Archive for December, 2011

Jake Davison

Many long-overdue, common-sense reforms have been passed and signed into law by Gov. Rick Snyder and the Republican Legislature this year. These include the Emergency Financial Manager law, tax reform, teacher tenure reform and the lifting of the arbitrary charter school cap. One reform that has hardly been touched, however, is drug testing of welfare recipients.

State Representative Jeff Farrington (R-Utica) earlier this month introduced House Bill 5223 which would do just that. HB 5223 has been referred to the Committee on Families, Children and Seniors chaired by State Representative Kenneth Kurtz (R-Coldwater), where it currently sits.

The Department of Human Services (DHS), under the fearless leadership of former State Supreme Court Chief Justice Maura Corrigan, is still in the “early process” of creating the exact screening policy, but has determined such a policy is certainly feasible. The process may begin by only targeting “likely” drug users – those who appear at DHS offices under the influence of drugs.

Urinalysis can cost between $25 and $44 per test, while hair follicle analysis can cost anywhere from $75 to $150 for each individual test. Many, like me, think this cost should be deducted directly from the benefit payments of welfare beneficiaries, since keeping them off or getting them off of illegal drugs is in itself a major benefit.

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Gregory D. Lee

Despite having more inmates on death row than any other state, California hasn’t executed anyone for six years. Why? Because defense attorneys have argued that California’s three-drug lethal injection protocol is in violation of California law.

Allegedly it “is unnecessary, dangerous and creates a risk of excruciating pain” (emphasis added). Dangerous? To whom? The executioners? I thought the drugs were designed to painlessly put hideous first-degree murderers to death. The last time I checked, no one put to death by this method has come back to complain of pain. So what’s the issue?

This latest tactic by defense attorneys and anti-capital punishment advocates is to devise yet another excuse not to execute anyone in California. For the third time in the last six years, since a California court placed a moratorium on executions, the state is forced to return to the starting line and create a new lethal-injection procedure.

To show how impartial she is, California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye told the Los Angeles Times that the death penalty is “not effective” and needs an overhaul the state cannot afford. She’s considered a moderate Republican, as evidenced by her appointment by Arnold Schwarzenegger, voting several times in favor of overturning gay marriages, and recently performing a gay marriage ceremony.

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Dan Calabrese

It’s no small trick for Republicans, after President Obama thoroughly lost the nation’s confidence on health care policy, to go ahead and lose it even bigger. But they seem to be doing so, in large part because their own history of “reform” proposals doesn’t make a whole lot more sense than Obama’s.

The larger problem is that almost no one in the governmental/political realm gets health care right, because they all buy the premise that the primary objective should be insurance coverage – the more all-encompassing, the better – for everyone. And Republicans are finding it difficult to maintain the advantage Obama handed them on the issue because, until very recently, they believed and touted much of the same thinking that led to ObamaCare.

We all know that Mitt Romney’s biggest problem in the 2012 presidential race is the policy known as MassCare, which was implemented during his term as governor of Massachusetts. The lynchpin of MassCare is the very thing ObamaCare opponents are now challenging in federal courts – the mandate that everyone purchase health insurance.

But if MassCare’s insurance mandate is unlikely to derail Romney’s path to the nomination, that is due in no small part to the fact that Romney is hardly alone in his recent love of insurance mandates. Yesterday, ObamaCare supporters were gleefully sending around a video of Newt Gingrich, speaking in 2008, on why we needed a federal mandate for everyone to purchase health insurance – coupled with some sort of fee for those who did not.

In other words, the very same policy Obama signed into law, which Gingrich now claims to oppose.

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David Karki

In less than a week, the Iowa Caucuses will officially begin the primary season. And as of right now, there isn’t a truly palatable choice available. It’s staggering to think that in an election year where President Obama is so vulnerable, this pathetic field is the best the Republicans can come up with.

First, you have Mitt Romney, who by all rights should be challenging Obama in a Democratic primary. His record places him solidly left of center, and, if his election is successfully orchestrated by the GOP beltway establishment who attached themselves to him from day one, we will see the massive expansion of government – and concomitant loss of personal liberty and freedom – Obama has rammed down America’s throat not repealed in their entirety but rather cemented into place forevermore. Nor can Romney make anyone believe he’ll do anything else; Mitt has reached the point where the more he talks, the less believable he becomes.

Romney’s arrogant, technocratic belief that he can simply better manage Obama’s disaster will only serve to get Republicans stuck with the blame for the enormous mess Obama has made.

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James Melton

I have, for a long time, been a fan of encouraging local units of government to share services, or even consolidate with each other, where that makes sense. I have argued, for example, that the metro Detroit region ought to share police.

