First, his campaign announced that pay equity pioneer Lily Ledbetter will be addressing the Democratic Convention on Aug. 26.

Then there’s the visit by Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, believed to be on Barack Obama’s short list of potential vice presidential picks (though at the list’s bottom), to Warren today for a women’s economic town hall, where she was to be joined by Sen. Debbie Stabenow.

Michigan is considered a major swing state, and sending a heavy hitter like Sebelius - the governor of a swing state and the only woman besides Hillary Clinton seen as a viable veep pick - confirms that Obama is seriously wooing women here.

The Obama campaign arranged and promoted Sebelius’ visit and on its Web site billed it as a launch event for the group Michigan Women for Obama. Early Tuesday morning, Gov. Jennifer Granholm sent an email to the Obama list asking its members to join the group and directing them to a video by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in which the California congresswoman addressed Michigan women directly.

It could be that Sebelius is dropping into an important state like Michigan in order to raise her profile just as the campaign prepares to announce Obama’s veep pick. More likely she’s here to shore up Obama’s support among Michigan women, many of whom supported Hillary Clinton during the primaries and some of whom are still frosted that she lost.

In any case, this is impressive message coordination by the Obama campaign - two female governors, a female senator and the female Speaker of the House speaking from the same playbook, combined with a women’s economic town hall and the announcement of a convention speech by a pay equity champion, all within a three-hour span on a weekday morning. Not bad.

Just decades ago, American teenagers were forced to watch movies like “Reefer Madness,” which warned that marijuana use would lead to insanity and deviant behavior. Tom Shields, founder of the Lansing-based Marketing Resource Group, points out:

Yet, last week not a single soul showed up to protest or even offer a word of caution at the State Board of Canvassers meeting where testimony was given on the potential wording of the ballot proposal to allow for medical use of marijuana in Michigan.

What a difference 40 years makes.

Not only didn’t anyone show up at the hearing, no one has even filed a committee to oppose the proposal. No PTAs. No churches. No cop organizations. Not even the anti-smoking groups.

With so much momentum, and no public opposition, it’s important to look at the potential consequences of decriminalizing medical marijuana, Shields writes. The potential fallout includes increased snack sales, more visits to doctors who prescribe marijuana and lucrative patient supply operations.

“A look at the experience of other states with loose qualifications suggests there would be little anyone could do to prevent recreational pot users from being part of the system,” he cautions.

In a recent New Yorker article — “Dr. Kush: How medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry” — David Samuels describes how the decriminalization of medical marijuana brought new (green) jobs to California.

Yeesh. Today’s clowns are Kathleen Sebelius and Mike Huckabee, the latter causing far more cheering and veeping din than the former. If our traffic meter is any gauge, the Huckster and his so-called army are going to continue to make a bunch of noise all the way to the Republican convention, demanding the veep slot until assuaged.

Don’t ask me what “assuaged” looks like in this “with us or agin’ us” internecine squabble between the social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives within the Republican Party. The fiscal conservatives are just as piqued about Huck’s Army’s excessively zealous demands as the Hucksters are about not getting their way with a presidential candidate, and there’s no indication that a compromise is in the works.

On the other side of the political aisle, there’s rampant chatter about a handful of veep candidates. The Obama campaign could easily be messing with their constituents with visits to Indiana and Virginia, spawning alternating freak-outs among the anti-Evan Bayh and anti-Tim Kaine factions. There’s the Wesley Clark option that sets the netroots of the Democratic Party into a frenzy whenever his name comes up as a possible candidate.

And then there’s Kansas’ Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. Quiet, effective, well-liked — obviously not an option, right? Can’t possibly have this much change on a ticket all at one time; the country would spin out of control if a man of color and a woman were offered up as a leadership team. That’s where the Buts come in …but Sebelius is now touring the country to campaign for Obama, as if trying out for the veep slot. She’s going to be in Michigan today and in Iowa on Thursday for multiple stops, as our sister site points out, pondering the idea that this might be an audition.

The odds are certainly looking stronger for Sebelius if futures traders are rational indicators.

Who knows; we have another month of this clown car, even if Obama makes a rumored announcement about his selection inside the next few days. Look out, here it comes now: Veep, veep!! Veep veep!!

Hoogendyk is hoping to use fear mongering to get people to support his plan to open up the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic to more drilling. The problem is, he points out Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and Venezuela as locations we are getting oil from.

The reality is, according to Energy Information Administration, we get our oil first from Canada, then Saudi Arabia. Russia is 10th on the list, Venezuela is fourth. Iran does not even make it into the top 15 countries supplying the U.S.

