UofM Wins Solar Race Again

The beginning of an article on the website UM Solar reads:

The University of Michigan Solar Car Team has crossed the finish line for the 2008 North American Solar Challenge after traveling nearly 2400 miles from Plano, Texas to Calgary, Alberta. The team finished ten hours ahead of its nearest competitors to bring back Michigan's fifth National Championship in nine races.

While some would have us waste time drilling, and spilling in hopes of being independent from foreign energy source, and destroying our environment, they should be working to see that we keep these wonderful minds in the state to help us in the transition to alternative fuel sources.

The only unanswered question on the minds of many in the state of Michigan is how much faster the car could have been had it been painted a more traditional racing color.

Paying taxes is patriotic

The need

With troops in foreign lands, and an economy in shambles, it seems to me the least patriotic thing someone could do is not pay their taxes. Complaining about tax rates, is as much a national past time as watching baseball, or eating hot dogs. But this nations need for capitol as we defend ourselves from both physical, and commercial warfare has never been more apparent. Some may complain that a majority of tax dollars may go to an unjust occupation in Iraq, and use this as an excuse to skim from their obligations. Others fight for different levels of taxation in search for what they claim to be fair. These arguments should be fought in the nations capitol, not in foreign tax shelters.

Turning the tide

The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by (our own senator) Carl Levin, held a hearing Thursday on tax haven banks and U.S. tax compliance. The committee has produced a report on its six-month-long investigation.

In reviewing a variety of case histories, the investigation found that from at least 2000 to 2007, LGT and UBS employed banking practices that facilitated tax evasion by their U.S. clients, including assisting clients to open accounts in the names of offshore entities; advising clients on complex offshore structures to hide ownership of assets; using client code names; and disguising asset transfers into and from accounts."Senator Levin estimated offshore banks deprived the US Government of $US100 billion ($102 billion) a year in taxes. The report says US clients hold about 19,000 accounts at UBS in Switzerland with an estimated $US18-$US20 billion in assets not declared to tax authorities.

Using simple math it is clear to see that Senator Levin's target is not Ma, and Pa Sixpack hiding little Timmy's lawn mowing income from the mean ol' IRS man. The use of code names, in complex structures, implies that this is not a simple mess up on the 1040 form that many working people may struggle with every year, but a blatant disregard for the same laws every red blooded American citizen must follow.

Local impact

What is untold, is the amount of money that the state of Michigan, and others in equal need are loosing through these unpatriotic actions.
People with the means to pay are depriving their own states of the ability to pay for much needed services, and obligations. Bridge, and road repair, power lines that are past due for overhaul, better care for returning guard veterans, and workers retraining programs must now be taken care of with borrowed money, or put off to some elusive "time horizon".

We must pay our dues, while arguing their use in the ballot box.


Regardless of ones point of view on unjust wars, and levels of taxation, the money continues to be spent by our federal government. Every dollar withheld from U.S. coffers will be borrowed from outside sources. This will leave a larger debt for future generations, and a weakening U.S. economy.

What may begin as civil disobedience, will end in generational warfare.

That's debatable-County Clerk & Register of Deeds

As I type this, the debate for Barry County Register of Deeds and County Clerk is getting underway at the Barry County Commission on Aging in Hastings. I dropped the ball on providing a place for discussion of the last two debates so here it is.

(Fair warning: Any comments on 9-1-1 or guns will be deleted!)

Introducing agnosticrat

In case you haven't noticed, this is now officially a group blog. I've asked agnosticrat to come on board and provide his unique and caustic commentary to issues that affect West Michigan. I was at a point where it was either ask for help or call it a day. I found myself at a point where I couldn't check in often enough to watch comments to ensure a relatively civil discourse or to post often enough to keep the trolls from dominating the conversation. From my discussions with agnosticrat and his comments here, as well as his too-infrequent posts on his own blog, I thought he could help me out in this regard. You've been warned...

Bullet points (or: Annie, Get Your Gun)

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

brandish
Pronunciation: bran-dish
Function: transitive verb
Etymology: Middle English braundisshen, from Anglo-French brandiss-, stem of brandir, from brant, braund sword, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English brand
Date: 14th century

1 : to shake or wave (as a weapon) menacingly
2 : to exhibit in an ostentatious or aggressive manner

Wikipedia:

Open carry is legal in Michigan, although some people think that it is socially unacceptable without good reason (security/police officers, hunting, etc.), and choosing to do so in populated areas may result in being charged with disturbing the peace or even brandishing.

