Clever Rivals - "Are You Smarter Than A Wolverine?"

Michigan "OHNO" Photo: Michigan band forms ‘OHNO’ at halftime
Rebuttal: TBDBITL Gets Revenge

Michigan's shrinkage

Michigan’s Decade of Tarnish Seen in Census Report

Excerpts:

While every other state in the nation gained population over the past decade, Michigan shrank. And yet, as word seeped across frozen towns like this one on Wednesday, almost no one seemed even mildly surprised. This was, many here said with resignation, just one last, official confirmation of Michigan’s long, grim and gloomy slide.

...

Cities like Detroit and Flint pondered ways to shrink their sizes to save themselves. States like Wyoming and North Dakota, flush with jobs, tried to recruit out-of-work Michigan residents to relocate. And places like this old corn and soybean growing village of 2,095 people — the self-proclaimed seed corn capital of the world — watched companies, like the soda pop top factory here this fall, close up shop.

In 2009, 2008 and 2007, United Van Lines, the moving company, had proclaimed Michigan to have its largest percentage of “outbound” moves. But experts here who had dismissed those figures as not particularly scientific had less to say about the Census Bureau numbers released this week, which showed that Michigan’s population shrank, for the first 10-year period since at least 1900. Not even Louisiana, which had weathered Hurricane Katrina, got smaller. Sure, Puerto Rico, a commonwealth, also lost population, but that seemed little solace here.

...

In the simplest terms, state officials say, Michigan’s .6 percent shrinkage to 9,883,640 people happened like this: A relatively low rate of people moved away, but a very low rate of people moved in from other states, or from other parts of the world.

Now some of the fallout is clear — the loss, as in so much of the industrial Midwest, of a House member and a possible drop in federal money — but there is a murkier psychic effect, which bubbled up as residents scanned The Kalamazoo Gazette’s headline here: “Michiganders Becoming Poorer and Older than Rest of U.S.”

“If I would have known 30 years ago what’s going on today, I’d be in Kentucky,” said Butch Vollmar, who pointed, by turns, to an array of causes for the state’s troubles — the shift in manufacturing, a “terrible” business climate in the state and a set of politicians he generally does not trust.

Comment: The state of my parents' birth. The state where I lived for 2 years (1978-80). A state I have vacationed in and love!

Backyard farming

A Michigan Teen Farms Her Backyard

Excerpt:

Lawn mowing and baby-sitting are standard summer jobs for the enterprising teenager. Alexandra Reau, who is 14, combines a little bit of each: last year, she asked her dad to dig up a half acre of their lawn in rural Petersburg, Mich., so she could farm. Now in its second season, her Garden to Go C.S.A. (community-supported agriculture) grows for 14 members, who pay $100 to $175 for two months of just-picked vegetables and herbs. While her peers are hanging out at Molly’s Mystic Freeze and working out the moves to that Miley Cyrus video, she’s flicking potato-beetle larvae off of leaves in her V-neck T-shirt and denim capris, a barrette keeping her hair out of her demurely made-up eyes.

Comment: This is for Bert Perry!

More: My dear Mother-in-law (died in 1989) had a huge garden in her backyard in Phlox Wisconsin. It was like heaven to visit her and the rural (very remote) Phlox!

Bulldozing Flint

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive

Excerpt:

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."

Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was "both a cultural and political taboo" about admitting decline in America.

"Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They're at the point where it's better to start knocking a lot of buildings down," she said.

Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.

Bulldozing Flint

An Effort to Save Flint, Mich., by Shrinking It

Excerpts:

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.

“Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life,” said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. “We need to control it instead of letting it control us.”

...

While the shrinkage debate has been simmering in Flint for several years, it suddenly gained prominence last month with a blunt comment by the acting mayor, Michael K. Brown, who talked at a Rotary Club lunch about “shutting down quadrants of the city.”

Nothing will happen immediately, but Flint has begun updating its master plan, a complicated task last done in 1965. Then it was a prosperous city of 200,000 looking to grow to 350,000. It now has 110,000 people, about a third of whom live in poverty.

Flint has about 75 neighborhoods spread out over 34 square miles. It will be a delicate process to decide which to favor, Mr. Kildee acknowledged from the driver’s seat of his Grand Cherokee.

Comment: Truly sad! My Grandparents lived NW of there when I was a child.

Detroit: Kwame M. Kilpatrick - time to GO!

Michigan Governor to Hold Proceedings That Could Lead to Detroit Mayor’s Ouster

Excerpt:

In a blow to Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick’s tenuous grip on his job here, Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan said Tuesday that she would hold proceedings next week that could result in Mr. Kilpatrick’s removal.

