Terrorized by Jack Lessenberry, Mike Kowall drops out of race

by: Eric B.

Sat Jan 21, 2012 at 10:01:18 AM EST

Just the other day Jack Lessenberry suggested that voters in the 11th Congressional District remember Mike Kowall as the guy who, when Monty Burns was thrown in jail for contempt, that they also toss in the clink the head of MDOT and some random, unnamed official from the city of Detroit. Then, this.

State Sen. Mike Kowall, R-White Lake, decided today to suspend his campaign for the 11th Congressional district seat.

The decision will avoid a primary fight with incumbent U.S. Rep. Thad McCotter, R-Livonia, who abandoned a run for president and decided to seek reelection to his seat.

Are the two things connected? Is it irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to.

By the way, just for the sake of clarity here ... Thad McCotter abandoned his run for president in the same way that I abandoned a run last week after putting my shoes on and looking outside to see freezing rain falling from the clouds. That is, he was the only person who rain who never enjoyed a moment at the top, except from the state's punditocracy, who wondered for a brief time whether he actually had a shot.

About that Keystone pipeline

by: Eric B.

Fri Jan 20, 2012 at 13:30:31 PM EST

The first thing you need to know about the announcement yesterday that the Keystone XL pipeline's permit was denied was that it ultimately came as a political decision. Not by the president, mind you, but by Congressional Republicans who demanded an answer to the permit question in such a tight timeframe that the president, who most indicators had as otherwise supporting it (in fact, it appears that he wanted to wait until after the 2012 to stick it to the hippies), said he had very little recourse but to deny it.

"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people," Obama said in a statement. "I'm disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my Administration's commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil."

This was essentially the consensus view among the Beltway press, that as part of the payroll tax cut holiday deal that they would hand the president a very narrow window in which to make a permitting decision on Keystone. Their intent, naturally, was to use his rejection as an Election Year cudgel. In fact, the president signaled that the Canadians could reapply for the permit next year, giving the State Department the time they believe is necessary to make it happen.

Please note that this had nothing to do with "the hippies," who continue to notch one of the worst imaginable performance records when it comes to actually executing their agenda and who do it in such a way that they are easy to blame for when things outside their control go wrong.

Bear in mind that this analysis takes place outside the framework of partisan shouting. Based on the accounts available in basically every media outlet, the president wanted to approve the permit but was given too little time to do it right and so had to reject it, which fulfilled part of the Republican plan this year to attack the president on the topic of jobs. The only people who are really arguing that the president caved to environmentalists and cost tens of thousands of American jobs as well as ceding energy security to the Chinese are people who've become entirely partisan. Cue, this morning's editorial in the Detroit News.

For someone whose operating slogan is "We Can't Wait," it's curious that President Barack Obama is willing to wait and wait and wait for the Keystone XL Pipeline project and the 20,000 desperately needed jobs it promises.

The 20,000 number, of course, is complete rubbish, although that's on the low end of the scale for predicted job creation. Some of the talking heads at Fox News were predicted hundreds of thousands of jobs, although at the end of this video courtesy Media Matters, the company that wants the pipeline itself says the number of jobs created would actually be in the hundreds. A few hundred ... 20,000 ... what's the difference?

The Keystone project is the subject of more than 10,000 pages of environmental studies. Every possible route has been explored. The State Department twice ruled the pipeline would have no impact on sensitive environmental areas, and initially recommended approval. But it switched its opinion to align with the president's political strategy.

Not to enrage the state of Nebraska, whose Congressional delegation wanted the federal government to find a different path. So much for state's rights and fighting a federal government forcing its will down the throats of locals, right?

China wants this oil, which would go a long way toward freeing the United States from dependence on petroleum from unsavory places, and is urging an alternate pipeline to the Pacific coast.

And, what we have here is perhaps the most poorly informed, least accurate editorial you're going to read this calendar year. It's not so much that they have committed a gross factual error here. The idea that the tar sands produce oil and not something that has to be first refined into a synthetic form of it, or that China would get all of it, or that the president is handing the Chinese a "strategic advantage" are just simply daft. It's almost as if the only thing the author of this editorial understands about global energy markets is what they've learned off the back of a box of cereal.

