Free Republic

The Biden administration's energy policies have drawn criticism as gas prices surge heading into the winter months The Biden administration is reportedly weighing the potential market consequences of shutting down an oil pipeline in Michigan, drawing criticism from opponents. Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Biden's energy secretary, predicted Sunday that heating prices will rise this winter regardless of the Biden administration's decision on the pipeline. "Yeah, this is going to happen. It will be more expensive this year than last year," Granholm told CNN. The administration has yet to decide on what to do with Line 5 and officials were...

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in heated debates on Twitter today over the credibility of a Washington Post fact check article about her. Here’s what you need to know.What happened?Glenn Kessler, fact check columnist for The Washington Post, published an article Thursday about Ocasio-Cortez. In it, the liberal media personality criticized the representative’s statements about the living wage. He wrote in the piece that there is not “a vast majority” of Americans who don’t earn a living wage, despite Ocasio-Cortez’s claims. He also pointed out that both Walmart and Amazon pay workers above the minimum wage, in contradiction to...

Pro-Union activists using bullhorns and spit interrupted a quiet discussion in Vancouver, Washington, about “right to work” laws that would allow prevent workers from being forced to join unions. The meeting had been convened by the Cascade Policy Institute of Portland and the Freedom Foundation of Olympia, Washington and was held at Clark College’s Columbia Tech Center in Vancouver, Washington. As the meeting began, the pro-union protestors marched up and down outside, waving picket signs. Eventually, however, they moved inside to harass the participants more directly. The protestors’ main tactic was to use bullhorns to shout down the meeting attendees....

Michigan’s state-run school system is the largest and most expensive government service state taxpayers support – spending more than $20 billion a year. It employs more than 350,000 people, who work in one of the more than 4,100 different entities. Given the enormity and complexity of the system, it’s no surprise that myths abound about how public schools are funded.

(snip)....There will never be a mainstream news media anymore," said Ken Braun, managing editor of Michigan Capitol Confidential and part of the five-person media panel. "It is becoming what I call a multi-stream media. That's the future we are headed to."... (snip)

When Kevin O'Neill said he arrived in Coopersville School District in 1998 as the superintendent, he said it had a $10,000 fund balance. "There was no money to be had," O'Neill said. Today, there is about $5 million in the fund balance, and O'Neill's annual compensation costs the district almost $120 per student. That's part of the reason that O'Neill is among the highest-paid superintendents in the state for the district with 2,600 students, located about 20 miles west of Grand Rapids in Ottawa County. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy is compiling a database of the state's highest paid...

Michigan and local taxpayers provided the West Bloomfield School District with more than $13,500 per student in 2008-2009, yet it still faces a $1.7 million deficit this year and $3.8 million next year. Employee compensation makes up 85 percent of the budget, so the district has asked teachers to help close the gap with revisions to their union contract. Their response was to picket, which they did Monday night. According to the Michigan Department of Education, the average teacher salary in West Bloomfield was $70,192 in 2009. This ranks 40th among 551 school districts in the state, and 10th highest...

(June 15) -- If you aren't the least bit concerned about the health of America's freedoms, you are either a) in a multiyear-long drug induced coma, B) Sean Penn, or C) dead. And you've definitely never heard of Overton's Window. The Overton Window is a political theory developed by the late Joseph Overton, a brilliant public policy strategist and ardent free-marketer. Overton observed that "when public policies in a given area (education, health care) are arranged from freest to least free, only a relatively narrow window of options will be considered politically acceptable." The theory says the window will gradually...

The barren economy of this rustbelt state is weakening the labor movement, but well-connected unions continue to shape Michigan's politics. So it's not surprising that some are willing to take extraordinary measures to help repopulate union ranks--even to the extent of making the state an accessory to a scheme to shanghai more than 40,000 home-based day care entrepreneurs and providers into a government-employee union. This development was first brought to the attention of the Mackinac -Center for Public Policy, where we work, in early 2009, when the center was approached by Sherry Loar, owner of Baby Steps Childcare Center in...

Motor City Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is right to be distancing himself from a City Council proposal to create a racially exclusive business district in Detroit to help black entrepreneurs. Not only would the plan, dubbed African Town, heighten racial tensions unnecessarily. It could also exacerbate the very problem it aims to solve. The insidious premise of this economic development plan, which was approved last week in a 7-to-2 vote overriding Mr. Kilpatrick's earlier veto, is that immigrants from Latin America, Asia and the Middle East are "stealing" jobs and resources from native blacks. But for the presence of these foreigners,...

Executive with think tank killed in ultralight crash The Associated Press 7/1/2003, 9:56 a.m. ET CARO, Mich. (AP) — An official with a think tank was killed when his ultralight aircraft crashed and burned near an airport, state police said Tuesday. Joseph P. Overton, senior vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, was dead at the scene of the 9:30 p.m. Monday crash, state police dispatcher Susan Schrader said. The 43-year-old Midland resident was piloting the single-seat aircraft under a flight instructor's supervision. He had just taken off from the Caro airport when, according to witnesses, the craft...