Category Archives: Michigan Government and Politics

Waterford, Michigan + Dying Mall = Arts Opportunity

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Monday night I went to a meeting at The Art Experience. The Art Experience exists inside a dying mall at the border between Waterford and Pontiac, Michigan. Once, it was the heart of shopping in this neck of the woods. Very little besides Sears and JC Penney remain. The Art Experience is still there serving the community, as is the Starlight Theater.

A Little Bit About The Art Experience

From what I could gather, The Art Experience is a small business created by a group of art therapists a little less than 15 years ago that provides artistic outlets for the community in North Oakland County’s Lakes’ Area. They are also involved with the mental health community.

A Little Bit About Summit Place Mall

This mall has just been sold and the ink will be hitting paper on March 26th. The new owners are planning on turning it into “retail condominiums.”

A Little About the Meeting

The meeting was an interesting mix of folks. There were representatives from such diverse organizations as ArtServe, Lighthouse of Oakland County, and the Waterford Chamber of Commerce. All of these organizations presented why supporting the arts were important for not only personal well-being but how integrated into the business community artistic endeavors are.

What surprised me most was that none of the people at The Art Experience realized the fastest and cheapest way to get out word that they exist was to cooperate with the Waterford Township Public Library or Pontiac Public Library! (The Chamber was aware of the library and school system as a resource, and have an Expo coming up at Waterford Mott High School.

There seemed to be almost no media savvy among the representatives of The Art Experience. In my mind, they are going to have to find the funding to pay someone to write press releases for the local paper, radio, and news. I know most people don’t want to have to pay for anything – including charitable and community organizations – but sometimes you have to bite the bullet and shell out the money for a media package. I know about this, but am not a press agent.

I told The Art Experience representatives I would be happy to help in a small way. Good thing I didn’t volunteer for anything! I came home to DH who had a nightmare I had volunteered to be the equivalent of a convention chair or programming head and was very, very, very cranky for the rest of the night. I admit, I almost volunteered to fix their web site – but I’m behind on my own clients’ sites currently.

A Little Bit About the Vision

Ultimately, the idea is that since the Oakland Cruisers are going to have a ballpark on the site, folks in Waterford, Pontiac, and Clarkston should contact the Waterford Planning Commission and inform them that they would like to have an arts center as part of the new complex.

The dying mall still has The Art Experience and Starlight Theater. Both are serving the larger North Oakland County community. Visitors to either would also be targets for restaurants and shops. This can be an amazing opportunity to revitalize the area.

Some Interesting Facts

Michigan is number 8 in the numbers employed in the fine arts.

Michigan is 38th in funding for the fine arts.

Michigan State University, University of Michigan and Wayne State University have internationally recognized fine arts programs.

Maybe Michigan communities should be doing more with the arts?

Maybe I should start a blog – or add to this blog – about area arts events.

City Slickers Keeping Chickens… Support Local Small Farmers Instead

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Recently, there has been a rash of posts about the wonders of keeping backyard chickens, on Blogher (http://www.blogher.com/chicken-egg-and-children, for example). I had to send this link to my dad.

Why did I have to send the link to my dad? Well, because, as a child he was the one in charge of the “free range” kitchen coop in both childhood homes – Kentucky and Ohio. Due to this, he will not eat chicken – or even turkey – to this day. (Interestingly, my husband’s grandfather is the same way for the similar reasons.)

As someone who grew up spending time in both the suburbia and rural areas, I actually once – and only once – helped clean out a chicken coop at my uncle’s small farm. There is nothing more disgusting than chickenshit. Have you ever been covered in it? And the cold water of the hose is not quite getting it all off? Well, welcome to the real fowl world!

Trust me, 6 to 12 chickens will create more manure than you will ever use in the average suburban garden. Doesn’t matter if it is a vegetable or flower garden. Chickens don’t stop creating manure just because you have lost the need for that much fertilizer.

