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 irony, there’s hypocrisy, and then there’s plain old-fashioned chutzpah. You’d have a difficult time finding a better example of the latter than the arguments being made by Blackwater in a lawsuit in Raleigh, N.C. One of the subsidiaries of this private military company founded by Michigan native Erik Prince, Presidential Airways, is being [...]
[COMMENTARY] In the same week that a 14-year-old “gay rights advocate” in Wayland Union High School on the west side of the state was assaulted for her advocacy, there was another story coming out of Macomb County in the state’s east side. The east-side story told a tale of a group of 20-30 African-American males [...]
[COMMENTARY] Well, marriage equality for homosexuals has arrived in California. Now all those flamin’ queers in the land of Reagan can strut their stuff with a piece of paper that recognized their relationships as just that, a social contract between two people, “to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, ’til death do [...]
[COMMENTARY] Community colleges, particularly Lansing Community College, are near and dear to my heart. I got my education at LCC, and I went on to serve a two-year term on the board of the state’s third-largest community college. At the time of my election, I was the first graduate of the college to be elected [...]
[COMMENTARY] A week after a federal jury acquitted Geoffrey Fieger of charges that he used “straw donors” to cover more than a hundred grand he donated to the 2004 John Edwards presidential campaign, the Detroit Free Press finally says Fieger was wrong about one of the statements he made before the trial ended. Better late [...]
[COMMENTARY] When I was first asked to cover Detroit for Michigan Messenger, I got a little uneasy. I had just moved to the city from Rochester, Michigan and was concerned that I was not qualified to be an informant on a place I didn’t know anything about. Over the past couple of months, I’ve added [...]
[Ed. note: The jury has asked for more documents, other media outlets report this afternoon. While we wait for what looks like a protracted period of deliberation, let's take another look at "The Jeff".] [COMMENTARY] According to recent accounts in the Detroit Free Press, besieged attorney Geoffrey Fieger doesn’t think he’s very popular in Michigan. [...]
[Commentary] And we wonder why Michigan residents hold their state Legislature in such low regard. Late Tuesday night, the Democratic-led House passed Senate Bill 776, a bill banning certain abortion procedures. The bill’s fate had occupied legislators’ time and attention for days, as the right-to-life lobby threatened to withdraw its endorsements from waffling legislators and [...]
Economist is a fellow at think tank funded indirectly by Phillip Morris and R.J. Reynolds [COMMENTARY] Pressure from the MGM Grand, Greektown and MotorCity casinos is working to swing the Democratic House leadership against the popular smoking ban bill. On May 22, in deference to pressure, Speaker of the House Andy Dillon, D-Redford Township, began [...]
[Commentary] Recently I was reminded why genuine conversation on race between people of different backgrounds is so often avoided: It’s really awkward. After all, it’s hard to talk to someone who doesn’t know anything about any culture other than the suburban white one, and trying to bridge that communication gap can make you feel uneasy. [...]
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