Up North Progressive
Politics and commentary for Northern MichiganMichigan Natural Resources Commission Bans Archery Anterless Deer Harvest In The Upper Peninsula
Friday , 12, June 2015 DNR, Upper Peninsula 5 Comments
No anterless deer may be harvested in the Upper Peninsula for the 2015-2016 bow hunting season. The Michigan Natural Resources Commission approved the ban on Thursday, June 11, in Monroe, Michigan, in an effort to help the deer population in the UP recover from successive winter die-offs. The anterless ban applies to hunters using the deer archery licenses and deer combo licenses. Anterless deer may still be harvested during the firearm season.
The past three winters in Michigan have deeply impacted deer populations in the Upper Peninsula. Deep snow and temperatures well below zero raised die-off levels to 40% in some areas. The harsh weather contributed to poor deer harvests by restricting hunter movement combined with the lack of animals available to kill. Over the past four years, between 5,000 and 6,500 anterless deer were harvested by archery hunters in the UP.
Banning anterless deer harvests was one of several options offered to the NRC by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. The choice came down to two: Maintain current regulations, or ban anterless deer during archery season. One option eliminated by the commission in an earlier meeting was banning all deer hunting in the UP in 2015. That option was not considered by the commission because of the impact on local businesses that rely on deer hunting season to stay open.
Those holding private land anterless licenses in deer management units 055, 122, and 155 will still be permitted to hunt anterless deer.
Hunters holding deer and deer combo licenses can contact the DNR for a refund. The deadline for returning licenses is September 20. After that they are considered, used. To find out more about license refunds, contact the DNR by calling (517) 284-6047 or by email at MDNR-E-License@michigan.gov
Many hunters believe other options would benefit Michigan’s deer herd, such as banning the September youth hunt. How this proposed ban will affect the deer harvest in the UP and local business remains to be seen.
Michigan Department of Education Provides Online M-STEP Surveys: You Know What To Do
Wednesday , 10, June 2015 Section 16 4 Comments
M-STEP testing is finally over in the state of Michigan. After 8 non-stop weeks of computer breakdowns, network downtime, teachers frantically searching for windows of time when the computer lab wasn’t being used for more testing, and frustrated school superintendents writing emotional letters to elected politicians, teachers looked at what little time was left for actual learning and slugged through it as best as they could.
But now that it’s over and as school districts finish out the school year, the Michigan Department of Education wants feedback on the online testing process.
Spring 2015 was the first administration of the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress (M-STEP). With the completion of the testing window, the Michigan Department of Education would like to invite feedback from parents of students in grades 3 – 8, and 11 who took the M-STEP.
Yes, parents, you have the opportunity to tell MDE what you really think of this new test. This link will take you to the survey. The last day to fill out the survey for parents is June 19.
But wait, students and teachers who proctored the online test also have a chance to let MDE know their feelings about two months of testing too.
The student survey is here. The deadline to complete it is June 12. Teachers who administrated the online test can find a link to their survey here. You have until June 12 to take the survey.
It’s really important for everyone who endured M-STEP’s first run in our public schools to let the Michigan Department of Education know how you feel about M-STEP. Please take the 10 minutes required to fill out the survey.
Michigan’s Free Fishing Weekend Is This Saturday and Sunday
Tuesday , 9, June 2015 DNR Leave a comment
Twice a year the Michigan Department of Natural Resources offers free fishing weekends to anyone interested in fishing Michigan’s Great Lakes or over 11,000 inland lakes. Fishing is also free on rivers and streams, any place in the state where people may want to fish. The summer free fishing weekend for 2015 is this Saturday, June 13, and Sunday, June 14.
Anyone aged 17 and older wanting to fish in Michigan is required to purchase a fishing license. In an effort to encourage more people to go fishing, the DNR offers the chance for people who can’t afford a license, or who have never gone fishing before to give this great sport a try. Research shows that children don’t get the opportunity to fish as they used to in the past. The free fishing weekend is a great family opportunity.
Events are scheduled all over the state for the weekend. Some locations will hold fishing contests, and even have fishing gear available to use if you don’t have your own rod and reel. The weekend weather reports show the rain clearing out and dry weather for both Saturday and Sunday.
Other fishing regulations, such as catch limits will still apply. Take the whole family fishing this weekend, it’s fun for everyone.
