MIRS launches new political podcast

There is a new political talk show in town, and for a political junkie like me that’s a great thing.

MIRS (Michigan Information & Research Service), the subscription only newsletter that covers the Capitol, launched an hour long podcast focusing on Michigan politics on Monday, and it will run weekly on Monday. The podcast is hosted by MIRS’ Editor Kyle Melinn. Panelists include MIRS’ Publisher John T. Reurink and Correspondent Susan Demas, who also writes for the Michigan Truth Squad.

It features discussion and interviews, and the best part is that even though MIRS is subscription only, the podcast is free.

I love podcasts, which are kind of like audio blogs. They are excellent for a slow day in the office because you can listen anytime you want and pause them anytime you want. Some podcasts are just recordings of radio shows, like the Stephanie Miller Podcast I subscribe to, but there are some great local ones, too.

One of my favorites that comes from a broadcast radio show comes from the Lansing City Pulse. The hour long show is broadcast on Wednesday evenings on 89 FM, the Michigan Sate University radio station, but its podcasts are archived on the City Pulse web site. The shows go all the way back to October of 2008, and they have filled some slow afternoons at the office. The show was, until last week, also hosted by Melinn and City Pulse Publisher Berl Schwartz. The show has guests that generally cover three areas: politics, the arts and the local Lansing area.

My favorite non-radio podcast is called “Two Guys Named Joe” put out about one a week by political consultants Joe DiSano and Joe Munem. One is a Democrat and one is a Republican, and they offer up lots of great inside information.

One of the newer but really good podcasts on Talk Lansing is “The Back Room: Michigan Politics” hosted by veteran journalist and radio host Walt Sorg. The show features a weekly rotating roundtable of mid-Michigan political activists that has included Ari Adler, former press secretary to the Republican leader of the Michigan Senate; Mark Grebner, Democratic political consultant and longtime Ingham County Commissioner; and Kathie Dunbar, Lansing city councilperson and head of the South Lansing Community Development Association.

Snyder trying to run the clock out until November

As expected, Republican gubernatorial nominee Rick Snyder continues to duck and try to weasel out of debates with Democratic nominee and Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero.

Like he did in the primary election when he only took part in one of the five debates and held staged “town hall meetings” in front of friendly audiences, he is stalling and using the same strategy in the General Election. He is hoping he can continue to stall and run out the clock until November and con people, praying they do not find out how little he knows about state government and that he has no real plan for Michigan.

Bernero appeared on the radio show “City Pulse On The Air” on Thursday and said the Snyder campaign is more interested in "the size of the table," "the size of the podium" and other assorted "nonsense."

“You've got to face the music,” Bernero said. “We're not running for county commissioner here. This is governor for the state of Michigan. We should be debating over the next two months in every region of the state. We owe that to the public. Let them shop and compare. Let them kick the tires. They're going to be stuck with one of us the next four years."

Snyder spin doctor, Green Oak Township resident and GOP dirty trickster Bill Nowling, is doing his best to spin the Snyder cowardice, but he does not have much to work with.

He told subscription only MIRS that “what the Snyder camp doesn't want is a free-for-all public spectacle that only "Lansing reporters" would enjoy watching. Reminded about the 2006 gubernatorial debate in which Republican gubernatorial nominee and fellow outsourcer Dick DeVos gave a now-infamous blank stare to the camera after being thrown off right out of the gate by a Tim Skubick question, Nowling responded, "Yeah, nobody is interested in that."

Well, Snyder and Nowling are not interested in answering tough questions from people who know what’s going on in the State Capitol, but many voters are. That’s simply Snyder ducking the debates.

Like I have said before, Snyder is wrapped himself so tightly in the outsider blanket that he wants nothing to interfere with that expensive image he bought with the millions he made cheating stockholders; like facts and the fact he has no idea how state government works. His preferred campaign mode is the millions he has spent on 30-scond TV commercials crafting the false image of “one tough nerd” and in front of friendly audiences who someone believes state government can be run like a business where you can fire the elected Legislature if they don’t do what you want.

Good luck with that, but that bought and paid for image will be destroyed after the first debate

Salaries of House Legislative staff members will soon be published in the LSJ

The salaries of legislative staff members in the Michigan House of Representatives will soon be added to the searchable list of public employee salaries maintained by the Lansing State Journal.

A memo from the House Business Office informing the member offices, as well as partisan central staff, went to the member offices Friday informing them that it had received a Freedom of Information Request from the LSJ requesting the public record information. The Secretary of the Senate maintains the salary of those staffers in the Senate, but I do not have a source there. However, I am assuming the same thing happened there.

The 110 Members in the House are allowed two full-time employees, and their salaries are paid out of their annul office allotment, which is set by the Speaker of the House. The Business Office sets the salaries at a minimum of $20,000 annually and a maximum of $60,000.

Last month the LSJ posted the public information on 53,000 non-exempt public employees that includes name, title, department, county of the workplace and salary.

There was an immediate backlash, and according to the Lansing City Pulse there is a misguided boycott afoot against the LSJ.

The Coalition of State Employee Unions told state employees the unions were coordinating efforts to address the problem, pledging to pursue legal action and urging members to reconsider their Journal subscriptions.

This is perhaps the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. The newspaper is fulfilling one of its most important and cherished public functions: serving as a public watchdog. I have nothing but respect for public employees, and I was once one and plan to be one again. However, when your salary is paid by pubic taxpayer dollars you give up a bit of privacy.