Hoogendyk will face Carl Levin, D-Detroit, in November. He has consistently been running in the mid-30’s in polls.

“Based upon the diagrams I have seen so far,” said Genesee County Health Department spokesman Mark Valacak in a phone interview with Michigan Messenger, “the outbreak has already peaked, and we are on the downslide.”

Valacak said this outbreak underscores a behavioral study done by the department last year. The study, he said, showed that over 50 percent of respondents in Genesee County did not use a condom the first time they were with a partner. He said this is contributing to the syphilis outbreak.

“We try to do a good job of educating people about this,” he said. “The only way you can be certain is about yourself. You can’t be sure your partner is monogamous.”

In addition, he said the disease appears to be on a “downslide” because of public awareness of the outbreak and educational outreach programs.

Officials have confirmed 70 cases of the bacterial infection so far this year. That is a 400-percent increase over cases reported in all of 2007. The youngest person infected this year was 17 years old, but the majority of cases were among people in their 30s to 40s. An immediate breakdown of genders for the outbreak was not available, Valacak said, because a majority of the cases had been diagnosed by private physicians, not through the traditional sexually transmitted disease clinics.

The outbreak appears to have been mostly in heterosexuals and the commercial sex worker populations of Flint, Valacak said. Three of the cases were co-infected with HIV as well. A breakdown of the other sexually transmitted diseases that the cases might have been co-infected with was not available, Valacak said.

The outbreak began late this spring, and since that time the GCHD has been working with local media outlets, health care providers, particularly OB/GYNs and dermatologists; and the health department has gone into several areas with mobile testing. The mobile testing has not discovered any cases of syphilis, but it did find cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and the parasitic infection trichomoniasis.

The health department is also working closely with police and the court system to make commercial sex workers charged with prostitution get tested for syphilis as well, Valacak said.

In addition to this, the department has brought in experts from Detroit, which handled a similar outbreak several years ago, to assist in training GCHD staff on how to do outreach to clients most at risk, particularly commercial sex workers.

This new policy by Worthy is appropriate; I wish she had taken that position before meeting with those community leaders. Plea deals are negotiated by defendants and prosecutors, not by politicians or those not directly involved in the trial. I’m sure Granholm sees the entire Kilpatrick situation as an unwelcome burden dropped in her lap for which there is no good political answer, but that doesn’t mean she should be pushing the judicial system to do anything other than its job, which is to determine guilt or innocence and secure a conviction where guilty. This comes dangerously close to political interference in the judicial system, the independence of which is vital to the administration of justice.

Worthy should not be concerned with the political consequences of prosecuting Kilpatrick or the political convenience of those who just want a swift end to the controversy. Such political considerations should play no part in judicial proceedings because including those considerations can only distract from the job that a prosecutor is paid to do. If she and Kilpatrick’s attorneys can negotiate a plea arrangement that serves the interests of justice in the case, they should do so. But they should do so only for that reason, not because it might serve the interests of others not involved in the case.

We've come a long way since this earliest logo

Hello, and welcome to the new look of Michigan Messenger.

The debut of our new design gives us the perfect chance to introduce ourselves to you — something we haven’t had a formal occasion to do since our quiet, curious launch almost a full year ago, last September.

The Center for Independent Media (CIM), our parent organization, is a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that besides us, operates a network of independent news sites that includes nationally-focused The Washington Independent and state-focused news magazines in Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado and New Mexico.

Our mission

CIM started Michigan Messenger in 2007 almost on a whim with the idea of filling the gap in political and policy news that goes un- and underreported in the mainstream news outlets in this important swing state.

Michigan’s most widely known daily papers, news radio outlets and local TV news affiliates generally all do an excellent, professional job of bringing you what they bring you: part of the story.

By mainstream news, I’m talking about the outlets we all grew up with: The Detroit News, for example, which I delivered door-to-door as a wide-eyed kid on the northeast side of Ann Arbor — including the edition in 1980 with the banner headline screaming that John Lennon had been shot.

And of course I’m talking about the Detroit Free Press, WWJ-Detroit (which I contributed to years later as a reporter) and the most-listened-to radio station in Michigan: WJR-Detroit, which airs five straight hours of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity back-to-back every weekday afternoon.

And I’m talking about outlets like WXYZ-TV Channel 7 in Detroit and hometown papers like The Grand Rapids Press, Lansing State Journal, The Ann Arbor News and The Flint Journal.

