Earlier this month, John Covington, the former head of Governor Rick Snyder’s failed education experiment on Detroit students – the Education Achievement Authority (EAA) – resigned to become a consultant (and, according to Covington, to take care of his mother.) As Jack Lessenberry explained it in his Metro Times titled “Detroit’s EAA ‘fatally flawed’” (a terrific piece worth reading in […]

There’s little doubt that Michiganders being “treated” to Terri Lynn Land’s comically funny “Really?” ad know it to be the complete and utter and laughable failure that it is. What you may not know is that it has gotten national attention for how terrible it is, too. On Fox News (yes, FOX NEWS!), Republican pollster and adviser Frank Luntz tore […]

Jonathan Oosting is reporting at MLive that Taylor Grenawalt, the college-aged intern for Rick Snyder’s reelection campaign who tried to infiltrate the Schauer/Brown campaign, has been fired. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s re-election campaign has parted ways with an intern who asked about volunteering for Democratic challenger Mark Schauer in an apparent attempt to infiltrate the rival campaign. Snyder campaign spokesperson […]

UPDATE: I hadn’t taken into account that the National Heritage Academies actually began their ad blitz at the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News on Sunday. This post has been updated to reflect that. It’s Day Four of the explosive Detroit Free Press exposé of Michigan charter schools and also Day Four of the National Heritage Academies complete takover of […]

UPDATE: This post has been updated to include an email Taylor Grenawalt sent to Lt. Governor candidate Lisa Brown, as well. UPDATE 2: Grenawalt has scrubbed his Facebook and LinkedIn pages, removing references to working for the Snyder campaign. UPDATE 3: Grenawalt has been fired from the Snyder campaign. Details HERE. In late May, an aspiring college-aged man named Taylor […]

There are four things that, in my opinion, should NEVER be put in the hands of for-profit corporations: healthcare, education, national security, and prisons. Why? Because when a profit motive is involved in anything, corners will always be cut in order to enhance the profitability of the enterprise. And, in these four situations, that means the lives of actual living […]

Of George W. Bush’s myriad of failures that continue to wreck havoc at home and abroad, 7.9 million Americans losing their health insurance rarely gets mentioned. “When [former president Bill] Clinton left office, the number of uninsured Americans stood at 38.4 million,” Ron Brownstein wrote in 2009. “By the time [former president George W.] Bush left office that number had […]

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 […]

The corporatist front group Mackinac Center is waging a no-holds barred, blatant attack to destroy teachers unions and they seem to have a particular hatred of the Michigan Education Association (MEA). The group, heavily funded by millionaires and billionaires like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family, is shameful in their approach. They have used the Teacher of the Year […]

In February, Terri Lynn Land accidentally confirmed that she was confirmed that she was speaking with Super PACs about funding her campaign, something that is against the law and something she had done before. One of the groups she mentioned is the notorious anti-Choice group Susan B. Anthony List. Apparently Land’s outreachwas successful because this week the Susan B. Anthony […]

As I wrote about this morning, Michigan’s largest for-profit charter school company, National Heritage Academies (NHA) responded to a blockbuster new investigative report being published at the Detroit Free Press this week by buying up all of the ad space on the front page of their website as well as the website of the Detroit News. It turns out that […]