Weekly Blog Roundup

This is the first installment of a new feature at the Michigan Messenger, a weekly roundup of blog stories that address issues in Michigan or larger issues that the Messenger has covered. We’ll be rolling it out on Thursday or Friday every week to spread the word about interesting things being said by people who aren’t us. So let’s get started:

The Daily Kos reports on a new poll that suggests that Barack Obama would be much more likely to beat John McCain in the state of Michigan than Hillary Clinton. The EPIC-MRA poll shows Obama beating McCain 42-37%, while Clinton would lose to McCain 45-37%. Since Michigan is a key swing state in every presidential election, this could prove very important. Clinton says she would done better in the polls but she was busy dodging sniper fire at Metro Airport.

West Michigan Rising notes that a PAC called All Children Matter, run by Betsy DeVos, has been nailed with a record $5.2 million fine. They were basically using another state PAC in Virginia to launder money and channel it back to their Ohio PAC to get around state limits on campaign donations and the Ohio Elections Commission caught them with their hand in the cookie jar. All of the various state PACs controlled by DeVos in this situation were set up to push charter schools, which clearly begs the question of whether those schools would include a civics class and some instruction in ethical behavior.

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The U of M Democrats provide a much-needed analysis of the various sub-species of Republicans, which they call the Five Tribes: neo-cons, theo-cons, business conservatives, libertarian conservatives and paleo-cons. I still maintain that libertarianism, properly understood, is a subset of liberalism rather than conservatism; I could probably make some headway in convincing others of that if there weren’t so many Ron Paul-style paleo-cons calling themselves libertarians. But that’s an argument for another forum.

The NY Times finds the silver lining in our state’s current economic cloud: sure the economy sucks and the unemployment rate is going up like Mark Foley at a boy scout jamboree, but that just means more vacant buildings to make movies in. Turns out we’ve got lots of empty prisons in which to film the sequel to Caged Heat. Which leads to the obvious question: do women in prison really take that many showers?

Kathy at Blogging for Michigan lays the smack down on John McCain for calling Obama an “elitist,” but let’s not let Hillary Clinton off the hook for that one either. And while we’re at it, can we just ban all accusations of “elitism” from political campaigns? Everyone who runs for president is a member of the elite, by definition. McCain and Clinton are worth more than $100 million each and they’re calling someone else an elitist. The last two presidential campaigns have featured George W. Bush, John Kerry and Al Gore, every one of them born into lives of extraordinary privilege, yet they spent most of their time trying to out-Bubba one another. When we’ve got third generation scions from America’s wealthiest and most powerful political families accusing each other of not being a “common man,” you know how ridiculous our political discourse has become.