But even for a let’s-all-work-together guy like me, a proposal to put all of Michigan’s state-supported universities under the control of a single governing board is nerve-racking. The idea – and really, that’s all it is at this point – is moving slowly though the state Legislature. I think that’s the right pace. Any attempt to fast-track a Lansing takeover should be discouraged because, in this case, doing the wrong thing could be far worse than doing nothing.

While Michigan’s university system is probably more expensive than it needs to be, it is far from broken. It is, in fact, something our state should be very proud of – and the best asset we have if we are serious about creating a diversified, knowledge-based economy. Not only do they train people for jobs that actually exist, our universities are important research factories that keep Michigan in the game in terms of creating and commercializing new technology.

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Brett Noel

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Large version for newspaper publication.

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Eric Baerren

One of the first acts by this year’s Michigan Legislature has also become one of its most toxic albatrosses, and the reek shows no signs of going away.

Among the things Gov. Rick Snyder inherited were a number of cities and school districts in severe financial distress. Part of this was due to declining revenues through years of neglect from Lansing and declining property values. Part of it, however, was due to corruption and incompetence. For instance, the Detroit Public Schools, under an emergency financial manager appointed by Snyder’s predecessor, had a school board whose president was not only functionally illiterate, but later bounced from office for lewd behavior.

The problem was that the old law authorizing the state to appoint emergency financial managers was weak. The emergency financial managers had few concrete powers, because the original authors understood that Michiganders traditionally love the idea of local control while hating state government.

Snyder pushed for and got a law authorizing sweeping new powers for emergency managers. They could fire local officials, tear up contracts with unions and usurp powers otherwise laid out in city charters. In doing so, however, he made three blunders.

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Dan Calabrese

I understand that John Dingell considers it his job to cheerlead for the domestic auto industry. And I suppose it’s not that big a deal when he comes forth with exaggerated indignation any time someone makes a criticism of it.

But does Dingell actually know anything about the industry? Or is he merely steeped in the conventional wisdom that informs political types, even if it is completely unrelated to the truth?

An astoundingly ignorant statement he released last week leads me to think that Dingell sees the auto industry through the prism of political fantasyland.

On Thursday, I received a press release from Dingell, excoriating Mitt Romney for saying on a Boston radio station that the Chevy Volt is “an idea whose time has not come.” That is all Romney said, as the question was asked during the final seconds of the interview and there was no time for him to expand on his answer.

Dingell’s press release, as you might imagine, rips Romney for his dastardly attack on all that is good and decent, reminding us that Romney wrote an op-ed in 2008 titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” (which GM and Chrysler did, by the way, likely prolonging their lives as a result) and accusing him of wanting to “surrender the advanced vehicle market to foreign manufacturers.”

Yeah yeah. This sort of bluster is standard fare for Big Jawn.

But as you read through the press release, you come to this gem (emphasis mine):

“Romney is the only fellow in the United States who appears to think that the Volt is an idea whose time has not come. Clearly it has not come to him,” said Michigan Congressman John Dingell. “The Volt is selling like hotcakes.”

Um, yeah . . . excuse me. It’s what?

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Jocelyn Benson

In our democracy, the right to self-governance is fundamental. That’s why, over 50 years ago, the United States Supreme Court held that voting, the quintessential act and affirmation of self-governance, is a fundamental right. One component of protecting that fundamental right is ensuring that no eligible voter is blocked from casting his or her ballot. And another is making sure that this ballot is counted accurately and is not “cancelled out” by a vote that is cast and counted by someone who is ineligible.

Our current political debate over voter identification, which sees these two components as competing, is misguided. One side argues that every voter must produce certain forms of photo identification or even proof of citizenship in order to cast a vote, or else our system of democracy will collapse under the weight of fraudulent votes. The other side points to the lack of evidence that fraud is prevalent enough to require such a blanket response, and proffers other data showing that onerous identification requirements will result in discouraging otherwise eligible citizens from voting. In fact, the New York Times recently reported that, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, more than 5 million eligible voters may be blocked from casting their ballots in 2012 as additional voter identification requirements are imposed throughout the country.

No citizen benefits if the democratic process is tainted with fraud. At the same time, our country and state cannot prosper if its citizens are blocked or discouraged from participating in the electoral process. That is why the most effective system of election administration is one that will make it simultaneously easy to vote and hard to cheat.

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Herman Cain

Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! And Happy New Year!

I said it. So send the politically correct police after me.

Even though most people are not offended by these opening salutations, we hear many stories about an element of our society that appears to be trying to take Christ out of Christmas, happy out of Hanukkah and New Year.

Some public schools have insisted on calling this season their “holiday break” instead of the traditional Christmas break. Fine! So which holidays are they referring to? Some schools have even banned images of Santa and the presence of poinsettia flowers with the distinguishing red leaves, because those symbols might remind kids of (don’t say it) Christmas.

There was even a case in Illinois where an atheist sued the school district for allowing kids to have a moment of silence because in that moment they might think about God or Christ. Heaven forbid we might even think about God!

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