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.
The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), an Ann Arbor-based Christian legal group, has filed another lawsuit against the government, this one on behalf of right-wing talk show host Michael Savage and others over a new report by the Department of Homeland Security concerning the dangers posed by right-wing extremists. You can see the full legal complaint here.
The TMLC seems to specialize in filing lawsuits with little hope of succeeding on the merits. This is the same group that filed suit against AIG last year because one of its subsidiaries sells a type of insurance that complies with Muslim legal restrictions, prompting some of the top legal scholars in the nation to scoff at the complaint. In fact, the plaintiff in that case, Michigan native Kevin Murray, is also a plaintiff in the new case.
This case appears to be little better. Like the AIG complaint, it’s mostly filled with political boilerplate rather than serious legal arguments. That’s a surefire way to annoy a judge. I emailed a copy of the complaint to Daniel Ray, a professor of constitutional law at Cooley Law School’s Oakland campus and he replied that it was “clearly a PR suit that shouldn’t survive a motion to dismiss and comes dangerously close to Rule 11 sanctions.” Rule 11 is a provision of the Federal Rules on Civil Procedure that allow a court to levy sanctions against an attorney for filing a suit that is clearly frivolous.
It’s especially ironic that the group objects to DHS keeping an eye on right-wing extremists less than two weeks after Richard Poplawski, a white supremacist with ties to far-right organizations, opened fire and killed three police officers in Pittsburgh. We have an unprecedented increase in white supremacist activity in response to the election of the nation’s first African-American president, we have groups and individuals stockpiling huge amounts of ammunition and guns flying off the shelves, we have a vast increase in the number of credible threats being handled by the Secret Service, and we have right wing groups openly talking about revolution. And the government shouldn’t be keeping an eye on right-wing extremists?
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