I really don’t know a whole lot of people who enter public service with the top goal of making a lot of money. Certainly, decent pay is one important consideration, but all most people really want is a decent, living wage. Public employees are not overpaid, and they are hard-working, dedicate professionals.

I, and many other people, question the timing of this, and my only question is why it took so long to do it. In a story in the LSJ talking about the anger of public employees, Executive Editor Mickey Hirten said, “he acknowledged that this is upsetting to workers, especially since this sort of public service journalism hasn't been done in mid-Michigan.” He then went on to cite examples of other newspapers that publish public salaries like The Asbury Park Press in New Jersey and The Boston Herald. The former statement is simply not true.

For the past 20 years the Livingston County Daily Press & Argus in Howell in mid-Michigan has annually published a special section called the “Public Payroll” listing the name, title and salary of every person in the county, that they are aware of, that receives compensation from tax dollars: from U.S. Rep Mike Rogers to the constable in little Conway Township.

The P& A is owned by the same company as the LSJ, Gannett, so it seems a little odd that Hirten would overlook that example. The section is popular, at least with readers. That example kind of blunts some of the outrage and anger over the LSJ publication.

“Roberto Mosqueda, president of the Michigan State Employees Association, said the newspaper went too far when it published the county in which the state employee worked. None of the other eight newspapers publish this information and only Iowa includes it on its official salary database. That basic form of identification could put a conservation officer or any other regulatory agent in jeopardy of retaliatory attack from an angered member of the public, he argued. Corrections officers, for example, could be harassed.”

Obviously, in the example of the P & A the county where they are employed is identified, and no one has ever suffered an attack from an angry citizen or a has a public employee in hiding has ever been tracked down by an angry spouse. There have been, however, some angry citizens upset over the amount of money some public school administrators are making, and that’s the entire point of this.

I want to see the information for all people paid with tax dollars, and there should be no exception to FOIA.

Al Gore’s new book gets good review by panelists

Enthusiasm is building for former Vice-President Al Gore to enter the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and there was plenty of that enthusiasm at a panel discussion of Gore’s latest book – “Assault on Reason” – on Thursday put together by mid-Michigan draft Al Gore proponents at Schuler Books in Okemos.

The panel, consisting of Beryl Schwartz, editor and publisher of the Lansing City Pulse; Tracy Dobson, a professor at Michigan State University’s Fisheries and Wildlife Department; and Doug Kelley, the retired director of Extension and Continuing Education at the University of Michigan in Flint.

The panel had differing opinions on latest book. Schwartz said he was disappointed the book had no new ideas from Gore, but he said it served as a good reference for all of Gore’s previous positions and good ideas.

“This book, to a large extent represents, both what is good and bad about Al Gore,” he said. “He is brilliant, but as a campaigner he is a little wooden.”

Kelley disagreed with that assessment, and he said Gore’s positions are what the former U.S. Senator and Vice-President are passionate about.

“I found this a very passionate book,” he said. “He says George Bush violated the law – not that that he just lied to people – that he violated the law for the past six years.”

Dobson said there were good and bad things in the book, but she really enjoyed Gore’s take on the history of democracy and communications in the United States.

“TV has done more to damage our democracy than anything else,” she said. “Political debate has been diluted down to 30 second advocacy spots.”

The talk naturally drifted away from the book to politics and other subjects, and the panelists also talked about their personal experiences with Gore. Schwartz said he first met Gore in the early ‘80s when Gore was a Senator and Schwartz was a reporter for Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C. Schwartz was offered a job as publisher of the Knoxville News Sentential in Gore’s home state, and shortly after that he accepted the job got a call from “Al’ – a former reporter himself - inviting him to lunch.

“We had a lot to talk about,” he said “He has a great sense of humor.”

Schwartz said even then he was developing a respect for Gore, but that respect was cemented when Gore appeared at a journalism panel celebrating the newspaper’s 100th anniversary that Gore had to fly to from a conference in Bermuda and back just to be there because he had made a promise to Schwartz to attend.

“I think there are a lot of people from liberals to conservatives who wish he was president today,” he said. “We would be better off today, but this book will not get him there.”

Kelley, very active in the Washtenaw Democratic Party, said he saw Gore at all six of his Michigan appearances, and he was one of the 1,000 presenters Gore personally trained last year in Nashville to present the slide show based on Gore’s Academy Award winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” Kelley said he saw a man that was far from wooden and lacking in emotions, and he saw a man who cared about people and was at ease with people from al walks of life.

Kelley has one of the largest collections of Democratic Presidential campaign memorabilia in a garage-like structure at his Ann Arbor home he calls the “archive” that he welcomes people to visit. Kelley once worked as an aide to late Democratic U. S. Senator Phil Hart, and he compares Gore favorably to Hart. Hart was a former Lieutenant Governor of Michigan, and he served in the Senate from 1959 until his untimely death in office in 1976. The Senator Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. is named for him.

“He (Hart) was as close to a saint as a politician can get,” Kelley said. “Al Gore has some of those same qualities.”

Bob Alexander, a former Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress in the 8th Congressional District, is one of the organizers of the mid-Michigan Draft Al Gore movement. The group meets every month at 7 p.m. at the Gone Wired Cafe, 2021 E. Michigan Ave. in Lansing.

For more information contract Alexander at Alexjuliea@aol.com.