Mob Wisdom

Put 600 business leaders in a room for two days and what do you get?
Well if you’re in West Michigan and at the Regional Policy Conference, you get this:
(P)articipants set these top five priorities for legislative action:
1. Eliminate Michigan Business Tax and corresponding spending cuts.
2. Implement a Right to Work status for the state of [...]

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High Sticking

We like our hockey in Michigan, especially smash-mouth hockey. And this week self-identified hockey mom Gov. Sarah Palin delivered. An audience of 37 million testifies that we are not alone, plenty others like the that audience also raises the question of what exactly was she tapping?
Was it just the smash mouth politics?
Was it the [...]

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Amy Sullivan was right

Up north, I had the opportunity to finally get to some reading, including Amy Sullivan’s The Party Faithful. There’s more to be said about the book, but of immediate interest (certainly with the election breathing down on us) was her view of the current state of evangelicals and the Democrats. The hyper-partisan nature [...]

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Selling Out Our Values

The item is relatively small, almost a toss away. Under the guise of election reform the Reform Michigan Government Now! proposal would “prohibit illegal immigrants from registering or voting” (as the UAW PowerPoint summarizes it).
Who could be against that? By definition you need to be a citizen to vote.  Rather obvious, really. [...]

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The Partisan Monoculture

Early in the week, Phil Power had an interesting column on Reform Michigan Government Now (RMGN) , in part reacting to the Chamber’s counter survey (more on that later), and in part looking at the impact of redistricting. With approximately three quarters of all seats defined as strongly favoring one party (“gerrymandered” would be the [...]

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Michigan Primary Redux

(update: There was an embarassing numbers mistake below. What I read as $17 million for Justice Corrigan, was 17,000. Oh what a difference those extra 000s make. My apologies. The numbers (and their impact) have been corrected)
The Reform Michigan Government Now proposal increasingly ought to come with a warning: be careful what [...]

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The 50 percent solution

The Reform Michigan Government Now (RMGN) proposal  comes with a lot of interesting details, but the one that gets me, is the notion that the state’s electorate basically splits 50-50, Democrats and Republicans.
Call me a contrarian, but does this match reality?
First, however, you need to understand how the base vote is calculated.  As the proposal [...]

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