You can't really blame the News' editorial page. They don't actually do journalism there, but instead participate in the poorly informed echo chamber that is rightwing politics. Once you understand that their advocacy is intended to substitute noise for insight, you can sleep better knowing that the things published there carry the same amount of reality-based weight as press releases from Mike Rogers' office.

It's cold out, and here are some links

by: Eric B.

Fri Jan 20, 2012 at 11:00:23 AM EST

This is going to be a really, really long post of links. Stuff's been building up the last couple of days, which includes a good deal of mucous in my chest. Now all of it, the mucous included, is sorta coming out. If I really wanted to synchronize, I'd make the background of MichLib a lovely shade of bright greenish yellow. Anyway, if my laptop weather widget is accurate, the temperature is in the single digits, which means you all have motivation to stay inside and read, read, READ!

Onward!

*--More from the State of the State, which appears to have been universally panned as vague and empty (and largely bereft of mentions of the environment, which isn't surprising). This time from Stephen Henderson, who benevolent overlord Rick Michigan tells to go suck it by way of dismissing all of his critics with a wave of the hand. This, by the way, is endlessly annoying ... why would MiOSHA tell someone they had to put the toilet seat down? One imagines it might have something to do with infection control, but when you're entire ideology is given over to taking such stuff on faith, thinking things through is never a priority. Like the ACLU, KKKlinton, William Ayers, ACORN, and a few other things ... the mere mention of regulation says one thing to the general public and an entirely different thing to conservaives.

*--Gary McDowell gets some love from the DNCC in his bid to unseat the teabaggin' surgeon, Dan Benishek. The DNCC the other day also said it thought it could retake the House, which probably isn't as tall an order as you might think with the general approval rating for a Republican-dominated Congress less than 10 percent (yes, I know, the Senate ... anyone heard from Harry Reid lately?¹).

*--Janice Daniels remains more spooked by the idea of urban youth visiting Troy than building a bridge into the future.

*--Benevolent overlord Rick Michigan's tenor towards state workers, which is somewhat different than those of a certain neighbor to the west, has calmed jangled nerves. In other words, he's likely to get better production out of state workers by not treating them like an enemy that has to be crushed at all costs.

*--Mike Kowall makes an early run at the Most Odious rankings by suggesting that when Matty Maroun was thrown in jail for failing to make good on a contract, that the head of MDOT as well as someone from Detroit. Jack Lessenberry's suggestion is that the voters of the district remember this when election day comes, and if I had a dime each time people ignored this sort of plea I could buy myself a seat in Congress.

*--The Bridge looks at township fund balances, in two articles. My chief quibble with the package is that they allow to let hang out there the suggestion that townships build up huge fund balances, but don't do a lot of asking what some of these township are saving to build. I mean, before local Democrats took over our neighboring charter township, they built up savings mostly by refusing to increase the number of services it provided and instead got them subsidized by everyone else.

*--Dear Plymouth-Canton Schools: Banning books for whatever reason is always a terrible idea. Always. Or, as the poet says, "They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove 'em."

*--An Op-Ed piece on Right to Work. Again, I hope they start publicly pushing this, because it's a good way to guarantee that the Republicans will lose the House, the state Supreme Court, and probably at least one Michigan seat in Congress.

*--Tim Walberg: Partisan hack.

*--The future of Michigan's film tax credits is cloudy.

*--Benevolent overlord Rick Michigan to enrage his own party early this year, first by pushing for an Obamacare-inspired, consumer-friendly health care exchange, the likes of which Wisconsin's Scott Walker has rejected millions in federal dollars for; and also for pushing to embrace pro-immigrant immigration reform. I now look forward to the coming news that Goat Killer and Tom McMillin are holding prayer meetings under the Rotunda so that God will reveal to them whether benevolent overlord Rick Michigan is really just a secret agent for promoting Sharia.