Of course, there is little mention of the fact that even chickens – sans rooster – are somewhat loud at times. Many domesticated chicken breeds are, well, stupid. There are smart chickens, but they don’t tend to be the best layers. From what I can tell, most of the folks wanting to have chickens are wanting them for egg laying. I wonder how many realize that a hen’s egg laying career is limited and would usually be slaughtered at the end of it for a soup stock chicken? (A hen that old is too tough to eat as a roaster or fryer!)

What if you have a rooster too? Please don’t be stupid enough to keep more than one rooster if you have only one coop! I actually met a woman whose husband – a New York City native – wanted chickens when he got a job at an agricultural university. He bought a rooster and hen of 20 varieties of chickens. Roosters fight – and kill – one another in competition for those hens. Roosters are always loud because they are announcing their primacy in keeping their hens from other roosters. Even the small ones like Bantams like to put up a good front in a fight – and that means they will fight loudly at any time. Your neighbors will not like you much.

Normally, farmers kill young roosters as eating chickens. The rooster’s crown is considered a delicacy by many cuisines, including both Appalachian and Chinese. If you have eggs hatched, and a rooster or three appear, are you prepared to slaughter them? You have to catch it, break it’s neck, slice it open and let the blood drain as you pluck the feathers. I will never forget the first time I saw my uncle kill and pluck a chicken. Of course, in some states, you are not allowed to prep your own chickens, you have to get a licensed butcher to do it. (Usually the same states that require deer to be dressed by a licensed butcher.) Rather expensive, yes?

Did I mention chickens eat everything and anything? Including small snakes? Those Ripley’s Believe It Or Not stories about finding copperheads in the stomachs of chickens are true – it happened to my paternal grandmother. If you can butcher your own chicken, are you prepared to deal with that?

Now, I am not immune to the desire to keep small game. I have food allergies, so have been tempted to keep my own fowl – with the double benefit of the pest control. In my case, it was from reading an article in Mother Earth News – a great resource for simple living. I wanted Guinea Hens. They are much more effective at staying away from predators than chickens are. My husband believed the idea of keeping guinea hens was bad. Of course, I had been teasing him with keeping long-haired goats or alpacas – but that’s because he is a true city boy and it is just fun to get him riled up.

I came to my senses. Though, I admit, I am spoiled by the great Farmer’s Market Oakland County has, as well as all the small farms to buy from. There are only few tropical fruits that I can’t get within a 2 hour drive of my home – and most of those someone is selling either at the local Co-Op or the Farmer’s Market. And, well, every Michigan grocery store takes pride in announcing that they have local produce, or even chicken, beef, etc. Even in my childhood I can remember those. It is the legacy of a really great governor, Milliken, who knew farming was the backbone of survival, but I digress.

I spoke of predators. Most suburban dogs and cats don’t know to not go after chickens. “Free Range” chickens are particularly susceptible. Of course, most dog owners are a bit guilty of the “get the squirrel” game – which most suburban dogs are going to believe gives them permission to go after all small game animals – rabbit, cat (depending on cat, this may include huge veterinary bill), skunk (tomato juice is your friend), opossum, or, even, your precious chickens. Many wouldn’t have the sense to kill the chicken, but the noise will disturb the entire neighborhood.

Then there are the outdoor and feral cats that abound in all neighborhoods – rural, city, suburban. These cats, as a British study found, are very effective in hunting almost anything. Are you prepared to lose a chicken or two to the local cat population?

Oh yeah, did I mention that rats love chicken coops as homes? Rats, after all, will kill and eat chickens. So, if you want to keep chickens, and you don’t want to use D-Con, I suggest you get a big cat – think Maine Coon – and a terrier who can take down a rat. Rats are just one disease vector you are introducing when you introduce a chicken coop.

Chickens are also a very effective disease vector. Almost all of the major flu epidemics started in birds – particularly chickens – which were kept in close proximity to populations. As in backyard chicken keeping in cities. The limited land does not act as a good buffer to prevent the spread of the disease from chicken to songbird to chicken to person. Pneumonias are also known to spread in this manner. So many of the people who want to keep chickens are saying they want to prevent over medication of these animals. Well, sometimes, the medication is the only thing between us and a pandemic. I, for one, do not want to see a return of the 1918 flu epidemic – which, interestingly, is when a number of the restrictive livestock keeping laws went into place.

