It’s no secret that Republican Congressman Mike Bishop (MI-08) has been in the pocket of Michigan billionaire Matty Moroun for years. In 2010, Bishop was the State Senate Majority leader and promised to hold a vote on a new bridge crossing from Michigan into Canada. However, he ended up blocking the vote, something Matty Moroun liked very much, indeed, since […]

The following essay was written by Mitchell Robinson and was originally published on his most-excellent blog at MitchellRobinson.net. Robinson is associate professor and chair of music education, and coordinator of the music student teaching program at Michigan State University. His essay is reposted here with permission. The Great Lakes Education Project is a Michigan advocacy organization dedicated to advancing the […]

As the water crisis has unfolded in Flint over the past few months, there has been an enormous amount of finger pointing and blame shifting going around. Just this week, Darnell Earley wrote an op-ed piece for The Detroit News absolving himself of any of that blame, despite the fact that he or one of his predecessors was in charge […]

The picture above is a screenshot of a Detroit Free Press article published yesterday. In the article, Gov. Snyder paints on an optimistic smile and says he’s confident that there is “strong momentum” for something getting done on road funding, despite a half decade of failed efforts on his part and on the part of his Republican colleagues in the […]

Steve Ingersoll has become the face of charter school operators scamming Michigan taxpayers by siphoning tax dollars intended for education into their own personal bank accounts. Ingersoll founded and operated the Bay City Academy in Bay City and the Grand Traverse Academy in Grand Traverse County. Last spring he was convicted on three counts of criminal tax fraud connected to […]

The anti-labor group Protecting Michigan Taxpayers (PMT) was formed in 2012 as a front group for anti-union forces who wanted to defeat Proposal 2 which would have enshrined collective bargaining rights for workers into Michigan’s state constitution. The group had been dormant since their victory in November of 2012 but was resurrected last spring to push a ballot initiative of […]

Remember when the Democratic Party was the party of the “big tent?” As of today it seems to have become a two-candidate party. But it certainly didn’t happen in an organic way, that is by voters hearing what each candidate envisions for the U.S. and why, and then winnowing out the candidates that lack vision, leadership skills, or more importantly […]

The unbearable costs of Republican politicians pandering to their base Michigan’s Attorney General Bill Schuette is wasting taxpayer agenda to join another partisan lawsuit designed to stifle the agenda of a president his state overwhelmingly supported twice. The Detroit News reports: Led by West Virginia, the states are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit […]

Yesterday I wrote about a report from the Center for Media and Democracy that showed how 25 proposed charter schools in Michigan received $1.7 million in tax dollars but never actually opened. It turns out that one of those schools was the Detroit College Preparatory Academy, the brainchild or “dream” of a woman named Natasha Baker. Here’s what Baker’s dream […]

The worst irony of our political system is that the party that wants to gut Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid — the three programs that have combined have cut the senior poverty rate from about 35 percent to about 10 — is in only power because of the votes of senior citizens. It’s time to change that — or at […]

This week, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released a scathing report on charter schools in 12 states which have received federal funding. The report, titled Charter School Black Hole shows that Michigan charter schools received $34,997,658 between 2010-2015 under the federal Charter School Program (CSP). 139 of the 297 charters (as of 2014, the number is up to […]