It's now 11 degrees outside, which is perfect timing for me to go out and purchase bananas.

¹-Yes, I know. Harry Reid shit-canned a vote on SOPA/PIPA Friday morning, which is the first reminder anyone's had this calendar year that he still served in the Senate. 

Foreign policy, Nolan Finley style

by: Eric B.

Fri Jan 20, 2012 at 09:39:37 AM EST

From the same people who brought you the invasion of Iraq while not knowing the two major schools of Muslim thought.

But he stood out in this one for reminding the Obama administration that Taliban sensibilities weren't nearly as tender when they videotaped their beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, or when they hung the butchered remains of American contractors from an overpass.

Not to get all pointy-headed on you, but...

A) The Taliban is a political and religious movement whose ideology is drawn from a violent interpretation of Sharia blended with local, Pashtun tribal codes. It is rooted regionally, confined to the wilderness areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

B) Daniel Pearl was killed by al-Qaida in urban Karachi, Pakistan while tracking down the link between shoe bomber Richard Reid and al-Qaida. That one dude, who looked like he fresh off a five-day bender when photographed after his capture, says he did the deed personally. Al-Qaida, while hostile to Shiia, the other school of Islam, is neither confined to region nor necessarily steeped in the tribal codes of what the British once referred to as the Northwest Frontier. That is, the Taliban and al-Qaida are different things.

C) The four Blackwater contracters killed and maimed in Fallujah were not killed by the Taliban, since the Taliban has never operated in Iraq. They were killed by Iraqi insurgents, although it is unclear whether those responsible were locals enraged by a hamhanded American occupation or foreign fighters fighting under the banner "al-Qaida in Iraq" (an entirely different organization from al-Qaida the terrorist organization) who were encouraged by that. What is certain, however, is that the Taliban weren't involved.

Now, like Finley, I've never actually fought a battle. I did serve in the military, which does give some insight into the thought processes of military commanders, and I can tell you that desecrating the bodies of your enemy isn't something the military chain of command is likely to take any more lightly than have members of the Obama administration who Finley thinks are overreacting. Why? Because if there's anything that military commanders dislike, it is things that unnecessary complicate their mission.

Every four years, we hear about the horrors of negotiating with your enemies from whatever Republican is trying to throw red meat to his party's base. These people are so damned dumb, they not only can't learn from their failures they can't learn from their successes. The Surge in Iraq wasn't just successful because we flooded the country with a bunch of troops. There were intense negotiations and bribes floated to bring war-weary but also wary tribes from under the influence of factionalization and into the fold of a peaceful resolution. That is, they were encouraged by money and the perception of security to come to the negotiating table and settle differences there rather than with car bombs. This is a simple principle that has been at work with every insurgency in the modern time (the notable exception was the British put-down of an insurgency of isolated Chinese communists in Malaysia).

In other words, the same negotiating table that the Republican field regularly holds in contempt for the sake of mollifying their own base of ignorant, xenophobic bigots is a critical tool in ending conflicts and allowing trapped superpowers to extract themselves as painlessly as possible. That makes anything that complicates that, like desecrating the bodies of your enemies, a threat to national security threat. Certainly not as bad as selling secrets about America's military communications system to the Israelis, but anyone who thinks to comment on this kind of stuff ought to at least be expected to recognize that it's not in the nation's best interest to pass this sort of stuff off with a "boys will be boys" attitude.

About last night

by: Eric B.

Thu Jan 19, 2012 at 12:41:04 PM EST

I skipped last night's State of the State. Okay, that's not really fair. I missed it because I had a meeting. Okay, that's not really fair. I could have skipped the meeting and watched the speech. Ultimately, it came down to the path of least pain, which involved missing the State of the State to attend the meeting that I was earlier in the week tasked with chairing. By the time I got home, it seems that everyone already had formed an opinion of the speech. In fact, most people had already formed an opinion before benevolent overlord Rick Michigan delivered the thing. So, it frankly didn't seem like an environment worth adding to.