Petition Campaign For Vote-By-Mail Begins: Let’s Vote, Michigan!
Friday , 5, June 2015 Community 2 Comments
Back in November of 2014 Up North Progressive published a story about how one state in the US had a significantly high turnout of voters despite it being a midterm election. The reason why they had a successful election while everyone else battled apathy and GOP-fueled disenfranchisement was because every registered voter in that state received their ballot in the mail three weeks before election night. The state is Oregon, where 69.5% of eligible voters casting a ballot is considered low voter turnout. In Michigan, only 41% bothered to show up at the polls in 2014.
Michigan has far too many obstacles that make voting difficult. Precincts open at 7 am and close at 8 pm, but many people are on their way to work at 7 am, and people come home from work at night, eat dinner, and usually have evening activities going on that keeps them from voting. There are also problems with people working 2nd shift or 3rd shift that may find it difficult to vote. Then there are the people working more than one job trying to make ends meet who simply don’t have the time to get to the polls to vote. Absentee ballots are available if you provide a reason why you can’t go to your precinct on election day, and usually the reasons are you’re a student or traveling (Often due to work), or have a health reason that keeps you from going to the polls. While other states have adopted early voting and no-reason absentee ballots, Michigan has not.
Oregon leads the nation in making voting the most accessible for registered voters. Your ballot arrives three weeks before election day, giving you plenty of time to read over the candidates, ballot issues, and being able to make informed choices. Ballots need to be mailed a week before election day, and the state provides drop off boxes for people who wait until the last minute. Oregon saves about $3 million on elections by having people vote this way.
And it works. Elections are fraud proof; the double envelope the voter uses to mail their ballot ensures ballots are not tampered with. Oregon provides a website voters can check the status of their ballot and whether it has arrived at their voting precinct. And this year, the governor of Oregon signed a new law that automatically registers every person who can legally vote in the state. Registering every American citizen when they turn 18 was recently endorsed by Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Washington State and Colorado has also adopted the vote-by-mail system. California is in the process of introducing vote-by-mail in that state. Now a group of people in Michigan want to make Michigan the next vote-by-mail state.
Let’s Vote, Michigan! are currently working on petition language to submit to the State Board of Canvassers in Lansing. They’re collecting donations to print petitions and will need help canvassing for signatures in order for the petition to make it on the 2016 ballot. This ballot initiative will require changing the Michigan State Constitution, and if successful will make Michigan a vote-by-mail state.
And with Michigan’s most recent low voter turnout, petition canvassers will need to collect fewer signatures than petitioners needed for ballot initiatives before the 2014 election.
No one can argue that registering more eligible voters in Michigan and having them cast a ballot is a bad thing. This is the most bipartisan issue Michiganians can get behind and support. Let’s Vote, Michigan! is ready to take the lead. Please join them and help them make vote-by-mail a reality in our state.
If You Weren’t Disgusted With The Duggars Yet The Fox News Interview Should Have Done It
Thursday , 4, June 2015 Religious Fundamentalism Leave a comment
Watching the Duggar interview last night was infuriating and painful. For sixty minutes two grown adults acting like irresponsible brats blamed everyone else for losing their TV show. No one should be surprised, These are people who belong to a cult so ridiculous it teaches them they can be as irresponsible and commit any crime they want, as long as they ask God’s forgiveness before they die it’s fine. Making excuses for everything and blaming everyone but themselves illustrates why these are people who have no business having a single child.
That’s not the part of the interview that was the most bothersome.
Listening to 48 year old Michelle Duggar talk in that sing-song little girl voice that’s normal when you’re 5 reminded me of interviews done with women from the fundamentalist Mormon cult in Texas. In 2008, 400 children were taken into custody after allegations of child abuse, including underage girls being raped by older men were brought against the Warren Jeffs cult. There were interviews with the mothers of the children and every. single. one. spoke with that same little girl baby voice. The same situation for the women living there exists in the Duggar household. The man is the authority, and everyone else must submit to him and never question any decision he makes. Michelle Duggar has given birth to 19 kids because she had no say in how many she has. If Jim Bob says we’re going to have more, then Michelle will do everything she can to get pregnant. There’s a term for someone suffering in a living situation like Michelle Duggar – Stockholm Syndrome.
TLC needs to keep this show off the air.