• Supporters of Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf are taking shots at Hastings Police Chief Jerry Sarver, a candidate for sheriff in the August primary. Sarver is seen by gun lovers as being insufficiently "pro gun." Sarver is drawing fire for his alleged opposition to "open carry," the legal right to openly carry your sidearm on your person in a public place. They no doubt feel emboldened by the recent Supreme Court decision striking down a ban on handguns in Washington D.C. but mainly they feel like their support got current Sheriff Dar Leaf elected. Leaf's opponent in that election was the then-current Sheriff, Steve DeBoer, who was being attacked for sometimes denying concealed carry permits). I think Leaf's victory had more to do with former Sheriff DeBoer's drunken meeting with a mailbox while driving home from Grand Rapids and the attempted cover-up of the incident. Regardless, Leaf has long courted the extreme elements among the pro-gun crowd and counts himself among them.

• Sarver defended himself in a July 17, 2008 letter to the Hastings Banner in which Sarver relates his understanding of Michigan law concerning the open carrying of handguns and an incident in which a man was threatening to walk through a local grocery store openly displaying his firearm. The man in question backed down, perhaps deciding his Second Amendment rights could wait until election season to be exercised.

• And now that we are in the final throws of the primary campaign, Leaf's supporters have arraigned a political stunt, firing off these press releases:

http://www.usacarry.com/

In response to the Police Chief of Hastings, Chief Sarver, law-abiding citizens will be walking down Main Street in Hastings open carrying. Chief Sarver in response to a letter to the editor responded by saying it was brandishing, a misdemeanor. He failed to say that the Michigan Attorney General’s office wrote him telling him that open carry is not against the law. We are asking anyone who is interested in furthering their Second Amendment rights to join us on Thursday, July 24th at 4 PM. We will be meeting at Richie's Coffee Shop (146 W. State Street, Hastings, MI 49058).

An attorney that supports your right to keep and bear arms will be joining us.

It is important to note that this is a peaceful demonstration of our constitutional rights and everyone must be on their best behavior. All well mannered, law-abiding citizens are welcome to join us. Please RSVP if you can. Please do not dress like a paramilitary organization. Wear ordinary clothing that fits in well with the general public.

If you have any questions you can contact me at dstevens@iserv.net

David Stevens
Barry County Citizens for Second Amendment and Firearm Rights (B-SAFR)

http://www.ask4direct.com/news/wbch

CITIZENS WHO SUPPORT THE SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS WILL WALK DOWN STATE STREET IN HASTINGS THURSDAY OPENLY CARRYING A WEAPON TO PEACEFULLY DEMONSTRATE WHAT THEY SAY IS THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO OPEN CARRY. DAVID STEVENS, REPRESENTING BARRY COUNTY CITIZENS FOR SECOND AMENDMENT AND FIREARM RIGHTS, SAID LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS INTERESTED IN FURTHERING SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS CAN JOIN THEM AT RITCHIE'S COFFEE SHOP IN DOWNTOWN HASTINGS ON JULY 24 AT 4 P.M.

• Personally, instead of Richie's Coffee Shop at 4 p.m. I thought they'd have gone for Ponderosa at High Noon. I guess the plan is to draw a crowd, fired up with coffee and shoot on down to the Hastings City Hall so they can ceremonially display their Second Amendment rights and get out of Dodge, believing they've helped support the Sheriff's re-election bid by embarrassing Sarver. They likely think they've cornered Sarver into saying he'd arrest anyone brandishing their weapon. Either Sarver ignores the event and they get to say he backed down or he arrests anyone he believes is brandishing and they make a stink, take it to court and make political hay out of it.

• One has to wonder what a circus event clogging the city streets at the beginning of rush hour will do to win votes for Dar Leaf, who already has the support of 99.99% of gun enthusiasts who feel no restriction should infringe on their obsession with defending themselves from things that go bump in the night and fictional TV burglars. One also has to wonder what will stop people from trying to dilute the purpose of the event, perhaps even bringing along their own props and making a mockery of the event. Will people with squirt guns and toy weapons be barred from walking the streets of Hastings during this period? We've seen with the WTO protests and anti-war rallies that 100,000 people can march peacefully but it only takes one useful idiot to make the event backfire.

• There are all sorts of ways this could backfire, including revealing Leaf to be out of step with public opinion and costing him votes. One could even see this as a sign of panic in the Leaf campaign, a signal that they aren't confident they can win this on the merits and need a last ditch effort to cripple Sarver's campaign. Some might even wonder if the planners of this event are operating with a full clip or are they just shooting from the hip?

• Will Sarver's opponents shoot themselves in the foot and give him the ammunition he needs to win August 5 or will they hit their target? I guess we wait until the smoke clears...

How to win votes and influence elections

As we hit two weeks to go before Primary election day, I figure it might be my final chance to give some last minute advice to those brave and/or fool-hardy souls who have chosen to run for public office. I see too many people who throw their hat in the ring but seem unable or unwilling to do what it takes to win, so here's some free advice based on seeing where people get it right and where they go wrong...