For what it's worth, here is Gretchen Whitmer's rebuttal, which appears to be predicated on the idea that benevolent overlord Rick Michigan did what he always does, which is offer meaningless platitudes but only vague details. This is a speech, mind you, that is always high on vague details and meaningless platitudes through administrations. Fer'nstance.

Lansing— Michigan is "getting it right and getting it done," Gov. Rick Snyder pronounced in a State of the State address Wednesday that included no surprises or bold new initiatives.

A couple of years ago, a panel of old, white men expressed sadness that Jennifer Granholm didn't include in her State of the State address tax hike proposals everyone knew were going to be part of the conversation, and instead waited to spring those on an "unsuspecting" Lansing for her budget proposal. Last year, everyone was agog over dashboards.

Meanwhile, Skubick notes that benevolent overlord's vague, unsurprising speech failed to mollify the concerns of Detroit, where residents are concerned that a financial emergency might be used as an excuse to send in a dictator.  Someone else last night noted that the speech made no references whatsoever to pulling local communities out of a quagmire of declining property values and years of broken promises. It's a fair cop, but an understandable one. As noted, these speeches are intended for the digestion of the state as a whole, but those people who live and work within the Lansing bubble.

The Day the Internet turned back on

by: Eric B.

Thu Jan 19, 2012 at 09:24:02 AM EST

Lil' Fella, the Man Who Never Surged, and Candice Miller ... those are the three Michigan Congresscritters who have currently listed themselves as opposing SOPA/PIPA, the two bills that would squeeze the Internet on behalf of an outdated, dinosaur-like entertainment industry. And, of course, there's John Conyers, the lone Michigan Congresscritter listed as supporting it. At least, that's according to the latest whip count.

Guess where this leaves us, sunshines? In the very curious position where we're better represented in Congress by Republicans than Democrats. Oh, someone mentioned on Facebook yesterday that John Dingell's office said The Dean is uncomfortable with the bills, as written. The solution to that is very simple. Declare your opposition to the bills as written. Word on the street is that the worst elements of the bills are being written out of the legislation, so it's a very easy position to take.

Meanwhile, you can register your dissatisfaction with Michigan's only active Congressional supporter, John Conyers, by tossing some coin at state Sen. Glenn Anderson, who has spoken out against both and has in the past put his oars in the water deeply enough to have some credibility on the issue. This isn't to preclude his other primary opponent, state Sen. Bert Johnson, but as of yesterday he didn't have an active Act Blue page to donate through.

Update! ... Dale Kildee opposes. So does Sandy Levin.

While I was sleeping: Mad Jack makes it official

by: Eric B.

Wed Jan 18, 2012 at 20:51:38 PM EST

Jack Hoogendyk throws his hat into the ring, signifying his willingess to sell one of Michigan's Congressional seats to the Club for Growth.

Former state Rep. Jack Hoogendyk announced today he will challenge Rep. Fred Upton (Mich.) for a second time in the Republican primary.

We all knew this was going to happen when Mad Jack and the Club for Growth started sniffing each other's rear ends a couple of months ago, and especially after Mad Jack said a decision was forthcoming earlier this month.

It's not a circus until someone shows up with a foam pig

by: Eric B.

Wed Jan 18, 2012 at 17:02:28 PM EST

Apparently someone decided that political discourse hasn't been degraded quite badly enough and dragged Mr. Perks to Lansing to make sure that job doesn't go unfinished.

What's the occasion? Tonight's State of the State address! I see by the lead-up coverage that people are mad that the governor's promise to put a dashboard in every pot hasn't come through to fruition, probably because benevolent overlord Rick Michigan's real agenda this last year wasn't actually about creating Internet dashboards for state agencies. And, let's face it, the State of the State isn't actually a speech intended for consumption by the general public. It's become a speech intended to be consumed by the small minority of people who follow state politics and the media. Tomorrow, there will be media stories about what was said, and perhaps a comment or two of rebuttal. The State of the State is really just another half-inning in a game of insider political baseball.