They’re all popular and professional print and broadcast outlets that are no longer run as locally owned moms & pops, but rather by national chains that report their quarterly earnings on Wall Street and are beholden first and foremost to their bottom lines and scatter shot investors. For this reason, Michigan needs an independent daily.

Let’s face it, corporate ownership has taken the bark and bite out of journalism, what with its budget-driven de-emphasis on investigative journalism, insatiable taste for scandal and sensationalism, and deep desire to not offend its shrinking roster of advertisers (including this state’s biggest polluters and corporate lobbyists).

At Michigan Messenger, we aim to find out, report and discuss with you news, viewpoints and information you will not always read in your hometown paper. We snoop, we watchdog, we work for the people of Michigan. And we do it without accepting money from advertisers or political campaigns. We also try to have fun, too, because you can’t be too serious all the time, either.

Who we are

Like our sister sites, Michigan Messenger is staffed with what we call Fellows — part-time journalists dedicated to looking at things with old-fashioned skepticism.

And our new look gives us heightened interaction with you, our reader. In our original incarnation that we just left behind it was difficult to figure out how to leave comments. Now it’s simply a matter of registering here to begin commenting on the stories you read. Please join our discussion.

And please bookmark us for our award-winning coverage.

Our team of contributors is organic, consisting of seasoned veterans who’ve been here since day one, and newer faces with varying backgrounds in journalism and blogging.

Todd A. Heywood is the capital correspondent for Michigan-based weekly gay newspaper, Between the Lines. He’s been reporting on a variety of issues, including LGBT, the extreme right, the culture war and partisan politics since 1989. Ed Brayton, also from the Lansing area, is one of the nation’s best-known bloggers, coming to us from ScienceBlogs. And Eartha Jane Melzer, of Traverse City, is a veteran investigative journalist who won recognition this year for her reporting on this site about Sovereign Deed. This private disaster response company founded by a military contractor sought millions in state economic  development funds and promised hundreds of jobs to the Petoskey area. Her investigation revealed a string of fraud charges against the company CEO, who had hired a retired Army general to promote country club-style disaster response services for the wealthy, received an honorable mention for the Hume Award from the National Press Club.

Other Fellows join these original writers and reporters. Minehaha Forman is a young, talented writer and videographer with a journalism degree from Oakland University. Alexa Stanard has a master’s in journalism from Northwestern. Both report from the Detroit area. Our newest Fellow, Diane Sweet, is a Michigan resident living near the Ohio border who comes to us from The Raw Story, one of the Internet’s most well-respected political blogging sites.

Whether we have journalism degrees or a fancy list of credits, we are all professionals. We get paid to be here. But passion for truth-telling and freedom of expression is usually the deciding factor in what brings us to Michigan Messenger.

Michigan Messenger's editor, Todd Spencer

So, then, who we are collectively: A loose-knit, rag-tag band of crusading miscreants? To some, probably. Keyboard-pounding Minutemen ever-ready to strike a blow for truth, democracy and the American way? Maybe.

For sure, we’re reporters, bloggers, observers and citizens who care about Michigan, its future, and the not-always-healthy state of its democracy.

At the end of the day, it boils down to this: We aim to give you another place to stop when informing yourself about the state you live in.

Our managing editor and longtime independent blogger LoRayne Apo-Joynt who lives in Saginaw and our journalism mentor, Tony Collings, who teaches at the University of Michigan hold Michigan Messenger together. Tony is a veteran of CNN, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press and whom you might know as the guy who drives all over Ann Arbor at 25 mph to save on gas.

Welcome to our new look. And thanks for your curiosity about, and concern for, the state we love so much.

We’re glad to be here, off leash.

Todd Spencer

Editor
Michigan Messenger

Michigan's 75th state house district

Incumbent Democratic Rep. Robert Dean faces a stiff challenge from longtime businessman Dan Tietema in the race for the state House from HD-75, which includes much of Grand Rapids from Fulton Street on the west to Beltline Avenue on the east and from 36th Street on the south to Knapp Street on the north.

Dean, a one-term incumbent, is the pastor of the New Life Church of God in Christ in Grand Rapids, which he founded in 1980. His road to the state House included stops on the Grand Rapids School Board from 1990 to 1996, serving as president of the board in his last year, and on the Grand Rapids City Commission from 1999 to 2006, serving as commission president in 2002-03. He resigned from the commission in 2006 to run for state representative.

In his two years in the House, Dean has served on several committees, including Families and Children’s Services (of which he is vice chairman), Commerce and Education. He has been active in proposing legislation during his time in the House, sponsoring major legislation on a number of subjects, including HD 4918, part of a package of legislation that would provide harsh penalties for human trafficking; HB 4950, which established 10 “renaissance zones” with reduced taxes specifically for the development of renewable energy facilities; and HB 6250, which would tighten regulations on false or misleading advertising and unfair trade practices.