With Potato You Get Fresh Protein: Aramark Strikes Again
Wednesday , 3, June 2015 Nerd Problems 2 Comments
Prison inmates found maggots living in potatoes they were cutting on June 2nd at G. Robert Cotter Prison in Jackson, Michigan. The kitchen was closed and inmates were sent back to their units while the prison shut down the food line and cleaned it. All potatoes in the prison were thrown away.
This is the latest episode in a long-running series of disasters for Michigan’s new for-profit food service company, Aramark. While it’s possible, some of the maggot-infested potatoes were served to prisoners before the discovery, no one can be certain. Rick Snyder replaced the union employees that worked for Michigan’s state prison system with the for-profit company in 2013. Since then, there has been numerous problems with maggots on the serving line, not enough food, improper substitutions for food, spoiled food, and feeding inmates actual garbage.
Food problems are not the only issue plaguing Aramark. There have been problems with the staff they hired to run the prison food service. Employees have been caught bringing drugs and contraband to inmates, having sex with inmates, and even offering to murder people outside the prison for inmates. Despite the growing list of violations with the company, the state has quietly set aside fines levied on the company and Rick Snyder insists Aramark is doing a good enough job to keep their contract with the state.
For-profit companies like Aramark are supposed to save the state money by hiring scab non-union workers at lower wages. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Just cut open a potato to see the quality Michigan gets for its savings.
The Only Amicus Brief The Supreme Court Needs For Any Abortion Case
Tuesday , 2, June 2015 Michigan Women, Religious Fundamentalism Leave a comment
Once upon a time in America no true conservative would dream of telling another person what they were allowed to do or not do. The only concern was no other breathing, living person be harmed with what an individual did. Pretty simple, right? These days, too many people are confused on what being a real conservative means. They think it means they have to tell people what they can do with their bodies or who they share they bodies with.
The Supreme Court may be hearing a case that would allow states to further undermine a woman’s right to choose her own reproductive health care. The state of Mississippi has one licensed women’s health clinic left that provides abortions, and the state legislature wants to force it to close. Making women to go to another state for health care is barbaric, but anti-choice supporters prefer to tell other people what to do with their bodies, rather than be real conservatives and leave them alone. Federal courts have struck down Mississippi’s law, stating that even though Texas passed a similar law, there were forty open clinics in that state, and the law there reduced it to five.
So why are anti choice people so adamant about controlling women’s bodies? Barry Goldwater, a man no one would suggest wasn’t a conservative, even said abortion is not a conservative issue. There is obviously more going on here than trying to protect fetuses. If the Supreme Court wants to be truly conservative in making a decision about any upcoming abortion case, here is the correct, conservative position to have:
Anything other than this is not conservative. What the states legislatures and anti-choicers want to do to women’s choice is expand the role of government. Expanding is the opposite of conserve, therefore anti choice people are anti conservative.
People who believe their imaginary sky alien gives them authority over other people are not conservatives, they are authoritarians. Being anti-choice is being an authoritarian. Anti-choices are not at all interested in preserving life, they want to control and shame women into living the way they believe women should live – subservient to authority. If the court hears this case, the anti-choice authoritarians may get their way on controlling women’s lives and health care decisions.
Dan Benishek Hates Clean Water Because He Cares About Northern Michigan Farmers
Sunday , 31, May 2015 Environment, Upper Peninsula 1 Comment
Dan Benishek is keeping busy these days. Between breaking promises not to run for a fourth term because he has to help the veterans and attending dedication ceremonies for post offices, he also wants to be known as the congressman who’s looking out for farmers. Like other Republicans, he’s mad at the Environmental Protection Agency for trying to do a better job protecting American water. Why? Because according to Benishek, if the EPA gets their way, farmers in Michigan won’t be able to farm anymore:
“Under the guise of protecting our waterways, today’s announcement by the EPA is nothing more than a power grab that will add more bureaucracy without any real benefit. Among the most impacted will be farmers, and agriculture is a major part of our economy in Northern Michigan. From talking to farmers around our district, they feel like the EPA has railroaded them with this new rule without justification and without understanding the impact it will have on jobs. This is exactly the type of bureaucratic red tape that we do not need. I will continue to fight against this rule so that farms and businesses in our community do not suffer needless regulatory burden.”
