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.
To the long list of political ironies, add one more: The desire of Republicans, particularly Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, to implicate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the torture scandal by saying she knew about it early on and did nothing to stop it may have actually made it more likely that a Truth Commission will be appointed to do a full investigation. Mike Soraghan writes at The Hill:
If nothing else, Pelosi’s hard-to-prove assertion that the CIA lied to her in a briefing has renewed interest among Republicans and Democrats in what the Bush administration was doing with detainees six years ago and what it told Congress and other officials.
That’s exactly what President Obama was trying to avoid earlier this year when he shot down the idea of a truth commission by saying he wanted to “look forward, not backwards.”
His position seemed to square at the time with Republicans, who also don’t want the Bush administration in the news as they try to dig out of an electoral hole.
But to go after Pelosi, Republicans have had to start looking back, too. Republican former speaker Newt Gingrich is talking about a House investigation into Pelosi’s claim. Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, is demanding increasingly detailed records of what the CIA told Congress about its interrogation program in 2002 and 2003.
The focus on Pelosi and the CIA briefings was a calculated move by Republicans to shift the focus away from the Bush administration’s actions and to send a warning shot across the bow of Democrats and tell them that if they demand a full investigation of this, their own leaders may be implicated too. But it seems to have done the opposite, increasing demands for a Truth Commission to investigate the entire matter.
Hoekstra may well regret bringing this issue up in the first place. Another Michigan Congressman, John Conyers, is still pushing for a nine-member commission with full subpoena power.
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