In both his 2006 campaign and his current re-election bid, Dean has the support of the major state Democratic organization PACs. He has received $10,000 from the Granholm Leadership Fund, $9,800 from the Michigan House Democratic Fund and $5,000 each from the Meisner Majority Fund, the Byrum Leadership Democratic Fund and the Kent County Democratic Party. He also has strong support from the traditional Democratic constituencies: $5,000 each from the United Auto Workers, the Michigan Trial Lawyers Association, $3,000 from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees PAC, $2,500 from the Realtors PAC of Michigan and $2,500 from the Health PAC.

Dean’s opponent, Dan Tietema, had to defeat two opponents, T.J. Carnegie and Michael Burdo, in the Republican primary to win the right to compete for the House seat. Tietema has no experience in elected office but has a long track record in the business community and in volunteer organizations. In 2000 he sold the bottled water company he founded, and in 2002 he launched Omni Medical, a company that specializes in the disposal of medical waste. One of his sons having been born with a serious heart defect, Tietema has also served as vice president of the American Heart Association and as an advisory board member of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Grand Rapids.

In 2005 Tietema was defeated in a race for the Grand Rapids City Commission. He also ran briefly for the Grand Rapids mayor’s office in 2007 but withdrew less than two months after he’d announced his candidacy, saying that his business was expanding so fast that he had to give it his full attention. During his 2005 run for the City Commission, the Grand Rapids Press reported that he had voted in fewer than half the state and national elections in which he was eligible to vote as an adult, and he had not voted in local elections at all during his lifetime until just the year before he ran for office.

Because Tietema has no track record in elected office, we can go only by his announced positions on various issues. He has said several times that his primary motivation to run against Dean was his opposition to Dean’s support for an increase in the state income tax to balance the budget last year, a vote that led to an unsuccessful attempt to recall Dean from office. Legislators like Dean, Tietema says, “have decided to tax our way out of this mess.”

Among the policies he advocates on his official Web site, Tietema calls for abolishing the Michigan Single Business Tax, transforming the state legislature into a part-time body and adopting the Michigan Fair Tax, which would replace the state income tax with a broad sales tax higher than we have now. He also pledges to “cut Michigan’s budget” but does not indicate how he would do so or what he would prefer to cut. Interestingly, he also calls, as Barack Obama recently did in his appearance in Lansing, for transforming Michigan’s manufacturing base to focus on newer energy products and services.

At Gannett’s Michigan voter guide, Tietema does call for state legislators to “give up their own Lifetime Health benefits while their constituents are struggling to pay for regular check-ups” in order to save the state money. Interestingly, Dean has proposed legislation in the House, HB 4580, to do exactly that.

Bill Ballenger, the publisher of Inside Michigan Politics, told WOOD-TV 8 after the primary earlier this month that the Dean/Tietema election should be a close race, though he expects Dean to prevail.

The US Justice Department sent target letters to the guards being investigated, The Washington Post reported Saturday. Although not identified by name, the guards were described as US military personnel.

Target letters often are a prelude to indictment, but allow the suspects to defend themselves by telling the court their own version of events. A federal grand jury has already heard the testimony of dozens of witnesses, including US and Blackwater officials and Iraqis.

This has looked like a cover up from the beginning and I was highly doubtful that there would ever be an attempt to prosecute those guards. Despite several independent investigations, including one by the Pentagon itself, that concluded that the Blackwater guards fired on an unarmed group of civilians who had not attacked them in any way, the government has held off charging them with any crime because it was not clear that they could be charged under either Iraqi or American law. It remains to be seen if they finally are charged and whether an earlier grant of partial immunity to secure their testimony will prevent a conviction.

But the Illinois senator, introduced in San Francisco by House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi as a “leader that God has blessed us with at this time,” vowed not to make the mistake of previous Democratic nominees in failing to sufficiently repel Repubican assaults.

Okay, can we just stop this nonsense now? I understand the need to reach out to religious voters and I think that Obama genuinely is a man of faith who speaks authentically about his religious views, but this rather absurdly crosses over the line. When Republicans spoke openly at the last two Republican national conventions about George W. Bush being God’s choice to lead the country, we blasted them for their presumptuousness and their irrationality. Pelosi deserves no less for saying the same ridiculous thing. This kind of shameless pandering should be condemned by all rational people.