Tag: Michigan

Michigan town defunds library that refused to remove LGBTQ books

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Another day, another example of grown adults rallying to ban books that could be educational, affirming, and in some cases life-saving for their kids. This one is in west Michigan, where residents of Jamestown Township voted this week to defund their local library following public disagreements about its inclusion of LGBTQ books for young adults.

The vote was against renewing a millage, the share of property taxes that provides 84 percent of the Patmos Library’s operating budget, for 2023. Ron French noted, in an extensive report for Bridge Michigan, that this “may be the first time a community voted, in effect, to close its library” rather than continue to provide LGBTQ books to kids.

When library staff refused to take the books from the library, the effort to defund it began. The library can operate on its current budget through the end of the first quarter of 2023; after that, library board president Larry Walton told French, the library would have to close.

We must be the leading country in the world at using democratic powers to enforce anti-democratic politics.

Mapping drone sent to a watery grave by a Bald Eagle

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An Upper Peninsula bald eagle launched an airborne attack on a drone operated by a Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) pilot last month, tearing off a propeller and sending the aircraft to the bottom of Lake Michigan.

The brazen eagle vs. EGLE onslaught took place near Escanaba in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on July 21 when EGLE environmental quality analyst and drone pilot Hunter King was mapping shoreline erosion for use in the agency’s efforts to document and help communities cope with high water levels.

King was watching his video screen as the drone beelined for home, but suddenly it began twirling furiously. “It was like a really bad rollercoaster ride,” said King. When he looked up, the drone was gone, and an eagle was flying away. A nearby couple, whose pastimes include watching the local eagles attack seagulls and other birds, later confirmed they saw the eagle strike something but were surprised to learn it was a drone. Both King and the couple said the eagle appeared uninjured as it flew from the scene of the crime.

The eagle was fine. Rescue expeditions failed to find the EGLE.

Armed Black men and women escort Michigan lawmaker to capitol

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Nutball gun-toting white demonstrators tried to intimidate lawmakers. The next day, voters from Lansing, Michigan showed up to escort their first Black representative to work at the Capitol.


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A black lawmaker came to Michigan’s capitol with an escort of armed black citizens on Wednesday, days after white protesters with guns staged a volatile protest inside the state house, comparing the Democratic governor’s public health orders to “tyranny”.

The state representative Sarah Anthony, 36, said she wanted to highlight what she saw as the failure of the Michigan capitol police to provide legislators with adequate security during the protest, which saw demonstrators with rifles standing in the legislative chamber above lawmakers.

“When traditional systems, whether it’s law enforcement or whatever, fail us, we also have the ability to take care of ourselves,” she told the Guardian. Anthony became the first African American woman elected to represent her district in Lansing, Michigan’s capital, in 2018.

There was a time when the labor unions of Detroit would have marched on the state capitol to defend elected lawmakers from gun-toting rabble trying to shut down democracy. They marched against Nazis. They marched against the KKK. Representative Anthony is fortunate she has individuals in her district who are willing and ready to stand up against attempts at intimidation.

Republican Mayor won’t vote to re-elect Trump…will support Biden

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Michael Taylor — the GOP mayor of Michigan’s fourth-largest city, Sterling Heights — is all in for Joe Biden…The longtime Republican officially endorsed Biden in the 2020 election — should Biden secure the Democratic presidential nomination…

Taylor described the 2016 election as a nationwide “referendum” on Washington politics and recalled “thinking this Trump thing is insane, but when it was down to him and Hillary (Clinton), I kind of said, ‘Well, you are a Republican, and yeah he’s nuts, but maybe he’ll get better and you know he’s going to lower taxes.’”…

“I slowly talked myself into it,” Taylor explained. “’He can’t seriously be this deranged once he gets in there, and he’s even more deranged now than I thought then. So, I take the blame. I voted for him.”

“I’m not proud of my vote for him,” he said. “I’m not satisfied with his leadership. I don’t think the country’s heading in the right direction. I think he’s incompetent. I think he’s divisive. I think he lacks moral character.”

“We have a president who, in the middle of what could be a global pandemic, is really more concerned about his reelection than coming up with a plan,” Taylor added. “People want to get back to some sense of normalcy. They’ll look to Biden and say, ‘Things are going to go back to the way they were before.’”

