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State Representative Curt VanderWall (Republican) who represents Michigan’s 101st district says the bills being rushed through the legislature during this month’s lame duck session are “unfortunately part of politics”.

Bergman says he he will vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Gov. Snyder says tens of thousands of Michigan residents could be at risk of losing health insurance.

Photo by Anne-Marie Oomen: Kayakers protest the Mackinac Straits pipeline on Labor Day weekend. Canadian company that owns Mackinac Straits oil pipeline responds to “shut down Line 5” campaign By Jacob Wheeler Sun editor The Canadian oil company that owns the Mackinac Straits pipelines — and was responsible for the 2010 Kalamazoo River spill — […]

Burdickville resident Jim Lively, a program director with the Traverse City-based Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities (formerly the Michigan Land Use Institute) is a key player in the Oil & Water Don’t Mix campaign, which calls on the state to shut down two aging oil pipelines under the Straits of Mackinac.

Environmentalists, activists, citizens and a growing number of Michigan policymakers worry that if Pipeline 5 under the Mackinac Straits were to rupture and spill oil directly into the world’s largest freshwater resource, the damage could decimate aquatic ecosystems, local economies and the tourism industry. One in five Michigan jobs are tied, directly or indirectly, to safe and clean water.

Gov. Rick Snyder today directed the Michigan State Police to amend a recent disaster declaration for Grand Traverse County to include Leelanau County after severe thunderstorms caused widespread damage in both counties on Aug. 2.

Three years after the July 25, 2010 Kalamazoo River oil spill, this tragedy holds important warning signs for communities and municipal and state governments. Oil pipelines now crisscross the entire country, running through Midwestern states that are not oil producers but have become oil transit zones. Many of them already carry Canadian Tar Sands oil.

Michigan Senate Bill 59 may go down as the most ill-timed pieces of legislation to come out of Lansing in decades. On Thursday, Dec. 13, the state’s Republican-dominated Senate and House passed a bill that would allow people to carry concealed weapons in schools —regardless of a school’s prerogative.

Proposal 3, Michigan’s Renewable Energy Mandate, in particular, would require that 25 percent of the state’s electricity come from renewable resources such as wind, solar, biomass and hydropower by 2025. The effort has been called “the most important clean-energy vote this year” (nationwide) by Grist magazine’s environmental luminary David Roberts.

When I spoke on the phone recently with Derek Bailey, current chair of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and now Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress, he was crossing the Mackinac Bridge and returning home to Traverse City. The tires on his 2005 Saturn VUE hummed loudly as he passed over the rumble strips on the majestic arch that connects Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas.