republicans have passed a law to take away the right to vote for all the candidates of a single political party with one mark on a ballot. Both times voters went to the polls and rejected their law. As the clock ticked down on the 2015 legislative session, Republicans passed the same damn law a third […]

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 […]

This year will have many challenges, not the least of which will be comparing and contrasting Bernie and Hillary while sifting through the Frank Luntzian messages coming from the dozen or so remaining GOP presidential candidates. You might wonder why Progressives would even want to spend time inviting blood pressure problems by trying to decoding right-wing messages? For one thing, […]

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 […]