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.
Tim Skubick has a post on his blog about Gov. Granholm’s latest move in an elaborate chess game to force the Republican-controlled Senate to vote for more revenue, something they have so far refused to do. And he rightly says that the outcome will be a measure of her power and that of the education lobby:
At the end of this historic battle, we’ll know how much juice the state’s education lobby really has and whether Gov. Jennifer Granholm is a wounded lame duck.
The governor rolled the dice last week in a gutsy move to round up some GOP senate votes to raise new revenue for the schools. She
announced a whopping $292 cut per pupil across the state. Republicans blamed her for for trying to force them to cough up the bucks. That’s exactly what she was doing and the Senate GOP leader labeled it a form of political extortion…The massive and well-heeled and supposedly influential school lobby is standing behind the governor 1000%…
But with the education lobby helping her to turn up the heat, she hopes to net three, four maybe even five GOP defections. When the dust settles, we’ll know how powerful it and she really are.
And we’ll know just how resolute the state GOP is in maintaining their no taxes pledge. She only needs two Senate Republicans to bow to pressure and vote for a tax increase to restore the K-12 budget cuts. And as we noted earlier, the cuts to the 39 out-of-formula school districts that the governor made by line-item veto took more than $20 million from schools in the districts of two key Republican Senators, John Pappageorge and Nancy Cassis.
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