I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
[COMMENTARY] There’s a thing in architecture called perspective. Look at a five-story building by itself, without comparison to other structures, and it looks big. Stand beside it, and it seems gigantic.
Build a 60-story tower next to it, and look again.
It seems tiny.
Continued -Now, think about Kwamegate. Until last weekend, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s racy text messages were the biggest story Detroit had seen in decades. The scandal towered over other news stories. The Detroit Free Press caught hizzoner making what he thought were private, racy electronic comments to his chief of staff and erstwhile paramour, remarks that contradicted his and her sworn testimony in an $8.4 million lawsuit.
Last weekend, we got perspective. We learned, thanks apparently to a Justice Department leak, that the FBI is looking at four Detroit City Council members for heavy-duty corruption. They’re suspected of selling their votes for relatively small amounts of money in a sludge-processing deal worth $47 million to a Houston contractor called Synagro Technologies. Graft seems to have been rampant in the Coleman A. Young Building.
But so far, Kwame hasn’t been implicated. The Wayne County prosecutor’s perjury charges against him now look pretty puny next to the influence-peddling felony charges that could come out of this probe.
Suddenly, next to Sludgegate, Kwamegate looks like a little trash can sitting next to a mountain of garbage.
Maybe it wasn’t such a big deal, after all.
Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
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