It seems odd that Dan Benishek would talk to farmers about the new Waters of the United States rule, as it’s stated that this new rule makes no changes to agricultural use of water at all, and in fact expands agricultural exemptions in some cases. Why are farmers concerned about a rule that will not affect their ability to farm?
The Waters of the United States rule is a clarification of the 1972 Clean Water Act. The purpose of this act is to keep major bodies of water in the United States clean of pollution, and this means regulating the waterways that feed those large bodies of water. The Supreme Court ruled that the act wasn’t clear enough in 2001 and 2006, and the Waters of the United States rule is an attempt by the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers to better explain what the act is supposed to do. So why is this controversial?
Because President Obama. He’s using his constitutionally legal executive authority to make it happen. Anything President Obama wants, whether it’s clean water or the Heritage Foundation’s plan to make everyone buy health insurance, Congress instantly has to hate it and do everything they can to stop him. This is where the Regulatory Integrity Protection Act comes in.
This act voted by the House and now in committee in the Senate would stop the EPA from using the Waters of the United States rule because despite it not affecting water used for agriculture in any way, Republicans like Dan Benishek insist it will. Even though it won’t.
What could be the real reason for Republicans wanting to stop the EPA’s attempt at clarifying the Clean Water Act? Perhaps it has to do with the EPA’s report on fracking that will be released in 2016. It was supposed to be released in 2014, but had to be delayed. The fracking industry is exempt from following regulations set by the Safe Drinking Water Act through the Energy Policy Act passed by Congress in 2005 under the direction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.
The Energy Policy Act, which Congress passed in 2005, exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act, which seeks to protect the public water supply from contamination from toxic materials. The oil and gas industry could lose this loophole if the EPA study finds that fracking has negative consequences for public water supply.
By deflecting American attention away from the real purpose, Republicans want us to think President Obama is destroying jobs for clean water. Making sure corporations aren’t poisoning us with toxic chemicals in our water and air is why the EPA exists. Republicans are determined to hamstring the EPA, and we don’t need to waste time wondering why.
Dan says he’s doing it for the farmers. Just like he consistently votes to cut veteran’s benefits because he cares about veterans. Sure Dan, Northern Michigan can trust you to keep your word.
Fund Raising GOP Style: Only One Answer Matters On Our Multi-page Questionnaire
Saturday , 30, May 2015 Presidential Primary 2016 Leave a comment
Not that political party fund raising ever stops (just ask any member of the Democratic Party to show you their email inbox some time), but it’s interesting to see the level of creativity the GOP conjures when asking for funds. Since most Republican-leaning people still get the bulk of their correspondence via a metal box on a post in front of their house, daily email alerts are probably not as effective as slick snail mail asking for money. Or in the case of this example, outright extortion.
A fund raiser cleverly disguised as a very official looking census questionnaire would make any FOX News-fueled person convinced Obama’s America is a fascistcommunistgaynazimuslimdeathpanel police state willing to fill it out and let the GOP know just how mad as hell they are about the fact they’re living in a fascistcommunistgaynazimuslimdeathpanel police state. It comes with a four page letter and very official looking census envelope.
The letter is what you would expect from a GOP fund raiser pretending to look like an official government census document. It contains a long litany of all of the evil Obama has done to our country and without your help, it will continue unless the Republican Party wins the White House in 2016. The questions are what you would expect to see on FOX News, sans the typical y-axis impaired graph.
Anyone who is still first, a member of the Republican Party and second, capable of critical thinking must know this is in no way an official census. There is only one section of questions anyone at the RNC cares about, and it’s this:
More specifically, this:
The RNC knows they’re duping people scared to death after six years of propaganda that Obama is the Antichrist into sending fifteen dollars to “process” their completed census. What these people don’t know is the census they took time out of their day to fill out will never be read. No political party conducts research in this way. It’s all done by telephone. The only answer the GOP is interested on this questionnaire is whether you’re going to send them fifteen dollars, or perhaps more. Probably not the answer they want, but certainly the answer the Republican Party deserves:
The only question left – is it worth a stamp to send it in?
The Up North Progressive has been busy for the past week, not much time to write witty banter about Northern Michigan and politics.
My father passed away on May 20.
I was offered a full time job on May 20.
Things should be as back to normal as can be expected next week. Maybe. Thank you for your patience.