The mayor, who stands accused of 10 felony counts in two separate criminal cases, will have to defend himself before Ms. Granholm, who under state law is authorized to convene the proceedings.

The Detroit City Council, which has no authority to remove Mr. Kilpatrick from office, had asked Ms. Granholm to take up the matter after having urged the mayor to resign.

Comment: You can't begin to fix Detroit until this crook goes!

Detroit-ification of Michigan

Granholm's Tax Warning

Excerpt:

Michigan is now in the 18th month of a state-wide recession, and the unemployment rate of 6.9% remains far above the national rate of 5%. Ms. Granholm blames the nationwide mortgage meltdown and higher energy prices for the job losses and disappearing revenues, but this Great Lakes state is in its own unique hole. Nearby Illinois (5.4% jobless rate) and even Ohio (5.6%) are doing better.

Leon Drolet, the head of the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance, complains that "we are witnessing the Detroit-ification of Michigan." By that he means that the same high tax and spend policies that have hollowed out the Motor City are now infecting many other areas of the state.

The tax hikes have done nothing but accelerate the departures of families and businesses. Michigan ranks fourth of the 50 states in declining home values, and these days about two families leave for every family that moves in. Making matters worse is that property taxes are continuing to rise by the rate of overall inflation, while home values fall. Michigan natives grumble that the only reason more people aren't blazing a path out of the state is they can't sell their homes. Research by former Comerica economist David Littmann finds that about the only industry still growing in Michigan is government. Ms. Granholm's $44.8 billion budget this year further fattened agency payrolls.

There's another national lesson from the Granholm tax dud. If Democrats believe that anger over the economy and high gas prices have put voters in a receptive mood for higher taxes, they should visit the Wolverine State.


Comment: We have strong connections to Michigan: Mom and Pop Peet are from Michigan, we lived there for 2 years while I was in seminary, and we have many relatives there. The last time we visited, it is clear it is a state in decline!

Florida ‘train wreck’ scenario

Sen. Bill Nelson paints Florida ‘train wreck’ scenario

Excerpt:

Nelson sent a letter to DNC Chairman Howard Dean Thursday asking the committee to either accept the Jan. 29 results of the primary election or pay for a redo of the elections, which could cost in the range of $20 million. He sent the letter after Dean did not return his telephone call Wednesday.

“If they go to the Democratic Convention and stiff-arm the Florida delegations, how in the world do you think Floridians are going to support the Democratic nominee on Nov. 4?” Nelson told reporters Thursday. “It’s in everybody’s interest to find a solution to this problem.”

However, earlier in the day, Dean said the party would not pay for any do-over.

“We can’t afford to do that,” Dean stated on CBS’s “Early Show.” “That’s not our problem. We need our money to win the presidential race.”


Newt from 2/14: Newt: the makings of a Democratic civil war

Comment: The Democrats = the party of disorganization! Fascinating! They made the rules, then broke their own rules and now can't figure out how to resolve it!

Looks like its a fake!

Edmund Fitzgerald ring a fake?

Excerpt:

But the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum received a visitor recently who refutes the ring's authenticity.

Cynthia Edwards told a museum employee last week that her father bought the orange preserver at a garage sale many years ago, painted the name of the ore carrier on it and hung it at his cabin in Eagle River — not far from where it ultimately was found in the Upper Peninsula's Keweenaw Peninsula. When they remodeled two years ago, they put the ring on a tree and from there it disappeared.

"With the information coming in now, it looks more and more like it's not from the Edmund Fitzgerald," said Tom Farnquist, executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, which owns the museum.


Earlier Post

Edmund Fitzgerald life ring found?

Family finds life ring that could be from Edmund Fitzgerald

Excerpt:

Joe Rasch, a farmer from Conklin, about 15 miles northwest of Grand Rapids, said he was vacationing with his family last week in the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan's far north. Hunting for agates and other rocks along a remote beach, he saw an overturned tree where the beach meets the forest.


Interesting Edmund Fitzgerald links:

1. SS Edmund Fitzgerald
   
2. Gordon Lightfoot: The Wreck Of the Edmund Fitzgerald
   
3. S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald Online
   
4. Yesterday's news: November 11th, 1975
   

Vintage postcard from Alto Michigan

I found this cool vintage (from 1908!) postcard of McEwen Lake in Alto Michigan. My Mom and Dad grew up in Alto and I've been to this lake many times in my youth. My first experiences water skiing were here behind Uncle Jim's boat.

I bought it today and am sending to my Mother!