Refreshing.

An AI model showed Flint how to find lead pipes. What do you think they did after that?

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❝ …Volunteer computer scientists, with some funding from Google, designed a machine-learning model to help predict which homes were likely to have lead pipes. The artificial intelligence was supposed to help the City dig only where pipes were likely to need replacement. Through 2017, the plan was working. Workers inspected 8,833 homes, and of those, 6,228 homes had their pipes replaced — a 70 percent rate of accuracy.

Heading into 2018, the City signed a big, national engineering firm, AECOM, to a $5 million contract to “accelerate” the program, holding a buoyant community meeting to herald the arrival of the cavalry in Flint…

❝ As more and more people had their pipes evaluated in 2018, fewer and fewer inspections were finding lead pipes…The new contractor hasn’t been efficiently locating those pipes: As of mid-December 2018, 10,531 properties had been explored and only 1,567 of those digs found lead pipes to replace. That’s a lead-pipe hit rate of just 15 percent, far below the 2017 mark…

❝ There are reasons for the slowdown. AECOM discarded the machine-learning model’s predictions, which had guided excavations. And facing political pressure from some residents, Mayor Weaver demanded that the firm dig across the city’s wards and in every house on selected blocks, rather than picking out the homes likely to have lead because of age, property type, or other characteristics that could be correlated with the pipes.

After a multimillion-dollar investment in project management, thousands of people in Flint still have homes with lead pipes, when the previous program would likely have already found and replaced them.

Life in America seems about as predictable as ever. Doesn’t have to be. Still, don’t get smug about analyzing the causes. Just fix it!

A Giant Step Forward in the Flint, Michigan, Water Crisis

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From Rhea Suh, President NRDC


Unless you’re a Republican, nowadays

❝ For once, I am excited to report that there is good news on the Flint water crisis front. The pipes at the heart of the disaster are going to be replaced. For the first time in the three years since this Michigan city’s water was turned to poison, Flint’s citizens have a guarantee that the resources are in place to replace its estimated 18,000 lead pipes. And for the first time, they know when the pipes will be gone.

Let’s be clear, Flint is not fixed. But things are going to get better.

❝ This did not happen because of the city, state, or federal governments that failed them. It happened because brave people in Flint stood up for their neighbors. They went to court. One of the genius parts of American environmental protections are the citizen suit provisions in our major environmental laws. When the government fails to protect its citizens, we are all empowered to go to court and force the government to do its job.

❝ That happened in Flint. After the city and state trashed the drinking water infrastructure through a series of mistakes and errors, we joined with the Concerned Pastors for Social Action and Flint resident Melissa Mays to petition the federal government to use its emergency powers to help the beleaguered city. They refused. So, along with ACLU Michigan, we sued the city and state. The Safe Drinking Water Act also has provisions for citizens to enforce drinking water rules. Though there have only been a handful of these kinds of cases filed under the act, we all thought Flint seemed like a textbook situation for this type of case…

And today, that suit comes to the end with a settlement that guarantees that in three years, the lead pipes will be replaced. It guarantees that the state kicks in $67 million to help fix the mistakes, along with tens of millions more from federal sources…

❝ …But for today, let’s just celebrate good news for Flint. A city that deserves far more of it in the years to come.

I’ll second that emotion. RTFA for more details, past and present. Rhea Suh is too politely politic to trash-talk the conservatives, mostly in the Republican Party – and some Democrats deserve their share of condemnation for foot-dragging.

Too many folks hold elective office who consider budgets and balance sheets more important than the lives of the human beings they represent.

Republican War on the Environment marches on — Michigan just banned banning plastic bags

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The queen of a Republican fundraising festival

❝ A new law in Michigan will prohibit local governments from banning, regulating or imposing fees on the use of plastic bags and other containers. You read that correctly: It’s not a ban on plastic bags — it’s a ban on banning plastic bags…

The new public act prohibits local ordinances from “regulating the use, disposition, or sale of, prohibiting or restricting, or imposing any fee, charge, or tax on certain containers,” including plastic bags, as well as cups, bottles and other forms of packaging. This means individual cities and municipalities are not allowed to ban plastic bags or charge customers a fee for using them.

