Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said on Wednesday that the forgiven student loans of about 1.4 million Michiganders won’t be treated as taxable income.
Typically, the Internal Revenue Service treats debt forgiven as taxable income, meaning that Michiganders could have been taxed student loan debt wiped by President Joe Biden’s plan for Public Service Loan Forgiveness.
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More than 800 parents, including Christians, Muslims, and Jews, organized in Dearborn, Michigan, to fight back against the radical left’s sexualization of their children in government schools.
The parents’ goal is “simple,” reported Patty McMurray at 100PERCENTFedUP.com, a conservative site run by moms McMurray and Leisa Audette.
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A physician assistant at a University of Michigan hospital in west Michigan claims she was told she was evil and was responsible for the suicide of transgender people by the health system’s director of diversity and was later fired because she refused to acknowledge the preferred pronouns of patients.
The First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit legal organization, spelled out Valerie Kloosterman’s grievances against the University of Michigan Health-West hospital system in a Sept. 27 letter that demands Kloosterman be rehired. First Liberty claims that Kloosterman’s religious rights were violated.
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Motions were filed Monday in the Michigan Court of Appeals to allow abortion opponents to intervene as appellants in the legal battle enforcing the state’s 1931 law outlawing abortion.
The Alliance for Defending Freedom, a Texas-based legal group representing Michigan Right to Life and the Michigan Catholic Conference, asked the court to allow it to defend the 1931 law in the ongoing Planned Parenthood of Michigan v. Attorney General of the State of Michigan.
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An octogenarian was shot in the shoulder while canvassing in Ionia County 50 days before the Nov. 8 election.
Right to Life Michigan reported an 83-year-old volunteer from Lake Odessa was shot on Tuesday last week while going door-to-door to talk about Proposal 3, a Nov. 8 ballot question asking voters if they want to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution.
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A complaint filed to the Michigan Board of Elections claims Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson violated the federal Help America Vote Act by outsourcing the managing of voter rolls to the Electronic Registration Information Center.
The conservative Thomas More Society filed the complaint on behalf of nonprofit Pure Integrity Michigan Elections.
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“In the 1950s,” writes J. Eric Wise in “The French Exit: A Detroit Love Story,” Detroit was “outwardly living well, a very healthy city, technologically advanced, with economic diversity, prosperity, peace, and civil life supporting the arts and sciences.” That is no exaggeration, as this writer can testify.
As Wise explains, Detroit prospered enormously from World War II and attracted workers from far and wide. My father, a mechanical engineer, was among them. In 1952, he moved our family from Alliance, Ohio, to Detroit, Michigan. The Big Three automakers gave him all the work he could handle.
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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) federal abortion ban proposal after 15 weeks has the backing of the majority of Americans, according to a recent poll.
Graham’s abortion ban proposal would “bring U.S. abortion policy in line with other nations,” according to a press release from his website. The bill would restrict abortions after the 15-week gestation period, except in the cases of rape, incest or the life of the mother. According to the release, it “puts the United States in line with other modern societies – 47 out of 50 European nations limit elective abortion prior to 15 weeks gestation.”
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Hispanic parents nationally are increasingly investigating alternatives to traditional public schools, according to a survey released this week by Conoce tus Opciones Escolares.
COE reported 59% of Hispanic parents surveyed responded they were considering other education options for at least one child from each family, whereas 52% of all parents – Hispanic and otherwise – responded likewise.
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The Michigan House approved more than 20 bills aiming to limit the governor’s emergency powers.
The Center Square reported about the bill package in June, more than two years after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer triggered a 1945 law that she said authorized her to declare a state of emergency for as long as she thought necessary.
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A bipartisan coalition is backing a bill known as the “Buy Michigan” plan.
House Bill 4902 and Senate Bill 117 aim to favor Michigan-based businesses in procuring state contracts.
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The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy with backup authority from the attorney general’s office and the Genesee County Sheriff’s Office, issued an order Monday against Flint-based Lockhart Chemical Company.
The company must immediately cease use of its wastewater and storm water conveyance systems. Instead, Lockhart must pump the contaminated liquids and ship offsite for disposal.