I think one of the biggest mistakes people make when they run for local office is never telling people where they stand on actual issues. It's not enough to say in your campaign materials that you are trustworthy or that you're a nice person, what church you attend, that you have 2.5 children and a yellow lab, etc. Too often people spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars running for local offices but never seem to give people a reason for voters to take time out of their day before or after work to cast their lone ballot. Campaigning is a form of advertising and the first thing you do when you try to sell something to someone is tell them why they can't live without the product (which, if you're running for office, is YOU). Give concrete examples of how and why you'd do a good job. Voters need information and too often campaigns spend lots of money without telling voters anything besides where a candidate graduated, what they look like and other generic and meaningless factoids.

The flip side of convincing people to vote FOR you is convincing people that they also need to vote against the other person, not because they're bad but because you'd do that much better of a job. "Negative" campaigning gets a bad rap but it works because it's how you tell people that the other person is not as good as you. Many politicians get it wrong and give negative campaigning its bad reputation because their attacks aren't substantial and on message- they are mean-spirited and personal where they should be about issues and drawing a contrast between choices. I find too many candidates seem to do either too little or too much negative campaigning- too many don't understand the subtle difference between highlighting areas of difference and just being nasty. As a voter I need information that gives me a reason to vote for you and not stay at home, but a campaigns that gets too bitter and personal can keep people at home (which can be an intentional strategy used by politicians who know the other person is a stronger candidate). If I think the other candidate is also an acceptable choice then maybe voting isn't that important and I can just get home and fix dinner for the family and mow the lawn instead of choosing which little circle to fill in with a number 2 pencil.

I'm also surprised by how many people are willing to spend a bunch of money to buy campaign signs, send mailers, put their ego and pride on the line and then suddenly seem to get cold feet when the going gets tough. Elections can get expensive (why do you think so many politicians are people that already have money?) and if you're facing a tough opponent you can find yourself writing check after check to keep up. Too many times people jump in a race because it seems fun and exciting when people are telling you that should run, but then start to chicken out when they realize how tough it is. If people see you aren't willing to invest your own money and time on a race, they'll be less willing to help you out when the going gets tough.

Media lays an egg inreporting on reform effort

It's said that space abhors a vacuum and so, it seems, does the media.

When word finally got out that a grassroots group had a petition drive in motion that would reform Michigan government the media was caught by surprise. The group was quietly gathering the 370,000+ signatures it would need to get the effort to amend the state constitution on the November ballot, but no one told the power brokers in Lansing. Alarm bells went off and soon political reporters and bloggers were hunting for every shred of information they could get about Reform Michigan Government Now. Sadly, they got a lot of it wrong.

In their effort to fill space in their newspapers the reporters often turned to uninformed idiots who were willing to pretend they knew what they were talking about. In that reporting was also an elitist element that sounded angry that the grassroots effort hadn't consulted the power brokers and influence peddlers in Lansing. Surely, this group was a secret front for some known lobbying group, the Lansing insider class decided. And all the rest of their reporting has been spent trying to prove their initial belief. Instead of trying to find the truth, the media decided it knew the truth and would fit the story around that supposition.

In the days and weeks that followed the initial news leak, many established Michigan pundits and politicos weighed in. Early on, State Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer commented positively on many of the reforms in the package and thus the media decided he must be behind the effort. When it came out that many of the members of the unsuccessful Unicameral Michigan campaign to "Fire the Senate" were behind Reform Michigan Government Now and that paid petition circulators were being used (sadly, you almost can't get a petition drive on the ballot if you don't have money to pay professionals to do the collecting- only one such effort was ever successful in Michigan), the media demanded to know who was funding the drive. In the absence of correct information, it was floated that John Stryker was bankrolling the effort. When Stryker issued a firm denial we get yet more speculation and no real information. The media's obsession with the money seems to have blinded it from doing it's job and asking the only important question- is it any good for Michigan? Should it pass?

It's the media obsession with Brewer and Stryker which is so "striking" to me and gets to the heart of why these reforms are so necessary. In their attempts to find a way to attack the reform movement, they wish to 'kill the messenger' and they can't really do that with a group of ordinary citizens other than to incorrectly label group treasurer Harland Nye as a chicken farmer (he's a retired band director). The group of political outsiders has played their cards close to the vest which seems to be an affront to the sort of insider-class culture in Lansing. Despite employing the public relations firm of former state House speaker Dianne Byrum, the group is attacked for not being more establishment such as when Jack Lessenberry writes that:

They just might have been able to pull this off if they had gotten together with a few reasonable Republicans, like Joe Schwarz and Kalamazoo County Administrator Don Gilmer, and come up with something truly bipartisan. Instead, to give themselves cover, they put up as their official treasurer an 80-year-old retired high school band director who says he is a Republican. Give me a break.