Now, I believe there are legitimate reasons to keep chickens – even as pets – but from a lot of the things I have read, I don’t really think the majority of people who are romanticizing farming (or even gardening) realize how back breaking even a small flock of 4 to 6 hens would be to manage. Farm work is a lot harder than most of us city slickers would believe – there are no vacations when you keep livestock.

  • That coop is not going to clean itself.
  • Chickens need food and clean water (water changed more than once a day).
  • Rats and other pests must be kept out.
  • Predators (other than rats) must be kept away.
  • Veterinary bills from the visiting vet – a coop keeper is not able to take his or her flock to the vet. Did I mention that very few vets are farm animal vets anymore – that’s a post for another day?
  • Manure – no one can use that much manure.
  • The majority of chickens are, well, stupid – not all – but the majority.
  • If you have a rooster, and the eggs hatch, what are you gonna do about the young roosters?
  • Costs of butchering your young, excess chickens – or your old non-layers.
  • Costs of making sure your flock does not become a disease vector – and losing that flock if it is deemed infected.

Yep, I have barely scratched the surface, and people accuse me of romanticizing farming. Personally, I think those who want to keep chickens would be better served by finding local farms that keep chickens and patronizing them. And, maybe encouraging other farms to diversify by telling their congress critters to stop subsidizing corn, soy, etc. and start subsidizing the biodiverse farms. Real farmers – even serious hobby farmers – are much better suited to keeping chickens as layers than suburbanites.

The Auto Industry Matters More Than The Banks

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The rest of the country is very ignorant of how important the automotive industry is to the very base of every other business in the USA. For every 1 job at an actual auto company, there are 6 jobs that support that job – from secondary vendors to waitresses to construction workers. No industry has invested more in the USA than the auto industry. None.

Silly Valley (aka Silicon Valley), can thank the advances in industrial robots that occurred in the 1970s for much of the basic research that has enabled portable computing and networking. Oh yes, as bizarre as it sounds, both Ford and GM have what are known as SciLabs that do some of the most cutting edge research anywhere. Much of that has been incorporated in other industries – from pharmaceuticals to computers to manufacturing. Lasers? Much of the most advanced work was to do tooling and die in the auto plants!

It is very easy for the rest of America to blame the auto industry for pollution, high prices, etc. without wondering why this is – or even the American public’s culpability in this. For every safety feature demanded, you get to lose fuel efficiency and affordability. Yep, you can’t have both in the environment that has been created by the regulations and laws imposed upon the auto industry.

Despite all the belly aching of the American public, they still buy foreign cars. They have bought foreign cars until there are, in reality, no American-made cars. There are American assembled cars. But, the parts are made from all over the world – some in the USA, most elsewhere.

What about the unwillingness of Americans to pay for health care as a society? The automotive companies pay for more people’s health care than any group other than Medicare (government). Yet, you expect they should be able to sell at the same price as the Japanese and Germans who have no need to cover this for the vast majority of their employees? This is the single biggest expense the auto companies have! Prices would be reduced on most of their product if this expense was not there.

I am highly annoyed with Congress and the American public. They are balking at helping GM in acquiring the dying Chrysler Automotive Group. Chrysler is not going to survive without a real auto manager taking over. Cerberus Group showed complete incompetence in their first 6 months when they endangered the supply line for all 3 manufacturers (and some domestic Japanese manufacturing) by withholding from a major Tier 1 supplier without warning the others they were going to do that. To cut costs, the supply line in manufacturing is razor thin. The auto company execs, unlike Wall Street execs, are not outrageously paid. (They don’t have that kind of money!)

The auto industry, unlike the banking industry, has a history of actually paying back loans from the government. Wow!

By the way, the only parts of GM and Ford that are in trouble are the North American companies. The international divisions – which are kept separate – are in very good health and are actually hiring in some sectors. So, the only parts that are hurting are the ones in the strangle hold of ridiculous levels of obligation and regulation. There are always scuttlings of how Ford or GM is going under. Maybe the North American divisions, but there will be a Ford and a GM, but it may no longer be anywhere in the USA. Hell, it would behoove them to move to Windsor, Ontario, Canada with the way the US government and people have been treating them since Reagan!