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Seven Midwest states entered a coalition to pursue clean hydrogen development as an alternative to gas and diesel fuel.
The governors of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin signed onto the Midwest Hydrogen Coalition. The coalition will accelerate clean hydrogen development, from production and supply chain to distribution in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and other industries.
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Theoretically, taxpayers should be able to see how Michigan schools are spending $5.7 billion of taxpayer money to recover from COVID-19-related learning loss.
But an investigation by The Center Square through more than 80 records requests to schools statewide shows how difficult it can be to obtain itemized COVID spending records. Many schools never responded to an initial Freedom of Information Act request.
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The ridership of the two largest Detroit Metro public transit systems has plummeted post-pandemic and one expert says it might not return this decade.
In 2020, the Detroit Department of Transportation and the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation provided free fares and reduced operations during some of COVID. The systems later revived fares and added more routes, but many people didn’t return.
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Michigan won a $105 million federal grant to replace the I-375 freeway in Detroit with an accessible boulevard. Work is expected to start in 2025.
Almost 60 years ago, government officials approved a plan that bulldozed through the mostly minority-populated neighborhoods Black Bottom and Paradise Valley in order to build I-375, displacing more than 130,000 people. The new project will replace it with a boulevard to reconnect the split communities.
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Taxpayers are being asked to fund the reopening of the Palisades nuclear plant in Southwest Michigan through a federal grant.
When it was still in operation, Palisades provided more than 800 megawatts of of carbon-free power and employed 600 people. The plant’s former owner closed the plant on May 20 after the plant’s fuel supply ran out and the power purchase agreement with Consumers Energy expired.
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The Michigan Supreme Court will likely be weighted toward Democrats after Chief Justice Bridget McCormack announced she’s leaving the bench later this year.
The vacancy will allow Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to appoint a judge to the bench whether or not she wins re-election in November.
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Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is “wrong” in claiming that she bears no responsibility for Michigan election officials accepting millions in grants from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to underwrite the cost of the 2020 general election, an attorney representing voters in a lawsuit naming Benson says.
“Evidence confirms that Benson was aware of this private funding scheme and even encouraged election officials to participate,” Mark “Thor” Hearne, special counsel with the Thomas More Society, told Great Lakes Wire.
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Michigan taxpayers are footing $27 million for a Hemlock Semiconductor Operations project that the company says will create 170 jobs at its Saginaw County headquarters.
The company says it is spending $375 million on a new project to meet the increasing global demand for hyper-pure polysilicon in the semiconductor and solar industries.
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The taxpayer cost of the 2014 Flint water crisis litigation might grow to as much as $90 million after the Michigan Supreme Court rejected Attorney General Dana Nessel’s appeal of a decision that she must use a “taint team” to separate legal documents.
The court said justices were “not persuaded that the question presented should be reviewed by this Court.”
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A juror who helped convict two men last month of plotting to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was allegedly “far-left leaning” and had said they would seek to “hang”, the defendants’ legal team alleged a witness said in a court filing this week.
A retrial jury found Adam Fox guilty Aug. 23 of conspiracy to kidnap and possession of a weapon of mass destruction, while Barry Croft Jr. was convicted of the same crimes in addition to unregistered destructive device possession. Fox and Croft’s lawyers asked Tuesday for a hearing on whether the juror committed misconduct, and a new trial because of the juror’s purported misconduct and an alleged appearance of judicial bias affecting the retrial proceedings.
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The Michigan State Supreme Court Thursday ordered a proposed amendment enshrining abortion as state constitutional right to be certified for voters’ November ballots.
With a 5-2 majority, the court said a petition to place the proposed amendment on ballots had undisputedly received enough signatures, deciding that the amendment’s words were spaced properly for certification. In July, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan (PPAM) said over 753,000 signatures were collected by Reproductive Freedom for All campaign supporters, MLive reported.
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Two men recently convicted of conspiring in 2020 to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called for a third trial Tuesday following an allegation of a potential rogue juror in their retrial, according to the Detroit Free Press.
