TexasTowelie
TexasTowelie's JournalLansing company hosts website that inspired Charleston shooter, but not for much longer
DELTA TWP. — Local web hosting company Liquid Web Solutions is host of the hate group website that inspired mass murderer Dylann Roof.
But it won't be for much longer.
An investigation by technology and science website Gizmodo from earlier this month found that Lansing-based Liquid Web Solutions is the host of the website for Council of Conservative Citizens, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group.
Roof shot and killed nine people during a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. All of the victims were black.
According to his manifesto, Roof was interested in the death of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old who was shot and killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in February of 2012. Roof said it was obvious Zimmerman was in the right so he searched "black on White crime" on Google.
Read more: https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/2019/07/26/liquid-web-council-conservative-citizens-white-supremacist/1830619001/
Lansing Democrats await Detroit debates
If the road to the White House runs through Michigan — as national experts are saying it once again could — the Democratic debates in Detroit next week are part of the trip.
Lansing Democrats will be tuned in to CNN Tuesday and Wednesday nights to see who they want driving their car.
In 2016, Donald J. Trump inched out a 10,704-vote victory in the state — fewer people than the worst night at the Tigers’ Comerica Park. As a result, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania put him in the Oval Office.
City Pulse quizzed a handful of local Democrats to size up their large field of presidential challengers in advance of the spotlight on Michigan.
Read more: https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/lansing-democrats-await-detroit-debates,13057
Flint welcomes Democratic candidates, but distrust of help runs high
Flint — The spots on the arms of Keith Tomaszewski tell the story, he said, of how the long-running lead-contaminated water crisis here has affected his life and others.
But as 20 Democratic presidential candidates prepare to debate Tuesday and Wednesday in Detroit, Tomaszewski said he is not convinced any of them really care about him or other residents — even though four candidates already have visited the city and Flint is bound to come up on the nationally televised stage.
"I think it's going to be the same thing, just enough to get a little shine on the votes," said the 55-year-old Flint resident as he recently walked to a bus stop downtown. Tomaszewski fears he may have Legionnaires' disease and hopes to get checked soon.
"I don't think they are going to step in and do anything about it," he said. "I've got marks all over my skin."
Former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey last week were the latest to campaign in Flint. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro was the first to visit in June, and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand went in early July.
Read more: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2019/07/27/flint-welcomes-democratic-candidates-distrust-help-high/1810026001/
Wayne State loses public records lawsuit over Flint water crisis documents
The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation was awarded $6,000 in attorney’s fees on Tuesday for its public records lawsuit filed against Wayne State University.
The lawsuit, filed in June 2018, was launched on behalf of Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards — one of the whistleblowers in the Flint water crisis — after the university allegedly ignored several of his Freedom of Information Act requests.
The requests sought presentations and emails between university and state employees, after rumors circulated that the $3.35 million state-funded research on Flint water led by WSU was being interfered with.
“This case shows that government institutions, including our public universities, aren’t above the law and cannot stand in the way of complete transparency,” Derk Wilcox, senior attorney with the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, said in a statement. “Having an open and transparent government is an essential right.”
Read more: https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2019/07/25/wayne-state-loses-public-records-lawsuit-over-flint-water-crisis-documents
State Bar will stop dipping into client protection fund to meet payroll
The State Bar of Michigan has vowed to never again pay its staff by dipping into a special fund intended for compensating clients whose lawyers ripped them off.
The bar's 32-member Board of Commissioners voted Friday to adopt a policy that specifically prohibits using money from its Client Protection Fund for unintended purposes.
The new policy is a response to an episode last September when the organization's finance director borrowed $275,000 from the fund to meet the organization's payroll. The State Bar was experiencing a cash shortage because of technical issues that affected a website that processes members' yearly dues.
Although the State Bar had reserves to meet the shortfall, there was not enough time to convert the certificates of deposit to cash, according to details of the episode in the new policy proposal. The borrowed money was put back into the fund several days later.
Read more: https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/2019/07/27/state-bar-dipping-client-protection-fund/1836580001/
Mitch Albom: The price we'd pay for $20 minimum wage
You can force businesses to raise wages, but you can’t force them to keep workers. And study after study, expert after expert, shows that, eventually, the higher the wages demanded, the fewer positions there will be.
Follow this to its logical conclusion, and at a certain point, if a business can’t afford to pay the minimum salary to the minimum workers it needs, it closes.
In which case, even more jobs are lost.
The rub with the raise
With that in mind, let’s skip the headline-grabbing sound bites and look at some facts.
