Hypocrisy is rarely so clearly on display

Last week at his press conference (where, by the way, he didn’t take a single question), National Gun Fetishists Association (NRA) Executive Vice Chair Wayne LaPierre castigated the federal government for its inaction on forming a national registry for the mentally ill.

It’s an appalling demostration of hypocrisy given that what he didn’t mention is that his group has been actively fighting AGAINST a similar registry of gun registrations in this country.

Michigan Republicans owe me $57.50

My kids are in town today and we decided to drive to The Henry Ford to see The Hobbit in 3D and Imax (squee!) It had been snowing and blowing for a couple hours and there were three inches or so of snow on the ground. The road in front of our house was pretty slick but I knew that, once I got on I-94, the main highway into Detroit, I’d be fine. It’s a main artery, after all, with heavy truck and commuter traffic.

We got 5 miles down the highway and decided that it was simply too dangerous to continue. We saw three accidents with cars and trucks in the ditch, one all the way into the woods on the side of the road.

For three inches of snow.

My rant after the jump.

He meant to (not) do that

Remember the horrifying graphic from Mitt Romney’s transition webpage that showed him as “President-Elect”?

Given his complete lack of qualifications for being president and the fact that he was so completely out of touch with most Americans, the very idea of Romney as “president elect” was enough give Democrats heart palpitations.

As it turns out, at least according to the story that’s being spun by Romney’s family and campaign officials, he didn’t really want to run for president anyway. It was something he did because he got talked into it by his son Tagg and his wife Ann.

Just another trophy to add to the shelf. Another item for his curriculum vitae. But not something he really wanted to do.

More analysis after the jump.

The current meltdown reminds us that 2010 was a massive fluke that we must avenge In the summer of 2012, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi pushed a plan that would extend the Bush tax breaks for all income under $1,000,000. She did this for one reason: To prove the House GOP would never vote for a tax increase ever, despite […]

“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 life.

My wife’s cousin, an editor (e.g. “Flags of Our Fathers”), has convinced me to use it as the launching pad for a book about life with my mom. I have yet to find the time to do this but that book is still inside me and waiting to get out. It’ll happen.

I offer this story to my friends here at Eclectablog on Christmas as a tribute to my mother, a woman who went from a pregnant sixteen-year old to an executive for the Chrysler Corporation in the short span of twenty years.

Much of who I am today is because of her and the lessons she taught me.

Read it after the jump.

Doubling down on stupid just makes you twice as stupid

National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre went on Meet the Press this morning to make sure the entire country knows just how off base and out of touch he and the gunphiles he speaks for are with their plan to put a gun-toting protector in every school in the USA. The National Center for Education Statistics says that, in the 2009-2010 school year, there were 132,183 public and private K-12 schools in this country. Leave it to the NRA to come up with a solution to school shootings that involves putting over 132,000 new guns into our schools.

More after the jump.

Or, how billionaires use wingnuts as human shields At first, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre’s press conference seemed like a tone-deaf failure, a PR disaster, a complete clusterfogetaboutit. But then I began to realize his goal had nothing to do with improving the NRA’s image. His goal was to feed the kind of dissension, fear and anger that sells […]

The impact of new Republican taxes in Michigan is about to get very real

Back in February, I wrote piece titled “The tax timebomb that explodes in Michigan in 2012 is MUCH worse than you thought”. The piece got a lot of attention, primarily because it was a big news flash that in order to pay for the billions in giveaways to Michigan corporations, Michigan Republicans raised taxes on over half of the people in Michigan. And, make no mistake, true to Republican) form, the impact was far greater on lower income Michiganders than on our wealthiest citizens.

Postcards notifying many of these people about the tax hit they are about take arrived in mailboxes in Michigan this week.

Take a look after the jump.

Fearlessly leading from the rear… After the Republican-led Michigan legislature passed S.B. 59 – the so-called guns-in-schools-and-daycares bill — the Huffington Post asked anti-teachers union group StudentsFirst if they supported this legislation that would allow the carrying of concealed weapons in schools. It’s a fair question, right? If they truly DO put students first, a dubious claim at best given […]

Using the power of personalizing issues to make change when you’re in the minority

One of the most outspoken and eloquent Democrats in the legislature for the past two years is Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer from East Lansing. Whenever there was a major issue making the headlines that Republicans were on the wrong side of, Senator Whitmer was there to be sure that they were not only held accountable but that their actions would not go unnoticed.

Given the Republicans’ recent flurry of ideologically-driven activity and the fact that Republicans still control both houses of the state legislature, control the state Supreme Court, and that the Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State are all Republicans, I wanted to see how the top Democratic leader of the state Senate (and longest serving sitting Senator) was feeling about the road ahead. I sat down with her in a coffee shop in East Lansing this week for an interview.

(It’s all there, after the jump.)

OK, that’s Time magazine’s thing. But we totally agree. I’m no Pete Souza and I didn’t have 48 hours with the President, but I do have a few photos and a story to share. Over the last four years I have had the privilege of photographing Barack Obama many times and, as I tell my story, I will include a […]