A retrial jury found Adam Fox guilty Aug. 23 of conspiracy to commit kidnapping and possession of a weapon of mass destruction, while Croft Barry Croft Jr. was convicted of the same crimes in addition to unregistered destructive device possession. U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker heard of an allegation during the retrial that one juror said at work prior to selection they “had already decided the case and intended to ensure a particular result at the conclusion of the trial,” a filing obtained by the Free Press said.
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Michigan Court of Claims Judge Elizabeth Gleicher ruled the state’s 1931 law that bans abortion, triggered by the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, is unconstitutional.
Gleicher said the law violates the Michigan Constitution’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses.
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More than 500 professors at Eastern Michigan University went on strike Wednesday after their contract concluded on Aug. 31, according to a statement by the professors’ union.
Nearly 91% of the tenured and tenured track faculty in the Eastern Michigan University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (EMU-AAUP) voted to strike Tuesday following the start of classes on Aug. 29, according to a statement by the union. Students have been advised to continue to go to class as normal and wait to see if their professor shows up, as the strike commences.
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Following a recent win in his legal battle to compel Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to purge 25,000 deceased voters from her state’s rolls, Public Interest Legal Foundation President J. Christian Adams explained his suit on the “Just the News, Not Noise” television show on Friday.
After the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan last week denied Benson’s bid to dismiss the legal nonprofit’s suit against her, Adams decried the George Soros-backed election official’s unwillingness to update her rolls despite PILF’s documentation of the dead voters.
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The Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) plans to spend $1.2 billion of federal COVID-19 relief to recover from learning loss and revamp its buildings.
The spending plans aim to repair learning loss detailed by test data the state and federal government released this week showing a drop in test scores, and for some students, decades of learning loss.
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The Federal Highway Administration has awarded Michigan $50 million to reimburse emergency road and bridge repairs after heavy rain and dam failures in 2020 caused widespread flooding in mid-Michigan.
The deluge caused more than 10,000 people to evacuate from 3,500 homes, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared a state of emergency. Whitmer welcomed the reimbursement.
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has taken measures to mitigate the temporary shutdown of BP’s Whiting, Indiana, oil refinery due to a fire that is expected to impact Michigan.
According to a news release from the governor’s office, Whitmer is hoping to secure fuel supplies for motorists by suspending guidelines on motor vehicle hours-of-service rules.
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Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson says the state government is working with police to investigate the alleged illegal sale of a Dominion Voting Systems device that helps disabled voters cast ballots.
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A national poll has concluded that most Americans oppose the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act.
Don’t count Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) as part of the opposition. Whitmer celebrated the bill after the U.S. Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act.
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A GoFundMe fundraising site has garnered more than $245,000 in support of a Michigan library for about a year after voters rejected its millage, angry over LGBTQ books.
Patmos Library in Jamestown Township faced closure next year after voters rejected an Aug. 2 library millage renewal in protest of some graphic LGTBQ content in the library’s collection, The Center Square reported in early August.
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The U.S. Department of Labor awarded the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency a $6.7 million grant to improve access to workers in underserved communities.
The grant aims to reach workers who have historically had difficulties applying for benefits, such as rural and urban areas with limited internet access and those with language barriers.
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A Christian health care group says that Michigan’s recently reinterpreted civil rights law relating to sexual orientation and gender identity violates its constitutional right to religion.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing Christian Healthcare Centers, a Michigan faith-based medical nonprofit, sued Attorney General Dana Nessel, who’s responsible for enforcing Michigan’s civil rights law. In June, state courts reinterpreted state law to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
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Michigan’s K-12 education spending, per pupil and adjusted for inflation, increased by 10% between 2002 and 2020 because the state lost 25% of enrolled students, according to a new report.
The nonprofit Reason Foundation’s 2022 K-12 Education Spending Spotlight includes real and nominal U.S. Census Bureau data for all 50 states dating from 2002 through fiscal year 2020, the most recent available.
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The Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) will award over $2.8 million to the Michigan Strategic Fund (MSF) in hopes of honing skills of prospective employees.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) made the announcement Aug. 19, according to a press release from her office.