In Seattle, which is moving towards a $15 minimum wage by 2021, a study conducted by the University of Washington last year showed employers were already reducing hours, with a net effect of reducing low-wage employees’ earnings by $84 a month.
Read more: https://www.freep.com/story/sports/columnists/mitch-albom/2019/07/28/mitch-albom-rashida-tlaib-20-minimum-age/1847078001/
Note: This editorial is in the Detroit Free Press which is rated as left-center by https://mediabiasfactcheck.com .
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/detroit-free-press/
State lawmaker: Michigan shouldn't fly gay pride flags. Whitmer: Try me
More than a month after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ordered multi-colored rainbow flags to fly over the Romney office building in Lansing to commemorate Pride Month, a Republican lawmaker said enough is enough.
State Rep. Lynn Afendoulis, R-Grand Rapids, introduced a bill Thursday that would allow only the Michigan and United States flags to be flown on state office buildings, saying it's inappropriate to promote social policy, even in the form of a flag, on state office buildings.
“We shouldn’t be playing identity politics with the people’s property,” Afendoulis said in a statement. “It isn’t right.”
Whitmer was quick to respond, retweeting a post from a Detroit Free Press reporter with the addition: "My veto pen is ready."
https://twitter.com/GovWhitmer/status/1154542590727000064
Read more: https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2019/07/26/whitmer-gay-pride-flags-veto-michigan/1837069001/
As Charles Koch Cultivates Anti-War Image, Koch Industries Profits from Defense Contracts
Libertarian billionaire industrialist Charles Koch has gone to great lengths to paint himself as an anti-interventionist. He has funded foreign policy-focused think tanks and university centers such as the conflict-averse Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University and the Notre Dame International Security Center, which is directed by anti-NATO professor Michael Desch.
Most recently, he teamed up with an extremely unlikely ally, liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros, to found the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The Charles Koch Foundation and Soros’ Open Society Foundations each contributed $500,000 to help found the Quincy Institute, which will open in September, along with $800,000 from other donors.
“Political leaders have increasingly deployed the military in a costly, counterproductive, and indiscriminate manner, normalizing war and treating armed dominance as an end in itself,” reads the institute’s website. “The Quincy Institute is an action-oriented think tank that will lay the foundation for a new foreign policy centered on diplomatic engagement and military restraint.”
But Koch Industries, the giant oil, chemical, paper, and electronics conglomerate owned and led by Koch, has been cashing in on Department of Defense contracts. Since 2016, two Koch Industries subsidiaries have gotten federal contracts worth a total of close to $2.3 million to provide the Navy with circuit boards for its ships, according to Sludge’s review of federal contract data from the Federal Procurement Data System.
Read more: https://prospect.org/article/charles-koch-cultivates-anti-war-image-koch-industries-profits-defense-contracts
(American Prospect)
Rashida Tlaib Far Ahead Of Benny Napoleon And Brenda Jones In 2020 Poll
A poll shows U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who frequently appears in the news, and is a member of the group known as "the squad," leading Detroit Council President Brenda Jones in a hypothetical re-election race in 2020, 56% to 19%, according the MIRS news service in Lansing.
In a hypothetical three-way race in the 13th Congressional District, Tlaib gets 51 percent compared to Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon with 23 percent and Jones with 8 percent.
Last year, Tlaib lost to Jones by 1,648 votes in a special election primary to fill the last six weeks of former U.S. Rep. John Conyers' term. Tlaib beat Jones for the full two-year term by 900 votes in November's race with two additional candidates.
"For a freshman rep, to have these types of numbers is very usual," says pollster Ed Sarpolus or Target-Insyght, who has followed Detroit politics since the late 1970s.
http://www.deadlinedetroit.com/articles/22893/rashida_tlaib_far_ahead_in_poll_against_benny_napoleon_brenda_jones_in_2020_race
(no more at link)
Rural children more than twice as likely to be homeless in Michigan
There could be more than 15,000 homeless children ages 4 or younger in Michigan, with more than one in 10 in several rural counties lacking stable housing.
That’s the conclusion of a sobering new report that tries to quantify the number of homeless children in the state, and describes the long-term impact on their ability to learn, particularly if they do not receive early support.
The report, released by the Michigan League for Public Policy in collaboration with Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan, estimates the number of homeless children age 4 or younger in Michigan to be 15,565. Of them, 75 percent live in urban counties.
But it’s Michigan’s rural counties that have the highest rates of homelessness ‒ 5.7 percent of children age 0-4 compared to 2.4 percent in urban counties.
Read more: https://www.bridgemi.com/children-families/rural-children-more-twice-likely-be-homeless-michigan
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