Progress Michigan blog posts.
Yesterday, the Snyder administration said they’d be shelving their “Skunk Works” group, but left open the possibility that the “value schools” piece of it will live on. The father of “Skunk Works” and Mackinac Center cofounder Richard McLellan declared that while the group is dead, “value schools” are still very much alive. And after claiming…
Oooh, that smell. Can you smell that smell? It’s the smell of “Skunk Works” slow-roasting in Michigan’s hot spring sunshine. Over the weekend, emails obtained by the Detroit News through a FOIA request revealed that “Skunk Works” – contrary to what Gov. Snyder has claimed – has always been a government-sanctioned work group. Basically: they…
Radical politicians and anti-choice extremists are at it again. They’re resuscitating a failed attempt to dismantle women’s rights. When it comes to making choices about a women’s health and her body, it’s clear conservatives don’t think women have the wherewithal to make their own decisions. They’re escalating efforts to roll back the clock on progress,…
What happens when you cut funding to local schools? Easy: they can’t pay their bills. Over the past two weeks, Buena Vista schools, the Flint School District, and Albion High School have had to shut down, cancel classes, or lay off staff and teachers. Even Ann Arbor schools are having trouble and considering cuts to…
Yesterday reports emerged that anti-choice groups are launching a ballot drive to revive their failed attempt to ban health insurance plans from covering any abortions, even in case of rape and incest. This extremist proposal was vetoed by Gov. Snyder last December, on the same day he signed another law imposing the most sweeping and…
One year ago today, the election-rigging scandal now known as “Bolgergate” started to unravel. On May 16, the day of the 2012 election filing deadline, then-Democratic State Rep. Roy Schmidt announced he was switching parties to run as a Republican, and an unknown amateur bodybuilder named Matt Mojzak filed to run as a Democrat. Bolger…
Fresh off a major embarrassment when his Administration’s secret “Skunk Works” project to defund public education was exposed, Gov. Snyder forced the group into the public eye. State Superintendent Mike Flanagan is now leading the project, and accepting public input on Facebook and through an online survey. We saw earlier this week that Superintendent Flanagan…
Impeaching President Obama for the crime of “Presidenting While A Democrat” has been on the lips of conservatives since early in his first term, for everything from not defending the federal ban on marriage equality in court to just existing. But it’s reached a fever pitch in recent days, as some members of the right-wing…
Sometimes things get so out of hand it becomes hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Fortunately, we’ve developed a tried and true system for dealing with this: lists of said chaff. So here are five of the most recent examples of proposals from Michigan’s fever swamps, which we affectionately call “Bills from the…
Last Thursday, the MIRS Capitol newsletter reported that Rep. Pete Lund would be on Off the Record over the weekend defending the plan to gut Michigan’s model auto no-fault system. This would be out of character for Lund, who declined to write an op-ed in the Detroit News defending his bill that would rig Michigan’s…