Marquette, Michigan averages 141 inches of snow each year, and is the home of Northern Michigan University. The city is not exactly renowned as a hot bed of either political posturing or cutting edge artistic envelope-pushing. All that changed when the City of Marquette Arts and Culture Center’s “What’s in a Name?” July exhibit went [...]
A2Politico reported on June 25, 2011 that Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder has one of the most abysmal approval ratings in the United States, somewhere between 30-35 percent, giving him the dubious honor of being tied for the title of most unpopular governor in the country. Political analysts, including one who crafts policy for an influential [...]
Council member Mike Anglin (pictured left) has represented Ann Arbor’s Fifth Ward for the past four years. He shocked many when, in 2007, as a newbie to local politics, he knocked off three-term incumbent Fifth Ward Council member Wendy Woods with 59.6 percent of the vote. In 2009, thanks to FOIAs of Council emails by [...]
Well, Snyder and Skubick won’t think you’re stupid, exactly. Just dumb. Skubick (pictured left), who most recently prognosticated that the recall effort against Governor Snyder was “dead as a door nail” just a few days before the Michigan Education Association joined in the battle, recently interviewed Snyder on the hot button subject of, yep, political [...]
Former City Administrator Roger Fraser was caught by the city’s auditor abusing his city-issued credit card, and repaid the city on multiple occasions for charges to his city credit card that were not in keeping with city and state guidelines and laws for credit card use by public employees. In his nine years at the [...]
When was the last time a big city mayor rode into office making “food deserts” one of his campaign issues? That’s just what Chicago Mayor (and former White House Chief of Staff) Rahm Emanuel did. And he has wasted no time following through – hosting a Food Desert Summit within a month of taking office. The mayor [...]
by Patricia Lesko You may notice that there have been some changes to A2Politico, including to the site’s logo. We’ve added “Smart, fearless, local journalism” to the tagline. This is unabashed homage to MoJo, the lefty magazine that has provided investigative journalism through a non-profit model since before it was trendy to deliver accountability journalism [...]
Lawrence Kestenbaum has just 280 followers on Twitter. Not a grand following for the County Clerk of Washtenaw County. Kestenbaum, a Democrat, yesterday made the unusual choice to tweet about a new recall effort launched in the state of Michigan, this time against a Democratic legislator. Kestenbaum sent out two tweets, the first of which [...]
A2Politico has been consistently critical of the city’s move to single-stream recycling, interviewing and quoting national experts who dubbed the move “environmentally regressive” and a “waste of taxpayer money.” A2Politico questioned the rosy collections projections of city staff, consultants and local politicos who used their support of single-stream recycling in the 2010 City Council and Mayoral [...]
Small businesses owned by individuals, couples and families do one thing really well: take out as much money as possible from the business, and minimize the tax burden as much as possible. This can be confirmed by just about any small business owner you meet. Michigan’s new business tax that exempts small business owners from [...]