By destroying the auto industry through systemic bad regulation and an ever-increasingly onerous health care burden, you have destroyed the manufacturing base that is what makes real wealth in a country.

Real wealth is not from interest compounding on the backs of those who create real goods and services. Real wealth comes from making things people need and want.

Are the auto companies perfect? Hell no! But, they are a damn sight more moral than any banker will ever be.

I have worked in banking, telecommunications, automotive, IT, academia, government, and retail. Each have strengths and weaknesses. The smartest people are in telecommunications and IT, with telecommunications edging that out because, well, if you can play with at telephony switch, that beats a simple server. The most conniving, in banking. (Conniving isn’t necessarily evil.) The most imaginative in academia – though, there was rarely any bearing on reality. The most patient were in retail. The most resourceful and practical? Automotive.

If I had something I needed done in no time whatsoever and someone told me it was impossible? I would call anyone who had run an automotive plant or had to get anything done in automotive. Would it be perfect? No. But, the amazing thing is that these folks don’t just walk away. They will continue to fix the problems.

I have traveled over most of the USA. The auto worker of the American Great Lakes Region and Midwest is the real salt of the earth. This is the person who takes off the first day of deer season. This is the guy who helps his neighbor who is now out of work. They may call one another all kinds of names – even swearing at one another – but they leave it back on the plant floor at the end of the day.

Perhaps it is the very saltiness of the auto worker that alienates so much of the East and West Coast. This saltiness filters all the way through to the Congress Critters we send from Michigan. Even our top executives are not all that refined. They come through the ranks – every successful one, at least.

As much as you may detest the auto industry, it is only a reflection of your dislike of what America is. America is made up of the auto worker and his compatriots more than it is made up of any other group – more than banker stereotype (I am not including day-to-day workers like tellers as “bankers”); more than entertainment stereotype; more than the Silicon Valley stereotype; more than the Washington, D.C. stereotype; because, the majority of people in any industry are just like the guy on the line. Just trying to make it to the end of the day. And, unlike the other industries, the auto companies are trying to keep their promises to their older workers – even if they did eat their young.

One last thing, Michigan, the home of the auto industry, was a leader in environmentalism throughout the 1960s and 1970s. We still have a majority of family farms because of some of these initiatives, does your state?

I Voted – Some Thoughts

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Sunday night was devoted to examining my ballot and deciding who I would put into office – as well as on three proposals. Sadly, I am not very happy with any of the candidates presented for anything. I do not like McCain. I do not like Obama. I do not believe either are what is needed for this country. Of course, I do not like the Democrats or the Republicans. Neither has served this country in good stead for going on 40 years.

Third Parties …

This has led me to support the Green Party. My main reason for this is that it is vital for us to create an alternative to the current system. The Democrats and Republicans have become, for all practical purposes, the same party. Their objectives are the same even when their methods are not. Do I agree totally with the Green Party platform? Nope. Do I think they are the most viable alternative we currently have in the USA? Yep.

Speaking of political parties …

One thing that really annoys me is that in Michigan, the ballot does not show what party judges are from. Make no mistake, despite all protestations otherwise, judges are very much partisan players in politics. A case in point are judges that move from school boards to city councils to the bench. How am I, or anyone else, to believe that judges can be separated from party affiliation?

The State Proposals

Judges are partisan. This was so clearly demonstrated in a local NPR station’s interview about Proposal 1 – legalization of medical marijuana in Michigan under certain strictures. This is something, I, for one, support. The judge in question was spouting nonsensical pablum. He claimed that legalization would lead to teens using marijuana as a gateway drug. There are no unbiased studies that show marijuana as a gateway drug. There are studies showing that marijuana reduces virility, drive, and increases fuzzy thinking. The proposal in question is to allow THC to be used in palliative care. Anyone who votes against this has no compassion as far as I’m concerned.