The other side of this is that while we normally consider the State of the State to be the governor's opportunity to set his agenda for the upcoming year, benevolent overlord Rick Michigan is apt to deal with a Legislature that wants to lead him around by the nose. They do have the upper hand and both chambers are filled with people whose chief goal it is to use the machinery of public policy to torment constituent groups they dislike for reasons of simple bigotry.

The day the Internet went dark

by: Eric B.

Wed Jan 18, 2012 at 15:26:35 PM EST

The dearth of posts yesterday and today is not related to the Internet boycott under way at a number of the most prominent sites around to a pair of bills under consideration in Congress that could potentially negatively transform how the Internet works. The bills aren't being pushed by companies that have used the Internet to innovate or transform, but old-style companies that have seen changes forced to their business models thanks to it. That is, the bills aren't about making the Internet a better place, they are about making it a worse place for interests that have been rendered largely obselete by it and rather than changing with the times wish to hold back change.

It's my sad duty to report that John Conyers, longtime Detroit Congressman, is one of the sponsors of this legislation and part of waning support for it. Stifling change on behalf of monied interests, that is, is a bipartisan affair.

"The notion that this bill threatens freedom of information is insupportable," said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the committee's senior Democrat and another SOPA sponsor.

I checked, and unfortunately it appears that Conyers' primary challenge for next year, state Sen. Bert Johnson, is not currently accepting contributions through Act Blue, which seems like a better way to undermine support for this legislation that blacking out the Internet for the day.

Update! ... I am informed by anonymous sources that there is another challenger to Conyers next year, and I'm sorry I forgot about him. State Sen. Glenn Anderson has long been a friend to the Internet and even this site. Shortly after taking this site over, I visited a few of our esteemed elected officials in Lansing, and he was one of those who sat down for a brief chat. He also came out to a reception that evening and hung out with the MichLib crew for a few minutes. He also has a working Act Blue page.

GOP celebrates MLK Day by claiming him as one of their own

by: Eric B.

Mon Jan 16, 2012 at 14:13:28 PM EST

Count this among your annual gathering of conservatives claiming that Martin Luther King, Jr. was the original teabagger. It's a special e-mail from the state GOP chairman, Bobby Shostak.

Since our country was founded, we have always been a people who deeply cherished freedom. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. loved freedom so much that he constantly risked his life in its pursuit for others, no matter their station in life. Dr. King pushed our nation into the unflickering light of conscience so that all could enjoy equality before the law; and he gave his life so that all Americans would be born into a nation that fully lives the seminal words of its founding, “we hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.”

Today, his legacy lives on in others -- all those who advance the cause of individual liberty, freedom and equality.

This is an awfully generous allowance for a people who so deeply love freedom that it required a war that left more than 600,000 dead just to get an emancipation that led to a further 150 years of lynchings, Jim Crowe, Lester Maddox and George Wallace and Orville Faubus, and violence threatened over attempts to end segregation under the auspices of a doctrine now held dear within the Republican Party ... state's rights.

What is further rich is that voter suppression under the guise of fighting largely non-existent voter fraud is a thinly scaled attempt to roll back the right to vote that was among those things King gave his life for. So, thanks, but no thanks guys. If you'd like to really honor MLK, then what say you stop making it more difficult for poor minorities to exercise the franchise.

Also, this. I have a very difficult time believing that the same Martin Luther King who advocated on behalf of labor unions and for some of the most radical wealth redistribution and housing desegregation laws would take too kindly to the state going to an urban center and dictating policy in a way that left workers earning a small paycheck at a time of such great wealth inequality. Again, if you really want to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. ...

When words cease to have meaning, Magic Frank edition

by: Eric B.

Sat Jan 14, 2012 at 12:03:30 PM EST

Well, we all knew it would happen ... on his way down the ladder of GOP presidential hopefuls, Newt Leroy Gingrich would wage a scorched earth campaign on Willard Mitt "Mittens" Romney. We knew this because that's what Gingrich is, a doughy mass of ego and spite who once shut down the federal government because he couldn't sit in the front of Air Force One. And, so he did, unleashing a vicious attack by way of the same sort of Super PAC that Romney used to torpedo Gingrich last month. It's the sort of video, if you haven't seen it, that you'd expect from a Michael Moore, a thorough knifing of the Republican frontrunner that will be difficult for Romney to pass off as looney leftist yelling.

