Today, back on his “Look, I can read stiltedly from a teleprompter” pivot, Donald Trump laid out one of the most extreme foreign policy proposals since the Cold War. His new policy – what he calls “extreme vetting” – would force immigrants to take an ideology test to see if they are worthy of being in America. The deep, twisted, […]

By now you’ve probably read about Donald Trump’s wife Melania and the speech she gave at the National Republican Convention last night. Her plagiarism of Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech was first noticed by journalist Jarrett Hill whose tweet blew up the internet: CORRECTION: Melania stole a whole graph from Michelle's speech. #GOPConvention WATCH: https://t.co/8BCOwXAHSy pic.twitter.com/zudpDznGng — Jarrett Hill (@JarrettHill) July […]

Early this month, in a piece about Republican attacks on State Board of Education President John Austin, I noted that State Senator Tom Casperson was moving forward with introducing one of his own here in Michigan. Sure enough, as he promised, today that bill was introduced as Senate Bill 993. In that piece, I also said this: Sen. Casperson’s yet-to-be-introduced […]

The following guest post was written by my friend Chris Armstrong, Partnerships and Government Affairs Director for Small Business Majority. Chris was the former student body president of University of Michigan and experienced first hand the corrosive impacts of anti-gay bigotry at the hands of former state Assistant Attorney General Andrew Shirvell who stalked and harassed him during his time […]

There are two things that worry me most about Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and the national, even international, megaphone it gives him. The first is that he’s so outrageous that he makes a zealot like Ted Cruz seem “reasonable”, a terrifying prospect. Second, and equally worrisome, Trump is giving voice, cover, and even legitimacy (in some people’s eyes, anyway) to […]

When Irving, Texas police arrested 14-year old Muslim science nerd Ahmed Mohamed on Monday, it appeared that bigotry had won and that all it takes to be branded a terrorist is to have brown skin and an Arabic-sounding name. Police were called in after his teacher and principal assumed he was going to bomb the school with his oh-so-cool digital […]

Mohamed Ahmed is a 14-year old Texan from Irving who loves to invent and build things. This week, he built a homemade clock and brought it to school to show his teacher, thinking it would impress him. What happened next is has sent a shockwave of outrage across the country and across the globe and even prompted Hillary Clinton to […]

It’s easy for Democrats to hope that Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination because it’s easy to believe he can’t win. For those of us who watched in horror as George W. Bush won (twice), we know otherwise. For those who watched the Michigan state legislature be completely taken over by tea party religious zealots, we know otherwise. Trump, who […]

UPDATE: This post has been updated and the title updated to reflect the new information. As Amy wrote about earlier today, the Michigan senate was considering a package of bills that will allow adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBT couples when placing children. So-called “sincerely-held religious beliefs”, at least for the bigots among us, include consigning some children to a […]

This post has been updated to reflect Brian Klawiter’s conviction on assault and battery charges and for parole violation. After the owner of Indiana pizzeria Memories publicly declared she wouldn’t make her pies for same-sex weddings, she raked in well over $800,000 from a GoFundMe.com fundraiser. Eager to get in on the action, or at least to share the limelight […]

There’s been so much in the news about over-the-top idiocy from Michigan Republicans lately that I thought I’d just put them all in one post. Over the past week or so, they’ve been trying to further degrade a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion and to corrupt our democracy by rigging the electoral system in favor of […]