Proposal 2 is, primarily, to allow for stem cell research with IVF embryos that were going to be discarded anyway. Guess what? The majority of IVF patients want this. When given the option of donating to research or allowing another couple to use the embryos, the majority of couples chose to give them to research. To those who are of the opinion that this is killing babies, well, you are ignorant of the most basic of science. The majority of blastocysts never ever make it to a full pregnancy.

Proposal 2 is vital for the economic well-being of Michigan if you want Michigan to be a center of medical, pharmaceutical, and bioengineering science. Not allowing for stem cell research is a guarantor of relegating Michigan to the backseat of these sciences. The businesses that have traditionally been the backbone of the sciences in Michigan are dying. We must embrace a new future in bioengineering.

People Run Against Levin?

What? Why bother? DH is asking why Levin isn’t doing Halloween Ads just for the heck of it. He could pull off Grandpa Munster pretty well. He has served Michigan well throughout his career.

The same can be asked about running against L. Brooks Patterson as Oakland County Commissioner. However, the former mayor of Southfield is probably just prepping for when L. Brooks finally (really) retires.

The Really Local Races

The less said, the better. I’m not impressed. I chose as well as I could, and, well, I can live with those choices. Considering the big one was the School Board which can’t seem to do anything but bicker and lie currently. So, that one got a clean sweep.

The rest of the races?

Well, none of them were all that contentious. Some had no one running against them. Of course, the people doing the jobs are very competent. Of those running against really competent folks? One was just about as competent as the other. Were talking Treasurer-type positions here, folks.

It’s Like Mark Twain Wrote the Presidential Campaign for 2008

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I’m sorry, but today the farcical nature of politics came to the forefront. All of the candidates suck, frankly. I’m not a fan of any of the candidates in question. I’m tempted to vote for Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies. As far as I’m concerned, you have a bunch of TV characters come to life.

Myself, I am amused at how heated under the collar everyone is getting about the various politicians. Obama’s supporters are way too serious for their own good. McCain’s supporters are, well, just confused by what their candidate is saying and doing.

The vice presidential candidates make me roll my eyes. Sarah Palin is a Huckabee wannabe. Joe Biden is a credit card company owned man. I’m not exactly impressed by these choices.

Of course, living in Metro Detroit, I’m used to entertaining politicians. After all, even when Kwame and the Detroit City Council aren’t acting like asses, we have the Warren City Council for real fist fights from time to time.

Who said politics were genteel?

The Clone Age: Adventures in the New World of Reproductive Technology

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I wanted to like The Clone Age: Adventures in the New World of Reproductive Technology by Lori B. Andrews, I really did. Some of what Lori Andrews says is intelligent, but she allows her misunderstanding of basic science to get in the way. Of course, the majority of attorneys have no scientific training, so this does not surprise me. I was just disappointed.

Ms. Andrews started her career in US reproductive medical law with supporting surrogacy. She found herself representing a variety of men and women trying to have children. Surrogates – except for some high-profile media cases – were very likely to be doing this for altruistic reasons. Seeking no more than compensation for their actual medical expenses, these women see themselves as helping those who want to have what these women so love having – a family. Despite some feminists trying to argue that these women were exploited, there were no signs of this with reputable surrogacy agencies.


The Clone Age

This was not the beginning of 3rd party reproduction. Donor sperm has been around for around 100 years and there are a myriad of historical perspectives on the legal issues that ensued. In some places using it was equivalent to adultery – in most jurisdictions the marital bond provided legal parentage no matter the actual biological parentage. These laws could not easily be translated to relate to surrogacy and a patchwork of laws now hold sway in the USA.

My own state of Michigan was – and is – one of the most backwards. (I, personally, blame the undue influence of the Catholic Church and Dutch Reformed Church in the state’s legislative body.) Things have been improving, but not by much. Michigan, unfortunately, was the scene of one of the more egregious surrogacy fiascos resulting in a woman who was not psychologically equipped to deal with being a traditional surrogate being a surrogate. Of course, most of the law surrounds traditional surrogacy with no acknowledgement that carrying a child does not automatically mean that you have provided the primary genetic material (an oocyte) to create the child. Gestational surrogates opened up a whole new kettle of fish.