❝ Bans and restrictions on the use of plastic bags are widespread in other parts of the country and around the world. The rationale is simple: Plastic bags are infamous non-biodegradable sources of pollution — although they will eventually break down into tiny pieces, scientists believe this process can take hundreds of years, or even up to a millennium, in landfills…

❝ Bangladesh was the first country in the world to ban certain types of thin plastic bags in 2002, after they were found to have choked the nation’s drainage systems during a series of devastating floods. China instituted a similar ban in 2008, and also prohibits businesses from giving out thicker plastic bags to customers for free. Other nations, including South Africa and Italy, have also enacted similar restrictions.

San Francisco became the first U.S. municipality to institute a plastic bag ban. And in 2014, California became the first state. Many other municipalities around the country have bans or fees in place, including Austin, Seattle and Chicago…

❝ On the other hand, Michigan is not the only state to have implemented a ban on bans. Idaho, Arizona and Missouri all have enacted similar laws. In these cases, proponents of the laws have defended them as a way of protecting businesses from having to comply with additional regulations.

Today’s Republican mind considers any facet of economic life beyond profit margins to be trivial. Perhaps, suspect and subversive.

Here’s why Trump can’t save jobs in the coal industry?

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Completed in 1974, Monroe Power Plant will be the last one standing in 2030

❝ All year, Donald Trump has been promising to rescue the US coal industry by repealing various Obama-era pollution rules and ending the “war on coal.” And all year, analysts have pointed out that he probably can’t stop the collapse of the coal industry — since coal’s woes go far beyond the Environmental Protection Agency.

But if you want a perfect example of why Trump will struggle to bring back coal, just look at Michigan.

❝ Last weekend, the CEO of Michigan’s largest electric utility reiterated that his company is still planning to retire eight of its nine remaining coal plants by 2030 — whether or not Trump tries to repeal President Obama’s climate policies…

Gerry Anderson’s reasoning was simple. Coal is no longer the economic choice for generating electricity, due to relentless competition from cheaper (and cleaner) natural gas and wind power. In Michigan, a new coal plant costs $133 per megawatt hour. A natural gas plant costs half that. Even wind contracts now cost about $74.52 per megawatt hour, after federal tax credits. “I don’t know anybody in the country who would build another coal plant,” Anderson said.

❝ What’s more, Anderson added, surveys show that most of Michigan’s consumers want to add more renewables “if it can be done at reasonable cost.”

❝ It’s not just Michigan. This dynamic is playing out all over the country, as coal plant after coal plant succumbs to competition from cheap natural gas and wind. Over at Politico, Michael Grunwald estimates that US power plants are now on track to emit 27 percent less carbon dioxide in 2016 than they did in 2005.

What’s remarkable is that this is all happening before Obama’s Clean Power Plan even takes effect. That rule, which is still tied up in court, aimed for a 30 percent cut below 2005 levels by 2030. We’re almost there already. So it’s clear that scrapping the CPP, as Trump has pledged, won’t help coal power make a huge comeback.

Not that reason, efficiency and cost mean much to Republicans and other Trump Chumps. The vicarious thrill of turning back regulations designed to make life healthier for most folks is almost as visceral a pleasure as, say, machine-gunning a basket of kittens.

An Arabic billboard in Michigan pokes fun at Donald Trump

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❝ Over the weekend, a black billboard appeared alongside the highway heading into Dearborn, Michigan, the city that boasts the largest Arab population in the United States. The name “Donald Trump” is written in English, followed by Arabic script (which reads from right to left) that translates to “He can’t read this, but he is afraid of it.”

❝ The billboard is sponsored by a super PAC called Nuisance Committee, which was started by Max Tempkin, one of the creators of the racy Cards Against Humanity card game. The intent of the billboard is to spark conversation among non-Arabic speakers, encouraging them to ask their Arabic-speaking neighbors what the billboard means.

“We came up with it because we believe that Donald Trump’s hateful rhetoric is not based on reality. It’s based in fear,” Nuisance Committee spokeswoman Melissa Harris told the Detroit Free Press. “And we think that irrational fear is what’s driving his anti-immigrant message.”…

Idjits will avert their eyes to keep from being struck by lightning.