So, is Lessenberry saying Mr. Nye is NOT a Republican or that he's not reasonable? Is he saying it's bad that the group lies but only because they didn't tell a different lie, one that him and his reporter buddies are used to hearing? Give US a break, Jack. If you don't think the effort is bipartisan, please tell me what's in the plan that makes it partisan. Instead we get more garbage like this:

But the proposal reveals its naked partisanship in its intention to eliminate two state supreme court justices.

So, it's nakedly partisan to preserve a majority of Governor Engler-appointed judges on the bench? It's partisan to take a non-partisan method for eliminating the two most inexperienced members of the bench? Lessenberry's arguments show exactly how much the media is contorting itself to find reasons to oppose these common sense proposals which make up a rather cohesive set of reforms that could never be enacted in our poisoned partisan atmosphere in Lansing. Yet some of the people who make a living speaking out against are now mad that the proposals aren't more blatantly partisan. In fact, Lessenberry decries that the proposal doesn't target the most independent member of the state Supreme Court (the court which was recently ranked worst in the nation in judicial partisanship by the way). Huh?

In a town where partisan politics is everything, Lansing can't help but turn an anti-partisan/non-partisan effort into something which can only be seen through the filter of which party it helps or hurts. What's funny is that in none of these efforts do we hear any good reasons why one side might be advantaged. We do suddenly hear how partisan our non-partisan justices are though which should come as a surprise to anyone who thought they were voting for judges and not political parties.

Which brings me back to the effort by some to paint this as a secret scheme by Mark Brewer to control state government. First, the state Democratic Party is poised to have its best November in a long time. With a toxic Republican brand and a charismatic figure on the top of the ticket who threatens to boost turnout in the state, Democrats in Michigan have to be swooning at their prospects this fall. Yet we are to believe that instead of trying to turn out the vote in November, Brewer has been busy crafting and organizing an effort that would take redistricting away from his own party? We are also supposed to believe that Brewer is secretly behind a plan that includes proposals floated or supported by people such as Terry Lynn Land (no-reason absentee voting), Glenn Steil Jr. (reducing number of state legislators), and Chief Justice Clifford Taylor (reducing number of judges), among others?

In their rush to judgment and then to be jury and executioner, the media has conveniently forgotten many of the proposals were originally proposed by members of the Republican Party and seem to exclusively focus on the ones that do not benefit the Republican Party machine while skimming over the rest (some of which, like losing the power of redistricting which has helped deliver State Senate control to the GOP despite getting less votes state-wide, actually hurt Democrats but the reporting never seems to mention that aspect). State Republican Party chair Saul Anuzis has attacked Reform Michigan Government Now's ballot drive with his standard line of attributing anything he doesn't like as coming from trial lawyers and liberals but Mr. Anuzis and the media have been pretty scant on what in the proposal would advantage Democrats. Other than the coincidental fact that the two most inexperienced Supreme Court justices are "Republicans" despite their constant past efforts to pretend they were non-partisan. Apparently it's bad that the effort is so partisan except when it should have been even more partisan. Yes, they think you're that stupid that you can't see through their shifting reasons for attacking the grassroots effort.

What's sad is that most average citizens in Michigan realize state government is badly broken and want it to get fixed but feel powerless to do anything about it. After too many years of divisive wrangling over budget issues and taxes, Lansing has proven it can't take on the toughest of issues. What is needed is for someone, anyone to step up the plate and deliver a set of much-needed reforms that would help reduce the partisan atmosphere and help voice the disgust of the people at what is happening in Lansing. Instead, we get the media trying to kill the messengers. We get the partisan spin of Saul Anuzis reported as truth. We get lies about the honest people in Barry County who've given years of their lives in trying to make Michigan state government actually work for the people. We get a defense of the status quo. We get more of the same.

Today, the group is expected to drop well more than the required number of signatures, with plenty of cushion to ensure that the effort gets on the ballot in November, into the hands of the Secretary of State. The special interests have already lined up against this, the influence peddlers have been honing their attacks. All I ask is that the people quit listening to the media trying to tell them they're too stupid to understand the proposal and look into it themselves. The media shouldn't waste it's time telling you WHAT to think about it but instead telling you what it actually would do. If they can't do that simple task then they are part of the problem too.

In fact, not only are they trying to tell you what to think about the proposals instead of giving you the information to think for yourself, the media has gotten many of their facts wrong. If you can't trust them to give you the basic facts about Reform Michigan Government Now, then how can you trust them when they try to tell you it's a bad idea? That's something even a chicken farmer could understand.