I was speaking with a Democratic state legislator today and they raised an interesting point. If the House passes the bill to hike the state minimum wage that was passed by the Senate last week, unless both chambers give the bill “immediate effect”, it won’t become law until 90 days after the end of the current legislative session which ends […]

The only thing less popular than a Republican is a Tea Partier Pundits want to remind you again and again that Democrats should get pounded this year. That’s what tends to happen in a president’s party after six years of holding the White House. President Obama’s approval is below 50 percent and Republicans have a chance to pick up seven […]

This afternoon the Michigan Senate passed S.B. 934 which raises the minimum wage in Michigan but by less than an indirect initiated state statute ballot referendum would have. This legislation short-circuits the ballot initiative. However, the legislation as passed by the Senate does reflect some changes since it was first introduced. In the beginning, the legislation only increased the minimum […]

As I have written about before, Republicans are petrified of a drive to put raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour on the ballot in November. It’s such a winning issue for Democrats that Republicans know that they simply must kill it or risk losing big on election day as more Democrats than usual turn out to vote in […]

A willingness to confront reality is on the ballot Rep. Gary Peters has become the first U.S. candidate in a close race to call out his Republican opponent’s stand on global warming. “This is something elected officials should be talking about — we have to be concerned about it,” Peters told The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent. “Certainly the voters would […]

It’s good to be know the king A Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) permit has been issued to Russian steel corporation Severstal this week, allowing the company that DEQ once called “the most egregious facility in the state” to continuing spewing pollutants in Dearborn and Detroit at levels far in excess of state regulations. As I wrote about earlier this […]

Correcting one more bad decision on top of so, so many others Bowing to public outrage, officials at the Education Achievement Authority — Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s failed education experiment with Detroit students — have reinstated fired teacher Tiffani Eaton. Eaton was fired for breaking up an exceedingly violent fight in her classroom by whacking one of the kids on […]

NOTE: this story has been updated HERE. When Tiffani Eaton stopped a violent classroom fight between two strapping high school boys by whacking one of them with a broom, she was fired by the Education Achievement Authority that runs Pershing High School in Detroit. EAA administrators defended her firing saying that she violated state corporal punishment laws; that it amounted […]

Rand Paul continues to fling any turd he can find at the Clintons for pretty obvious reasons. The first-term senator from Kentucky has to do something to show the GOP establishment he can be competitive in a general election, and he’s trying to keep the former president out of his home state’s Senate race so Rand didn’t sell out to […]

The Detroit News has a report out today that is both shocking and unsurprising. In it, they reveal that, since its inception in the fall of 2012, the Education Achievement Authority has spent nearly a quarter million dollars in travel, gas, a chauffeur for Chancellor John Covington, on furniture and other miscellaneous, non-education-related items. And they put it all on […]

Or possibly ever The Associated Press reports on a little-known benefit of the Affordable Care Act for low-income pregnant women: Lower-income women who signed up for a private policy in the new insurance exchanges will have access to additional coverage from their state’s Medicaid program if they get pregnant. Some women could save hundreds of dollars on their share of […]