Magic Frank, donning his hood as chief inquisitor of the modern Republican Party, sees something else at work. It's now, he writes, time to purge Gingrich from the Republican Party.

Conservatives believe the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to seek their own happiness and make the best of their own lives in a free country and economy.

Gingrich can no longer claim the latter definition.

If you're part of an ideologically-inflexible political party, nobody every tells you that they're going to purge you. It doesn't happen that way. There weren't arguments or curses like in the movies. Your political commissar comes with banal punditry.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Magic Frank has single handedly managed to redefine conservatism as what is mainstream to the Republican Party. Willard Romney, pro-choice and pro-gay rights before he was against them, is now the real standard bearer of conservatism. And, it is so not because Romney has had some sort of convincing pre-deathbed conversion to true conservatism, whatever the hell that is, but because he was the victim of an attack everyone could see coming six miles down the road. Conservatism, according to Magic Frank, apparently finds value and nobility in whatever helps alread-wealthy people become more so ... even if they have to destroy communities to do it.

To be fair to Magic Frank, capitalism today is under unprecedented attack. I mean, those stinking hippies in Zuccotti Park were bitching last fall that Wall Street had grifted the nation and that they wanted capitalism back. A more bone-chilling assault on free enterprise the nation hasn't seen (leastways, since the genuine movements to supplant capitalism with anarchy, socialism, and/or communism of the first half of the 20th century).

Wrap up on the short imprisonment of Monty Burns

by: Eric B.

Sat Jan 14, 2012 at 11:31:32 AM EST

Jeff Wattrick at MLive covered the short, tear-stained imprisonment of Monty Burns pretty authoritatively. Here, for instance, a wrap-up of the punditry. And, this one, breaking down the case and Burns' professed love of country after departing the stony lonesome.

The thing that's been missing in this sad tale of woe is that Burns not only failed to live up to court-ordered obligations, but this last year managed to stall the construction of a competing span by purchasing himself a chamber of the state Legislature ... specifically the state Senate ... and by convincing the state's teabagger set that in all this he's the real victim of oppressive government.

The two go together like hand and fitted glove, and someone somewhere ought devote some energy to pointing out that the Senate Republicans have as a chief patron a man who had to be jailed because he was found guilty of holding a legally binding order of a court in good standing in contempt.

The ongoing train wreck that is Janice Daniels

by: Eric B.

Sat Jan 14, 2012 at 11:05:30 AM EST

We can all be happy that Troy mayor Janice Daniels, having put her real estate license in escrow thanks to the backlash over her homophobic ravings (followed by her pronouncement that she's the real victim), apparently has no intention of letting go of her grip on #9 on the state's most odious political figures list.

But then this week, Daniels compounded her Facebook faux pas when she met with a group that advocates for gay students at Troy High School to help plan a forum on bullying and tolerance. The students say Daniels suggested including a panel of psychologists who can speak to the "mental disease" that homosexuality represents.

Daniels denied that, but acknowledged that she wanted to make sure the teens were made aware of the "higher incidence of disease" among homosexuals.

There's no point in laying out the explanation behind the "higher incidence of disease," is there? It's like pointing out that Detroit's decline and fall weren't linked solely to "liberal Democrat" policies but a complex stew of neglect and regional dysfunction. Once you grab hold of the end product and refuse to think things through to genesis, you're basically a lost cause.

Meanwhile...

Daniels has a right to her opinions, something she has pointed out several times since the initial flap over her Facebook post. Our First Amendment protects bigoted speech as much as any other kind, and no one has the right to silence another purely for the objectionable nature of what they're saying.

I would like to propose something here. I would like to propose that if Janice Daniels wishes to play part-time mayor of a major Michigan city that she be expected to wear her big-girl panties. The First Amendment protects bigoted speech from prior restraint by the government. It does not, however, protect bigoted speech from mockery and derision. Pretending that she's somehow a victim of her critics in all of this elevates hate speech to special status ... she has a right to embrace it to the point where anyone who responds is worse than she is.