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A national nonprofit organization will be expanding operations at its Detroit location in order to meet the needs of one of its clients.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was joined by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) to announce that sewn trades-based Industrial Sewing and Innovation Center (ISAIC) will be expanding its facility, a press release from the governor’s office said this week.
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Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office voiced her office’s opposition to the Michigan Public Service Commission’s granting Consumers Energy request for a rate increase.
Consumers Energy filed its application to the MPSC seeking a rate increase of about $266 million for its Michigan jurisdiction on April 28, 2022, to start in 2023. If the proposal is approved as filed, the overall rate impact would be an increase of 6.5% for all rate classes and a 6.8% increase in residential rates.
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Michigan voters in November will decide whether state legislators will have a shot at longer terms in office.
Proposal One, the Michigan Legislative Term Limits and Financial Disclosure Amendment, was approved by the Michigan legislature for inclusion on the Nov. 8 ballot. If voters approve, term limits for state legislators would expand to 12 combined years in both the Senate and House of Representatives.
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The reactions of Michiganders to President Joe Biden’s effort to forgive some student loan debt range from predicting an economic boom to even higher inflation.
Michiganders earning less than $125,000 will have $10,000 in student loan debt cancelled. Married couples earning less than $250,000 will have $20,000 of student-loan debt cancelled. Pell Grant recipients will have $20,000 in student debt forgiven. The pause on payments for all borrowers has been extended through the end of the year.
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Some East Grand Rapids residents are questioning how an eighth-level priority for developing Manhattan Park – splash pads costing between $245,000 and $532,000 – reached a final grant application.
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Adam Fox and Barry Croft on Tuesday were found guilty of conspiracy to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.
After eight hours of deliberation, the jury also found Fox and Croft guilty of conspiring to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction. Croft was also declared guilty on another explosives charge. Another pair of defendants, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, had already pleaded guilty to charges brought against them. Garbin and Franks cooperated as witnesses in the Fox and Croft trial.
It was the second trial for Fox and Croft after a mistrial was declared last April. In the first trial, a jury found two other defendants, Brandon Caserta, 33, and Daniel Harris, 24, not guilty of all charges them, but could not reach a unanimous verdict for Fox and Croft.
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Two thousand salaried and 1,000 contract employees will be cut from Ford Motor Co.’s payroll this week.
Jobs in the United States, Canada and India will be eliminated.
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The Washington, D.C., FBI field office that raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and is investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol breach is led by Steven D’Antuono, who ran the bureau’s Detroit field office when, trial testimony alleges, it instigated, encouraged and facilitated what the government charges was a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
The retrial of two men charged in the alleged plot, Adam Fox and Barry Croft, Jr., finished its first full week on Thursday, as the prosecution rested its case.
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Governor Gretchen Whitmer had a mixed result in separate courts on two key issues the Democrat is campaigning on for re-election in 2022: advancing the end of fossil fuel production and maintaining access to abortion without limit in the state of Michigan.
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Two prominent Michigan economists, a county zoning administrator, and a nonprofit program manager scrutinized the details of a proposed Ann Arbor to Traverse City passenger rail system for The Center Square.
The feasibility of the A2TC project was discussed in separate conversations with University of MI-Flint economics professor Chris Douglas; Mackinac Center for Public Policy Fiscal Policy Director James Hohman; certified land use planner Kevon Martis, a zoning administrator in Deerfield Township, Lenawee County; and Caroline Ulstad, transportation program manager at Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities.
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A new poll shows the Michigan governor’s race is close between incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer and Republican challenger Tudor Dixon less than three months before the 2022 election.
AARP Michigan released a 2022 election survey that shows Whitmer leading Dixon 51% to 46% among all likely voters, with a similar split (50/46) among voters ages 50+.
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Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin will deliver the keynote address at the Michigan state GOP convention to support the party’s gubernatorial nominee, Tudor Dixon, in her bid to unseat Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
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More than two years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, Michigan K-12 schools and higher education institutions have only spent 44% of $7.92 billion of federal relief to combat learning loss.
The United States Department of Education says Michigan schools and colleges have spent $3.49 billion from the Education Stability Fund to combat learning loss for some of the 1.4 million students enrolled in local education agencies and more than 691,000 students in Higher Education.
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