Ms. Andrews was comfortable with traditional surrogacy, but not comfortable with egg donation or gestational surrogacy in the same way. She shows an underlying hostility towards others using egg donation due to her perception of extreme danger for the donor. (Pregnancy is still more dangerous than controlled ovarian stimulation, statistically speaking.) Of course, math illiteracy is endemic to attorneys and politicians – not to mention the entire general population, educated or not. She outright fears any kind of cloning.

This is where she completely loses me. I do not fear reproductive cloning. And so many people feel they must cut off cloning at that point no matter what.

Of course, Ms. Andrews argues that the problem is with the idea of cloning in total. I have to wonder what happened to her that she fears cloning since experiment after experiment has shown clones are not exact replicas of their genetic parent. Of course, I am used to hanging out with clones knowing too many identical twins who are nothing alike. (They actually run in my family.) It is hard to fear something you have been living with without incident.

Now, if she is talking about due diligence in research, that is something separate. I am all for proper scientific rigor being used to ensure the safety and efficacy of any new procedure. She, however, has decided there can be no benefit of this.

One of the things that bothers me most about the book is the lack of empathy she shows. She kind of admits this when she mentions that she had expected to have trouble having her child since she had been immersed in reproductive medicine for quite awhile. Surgeons, being surgeons – even when they are OB/Gyns – gave her a hard time during her pregnancy which probably alienated her further from them. (Every profession has a weak point they are known for, surgeons have egos that are dwarfed only by the emerging emergency medicine subspecialty. OB/Gyns just happen to be the “nice” surgeons.)

Interestingly, she predicted with great foreboding the development of pleuripotent stem cells from non-embryonic tissue. She actually seems to tend towards considering a blastocyst a person. This is patently absurd to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of biology.

Now, she does make some good points. One of which is the privatization of the genome. She mistakenly states that the US has never limited patent applications. This is simply not true.

The U.S. Patent Office used to actually forbid the patenting of animals and humans – until Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was the devil himself, as far as I’m concerned. He is the father of the destruction of the Republic. I didn’t like him when he was elected and he did everything I thought he would do. GWB is the natural extension of his policies. Under Reagan, suddenly, previously unpatentable farm patents were being granted. Now, granted, plant patents have always been granted.

If you ever get the chance you should go to your local patent center and take a look at some of the older plant patents. They are gorgeous.

Now, here is the thing, discoveries of facts are not supposed to be patentable. So patenting the genome should be challenged. Unfortunately, the attorneys and magistrates involved are not educated enough to deal with the nuances of science. Those making the decisions are normally people who went out of their way to avoid taking math or science classes!

On page 213 is where she lost me totally:

But we do not usually look to ten-year-old children for assessment of the morality of an issue. . . the fact that many adults still feel the “yuck factor” when thinking about the issue of fetal ovarian transplantation indicates that the concept is not a comfortable one.

I would argue that a 10 year old child would have a stronger grasp of the science than the average Congress Critter or attorney. And, since I would think the maturity of a 10 year old beats the maturity of many politicians I have dealt with (think 2 to 3 year-old “me-me-me-me” mentality), I can’t give credence to the idea that this is some sort of standard. Think about it. Even grown men get squeamish when dealing with women’s cycles. Should they be making any laws dictating what is done to a woman in regards to that cycle?

Another part that made me want to shake the woman silly was her diatribe about how it was all about cloning men. Um… She was in Dubai! Arabic culture is very misogynistic. The truth in the West is that despite most of the physicians in the research being men (not all) the majority of the research monies have been private endowments by women for women suffering from various forms of infertility.

Think about that: Women are the primary financial supporters of infertility treatment.

It bothers me that this woman has such a strong influence on the legal landscape worldwide. She portrays herself as the go-to gal for a variety of governments. I have no reason to disbelieve this. I don’t think those without science education or knowledge should be allowed to dictate the debate.

Most people refuse to educate themselves about something if they find it “icky,” and I think this woman finds cloning icky. It isn’t. There are very real problems in the current cloning technology that we do not yet know how to fix – especially those involving cell aging and death. But, at the same time cloning research is finding those issues, aging research is working on stopping cell aging. Does she even mention this? Nope.