Shocker: Merit pay doesn't lead to better schools

by: Eric B.

Fri Jan 13, 2012 at 14:01:14 PM EST

From the department of "Who could have predicted?"

Paying teachers more won't attract them to high-needs school districts, especially if that extra pay in linked to student performance, according to a study released by groups backed by teachers unions.

More attractive to teachers, the report says, is smaller class sizes and opportunities to collaborate with colleagues, said Teri Battaglieri, executive director of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, which helped fund the study.

In other words, like all professionals, teachers aren't automatically drawn to pay but are drawn to things that make the career they've chosen to be professionally attractive. Does this surprise anyone that people who go into a service-oriented field rather than one predicated on making lots of money pick things that make their work more personally enriching rather than money? Again, if we had policy making decisions based on reality rather than the whims of people who believe the whole world really does operate according to the bottom line of a ledger, this wouldn't be necessary.

And, I've said it before, I'll say it again ... the key to improving schools has next to nothing to do with teacher pay. It has everything to do with making children want to learn and feel that it will benefit them. That means getting parents more involved. It also means being able to help a child make a connection between an education and how it will improve his or her lot. Cities allowed to resemble demilitarized zones sends the message that getting an education won't necessarily open up opportunities for a better life.

Coming to a wilderness area near you: ATVs

by: Eric B.

Fri Jan 13, 2012 at 11:43:54 AM EST

The Upper Peninsula has benefited like no other part of the state from the important work of past Congresses to place off limits from development a few shreds of land, mostly around unique natural features. Mining may have once defined the Upper Peninsula, but to most of us trolls it's now a recreation paradise. One of the most important laws that has helped promote this was the Wilderness Act of 1964, which was intended to identify the most unique of the nation's natural features and recognize that they have a value all their own that can't be quantified in a way that Babbitt nation can recognize -- intrinsic aesthetics. The crux of the law is that there are places in the United States which will, going forward, be untrammeled by permanent buildings or the roar of engines.

Dan Benishek, thankfully, has apparently recognized that this sort of thinking is outdated, and wants to open up the nation's wilderness areas to the sorts of ORVs and other pollution-spewing machines that have made the air in our most popular national parks so bad to breath. I give you the Recreational Fishing and Hunting Heritage Opportunities Act.

(1) The provision of opportunities for hunting, fishing and recreational shooting, and the conservation of fish and wildlife to provide sustainable use recreational opportunities on designated wilderness areas on Federal public lands shall constitute measures necessary to meet the minimum requirements for the administration of the wilderness area.

(2) The ‘within and supplemental to’ Wilderness purposes, as provided in Public Law 88-577, section 4(c), means that any requirements imposed by that Act shall be implemented only insofar as they facilitate or enhance the original or primary purpose or purposes for which the Federal public lands or Federal public land unit was established and do not materially interfere with or hinder such purpose or purposes.

The primary purpose of the Wilderness Act was to create "units of land" on which people could go without worry that they might have to have modern, mechanized society imposed upon them by some thoughtless asshole who, when he looks at nature, sees mostly just stuff he wants to drive across or animals to kill. The idea that you'd allow people to use ORVs to facilitate hunting in a wilderness area violates the very basic spirit of it. And, really, frankly, if you wanted to get all "heritage" about it, you'd require that people pack in supplies on mules and horses, since that's what they had to do before the internal combustion engine.

It might not strike the typical Michigander as a really big deal. After all, I doubt most people -- even those who claim to enjoy recreating outside -- understand the difference between a national park and a wilderness area. It's kind of insider baseball for the wilderness preservation movement. It's also the source of long-standing tensions, especially out West, where they have genuine concern to keep mechanized vehicles out of certain places because they can cause genuine damage to the ecosystem through clumsy use (cryptobiotic soil, we're looking in your general direction, sir). This is a white wash of that.