Michigan Messenger

Pranksters with too much time on the hands are alleviating their boredom by scavaging around Detroit’s ample supply of abandoned and vacant properties, The Wall Street Journal reports. A staff  videographer even documented a group of perpetrators in the act of pushing a dump truck out a fourth-floor window of an old Packard plant. Click [...]

The Michigan Messenger’s Todd Heywood reports:
While the state is coming down from its second temporary shut down in two years, ever increasing unemployment and unresolved budget issues, Michigan House Republicans this week introduced legislation to amend the state constitution to define life as beginning at fertilization.
The resolution to amend the constitution was introduced by Democratic [...]

From The Michigan Messenger:
Rep. Bart Stupak [D-Mich.] has reconsidered earlier legislation that would have given several acres of Coast Guard property in Cheboygan [Mich.] to a Christian school free of charge after constitutional law scholars pointed out that the land transfer would violate the First Amendment separation between church and state.

The Michigan Messenger’s Todd Heywood reports:
The Standish City Council unanimously approved a resolution targeting President Barack Obama and federal authorities with one message: Send us your prisoners.

The Michigan Messenger reports that Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-Mich.) temporarily laid off state workers at midnight after the state legislature failed to pass a budget for fiscal year 2010. However, two hours later, Granholm signed a resolution passed by the Senate allowing the government to continue operating for 30 days while lawmakers continued to negotiate [...]

The Michigan Messenger reports that Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-Mich.) has notified state employees that they will be temporarily laid off at the stroke of midnight if the legislature does not pass a budget by the end of the day. Follow events as they develop here.

The Michigan Messenger’s Todd Heywood reports some strong statements from Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) in support of a government-run health insurance plan to compete with private insurers.
“If we don’t have a strong public option, the bill will never get out of the House,” Conyers said during a Monday night town hall meeting on hate crimes [...]

The Michigan Messenger reports on a state legislature hearing about a proposal to relocate Guantanamo Bay detainees to a Standish, Mich., maximum-security facility, following the scheduled closure of U.S. prison in Cuba next year.
Not surprisingly, opinions were mixed.

The Michigan Messenger’s Ed Brayton reports a convoluted tale involving all of the above. Long story short, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) — whose name you may know because he lives at the GOP sex scandal-connected “C Street” house — has introduced a bill to transfer a piece of U.S. Coast Guard-owned property in Cheboygan, Mich.,  [...]

More news from Michigan:
City Councilwoman Monica Conyers has been identified in an FBI bribery probe as “Council Member A,” the city official investigators say received more than $6,000 in cash bribes in exchange for a deciding vote that approved a $1.2 billion sewage disposal contract with the waste management company Synagro Technologies.
According to a report [...]