I was very disappointed that a seeming friend to the infertility community is really a frenemy. One who poses as a friend only to sabotage hope and future advancement. This woman would stop many of the people I know from being parents due to her undue concentration on statistical aberrations such as a case where an IVF child died at the hands of his father.

Study after study has shown that children who are born to parents who had to go to the lengths of IVF (and one day I will blog just how involved that is), are perceived as more cared for even by the child. The rate of abuse in the general population makes even the most horrendous cases of abuse in IVF to shame. I know, I worked in that part of law enforcement and know people who are still involved. It really does argue for a license to be a parent.

It is telling that one Texas Reproductive Endocrinologist informed Ms. Andrews that she would never pass his clinic’s psychological evaluation to become a patient.

One last entertaining item that shows how little this woman understands of human nature is when speaking of an 18 to 21 year old man whose parents wanted to preserve his seed and create a grandchild, actually says “But is it really feasible that their son would have wanted to spread his seed across Wisconsin?” (p 232). The male of most mammalian species is quite promiscuous. Humans are not an exception. Now, yes, there is a “squee” factor to posthumous conception, but, if it is right for some couple to preserver their line, it isn’t going to stop just because some lawyer says so.

If you want to know your frenemy, read the The Clone Age: Adventures in the New World of Reproductive Technology. Otherwise, consider it just more anti-reproductive technology tripe and anti-cloning nonsense.

Michigan – A State of Emergency, Bankruptcy, and New Taxes

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The Michigan State Legislature is trying to rectify a self-made disaster.

They have no excuse for this fiasco.  They have avoided being responsible representatives to  the needs of our state since at least May.  In truth, it started with the Religious Republican takeover under Gov. Engler and their religion of tax cuts for the wealthy.

Here is a radical idea:

You have to pay for services in some way, shape, or form.  In a society, the most effective way to do this is taxes, not the private sector.

The private sector has the sole motivator of greed with no consequences that fall outside of that without checks from government.  I realize that the delusional right believe that the invisible hand of the market will correct all excesses, but the reality is that the places that have had unchecked capitalism and privatization are the Third World.  And that is how those places got to be the Third World.  I for one, do not want to see the state of Michigan or the United States end up there despite our current endeavors.

Now, even though I am all for appropriate taxation, I find it quite reprehensible that once again the smaller, poorer sole proprietorships in Michigan will be taking the brunt of this tax.  Hairdressers, psychics, massage therapists, etc., are all going to get hit very hard and lose business and/or money that they simply cannot afford to lose.  On the other hand, more well-paid (or at least used-to-be) computer consultants are 100% exempted from this tax.  Big Business lobby anyone?  The majority of computer consultants in Michigan are outsourcing firms that have been actively funneling jobs to India.  Why are they being rewarded for damaging the Michigan economy?

My uneducated by Michigan-specific facts, but educated by historical precedent guess is that the lawmakers are making money from the outsourcers even as their constituencies are losing their homes.

Oh yes, I believe they included a tax on realtor fees in a housing market faced with record high foreclosures.  That is just brilliant.

A better way of taxing the people of Michigan would be a true luxury tax – any item that is selling at a premium for its type.  Automobiles such as Escorts and Focuses would not be taxed, but any Lincoln, Cadillac, etc. would be at time of sale.  I also think there should be an SUV tax of 50% - but that is because I don’t think most people can drive an SUV, so, if they had special licensing the tax could be waived.  No one needs a huge SUV in the city, it is part of the reason our roads are the mess they are.  The heavier the vehicle, the more damaging it is to road surfaces.  Weight should be a factor in the tax rate of a vehicle.

Wait, I am using something called logic, that will never fly in a legislature filled with neophytes who don’t understand the rudiments of governance due to short-sighted term limits.

Honestly, I think there is class warfare and the rich are pummeling the poor – mostly because there is no Middle Class.  Big Business and the rich have won big in their short-sighted way, but if there is no one around to buy their products, well, they, too, will whither and die.